Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great

by Nicholas Nicastro

  Alexander turned away from India, but that didn’t mean he wanted to go home. That left the alternatives of proceeding north, where there was nothing but savages and wasteland, and south, to the Indus delta. The choice was obvious: the entire army, the King decided, would sail down the great river to the sea, with the double objects of exploring this unknown territory and rounding out the limits of his empire. The plan was to go south along the Hydaspes just above the confluence with the Acesines. From there the other tributaries, the Hydraotes and the Hyphasis, would add to the great stream until they joined the Indus proper for the unknown distance to the ocean.

  In the center would proceed a fleet of boats under the immediate command of Nearchus of Crete. This man had been with Alexander since the beginning, but not being a Macedonian had limited his prospects for advancement. On the water, however, Nearchus’ value was undeniable. In many respects he was the sort of man that complimented the best aspects of Alexander’s character: loyal, resourceful, possessed of a fervent curiosity. Would that there had been more Nearchuses and fewer Peithons on the campaign!

  The floating contingent was made up of Alexander’s court, the lighter auxiliaries, a few select units of cavalry, and most of the supplies. The heavy infantry and cavalry marched on the right bank of the river with Craterus, while the elephants, siege train, and Hypaspists went on the left, under Hephaestion.

  When all was prepared, Aristander the soothsayer conducted a sacrifice in the center of the Hydaspes. The blood of the bull was poured into the river to honor it, and also the deities of the Indus and all her tributaries, as well as father Zeus-Ammon, uncle Poseidon, brother Heracles, and Ocean. Afterward the Persian allies held rites in honor of Ahuramazda and Haurvatat, Zoroastrian god of water. Their libations did not use blood, but cow’s milk sprinkled with marjoram leaves, ladled into the river with a copper spoon. Alexander presided with equal reverence over both ceremonies, and for a moment the confluence of these rites, and therefore their peoples, seemed more propitious than ever before.

  Many armies have come and gone in the eternal history of the Indus. Yet the river had probably never seen anything like the Macedonians who passed that way. On the stream were almost a thousand boats, their oars stroking the water to matched drumbeats, the colored flags of each unit snapping on their staffs. Along the banks marched 100,000 men, 50,000 followers, and 200 elephants, spread along columns that covered miles on both shores. The dust raised by their feet was visible as twin plumes towering and mingling as they rose into the sky. Villages surrendered days before this host was glimpsed; saffron-robed natives, awed by the spectacle, gaped from beaches and hilltops.

  It was remarkable that anyone would dare resist such a force. Yet the Brahmins persisted in their defiance, convincing two of the local kings to oppose Alexander. The first, King Musicanus, first pretended to submit, then killed all the Macedonians left in his kingdom after Alexander had passed. Peithon was sent back to deal with him, assaulting his city walls with siege equipment the Indians had never seen before. The Indians died by the thousands, with the survivors sold as slaves under the auspices of Oxyartes, Rohjane’s father. Musicanus was brought before Alexander in chains and hung next to the Brahmins who provoked his treachery. But before the last Brahmin was killed, he cried out to Alexander.

  “Beware O Alexander, lest you lose all!”

  “What do you mean?” the King asked the man.

  “The only ground any man truly owns,” he replied, “is that under his own feet.”

  This advice, exclaimed Alexander, reminded him something Diogenes the Cynic might say. He therefore let this last Brahmin go free.

  The other defiant kingdom was that of the Mallians. I was not present at the conquest of Multan, their capital, so I cannot appraise Aeschines’ account of what happened there. What is certain is that during his attack on the mud-brick wall of the town, he somehow got himself inside the city with his guards still outside. Alone among the Mallians, he drove off repeated attacks as he was heard to cry out, in a voice full of joy, random phrases that verged on nonsense, such as “There it is!” and “Upon the color of it!”. He was finally pierced by a lance, falling backward with only the shield of Achilles to protect him. Though almost a thousand years old, the relic warded off all blows until the outraged Macedonians broke in to his rescue. Alexander’s men, seeing the King fall, focused their wrath on the survivors. Every single Mallian in the town was slaughtered that day, down to the youths, the infants, and the unborn babes.

