God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (92 page)

I had about a hundred men with me, and far too many of the officers – good for my group, bad news for my assault as a whole. I remember killing my way over the second barricade, and pausing to drink water from my canteen. I found that my strap had broken, or been cut, and I turned to Cleomenes and stopped him – carefully, as his blood was up.

‘Water, brother?’ I asked, and because I had to pop my cheek-plates to drink, I could hear and see when the enemy ambush began to filter into the street behind us.

‘Ware!’ I bellowed, and all the men on the barricade turned, and we made a shield wall – fifteen or twenty of us – and we held them. Please do not mistake me – the Persians and the Nabataeans at Gaza were brave men and well led, but they were never a match for us in combat. They lacked the armour, and they lacked the mettle. They hit us and we broke them and then we chased them back down the alley.

And now I really had time to look around, and what I saw was that we were not actually taking ground – that every stone house had defenders, and we were receiving a constant and deadly barrage wherever we went.

The problem I had – the problem every strategos always has – was information.

I gathered the men I had and we stormed a house. The fighting was bestial – kopis and xiphos against short spear and knife in rooms no larger than a large himation laid on the ground, through doorways so narrow and so low that a child would have to stoop to enter, and up steeply turning stairs that rotated to the right to cramp a fighter. At every check, the enemy put an archer or two behind a few swordsmen.

I couldn’t take more than a room or two at a time, and then I had to exchange out of the front rank. It was true of every man – fighting inside a city is a terrifying thing, every blow is a death blow. But as with fighting at night, discipline and armour make all the difference.

In the end, we stormed the tower and exterminated the garrison at the top, throwing the last bodies to the street below.

Now I could see.

There were fires throughout the town, and the dirt streets – the alleys – raised clouds of dust, so that a pall seemed to hang over the town, lit red and yellow by the flames in the early light.

It was actually quite beautiful.

But the pattern leaped to the eye. We were not penetrating the town. We were being funnelled down four corridors for the convenience of the garrison – a corridor for every breach – and each corridor led to a maze of alleys and barricades.

I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to catch my breath. Long enough for the sweat on my abdomen to start to dry. Because I had to be right.

Then I ordered my hyperetes to sound the recall.

I was the first. I remain proud of my decision.

Alexander did not feel the same way.

‘You what?’ he asked, his arms crossed. ‘You
ran?
’

I stank of death, and I was covered in soot, and I had two wounds. I had prepared myself for the encounter, and when I was clear of the breach, I ran – ran – all the way around the wall to Perdiccas to find him in his breach, and he, too, was coming out. And I promised him I’d explain to Alexander. I had set my mind to it as I climbed back up our siege mound, and I went straight to his tent.

And I was still not ready. I had my logic all prepared, and the king needed to know what Batis had done.

He smelled of spikenard, and he didn’t have a mark on him. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have grown used to uninterrupted victory. Or perhaps I simply cannot expect as much when I’m not there in person. I know what fear is, Ptolemy. You are forgiven.’

I suspect my mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. I don’t remember that part. What I remember is my head screaming at me to keep my mouth shut.

‘Fuck you!’ I roared at him. Alas. ‘You weren’t there – Lord King. You have no idea what we faced, and you think I
panicked?
You’re fucking right you should do it yourself. Because if you continue to talk like that, you may have to!’

Wise, carefully considered words they were not. I turned on my heel and walked away. But he had it coming, and then some.

The thing is, Alexander was . . . Alexander. God, monster, man, inhuman – all of them in one body.

So while Thaïs washed the crap and blood from my body, and my rage simmered and I tried – tried hard – not to turn it on my lover – Alexander came in. He had four Hetaeroi with him, and he was in armour.

He had a baton in his hand, and he put it carefully on my camp bed and came immediately to my side. He sniffed, made a face and sniffed the wound in the top of my shoulder, where you could see the white fat oozing out through the blood.

‘Do you have a wound gone bad?’ he asked. ‘You stink like a bad wound.’

‘I stepped in a corpse,’ I said, my tone carefully neutral.

