God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (105 page)

He told me that the Taxeis of Outer Macedon had lost two hundred and thirty dead and wounded not expected to recover. Other taxeis had fared worse. Craterus had lost almost five hundred men, and altogether we’d lost almost two thousand infantry, most of them from the taxeis with Parmenio.

Marsyas wasn’t going to tell me, but I saw through him.

‘Our taxeis is being broken for replacements, isn’t it,’ I said.

Marsyas nodded.

And that was like the death of a friend. Another death. I hadn’t started to mourn Callisthenes yet.

The rest of Babylonia fell without a fight.

That took months to play out. The welcome did not.

I was back to being a Hetaeroi. Because of my place in the battle, I was in favour, and because of my wound, I was still fevered, and I confess in advance that it added to the intensity of the experience. I was perpetually light-headed, and the sun had a quality to it that is hard to explain. It was brighter than I have ever known it, even in the endless Gedrosian desert. Even in Aegypt and Lydia. It burned into your eyes, and the grit – not really sand – rose to suffocate you, and the green of the trees was so green as to seem lurid. And the smell of human excrement, which they used for manure, fought the stink of naphtha fires and the omnipresent smell of incense. Men say that Aegypt is priest-ridden, but Babylon is god-ridden. They have gods everywhere, and they worship them to distraction.

Incense and naphtha. Smoke at the back of your throat, grit in your clothes. All the way south from Arabela to Babylon.

There was another kind of grit in my throat, and that was Mazaeus. Somehow, while I was recovering from my wound, he had come into our camp and made peace with Alexander, and he was suddenly the favourite – so much so that Hephaestion rode with
me
. Mazaeus had been one of Darius’s most trusted officers, and his defection
was
important. Because of him, Alexander received the homage of dozens of important Persian and Mede officers, and our way was made smooth.

Darius had fled the field – again – and I found it almost melancholy to hear from Mesopotamian peasants that they no longer considered him king. Greek peasants, I’m sure, would have maintained their allegiance a little longer.

Or perhaps not.

At any rate, Mazaeus was tall and handsome and dignified, long-limbed, a beautiful horseman and a fine warrior. He wasn’t ingratiating or obsequious.

But he did throw himself on his face every time he entered Alexander’s presence – the royal presence was suddenly becoming the Royal Presence. Because of his age and immense dignity, Mazaeus made the rest of us seem like clods, and he clearly thought we were – except Alexander, who he found a way to love.

Really, I have a hard time remembering how it all started. We didn’t go to war, on Alexander’s staff, about proskynesis and Persian customs for
years
. And yet, the whole argument, the whole cultural disagreement, could have been read on every Greek and Macedonian officer’s face, the first morning that Mazaeus made his reverence.

We rode south, away from Darius. I thought it was a mistake, and so did Parmenio. I felt that we needed to have Darius’s head on a spike, or we weren’t done. Parmenio agreed.

The old man was in a state of shock – not utter shock, but a sort of euphoric disbelief. He hadn’t expected us to win the battle, and he clearly hadn’t expected to
survive
the battle, and in the aftermath, he was quite naturally a little aloof, a little diffident, and genuinely generous to those who had played a role in the rescue of his wing – Diodorus, Kineas and the king. He was not hesitant in describing how desperate the situation had been.

This was not politics. This was just an honest old man thanking the team that saved him.

But Alexander’s faction didn’t hesitate to capitalise on his admissions of weakness, and Parmenio’s sons, who were
not
thankful and felt that Parmenio had been hung out to dry, so to speak, were in turn angered.

Two days out of Babylon, with rumours rife that the city would resist, that Darius had another army forming behind us, and that Bessus, the senior satrap who had escaped Arabela, was still in the field with all his cavalry – a force still larger than our army – Alexander ordained that all the officers would dine together.

A symposium.

I remember, because he had just promoted Astibus and Bubores to company commands in his recently expanded hypaspitoi, and they were on the next kline to mine. They were crowned in wreaths of gilded laurel. So was I, and so was Marsyas, who shared my couch. Kineas shared a couch with Diodorus, also crowned.

Whether by intention or not, half of the great circle wore crowns of valour. And the other half did not. Philotas did not have one, and neither did Nicanor, although he had led the hypaspists with flair and reckless bravery. The older men, the partisans of Parmenio, had no crowns.

