God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (125 page)

Archers on the backs of the elephants shot, too.

The Agrianians went forward into the arrow storm, heads up, legs pumping them forward. Right into the monsters.

Off to my right, the hypaspitoi watched us come up, pass their front and move on. They cheered us, but they didn’t follow.

Farther to the right, I could see the king – far, far off, gleaming on his white horse. He had formed the Hetaeroi into four wedges, and that’s all I had time to see.

‘The king is coming!’ I called.

And then the Agrianians went in among the elephants, and the madness began.

The Indian infantry stopped being stunned by our reckless approach – really, a charge – and started forward, eager to crush our Psiloi.

I put my bare head down and rode for the hypaspitoi. But Seleucus waved me off, and I saw him march off his half-files to the left, doubling his front, and then the whole of the hypaspitoi started forward at the Indian infantry. They, naturally enough, flinched, and responded to the charge of the hypaspitoi.

Triton had decided that he could survive facing elephants. He shied, but he went where I pointed him, and now I pointed him at the largest struggle – fifty of my Psiloi and twenty archers against five or six elephants right in the centre of the field.

There were Paeonians there, too, because the Prodromoi and the Paeonians had filtered all the way along the Indian line by this time – the battle was breaking down into a desperate, every-man-for-himself engagement of a kind I had never seen. The Indians were surrounded, but so far their monsters were untouchable.

Even as I watched, an Agrianian punched his heavy javelin into the side of one of the towering beasts, and then threw himself at the shaft, stabbing deeper and deeper. The great animal bellowed, and its trunk licked out and caught him and ripped him free, throwing him over its head – but another man had a shaft in, and a bold pair of Toxitoi stood almost at its feet and shot – shot quickly and accurately, despite the bestial death that towered over them, and they cleared the crew off the beast’s back, and an engineer leaned in, almost touching the animal, and his bolt vanished into the behemoth’s guts and the animal screamed in agony.

The archers shot into its face, and their shafts bounced off its thick skull, and then a lucky shaft, Athena-guided, or moved by Apollo’s hand, went into an eye, and the creature stumbled, bowed its mighty head and slumped to its knees.

The other animals nudged it – it was somehow more horrible than anything to see their concern for their fellow monster.

And then they shuffled their great, flat feet and moved back, away from the pinpricks of the Psiloi.

I rode back down the field to the pezhetaeroi. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ I shouted.

And they came.

Meleager had a handful, when he first started back up the field. Antigenes and Gorgias had even fewer.

But Philip son of Amyntas, senior phylarch, had a lot of good men – men of all six taxeis. He ignored the officers. His full-throated roar was as loud as an elephant’s scream of pain, and carried across the field.

‘Get in the ranks! Get in the ranks! Pick up any spear you see and get in the fucking ranks! Are you cowards? Are the fucking barbarians better men? Are the
archers
better men?
Get up!
’ he screamed. Spittle shot from his mouth as I rode up to him, and he ignored me. ‘Get in the ranks! Fill in! Now.
The king needs us!
’

And they came.

They came in tens, and then they came in hundreds, and then it was like an avalanche of pikemen. They came with swords, with daggers, with broken spears, with stolen javelins, with bare hands.

I had never seen anything like it.

Gorgias and Meleager ran to the front to take command, but I cantered past them to Amyntas son of Philip.

‘Into the Indians!’ I shouted. ‘Stop their gods-forsaken archers from coming to grips with the Psiloi!’

He put a hand to his ear – an ear covered by the flaps of his helmet.

‘Forward!’ I shouted.

He grinned. It was a hard grin – an evil grin. ‘Here we come,’ he growled.

I galloped back to the elephant fight. Dozens – in some cases hundreds – of Indian archers were clearing our Psiloi off the beasts, pushing our men back, and back.

Until the hypaspitoi and the phalanx struck them, and crushed them. In three hundred paces, the battle was transformed and the Indian archers broke, running for the safety of their elephant line, which had retreated several hundred paces, the great beasts lumbering away and putting heart into our phalangites.

