God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Tell that to the Mallians.

  I look at the pages of the Journal, and I see that we fought our way down the Indus. It’s a blur to me. We did not truly rest among the Mallians – no more than an exhausted man rests when he has three hours of sleep – and the spring campaign was more rapid marches and more killing. By late spring, no one in the Valley of the Indus would stand against us. Whole populations moved east, emptying towns before us.

  There was one exception.

  South of the land of the Osetae, we were marching – I was marching, anyway. The king had left Nearchus to command the river fleet, and the whole of the Aegema was travelling on the banks of the river, broad spring meadows carpeted in flowers. It was beautiful, unless you looked too closely and realised that these were supposed to be farm fields.

  It was mid-morning, as I remember. I was riding with the king, and the Prodromoi came up to inform us that there were Indians – unarmed – in the fields ahead.

  The Indians had an entire class of philosophers – fascinating men, like priests, except that they were born to their caste, and never left it – called Brahmins. Waiting in the fields were hundreds of Brahmins, dressed in the sombre colours of a funeral.

  Alexander cantered over to them, with his bodyguards, fifty Hetaeroi of the household, and some hypaspists. I rode alongside him on my mare. We were a brilliant riot of colour – horses, gold and silver buckles, brilliant bronze breastplates, helmets, silk and wool and linen, strips and furs.

  One man stood forth – a tall man with a long beard. As we approached, he and his companions began to stomp their feet on the ground.

  Alexander laughed. He turned to one of our many interpreters – a Mallian slave. ‘Why are they stomping their feet? Is it some form of applause?’

  The king’s interpreter rode forward, dismounted and touched his head to the ground respectfully. They spoke in the local language.

  Then the Brahmin stepped forward. His Greek was not wonderful, but it was clear.

  ‘We own the ground under our feet,’ he said. ‘And you, conqueror, own no more than we.’

  As a veteran of the Sogdian War, I knew we never owned any more than the ground under our feet. So I laughed.

  The Brahmin glared.

  Alexander nodded. ‘So very true,’ he said, with no interest at all. He turned to me. ‘Perhaps you should befriend him, Ptolemy, since his humour seems to suit you.’

  We rode on.

  By midsummer, we had taken Patala, the greatest city at the mouth of the Indus, and a few weeks later, I stood looking out at the Great Ocean.

  It stretched, a dirty grey-white sheet of sun-sparkled seawater, to the horizon – stinking in the heat, rippled like a new-washed chiton of linen, and it was obvious to a child that this was an enormous body of water and that it did not flow into the sea near Libya or any other sea. It had tides – great tides.

  I was with a cavalry patrol when I first saw it.

  I remember reining Amphitrite in and sitting on her back, looking out at its white-hot immensity, and thinking that we were doomed.

  But we were not doomed. We were merely very far from home. After a pause to gather supplies, Alexander reorganised the survivors, picked march routes himself without consulting any of the rest of us and marched us west towards Persia.

  Morale was high, because any man who could see the sun could see that at last we’d turned west, into the setting sun, and we were marching home, or at least towards Macedon, as was evident to the meanest understanding.

  Of course, they hadn’t heard of the Gedrosian Desert.

  I had. I had patrols out all the time. And it was clear to me that we were about to undertake one of the labours of Herakles.

  Let me be clear. We could have taken the route Craterus took, across the mountains. We knew how to do mountains, and most mountains have water.

  We could have ferried the army home by sea, sending three lifts.

  I was with the king, and Leonnatus, who was his new favourite (fair enough – he had saved the king’s life), lying on a couch with Perdiccas. Strako – now an officer of the Prodromoi – was going through the options.

  And that useless fuck, the seer, stood and poured a libation. ‘Cyrus lost his entire army crossing the Gedrosian Desert,’ he said, the pompous fuck. ‘No army has ever crossed it, O King.’