Parmenio was on a couch to my left, well within earshot, and he shared the couch with Philotas.

On the third bowl of wine, Philotas sat up. ‘Why no crown for Mazaeus? He fought well enough!’

I must confess, I laughed too. It was funny. He was so ill at ease with us, in his long flowing robes. He’d probably never eaten lying on a couch, and he was desperately uncomfortable sharing his with Cleitus the Black, who glowered at him.

There were other Persian officers present. They did their best. It is almost impossible to be conquered with dignity, but they did it well enough.

But Philotas couldn’t let them go. ‘Why the long faces?’ he called. ‘We’ll all be in high hats and long robes soon enough.’

This quip was not greeted with the enthusiasm that his earlier jibe received.

The wine went instantly to my head, even well watered, and I went off to Thaïs and bed. After I left, the Persians were heckled until the king ordered the verbal attacks to stop.

Just one big happy family.

Babylon.

The morning after the symposium, we formed the entire army in battle order on the plain of Mesopotamia. Despite dykes and irrigation ditches, we could march unimpeded. Indeed, Mesopotamia was the ideal ground for infantry – three thousand years of tillage had levelled it as flat as a skillet.

We advanced on the city in battle order, and we made camp the next night within sight of the place, a great mound twinkling with lights in the middle distance. It had an air of unreality.

Babylon was, and is, one of the mightiest, if not the greatest, city on the wheel of the earth. No one knows how many people live in its mighty compass, but I have heard that it has a million inhabitants. The girdle of walls, mud brick, fired brick and stone has a greater circumference than that of any other city walls I’ve ever seen, and despite that, the suburbs spill out of the city gates like wine from a drunkard’s lips, so that there is a further girdle of intense habitation all around the city, many stades thick. The dense population is only possible because Mesopotamia has some of the finest soil and farmland in the world, and the two great rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – allow the produce to be floated directly to the city, which is also at the head of navigation, so that ocean-going ships can depart straight for the eastern seas from Babylon.

Babylon has ten times the population of Athens, the greatest city of our world.

Babylon could, all by itself, field a mighty army. Only sixty years before Marathon, a king of Babylon had challenged the whole might of Persia by himself, fielding a magnificent army of armoured cavalry and chariots. He had only narrowly been defeated.

I had a hard time sleeping. The fever was on me – the mosquitoes were like nothing I had ever seen. In god-ridden Mesopotamia, they didn’t have a mosquito god, which I found surprising. I would have done a great deal to propitiate such a god.

I eventually got to sleep, only to have a dream that took me high over the Great Pyramid at Chios, and then, as if driven by a catapult, I did not so much fall as was driven down and down, into the very top of the magnificent structure, and I awoke covered in sweat. I threw off Thaïs’s leg and my military cloak and stumbled out into the oppressive heat.

The only peace from the flies was by the fires, where the heat was worst.

A fever, high heat and bugs. I don’t think that man can know a greater torment, unless it is the pain of a bad wound and the sure knowledge of coming death.

I settled by the smoke of a fire. I had lost my way in the camp. I was lost, or uncaring. Even now, I scarcely remember it.

But Philip, the veteran phylarch of Craterus’s taxeis, came and sat by me in the smoke. He had wine, and I drank some.

‘Fucking bugs,’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’

After some time he pointed at the distant, twinkling lights. ‘Think they’ll fight?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. Thaïs was sure they wouldn’t fight. Her sources were new and untried, but we had the feeling that the Babylonians, inscrutable in their religious bigotry, hated the Persians far more than they hated us.

But a city of a million men could field an army of a hundred thousand. And again, as at Gaza, the army was tired. Victorious, but tired. The elite cavalry units had been in continuous combat since midsummer, and everyone – every single unit – had been engaged at Arabela.

I wasn’t exactly afraid.

Neither was Philip. He fingered his beard. ‘I’d rather they fought,’ he said.

‘Who?’ said another veteran, who plonked himself down by the fire and coughed in the smoke. ‘Fucking bugs. Ares, where do they come from?’

‘Farted out of Hades’ arsehole,’ Amyntas son of Philip said. A gross impiety, if you like, but it summed up what we all felt.

