God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (99 page)

In short, we were late for parade. All the taxeis competed to be
first
on parade, and we were deliberately last.

We had the front left file closer – Leosthenes now – carry a sarissa with every wreath and garland we had won as a body in the games tied to the spearhead with superb cloth-of-gold tape that Thaïs provided. We had a pair of slave aulos players, whom I freed for service.

We marched on, crossing the back of the parade to the tune of our flutes, marching in step.

We could hear the muttering in the ranks; ‘awkward sods’ was about the nicest thing we heard.

And then they saw us.

Heh. Another great moment.

There was no body of troops in that army of fifty thousand men who had matching helmet plumes, matching armour, matching spears, new chitons that shone like snow. We glittered.

And when I called ‘Ground your . . . spears!’ fifteen hundred saurouters crunched into the gravel with a single sound.

Alexander glanced at me. I had on my new panoply. I smelled like new leather and Thaïs’s perfume – I think she’d kept the armour awfully close during the sea voyage.

The king grinned.

Then he rode away to the head of the Royal Squadron, and we passed in review, marching past the king sixteen files wide, and in step, in a way that never really happened on the battlefield, and yet was a practical test of a regiment’s drill.

We marched up and down, and we marched past the king. And as the head of our regiment drew even with him – he was deep in conversation with Hephaestion – he touched his heels to Bucephalus and rode out to us.

‘Men of Outer Macedon!’ he shouted. Technically, that was our taxeis – the Taxeis of Outer Macedon.

He waited a moment or two.

‘YOU LOOK LIKE GODS!’ he roared.

They were still shouting his name when we went back to camp. They were willing to die for him, then.

Sometimes, he was easy to love.

Harpalus brought us detailed information on the war with Sparta and the threat to the League of Corinth in Greece. The night of the great review, when Craterus had pretended to punch me in the nose and Perdiccas had demanded that I tell him the source of my wonderful helmets (I told him), we discussed the war behind us – what Alexander later referred to as a war between mice.

They were dangerous mice. The Spartans were nothing like in their prime, but man for man they were still magnificent. And their king, Agis, understood strategy better, I think, than Darius. He struck immediately, and where we felt it most – he put a fleet to sea and took Crete, as I’ve mentioned above. Had we
not
won Tyre and Aegypt, Agis’s strategy would have crippled us, cut us off. So much for Parmenio’s views of the world.

But Tyre fell and the Cypriots came over to us, and the world changed faster than Darius and Agis were prepared for, and once again, Alexander was a step ahead.

As usual,
everything
depended on Athens. During the winter, while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon, our entire campaign teetered on the edge of extinction. Athens had three hundred ships. If Athens had joined Sparta, we would have faced a general uprising of all the states of Greece, and Antipater notwithstanding, the war would have been fought at sea, and in Macedon.

But Athens stayed loyal. Actually, Athens seethed with discontent, but stayed just the right side of betrayal. Or, as I have said before, the thetes couldn’t stomach siding with Sparta and Persia at the same time.

What role Harpalus played, I can only guess. His role was never vouchsafed to me. But Thaïs’s trip to Athens while Alexander went to the shrine of Amon . . . at the time, I never guessed it. She had apparently withdrawn from politics and spycraft, during her second pregnancy. Callisthenes took over her duties and ran her agents.

When I look back, now, I realise that she controlled Harpalus’s false defection, and ran him as a fisherman plays a fish. She was his lifeline and his paymaster, and the five thousand talents he ‘stole’ were used to bribe Athens. It was a brilliant move. I wish I could be certain whether Thaïs thought it through herself, or whether Harpalus designed it, or whether the king did – all three in concert, I think, but somehow, it has his stamp. Alexander’s mind . . .

Last year, I saw a device at the house of Ben Zion – a device that had been ordered by the Tyrant of Athens. It was a bronze and steel machine for predicting the movement of the planets. Have you seen one? If you rotate a lever, you can see the moon spin on its axis as it moves around the earth, passing through her phases, and you can watch Ares make his remarkable movements – forward, back, forward, like a man dancing the Pyricche.

