‘These people don’t even know who we are,’ I pointed out.
‘They will before morning,’ the king said.
We crept up the hill in the last darkness. We put ten ladders up against the wall, and then, far too late to save themselves, the defenders threw lit torches into the ditch and began to loose arrows at us.
Alexander was wearing greaves, but one of the arrows caught him in the ankle and he almost fell off the ladder. I pinned him against it. Then, because going down was out of the question, we went up.
He was the first on the wall, and he moved like the athlete he was, and his sword rose and fell and stabbed the way a skilled seamstress’s needle moves, with perfect economy. I was only heartbeats behind him, and still he had killed or mortally wounded three men before I had my feet over the parapet.
There was a rush along the top of the wall, and it came at my side. I turned, put my shield into my attackers and my aspis all but filled the catwalk. They pushed me back, and I cut under the shield – and then back over. My opponents were being pushed forward by their mates. I scored across one man’s thigh under my shield and raked another’s nose – no kills, but they flinched, and I backed up a full step and then pushed, caught one man off balance and he fell off the wall.
I couldn’t risk a glance, but I did wonder where in Hades the king was.
Behind me, I could hear him. He bellowed, ‘Spear! Throw it!’
I had my right thumb in the hollow of my blade – a nasty technique I’d been taught by a hoplomachos, a Keltoi trick, and one I used when I had to fight at night. With your thumb pressed into the blade, your blade becomes the perfect companion to a circular shield. Your hand and elbow allow the blade to travel around the edge – parrying and striking in the same action.
I cut low – cut all the way around my shield – and a man groaned and fell to his knees. I kicked him and the rest pushed me back.
Something hit the crest of my helmet.
I stepped back, and a spear came over my shoulder and punched into the throat-bole of the man in front of me. And then, fast as lightning, a thrown spear hit the man to my right.
I stepped forward into the space left by the sudden corpses, and cut overhand – feint, backhand.
Another man fell.
Alexander stepped up so close that his knee was against my hip as I crouched, and he shot his spear out overhand and caught another man in the thigh, and he went down, and the knot of men behind him broke and ran for the tower.
Without speaking, we chased them – two men against a dozen.
Some fool opened the iron-bound door of the keep to let them in, and we were on them, hacking, cutting, side by side – they slammed the door, but Alexander put his spearhead into the door jamb with godlike precision, and the spear-point stuck in the wood of the jamb as he intended, and the door smashed against it and bounced from the fine steel.
The courtyard was filling with blood-mad hypaspitoi, and Seleucus led them against the door. The men inside struggled to hold it.
They failed.
We killed everyone in the tower.
Then we walked down the hill, back to camp. Alexander was delighted. He kept slapping my back and telling me he had missed me.
I kept wanting to tell him to stop playing war. I was tired, and I had a long scratch down the inside of my leg that had almost touched my testicles, and I was not in a particularly good mood. Slaughtering men raising their hands to surrender – it always sticks in my craw, like the last bite of a meal that’s too big.
At the base of the hill, the sycophant Anaxarchus the priest stood with Anximander, the seer – brothers in crime, if you ask me.
Anaxarchus saw the blood flowing from the royal ankle. ‘Ah, ichor from the wound of an immortal god!’ he said. Always the man to go for the grossest flattery.
Alexander glanced at me. He flashed me a grin, and turned on Anaxarchus. ‘Blood,’ he said in weary disgust. ‘Just blood. Don’t blaspheme.’
All things to all people. Even me.
I loved him.
I went back to Hephaestion, coaxed a convoy over the brown ridges from Taxila, read reports on Porus, whose trans-Hydaspian kingdom was our immediate target south of the mountains, and was back with the king in time to see him open the siege of Nyasa. The town didn’t resist more than a day, and surrendered on terms. It was not a bandit hold, but a small town full of people who looked nothing like the other inhabitants – they had strange customs, but beautiful women; they hung their dead in cedar coffins, from trees, but they were the first people in Asia to make decent wine. The vines grew on the mountains behind Nyasa, and we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus there, and we were all royally drunk, and Alexander didn’t kill anyone.
I took another convoy north a week later, and Alexander was at the Rock of Aornus. The place was so high that the top was lost in clouds when I arrived – legend had it that Herakles and Dionysus had both failed to take the place.
Alexander refused to leave it alone. It was parasanges off our route, and we didn’t need it, as we had Nyasa, but the mere mention of Herakles and he was off, armed with a fresh pothos, to do his best to emulate or exceed the hero.
We set the siege engines, which loosed their first rocks. They went up and up, and at perihedron, they were still below the level of the walls.
A week later, and Hephaestion was at the rendezvous. He willingly took my advice and started to build a set of bridges over the Indus while the main army built a fortified camp and supply magazine – more to make work than because we needed such a thing.
Back at Aornus, I was stunned by the scale of the king’s ambition – I, who had known every one of his ambitions. He was building a trestle – a web of wood – that rose from the next mountain. It was immense.
It was almost complete. The troops were working like daimons.
Morale was incredibly high. Word was out – as the king intended – that this was the last campaign, and that the king had asked that every man do his best. It was a heady combination.
