Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (47 page)
Read Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) Online
Authors: Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Aristotle sighed. Sixteen cubits! He stood up to measure that length with his steps and had to leave the room because it was not long enough. He turned back to the table and continued reading.
The cultivated lands are most fertile, but the forest seems to surround them everywhere, attack them even, in a certain sense. There are monkeys of all sizes everywhere too and they have the curious habit of imitating everything they see. Some of them are amazing because of the expressions on their faces, which seem almost human, as you can see for yourself.
Alongside those words Ptolemy had had one of those monkeys drawn with charcoal, by a very skilled artist, and the animal’s gaze indeed astonished the philosopher, almost provoking a sense of unease, a perturbing sensation.
There are also incredibly large trees that the Indians call
banyan.
They reach heights of seventy cubits and their trunks are so big that not even fifty men together can embrace them. On one occasion I saw more than five hundred men in the shade of one of those giants.There are snakes of all kinds. Some look like a bronze rod, others are dark in colour and their neck opens up into a sort of crest with two marks in the shape of circles. Their bite brings death almost immediately with unspeakable pain and heavy sweating. The first times we came across these animals we sat up all through the night, terrorized at the idea of being bitten in our sleep, but then we learned to light fires around the camp and the locals taught us how to use certain herbs as antidotes to the venom.
They are even more dangerous than the tiger that frequents these impenetrable woods because at least there is a defence against the big cat, so they say, with a good sword, or a good javelin. The tiger is bigger than a lion and has a magnificently coloured coat with ochre and black stripes, and its roar makes the night air tremble at an unbelievable distance. I have never seen one, but I have seen a skin and this is how I am able to describe it.
Now I must stop. The torrential rains make it impossible for me to write any more – the humidity makes everything rot, the men fall ill, others end up in the jaws of the crocodiles that crawl everywhere here because the waters have caused the rivers to burst their banks and the fields and the countryside are flooded for thousands and thousands of stadia. I myself have no idea of when I may once again hope to live as a man and not as a beast.
Only he seems to know neither fatigue nor despondency of any kind. He always marches ahead of everyone, clearing the way through the thick vegetation with his sword, helping those who fall, encouraging those who are tired. And in his eyes is that burning light, the same light I saw so long ago when I saw him come out of the temple of Ammon in the midst of the desert sands of Libya.
Ptolemy’s story finished at that point and Aristotle closed the scroll and put it on a shelf.
His thoughts turned to Callisthenes and his eyes filled with tears. His adventure had finished so sadly in some far-flung place near the ends of the earth and perhaps it really had been fear rather than the poison that had killed him. He grieved for him now, knowing just how much stronger his ideas were compared to his soul and his courage. He would have liked to be there at the final moment and to have read to him Socrates’ last words: ‘But already it is time to depart, for me to die, for you to go on living . . .’ but perhaps he would not even have heard, caught up as he was in the coils of sheer terror.
Aristotle put out the lamp and as he lay down and sighed in the empty room, in the diaphanous rays of the autumnal moon, he wondered if Alexander had felt any pity for Callisthenes.
H
EPHAESTION RAN TO THE
King’s tent under the torrential rain, splashing mud as he went. The guards let him in and he moved over to the brazier in which a fire was burning, giving off more smoke than heat. Alexander moved over to greet him and Leptine appeared and gave him a dry cloak.
‘Sangala has surrendered,’ he announced. ‘Eumenes is just finishing the count of the dead and the wounded.’
‘Are there many?’
‘Seventeen thousand dead.’
A massacre. They obviously put up a strong fight.’
‘We have an enormous quantity of prisoners. We have also taken three hundred war chariots and seventy elephants.’
Eumenes entered, he too soaked to the skin. ‘I have the final count – five hundred dead on our side, one hundred and fifty of which are Macedonians and Greeks, and one thousand two hundred wounded. Lysimachus has a bad wound on his shoulder, but it’s not dangerous, for the moment. Do you have other orders for me?’
‘Yes,’ replied Alexander. ‘Tomorrow you must set off to the other two cities that lie between here and the Hyphasis. Take a few prisoners with you who can recount what happened at Sangala. If they recognize my authority then there will be no more deaths or massacres. We’ll follow on behind you with the rest of the army.’
Eumenes nodded and went out into the open with his cloak over his shoulders while a blinding bolt of lightning lit the entire camp up in a blue flash and a thunderclap exploded almost directly above the King’s tent.
‘I am going now to supervise the transfer of the prisoners,’ said Hephaestion. ‘If I can, I’ll stop by again before nightfall to report.’
With his shield held over his head, he reached the palisade that surrounded the camp and saw that the prisoners were moving through two rows of stock-still
pezhetairoi
under the torrential rain, following two mounted officers who were leading them to a huge fenced area near the western gate, where enough tents for just over half of them had been pitched. Soldiers made sure that the women and children found shelter and then the men were taken care of, crammed in together in a tremendous crush, their feet caked in mud.
He lifted his eyes upwards and saw black clouds threatening even more rain, and then to the horizon where blinding flashes of lightning appeared increasingly frequently. It was an ugly sky and the rain was unrelenting, incessant. What was that land over there? What would they find on the other side of the river that Alexander was so determined to reach?
At that moment a lightning bolt cracked through the clouds, so strong it lit up the entire area and the city, and there appeared before him a spectral, ghost-like figure – a solitary man, semi-naked and skeletal, who moved forward through the open gates of the camp. Hephaestion walked towards him in his astonishment and shouted over the deafening noise of the thunderclaps, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
The man uttered something incomprehensible in reply, but he did not stop, and continued to walk through the tents until he came to an enormous
banyan.