‘Ah,’ he said. He took a cloth from Thaïs and cleaned my shoulder wound with what I can only call tender ruthlessness – he was as quick as he could be. He was very good with wounds.

It was all I could do not to cry out, or just cry.

When he dipped the cloth into the hot water, he said, ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. Not fighting – I cannot do it. I cannot cower in the rear. It makes me a woman. In too many ways.’

Thaïs sniffed and muttered something about childbirth.

Alexander ignored her. ‘I should have been there. But I’m told it was a trap.’

‘A well-laid defence – a trap if we were foolish enough to come into it.’ I began to breathe more easily. My first thought when he entered the tent was that I was to be stripped of my command.

‘And perhaps, had I led today, I would have died.’ He shrugged. ‘I will lead the next.’

‘Tomorrow?’ I asked. In truth, I felt weary to the bone. It was still early morning, and I wanted to sleep.

He shook his head. ‘This was bad. We lost – three hundred pezhetaeroi, and perhaps more. I will let our men rest. Five days. And then I’ll take the Hetaeroi and the hypaspitoi.’ He smiled.

I knew what men would say in camp. That my men hadn’t been up to it. But neither could we assault every time, and my men didn’t have anything to prove. I took two breaths to fight down the urge to demand to participate, and then I nodded. ‘Bless you, Lord King, for coming to me.’

He put a hand on my good shoulder. ‘I love you, Ptolemy. Even when I behave thoughtlessly.’ He kissed me on the cheek and left the tent.

Go ahead. Hate that.

I couldn’t.

I don’t remember how many days passed – ah, here it is, in the Journal. Three days.

I probably slept for two of them.

My taxeis came out of the siege lines at midnight. Morale wasn’t bad – the new armour was coming in any day, I’d just given a small pay rise to all the married men in my regiment and I’d bought meat far away at Jerusalem and had it driven on the hoof into our camp, and every man knew he had a dinner of lamb to look forward to. In fact, I was spending money as an orator spends hot air, but my men needed it or they were going to collapse. All the taxiarchs were doing all they could.

I heard Parmenio, playing Polis with Craterus, mutter that the best thing that could happen to us was that Darius would get up the nerve to attack us, because that would put spine back in the pikemen. Parmenio was deeply depressed. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke slowly and very seldom, and he and his sons had become isolated.

At any rate, we were filtering down off the siege mounds north of the city, far from the breach that had killed seventy of my men, when we heard the unmistakable sounds of combat from all the way around the city.

I was already down at the base of the siege mound, on the road that Diades had built and kept clear for rapid troop movements. I had a habit of forming the men every night before dinner, to ‘pass the word’, as we used to say, and that night it stood me in good stead.

‘Files from the left by fours – to the left – march!’ I shouted, and ran to their head. Each group of four files marched forward to the road and then wheeled in fours to the left, forming a column four wide on the road from a phalanx eight deep. Simple stuff – if you drill every day.

As soon as the first fours were on the road, I trotted to their head. ‘At the double! Follow me!’

It was six stades around the wall to where we heard fighting. We were not sprinting, but we made it in time.

When we came up to the southernmost siege mound – territory we knew all too well, as it is where our own assault had jumped off – there was a vicious fight – a dust cloud, darkness falling and several thousand enemy troops engaged on the front face of our siege mound. They’d clearly made it into our works, because one of our batteries was aflame, and the smell of naphtha was in the air. Amyntas’s taxeis was broken – I could see his phylarchs rallying men to my right. And the hypaspitoi were fully engaged. I looked for Alexander.

I couldn’t see him.

The hypaspitoi were being pushed back, step by step. The Persian assault was ferocious. I didn’t know why, yet. I just saw disaster looming.

So did Perdiccas and Craterus, both of whom were forming their taxeis as quickly as they could on the parade ground, just two stades away. But the time was right then, or never. The Persians outnumbered the hypaspitoi four to one or more.

I led my men
down
into the no man’s land between the siege works and the town, and halted a spear-cast from the flank of the Persians.

‘Form your front!’ I ordered.

The first four halted. All seven men in the four files halted, as well.