I went back south to meet another convoy from Taxila, then ordered Ariston to scout south of Taxila, and then I went back to the king.
Eight days after opening his siege, the engines mounted on the trestle of wood began to loose stones into the town. The effect was devastating, and the dry-stone wall that crowned the fortress collapsed in eight or ten hits.
We stormed the place in the morning, right over the new breaches. The defenders weren’t ready. Incredible, really.
We rolled south, linked up with Hephaestion and marched to Taxila.
THIRTY-SEVEN
South of Taxila, the hills rise once more in a shield, and then fall away into the endless plain of the Indus. We already had scouts in the plains, and we picked them up as we advanced, and used them as guides. And the Raja of Taxila, towering in the howdah of his elephant, was there in person to direct us. It was for his alliance that we were marching to fight Porus.
We marched from Taxila to the banks of the Hydaspes in two days – because we heard at Taxila that Porus was forging alliances in the plains and had eighty thousand men and two hundred elephants.
The army was just growing accustomed to elephants. We had forty of them, and we drilled alongside them, and our horses were often picketed near them – horses can be spooked by elephants; both their noises and their smell can affront even a battle-hardened mount. But we had no notion what squadrons of elephants could be like. Forty seemed like an army.
We had no notion what rain was like, either, until the monsoons broke. The king intended to fight in the monsoon, presumably because the Indians didn’t and it would add to the sense of adventure. In fact, it reduced their archery to manageable proportions, which was good, as they had expert archers with great bows of bamboo that shot shafts heavy enough to penetrate a bronze thorax.
So we marched in rain so thick that at times it was difficult to breathe, and over roads that either became swamps or torrents. Despite that, we made ei
ght to ten parasanges a day.
The Indians of the plains used chariots, too, which added to the Homeric element for all of us – enormous battle cars, with four or six horses yoked in a line, and four archers per swordsman and a pair of drivers. I encountered one in person on our third day after Taxila, when the Paeonians and a handful of our allied Indian cavalry ran into one of Porus’s patrols across the river. The enemy commander was in a chariot as big, it seemed, as an elephant. His cavalry outnumbered mine by two to one or more.
I sent scouts out into the fields on either side, and they reported that the ground was solid enough. So I closed up my column, prepped my officers and rode straight at my opponent.
He began to deploy his cavalry.
A little more than a stade from the head of his column, and the rain stopped. I pumped my fist in the air – my only order of the hour – and my column unravelled in heartbeats. My units never attempted to form a line. Instead, as soon as any unit came up, they charged. The Indians were hit with a rolling series of squadron charges – every impact had its effect, and by the time Cyrus’s second half-squadron of Persians rolled forward, the Indians were shattered.
We lost three troopers wounded and two dead, and we took fifty prisoners. Best of all, the action was over in the time it takes to sing a hymn. It was a small action – no empires fell – but I feel it shows where we were as a force – what we were capable of. Persians, Thracians, Greeks and Macedonians in one force, well trained, well disciplined, and I rather like to think well led. The Indians were good, but not like us at all. They couldn’t fight from a column on a road.
That night, I was huddling by a spitting fire in the rain, happy as only a victorious commander with low casualties can be, and Bubores came to me with a wreath of some local plant – from the king, for my victory. He gave me a hug, and stayed to drink my wine.
I remember because he asked me to tell him how the fight had gone, and I just shrugged. ‘Bubores, do you think this army has ever been a better weapon than it is right now?’
The Nubian looked into the fire – the coals, anyway – for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drill—’
‘The high morale,’ I said.
‘The teamwork,’ Polystratus said at my shoulder. ‘It’s never been better.’
I nodded. ‘When it is like this,’ I said quietly, ‘I almost enjoy it. Hades, brothers – I do enjoy it. But those poor Indians never knew what hit them.’
Bubores nodded. ‘But it is only because he says he’ll go home, after.’
We all nodded, and the wine went around.
Anyway, I got a crown of laurel – or whatever India had that looked like laurel – because I captured their strategos’s chariot. I sent it to Alexander, who received it with delight.
But Porus had beaten us to the river, despite our best efforts. And five days after we left Taxila, we were staring across the river at an army with almost a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants. Porus was no fool. He covered the fords, and all the fords for parasanges up and down the river.
The rain fell.
The army moved up, and built a camp. I doubt that anyone, from footslogger to the King of Macedon, was comfortable, but one of the advantages of years of campaigning in every climate in the world is that your men learn to construct shelters, and this time, since it was clear we might be here for months, we floated logs down the river and built huts.
In fact, the king kept the troops moving, marching up and down the river, building small forts and feinting at various crossings.
Sometimes his brilliance lay in being a thorough master of his craft. For three weeks, every time a detachment marched out of camp, Porus sent twice the number of his Indian cavalry to shadow it along the far side of the river. Our men were still eager, but the wine and olive oil were mostly gone, and we were stymied in an endless quagmire of mud by a foe who outnumbered us.
I kept my lights together as a division. I enjoyed commanding them, and I expected the king to break them up into task forces every day, but he did not, and so I kept them busy, scouting the riverbanks.