The Psiloi ran down the gaps between the taxeis, and reformed in the rear, drinking from canteens, and slumping to the ground in blank-eyed exhaustion. They had faced the monsters for about as long as a man and a woman make love. No longer. And they were spent.

Nonetheless, Ochrid arrived with a train of slaves bearing arrows, javelins, bolts and darts.

Briso was missing. Attalus was badly cut by a sword, and Helios was commanding all the Psiloi. I waved a javelin at him in thanks. ‘I think you’re finished,’ I said.

His look of relief said everything.

I turned Triton and rode for the front.

There was almost no fighting. The Indian infantry was lightly armoured and when they ran, our men couldn’t keep up, even if they broke ranks. All along the front, our men reclaimed fallen spears, some picking up shields. To be honest, men were
still
coming up from the woods, convinced by the victory that it was safe to emerge from their cowardice.

They were wrong.

Porus wasn’t beaten. Porus was regrouping.

The king had begun to throw his wedges into Porus’s flanks, but Porus, with real brilliance, countered them with elephants, sending companies of elephants into the point of the wedges, shredding their formation.

He had saved a squadron of giant chariots, and now he released them against the king’s flank, but that, at least, we were prepared for, and Alexander sent his tame Saka, Massagetae who had taken service and Sogdian nomads, to shoot the chariot horses. They destroyed the whole force – a thousand chariots – before the infantry had time to panic.

But, Porus rallied the bulk of his elephants, and placed himself in the centre. Any infantry that could be rallied – and they were brave men, those sword-armed archers – came forward on the flanks of a veritable phalanx of elephants, with the giant of giants leading the way.

It was a slow attack – scarcely a charge, but a shuffling, lumbering advance, slower than the march of a closed-up phalanx.

But our men were not going to stand it. They began to shuffle back.

And then the king was there.

He appeared out of the woods, and he rode unerringly to Amyntas’s side even as I reached him.

‘The infantry!’ he said. He smiled. ‘Just hold their infantry. Oblique right and left from the centre – avoid the elephants.’ Men heard him. The words ‘Avoid the elephants’ were wildly popular.

And his presence was like a bolt of energy.

The retreat stopped.

I remember the king looking at Meleager, who was not in the front rank, not in his proper station, and clearly not in command. His glance only lasted a heartbeat. He didn’t show anger, or pity.

Just a complete lack of understanding, like a man facing the sudden appearance of an alien god.

Then he turned his horse.

I didn’t wait for him. I knew what he needed. I just waved.

And rode for Helios.

‘One more time!’ I called.

Even the Agrianians – the bravest of the brave – shuffled their feet.

There are times when you yell at troops, and times when you coax them.

And sometimes, when brave men have already done all that you can ask – all you can do is lead them.

I rode to the front of them, and I raised my javelins, as yet unthrown, over my head.

‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘Do as you wish.’

And I pointed Triton’s head at the elephants and walked forward.

I didn’t look back. I had time to think of the hill fort, and the taxeis that left me to die. The Agrianians were men I’d served with for years – but they weren’t
mine
. I was best with troops who knew me. I didn’t have the magic Alexander had. I was the plain farm boy, and it took men time to love me.

So I let Triton walk forward, and the elephants were close – fifty of them, formed in a mass.

The phalanx had broken in two, and each half marched obliquely to its flank – or flowed that way like a mob. Discipline was breaking down. It was already the longest battle any of us had ever seen, and darkness was not so very far away, and the main lines were on their third effort.

There would be no fourth effort.

This, then, was it.

Alexander appeared at my bridle hand. He was smiling, and the sun gilded his helmet. He pulled it off his head, and waved it. ‘Nicely done, Ptolemy,’ he said, his eyes on the men behind me, who were following, formed in a compact mass roughly the width of the elephants to our front. The Toxitoi and the engineers and the Agrianians were all intermixed.

To my left, Amyntas was leaning forward towards the enemy as he walked behind his pike-head like a man leaning into a wind. To my right, Seleucus was almost perfectly aligned with us.

