God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (101 page)

I wrote down the last figures. The wax was growing too soft to hold the letters, and the morning was young.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good looks and luck won’t win this,’ Parmenio said.

It is one of the oddities of my make-up that I could flare into rage at the slightest provocation from the king, but Parmenio never affected me that way. I merely shrugged.

‘He’s insane,’ Philotas said, suddenly at my elbow.

Medea fidgeted, and I curbed her.

‘He’s insane and he’s going to get us killed here,’ Philotas insisted.

Parmenio looked away, as if carefully detaching himself from the scene.

Polystratus coughed.

‘You don’t think any better of him than I do. I saw your face when the Persian woman died,’ Philotas said. ‘For the love of all the gods, Ptolemy! He’s not our king any more. He’s becoming a monster!’ Philotas read in my face that he’d gone too far. ‘We do all the work, and he’ll fuck it away,’ he said bitterly.

I glanced at Polystratus, who looked mad enough to punch Philotas, which wouldn’t have gone well.

‘We wouldn’t be here on this plain, ready to fight for the dominion of all Asia, unless Alexander brought us here,’ I said. ‘And the very power that renders him able to conquer Asia contains the set of flaws that make me angry at him.’ I turned from Philotas to Parmenio. ‘You, sir, are as blind as he, if you cannot see that he is leading this army and you are not.’

‘He makes messes, and I clean them up,’ Parmenio said angrily.

‘I’ll copy this fair for you,’ I said. I was done. They were edging towards treason. I would shout myself blind at him to get his attention, to find the spark of a
man
that he must still have burning, but I wasn’t going to side with the weasels.

‘He’ll destroy all he has built,’ Parmenio said. ‘Or rather, he can only destroy. He can’t build. He’s a war god, not a king.’

‘Tell them in Alexandria,’ I said.

I gathered my officers and we rode back to the battlefield. I had a bag of hot sausages across my thigh – the fat burned me. I ate them anyway. And Polystratus had pomegranate juice – gods know where he got that – and I drained his canteen.

I took them to my little cairn of stones, which itself took me five minutes to find. While we sat on our mounts and talked, Polystratus and Ochrid and a dozen camp servants built it up into a cairn that could be seen for two stades – waist-height, and broad. They put a spear into it, with all of our wreaths from the games at Tyre.

Leosthenes put his hands on his hips and turned slowly through a full circle.

‘Nothing to cover our flanks,’ he said.

Cleomenes looked at the Persians, slowly filtering on to the field. Alone of all their troops, their Greeks marched on, singing. The rest didn’t march – they just strolled to where their markers were waiting, and sat.

It was . . . odd. In a few hours, we’d be killing each other. At the same time, it seldom made sense to interrupt an enemy’s dispositions, as he’d just run away, and the whole thing would have to be done again.

I’m pretty sure Memnon would have sent cavalry to disrupt our planning.

‘We are in the centre,’ I noted. ‘Almost exactly in the centre. We have the hypaspitoi on our right and Craterus on our left.’

Callisthenes smiled. ‘We’ve moved up in the world.’

It was true. Alexander’s dispositions suggested we were now the most trusted of all the pezhetaeroi, standing between the hypaspitoi, the household and the rest of the sarissa-armed infantrymen.

Marsyas stole a sausage. ‘Maybe he just thinks we’ll look the best next to the hypaspitoi,’ he opined. ‘So – why are we here?’

I nodded at the cairn. ‘Dust or sun or pouring rain, when we reach this part of the field, I want to have to touch that cairn as I march through, because then all our dispositions will be right. If I’m already dead, you three make sure we hit it.’

They nodded.

‘We’re the one thing Alexander can absolutely count on,’ I went on. ‘We can beat his second-rate Greeks and we can eat his levies for breakfast. We must grind forward. It is the relentless advance that panics the Persians, and the knowledge that they cannot fight us to the front. Given the king’s dispositions, I think it is safe to say that he needs us to keep going forward. If I fall, see to it that the lads go forward. He’s going to spend the cavalry like money in a brothel to keep our flanks secure. Don’t get distracted. Keep rolling forward.’

