The Persian Boy (35 page)

Alexander looked at him earnestly for a while, then said, “Tell him I do not only travel the earth to possess it. I seek to know what it is, and what men are, also.”

The philosopher bent down in silence, and held up a pinch of dust.

“But,” said Alexander, “even the earth can be changed, and so can men.”

“Men indeed you have changed. Through you they have known fear and anger, pride and desire, chains which will bind their souls through many lives. And you, who think yourself free because you have mastered fear and the body’s greeds; the desires of the mind consume you like raging fire. Soon they will burn you all away.”

Alexander thought a little. “That may be. So is the sculptor’s wax consumed within the clay, and is gone forever. But in its room they cast the bronze.”

When this was interpreted, the philosopher shook his head.

Alexander said, “Tell him I should like to talk further with him. If he will come with me, I will see he is treated with honor.”

The old man’s head lifted. Whatever he thought he was free of, I doubt he was free from pride. “No, King. Nor would I permit the least of my children here. What can you give me, or what can you take away? All I have is this naked body, and even that I do not need; by taking it you would lift from me my last burden. Why should I go with you?”

“Why indeed?” said Alexander. “We will trouble you no more.”

All this time, the man with the garland had sat still, gazing at Alexander. Now he stood up and spoke. I could see his words disturbed the others; the leader for the first time looked angry. The interpreter motioned for silence.

“He says this, lord King. ‘Even the gods grow weary of their godhead, and seek release at last. I will go with you till you are freed.’ “

Alexander smiled at him and said he would be welcome. He took from a crotch of the tree an old breechcloth, which he wound on, and a wooden food-bowl, and followed barefoot after the King.

Later, I met a Greek who kept a shoeshop in the city and knew the sages; I asked him why they had been so angry with the man. He said it was not because they thought he had gone from greed of wealth, but because he had been drawn in love to a mortal creature. They held that even though his love was of the soul, it would be a chain to him, and cause him to be reborn after his death, which they think a punishment. This was all I could understand.

Certainly, all he would take from the King was food for his wooden bowl, and not much of that. Since no one could pronounce his name, we called him Kalanos, from the sound of a word he used in greeting. Soon we all grew used to him, sitting under some tree near the King’s pavilion. Alexander asked him inside, and talked to him alone but for the interpreter. He said to me once that though people thought Kalanos did nothing, he had fought and won great battles to be what he was, and was magnanimous in victory.

He had even a little Greek, picked up from the settlers there. It was said he had been a scholar, before he joined the naked men. But Alexander did not have long to study with him; he had to make war upon King Poros.

This was King Omphis’ enemy, against whom he’d asked for help. His land was beyond the next river, the Hydaspes.? This too had been taken into the empire, under Darius the Great; its kings were still satraps in name, but had been let alone for generations, and were kings again. So King Poros told Alexander’s envoys, when they came asking for fealty; he added that he would pay no homage to any ally of Omphis, descended as he was from lowborn slaves.

Alexander prepared for battle, but had first to rest his men, after the winter wars (Hephaistion’s had had some hard fighting too, going through Khyber). He took his time, giving them games and festivals, though as it grew warm with spring, the rivers were rising. We were told that soon it would rain.

When we did march down to the Hydaspes along with King Omphis’ troops, we were a vaster host than ever, in spite of the garrisons left in conquered strongholds. We made camp up above the river, while Alexander scouted for the best place to cross. It was brown and fierce already; one could tell it would never endure a bridge.

On one of these days, some person of consequence, whose name and race I forget, came to Alexander’s tent for audience. He had been gone some time, so I said I would go and find him. I rode about the camp -no Persian will walk when he can ride-till I heard he had gone to the horse-lines. I went over to the endless rows of shelters, made from bamboo and grass and palm-leaves, which housed the cavalry mounts; a town in itself. At last a blue-tattooed Thracian slave, who was holding the King’s charger, pointed me out a shelter standing alone, and handsomer than the rest. I dismounted and went inside.