  Alexander suffered a deep chest-wound in the brawl. His condition deteriorating to the point where it seemed he would die, he was carried in stages back to the river. There he hovered near death for a week.

  Aeschines says his men kept up a constant vigil, but my memory is different. With each day that passed without sign of Alexander, more of his men were convinced that he had already died. Few protested when, with the necessary connivance of Perdiccas, Ptolemy and Craterus, Peithon began to issue orders in his place.

  His first act was to separate the allied Persians from the Macedonian units they had joined. This was a popular order among the Macedonians, but divided the army against itself, bringing the camp to the brink of hostilities between the new imperial “partners.” After a few more days passed, Peithon was emboldened enough to put a golden fillet around his head. One day more, and he ordered a final inventory of the contents of Alexander’s tent. Objects of the Persian style—furniture, lamps, native clothing adopted by the King—were collected in a pile outside the tent, apparently waiting only for Peithon’s order to set them ablaze.

  I was not alone in being concerned at this arrogance. Nearchus shared my feelings, but dared not defy the usurper or those backing him. We agreed that someone should get word to Hephaestion. To this end Nearchus lent me a few Cretan archers. Our party left early the next morning, just before the changing of the dawn watch.

  It was just a few miles to the little camp upstream where Alexander lay. We arrived just as the sun rose on our right shoulders, illuminating the tent and wagons on a little knoll above the Hydaspes. Forming my men into two columns of sixteen each, we approached the place guardedly, not knowing what we would find.

  The first movement we saw in the camp was the bent figure of the King’s doctor, Critobulus. From a distance I could see he held a water jug in his hands, and he turned his head toward us as I hailed him. With the sound of the stream so close to me I could not understand his replies. He began to point fretfully in the direction opposite to us, jumping up and down.

  “On the run now, boys!” I ordered my archers, understanding his warning at last.

  XIX.

  The dark-haired Mallian horsemen arrived just as we did, at dawn. They were riding in hard from the flatlands, blades raised, eyes blazing with fury at the massacre of their people at Multan. My men surrounded Alexander’s tent just in time to set themselves, draw one arrow, and let fly. The Cretan reputation for bowmanship was fulfilled: five of the Mallians went down right away. The other ten reached us before we could get off another shot. At that point we took the worst of it, since only I had a proper sword, the archers being equipped with daggers. We made a fighting retreat with our backs to the tent, a few of us forming a screen for the rest to use their bows. Three more Mallians dropped as our legs brushed the tent cords.

  It took some time before I realized a short-limbed demon was fighting beside me. It was Alexander, his sword flashing, clad only by his own bloody dressings. The appearance of the great Alexander took the heart out of the Mallians. They began to give ground until the arrows flew again. Then, with a final, undecipherable curse, the last one wrenched his horse around and rode away.

  The King said nothing during the fight. When it was over he just stood there on uncertain feet, smiled, and collapsed. Critobulus reappeared from his hiding place in the bushes.

  “Help me get him inside!”

  Fresh bleeding had soaked through the linen wrappings around Alexander’s che
st. Cutting the dressing away, the doctor washed off the old and new blood, the poultice of sea salt, and exposed the wound. It was an arrow hole in his left side, surgically enlarged to extract the head. The scab had been ripped in two, no doubt during the exertions of the fight, and the wound issued blood-red foam.

  “There is air mixed with the blood, so the lung has not healed,” said the doctor. “but the bleeding is our concern now. Lay this on with your whole weight…use both hands.”

  I stood leaning on Alexander with a wine-soaked cloth until Critobulus was ready with another styptic. When it was applied, and we had the King wrapped in fresh bandages, I finally asked the doctor the question I had meant to ask him since I had arrived.

  “What happened to your guards?”

  “I don’t know. When I got up to check the wound before dawn they were already gone.”

  “Where is Hephaestion?”

  “I told him to sleep in his own tent last night. He was accomplishing nothing here.”

