God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I take no joy in slaughter. I like a good fight, now and then – I like to win and I hate to lose, but I like the fight to be . . . interesting.

  This was a butchery of peasants, and it went on too long.

  And then we pressed forward into the dark, with Alexander’s golden lion helmet burning like a beacon in the light cast by the flames from the walls and the burning machines. He glowed with power, and we ran through the night, falling over logs and stones, cursing the darkness.

  The fight at the main gate was locked in stalemate. The old men – Philip’s men – had saved the phalanx and steadied it, but they could not beat the hoplites, who, man for man, were as good or better. And darkness aids no man. Darkness robs the best swordsman of his skill and the rawest recruit of his wits. Dawn was coming up, somewhere far to the east – Athens was probably already lit by sun, and Pella was at least burning pink, but under the walls of Halicarnassus, it was still as black as new-poured pitch, lit only by fires.

  We slammed into the Greeks. We didn’t really catch them by surprise – the Athenian captains had turned to face us – Ephialtes himself, I heard later, one of their best.

  But our arrival had an effect nonetheless. The Persian levies were dead or broken, and their survivors were glutting the gates in terror, and now we threw in our last reserve – and Memnon, who also had an elite reserve, couldn’t get men through the gates blocked by his useless peasants.

  Don’t think the irony was lost on any of us, lad. We were saved – Macedon was saved from defeat by Athens under the walls of a city in Asia by the cowardice of Persian levies.

  The fighting was desperate. All fighting is, but this was made nightmarish by the darkness. Inside my helmet, I could see nothing once I was engaged, and the worst of it was that our rear-rankers had no sense of the combat and kept pushing forward, grinding me relentlessly into the ranks of the hoplites I was fighting, so that I couldn’t fully control my weight or balance. More than once, an unintended shove from my file partner sent me to my knees or worse.

  But unlike most men, Kineas and I were in full armour. I had greaves and a heavy breastplate, a full helmet, an aspis and a heavy spear, and Kineas was armed the same way, and details – long ‘feathers’ covering our upper arms, a full yoke covering the back of my neck in bronze – were lifesavers, because none of us could see a blow coming. I don’t know how many times I was hit, but I know that the next day I threw my beautiful helmet into the sea – too dented and cut up to be saved. Only the thickness of my cap and my hair saved me from death – there were shearing blows that penetrated the thick bronze.

  I don’t remember a single fight. There’s nothing to remember – no vision to cling to – just the relentless weight of the men behind me and the ringing blows on my shield and all too often on my helmet. I took a bad blow – something, probably a spear shaft, hit my spear hand and suddenly I had no weapon and was almost weeping from the pain.

  Pyrrhus and Kineas covered me while the tears flowed out of my eyes unbidden and I flailed about on the bloody ground for a weapon. My sword was gone, my spear was gone, and by the time my hand closed on the shaft of a spear I was disoriented. But I got my feet under me and found myself under Pyrrhus’s shield, safe – I got a breath in me and got my spear and shield up, and I was alive.

  That heartbeat of complete disorientation on the dark battlefield with death all around – it still visits my dreams, like falling from a great height. That’s terror.

  And then the Greeks began to back away.

  In fact, I suspect they’d been backing away for some time, and I was just too busy to notice. But now I was moving forward at a brisk pace – by the standards of infantry combat – tripping over bodies and without someone’s spear trying to poke out my eyes.

  Memnon ordered the main gates closed while more than two hundred of his hoplites were still trapped in the darkness. It was the correct decision, but it doomed them to death, and they knew it, and the whole combat developed a ferocity that I have seldom seen equalled. It is not for nothing that strategoi speak of the ‘Golden Bridge’ – the easy path of retreat we offer to a defeated enemy in most circumstances. Trapped men with nothing to lose are ferocious.

  Those Greeks were monsters, and many of us died.

  Of course, they all died.

  Alexander was in the front of it, and his spear flashed like the bolts of Zeus, and he didn’t hesitate to go shield to shield with those raging monsters and slay them, and where he led, we followed, shouting his name.