  ‘My army will cross it,’ Alexander shot back. He looked around, and Leonnatus, who was another driven man, grinned.

  ‘Or die trying,’ Hephaestion said wearily.

  ‘Oh, as for that . . .’ the king said. He grinned. ‘They made me turn back. They can’t complain about my route home.’

  I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

  More men died in the desert than died at Hydaspes.

  I ran the logistika for as long as we had any meaningful amount of supplies. I didn’t do it for the king. I did it for the army.

  To be fair, he was, as usual, of two minds. He didn’t care if they died, but he wanted to get them across triumphantly. But I think he wanted enough of them to die to make it look Herculean.

  He did order supplies to be gathered. He sent out members of Thaïs’s Angeloi on racing camels, headed north-west and due west, to the satraps, ordering them to prepare magazines for our march. I helped with this, and while I thought that the king was setting an impossible pace for his army, assuming that they could cross a hundred stades of desert a day, I nonetheless had to be satisfied with the other preparations. The satrap of Gedrosia was ordered to have fifty thousand mythemnoi of water at every depot – not enough for surfeit, but a realistic amount. The grain, the meat on the hoof, the remounts – I planned them all. Spare saddles, cloth for chitons, baskets to replace baskets, pack animals to replace dead pack animals.

  I had three days, and I doubt I slept. When I closed my eyes, the Greek letters danced in front of my eyes, and when I awoke, it was with the thought that I hadn’t counted on the weight of water jars in my calculations for cartage.

  Alexander had an air about him – of amusement, perhaps – that I found frightening. As if he knew that the result was a foregone conclusion, but insisted on playing his part with a light heart.

  Nonetheless, he signed and sealed my orders for Apollophanes, satrap of Gedrosia, and for the satraps of Carmania and Archosia. We pillaged Patala for carts and draught animals, and when we formed to march west for good, we had forty-two thousand men and twenty-two thousand women and children, as well as a little over two hundred thousand animals. And that did not include Craterus with the elephants, who took another route, nor Nearchus with the fleet, which now ventured out of the river and on to the open sea.

  Alexander imagined that the fleet would be in touch with us as we marched, but most of the coastline of Gedrosia is a single massive cliff, fifty men high, and barbed like a phalanx with spears.

  For two days, we were still in the plain of the Indus.

  On the third day, we began to climb, and the climate grew drier, although the air was humid. We reached a set of low hills, and when we climbed them, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau between the mountains – the endless, tall, barbed mountains of Archosia – with the cliff and the sea to our left.

  An army of seventy thousand men and women and children, on a single march route, with a single track just wide enough for two wagons to travel abreast – in places, it narrowed to a single cart track.

  So, a little mathematics. How long is an army of seventy thousand, if there is only room for four men to march abreast?

  About a hundred stades. A hundred stades. And that’s without intervals between units and divisions, without stragglers, without a single broken cartwheel or dying horse blocking the path.

  And never mind the corpses.

  An army strung out over a hundred stades, which only marches fifty stades a day, has to travel in multiple divisions, and they must all form at the same hour and march at the same time, or they cause each other brutal traffic delays in the boiling
sun.

  All of which we did.

  We had excellent march discipline, or we’d all have died. But after the first two weeks, we were losing a hundred men a day, and the officers knew we couldn’t turn back. And the rocky ground had no habitation to strip, no peasants whose water and food we could forage. Even in Bactria, there had been wells and streams. Gedrosia had nothing.

  Alexander seemed delighted. Because it was so hard.

  After the fourth week, the king had to move up and down the column constantly to keep people moving. We were all doing it, but he was the most active. I met him, repeatedly, and he’d always halt, accept my salute and smile.

  ‘Not as bad as it might be,’ he’d say, while a twenty-three-year-old Persian concubine died of heat exhaustion at the feet of his riding horse.

  On and on.