Ariston found Adama Island, four parasanges north of the army, outside of Porus’s patrol area. We poured men and supplies north once we’d found it, and all the engineers – twice they tried to bridge it, first with piling driven into the swollen banks, and the second time with a bridge of boats assembled on one bank and swayed across, as we’d done against the Thracians at the Danube.
The river was falling – the rains tapering off – but they couldn’t get a bridge across.
Another week passed. Every day, the king was more difficult to live with – nervous, anxious, quick to anger. He expected Porus to find the potential crossing site any day, and build a fortification to cover it.
I had volunteered to take command at the island and get the advance guard across, and I was on my way to take my leave – already up to my ankles in mud, standing in warm rain – when Hephaestion came out of the king’s tent, his face red and angry even in the watery light.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He grunted. ‘Going to see him? Good luck to you, Ptolemy. I’m ready to go home to Macedon and leave him.’
I gave him half a grin and went into the tent.
Alexander was staring at a sketch of the river. He looked at me. ‘What?’ he shot at me.
‘I’m on my way upriver to try and get the bridge across.’ I saluted. ‘If it can be done, I’ll do it.’
‘If it can’t be done, we’re finished,’ he said with uncharacteristic candour.
‘So?’ I asked.
He pursed his lips.
‘Answer me this, Lord King – what difference does it make? Why are we fighting Porus?’
Alexander wrinkled his nose and made a face as if I’d asked a childish question. ‘He lies across our path and you ask this?’
I shook my head. ‘We’re invading his country.’ I laughed. ‘We could just march away and not invade his country.’
‘Perhaps I should send someone else to the island,’ he said, only half joking.
We set the next night for our attempt to force the river. Alexander’s plan was subtle, but simple. He was going to march the elites upriver – the Hetaeroi with their Persian counterparts, the hypaspitoi, three cavalry commands under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrios, as well as two big phalanx divisions with all the veteran Macedonians, and my command. We would cross, and try to turn Porus’s position. At first light, on a day that promised to be fair, Craterus was to lead the main army across the river.
I had gathered every boat for ten parasanges, and floated them to our bank, as we had at the Danube. I had sixty Agrianians across already, in four forward pickets with fires.
Alexander arrived before full darkness, with the hypaspitoi. Diades floated the pontoon bridge, Helios got it staked in hard to the far bank and we had some long moments in the torchlit, soaking darkness until it swayed out into the current and stayed put. And then it broke loose.
It was just too short, and came all the way around, breaking ropes, to land against our bank. Luckily, we had dozens of Greek sailors, and they fended the boats off and then pulled them back upstream. Ropes were shifted for another try, and four more boats were lashed on to the end of the pontoon platform, and we had lost an hour.
Diades begged the king’s forgiveness. Alexander sat bareheaded in the torchlight, surrounded by his officers, and watched, his eyes never leaving the ropes, the sailors and the boats.
Again they swayed the bridge out into the current. Again we saw Helios and his men drive in palings on the far side.
This time, they got their grapples into the far bank properly, and the bridge steadied in the current. The current took the bridge and slammed it downstream, but the hawsers held.
We waited.
They held.
I caught Cyrus’s eye. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and led my household companions across the bucking bridge. But Alexander was ahead of me, with Seleucu
s and Lysimachus.
He cantered across the bridge. I rode more slowly.
The engineers began to hold men back, only allowing men to cross in tens, and meanwhile the infantry was embarking in the rafts and boats I had collected for a week.
The boards on the bridge were slick, the oils in the new wood combining with the water to make them treacherous. To make matters worse, the rain turned into a lightning storm, and bolts from heaven began to lash the column.
A bolt struck a file of phalangites, killing three men outright.
In midstream, with the river rushing under my horse’s feet like a live thing, the sky criss-crossed with purple lightning, as if Zeus had set up a trestle to lay siege to the sky, the banks on either shore lost in the darkness and the torrential fall of rain that was, itself, the negation of all sound, I felt as if I were no longer of this world, but had followed the king into the nether regions.
Indeed, when my charger got his forefeet on the far bank, with a loud whinny to announce himself to the waiting horses, or perhaps a prayer to Poseidon for his deliverance, the king spoke out of the flashing darkness.
‘Welcome to Tartarus,’ he said bitterly.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Follow me,’ he yelled. We could barely make ourselves heard.
It was a short ride.
The rising river had cut a new channel.
We were not on the far shore.
We were on a new island, and on the far bank, an enemy signal fire burned despite the torrential rain.
Sometimes, he was a god.
He turned to me and his face, streaming with water, was almost alight with his determination.
‘It can’t be very old,’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to try it. It can’t be deep.’
Before I could say anything, he made Bucephalus – perhaps, by then, the oldest horse in the army – jump into the water.
It was deep. But the horse swam well, and the water had almost no current to it – the channel was fresh, and had not yet cut deep. I saw no point in watching further, and urged my mount into the water – my Nisean, one of the army’s tallest horses. His feet touched the mud underneath – my feet got wet, but they were wet already. We were across in a hundred heartbeats, and we scrambled up the new far bank side by side, rode to the enemy watch fire, scattered it and killed the sentries.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 93