  But when the last Greeks were dying, we were still under the walls, the gates were still locked and they were pouring red-hot sand on us.

  The Military Journal says that we lost one hundred and twelve pezhetaeroi and found six hundred bodies of the enemy.

  In fact, we lost – dead and badly wounded – a little over nine hundred men, and we found about five hundred corpses.

  Our machines were all burned, and we would have to start all over again.

  In the morning, Memnon asked for a truce to retrieve his dead. This pleased Alexander immensely, as it meant that he could claim to have won a victory. He was difficult, that morning – elated, brash and far, far too talkative. Parmenio looked at him with something that seemed to me like loathing.

  He was never his own best friend, Alexander. On the battlefield, he was solid, calm and brave, but afterwards, he was like a boy after his first girl – all bragging and no substance. How could the god become so very human?

  He went on and on, that day, tiring every one of us – even Nearchus grew tired of his recitation of his own triumphs. He may well have killed the Athenian captain, Ephialtes, himself – he certainly claimed he had, and we found the body – but when he told the story of the fight with Iliad-like embellishment, we all knew he was a liar. No one among us could have seen a single thing, and his description was like a piece of theatre. The theatre of the inside of the king’s head.

  Hephaestion tried to shush him, and failed.

  Philotas left the tent, disgusted, and Parmenio walked out a little later. I was trying to pretend I was somewhere else – perhaps someplace involving a bath – when Parmenio came back.

  ‘You have won a noble victory,’ he said with rich sarcasm. ‘Come and see, great king.’

  Alexander, when he was like this, didn’t even notice his sarcasm. He followed Parmenio out of the great tent, and up to the top of one of our northerly engine platforms.

  Memnon was abandoning the city.

  He was ferrying his entire force to the three island citadels that dominated the harbour mouth, and the Persian fleet was putting to sea.

  He was keeping his army intact, and slipping away to fight another day. And we could do nothing to stop him.

  Alexander nodded. Looked around, expecting approval. ‘We beat him,’ he said. ‘Every city in Greece will know we took Halicarnassus from Memnon.’

  Parmenio watched his nemesis slipping away, and all we could hear was the sound of the slaves digging graves in the thin soil. The only smell was smoke, because as he left, Memnon set fire to the city. It burned for three days, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

  ‘He intends to bleed us until we drop, and then destroy us,’ Parmenio said.

  ‘We made him ask for a truce to bury his dead,’ Alexander said.

  ‘We have no fleet!’ Parmenio said, disgusted.

  ‘I will deal with that. One victory at a time,’ Alexander said, his voice a little too bright.

  ‘Ten more victories like this one and we will have no more Macedonians!’ Parmenio shouted.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Alexander said.

  ‘He is not beaten! He still holds all the citadels and he’s left the city an empty shell! By the gods, are you insane? Stop this! We cannot conquer Asia!’ Spittle flew from Parmenio’s mouth. ‘Even if by the will of the gods we were to war down Persepolis, we will never hold it all!’

  Alexander looked around. ‘How many of you feel the same?’ he as
ked, ingenuously. You had to have grown up with him to know what mood he was in.

  About half of the officers present raised a hand.

  Most of them were older men, Parmenio’s friends.

  ‘Then I recommend you go home, every one of you.’ Alexander shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to carry on without you.’

  NINETEEN

  Parmenio took half the army and marched away.

  Alexander gave me four thousand Greek mercenaries, my squadron of companions and Kineas and his Allied Horse, and left me to reduce the coast to obedience and complete the conquest of Caria and Cilicia.

  He had a small ceremony to mark the occasion. As was his way, I had no warning – suddenly I was summoned to the command tent and given an independent command. I knew that this was a result of Parmenio marching away, and I knew that I was being given troops from Parmenio’s command. And that I was facing long odds – equal or greater numbers in fortresses for which I had no engines, or on islands I could not reach without ships.

