God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (122 page)

S
outh of Taxila, the hills rise once more in a shield, and then fall away into the endless plain of the Indus. We already had scouts in the plains, and we picked them up as we advanced, and used them as guides. And the Raja of Taxila, towering in the howdah of his elephant, was there in person to direct us. It was for his alliance that we were marching to fight Porus.

We marched from Taxila to the banks of the Hydaspes in two days – because we heard at Taxila that Porus was forging alliances in the plains and had eighty thousand men and two hundred elephants.

The army was just growing accustomed to elephants. We had forty of them, and we drilled alongside them, and our horses were often picketed near them – horses can be spooked by elephants; both their noises and their smell can affront even a battle-hardened mount. But we had no notion what squadrons of elephants could be like. Forty seemed like an army.

We had no notion what rain was like, either, until the monsoons broke. The king intended to fight in the monsoon, presumably because the Indians
didn’t
and it would add to the sense of adventure. In fact, it reduced their archery to manageable proportions, which was good, as they had expert archers with great bows of bamboo that shot shafts heavy enough to penetrate a bronze thorax.

So we marched in rain so thick that at times it was difficult to breathe, and over roads that either became swamps or torrents. Despite that, we made eight to ten parasanges a day.

The Indians of the plains used chariots, too, which added to the Homeric element for all of us – enormous battle cars, with four or six horses yoked in a line, and four archers per swordsman and a pair of drivers. I encountered one in person on our third day after Taxila, when the Paeonians and a handful of our allied Indian cavalry ran into one of Porus’s patrols across the river. The enemy commander was in a chariot as big, it seemed, as an elephant. His cavalry outnumbered mine by two to one or more.

I sent scouts out into the fields on either side, and they reported that the ground was solid enough. So I closed up my column, prepped my officers and rode straight at my opponent.

He began to deploy his cavalry.

A little more than a stade from the head of his column, and the rain stopped. I pumped my fist in the air – my only order of the hour – and my column unravelled in heartbeats. My units never attempted to form a line. Instead, as soon as any unit came up, they charged. The Indians were hit with a rolling series of squadron charges – every impact had its effect, and by the time Cyrus’s second half-squadron of Persians rolled forward, the Indians were shattered.

We lost three troopers wounded and two dead, and we took fifty prisoners. Best of all, the action was over in the time it takes to sing a hymn. It was a small action – no empires fell – but I feel it shows where we were as a force – what we were capable of. Persians, Thracians, Greeks and Macedonians in one force, well trained, well disciplined, and I rather like to think well led. The Indians were good, but not like us at all. They couldn’t fight from a column on a road.

That night, I was huddling by a spitting fire in the rain, happy as only a victorious commander with low casualties can be, and Bubores came to me with a wreath of some local plant – from the king, for my victory. He gave me a hug, and stayed to drink my wine.

I remember because he asked me to tell him how the fight had gone, and I just shrugged. ‘Bubores, do you think this army has ever been a better weapon than it is right now?’

The Nubian looked into the fire – the coals, anyway – for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drill—’

‘The high morale,’ I said.

‘The teamwork,’ Polystratus said at my shoulder. ‘It’s never been better.’

I nodded. ‘When it is like this,’ I said quietly, ‘I almost enjoy it. Hades, brothers – I
do
enjoy it. But those poor Indians never knew what hit them.’

Bubores nodded. ‘But it is only because he says he’ll go home, after.’

We all nodded, and the wine went around.

Anyway, I got a crown of laurel – or whatever India had that looked like laurel – because I captured their strategos’s chariot. I sent it to Alexander, who received it with delight.

But Porus had beaten us to the river, despite our best efforts. And five days after we left Taxila, we were staring across the river at an army with almost a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants. Porus was no fool. He covered the fords, and all the fords for parasanges up and down the river.

The rain fell.

The army moved up, and built a camp. I doubt that anyone, from footslogger to the King of Macedon, was
comfortable
, but one of the advantages of years of campaigning in every climate in the world is that your men learn to construct shelters, and this time, since it was clear we might be here for months, we floated logs down the river and built huts.

