God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (65 page)

Alexander’s eyes widened, just as Philotas’s had, but for the opposite reason. He positively beamed with pleasure. ‘Ptolemy! How unlike you!’ he teased me, and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘And then I missed my stroke against the Mede – did you take him?’

I smiled. In truth, the king’s need to refight his actions and praise himself was annoying – the sort of conceit you’d expect from a much lesser man. But I was relieved, strangely happy, even. ‘He unhorsed himself,’ I said. ‘I got his spear in my left hand and he fell off his horse.’

Alexander threw back his head and laughed – a high-pitched laugh that sounded utterly false.

He stopped mid-laugh.

Darkness was falling. And as if he’d become another man, the king suddenly turned his head.

‘We should be marching south,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll never reach their flank by morning.’

We’d lost more than twenty Hetaeroi, and in later years the king put up monuments to them. But we were alive, and the king was still king.

If Parmenio had another plan, he didn’t try to press it on the king. In later years, he insisted to anyone who would listen that the plan to go south around the lake was his plan, not the king’s – that all the king wanted was to ride forward and challenge Arsites to single combat.

Crap.

The king loved to fight, but we went forward to try to steal the ford from the Persians, and we missed by minutes – minutes that Philotas and Amyntas had wasted. To my mind, Parmenio only sent us forward in the hope that we’d die.

That said, though – the king propagandised his version, too. Look at what it says in the Military Journal. No mention at all of the battle at the ford. Eh? Nor any mention of Parmenio, even though it
was
Parmenio who marched the army off to the right behind the screen of hills and got them to the edge of the lake under cover of darkness – and into a cold camp without fires. When we rode into that camp, our horses were
done
, but there were grooms ready to take them, and men handed us cold food and wine and led us to our pallets to sleep – Parmenio had done a magnificent job.

Pyrrhus rode in after dark with four men. He had a claim to having been the bravest of the Hetaeroi, and the king embraced him – it turned out that he’d ridden through the Medes and kept going – with just half a file – sweeping through the Phrygians before realising that no one was behind him. He’d escaped down the Persian bank of the river, and he admitted that he’d been unpursued. The Medes had been shocked by the cavalry action.

We were up well before first light. We crossed the marsh south of the lake on trails marked by the Agrianians and pushed north – crossed the Granicus almost dry shod, where long bars of stony shale lay across the water like piers or bridges.

We were fast and silent, but Arsites was no fool, or perhaps it was Memnon. Either way, the lack of fires probably gave us away, and the Persians sent cavalry probes across the Granicus at first light, and these found us – they on our side of the river, and we on their side. They galloped off, and we couldn’t stop them, and the game was up.

So the king led us on faster. I was on Penelope, saving Poseidon for the last possible moment. Polystratus had him in the rear of my squadron. Philotas rode six files to my right – he was commanding the Hetaeroi, and I was reduced to a mere king’s bodyguard. He hadn’t said a word to me all morning. I’m certain we both had the same thought – no need to quarrel, when with a little luck the Medes would kill one of us.

Arsites formed his army to his own left – which is to say, he now formed with his Greek mercenary infantry on that low ridge, and the far right of his cavalry (the western end of his line) covered by the river, and his left-flank cavalry dangled at the eastern end, but because he had fifteen thousand cavalry to our six thousand, his left flank overlapped our right.

On our far right, in the bushy ground to the east, Alexander set the Agrianians and all the archers under Attalus. Next in line came Philotas with a thousand Hetaeroi, and then the king in the centre of the right, with his bodyguard, and then Arrhabaeus, the scrawny sod, another of Parmenio’s old men, with the rest of the Hetaeroi. To our left were the hypaspitoi and then all six taxeis of the pezhetaeroi – ten thousand of them, the largest phalanx I’d ever seen formed in one place.

And on the far side of the phalanx was Parmenio with all the Thessalian cavalry, all the Greek allies, including your father, and all the Thracians.