  I dared not leave the King during the day and the night he slept after this near-disaster. That his guards had been withdrawn, and the Mallians made aware of his location, suggested a level of Macedonian duplicity that I had not suspected. For this reason I could not even risk sending word of the attack back to camp, lest it invite another attempt. For this precaution Hephaestion would be furious with me.

  Fortunately, there was a lot of work to divert me from these troubling thoughts. Twelve of the Cretan archers had died in the raid, with three surviving their immediate injuries. Despite our best efforts one of these men died from loss of blood. The others lost an arm and an eye, respectively. I heard the survivors boasting hopefully among themselves during the night:

  “If those fools in Sogdia got ten talents for climbing a rock, we should get a thousand for saving his life!”

  Alexander awoke with no memory of the raid. When I reminded him, and added that his guards had vanished just before the attack, he laughed. He relished the irony of it, that a battle with consequences as momentous as Guagamela had been fought and won for him by an Athenian and handful of bowmen.

  “So if it wasn’t for you my torment would be over, Machon! Do you expect to be rewarded for this cruelty?” he asked, indicating to include the tent, the sky—in short, life itself—in his conception of ‘cruelty.’ His attitude changed, however, when I told him that Peithon was rifling through the royal tent.

  “Peithon,” he said, weariness creeping into his voice. “why do you force me to act this role? Where is Hephaestion?”

  “Exhausted. Shall I send for him?”

  “No. I’ll go.”

  The physician laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “You must not rise,” he said.

  “I have no intention of rising, dear Critobulus! But we can’t leave our friend here to Peithon’s tender mercies.”

  A boat was brought in secret to a place below the knoll. The doctor oversaw the rigging of a stretcher between the wales. In this way, we floated Alexander downstream to the Macedonian camp. The sentries saw him first as he approached, shouting out that Alexander’s funeral barge was on the water. Alexander lay still as his men gathered on the bank, some wet-eyed with grief, some in wonder. Then, at exactly the most opportune moment, the King opened his eyes and raised his fist, proving to all that he still lived.

  Aeschines described the scene in his statement. But my opponent is wrong to claim that the King did this simply to prove he was alive. When he raised his arm, the finger on the end of it was pointing straight at Peithon. The officers around the usurper stepped away, leaving him standing alone in his glad silks and golden fillet. He was arrested by Perdiccas’ men, and after a short trial, disappeared. Some say he spent his last days in whatever hole that contained Callisthenes before he died.

  Despite hints that verged on outright denunciation, I could not convince Alexander that Craterus, Perdiccas or Ptolemy had a hand in Peithon’s crimes. His resistance to this idea seemed to have a practical purpose: with Arridaeus still incapacitated, and Philotas, Parmenion, Cleitus and now Peithon gone, the King’s circle of experienced commanders was shrinking. But I also believe there was the usual strand of Euripidean fatalism in his attitude—a conviction that his time was short, and someone strong needed to be left to pick up the reins. For their part, then, Perdiccas, Ptolemy and Craterus suffered nothing from allowing Peithon to overplay his hand. A potential rival was removed, and they had an opportunity to make a display of their loyalty to the King.

  Aeschines, you are mistaken in another way. You say that all the Macedonians rejoiced when they saw Alexander in the boat, throwing blossoms and money at him. In fact, while some cheered his appearance, the response was not overwhelming. The ambivalence showed painfully on many faces, for Alexander to have survived his wound would mean there would be much more fighting and dying before they reached home. Many of these deaths would be against petty tribes like the Mallians. After the stupendous achievement of conquering the Persian Empire, to risk themselves that way, pacifying primitives in marginal places, seemed a task less than worth their lives.

  Pushing south, we watched the Indus grow wider, and its waters rougher, until many of the boats were forced to find shelter along the banks. But when the men returned to where they had beached their craft, they found that the river’s level had risen while they were away, and their boats had floated off. Moreover, the Macedonians were confounded to watch the great river do an about-face and flow north. This inspired great unease among them, for they thought nothing mortal could make such a large river reverse its current. Some whispered that it was a signal of the gods’ displeasure that the army had pressed so far into unknown lands.