In fact, the king kept the troops moving, marching up and down the river, building small forts and feinting at various crossings.

Sometimes his brilliance lay in being a thorough master of his craft. For three weeks, every time a detachment marched out of camp, Porus sent twice the number of his Indian cavalry to shadow it along the far side of the river. Our men were still eager, but the wine and olive oil were mostly gone, and we were stymied in an endless quagmire of mud by a foe who outnumbered us.

I kept my lights together as a division. I enjoyed commanding them, and I expected the king to break them up into task forces every day, but he did not, and so I kept them busy, scouting the riverbanks.

Ariston found Adama Island, four parasanges north of the army, outside of Porus’s patrol area. We poured men and supplies north once we’d found it, and all the engineers – twice they tried to bridge it, first with piling driven into the swollen banks, and the second time with a bridge of boats assembled on one bank and swayed across, as we’d done against the Thracians at the Danube.

The river was falling – the rains tapering off – but they couldn’t get a bridge across.

Another week passed. Every day, the king was more difficult to live with – nervous, anxious, quick to anger. He expected Porus to find the potential crossing site any day, and build a fortification to cover it.

I had volunteered to take command at the island and get the advance guard across, and I was on my way to take my leave – already up to my ankles in mud, standing in
warm
rain – when Hephaestion came out of the king’s tent, his face red and angry even in the watery light.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

He grunted. ‘Going to see him? Good luck to you, Ptolemy. I’m ready to go home to Macedon and leave him.’

I gave him half a grin and went into the tent.

Alexander was staring at a sketch of the river. He looked at me. ‘What?’ he shot at me.

‘I’m on my way upriver to try and get the bridge across.’ I saluted. ‘If it can be done, I’ll do it.’

‘If it can’t be done, we’re finished,’ he said with uncharacteristic candour.

‘So?’ I asked.

He pursed his lips.

‘Answer me this, Lord King – what difference does it make? Why are we fighting Porus?’

Alexander wrinkled his nose and made a face as if I’d asked a childish question. ‘He lies across our path and you ask this?’

I shook my head. ‘We’re
invading his country
.’ I laughed. ‘We could just march away and
not
invade his country.’

‘Perhaps I should send someone else to the island,’ he said, only half joking.

We set the next night for our attempt to force the river. Alexander’s plan was subtle, but simple. He was going to march the elites upriver – the Hetaeroi with their Persian counterparts, the hypaspitoi, three cavalry commands under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrios, as well as two big phalanx divisions with all the veteran Macedonians, and my command. We would cross, and try to turn Porus’s position. At first light, on a day that promised to be fair, Craterus was to lead the main army across the river.

I had gathered every boat for ten parasanges, and floated them to our bank, as we had at the Danube. I had sixty Agrianians across already, in four forward pickets with fires.

Alexander arrived before full darkness, with the hypaspitoi. Diades floated the pontoon bridge, Helios got it staked in hard to the far bank and we had some long moments in the torchlit, soaking darkness until it swayed out into the current and stayed put. And then it broke loose.

It was just too short, and came all the way around, breaking ropes, to land against our bank. Luckily, we had dozens of Greek sailors, and they fended the boats off and then pulled them back upstream. Ropes were shifted for another try, and four more boats were lashed on to the end of the pontoon platform, and we had lost an hour.

Diades begged the king’s forgiveness. Alexander sat bareheaded in the torchlight, surrounded by his officers, and watched, his eyes never leaving the ropes, the sailors and the boats.

Again they swayed the bridge out into the current. Again we saw Helios and his men drive in palings on the far side.

This time, they got their grapples into the far bank properly, and the bridge steadied in the current. The current took the bridge and slammed it downstream, but the hawsers held.

We waited.

They held.

I caught Cyrus’s eye. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and led my household companions across the bucking bridge. But Alexander was ahead of me, with Seleucus and Lysimachus.