I was solemn, and slow, and it would have been much more impressive, as a speech, if I hadn’t been so hungry that I chewed sausage constantly, and so nervous that I farted every third line.

But they got it. We all four clasped hands, and then we rode back to our camp. I saw Kineas and his friends ride by going the other way – probably on the same mission I’d just accomplished – and I waved.

Diodorus waved back, and then it was time to put my panoply on.

Beautiful armour is always a pleasure to wear. And on the day of battle, when your guts turn to water and all your body is ready to shake, a beautiful panoply is worth every obol you spent. When I was armoured, I looked, and felt, like a war god myself. And the shakes stopped.

Men are simple animals, really.

We marched off from our camp by companies on an eight-file front, and wheeled into line at double depth – one hundred wide and sixteen men deep – and formed on Craterus’s taxeis, already in line.

I was still mounted on Poseidon, who was still a fine horse, and that day had more spirit than he’d shown throughout the whole campaign. I rode over to Craterus and explained about my cairn, and he nodded.

‘Good thinking. We’ll march off from the right – so you’ll be at the head of the pezhetaeroi. Line up on your cairn.’ He smiled. It was a forced smile, but that’s what you get on the day of a battle. ‘One less thing about which I get to worry.’

And then, like soldiers since the world was born, we waited.

We were ten stades from the battlefield. We had offered no sacrifice, nor read the omens. The sun was rising in the sky. The whole army was waiting in parade formation.

If nerves had been visible, they would have been a pall of sparks, like the cloud a bonfire shoots out in the last light when men celebrate the feast of some god, and our line, all twenty stades of it, would have been lit like the Milky Way.

And we waited.

Some of Perdiccas’s men began to sing. We had a song – Philip’s men had coined it, long ago.

It is sung to the tune of the ‘Homeric Hymn to Ares’, and it sounds very martial, but the words are:

Why are we waiting?

Why are we waiting?

Oh, why are we waiting?

NOBODY KNOWS!

Perdiccas’s men started it.

My men took it up, and so did Craterus’s men, and even the hypaspitoi and some of the Hetaeroi. The sound filled the air.

It must have sounded scary, to the Persians.

It made us laugh, and laughter makes scared men relax.

We sang it again.

And Alexander came. In truth, he appeared none too pleased. But he brightened up when men started to cheer. The word was that Parmenio had had to go to his tent and wake him. As I’ve mentioned, that may be true, but his grooming was spotless, his armour was perfect and his hair, sometimes a grizzled mass of blond curls, was straight and well brushed, except that his forward curls over his ears had been teased up to look even more like horns, and he had his magnificent lion’s-head helmet on his saddle-bow. His cloak and his saddlecloth were leopard skin. All the fittings on his armour were gilded, and his scales had been buffed like a thousand mirrors. He rode bareheaded to the centre of the army, and so he was all but nose to nose with me.

‘Asia!’ he shouted, his voice perfectly pitched to carry. ‘Asia dangles at the end of your spears, yours for the taking. Darius has nothing but peasant levies and the same cavalry you have beaten before, many times. Carve your way through and Asia is ours. Fail, and we all die here in the dust.’

He drew his sword. ‘I know which I’d prefer,’ he said, and tossed the sword high in the air. I watched it, but I needn’t have worried. He caught it by the hilt. ‘Kill Darius, and the day is ours,’ he said, and they cheered him as if Zeus Soter had descended from Olympus.

He trotted Bucephalus over to me. He was calm, almost detached, but he managed a smile.

Parmenio trotted his horse over to us. He was old – I’d never seen him look older. The night had worn him, and the morning was ageing him before our eyes.

‘Have a good sleep?’ Parmenio said, and his tone betrayed his anger. ‘More importantly, do you have a
plan
?’ He looked around. ‘The army is restless. You plan to fight? Aren’t you just a little afraid?’

Alexander didn’t sneer. He turned his horse, ignoring me, and extended a hand to Parmenio. ‘Afraid? Parmenio, when we were marching around the northern part of the country, I was terrified – lest Darius refuse battle and hide behind his burned crops. This morning, he is
right there
and he has no possibility of retreat.’

His eyes sparkled.

He laughed, and his laugh carried conviction. ‘Darius is offering
me
a pitched battle. Herakles has put him in my hands.’

