God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  But I digress. Cyropolis. The fort was two hundred feet above us, and I was standing in the front rank between Polystratus and Marsyas. I had four thousand men formed behind me, and another thousand Bactrians under Cyrus, ready to go up a dry gully to the south of the place. As far as I could see, the dry gully would get them within fifty paces of the position and the useless amateurs guarding the fort had missed it. I certainly hoped so.

  My four thousand were all veterans. They were a mix of mercenaries and one of Parmenio’s former taxeis – Polyperchon’s Tymphaeans. Polyperchon was down with one of Apollo’s shafts in him, and his men – some of whom were survivors of Philip’s campaigns – were none too happy to be used as assault troops.

  I could hear them behind me.

  ‘Let the fucking Medes do it,’ one old man said. ‘They seem to like it.’

  But soldiers always said such things before a fight.

  It was a calm, clear morning. I could smell the sharp smell of our morning fires, and while it promised to be hot, the early-morning air was still quite pleasant. The river made a low growl off to my right, and we had so many horses in our army that they made more noise than the enemy.

  But not more noise than a battery of war engines. Twenty engines loosed their bolts and baskets all together, about a stade to my left, and their noise drowned the river and the horses – the whip-crack of the torsion engines, the louder, deeper thud as the catapults released their heavier payloads. The engineers had opened breaches the night before and kept the range, despite the workings of temperature and dew on the torsion ropes. Dust rose all along the top of the breaches, as the gravel and the larger stones struck home. Someone was hit – he lay in the breach screaming.

  An archer on the wall tried a long shot. He must have been good – his first shaft struck a horse length from my right foot. But his second shaft fell shorter yet, and he stopped.

  We weren’t exactly going to surprise them.

  I exchanged embraces and arm clasps with my friends in the front ranks. Then I turned to the pezhetaeroi.

  ‘Let’s get this done,’ I said. Perhaps not my best speech.

  All I got in return was a low growl, but that was fine. Professionals.

  I looked at Laertes, another former groom who now carried the trumpet and acted as my hyperetes, because Theophilus had been promoted to decarch.

  He nodded once and sounded it, and we were off.

  I didn’t see any reason to hurry, since my real attack was going in with Cyrus, and the trumpet was his signal to start up the dry gully. We marched quite well. My shield hurt my shoulder. I was reaching an age when the accumulation of my wounds had begun to bother me almost every day. Thaïs had made me concoctions – they didn’t all work, but the thought was there. Now I had nothing but what Philip of Acarnia gave me. More and more, he used opium for everything. I didn’t want opium, so I put up with a lot of aches and pains.

  Four thousand sets of boots, going up the gravel to the fort.

  Arrows began to fall on us. They’d been lofted high to get over our shields.

  The men behind me raised their shields.

  I began to go forward faster. It is the natural reaction to incoming arrows.

  I was almost to the base of the main breach. We’d pounded three of them at last light, and the batteries had opened up again at first light, pounding the mud-brick wall to dirt and wrecking the attempts at repair. Baskets of gravel had cleared the workers off the walls.

  We were quite good at sieges, by the Jaxartes.

  Even as I reached the ditch at the base of the devastated mud-brick wall, I saw that the pioneers had filled it in with fascine bundles, and crossbow bolts were going over my head into the archers on the walls shooting down at me. It didn’t make me feel safe, but it is reassuring to a soldier to know that the other parts of the machine are functioning to support him.

  The poor bastard in the breach had been unlucky. A five-talent machine had hit his feet square on and effectively pulped them, and he lay in an immense pool of his own blood and screamed. His screams were horrible, because his fate represented exactly the sort of thing we all feared.

  I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.

  May someone do as much for me.

  Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields full of arrows, and behind them were a dozen more officers and gentlemen.

  The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.

  There was no one behind my officers.

  The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.

  There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.

  No thanks, I thought.

  So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.

  I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.

  I was wrong.

  It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.

  And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.

  It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.

  The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.

  But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.

  Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.

  Laertes fell atop him.

  My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.

  The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.

  I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.

  Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and cut with the spearhead as if it were the point of a sword. I felt pain – I was taking blows, and my forearms burned, but to stop was to surrender to death.

  Marsyas rose
from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.

  And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.