Opposite us, as we formed, we saw Arsites trot into position facing us. He moved twice, so insistent was he in lining up on Alexander. He had almost two thousand Persian noble cavalrymen – in effect, men as good as our Hetaeroi. The rest of his wing was composed of Hyrkanians and Phrygians, and on their far left they placed six hundred mercenary Greek cavalry under Memnon himself. Thebans, a lot of them, and Thessalian exiles and Athenian exiles – men with every reason to fight well.

Alexander rode along the front of the whole army as it formed, so that we appeared to be in a state of chaos, with regiments spread over forty stades in every direction. In fact, we had a standard formation and we’d practised it almost every day since we left Amphilopolis. Every man and every file knew his place, in rain, in snow, in fog. As soon as the order was given to the marching column to form line of battle, units marched to their places and pushed left or right to make sure they had room. Files opened and closed – cavalry units added or subtracted files to fit into the line.

And as this unfolded, the king rode from unit to unit, calling men by name and shouting encouragement. He didn’t restrict himself to units that loved him – he rode to every unit, even the taxeis that had been Parmenio’s in Asia, and to every group he called out, ‘Tonight we will be rich men!’ and they always cheered.

We rode with him, of course, and he rode fast, and I was glad I was still on my riding horse. We cantered from unit to unit, and then, when we’d reached Parmenio on the far left, we halted.

‘You ready, lad?’ Parmenio asked.

Alexander’s head snapped back as if he’d been hit.

‘Lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m your king.’

Parmenio smiled. ‘Your first real battle,’ he said.

Alexander sat back – spine straight, posture perfect, rein held loose. ‘Parmenio, if I win this battle, will you concede that I know my business?’ he asked.

Parmenio laughed. ‘Relax, lad. Take it easy. We have the numbers, and their Greek foot are no match for our pikes – our phalanx is twice the size of theirs. Nothing to worry you.’

‘When I beat them, I’ll execute every one of the traitors,’ Alexander said.

Parmenio smiled. ‘What a fire-breather you are, to be sure. Best get back to your wing. Arsites has decided to come at us.’

Sure enough, Arsites and his wing were advancing.

Alexander looked, turned his horse and we galloped across the whole front of the army.

No one else seemed to know we were late – men cheered just to see the king ride so beautifully, his cloak flying behind him, back straight, as if he were an equestrian statue brought to life. The rest of us followed as best we could – Black Cleitus, me, Nearchus, Marsyas; Laodon and Erygius, and older men like Demaratus of Corinth. In some ways, despite being a nation of innovators, Macedonians are very old-fashioned – in a big fight, we like to see a king go into battle surrounded by his closest friends. I’ve met dozens of Greeks who accuse Alexander of living like a hero in the
Iliad
– what they fail to understand is that
all
Macedonians live like heroes in the
Iliad
.

We hauled on our reins when we got back to the Hetaeroi. Polystratus was ready for me – I changed horses and buckled the cheek-plates on my helmet, and took my heaviest spear from Ochrid, who gave me a grin.

Arsites and his whole line were a stade away.

The king looked left and right down the line.

He pointed to Arsites, easily visible a stade or less away on a magnificent white horse.

‘Blow through them and the battle is won,’ he said. ‘Thank the gods that they were fools enough to fight.’ His personal priest and diviner, Aristander, offered a sacrifice and a libation, and exclaimed at the sight of the liver – he shouted aloud, he was so excited.

‘Victory!’ he shouted. He waved the bloody liver.

All the time Aristander was killing his beasts, the Persian line was advancing.

They weren’t Macedonians. Gaps began to open in their line as soon as they rolled forward. Indeed, the largest gap opened between the wing facing us and their cavalry in the centre. They’d put Paphlagonian or perhaps Phrygian cavalry in the centre – I couldn’t tell which – screening the Greek mercenaries to their rear. Why they placed cavalry in opposition to our phalanx I’ll never know.

But their cavalry had no intention of riding forward into our sarissas, so the centre lagged behind and Arsites’s wing plunged forward, and a gap began to open. An enormous gap.

The king waved to us, his bodyguard. ‘Hold here,’ he said.

He shouted orders to Philotas and waved at Arsites.

Philotas protested.

Alexander insisted.

Philotas shrugged, obviously angry, and barked orders at his trumpeter.

And our entire right division began to move.