  In the fifth week, we were losing five hundred people a day, most of them at first light when they simply refused to march. The phylarchs had orders not to waste energy on the dying, but simply to keep the men moving. We were just a day or two from the first great depot, and Alexander felt our losses so far were acceptable. I could have spent my time in rage, but I was as hot and tired as the others, and my little Arabian mare was finally showing signs of wear, and I wanted her to live, so I gave her all my water that evening.

  I barely slept. Once you have no water, everything goes wrong in your body.

  The next day, Laertes forced me to drink a cup of his own water. Bless him. And we started again.

  Alexander came up, saluted and informed me that he was riding ahead with the Hetaeroi of the royal household to the depot.

  ‘I’ll be back in three hours,’ he said. He looked around. ‘When I tell them it’s only six stades away, the men will perk up.’

  I wasn’t sure that was true at all, but I let him go with a wave and started to rove the column. I saw Bubores threaten to kill a man who wanted to sit down, and I saw Amyntas carry a child.

  The king didn’t return until sunset.

  We made about twenty-two stades, by my reckoning. A poor march.

  And we didn’t get to the depot.

  I was standing with Hephaestion, where we’d gathered two hundred Hetaeroi to guard the two dozen water wagons that still held water. In the animal park, we had another twelve hundred empty carts – most drawn by oxen – and the draught animals were increasingly difficult. Oxen are too big to control, when they lose their heads, and my experience as a logistics officer told me that the oxen had been taken a few marches too far.

  ‘We’re not going to make it,’ Hephaestion said.

  I was stunned by this pronouncement. ‘It can’t be more than a day’s march to the supplies,’ I said.

  Hephaestion shook his head. ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ he responded.

  Perdiccas was watching a crowd of soldiers form near the baggage animals. ‘They may just decide to kill the animals in the lines,’ he said. ‘Blood is as good as water, if you can keep it down.’ He shrugged. ‘I learned that in Bactria.’

  Philip the Red was dressing his troop of Hetaeroi, making a good show to overawe the pezhetaeroi and their women – women who were often as dangerous as the men – when the king rode up. He didn’t dash up to us – he rode slowly, and there were fewer than a dozen knights behind him.

  We saluted.

  He shook his head. ‘There’s no depot at Gelas,’ he said. ‘Not an amphora of wine, not a mythemna of water, nor of grain, not one bullock.’

  We looked at him in silence.

  He sat up straighter. ‘It is a betrayal. Someone wants this army dead.’ He shrugged.

  We were silent. I couldn’t think what to say. Apollophanes was never much of a leader, but I didn’t see him as a traitor.

  It didn’t matter, though. If there was no depot . . .

  I rode over to the king’s side. ‘We must order the draught oxen slaughtered,’ I said. ‘They will provide food and drink – buy us some time.’

  Alexander looked at me, and in the last light of the sun, his eyes burned like fire. ‘If only they hadn’t forced me to stop,’ he said. ‘We would all be comfortable in some marching camp on the Ganges.’

  Oh, how I hated him, in that moment.

  Perdiccas and I ordered the excess baggage animals slaughtered. The pezhetaeroi and their women killed them, drained their blood, and in the morning we marched, leaving a field of animal corpses, as if they had fought us, like the Mallians. And the men and women marched with brown blood flaking from their hands and mouths, because there was not one drop of water with which to wash.

  Alexander took his bodyguard and rode for the coast, to find the fleet.

  He came back four days later, and we were still moving. We had used up all the rest of the water, and he led us to the coast – three days out of our way – where he’d found a spring.

  We marched along the coast for six days, and we filled the remaining sixty wagons with water in skins and jars and anything that would hold it, and men marched with their helmets in their arms, full of water, children tried to walk holding a poor cup of water.

  There weren’t many children left.

