God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (117 page)

Coenus was uneasy. He could be a brute, but the Greek – despite a superb physique – was not a big man, and he looked inoffensive – naked, with a club. Coenus looked at the king. The king shook his head. ‘Just kill him,’ he said.

The naked man was an Olympic athlete who had come all this way to train Alexander’s soldiers.

Coenus – our Coenus, not your father’s friend – wouldn’t have lasted this long if he hadn’t been absolutely obedient. He turned, drew his sword and set his shield.

The naked boy came forward, edging crabwise.

Coenus struck, thrusting his shield into the man’s body and cutting hard, overhand.

The Greek slid inside the cut, broke his arm and knocked him unconscious with his club in one blow.

Fight over.

Alexander drew his bow from the gorytos, nocked an arrow and shot the Greek. The arrow went in just over his kidneys, and he fell screaming.

His screams pursued us down the ridge.

Hephaestion looked at me, and I just shook my head at him. I couldn’t think of what to say, or do, but for the first time, I considered two things.

Riding away from the army and taking my chances with the king ordering me killed.

Or killing Alexander.

That night, six of us had a secret meeting. It was a conspiracy – we all knew we could be killed for having the discussion. I swore never to repeat what we said, or who was there. It was a desperate hour, and a desperate oath. So I won’t tell you – except that we discussed options.

When we were done, Hephaestion held me back. ‘Barsines or her sister,’ he said. ‘Bagoas turns my stomach, but he’d do, too.’

Well, it was better than regicide. I nodded. ‘But we have to get through the weeks until he finds a sex toy or we can import one,’ I said.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘We need something as good as the bow was. And we need it to stay beautiful.’ His bronze hair glittered in the firelight. It was already cold in the mountains.

‘Horses? Playing Polis? How silk is made?’ I was talking to hear myself. I wanted Thaïs. I wanted to drink wine with Polystratus and Cyrus, or Marsyas. I wanted to stop being afraid.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘He’s close to the edge,’ he said. ‘What do we do?’

I didn’t have an answer.

I went to bed.

Polystratus wakened me while the stars were still turning overhead. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘The king wants you.’

I got out of my cloak, wrapped it back around me and ran for his tent – terrified, in a sleepy, cold way, that he’d done something. Killed Hephaestion.

But they were sitting together.

He was smiling, his face easy and unlined, his eyes glittering.

‘Listen, Ptolemy!’ he said. ‘Spitamenes is in revolt, and he’s slaughtered all seven of our new garrisons.’

Hephaestion looked at me. His eyes said
everything
.

Alexander went on, ‘He’s raised the whole province while we were playing at archery – and he’s cut us off from the main army. We’re surrounded. And our supply lines are
cut
.’ He fingered his beard. And smiled.

Hephaestion smiled.

Hades, I smiled myself.

Alexander looked up from the dispatch. ‘Gentlemen, I think we might have a war on our hands,’ he said.

We were saved.

THIRTY-FIVE

A
lexander’s reaction to Spitamenes was planned in one night and ran like lightning over the plains. He sent a relief column to break Spitamenes’ siege of Marakanda. Alexander placed Pharnuches, a skilled speaker of Persian and several of the Bactrian tongues, as commander; he got a troop of Hetaeroi, three hundred Macedonian pezhetaeroi mounted as cavalry, and two thousand mercenary infantry – good men, mostly Ionian Greeks. Alexander also gave him all the Amazon captives to escort into Marakanda. Spitamenes had sold them to us in the first place, and Alexander thought they might be useful as bargaining counters. He expected that Spitamenes would negotiate.

We marched for the Jaxartes. And we went hard and fast.

We took four forts in three days. In each case, we took the fort by storm, and the garrisons were slaughtered in the storming action. Alexander made it clear to the Bactrians that there were to be no survivors.

In every case, Alexander led the storming party in person.

This was not misplaced Homeric heroics. We had added thousands of barbarian auxiliaries to the army, and we were so short on ‘Macedonians’ that Illyrians and even Thracians had begun to seem like close friends. And morale among the Macedonian troops was low. Alexander made it clear that we were to lead from the front, and when the assault parties went in, the entire front rank of a taxeis might be, for instance, Hetaeroi officers.

That’s what it was taking to get our men into combat.

It was bloody work, but the Bactrian levies did their part, and that meant that they were ours. After killing their cousins in Spitamenes’ service, they weren’t going to go back to the steppe or join the revolt.

The Bactrians were better soldiers than any of us expected. They had enough tribal feuds and remembered hatreds to get them going, and they were still in awe of us. The problem was that as the Bactrians began to outperform the Macedonians, the bad feeling, already present, began to escalate.

There’s a belief, common among the sort of generals who fight their battles in the baths or lying on a comfortable kline at a party, that men who have fought in a number of battles are veterans and thus better soldiers. In the main, this is true. Veterans don’t die from preventable accidents. Veterans get fewer diseases, know how to dig a latrine and know how to find food. So they can indeed wager on how new recruits will die, in the field.

Veterans have learned a few things, and one of the things they learn is that people
die
in war or are horribly mutilated, and that the way to avoid these fates is to be careful and not take risks. Sometimes, in combat, the raw, unblooded troops are the better fighters.