You’ve seen one of these machines? Yes?

That is how I see the mind of Alexander. Except with an infinite profusion of those cogs and levers, calculating, calculating, so that unless his agents of information betrayed him with false data, he could see forward, not by prescience but by calculation, on the battlefield, in politics and perhaps even in friendships. So that, just as Demetrios of Phaleron’s machine could calculate a thousand years of eclipses, so Alexander’s mind could calculate three years of campaigns in Asia and all of Darius’s responses.

How dull the rest of us must have seemed.

At any rate, Harpalus returned, and the king felt his rear was secure. He restructured his commands to suit his campaign, and Parmenio didn’t quibble.

The two of them had a meeting, in private, with no witnesses. I can only guess, but I will. I think that the king promised him an honourable retirement and the satrapy of Persia proper. And Parmenio accepted, secure in the knowledge that he was being given a huge command and the Royal Treasury – and thus, that he could continue to provide patronage for the officers in his ‘family’.

Hephaestion was given his first large command. He took the elite cavalry – the Hetaeroi minus the royals, the Paeonians, the Thracians and some of the allies – such as Kineas – and the Agrianian skirmishers, and he vanished into the desert. He had what appeared to be a siege train. That accorded badly with the speed his column was supposed to maintain, but rumour said he was out of the area covered by the Prodromoi in a single day, so he must have moved like lightning.

You’ve no doubt heard the story from Diodorus, eh? How they raced to the Euphrates, and threw a pontoon bridge across.

Mazaeus, the best of the remaining Persian commanders, was there with three thousand horse, and the two forces fought every day – skirmish after skirmish on the banks of the Euphrates, up and down as Hephaestion sought to outflank Mazaeus, like two skilled men fencing with sticks. And Kineas won the day, racing south, finding a ford, fighting his way across with his Athenians in the face of a determined enemy, and turning Mazaeus’s flank, so that his whole force was rolled back and Hephaestion got the bridges across. That’s where your father won his magnificent Nisean stallion, and he rode that horse for years.

If you know your
Anabasis
, you know that Cyrus’s army took the same route we were on. And having won the crossings of the Euphrates and built a pair of bridges, we might have turned south towards Babylon and lunged at the Persians.

That’s what Mazaeus expected, and what Darius wanted us to do – march down the east bank of the Euphrates. Like Artaxerxes before him, Darius had ordered the land between the rivers scorched, the grain removed and the most populous place on the wheel of the world depopulated, so that when Alexander made his move for empire, he would have to cross a battlefield stripped clean of food and forage.

When we marched from Tyre, it was late in Hecatombion by the Athenian festival calendar, but we marched fast – up to two hundred stades a day. The men were fresh and well rested, and well fed. And even eager. We had water with us, and we marched across dusty plains at the height of midsummer.

When Kineas rolled Mazaeus up and forced him back on the road to Babylon, the rest of us – the main army – were virtually a dust cloud on the horizon. The next day, my taxeis and the hypaspitoi marched across the bridges yoked like oxen, carrying water, and behind us came the whole army. Mazaeus retreated south along the east bank of the Euphrates for two days, and Hephaestion, on what was probably the best day of his career, pursued just the right amount, and they fought another inconclusive action in the dust.

I was still marching.

We didn’t turn south to Babylon.

The wheels of the king’s mind had turned, grinding this campaign down to a few problems, and here’s the solution he reached, as best I understand it.

If we marched in spring, as soon as the ground was dry, then the rivers would be in spate, and crossing either the Euphrates or the Tigris would have been very difficult indeed. The marching would have been better for the soldiers, but that was never a great concern of Alexander’s.

But if the rivers were full to flood – if the spring rains came late – and the countryside was empty of crops, as every set of farms on earth is empty in late spring, when all the stores have been consumed – then we might reach the Euphrates bank and starve, or be trapped between the rivers.

As it was, although I think most of the army never saw the plan, his campaign worked better than he imagined. We shot east, crossed the two bridges mere hours after they were completed, and Mazaeus, by the sort of luck that comes with good planning, was pinned back south and couldn’t explore our dispositions. Two days later, when Hephaestion had withdrawn, Mazaeus’s elite cavalry came pounding north.

