God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (104 page)

I had no idea what he was saying, but I’d guess he was begging the King of Kings to get the fuck out of there before the war god ate him.

And I imagine that Darius was yelling – But I’m winning! I’m collapsing his flanks!

He was, too.

He was fighting his cousin for the reins when he saw me.

One Macedonian. Two horse lengths from his offside lead horse. It was a four-horse chariot, and I could, if I’d had a spear, have killed one of the horses with a cast. And saved us all from tragedy, or not. Saved five years of my life, I suspect.

I didn’t even have a dagger.

Darius looked into my eyes. I looked into his. We were about as far apart as a man courting in Pella and his lady-love above him on the balcony of her exedra.

And in that moment, Marsyas got his shield over my exposed side and said, ‘You fuckwit.’

Cleomenes got his shoulder into my back, and his spear went over my head.

Leosthenes came up on my left and locked up on me.

And Darius looked at us, and his eyes moved from us to our right – to where the war god, heralded by the storm of hooves, was coming. He let his cousin take the reins, and raced for safety.

The Persian horse guards rallied, and charged Alexander.

And Alexander cut through them like a sword through straw. I saw it, while Polystratus put a bandage on my hip – that’s a nice way of saying that he ripped the chiton off his body and stuffed it, sweat-soaked, under my broken thorax to staunch the blood.

We weren’t doing much fighting, you’ll note. There was no need; Alexander swept past us, and we roared our approval, and then, so close I could almost touch Bucephalus, his wedge slowed in the thickening sea of Persians and I saw his rage – the lion baulked at his kill by a tribe of hyenas was never so outraged as Alexander cheated of Darius.

Even from the ground, I could still just see the golden wheels of Darius’s chariot slipping away in the press.

Alexander swung his sword like a priest cutting up the sacrifice – heavy, professional strokes without a lick of mercy. He didn’t shout any of his battle cries – no prayers to Zeus, no imprecations to Athena or Herakles or Amon.

He roared – in his curiously high-pitched, leopard-like cough – ‘Darius!’

And again.

‘Darius!’

And he locked his knees on his horse, cut a Persian nobleman almost in two from his eyebrow to his ribs – a superhuman stroke – rose to a position where he almost stood and roared so that his voice sounded over the whole battlefield.

‘DARIUS!’

Alexander was – in that moment – greater than mortal. He was not a man. Bucephalus was not a mortal horse.

‘FACE ME, DARIUS!’ filled the air.

Darius rode away, leaving his empire.

Alexander killed men as if he had the fire of the gods in him and had come to scorch the earth. But though he cut a swathe you could follow with your eye, Darius was clear of the melee, and the chariot was moving faster.

‘Ptolemy? Lord Ptolemy?’ sounded from behind us.

My men were in no sort of order. I seemed to have very few casualties. I was a mess, and couldn’t think.

It sounded like Diodorus the Athenian. He was pushing his horse through my ranks, shouting hoarsely for me.

Polystratus roared back, ‘Here! Here!’

Ranks parted. Men were trying to get back in the right file, or trying to find the spear they’d left in some Immortal, or trying to get that damned sandal lace where it should have been all day, or drinking all the water in their canteens. They were behaving like soldiers who have survived hand-to-hand combat.

Diodorus became visible in the battle haze, which was as bad to our rear as to our front. ‘Where is Alexander? Where is the king?’ he asked.

Polystratus gave him wine. Diodorus looked like I felt.

‘The left is collapsing,’ he said.

I pointed and Cleomenes said, ‘He’s in the thick of it – right there. In front of us.’

Polystratus grabbed my shoulder. ‘Can you ride?’ he asked.

A pezhetaeros brought me Poseidon, and I mounted – it took two sets of hands pushing my arse, and I screamed at one point when I had to bend the wrong way. But no one in the Hetaeroi knew Diodorus very well. And everyone knew me. Blood was flowing from under my cuirass.

‘Come,’ I said. ‘Leosthenes – find Coenus, link up, wheel to the left and push.’

All three of my officers saluted. It still makes me smile.

Men don’t salute on battlefields. Mostly they grunt.

I don’t know how long it took me to reach Alexander, but he’d halved the distance to Darius by the time we reached him. Darius was changing from the chariot to a horse, and we could see him.

Alexander spared me a single glance, and then looked back, anger written clearly on his face. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Another spear!’ he shouted back at his immediate companions.

His arms were both bleeding. I doubt he knew, or cared.

Bucephalus was a pale golden horse, and his legs were coated in blood to the top of his fetlocks. Alexander had fought for some part of the action with a spear held high in a two-handed grip – and his arms were coated in blood to the elbow. When he cut a Persian in half, the man’s insides had exploded over him, and he had blood on his face, his chest was coated in it and his thighs were matted with ordure.

He was the carrion god in person. Ares, come to earth. Why did Alexander
ever
imagine himself the son of Herakles or Zeus?

Even on that battlefield, I could smell the blood on him, copper and shit mixed together. And over all of that, his eyes glittered like blue ice.

‘What?’ he demanded of me again.

‘The left is collapsing,’ I said.

Diodorus said, ‘I come from Parmenio,’ and started to fall from his horse.

Philotas caught him.

Alexander looked at me. He might have been Darius a moment before – because he said, ‘But I’ve won the battle.’

I was on horseback, and the Persian horse guard was mostly dead, covering the flight of their king, and as far as I could see, the Persian centre was done for. And I could see a fair way – we were out of the worst of the battle haze and in the rear of the Persian line.

But even from here, you didn’t need to be Alexander to see that the enemy right wing was not in line with the enemy centre, and that the battle haze had a distinct kink in it.

There was a hole in our line.

If I could see it . . .

‘Fuck him,’ Alexander said, in a terrible voice. ‘My curse on him.’

