God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  They were wrong.

  Porus wasn’t beaten. Porus was regrouping.

  The king had begun to throw his wedges into Porus’s flanks, but Porus, with real brilliance, countered them with elephants, sending companies of elephants into the point of the wedges, shredding their formation.

  He had saved a squadron of giant chariots, and now he released them against the king’s flank, but that, at least, we were prepared for, and Alexander sent his tame Saka, Massagetae who had taken service and Sogdian nomads, to shoot the chariot horses. They destroyed the whole force – a thousand chariots – before the infantry had time to panic.

  But, Porus rallied the bulk of his elephants, and placed himself in the centre. Any infantry that could be rallied – and they were brave men, those sword-armed archers – came forward on the flanks of a veritable phalanx of elephants, with the giant of giants leading the way.

  It was a slow attack – scarcely a charge, but a shuffling, lumbering advance, slower than the march of a closed-up phalanx.

  But our men were not going to stand it. They began to shuffle back.

  And then the king was there.

  He appeared out of the woods, and he rode unerringly to Amyntas’s side even as I reached him.

  ‘The infantry!’ he said. He smiled. ‘Just hold their infantry. Oblique right and left from the centre – avoid the elephants.’ Men heard him. The words ‘Avoid the elephants’ were wildly popular.

  And his presence was like a bolt of energy.

  The retreat stopped.

  I remember the king looking at Meleager, who was not in the front rank, not in his proper station, and clearly not in command. His glance only lasted a heartbeat. He didn’t show anger, or pity.

  Just a complete lack of understanding, like a man facing the sudden appearance of an alien god.

  Then he turned his horse.

  I didn’t wait for him. I knew what he needed. I just waved.

  And rode for Helios.

  ‘One more time!’ I called.

  Even the Agrianians – the bravest of the brave – shuffled their feet.

  There are times when you yell at troops, and times when you coax them.

  And sometimes, when brave men have already done all that you can ask – all you can do is lead them.

  I rode to the front of them, and I raised my javelins, as yet unthrown, over my head.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘Do as you wish.’

  And I pointed Triton’s head at the elephants and walked forward.

  I didn’t look back. I had time to think of the hill fort, and the taxeis that left me to die. The Agrianians were men I’d served with for years – but they weren’t mine. I was best with troops who knew me. I didn’t have the magic Alexander had. I was the plain farm boy, and it took men time to love me.

  So I let Triton walk forward, and the elephants were close – fifty of them, formed in a mass.

  The phalanx had broken in two, and each half marched obliquely to its flank – or flowed that way like a mob. Discipline was breaking down. It was already the longest battle any of us had ever seen, and darkness was not so very far away, and the main lines were on their third effort.

  There would be no fourth effort.

  This, then, was it.

  Alexander appeared at my bridle hand. He was smiling, and the sun gilded his helmet. He pulled it off his head, and waved it. ‘Nicely done, Ptolemy,’ he said, his eyes on the men behind me, who were following, formed in a compact mass roughly the width of the elephants to our front. The Toxitoi and the engineers and the Agrianians were all intermixed.

  To my left, Amyntas was leaning forward towards the enemy as he walked behind his pike-head like a man leaning into a wind. To my right, Seleucus was almost perfectly aligned with us.

  I could see men I knew, and men I had never seen before – Macedonians and Ionians and Greeks and Persians and Bactrians and Sogdians, Lydians, Agrianians. I think that I saw men who had been dead a long time – men who fell at the Danube, men who fell at Tyre, men who fell in pointless fights in Sogdiana.

  I certainly saw Black Cleitus.

  And next to me, Alexander made his horse rear. He laughed, and the sound of his laughter was like a battle cry, and the sarissas came down, points glittering in the last of the sun.

  Alexander turned to me and laughed again. ‘Watch this,’ he said, as he used to when we were ten and he wanted to impress me.

  He put his heels to his new horse, and he was off like a boy in a race – alone. We were close to the elephants, then. He rode at them all alone. I was too stunned to follow, for a moment . . .