He sat down near the tree, crossed his hands and held them in his lap with his palms upwards and the index finger and thumb of his right hand united in a circle, motionless as a statue under the beating rain.
Not far away Aristander was busy just outside the small wooden temple they had built to protect the camp, sacrificing a sheep to the gods, asking them to stop the rain. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck and heard a voice calling him. He turned immediately and he too saw the man walking slowly but surely through the camp. There was no one else nearby who could have called him and this intrigued him deeply. He went out into the rain, holding his cloak up over his head and walked towards the
banyan
tree. Hephaestion saw him try to communicate with the motionless, half-naked Indian and then he watched him as he in his turn first sought shelter in a cavity in the tree and then sat down on the ground.
Hephaestion shook his head and then, still holding his shield above his head, went to his own tent and dried himself as well as possible before putting on dry clothes.
It rained all night with frightful thunder and lightning crashing overhead, setting fire to trees and huts. The sun was shining in the morning, however, and when the King came out of his tent he found Aristander standing there before him.
‘What is the matter, seer?’
‘Look. It is him,’ and he pointed to the naked, skeletal man sitting under the
banyan.
‘Who is he?’
‘Him. The naked man in my nightmares.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I recognized him immediately. He has been sitting there motionless since last night. He has been in the same position, like a statue, all night, in the midst of the storm without even trembling, without batting an eyelid.’
Who is he?’
‘I asked the other Indians. No one knows. No one knows him.’
‘Does he have a name?’
‘I do not know. I believe he is a
samana,
one of their philosophers and wise men.’
‘Take me to him.’
They set off walking through the thick mud that now covered the entire camp until they found themselves opposite the mysterious visitor. Alexander immediately thought of Diogenes, the naked philosopher he had met one warm autumn day lying in front of his churn, and he felt a lump grow in his throat.
Who are you?’ he asked.
The man opened his eyes and stared at him with a shocking intensity to his gaze, but he said nothing.
Are you hungry? Do you wish to come to my tent?’ and he turned to Aristander and said, ‘Quickly, have an interpreter brought here.’
‘Are you hungry? Do you want to come under my tent?’ he repeated when the interpreter had arrived.
The man pointed to a small bowl there before him, and the interpreter explained that these holy men, ascetics who sought eternal bliss, lived off alms and that a handful of their boiled swamp grain, nothing more than that, would be enough.
‘Why will you not come to my tent, dry yourself and get warm and have something to eat?’
‘It is not possible,’ said the interpreter. ‘It would interrupt his journey towards perfection, his becoming one with everything; this is the only possible way to achieve peace, the only liberation from pain.’
‘Panta rei,’
thought Alexander. ‘Democritus’s ideas . . . everything dissolves and everything is reconstituted in different forms. Even the mind . . . breakdown as the only hope . . .
‘Give him something to eat,’ he ordered, ‘and tell him I will be happy to speak with him whenever he wants.’
The interpreter replied, ‘He says that he will speak with you just as soon as he has learned your language.’
Alexander bowed and returned to his tent, while the trumpets sounded the fall in for all the divisions. They set off in the direction of the Hyphasis, the last of the tributaries, the last obstacle before penetrating deep into the vastness of India, towards the Ganges, the wonders of Palimbothra, and the shores of the farthest Ocean.
The army set off into a sparsely wooded area that became thicker as they approached the river. On the second day it started raining heavily and it rained on the third and fourth day as well, with deafening thunder and blinding lightning bolts. The Indian guides explained that this was the rainy season and that it usually lasted some seventy days. When they reached the banks of the Hyphasis, the river swollen and muddy, the King held a war council in his tent. Admiral Nearchus was present, together with the vice admiral Onesicritus, who had acquitted himself very well in the recent river crossings and in their voyage down the Indus from Aornos to Taxila. Also present were Hephaestion, Perdiccas, Craterus, Leonnatus, Seleucus, Ptolemy and Lysimachus. Philip’s old guard had disappeared completely now and the lads from Mieza were the supreme commanders of all the army’s largest units.
There was also an Indian ally, a King by the name of Phagaias, who knew the lands on the other side of the Hyphasis very well.
Alexander opened the council. ‘My friends, we have come farther now than any Greeks had ever travelled previously, beyond the places visited by the god Dionysius in his peregrinations, and we owe this achievement to your incredible valour, to your exceptional fibre, your heroism and the qualities of our soldiers. All that remains now is the final step. On crossing the last tributary of the Indus, there will no longer be any obstacles on our march to the Ganges and the shores of the great Ocean. At that point we will have completed the greatest feat ever realized in the history of mankind and the gods. We will have given expression to the greatest dream ever imagined. I think our Admiral Nearchus should now illustrate his project for crossing the river, after which the commanders of our combat units will expound their point of view on the march.’
A thunderclap broke above the tent at that moment, so strong it made the objects on the table tremble. There followed moments of interminable silence and then the noise of the rain seemed to grow deafeningly unreal.
Ptolemy exchanged a quick glance with Seleucus and spoke first, ‘Listen, Alexander, we have followed you this far and we are ready to follow you even farther, to march through the mud, through the swamps, among the snakes and the crocodiles, we are prepared to cross more deserts and more mountains, but your soldiers are not.’ Alexander looked at him in amazement, as though unable to believe what he was hearing. ‘Your men have given their all and there is nothing left now.’
‘This is not true!’ exclaimed Alexander. ‘They defeated Porus and conquered so many cities.’