  Alexander sacrificed a spotless white heifer to Poseidon and to the Indus. Upon the performance of the ceremony, the Indus slackened and reversed her current again, so that the Macedonians believed the sacrifice had pleased these gods. But the complete cycle of flooding and ebbing happened again the same day; the flood, moreover, was composed of salt water, which could only have come from the sea.

  This phenomenon of the tides is known only on the shores of Ocean. Proceeding a few miles south, the Macedonians saw at last the great mouth of the river, and the infinite waters beyond. To commemorate their safe arrival, Alexander ordered a great trophy to be built of square-cut blocks, and more sacrifices. A hecatomb of Aambhi’s gift oxen were slaughtered offshore and the meat distributed to the men on the beach; so much blood was poured into the waters that the sea’s foam washed up red at the men’s feet.

  Aristander reported the auspices to be favorable for the King’s next project: a voyage of exploration along the southern coast of Asia to the Persian Gulf, under the command of Nearchus. To prepare the way for this journey, Alexander sent parties of men into the eastern desert to stockpile supplies and dig wells for the sailors. When a number of these parties did not return, the King blamed the natives for their disappearance. Punitive action brought these people—principally the Arabitae and the Oreitae—into line; as penance, he ordered the tribes to bring all the stores they could gather to the coast. Though the people had little to spare, they obeyed, so that Alexander gave permission for Nearchus to proceed when his fleet was ready.

  He ordered the bulk of the army, including all the Foot Companions, half the hypaspists, the elephants corps, and all the native auxiliaries, to follow Craterus to Carmania along the safe route west, through Arachosia. The rest of his men, amounting to about 6,000 infantry and 1,000 horse, plunged with him into the Gedosian desert. Alexander had heard that entire armies of Persians and Babylonians had been swallowed up there; in former crossings, an army of the Babylonians had been reduced to twenty men, while another of the Great King had lost all but seven. Naturally, it became Alexander’s intention to succeed where these others had failed, and become the first to lead a force through the desert intact.

  I went with Craterus, so I did not witness the ordeal that was in store for Alexander and his men. The outlines
are clear, though: for two months the expedition struggled through such infernal wastes as to make the trip to Siwa in Egypt seem easy. Though they were never far from the ocean, they found little fresh water except deep underground, and that only after expending more sweat and effort than the meager flows would replenish. They found no animals, and no plants except a kind of nettle that, for all the sustenance it provided, might have been made of bone. Though Alexander had intended to lay up supplies for Nearchus, he could spare none, and feared that the desolation of the coast would doom his fleet as well. Autumn came but the sun did not relent, forcing them to travel at night. This further confused his guides, who already contended with the disappearance of their landmarks under the shifting sands. Days and weeks were added to the march as the expedition drifted on and off the trail.

  Alarmed, Alexander sent scouts to seek the help of the native people of the area. His riders returned with discouraging news: the barbarians of the coast were too backward to possess towns, weapons, or buildings of any kind. The natives, whom the Persians called the Fish-eaters, went about mostly naked, with hair and nails left uncut over their whole lives. They lived in holes dug in the sand, roofed over with fish-bones and seaweed. The only moisture to pass their lips was dew collected on seal-skins they left unfurled by night, or the blood of the creatures that swam in those waters. They had no word for “rain” in their language.

  “Have the barbarians acknowledged our sovereignty over them as the Lord of Asia?” asked the King.

  “My lord, the Fish-eaters lack knowledge even of chiefs, let alone of kings that might reign over them from afar. We did not think to demand their submission.”

  “Ignorance is no excuse for their disrespect.”

  Alexander sent a force of cavalry to demonstrate his authority. The troops returned without suffering any losses, and bearing the finest tribute the Fish-eaters had to offer: a handful of sea-shells. This gift Alexander accepted as gladly as any from the wealthiest of his subjects, for he was not unreasonable, and could only expect the things thought most precious in the lands he conquered. The King returned their gift with a dozen javelins, for use in fishing or any other purpose they wished.