After the Indian sun it seemed almost dark. Splinters of dazzle came through the chinks of the wall, making bars of light and shade. They fell on an old black horse, that lay in the straw with laboring sides; and on Alexander, sitting in the muck of the stable floor, with its head laid in his lap.

My shadow had darkened the doorway; he looked up.

I had no words. I just thought, I would do anything … As if I had had the words all along, I said, “Shall I fetch Hephaistion?”

He answered, “Thank you, Bagoas.” I could just hear him. He’d not called the groom, because he could not command his voice. So I was not there for nothing.

I found Hephaistion by the river, among his engineers. They had brought his bridge-boats overland, in halves for cartage; he was seeing them put together. He stared at me in surprise; no doubt I looked out of place there. Besides, it was the first time I’d ever sought him out.

“Hephaistion,” I said, “Oxhead is dying. Alexander wants you there.”

He looked at me in silence. Maybe he would have expected me to send someone else. Then he said, “Thank you, Bagoas,” in a voice he’d not used to me before, and called for his horse. I let him get well ahead, before I took the road.

Oxhead’s funeral was held that evening; it has to be quick, in India. Alexander had him burned on a pyre, so as to have his ashes for a proper tomb. He only told his friends; but it was wonderful how many old soldiers came quietly up, who had fought at Issos, and Granikos, and Gaugamela. There were bowls of incense to throw upon the pyre; we must have given old Oxhead a full talent’s worth. Some of Omphis’ Indians, who stood further off, uttered loud cries to their gods, thinking Alexander had sacrificed the horse for victory.

When the fire had sunk, he went about his work again. But at night, I saw he looked older. When he first had Peritas he had been a man; Oxhead, he had had since boyhood. That little horse (all Greek horses look little to a Persian) had known things of him I’d never known. That day some of them died, and I shall never know them.

At night it thundered; and the rain came down.

In the morning the dust was laid, the sun was out, and all smelled of growing greenness. But clouds soon gathered; next time, it was as if the river had poured down from the sky. And I heard it said this was only the beginning.

In the downpour, plodding through mud, without a dry stitch on them, Alexander marched his men to the riverba?nks.

He would not take me. He said he could not tell where he’d be from hour to hour, let alone day to day, or when he would cross the river. He found time to bid me goodbye, but, as always, did not make much of it. He saw no cause. He would win, and soon be back. Tender farewells were for the losers.

Yet this was the greatest and most perilous of all his battles; and I did not see it.

The rain drummed down, turning the camp to quagmire. The wretched followers huddled in leaky booths; a good tent was riches. In the drenching storms I would give some wayfarer shelter; a half-drowned Baktrian child, a Greek ballad-singer; and, once, Kalanos the philosopher, whom I saw standing in a waterfall, in his single breechclout. When I beckoned him in, he signed a blessing; then crossed his feet upon his thighs, and sank into meditation. It was like being alone; but alone and happy.

At first, whenever the rain grew less, I would throw on a cloak and ride down to the river. There were troops along there for miles, but no one could tell me where the King was, nor what he meant to do. As it turned out, there was someone even more eager than I to know: King Poros, who had made his camp on the further shore, at the easiest point of crossing.

One night, in a lull of the roaring rain, we heard a great din of onset-trumpets, battle-yells, horses neighing. It had come at last. I lifted my hands to Mithra. The night was like pitch. All the camp was awake and listening. No word came back to us.

No wonder. No one had crossed the river. All that had happened was that Alexander had made a noise, and Poros had moved his whole army towards it, to stand by all night in the pouring rain.

Next night, the same. Now the great battle had really started; we held our breath. No battle. The next night, and the next, when we heard clamors we took it easily. So did King Poros, too.

Alexander never minded looking a fool, or even a poltroon, in the first part of a battle. He could afford it. By now, he had to find distant places to be believed in; but here he was far enough. He had fought no war with Omphis, to warn King Poros of what he was. Poros was seven feet tall, his only mount an elephant. It can’t have been hard for him, to think the little pup across the river was all bark, no bite.

Alexander kept barking, and running back to his kennel. He had great convoys of stores brought to his camp, giving out, to whoever would listen and spread the news, that he would wait if he must till the rains were over and winter shrank the stream. So Poros could camp all that time on a mudbank in the wet, while Alexander worked up his courage.