Philotas didn’t want to do it. It was written in every line of his body – in the way he rode. But I don’t know what else he wanted to do.

He rolled forward with half our cavalry, and three horse lengths from the enemy, he flashed his sword and the Hetaeroi went straight to the gallop – a tactic we practised on a thousand strips of grass, in winter and summer – and the enemy were caught by surprise, suddenly turned from aggressive attackers to defenceless prey.

Then I could see nothing but the sudden onset of dust – the battle haze of the poet.

Arsites was no longer opposite us. Something else had caught his attention, and he’d taken his bodyguard out of the line. But we could still see Persian cavalrymen in beautiful tall helmets opposite us. They were rolling into the melee – fighting draws men like a magnet.

Cleitus pressed in close behind the king. ‘We should—’

‘Silence!’ Alexander said. He had one fist in the small of his back and his other hand holding the reins, legs dangling, and he was watching the enemy line where the gap had opened – watching it to the exclusion of all other things.

I watched the Persian line opposite me shred as the line of men threw themselves at Philotas.

The king turned and motioned to Arrhabaeus. The older man saluted.

‘Follow me,’ Alexander said.

Arrhabaeus saluted again and we started forward. I’d assumed that the king would take us into the flank of Philotas’s melee, where the Persians were fully committed, and Philotas was fighting against odds.

But that wasn’t the king’s intention at all.

He turned to all of us – his friends – and he had the secret smile we all came to know so well – I’d seen it before, and I knew it. ‘Now we win,’ he said. ‘Unless Philotas folds in the next thousand heartbeats, now we win. Follow me, and be heroes, and live for ever!’

I know no other man who could say such stuff with a straight face and mean it. My heart swelled to twice its size, and I felt the power of an Olympian suffuse me. And we went forward.

As soon as the king was clear of the leftmost squadrons of the Hetaeroi, he turned sharply towards the centre of the enemy line – towards the gap.

He was going for the gap.

Ares, we were going to ride
past
their unengaged men and plunge into the open ground between their cavalry line and their infantry.

As soon as the king saw that the Hetaeroi were forming on him and angled appropriately, he sat back and put his heels to Bucephalus and we were off at a gallop.

The Paphlagonians opposite us began to shred as soon as they saw we were going to outflank them. They lacked anything like our level of training, and they couldn’t respond in kind – they couldn’t wheel to cover the open ground, or extend files, so the end men began to ride back to cover the gap, and in a moment they were in flight, and not a blow had been struck.

I once watched a thatched roof blow to pieces in a wind storm. It was like that. First there was a solid enough line facing us, and then a few men riding to close a gap – and then, as if burned by a flash fire or blown away on the rising wind, the Paphlagonian cavalry was gone, and we were riding for the flanks of their centre division – all those Phrygians, already unwilling to face our pike men.

Arsites saw the crisis. He sent Darius’s own cousin, Mithridates, with his bodyguard and the best of his Mede cavalry, straight at us. And to our front, emboldened or perhaps harangued, a few hundred Phrygians suddenly went from vacillation to attack – and came right at us.

That was my last glimpse of the development of the battle. I never saw it, but on our left, their cavalry crashed into Parmenion and threw him back – but he didn’t break, and his Thessalians and Thracians gave ground slowly. To our right, Philotas fought against odds – heavy odds. But he had the senior squadrons of the Hetaeroi, men who had fought in the mountains and on the Danube and who believed. They held. They were even pushing the enemy back.

We crashed into the Phrygians, and Alexander killed his man, and then I was fighting, spear against spear – I went high, this time, at contact, and I remember being showered with the remnants of my man as my spear wrecked his head.

Alexander broke his spear a horse length ahead of me, and old Demaratus of Corinth gave his to the king – very sporting. But before we had time to savour our victory, we were fighting for our lives, and the king.

No sooner were we into the Phrygians than the Persians hit the right face of our wedge, and they drove straight for the king – cutting us off from Arrhabaeus.

The first I knew was an arrow in Poseidon’s flank. I whirled and saw a man behind me, nocking an arrow, and I didn’t have time to make complex decisions, my arm went back and I threw my heavy spear, and it hit his horse in the neck and knocked the horse down.