  But I accepted his commands without hesitation. He put a circlet of gold on my head and girded me with a new sword, and promoted Polystratus to the companions, which I greatly appreciated and which made Polystratus a nobleman. It was only fair – the man had been my hyperetes all campaign, and had charged with the Hetaeroi at every engagement. But it was a great reward. And this is one of the things that makes Macedon – and Greece – great. Polystratus was a good man, and now he was an aristocrat. His children would not be the sons of a freed slave, but the sons of an aristocrat. His daughters were going to have dowries and would marry the sons of other minor aristocrats. In Persia, they would live and die as slaves.

  The truth of it was that our losses were heavy enough – not just battlefield losses, either, but dysentery and other sickness, accident, weather – that most of us who had brought our own grooms were not above putting them in dead men’s armour and using them to fill our ranks. The sort of distinctions that mattered enormously in lowland Macedon – birth, horse quality, armour – either mattered not at all in Asia (such as birth) or were gone (horse flesh and armour). We were all mounted on Asian horses and almost every Macedonian cavalryman regardless of social status now had a full thorax, a good helmet, a lance and a couple of javelins, a sword – and like as not, gold on his bridle and silver in his scrip.

  Polystratus’s promotion mirrored mine. I arranged for all of my grooms to be formally taken into the companions, and Polystratus was then formally my hyperetes, as Niceas served Kineas. And my troop returned to near full strength of over a hundred riders. I got Coenus’s troop, as well – he was going home to Macedon with the newly married men, a move that restored the king to popularity with the rank and file, because it looked normal – the married men were supposed to go home every winter.

  In fact, I was beginning to fear that the king didn’t really care what happened in Macedon. War in Asia was self-perpetuating – we were making about as much money as we needed to maintain the army, and even to increase its size. We were locked in a competition with Memnon for the service of all the mercenaries in the Greek world, and we were fighting for our lives, and Alexander loved every heartbeat of it. Why go home? What did Macedon have to offer?

  Also worth noting is that as long as we were fighting for our lives in Asia, no one was going to plot against the king – well, except Parmenio, and he was right there where he could be watched.

  And Olympias was a long way away, too.

  Coenus marched away with the married men, and Parmenio marched away with the left wing. He went back to Sardis, as he had wanted to all along – paid off some mercenaries, and then took the rest with the siege train and began a leisurely mopping up of mountain tribes north and east of Sardis.

  Alexander marched away along the coast, bypassing strongholds still held by Memnon. He had the hypaspists, the Aegema and the unmarried pezhetaeroi, and the scouting cavalry. I heard from him quite regularly for about four weeks – he seized Telmessus by a stratagem, and gave it to Nearchus to hold.

  I like to think that Alexander had tired of Nearchus’s constant sycophancy, but it’s worth noticing that he’d sent me away, too.

  I had four thousand men and plenty of slaves – I had seized the best portion of the city and had my men rebuild the houses. I inspected the work every day, and in two weeks we were the best-housed army in Asia. Then I kept them at work, rebuilding the temples and other houses, and after another week surviving citizens started to return.

  I also sent Kineas to find the Athenian squadron and beg or borrow some engines and an engineer.

  By the gods, he did me well. He came back in two weeks with ten heavy engines – or rather, the bronze parts for them – as well as Helios, a freed Cyprian slave, who had all of the problems of Pythagoras in his head and knew how to construct . . . well, almost everything. He’d been serving the Athenians as a dock builder, and he was bored. I offered him the Macedonian rate of pay as an engineer, and he signed on the spot. He was short, very short for a man, and his skin was deeply tanned, almost the colour of old wood. He had curly blond hair – hence his name – and a pleasant face. He’d been well born, but taken by slavers as a boy and treated badly.

  He looked at the three island citadels off Halicarnassus, and shrugged.

  ‘Three ways to take ’em,’ he said. He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Build a fleet and storm ’em, starve ’em, or grow wings and fly there.’

  I nodded. ‘I agree,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘Good. I was afraid you expected me to make something out of nothing.’