He cantered across the bridge. I rode more slowly.

The engineers began to hold men back, only allowing men to cross in tens, and meanwhile the infantry was embarking in the rafts and boats I had collected for a week.

The boards on the bridge were slick, the oils in the new wood combining with the water to make them treacherous. To make matters worse, the rain turned into a lightning storm, and bolts from heaven began to lash the column.

A bolt struck a file of phalangites, killing three men outright.

In midstream, with the river rushing under my horse’s feet like a live thing, the sky criss-crossed with purple lightning, as if Zeus had set up a trestle to lay siege to the sky, the banks on either shore lost in the darkness and the torrential fall of rain that was, itself, the negation of all sound, I felt as if I were no longer of this world, but had followed the king into the nether regions.

Indeed, when my charger got his forefeet on the far bank, with a loud whinny to announce himself to the waiting horses, or perhaps a prayer to Poseidon for his deliverance, the king spoke out of the flashing darkness.

‘Welcome to Tartarus,’ he said bitterly.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Follow me,’ he yelled. We could barely make ourselves heard.

It was a short ride.

The rising river had cut a new channel.

We were not on the far shore.

We were on a new island, and on the far bank, an enemy signal fire burned despite the torrential rain.

Sometimes, he was a god.

He turned to me and his face, streaming with water, was almost alight with his determination.

‘It can’t be very old,’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to try it. It can’t be deep.’

Before I could say anything, he made Bucephalus – perhaps, by then, the oldest horse in the army – jump into the water.

It was deep. But the horse swam well, and the water had almost no current to it – the channel was fresh, and had not yet cut deep. I saw no point in watching further, and urged my mount into the water – my Nisean, one of the army’s tallest horses. His feet touched the mud underneath – my feet got wet, but they were wet already. We were across in a hundred heartbeats, and we scrambled up the new far bank side by side, rode to the enemy watch fire, scattered it and killed the sentries.

My Paeonians were beginning to ford the river behind me. The Prodromoi were hard on their heels, and behind them came the Hetaeroi and their Persian equivalents.

There was an element of humour, sitting there with the king, watching them come. We were the first two across, and had the enemy been alert, Alexander’s conquest of the world could have ended in ignominious capture on the banks of the Hydaspes river.

But the rain was letting off, and the show of heaven’s wrath. Already, it was possible to hear the creak of oars. Already, men were singing the paean from the boats. The Paeonians and Prodromoi crossed and I sent them off into the darkness. The rest of the Agrianians crossed, and I followed them into the last of the rain. Behind us, the barges of the hypaspitoi and the pezhetaeroi were nudging the shore.

We were across. We had fourteen thousand men, to fight a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants.

As the rain settled, Alexander took on a glow; never had I seen him so sure of himself. Suddenly he was everywhere – with Seleucus, getting the hypaspitoi moving off the riverbank, and forward with me, asking me for a report. My pathfinder Agrianians, who had been across for days, came in as soon as I lit the patterned signal fires in the locations I had briefed them on – men came from as far as four parasanges, men who had laid the trees at the edge of Porus’s camp, reporting on his troop movements. Now they told us that Porus’s son, Porus the younger, with two hundred chariots and two thousand cavalry, was coming at us out of the rain.

We manoeuvred in silence in the growing grey light. There was almost no cover, but we moved the Paeonians as far forward on the left as could be managed, and Hephaestion took the royal Hetaeroi forward on the far right, with Demetrius’s men forming the centre well back. There weren’t enough infantry across yet to make a difference.

The king himself insisted on leading the centre, and then we could see the Indians coming. They’d formed well – they probably formed right outside their camp, fearful of our speed, which shows how competent they really were. Young Porus was in a chariot, and he drove it across the front of his force, haranguing them. Then he charged our centre, and we charged his flanks. He was young and foolish, and he died. We killed or captured his entire force in about as long as it takes to tell the story, because they hadn’t expected us to outflank the ends of their line. Thorough, but not good enough. They had not faced Spitamenes, or Memnon.