I could see men I knew, and men I had never seen before – Macedonians and Ionians and Greeks and Persians and Bactrians and Sogdians, Lydians, Agrianians. I think that I saw men who had been dead a long time – men who fell at the Danube, men who fell at Tyre, men who fell in pointless fights in Sogdiana.

I certainly saw Black Cleitus.

And next to me, Alexander made his horse rear. He laughed, and the sound of his laughter was like a battle cry, and the sarissas came down, points glittering in the last of the sun.

Alexander turned to me and laughed again. ‘Watch this,’ he said, as he used to when we were ten and he wanted to impress me.

He put his heels to his new horse, and he was off like a boy in a race – alone. We were close to the elephants, then. He rode at them all alone. I was too stunned to follow, for a moment . . .

He put his spear under the crook of his arm, and he put that horse right through the formation of enemy elephants – in a magnificent feat of horsemanship, passing between two huge beasts who appeared from three horse lengths away to be touching. But his reckless charge was not purposeless.

Oh, no.

He left his spear an arm’s length deep in the chest of the nearest elephant, and the great thing coughed blood and reared, dropping his crew to the ground and then trampling them to death.

The whole of Porus’s line shuddered, and the king rode out again, having passed behind the elephants, and he burst out of their left flank, still all alone, and rode along the front of the hypaspitoi.

That’s when the cheers started.

He killed an
elephant
. In
single combat
.

It was like the sound a summer thunderstorm makes as it rushes across a flat plain, driven by a high wind that you have yet to feel. It started well off to the right, among the royal Hetaeroi, who now launched themselves at the rallied Indian infantry.

ALEXANDER!

The hypaspitoi had the god of war himself riding in front of them, and their shouts rose like a paean.

ALEXANDER!

The pezhetaeroi picked it up, and the Agrianians, the Toxitoi. It spread and spread, and he rode to the centre, spinning a new spear in his hand, horse perfectly under control, head bare, and those horns of blond hair protruding from his brows.

ALEXANDER!

The sunset made his pale hair flare with fire, and the blood on his arms and hands glow an inhuman red.

ALEXANDER!

I happened to be in the centre of the line, and he rode to me – a little ahead of me. He paused and looked back at me, and his eyes glowed.

‘This is it!’ he shouted to me.

At the time, I think he meant that this was the end of the battle. In retrospect, I wonder if this was what his whole life had waited for. This was it – the moment, perhaps, of apotheosis. Certainly, and I was there, the gods and the ghosts were there – the fabric of the world was rent and torn like an old temple screen when a crowd rushes the image of the god, and everything was possible at once, as Heraklitus once said.

‘
CHARGE!
’ he shouted.

And we all went forward together.

The rest is hardly worth telling. I wounded Porus, and captured him – with fifty men to help me. Porus’s army broke, and ours hunted them, killing any man they caught – men who have been as terrified as ours show no mercy.

The carnage of that day was enough, by itself, to change the balance of the world.

If apotheosis came at Hydaspes, the end was near.

After the turn of the year, after Porus swore fealty (which he kept) and after the gods stopped walking the earth and went back to Olympus – after it was all over, and the slaves buried our dead – Alexander went back on his promise and marched east. We marched after the summer feasts, and we marched into more rain – rain and rain, day after day.

Victory gave us wings, for a few days. Alexander gave the troops wine, oil and cash, the takings of Porus’s camp, more women, more slaves.

Cities surrendered, and cities were sacked. We marched farther east. And three weeks later, on the banks of the Beas, the army stopped.

Amyntas son of Philip caught the king’s foot as he rode across the front of the army. The army was formed to march, but the pikes were grounded, all along the line, and the cavalry were not mounted, even though the men stood by their horses.

Amyntas pulled at the king’s foot.

The king looked down at him. ‘Speak,’ he commanded.

Amyntas didn’t grovel. He met the king’s rage with a level glance. It is hard to stare
up
into a man’s eyes and keep steady. But Amyntas had faced fire and stone, ice and heat, scythed chariots, insects and elephants, and the king did not terrify him.

‘Take us home, lord,’ Amyntas begged. But in that voice you could hear not terror, but steel.