Parmenio hawked and spat. ‘Very well, son of Zeus.’ He made the soubriquet sound like a curse. ‘We’ll be outflanked – badly – on both sides. What
exactly
do you expect us to do?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Is the arrowhead outflanked when it enters an enemy’s flesh, Parmenio? I expect you to fight your wing and avoid defeat, while I do the work and win the battle.’

Parmenio glowered. ‘When this is over, if we survive—’

Alexander laughed. ‘You are less a threat to me than Darius, and he is no threat to me at all. Listen, Parmenio! Is there one voice here shouting for you?’ He reared his horse, and my men roared his name, and the other phalanges took up the cry, so that I couldn’t hear what he said next, but Parmenio did, and his face grew red.

Alexander laughed. Then he turned his horse and rode over to me. And embraced me – one of perhaps five or six times I can remember when
he
embraced
me.

‘I wish . . .’ he said. His hand slapped the back of my thorax. The soldiers roared his name.

That was the measure of the morning. Alexander needed a hug from a friend.

I never learned what he wished. But I count it as the second-to-last time I saw the man I loved.

He rode off to the left and we heard the volleys of cheers follow him, and then he rode back. His trumpeter sounded ‘All Officers’, and we rode out to him. He was in command of himself, and us, but by the time the sun was high in the sky, it was the war god who was among us, and not Alexander. Alexander was gone.

He didn’t even trouble to look around, or smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and he pointed at the Persians, ‘I intend to march directly to the fight – to form our front from a column, rather than forming it here and allowing gaps to develop. We will advance from the right on full frontages – I expect this to be done with no fuss. I’m leaving the Thracian Psiloi to cover the camp and I’m sending the Paeonians to screen us and raise some dust – Ariston, see to it that you do not use up your horses, and that you
come back
to the line.’

He looked around. ‘We will advance directly to contact. Unless something has changed, Darius will feel rushed by the speed of our advance and will attempt to encircle our flanks. We
want
him to encircle our flanks. I’m leaving Cleitus with the rear phalanx. He will reinforce our line and cover our rear – if necessary, he will face his phalanx to the rear and we will make a
box
, like Xenophon’s men in their retreat, except that we will attack – we will attack relentlessly.
Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will.
We, not they, have the moral advantage. We have beaten them like a drum – they have never beaten us. We have a phalanx of bronze and they
do not.
Behind our phalanx is another! The
phalanx
will win the battle by pushing forward without pause.’ He looked around. ‘Do you understand?’

We did. It was, after all, something that we’d looked at a hundred times. And it would be executed using drills that the rawest new pezhetaeros had performed every day he had been in the ranks.

Aristander, dressed from head to foot in shining white wool and crowned in gold like the Great King himself, rode to the front of the army in Alexander’s chariot and offered sacrifice. The Persians were grilling in the sun, standing in their ranks, their army about two-thirds formed. Our men sat to watch the sacrifices, and grounded their spears.

Aristander was a greasy hypocrite, but he managed the sacrifices with sure-handed expertise. And that’s not nothing – try killing an animal with a knife while forty thousand pairs of eyes watch you. He didn’t flinch that morning, and he killed two rams and a bull – a great black bull. He held the bull’s heart above his head, and the blood ran down his arm, and the symbolism was obvious.

As one, forty thousand men rose to their feet and screamed their approval.

And then we marched.

It was daring, to manoeuvre in a column of regiments in the face of the enemy. Even more daring, Alexander made the first of several changes to his battle plan before the army had marched off from camp. He rode past me to Parmenio and told him something, and Parmenio immediately marched off in a parallel column led off by Craterus. And then Alexander rode to Cleitus, with the mercenaries, and he began to form a
third
column.

Columns are deceptive. The problem is that, like a xiphos, their deception is double-edged, because they can deceive their own strategos as effectively as they deceive the enemy.

The enemy really only sees the head of the column. Part of this is the problem of battlefield visibility. With cavalry raising dust, on a flat plain with no ridges or handy hills, the enemy strategos has a hard time seeing past the front five or six ranks. And unless he’s a magical combination of oracular wizard and mathematician, he cannot imagine how much space your column will eat when it turns into a line.