God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (126 page)

Alexander tried to buy them. He ordered the army to disperse and plunder – two days of licence to rape, murder and destroy, rob, loot and seize, burn if they wanted.

They did.

And he assembled the camp followers – wives, slaves, sex toys, matrons, mothers – and promised them increased rations and better pay – manumission – anything they wanted, to convince their warriors to go east.

That night, we lay on our klines and listened to the endless rain fall outside. It was so wet that the falling rain gradually soaked the hemp fibre of the great tent, and there was a sort of mist of moisture even inside.

Hephaestion drank deep, and I heard him laugh. ‘They’re like dogs, lord. They’ll come to heel.’

Meleager laughed, and the Persians all nodded. Even Cyrus. Craterus smiled a thin smile.

Perdiccas looked at me.

I shrugged.

But Alexander caught my shrug. ‘Oh dear. Ptolemy thinks otherwise.’

He was close to the edge. I could tell. Hydaspes had taken him too high – I truly feared what was to come. I should have been careful.

I didn’t feel careful.

‘They will not change their minds. They are finished.’ I looked around. ‘They were finished years ago, but they comtinued. For you. Their god. Their living, breathing god.’ I shrugged, and my rage brewed up like the flames in a hearth when the door is opened and the wind sweeps in. ‘They are
men
, not dogs. They have given you
everything
and you give them a district to rape.’ I shook my head. ‘They are finished. They mean what they say.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘So eloquent. But you cannot imagine that I would turn back for
them
.’

And then Coenus shocked me. He stood up, as I was standing. ‘Then turn back for me,’ he said. ‘I am finished. I need rest, even if you do not.’

Alexander’s eyes might have burned a man, they were so hot.

But Perdiccas stood up. ‘I stand with Coenus and Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I will fight for you until I die, but I want to stop marching east.’

Lysimachus stood.

Craterus looked from man to man. He was looking for the main chance. Looking for his moment.

Seleucus stood.

Nearchus stood.

The king rose, and hurled his golden cup across the tent, so that it struck the statue of Herakles and seemed to explode.

‘You cannot!’ he cried. ‘We are on the verge of immortality! After this, there will be nothing worthy, nothing great – merely the maintenance of an empire and bureaucracy, where I was a
god
.’

It was a plea.

‘You seek to limit me. But what limit should a man of the noblest nature put on his labours? I, for one, do not think there should be
any limit
, so long as every labour leads to noble accomplishments!’ He looked around. ‘We here are like the undying. I am going from triumph to worthy triumph!’

He was standing by his couch, in a swirl of muddy water and matted wet grass where the rising rains had flooded our camp. I mention this because Coenus looked at the floor.

‘Is this Olympus, then?’ he said with a snort.

‘If you just want to know when our wars will end,’ Alexander said, ‘we are not far from the Ganges. After the Ganges is the Eastern Sea. And the Eastern Sea will link to the Hyrkanian Sea, for Aristotle says the great sea girdles the earth.’

Of course, I knew from Kineas – who had sailed the Hyrkanian Sea – that it did not join with any other body of water. And I ran the scouts. I knew that no peasant we had met could tell me how far it was to the Ganges.

‘It is more than a thousand parasanges to the Ganges,’ I said into the silence.

‘
You don’t know that!
’ he shouted at me.

Craterus lay on his couch, and stared into the cup of wine in his hand as if it might tell him what to say.

Hephaestion sat up on his couch. But he didn’t stand. Nor did he speak.

Alexander looked at me, and the last time I’d seen that look was the night he killed Cleitus.

But I was tired, and I met his murderous glare with indifference. Only when you have killed as many men as I have, lad, and seen as many worthless victories, can you be truly indifferent. And nothing is more effective against hubris than indifference.

‘You traitors! Worthless weaklings!’ Spittle flew from his mouth.

It’s odd, but I thought of the pezhetaeroi huddled in the woods behind our lines, indifferent to my pleas that they go forward to win the battle. Indifferent.

Yes. They weren’t cowards.

They just didn’t have any more to give.

‘If we turn back now,’ he said, once more in control, ‘the warlike tribes of the East – every spearman in that thousand-parasange plain – will rise against us, and all our conquests will be pointless, or we shall have to undertake them again, and our sons will face these men.’

I might have said,
So you agree that it is a thousand parasanges to the Ganges?
Or I might have said,
You used this argument about defeating Bessus, and then Spitamenes
. Any of us might have refuted him.

But we had heard it all before, and like the drunkard’s proverbial wife, we shook our heads, tired of his lies.

He stormed from the tent.

Alexander spent two days alone, except for his slaves. He wouldn’t see Hephaestion, or Craterus, much less us, the
mutineers
.

Then he sent an ultimatum to the army via Agon, his hyperetes. March, or be left behind. Alexander threatened to go forward with only his Persian levies and his subject Indian troops.

Amyntas son of Philip came to my pavilion. My floor was a hand’s breadth deep in water. He sat on an iron stool that rusted as fast as Ochrid’s slaves could polish it, and he shook his head.

‘I want to tell him,’ Amyntas began.

I raised my hand. ‘I won’t conspire,’ I said. ‘Tell him yourself, or don’t.’

Amyntas shrugged and got to his feet in the water. ‘He’s fucking insane,’ he said.

He stood there, waiting for my reaction.

‘By Zeus the saviour of the world, Lord Ptolemy, he
promised
!’ Amyntas cried suddenly, in almost the same tone in which Alexander had pleaded that we would end as bureaucrats.

I remember that I nodded.

Amyntas left my tent and went to the king.

A day later, Alexander emerged, summoned the command council and announced that we were turning the army and marching for home.