  I shook my head. ‘My plan is to start with the easiest and move from there. Caunus and a town called Knidos.’ I shrugged again. ‘Never seen them myself, but they have to be easier than this.’

  In fact, Thaïs had people in both, plotting revolution.

  It was great fun, the two of us planning a complete campaign together. I’ve known men to freeze in high command, and it is different, but it wasn’t my first time, and she liked it too, and it was something we did together. And because she was working for me, and not for the king, I began to see how she ran her net of informants, and to watch the details of her intelligence-gathering.

  For strategic intelligence – the news of politics, of the thoughts and intentions of great men and cities, of the Persian court, of the satraps – she had her web of letter-writing friends. They didn’t think of themselves as spies, and in fact she called them her Epistolaroi. And the greatest and most important of the Epistolaroi was the Pythia and her priests at Delphi.

  For tactical intelligence – the immediate collection of information on local troop movements and enemy intentions in the near term, our scouts did most of the collection – most, but not all, because by this time, after almost a year in the field, Thaïs had a corps of spies she called the Angeloi, the heralds. Strakos led them, and they were mostly freemen. Their characteristics were unarmed anonymity, and superb horses. We knew every one of them by name and by sight, so that they could come and go from our lines without passwords. They seldom carried weapons openly, and they rode far and fast, gathering news. Every one of them had funds to buy information, and most of them had the personal skills to recruit their own informers on the spot.

  And above all of them was Thaïs. She read every report, spoke to the returning cavalry patrols, interviewed the Angeloi, read the letters from the Epistolaroi and answered them. It was an enormous workload, but she had a secretariat of slaves and freemen, most of them taken at Granicus – slaves who read and wrote Persian, or Thracian, or Aegyptian, or Carian. All told, her establishment had a hundred people working for it, men and women. It was not a miracle of efficiency, because it was more like art than science, but her information was reliable and quickly gathered.

  In the fourth week, I took a cavalry reconnaissance down the coast, with the Angeloi out in front and detailed reports on the towns already in my head, and Caunus looked the easiest, on paper and in fact. Knidos sat on the end
of a 250-stade long peninsula with a mountainous spine. Riding cautiously along the coast road, or rather the coast goat path, I could see an ambush site every five stades. By pure good luck and with some tips from Thaïs’s friends, we caught about a quarter of the garrison of Knidos outside their walls and captured them. And then, reversing Alexander’s policy, I hired the lot of them, and didn’t execute them. I wanted to make it easy for men to surrender, not hard.

  Caunus, on the other hand, sat three-quarters surrounded by land – flat, well-earthed land. Helios got off his horse in the dawn – we were moving fast and light – and crawled right up to the city wall, and he returned convinced that he could tunnel under the walls in a week.

  We got back to Halicarnassus late in the evening, after dark, soaked and very cold. I rode into the courtyard of my house and found it in near panic.

  Queen Ada had come into my house in Halicarnassus without being announced. The cold rain poured down the gutters of the house and spat out on to the ground, and I was in a surly mood – I wanted to throw Thaïs on a bed – or a warm floor – and I didn’t want to deal with this woman.

  It was as bad as I feared.

  ‘Why has he not written to me?’ she demanded as I entered the room.

  Why indeed? Because he was done with her. Because sex with her made him feel like a mortal, not a god.

  Thaïs spoke to her rapidly in a low voice.

  ‘You are my strategos, Lord Ptolemy?’ the queen asked, more pleasantly.

  In fact, I was the absolute lord of Caria. It said so on my warrant. But Alexander had promised her independence, when it suited him, and now I was left holding this particular bag. Love, sex, war, politics. A nasty brew.

  ‘I command all of the king’s troops in your kingdom,’ I said, as precisely as possible. ‘I will complete the task of reconquest.’

  She nodded. ‘When will he return?’ she asked.

  It was pitiful – sad, awful. When I’d first met her, I’d been impressed with her vitality, her youth and her complete mastery of the situation. She was a tough woman and a warrior.