  The hypaspitoi and the Bactrians under Cyrus, who had come up the gully unopposed and stormed the south wall, now butchered the garrison. No one tried to surrender, and the fighting went on and on – new pockets of resistance were found in alleys, on rooftops, and as the men began to break formation to loot and rape, they found men cowering in basements or tight-lipped in courtyards, and killed them.

  Polyperchon’s men came late into the town. They had baulked, left me to die and then been threatened with decimation – death for one man in every ten – by Alexander in person, lying on a litter. I missed it, but he went mad, so I was told by Cleitus, spitting, calling them the sons of whores. Alexander, who never swore. Well, almost never.

  When they came into the town, they went on an orgy of destruction and killing. The hypaspitoi had rounded up fifty or so women and some children – to be sold as slaves. Don’t imagine they were rescued for any altruistic purpose. Polyperchon’s men found them by the breach and killed them all.

  And then they started killing Cyrus’s men.

  At first, the Bactrians ran, or called for help, or pleaded that they were allies – friends.

  Then they started fighting back.

  I was sitting on a chair in the former agora – a looted chair. I had a nasty gash on my thigh and something was wrong in my lower back, and there was blood trickling from somewhere and running down my arse and my leg – all I wanted to do was sleep, or at least rest. And Polystratus, bless him, had found me some pomegranate juice – in the midst of a massacre, that’s a miracle. He’d been knocked out – clean unconscious – by a blow to the head, but taken no other wound.

  I saw the fighting start across the square.

  I cursed.

  Got to my feet. And, I’m not ashamed to say, I finished my juice before I went to save Polyperchon’s men.

  I was so angry that I didn’t bother to think. I walked up to the fighting, and I killed one of the Macedonians with a thrust to the face.

  He was a phylarch, and he’d probably fought at Chaeronea. I didn’t particularly care. I put him down, and I stood over him and let my rage have voice.

  ‘You stupid fucks are killing our Bactrians!’ I roared.

  They flinched.

  I smacked one man who had his sword raised – I swung the spear so hard he moved a foot or two and fell in a heap, out cold.

  ‘Anyone else?’ I roared.

  My friends – my own companions – began to close around me.

  Alexander was there. He’d been carried into the fort on a litter, and had Hephaestion with him.

  There wasn’t much I could say, standing there with the blood of a Macedonian officer on my spear.

  Alexander was white with pain, but he nodded to me. ‘Your precious pezhetaeroi,’ he said. ‘The sooner have I replaced them . . .’

  I had never heard him say it. Just at that moment, I was angry enough to agree, but even an hour later, I was calm, and I began to think of what it meant that Alexander no longer trusted his troops. I wondered if he even knew what was wrong.

  They wanted to go home. And they hated our Persian and Bactrian ‘allies’.

  And when Cyrus embraced me, he said, ‘I tell my men! That you are not like the others.’

  In other words, our Bactrians and Persians didn’t love us, either.

  Two days later, Alexander was off his litter and leading another assault. I was the one on the litter – it turned out that I had an arrow in my back. It had penetrated my thorax and the wool chiton under it, and gone in the distance of a man’s finger to the first joint, right over the fat that surrounds the kidney.

  Most of the men who’d taken arrow wounds were raving. The Sogdians poisoned their arrows, and while only a few men died, the rest were in pain, groaning, screaming, with fevers and sweats.

  I was, it turned out, suddenly very unpopular indeed with the army. My killing of a Macedonian made me one of ‘them’. One of the men who was against the old ways. No one seemed to care that the useless fucks had left me to die in the breach. Men I’d led at Gaugamela turned away when my litter passed them.

  That’s how bad the army was getting.

  Alexander was wounded again at the sixth fort. He took a rock – thrown from high on the wall – to the head, and went down.

  Our Bactrians and our Persians stormed the fort with the hypaspitoi. Hephaestion stood over Alexander with his shield, and Black Cleitus got him clear of the fighting.

  The seventh fort surrendered, with a garrison of six thousand men. But that day, a hundred men came in from the steppe and reported that Pharnuches had been ambushed by the Sakje, or the Massagetae, or possibly Spitamenes himself. He’d lost his entire command. Fewer than three hundred men had survived.

  Alexander ordered the prisoners from the last fort to be executed. He had the most recent Sogdian recruits and the men of Polyperchon’s taxeis do it as a test, or a punishment. The Sogdians were killing their own brothers. The Macedonians were performing an ugly task, and they knew why.