THIRTY-EIGHT

H
e never forgave any of us. Not the pezhetaeroi, and not the commanders.

What followed was horrible, and it made Sogdiana pale. Even now, I take no pleasure in the telling.

He tried to kill the army. He didn’t retreat along our lines of supply, but went down the Indus river to the sea.

Again, I return to the simile of the woman married to a drunkard. At first, we listened to the complex excuses he offered as to why we had to march down the Indus to the delta, and we affected to believe them. It scarcely mattered to us – we were going home. And I don’t think there were five hundred men in the whole army who didn’t feel the same.

But it turned out that marching down the Indus meant fighting our way through a vast, hostile plain. He wasn’t done – he was still on a binge.

And, in my opinion, he had determined to die, or achieve an even greater level of heroism, if that was possible, than he had achieved against the elephants.

He began well. He held an assembly and announced we would march back. Men applauded – men cheered him as they had cheered him when he charged the elephants. He ordered us to build twelve giant altars to the gods, and we sacrificed like the gods themselves, and we had games that went on twelve days. I did not win in a single event. My hands hurt so much when I awoke most mornings that I couldn’t hold a sword to spar. Men I’d never heard of won most of the events – recruits, just two years out from Pella, or Athens, or Amphilopolis, or Plataea.

One of Cyrus’s men won the archery.

Polystratus won the horse race, and received a golden crown, which he still wears at feasts.

His friend Laertes won the mounted javelin competition.

Then he made Porus, our erstwhile enemy, the satrap of India, and put the army to work as labourers, repairing dams and dykes and towns along the Indus. This was mostly make-work, as Nearchus and Helios and all the engineers spent the summer building triaconters – thirty-oared ships – to sail down the Indus, which we were told was navigable all the way to the great sea.

I remember that it was about this time that we met Kalanos and his disciple Apollonaris – that wasn’t his name, then. They were members of a sect that went naked but for their beards – serious ascetics, men dedicated to meditation and prayer and fasting. Hephaestion had the notion that they would make the king feel better, and brought their leader, Dandamis, to the king.

He was a great mind, and he and the king debated for hours – through interpreters—the nature of men’s souls, the size of the world, the purpose of creation. As Hephaestion had guessed, Dandamis filled a need in the king.

But the next morning, he was gone.

The king rode in person to fetch him from his camp. I wasn’t there, but I heard the story from Nearchus, and also from my son, who was there. The king found Dandamis sitting naked by a cold firepit. He sat on his horse for a while, looking down at the dirty, naked man, and then said, ‘Brother, come and follow me across the world, and we will learn together.’

Dandamis didn’t speak for a while, and the king repeated himself with great patience, according to my son.

But after the sun had moved in the heavens, the king’s horse began to fret, and the king sat up. ‘Come, philosopher,’ he said. ‘Follow the son of Zeus.’

And Dandamis laughed. ‘If you are the son of the greatest god, so am I!’ he said, and Barsulas says there was real mockery in his voice.

‘Are you a fool?’ Alexander asked. ‘You are naked, and I can clothe you – you have no fire, and I can feed you.’

Dandamis then looked at Alexander with pity. ‘You have nothing I want,’ he said. ‘Once, you might have made a passable philosopher, but now you value no opinion save your own. You wander because you cannot bear to be still – you conquer because you cannot bear to rule. Please go.’

Well, well.

But Kalanos and his disciple came with us – the young Chela, who became Apollonaris the Philosopher, here at court.

I hadn’t received a letter from Thaïs in a year, and I had no command and no real role. Craterus now worked the logistika directly. The king scarcely spoke to any of us, and never to me, and although I attended him daily, he never even turned his head towards me.

Of course, it might have been worse.

Coenus died of poisoning. Coenus, who had been with us his whole life. He died vomiting black bile. I held his head.

After that, Laertes and Ochrid found me a slave boy to taste all my food. About a week later, he died, vomiting black bile.

We found another.

Macedon, eh?

We had two thousand ships, crewed by our Aegyptians, our Carians, our Greeks – anyone who had ever even
heard
of a ship. Nearchus had the command, and we started downriver in autumn. Craterus had a third of the army, on the right bank of the river, and Hephaestion had almost half the army on the left bank, including all of our elephants. Alexander was very keen to get the elephants home – two hundred of them. Coenus had openly speculated that we weren’t going home via Sogdiana specifically because the king feared losing animals in the high passes. He may have been right.

We sailed along the banks of the Indus for a week. It
was
idyllic. Indians gathered on the banks and waved, or sang. Some knelt and prayed to Alexander as he passed, as a living god.

But where the Hydaspes and the Akesinos joined, there was a set of rapids, a narrow gorge and a whirlpool.

That is where I began to suspect that Alexander meant to kill us all. He ordered us to pass the rapids by rowing. In three days, we would have been able to unload, carry our ships across the portage and reload. We were the finest, most organised army on the face of earth, and we knew how to do such things.

He ordered us to row, and men died.

Ships were spun around, and collided with the rocks and capsized. Ships ran afoul of each other and capsized. Ships were simply sucked into the whirlpool.

We lost
only
seven ships, as Alexander mentioned with a laugh and a toss of his head that night, at dinner. He had the look of a smart boy who had pulled off a difficult prank.

Fifteen hundred men drowned.

South of the rapids, the river became broad and flat. We heard that the Malloi, a barbarian people, intended to resist. Alexander brightened up.

I was sitting on my bed, drinking too much, to be honest, when Theodore, Polystratus’s friend, came and banged my tent pole with his spear. ‘Message for Lord Ptolemy!’ he called.

I got up, threw a chlamys over my shoulders and went out into the brilliant sun. Even in evening, India is pounded by the sun.