  He put his spear under the crook of his arm, and he put that horse right through the formation of enemy elephants – in a magnificent feat of horsemanship, passing between two huge beasts who appeared from three horse lengths away to be touching. But his reckless charge was not purposeless.

  Oh, no.

  He left his spear an arm’s length deep in the chest of the nearest elephant, and the great thing coughed blood and reared, dropping his crew to the ground and then trampling them to death.

  The whole of Porus’s line shuddered, and the king rode out again, having passed behind the elephants, and he burst out of their left flank, still all alone, and rode along the front of the hypaspitoi.

  That’s when the cheers started.

  He killed an elephant. In single combat.

  It was like the sound a summer thunderstorm makes as it rushes across a flat plain, driven by a high wind that you have yet to feel. It started well off to the right, among the royal Hetaeroi, who now launched themselves at the rallied Indian infantry.

  ALEXANDER!

  The hypaspitoi had the god of war himself riding in front of them, and their shouts rose like a paean.

  ALEXANDER!

  The pezhetaeroi picked it up, and the Agrianians, the Toxitoi. It spread and spread, and he rode to the centre, spinning a new spear in his hand, horse perfectly under control, head bare, and those horns of blond hair protruding from his brows.

  ALEXANDER!

  The sunset made his pale hair flare with fire, and the blood on his arms and hands glow an inhuman red.

  ALEXANDER!

  I happened to be in the centre of the line, and he rode to me – a little ahead of me. He paused and looked back at me, and his eyes glowed.

  ‘This is it!’ he shouted to me.

  At the time, I think he meant that this was the end of the battle. In retrospect, I wonder if this was what his whole life had waited for. This was it – the moment, perhaps, of apotheosis. Certainly, and I was there, the gods and the ghosts were there – the fabric of the world was rent and torn like an old temple screen when a crowd rushes the image of the god, and everything was possible at once, as Heraklitus once said.

  ‘CHARGE!’ he shouted.

  And we all went forward together.

  The rest is hardly worth telling. I wounded Porus, and captured him – with fifty men to help me. Porus’s army broke, and ours hunted them, killing any man they caught – men who have been as terrified as ours show no mercy.

  The carnage of that day was enough, by itself, to change the balance of the world.

  If apotheosis came at Hydaspes, the end was near.

  After the turn of the year, after Porus swore fealty (which he kept) and after the gods stopped walking the earth and went back to Olympus – after it was all over, and the slaves buried our dead – Alexander went back on his promise and marched east. We marched after the summer feasts, and we marched into more rain – rain and rain, day after day.

  Victory gave us wings, for a few days. Alexander gave the troops wine, oil and cash, the takings of Porus’s camp, more women, more slaves.

  Cities surrendered, and cities were sacked. We marched farther east. And three weeks later, on the banks of the Beas, the army stopped.

  Amyntas son of Philip caught the king’s foot as he rode across the front of the army. The army was formed to march, but t
he pikes were grounded, all along the line, and the cavalry were not mounted, even though the men stood by their horses.

  Amyntas pulled at the king’s foot.

  The king looked down at him. ‘Speak,’ he commanded.

  Amyntas didn’t grovel. He met the king’s rage with a level glance. It is hard to stare up into a man’s eyes and keep steady. But Amyntas had faced fire and stone, ice and heat, scythed chariots, insects and elephants, and the king did not terrify him.

  ‘Take us home, lord,’ Amyntas begged. But in that voice you could hear not terror, but steel.

  Alexander tried to buy them. He ordered the army to disperse and plunder – two days of licence to rape, murder and destroy, rob, loot and seize, burn if they wanted.

  They did.

  And he assembled the camp followers – wives, slaves, sex toys, matrons, mothers – and promised them increased rations and better pay – manumission – anything they wanted, to convince their warriors to go east.

