God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (118 page)

And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.

It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.

The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.

But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.

Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.

Laertes fell atop him.

My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.

The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.

I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.

Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and
cut
with the spearhead as if it were the point of a sword. I felt pain – I was taking blows, and my forearms burned, but to stop was to surrender to death.

Marsyas rose from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.

And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.

The hypaspitoi and the Bactrians under Cyrus, who had come up the gully unopposed and stormed the south wall, now butchered the garrison. No one tried to surrender, and the fighting went on and on – new pockets of resistance were found in alleys, on rooftops, and as the men began to break formation to loot and rape, they found men cowering in basements or tight-lipped in courtyards, and killed them.

Polyperchon’s men came late into the town. They had baulked, left me to die and then been threatened with decimation – death for one man in every ten – by Alexander in person, lying on a litter. I missed it, but he went mad, so I was told by Cleitus, spitting, calling them the sons of whores. Alexander, who never swore. Well, almost never.

When they came into the town, they went on an orgy of destruction and killing. The hypaspitoi had rounded up fifty or so women and some children – to be sold as slaves. Don’t imagine they were rescued for any altruistic purpose. Polyperchon’s men found them by the breach and killed them all.

And then they started killing Cyrus’s men.

At first, the Bactrians ran, or called for help, or pleaded that they were allies – friends.

Then they started fighting back.

I was sitting on a chair in the former agora – a looted chair. I had a nasty gash on my thigh and something was wrong in my lower back, and there was blood trickling from somewhere and running down my arse and my leg – all I wanted to do was sleep, or at least rest. And Polystratus, bless him, had found me some pomegranate juice – in the midst of a massacre, that’s a miracle. He’d been knocked out – clean unconscious – by a blow to the head, but taken no other wound.

I saw the fighting start across the square.

I cursed.

Got to my feet. And, I’m not ashamed to say, I finished my juice before I went to save Polyperchon’s men.

I was so angry that I didn’t bother to think. I walked up to the fighting, and I killed one of the Macedonians with a thrust to the face.

He was a phylarch, and he’d probably fought at Chaeronea. I didn’t particularly care. I put him down, and I stood over him and let my rage have voice.

‘You stupid fucks are killing our Bactrians!’ I roared.

They flinched.

I smacked one man who had his sword raised – I swung the spear so hard he moved a foot or two and fell in a heap, out cold.

‘Anyone else?’ I roared.

My friends – my own companions – began to close around me.

Alexander was there. He’d been carried into the fort on a litter, and had Hephaestion with him.

There wasn’t much I could say, standing there with the blood of a Macedonian officer on my spear.

Alexander was white with pain, but he nodded to me. ‘Your precious pezhetaeroi,’ he said. ‘The sooner have I replaced them . . .’

I had never heard him say it. Just at that moment, I was angry enough to agree, but even an hour later, I was calm, and I began to think of what it meant that Alexander no longer trusted his troops. I wondered if he even knew what was wrong.

They wanted to go home. And they
hated
our Persian and Bactrian ‘allies’.

And when Cyrus embraced me, he said, ‘I tell my men! That you are not like the others.’

In other words, our Bactrians and Persians didn’t love us, either.

Two days later, Alexander was off his litter and leading another assault. I was the one on the litter – it turned out that I had an arrow in my back. It had penetrated my thorax and the wool chiton under it, and gone in the distance of a man’s finger to the first joint, right over the fat that surrounds the kidney.

Most of the men who’d taken arrow wounds were raving. The Sogdians poisoned their arrows, and while only a few men died, the rest were in pain, groaning, screaming, with fevers and sweats.

I was, it turned out, suddenly very unpopular indeed with the army. My killing of a Macedonian made me one of ‘them’. One of the men who was against the old ways. No one seemed to care that the useless fucks had left me to die in the breach. Men I’d led at Gaugamela turned away when my litter passed them.

That’s how bad the army was getting.

Alexander was wounded again at the sixth fort. He took a rock – thrown from high on the wall – to the head, and went down.

Our Bactrians and our Persians stormed the fort with the hypaspitoi. Hephaestion stood over Alexander with his shield, and Black Cleitus got him clear of the fighting.

The seventh fort surrendered, with a garrison of six thousand men. But that day, a hundred men came in from the steppe and reported that Pharnuches had been ambushed by the Sakje, or the Massagetae, or possibly Spitamenes himself. He’d lost his entire command. Fewer than three hundred men had survived.

Alexander ordered the prisoners from the last fort to be executed. He had the most recent Sogdian recruits and the men of Polyperchon’s taxeis do it as a test, or a punishment. The Sogdians were killing their own brothers. The Macedonians were performing an ugly task, and they knew why.

Eumenes convinced him
not
to execute the survivors or Pharnuches’s column. But they were sworn to secrecy. Eumenes had joined the inner circle, and the conspiracy to keep Alexander sane.

But pain made the king savage, and the atmosphere of the camp reflected it.

After a week of recuperating, we raced west to rescue Marakanda, because its loss would sever our supply chain. Spitamenes melted away, and we relieved the city.