It must have gone on a full quarter-month. One night came the worst storm yet; torrents of rain, lightning so frightful one could see it through the tent; I put my pillow over my head. At least, I thought, tonight there’ll be no battle.

At dawn, the thunder rumbled away; and then we heard. It was the din of onset, greater than on all those nights before, but further. Above it rose a new sound, furious and high; the trumpeting of elephants.

Alexander had crossed the river.

He had planned it for that night in any case. The storm, though a hardship, was a general’s gift. He had crossed a little way up river of Poros, where there were thick woods to screen his march, and a wooded island to screen his crossing. He had to get over before Poros knew and brought up his elephants. If the cavalry mounts saw them as they came to land, they would plunge off the rafts and drown.

Ptolemy has the whole battle in his book, and has shown Alexander’s skill and daring for men to come. His first peril was perhaps his worst. He made the crossing, first leaping ashore himself; then, while the cavalry were being landed, found that the bank had been cut off by a new flood-channel, and was an island.

At last they found a ford, though it was deep. Ptolemy writes that the water was breast-high on the men, and the horses could just keep their heads above. (You see what I mean, when I say Greek horses? look little to a Persian.)

Already Poros’ son had been sent with a chariot squadron, to push them -back in the river. Alexander formed his men up just in time. The prince fell; the chariots stuck in the mud; those who could, took flight. Poros had the news, chose a sandy stretch of firm land, and prepared for battle.

His front was unassailable; it had two hundred elephants spaced across. But he had an artist in war to deal with. To say much in little, Alexander lured out the cavalry by a show of weakness; attacked the front with mounted Scythian archers who shot and wheeled away; he himself charged the cavalry in front, Koinos at rear; he maddened Poros’ elephants with arrows or thrown javelins, or by shooting down their mahouts, till they did more damage on their own side than on his.

It’s all in King Ptolemy’s book; he read it me. He has it just as I heard it at the time, except that more Macedonians fell than he has written. When he read me that part, I daresay I looked up; for he smiled, saying those numbers were in the royal archives, and old soldiers understand each other.

We on the further shore came down to the bank at first light to see. The rains had laid the dust which hides most battles. We could see clearly the elephants with their swaying howdahs, the wheeling horse, the milling foot; but what this confusion signified, we could not tell. I could not even pick out Alexander by his flashing arms, for the river had muddied him all over. The sun grew high. The dreadful din seemed unending. Then at last, the flight and pursuit began.

It grieves me more than all else I missed, that I did not see Alexander meet with Poros. It was a thing after his own heart; also a true one, which neither time nor man’s deceit ever took from him.

Long after the fight was lost, the tall King fought on in the van. His elephant, brave even among that race, had never flinched. At last while he cast a javelin he was hit under his lifted arm, through the gap in his coat of mail. At this he turned his steed, and rode slowly after the rout. Alexander had watched him eagerly and longed to meet him; he thought so noble a man should be summoned only by another king, and asked Omphis to be his envoy. This did not do; Poros detested Omphis, and at the sight of him reached left-handed for a javelin. Alexander found someone more acceptable, and tried again. At this, Poros bade his elephant kneel; it put its trunk round him, and gently lifted him down. He asked for water- with the battle and his wound, he was parched with thirst-and went to meet Alexander.

“The finest-looking man I ever saw,” Alexander said to me later. He spoke without envy. I expect it grieved him in his youth that he was not tall; but if so it had ceased to trouble him, now that his shadow stretched from east to west. “He is just like Homer’s Ajax, but for his black skin and blue beard. He must have been in pain, but you’d never have known it. ‘Ask what you wish of me,’ I said. ‘How shall I deal with you?’ ‘Like a king,’ he said. Do you know, I knew it before it was ‘ interpreted? I said, ‘That, I’d do for my own sake; ask something for yours.’ He answered. ‘There is no need, that is everything.’ What a man! I hope his wound heals quickly. I’m going to give him more land than he had before. He will balance Omphis’ power; but above all, I trust him.”