  That night, we lay on our klines and listened to the endless rain fall outside. It was so wet that the falling rain gradually soaked the hemp fibre of the great tent, and there was a sort of mist of moisture even inside.

  Hephaestion drank deep, and I heard him laugh. ‘They’re like dogs, lord. They’ll come to heel.’

  Meleager laughed, and the Persians all nodded. Even Cyrus. Craterus smiled a thin smile.

  Perdiccas looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  But Alexander caught my shrug. ‘Oh dear. Ptolemy thinks otherwise.’

  He was close to the edge. I could tell. Hydaspes had taken him too high – I truly feared what was to come. I should have been careful.

  I didn’t feel careful.

  ‘They will not change their minds. They are finished.’ I looked around. ‘They were finished years ago, but they comtinued. For you. Their god. Their living, breathing god.’ I shrugged, and my rage brewed up like the flames in a hearth when the door is opened and the wind sweeps in. ‘They are men, not dogs. They have given you everything and you give them a district to rape.’ I shook my head. ‘They are finished. They mean what they say.’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘So eloquent. But you cannot imagine that I would turn back for them.’

  And then Coenus shocked me. He stood up, as I was standing. ‘Then turn back for me,’ he said. ‘I am finished. I need rest, even if you do not.’

  Alexander’s eyes might have burned a man, they were so hot.

  But Perdiccas stood up. ‘I stand with Coenus and Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I will fight for you until I die, but I want to stop marching east.’

  Lysimachus stood.

  Craterus looked from man to man. He was looking for the main chance. Looking for his moment.

  Seleucus stood.

  Nearchus stood.

  The king rose, and hurled his golden cup across the tent, so that it struck the statue of Herakles and seemed to explode.

  ‘You cannot!’ he cried. ‘We are on the verge of immortality! After this, there will be nothing worthy, nothing great – merely the maintenance of an empire and bureaucracy, where I was a god.’

  It was a plea.

  ‘You seek to limit me. But what limit should a man of the noblest nature put on his labours? I, for one, do not think there should be any limit, so long as every labour leads to noble accomplishments!’ He looked around. ‘We here are like the undying. I am going from triumph to worthy triumph!’

  He was standing by his couch, in a swirl of muddy water and matted wet grass where the rising rains had flooded our camp. I mention this because Coenus looked at the floor.

  ‘Is this Olympus, then?’ he said with a snort.

  ‘If you just want to know when our wars will end,’ Alexander said, ‘we are not far from the Ganges. After the Ganges is the Eastern Sea. And the Eastern Sea will link to the Hyrkanian Sea, for Aristotle says the great sea girdles the earth.’

  Of course, I knew from Kineas – who had sailed the Hyrkanian Sea – that it did not join with any other body of water. And I ran the scouts. I knew that no peasant we had met could tell me how far it was to the Ganges.

  ‘It is more than a thousand parasanges to the Ganges,’ I said into the silence.

  ‘You don’t know that!’ he shouted at me.

  Craterus lay on his couch, and stared into the cup of wine in his hand as if it might tell him what to say.

  Hephaestion sat up on his couch. But he didn’t stand. Nor did he speak.

  Alexander looked at me, and the last time I’d seen that look was the night he killed Cleitus.

  But I was tired, and I met his murderous glare with indifference. Only when you have killed as many men as I have, lad, and seen as many worthless victories, can you be truly indifferent. And nothing is more effective against hubris than indifference.

  ‘You traitors! Worthless weaklings!’ Spittle flew from his mouth.

  It’s odd, but I thought of the pezhetaeroi huddled in the woods behind our lines, indifferent to my pleas that they go forward to win the battle. Indifferent.

  Yes. They weren’t cowards.

  They just didn’t have any more to give.

  ‘If we turn back now,’ he said, once more in control, ‘the warlike tribes of the East – every spearman in that thousand-parasange plain – will rise against us, and all our conquests will be pointless, or we shall have to undertake them again, and our sons will face these men.’