The fifth of Cyrus’s forts on the Jaxartes – the one we called Cyropolis – was the worst.

Alexander had been wounded the day before, storming the Dakhas fort. He’d taken an arrow right through the shin – Philip had it out in no time, but it left the king out of the next action, against a fort that had a garrison of seven thousand men.

So there I was, with most of my friends and my own retainers. I had set out from Macedon with twenty grooms, and I had six left. Polystratus was now a gentleman and an officer – a phylarch. His second, Theodore, was now a hetaeros, a half-file leader in a gold-plated helmet. Ochrid, who had begun our campaigns as my body slave, was now my steward, as I have noted, and about this time started to serve as my mounted groom, and usually fought with the Hetaeroi, and any day now, I was going to have to put him in the ranks and add him to my roster. This is not a complaint – Ochrid was, it turned out, a warrior to his fingers’ ends. Most men are, if they are well led. Rather I mean it as an example of how desperate our manning problems were. The lines between master and man, between ‘Greek’ and ‘Macedonian’, between ‘mercenary’ and ‘professional’, were hopelessly blurred.

As the numbers of Greeks in our ranks increased – even in the Hetaeroi – the older Macedonians grew less and less inclined to accept the Bactrians and the Persians, as if the line had to be drawn somewhere.

But I digress. Cyropolis. The fort was two hundred feet above us, and I was standing in the front rank between Polystratus and Marsyas. I had four thousand men formed behind me, and another thousand Bactrians under Cyrus, ready to go up a dry gully to the south of the place. As far as I could see, the dry gully would get them within fifty paces of the position and the useless amateurs guarding the fort had missed it. I certainly hoped so.

My four thousand were all veterans. They were a mix of mercenaries and one of Parmenio’s former taxeis – Polyperchon’s Tymphaeans. Polyperchon was down with one of Apollo’s shafts in him, and his men – some of whom were survivors of Philip’s campaigns – were none too happy to be used as assault troops.

I could hear them behind me.

‘Let the fucking Medes do it,’ one old man said. ‘They seem to like it.’

But soldiers always said such things before a fight.

It was a calm, clear morning. I could smell the sharp smell of our morning fires, and while it promised to be hot, the early-morning air was still quite pleasant. The river made a low growl off to my right, and we had so many horses in our army that they made more noise than the enemy.

But not more noise than a battery of war engines. Twenty engines loosed their bolts and baskets all together, about a stade to my left, and their noise drowned the river and the horses – the whip-crack of the torsion engines, the louder, deeper thud as the catapults released their heavier payloads. The engineers had opened breaches the night before and kept the range, despite the workings of temperature and dew on the torsion ropes. Dust rose all along the top of the breaches, as the gravel and the larger stones struck home. Someone was hit – he lay in the breach screaming.

An archer on the wall tried a long shot. He must have been good – his first shaft struck a horse length from my right foot. But his second shaft fell shorter yet, and he stopped.

We weren’t exactly going to surprise them.

I exchanged embraces and arm clasps with my friends in the front ranks. Then I turned to the pezhetaeroi.

‘Let’s get this done,’ I said. Perhaps not my best speech.

All I got in return was a low growl, but that was fine. Professionals.

I looked at Laertes, another former groom who now carried the trumpet and acted as my hyperetes, because Theophilus had been promoted to decarch.

He nodded once and sounded it, and we were off.

I didn’t see any reason to hurry, since my real attack was going in with Cyrus, and the trumpet was his signal to start up the dry gully. We marched quite well. My shield hurt my shoulder. I was reaching an age when the accumulation of my wounds had begun to bother me almost every day. Thaïs had made me concoctions – they didn’t all work, but the thought was there. Now I had nothing but what Philip of Acarnia gave me. More and more, he used opium for everything. I didn’t want opium, so I put up with a lot of aches and pains.

Four thousand sets of boots, going up the gravel to the fort.

Arrows began to fall on us. They’d been lofted high to get over our shields.

The men behind me raised their shields.

I began to go forward faster. It is the natural reaction to incoming arrows.

I was almost to the base of the main breach. We’d pounded three of them at last light, and the batteries had opened up again at first light, pounding the mud-brick wall to dirt and wrecking the attempts at repair. Baskets of gravel had cleared the workers off the walls.

We were quite good at sieges, by the Jaxartes.

Even as I reached the ditch at the base of the devastated mud-brick wall, I saw that the pioneers had filled it in with fascine bundles, and crossbow bolts were going over my head into the archers on the walls shooting down at me. It didn’t make me feel
safe
, but it is reassuring to a soldier to know that the other parts of the machine are functioning to support him.

The poor bastard in the breach had been unlucky. A five-talent machine had hit his feet square on and effectively pulped them, and he lay in an immense pool of his own blood and screamed. His screams were horrible, because his fate represented exactly the sort of thing we all feared.

I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.

May someone do as much for me.

Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields
full
of arrows, and behind them were a dozen more officers and gentlemen.

The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.

There was no one behind my officers.

The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.

There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.

No thanks
, I thought.

So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.

I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.

I was wrong.

It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.