The next block of four files came at a run and fell in next to them. Now eight files wide.

Then four more files to the right and four more to the left.

In heartbeats, we were thirty-two files wide. I didn’t wait. Marsyas could bring up the second half as he saw fit – the darkness was growing, the growl of the Persians was deadly and I was already afraid that I had waited too long.

‘Spears down! March!’ I ordered, as the files closed up.

The Persians had had minutes to prepare for us, and they had a body of armoured bowmen loosing into our front ranks, and men fell, but shafts that went over got lost in the forest of spears, impetus broken. The archers didn’t await our onset, and there were no spearmen to resist us, and we tore right into the side of the Persian force and men fled us. This was the eternal problem for the Persians – without good Greek infantry, they had no foot who would abide us.

I was in the front rank, and I saw the man who I later learned was Batis cursing his men and wielding an enormous long sword with one hand. He was as tall as a small tree and as wide as a rock. His arms were the size of my legs. He swung at me, I put my aspis into his sword and he caved in the face of my aspis, crushing the bronze, breaking the wood underneath and causing the wooden ribs to splinter. His blow was so powerful that it hurt my shield arm, although the edge of his sword never penetrated the bronze or I’d not be here to tell of it.

I thrust my spear at him, and it glanced off the long scale tunic he had, and I stepped in and slammed my spear butt into his head even as he reversed his sword and slammed his pommel into my head. I caught some of his blow on my spear and my helmet took the rest and I was knocked flat – conscious, but knocked straight off my feet.

He stumbled back from my blow, and my file partner, Stephanos, once one of Memnon’s men, pounded his spear-point into Batis’s chest. Again his scale and his luck held, but now he fell backwards into his own ranks, and I was on my feet again, my ears ringing. In fact, my nose was leaking blood. But that didn’t matter, because Batis was being carried to the rear, and now his men couldn’t be held – they were back-pedalling as fast as they could go.

Except in one place. Even as I struggled to reach it, another surge of Persians – led by some Aegyptian marines with big shields – pounded into our hypaspitoi over to my right and farther up the hill.

I had no idea why the Persians were so tenacious, but they were pushing the hypaspitoi back, and the hypaspitoi were literally dying in place.

So I started cutting my way towards them. As I say, the bulk of the Persians didn’t want to face us. A gap opened in their line. That happens, on battlefields, and I ran into it, and part of my phalanx followed me and the other part stayed behind and kept rolling the Persian main body back. Not according to the drill field – but on a real battlefield, you can’t stay with the textbook. I counted on my files following me, and they did.

We slammed into the Aegyptians. The fighting was chaotic – my phalangites were in no real order, just following me in a mob – the Aegyptians were trying to lap around the hypaspitoi, and were caught in the flank or rear, but they themselves had reinforcements coming up behind, and catching my men in the shielded flank.

In the time it took me to break my spear on a hippopotamus-hide shield, the fighting was man to man, and neither my flanks nor my back were safe. I hit my opponent over the head with the butt of my spear, used as a club, and then crushed the skull of another Aegyptian through his leather cap with one blow to the side of his head – my bronze sarouter made a powerful mace. A blow caught me from behind, but the bronze of my thorax held and I stumbled forward into the enemy ranks – an enemy marine swung at me and our weapons locked, and he slammed his shield into mine, roared at me and cut at my head – I could see down his throat. I bashed his fingers with my sarouter-club, and he lost his sword and threw himself on me, arms wide, shield flung aside, and I stopped him on my shield, shoved him to unbalance him and punched the pointed end of the bronze butt into his throat.

Then I almost died at the hands of a hypaspist. He shot his spear forward with the power of a desperate man, and my shield – crumpled like a trireme that’s been rammed – didn’t really turn the blow, and it slammed down into my left greave.

‘Macedon!’ I yelled at him.

He stabbed at me again.

‘Macedon!’ I roared, and he flinched. Then he thrust powerfully into another man, and I had the pleasure of hearing him mutter – I didn’t catch what he said.

I turned my side to him and backed into the ranks of the hypaspitoi.