  I might have said, So you agree that it is a thousand parasanges to the Ganges? Or I might have said, You used this argument about defeating Bessus, and then Spitamenes. Any of us might have refuted him.

  But we had heard it all before, and like the drunkard’s proverbial wife, we shook our heads, tired of his lies.

  He stormed from the tent.

  Alexander spent two days alone, except for his slaves. He wouldn’t see Hephaestion, or Craterus, much less us, the mutineers.

  Then he sent an ultimatum to the army via Agon, his hyperetes. March, or be left behind. Alexander threatened to go forward with only his Persian levies and his subject Indian troops.

  Amyntas son of Philip came to my pavilion. My floor was a hand’s breadth deep in water. He sat on an iron stool that rusted as fast as Ochrid’s slaves could polish it, and he shook his head.

  ‘I want to tell him,’ Amyntas began.

  I raised my hand. ‘I won’t conspire,’ I said. ‘Tell him yourself, or don’t.’

  Amyntas shrugged and got to his feet in the water. ‘He’s fucking insane,’ he said.

  He stood there, waiting for my reaction.

  ‘By Zeus the saviour of the world, Lord Ptolemy, he promised!’ Amyntas cried suddenly, in almost the same tone in which Alexander had pleaded that we would end as bureaucrats.

  I remember that I nodded.

  Amyntas left my tent and went to the king.

  A day later, Alexander emerged, summoned the command council and announced that we were turning the army and marching for home.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  He never forgave any of us. Not the pezhetaeroi, and not the commanders.

  What followed was horrible, and it made Sogdiana pale. Even now, I take no pleasure in the telling.

  He tried to kill the army. He didn’t retreat along our lines of supply, but went down the Indus river to the sea.

  Again, I return to the simile of the woman married to a drunkard. At first, we listened to the complex excuses he offered as to why we had to march down the Indus to the delta, and we affected to believe them. It scarcely mattered to us – we were going home. And I don’t think there were five hundred men in the whole army who didn’t feel the same.

  But it turned out that marching down the Indus meant fighting our way through a vast, hostile plain. He wasn’t done – he was still on a binge.

  And, in my opinion, he had determined to die, or achieve an even greater level of heroism, if that was possible, than he had achieved against the elephants.

  He began well.
He held an assembly and announced we would march back. Men applauded – men cheered him as they had cheered him when he charged the elephants. He ordered us to build twelve giant altars to the gods, and we sacrificed like the gods themselves, and we had games that went on twelve days. I did not win in a single event. My hands hurt so much when I awoke most mornings that I couldn’t hold a sword to spar. Men I’d never heard of won most of the events – recruits, just two years out from Pella, or Athens, or Amphilopolis, or Plataea.

  One of Cyrus’s men won the archery.

  Polystratus won the horse race, and received a golden crown, which he still wears at feasts.

  His friend Laertes won the mounted javelin competition.

  Then he made Porus, our erstwhile enemy, the satrap of India, and put the army to work as labourers, repairing dams and dykes and towns along the Indus. This was mostly make-work, as Nearchus and Helios and all the engineers spent the summer building triaconters – thirty-oared ships – to sail down the Indus, which we were told was navigable all the way to the great sea.

  I remember that it was about this time that we met Kalanos and his disciple Apollonaris – that wasn’t his name, then. They were members of a sect that went naked but for their beards – serious ascetics, men dedicated to meditation and prayer and fasting. Hephaestion had the notion that they would make the king feel better, and brought their leader, Dandamis, to the king.

  He was a great mind, and he and the king debated for hours – through interpreters—the nature of men’s souls, the size of the world, the purpose of creation. As Hephaestion had guessed, Dandamis filled a need in the king.

  But the next morning, he was gone.

  The king rode in person to fetch him from his camp. I wasn’t there, but I heard the story from Nearchus, and also from my son, who was there. The king found Dandamis sitting naked by a cold firepit. He sat on his horse for a while, looking down at the dirty, naked man, and then said, ‘Brother, come and follow me across the world, and we will learn together.’