And found the crossing deserted, and our army – gone. Gone to the east.

By luck, good planning and the godlike far-sightedness of Alexander, we had broken contact, and our entire army was loose in the plains of Iraq.

Mazaeus raced south, leaving his best men to try and find us. Mazaeus had a head on his shoulders – he went in person to tell the Great King that Alexander had just shredded his operational plan and was now
somewhere
.

In fact, we marched for twenty days, moving as fast as men and horses could move. We were north of Darius’s scorched earth, and we were in the cool foothills and not in the Mesopotamian plains, and while ‘cool’ is a relative thing to a foot soldier who has been marching for ten hours with the sun pounding him like an enemy, we were not losing men.

The best of the Prodromoi swept south in small groups – ten or twelve men under a trusted officer or phylarch, covering huge distances with six or eight horses per man. By the time we reached the Tigris river, we were receiving the first reports of Darius’s army, as scouted by Agon’s men.

Alexander flatly refused to believe what he heard. Because what he heard was that Darius, the despicable and defeated Darius, had almost a hundred thousand men covering miles of ground, and that his army outnumbered ours nearly two to one.

The speed of the army was not good for everyone. The animals suffered in the heat and dust, and the women suffered worse than the men, even when they rode in litters, and one pregnant woman suffered worse than the rest.

I was with the main body when I heard her scream.

We had reached the Tigris river the night before, and our lead elements – today, Perdiccas and the Agrianians, backed by Thracian horse – punched across against no opposition. The Tigris, contrary to Callisthenes’ sensational account, was about four fingers deep over the rocks, and we scarcely cooled our feet in it as we went.

We were flanking the baggage, and I had the rotten job of making sure that the baggage carts made the crossing in good order. I was watching my officers check the cartwheels – because any old ones would break in the middle of the river, and any loose ones would come off. And the Great King’s wife began to scream.

I can’t pretend I knew who it was, but I was the officer in charge, and I rode to her cart – more like a broad pavilion mounted on a wagon bed.

There was so much blood that it was coming through the baseboards of the wagon.

I sent Polystratus for Thaïs, and then I climbed into the wagon. She was screaming, and her mother-in-law was holding her head, and two eunuchs tried to prevent my entering the wagon and I threw one out through the door.

‘You cannot enter here!’ the other said, desperately.

I ignored him and looked at Sisygambis, the Queen Mother. She didn’t meet my eye.

Leosthenes had been checking wheels. He popped his head in.

‘Fetch the king,’ I shot at him, and his head vanished.

Thaïs came. The eunuchs continued to try to remove me, but Sisygambis said something and they desisted. Thaïs put a hand on the woman’s forehead, reached down and flung the blood-soaked sheets back and caught my eye.

Miscarriage. I’m a country boy. I knew the signs.

Philip of Acarnia came first, and then Alexander. I’d have left the wagon, but I couldn’t get out, trapped in the press. Philip looked at her, felt her pulse and exchanged a glance with Thaïs. That was the worst thing – the conspiracy of silence. The poor woman. Imagine – trapped with fifty thousand enemy soldiers, pregnant with Alexander’s bastard and marching
towards
your husband, who will have you executed when he sees you. With only your mother-in-law and her ladies for company.

Then Alexander came.

Philip was blunt, as he always was. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he said. ‘She won’t recover.’

Indeed, the poor thing was bleeding at such a rate that it didn’t seem possible a body could hold so much blood.

She cried out.

Alexander turned his head away in revulsion.

She flung her arms out.

Alexander stepped back.

‘She is unclean,’ he said.

‘I am cursed!’ the Queen of Persia cried out. ‘Oh, God of Light, why must I endure this!’

Alexander shot me a look of disgust. ‘Why
exactly
was I summoned?’ he asked.

‘You got her with child,’ I shot at him. I don’t think I had ever been so angry with him.

He didn’t meet my eye. This had never happened before, save once.

He turned and left the wagon.

Philip of Acarnia all but spat.