God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  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 m
an 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.

  Poseidon turned on his back feet and I got my borrowed kopis out of the scabbard under my arm in time to parry a spear from a man in gorgeous armour – he might have been the King of Kings, he had so much gold on his body.

  His spear scraped across me – it was that close – and he swept past me, even as Poseidon continued to turn – and the world stopped as he drove his spear into the king’s side.

  Alexander’s speed and coordination were legendary among the former pages, and he leaned as far as he could, but the spear was driven hard by a man of great skill, and it hit Alexander’s green-bronze cuirass and punched through it, just as Poseidon crashed into the charging Persian’s horse.

  Alexander reached down and caught the shaft of the spear in his side and pulled it free. Blood spurted.

  Alexander took the spear, still wet with his blood, and threw it at the Persian, who was roaring his war cry – ‘Mithridates! Mithridates for Darius!’ in Persian.

  Alexander’s throw was perfectly timed, and he caught the man high on his breastplate, where the bronze is thin, and it punched through the hardened bronze and rocked Mithridates in his saddle.

  But it didn’t go deep – it cracked ribs, but it didn’t go deep into the Persian prince’s chest. Poseidon had made the Persian’s horse stumble, and as Mithridates drew his sword, Alexander swung his own spear – left-handed, no less – and caught the Persian in the face and stunned him.

  I got my heels into Poseidon’s sides, and he reared over the Persian and I hit him with my kopis – a sloppy shot, but he was stunned and it cut his neck and blood sprayed and down he went.

  But in moving to kill the great man, I’d left an opening in the ring around the king, and another Persian – I’d missed him – flew in like a thunderbolt and his backcut sheared the wings off the king’s helmet – cut through the bronze. I saw the blade go into his skull.

  Alexander reversed his spear, took it just behind the haft with his right hand and rammed it up under the man’s armpit – with the man’s sword still sticking out of the crest of his helmet.

  The Persian screamed.

  But the Persian nobles were all around us like sharks around a stricken tuna. Alexander looked back at me – I was facing away from him, trying to stem the rush of the enemy’s elite – I took blows in my back, my side, my helmet, but by the grace of Zeus or Apollo or Ares none of them hit my unarmoured arms or face or neck. I backed Poseidon – I don’t really remember anything except the blows raining on me, the dust and Alexander looking at me, his mouth working, and the sword stuck in his helmet.

  I saw Spithrakes – I only learned his name later – another of their great nobles. He came up behind the king in the fight – rode past Nearchus, fighting two men, and put Marsyas down with a heavy backcut, and then he had the king – he drew back his arm and Cleitus cut it off – one of the greatest blows I’ve ever seen – that man had the king’s life in his hands, and Cleitus saved him with one perfect cut, as if he’d waited his entire life for that moment to save the king’s life.

  But the Persians were pressing in – another Persian got past Nearchus and his spear blow – sloppy – caught the king in the back and tipped him on to the ground.

  We had never imagined that the king could fall.

  I had two opponents, and I was not fighting to take them down, but rather to block the path to the king. When he fell, my purpose in the melee changed. Or rather, everything changed.

  I let Poseidon go forward, and he sank his teeth into an enemy mare’s neck and she screamed, and my sword sheared off the top of the man’s skull and with my backcut, I blinded the other horse and spilled its brains, and then, ignoring the press of Persians, I whirled Poseidon on his forefeet and got him over the king’s body – looked down, and he was already on his hands and knees, and Black Cleitus was beside me – flank to flank, his horse nose-to-tail with Poseidon, and we had Alexander between us, and we cut outwards into the press.

  Bucephalus was the horse Alexander said he was. He pushed in between us to stand by his master.

  I cut a man’s hands off on his horse’s neck, and then I was just trying to stay alive – the spear-points never stopped coming, and I blocked them – up, right, high, anything to clear the iron from Poseidon and the king. I have no idea how long Cleitus and I held them – ten heartbeats? A hundred?

  I know that the gods could have made the earth and the heavens in that time, raised a new race of men and made a new golden age. It was that
long. It was like the first pangs of love. Like the last moments of severe pain. The intensity and speed of it rose to an intense pitch – there were blades everywhere and my kopis flew through the blocks and parries – I got a spear in my left hand, taken from an enemy or put there by a friend, and I used it to block thrusts at the king, who was off his knees and on his feet by this time, but I couldn’t risk a look – or he was face down in the muck and blood and dead. Either way, I had no means of knowing, because to risk a glance would be to die, and I was the last wall between the barbarians and the king.

  Faster, and harder. I had never fought so well in my life. I was fighting three men – perhaps four – and holding them.

  Like a god.

  And then the biggest of my opponents – a giant man on a big black horse with a huge spear – baffled my parry, and I had that sickening moment – the one you get in practice when you know you’ve missed your parry, and pain is to follow – except this was the end.

  His spear-point seemed to come forward slowly – but my attempt to reparry was even slower.

  And then a spear came over my shoulder from behind, and the blow meant for my face sheared off into the crest of my helmet.

  I rocked back and lost my kopis, but just like that, the fight was over.

  The Persians had thrown everything at us – all their cavalry reserve – and while we fought four thousand men, our pezhetaeroi and our hypaspitoi had shattered their centre and our cavalry was gaining both flanks. Their first line was fleeing. Their second line expected the cavalry to rally there – but they didn’t, and the only reason I can offer is that three of their senior officers were lying under our horses’ hooves.

  I sat there, shoulders slumped, looking vaguely at the ground.

  Cleitus got a hand on the king’s arm and hauled him up on to Bucephalus’s back.

  His helmet was gone, and there was blood pouring down the back of his neck.

  He was looking at Hephaestion, face down in the blood under our hooves. His jaw was slack. I hadn’t seen the king’s closest companion go down, but he was down, and his horse was dead atop him.