  I do not remember when it happened. I merely remember that one night Bubores came into my camp – I should explain. I was sitting on my saddlecloth, with my military cloak wrapped around me. Laertes and I were repairing our tack, to make our horses’ lives as easy as we could. We had no tents, no baggage of any kind – everything I owned was on my body or on Amphitrite’s rump. I’d killed my last riding horse the night before, for food, and from him I’d fed forty Hetaeroi and all the surviving Angeloi.

  At any rate, Bubores came, and sat on his haunches in that African way in the dying light of the sun. He had a young boy with him, a wizened, dark-skinned boy of four or five.

  Laertes held out a cup. ‘Share, friend,’ he said. He’d found us some water, and we didn’t ask him where. Ochrid had done the same, the day before.

  Bubores took the cup and gave it to the boy. ‘You remember,’ he said, and his deep voice was strong and even, ‘when the hypaspitoi were new, and we marched on to your farm – and you had slaves and bronze kettles for every man?’ He grinned. ‘I wanted to thank you. Ever since then. I had never owned a slave before, nor had any man treated me that way.’

  I laughed. ‘Bubores – you are a soldier of the Aegema, an officer, and you stand by the king. You can tell me this any time. Why now?’

  Bubores rattled the necklace of bones he wore around his neck. ‘I will die soon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘I am paying my debts. I owed you my thanks – never managed to tell you.’

  I laughed. ‘Don’t be an irrational arse. You won’t die here.’

  His bright eyes met mine, and his look was calm – and like the look new lovers give each other. Trust. Belief. ‘I will die soon,’ he said. ‘And so will most of us. Here? In the desert? Back at Babylon? What does it matter? The king will kill us all.’ He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. ‘It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.’ He raised his hands. ‘What does that make me?’

  I had never heard him speak this way.

  Laertes shook his head and Polystratus, behind me, grunted. ‘Got that right,’ he said quietly.

  ‘This boy is my son,’ Bubores said. ‘The mother is dead now. The boy is a good boy, and all I have left – what treasure is worth a fuck, out here? Listen, Ptolemy. You are a great man – an aristocrat, a friend of the king. When there is no more food, you will have food. When there is no more water, you will have water for a few more days. I beg you, as an old comrade, to take my son when I am dead.’

  Polystratus turned. ‘Just say yes, and don’t protest. Bubores, we’ll protect your son. You have my word.’

  Bubores shook my hand, and Laertes’ and Polystratus’s. And then he and the boy went back into the silent darknes
s.

  Two days later, while I walked next to Amphitrite, I saw him. He was walking at my mare’s tail.

  I looked at him, and he met my eyes.

  ‘Pater dead,’ he said.

  I gave him water and we walked on.

  When we had been fifty days in Gedrosia, give or take a few days, I was with the king. The light was gone from his face. We were burned red brown, and we hadn’t had any water in four days. We were losing a thousand men and women a day. There were fewer than two hundred horses left.

  We were marching only at night, which made it easier – if stumbling blindly across an endless waste of grit and rock, with no sandals and bleeding feet, bleeding gums, parched throat and no sweat – can be called easier – but the sun was rising and we were still going. Alexander was sure we were close to the capital of Gedrosia, called Poura.

  We came over a rise, and entered a long valley – a barren, rocky valley that had ancient trees – myrrh trees, the largest any of us had ever seen, with myrrh gum so abundant that we crushed it under our feet as we marched, so that the whole valley smelled as if the gods had come to us. It was absurd, and beautiful, and the smell rose to the heavens, and we had very few dead that day. And I have hated the smell of myrrh ever since.

  The next day, we were losing men so fast that I couldn’t stop to prod one without another falling over near by, and men had begun to die – literally, to die – on their feet.

  I left Amphitrite and Bubores’ son with Polystratus and headed for the king at the very front.

  He was walking quickly, using a spear as a staff. Perdiccas and a handful of his bodyguard were with him, and the rest of the army trailed away behind him like an army of spectres, spread, I expect, as far as three hundred stades – at the rate we were moving, there were still living men two weeks’ march behind us.