The other man held out his hand for the wine. ‘May I?’ he asked, and I recognised Draco, the man I’d faced – and lost to – in the pankration at Tyre.

We passed the wine and he drank, coughed, drank again. ‘Who would you rather we fought?’

‘Not we, damn it. I want to fight the Babylonians. I hear they aren’t worth shit as fighters, and if we fight them, we get to sack their city.’ He grinned. ‘Sack Babylon. Just think of it.’

Draco roared. ‘Good thought. Let’s sack it anyway. The king will forgive us eventually.’

‘What if it’s too big to sack?’ Amyntas son of Philip asked.

‘Let’s try!’ Draco said. ‘I’ve never fucked three women at once, either, and I might not be able to do it.’ He grinned. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to try.’

The wicked old man glanced at me.

I was being teased. I was an officer, in their space, and they were having a little fun.

I sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll get to sack Babylon,’ I said.

Draco nodded. ‘When exactly do we all get rich and march home?’ he asked. ‘Babylon? Susa? Persepolis?’

He grinned, but I thought he meant business.

I shrugged.

‘Well, if you don’t know, strategos—’

‘I don’t, friends. We’ll go home when Darius is beaten, I suppose, and the empire is ours.’ I noticed that there were a dozen men around the fire. We cycled almost unconsciously through the smoke – in, out, duck the bugs, get overheated, back to the bugs.

But their faces started to swim, and I began to see men who weren’t there – who couldn’t be there. Pyrrhus. Isokles. A dozen other men who had been my tent companions or my officers.

‘When will we go home?’ Pyrrhus asked.

‘My wife expects me for the planting,’ said a young spearman with a spearhead-sized hole in his chest.

‘What’s she planting, eh?’ asked Draco, with a laugh, and Isokles roared and slapped his thigh just below the groin, where blood flowed.

They were laughing, and my head was spinning . . .

Polystratus put a hand under my elbow and another under my arm and he got me on my feet and walked me back to my tent, where there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, and I lay in a wine stupor until I fell asleep.

I awoke to a pounding head, a face full of bug-bites and the thought that perhaps we had an army of our own ghosts following us across Asia, waiting to go home to Macedon.

Somehow, Ochrid got me up and dressed and armoured. I threw up twice – once the remnants of the wine, and again some bile. There was no cool water, and Ochrid didn’t like the smell of the water that the slaves had brought in the night before. I drank a little of the tepid local beer and kept it down.

And then I mounted my second war horse, a big gelding named Thrakos, and said a prayer to Poseidon. I missed the horse every time I rode. Intelligence is the most precious ability in horse or man – Thrakos was as dumb as a post.

We formed by camps, and we covered two parasanges, a great line with the cavalry wings thrown slightly forward and all the baggage in the rear. Remember, we’d taken all of Darius’s baggage at Arabela.

We marched on Babylon, and as the sun climbed the dome of the heavens, we saw a vast army forming to receive us – an unbelievable multitude that filled the horizon.

Alexander had the ‘All Officers’ sounded on the trumpet, and I responded without thinking. In fact, I was no longer commanding a phalanx; I had no command. On the other hand, no one tried to stop me.

Alexander was in full armour, with his lion’s-head helmet, and he sat on his charger’s back, hand on his hip, and watched the Babylonians with impatience.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said. ‘If they had an army worth anything, they’d have won their independence from Persia.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a waste of our time and manpower.’

The vast sea of enemies was coming at us across the endless plain of Mesopotamia.

We rested our right flank on the river and refused the left, under Parmenio, and began to move forward.

The Prodromoi went out to scout the face of the enemy army. Because we were already in formation, there was nothing else to do.

Ten stades apart, and the number of the enemy was unbelievable. They were deeper than we, and their main body was as great as ours. And they seemed to have three or four more bodies of like size, as well as dust clouds behind them as far as the smoke of the great city.

I was close to Alexander when Strakos rode straight into the command group and saluted. He was all but naked on his horse – like a Babylonian – deeply tanned, weaponless. I hadn’t seen him in a month. The Angeloi continued to function, although these days they mostly reported to Alexander’s permanent military secretary, Eumenes.