He didn’t mean Darius.

He meant Parmenio.

The Hetaeroi were still under control. The wedge was still recognisable, and despite the fact that Darius was slipping away, no one was leaving the right face of the wedge to run him down.

Alexander looked. I had seen how very quickly he could read a battlefield, all my life since we were first in the field together, and I know he read that one ten times, looking for an alternative.

My men, and Coenus’s men, and the hypaspists, were changing direction – slowly, like a grain ship under oars. Hoplites can go forward quickly, but when they move to the flanks, by files or by wheeling, it is like watching a glacier move on a mountainside.

He turned his head back towards Darius.

Then his face set.

I hadn’t meant to join in, but Poseidon and I were swallowed by the wedge, and I was in the place just behind the king.

It was all I could do to ride. Blood was actually running over my saddlecloth. Philotas, who had no time for me whatsoever, looked concerned.

‘Follow me!’ he called to his wedge. Turned it decidedly to the right, angled back towards Parmenio.

Alexander looked back at me, and the smile on his face, the elation in the whole set of his body, outweighed his frustration at failing to get Darius. ‘Don’t you feel alive, when the trumpet sounds?’ he asked me, and then we were away.

We charged into the flank of Mazaeus’s triumphant cavalry just as they closed the noose around Parmenio’s throat.

How bitter the Persian must have been, as he ordered the retreat.

There are a thousand ironies to the Battle of Guagamela.

It is ironic that the Persians killed so very few of us, because they were moments from massacring our entire left and with it, perhaps, the whole rear phalanx. I expect that had Alexander been ten minutes later, Darius’s defection from the field would have been meaningless.

It is ironic that to Bessus and Mazaeus, Darius – their king – betrayed them by running. Ironic as I had watched him struggle to stay and make a fight of it. I can say with assurance that had Alexander botched his final attack, Bessus would have won the battle. Darius lost his empire when he turned and ran, and he would never have been king again after that moment.

It is ironic that Alexander blamed Parmenio for costing him his pursuit of Darius, because Parmenio, in my opinion, had the weakest part of the army, faced the cream of the Persian cavalry and fought for as long as anyone could have expected, and then for a while longer – long enough to ensure that Alexander won the grandest victory of his life, and did it well enough that the battle flowed almost exactly as the king had predicted. Yet the king never forgave Parmenio for his
failure
.

Ironic that in victory, Alexander was so powerful that his opinions were like laws. Even men who had served in the left flank said that Parmenio had
failed
.

And hubris? It fell from Alexander as blood runs from a mortal wound.

About the time that Mazaeus cursed the name of his king and ordered his victorious cavalry to retreat like dogs whipped off the corpse of a lion, I was one rank behind the king, deep into a melee with the aristocracy of Babylon and Mesopotamia. They had beautiful armour and they weren’t much as fighters, and I suspect that they could read the wind as well as Mazaeus. Given our reception in Babylon, I’m not even sure they were sorry to see the golden disc of the sun fall.

But one of them, a mass of gold and bronze with armour all the way down his arms and scale mail that covered his face, exchanged sword cuts with me, and his mate drove a spear through Poseidon’s neck. Poseidon didn’t fall – by his namesake, he rose on his back feet, snapped the haft of the spear, and his mighty iron-shod forefoot crushed the chest of his killer before he slumped to the earth. And I crashed down on the same hip that had taken the wound earlier, and as Homer says, darkness covered my eyes.

PART IV

King of Kings

THIRTY-ONE

I
f you’ve come to listen to the end, young man, you must know that most of the glory has gone out of the story, and only the tragedy remains. Have I convinced you, yet, that Alexander is not the king you should seek to emulate?

I will.

Guagamela was Alexander’s masterpiece. He realised the plan, and he executed it perfectly – with brilliant, lightning-like changes of direction and purpose that marked his genius – instant response to the changes on the battlefield.

I am an excellent general, and I have won my fair share of battles. I could have
planned
Guagamela. But through all the dust I could not have seen the moment when the King of King’s centre had drifted from his right, and thrust into it.

I awoke to pain and stupor – I’d been given poppy. Thaïs and Philip were waiting on me personally. My eyes opened, and Thaïs looked at me and a smile lit her face.

That’s a good way to come back from the edge of death.

Philip leaned over, looked into my eyes and nodded. ‘No concussion,’ he said.

I was in the king’s tent. The red-purple tinge, like fresh blood, was unmistakable. Outside, the sun must have been high in the sky, and the tent cast a wine-coloured pall over everything.

Somewhere to my right, I could hear the king.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘And immediately after I shattered their centre – could you see? There is no feeling like riding at the point of the wedge. The power! And the danger! Did you see it?’

Murmurs of appreciation.

Thaïs made a face. ‘Please wake up and recover,’ she said. ‘I’ve had two days of it.’

Philip’s lips made the slightest twitch, acknowledging – and agreeing.

It all came back to me in a single piece of memory. The fight in the dust. The message. The wedge.

Poseidon was dead.

‘What’s the butcher’s bill on my taxeis?’ I asked. ‘Could you get me Isokles?’

Thaïs wiped my mouth. ‘Isokles has been dead almost a year,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I answered, confused momentarily. ‘Pyrrhus, too.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and looked away.

‘Callisthenes, then?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘He died here,’ she said.

‘Marsyas?’ I asked. ‘Leosthenes?’

‘Leosthenes is badly wounded and in the surgeon’s tents. Marsyas is collecting Persian women and writing poetry to them.’ Thaïs nodded to Philip. ‘I’m going to move him.’

Philip nodded back.

Marsyas came to see me a day later. I assume he’d tried and been turned away, but he’d done all that I could have done – he’d arranged burials, sent letters and even managed to retrieve and bury mighty Poseidon.