  Eumenes convinced him not to execute the survivors or Pharnuches’s column. But they were sworn to secrecy. Eumenes had joined the inner circle, and the conspiracy to keep Alexander sane.

  But pain made the king savage, and the atmosphere of the camp reflected it.

  After a week of recuperating, we raced west to rescue Marakanda, because its loss would sever our supply chain. Spitamenes melted away, and we relieved the city.

  Craterus went off with a column to pursue Spitamenes – lost him at the edge of the steppe and managed to get into a fight with a party of Sauromatae and Sakje who had disciplined Greek cavalry with them. He lost, and retreated, abandoning his wounded – our third defeat in a month. We’d lost thousands of mercenaries in the forts, in the storming actions, to Spitamenes’ raids and now to the Sauromatae on the steppe.

  Alexander’s wounds were so bad that he couldn’t see from time to time, and bone splinters were continually appearing from the leg wound and his collarbone. He was in so much pain that he stayed in his tent, and the Persians he’d surrounded himself with used the time to wall the rest of us off from the king.

  Worst of all, Spitamenes was gathering men on the steppe.

  Using Marakanda as a headquarters, the king devised a new strategy from his bed. He had the infantry move along the rivers, fortifying. We began to plant garrisons in every valley and on every hilltop, and using the wonderful horses we were taking as tribute from every chieftain we conquered, we mounted as many men as we could and divided the mounted army into five mobile columns. The infantry garrisoned the new forts we built over the winter and the cavalry swept between the forts.

  Hephaestion had a column. Alexander had one for himself. Craterus had one. Coenus shared one with Artabazus. And I had one.

  Spitamenes beat Coenus and took one of our border posts. I had a brush with your pater across the Jaxartes. I’m not ashamed to say I did everything wrong. My column was almost all Sogdians – recent converts – and I thought I was shadowing Spitamenes, but he’d slipped between our columns and raided south.

  Instead, I caught a tiger. We fought in a dust storm – I’ve never seen the like – and it was virtually impossible to see across the battlefield. My men held the battlefield – but only because your pater wanted to slip away, and he did.

  Your Spartan friend Philokles brought me in as a prisoner. Do you know this story? I said some unfortunate things to your father. I met your mother – not as a prisoner, but as a mother. I saw you at her breast.

  You know, lad, when I sit here – beside his tomb – in the
fullness of my power, King of Aegypt, Pharaoh of the Two Crowns – I can see them around the fire, at the edge of the great steppe. Your pater and his men. Philokles, who made me feel a complete fool – he still does – and your pater, who reminded me that he had been thrown away by Alexander and owed Macedon nothing. Your mother, who’d been our prisoner.

  And yet I was happy to be with them. They were great men, and they were philoi. In my thoughts, I have often compared Kineas and the king. Your pater loved war – he loved the planning, the scouting, the organisation, the movement, the action. But he never loved the killing, nor did he ever tell me stories of his prowess. And when, on the banks of the river, he and Diodorus offered to let me join them – I should have been outraged. But I was tempted, because the king was losing his mind from hubris and from pain.

  And because he loved war a different way, and he didn’t want the company of his peers. He wanted only to be the absolute master of all men.

  Your pater released me, and Philokles rode me clear of the Sakje and down to the edge of the Jaxartes.

  ‘Last chance,’ he said. He smiled. ‘I know you won’t change sides. But I’d bet a cup of good wine you could just ride away.’

  I smiled, because he had the right of it. I would never have betrayed the king, but I was tempted to use the moment and vanish. Harpalus did, later.

  Philokles clasped hands with me. ‘Remember what Srayanka said,’ he added. ‘Tell Alexander not to cross the river. Spitamenes’ time is almost done. The Massagetae are tired of him.’

  That was precious information.

  I rejoined my command south of the Jaxartes and we swept east along the river, staying well away from the Massagetae. When we returned to the army, I gave the king a severely edited brief – I knew how to edit a scouting report.

  Alexander could not sort out the Massagetae from Spitamenes. That is, he understood that they weren’t the same, that Spitamenes used Massagetae goodwill and manpower but didn’t actually control them. But Alexander wasn’t interested in listening to me. I’d been defeated, and I joined the ranks of the disgraced commanders.