Craterus went off with a column to pursue Spitamenes – lost him at the edge of the steppe and managed to get into a fight with a party of Sauromatae and Sakje who had disciplined Greek cavalry with them. He lost, and retreated, abandoning his wounded – our third defeat in a month. We’d lost thousands of mercenaries in the forts, in the storming actions, to Spitamenes’ raids and now to the Sauromatae on the steppe.

Alexander’s wounds were so bad that he couldn’t see from time to time, and bone splinters were continually appearing from the leg wound and his collarbone. He was in so much pain that he stayed in his tent, and the Persians he’d surrounded himself with used the time to wall the rest of us off from the king.

Worst of all, Spitamenes was gathering men on the steppe.

Using Marakanda as a headquarters, the king devised a new strategy from his bed. He had the infantry move along the rivers, fortifying. We began to plant garrisons in every valley and on every hilltop, and using the wonderful horses we were taking as tribute from every chieftain we conquered, we mounted as many men as we could and divided the mounted army into five mobile columns. The infantry garrisoned the new forts we built over the winter and the cavalry swept between the forts.

Hephaestion had a column. Alexander had one for himself. Craterus had one. Coenus shared one with Artabazus. And I had one.

Spitamenes beat Coenus and took one of our border posts. I had a brush with your pater across the Jaxartes. I’m not ashamed to say I did everything wrong. My column was almost all Sogdians – recent converts – and I
thought
I was shadowing Spitamenes, but he’d slipped between our columns and raided south.

Instead, I caught a tiger. We fought in a dust storm – I’ve never seen the like – and it was virtually impossible to see across the battlefield. My men held the battlefield – but only because your pater wanted to slip away, and he did.

Your Spartan friend Philokles brought me in as a prisoner. Do you know this story? I said some unfortunate things to your father. I met your mother – not as a prisoner, but as a mother. I saw you at her breast.

You know, lad, when I sit here – beside his tomb – in the fullness of my power, King of Aegypt, Pharaoh of the Two Crowns – I can see them around the fire, at the edge of the great steppe. Your pater and his men. Philokles, who made me feel a complete fool – he still does – and your pater, who reminded me that he had been thrown away by Alexander and owed Macedon nothing. Your mother, who’d been our prisoner.

And yet I was happy to be with them. They were great men, and they were philoi. In my thoughts, I have often compared Kineas and the king. Your pater loved war – he loved the planning, the scouting, the organisation, the movement, the action. But he never loved the killing, nor did he ever tell me stories of his prowess. And when, on the banks of the river, he and Diodorus offered to let me join them – I should have been outraged. But I was tempted, because the king was losing his mind from hubris and from pain.

And because he loved war a different way, and he didn’t want the company of his peers. He wanted only to be the absolute master of all men.

Your pater released me, and Philokles rode me clear of the Sakje and down to the edge of the Jaxartes.

‘Last chance,’ he said. He smiled. ‘I know you won’t change sides. But I’d bet a cup of good wine you could just ride away.’

I smiled, because he had the right of it. I would never have betrayed the king, but I was tempted to use the moment and vanish. Harpalus did, later.

Philokles clasped hands with me. ‘Remember what Srayanka said,’ he added. ‘Tell Alexander not to cross the river. Spitamenes’ time is almost done. The Massagetae are tired of him.’

That was precious information.

I rejoined my command south of the Jaxartes and we swept east along the river, staying well away from the Massagetae. When we returned to the army, I gave the king a severely edited brief – I knew how to edit a scouting report.

Alexander could not sort out the Massagetae from Spitamenes. That is, he understood that they weren’t the same, that Spitamenes used Massagetae goodwill and manpower but didn’t actually control them. But Alexander wasn’t interested in listening to me. I’d been defeated, and I joined the ranks of the disgraced commanders.

He concentrated his columns around Marakanda and pushed north and east, and finally, east of Cyropolis, he faced the Massagetae confederation and all of Spitamenes’ Persians across the Jaxartes.

We neither won nor lost.

I fought all day – two charges in the morning and two in the afternoon at the head of my Hetaeroi. Alexander was wounded in the fighting by the river when the Sauromatae almost collapsed our right flank, and the Macedonian infantry – the phalanx – had to cover our withdrawal across the river. I think it was the worst day that the Hetaeroi ever had. We lost men – we lost horses.

But the Massagetae could make no headway against the phalanx, and Spitamenes’ men took a beating from our left-flank cavalry. I almost reached him myself. By the time we withdrew, the Massagetae may have felt victorious, but the Persian rebels had ceased to be an effective field force.

I’ve heard a hundred men who say we lost at Jaxartes river. But by Ares – we went across the river into the arrow storm, and we crushed Spitamenes. He mounted one more raid –
one
, and then he was through. Nor did the Massagetae want any more of fighting us.

Best of all, the situation forced our Macedonians to fight. They didn’t fight well, but as Alexander put them in a position where the choices were to fight or to die, they chose to fight. After Jaxartes, the pezhetaeroi began to regain discipline. We didn’t lose. Had we lost, we’d have been exterminated.

Alexander, however, was deeply affected by the battle. It was the closest he’d ever come to a loss, and he had never before failed to take the enemy camp, seize the enemy’s baggage, provide his army with the benefits of victory.