God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Parmenio was shouted down, and we marched before light in the morning, headed south for the Syrian Gates. We were outnumbered two to one, but this, we all knew, was the battle for Asia.

  If anyone worried because the king’s eyes glittered or his hands shook, they kept that to themselves.

  The rains started two days south of Issus, and they battered us like a living embodiment of Poseidon pouring himself on the land, and men offered sacrifices – the sea was so angry, over to our right, and we passed very slowly through the Pillar of Jonah. Men were lost to the waves, and baggage animals. We had to march virtually single file, and when the water rose too high, we just had to wait. You don’t know it? Well, there’s a point south of Issus where the coast road has to go down the cliffs and across the beach. Just for a few stades – and the beach is wide and easy – unless Poseidon is angry. When we crossed, it was as narrow as a cart track in the mountains, and the penalty for slipping was drowning.

  Then we marched farther along the coast, taking Myriandros. There, at Parmenio’s insistence, we sent Philotas with six hundred cavalry into the passes to make sure we could get across before Darius did. That much caution the king accepted.

  I was summoned to the command tent in the morning, at which time I was standing on a wagon bed holding my morning orders group. I had just managed to get all of my phylarchs to laugh at a fairly weak witticism when Black Cleitus appeared behind me, spoke to Polystratus and literally ran off.

  That caught my attention. I turned to Polystratus, who was mounted.

  Polystratus was laconic. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

  Such was my trust in Alexander that I assumed it was trouble between Parmenio and Alexander, or medical trouble. I left Isokles to command the troops and I jumped on Medea (a new Medea, a beautiful Arab palfrey with a small head and a wonderful stride), and cantered across the camp to Alexander’s pavilion. At the palisade gate, there were forty men – disfigured men, most of them blinded, many with other wounds. Prisoners? I passed them, thinking on the fates.

  No one was talking when I entered. But every officer in the army was there. Parmenio’s face was white and red – blotches of red. That meant rage.

  Alexander was smiling.

  No one was saying anything.

  Craterus was my brigadier, so I went and stood with him and Perdiccas, and he gave me a nod.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  Perdiccas caught my eye and I followed him out of the tent.

  ‘Darius tricked us. He’s already behind us – has retaken Issus and all our baggage. He . . . blinded most of our sick and wounded, except a few he left with one eye.’ Perdiccas shrugged.

  ‘Ares,’ I breathed. Now Darius had us. He was on our communications. He’d outmarched us.

  Darius, the slow, conservative Persian.

  I followed Perdiccas back inside.

  Parmenio was busy apportioning blame. ‘I told you!’ he shouted as I entered. ‘Darius will pick a river – the one with the steepest sides – and he’ll entrench on the other side, and we will have to fight through him. We’re going to have to attack an entrenched army that is double our size.’

  Alexander’s smile never wavered. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory. And now Darius is committed to fight. He won’t be allowed to slip away.’

  Parmenio was about to go on with his (perfectly accurate) rant, but Alexander’s comment brought him up short.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Parmenio asked. ‘This is not a play. This is not a game. If we fail to break Darius, we are done. We will have lost.’ He was so angry that spittle flew from his mouth.

  Alexander’s smile was like the grin of a satyr. ‘Then we’d best win, hadn’t we?’ he said, and his confidence was both infectious and offensive, all at the same time.

  Two more days of rain, and we came back to the Pillar of Jonah. Darius could have held it against us for ever, but that wasn’t his style. He wanted a field battle as much as Alexander did. So we began to pass it, led by the Agrianians and the Thracians and Paeonians, who went through as fast as men could swim and run, and then spread out on the far side to give us some cover.

  That night, we camped on the heights north of the Pillars, and we could see Darius’s fires like a carpet of fireflies. The weather was mild in the evening, but around midnight the rains returned, drowning out Alexander’s attempt to make a burned offering on an ancient altar in the hills.

  I doubt my men were dry, but here’s the value of an old sweat like Isokles – he’d spent time training the new men to build shelters. Recruits build shelters that trap water and soak their cloaks – and then fall down at the first touch of wind. Veterans tend to build tiny, snug shelters that will last out a hurricane and have room for five men as long as the men don’t mind lying atop each other. Warm men can sleep, even if they are damp. Our men built some remarkable shelters that night – I remember them – my favourite of which (remember we were camped on a steep hillside) was a shallow cave with stakes driven deep into the sandy soil at the back – and then the file’s shields carefully laid across the stakes to form a roof of solid wood and hide. With some cloaks and some stolen cloth to pad it out, it was as dry as a bone and warm in there. I know, because that’s where I ate breakfast in the morning. With the rain still pouring down.

  I had some old friends to breakfast, because we’d made camp late and were all camped together on the ridge – pezhetaeroi and Agrianians and hypaspitoi and Hetaeroi, too. So Bubores and Astibus shared my hot wine and honey, my barley with local yogurt – and those were a general officer’s provisions, gathered by expert foragers like Ochrid. We were in trouble, and everyone knew it.

  Later, I gathered that the yogurt cost me a gold daric. The cost of a good donkey, at home.

  Bubores was delighted by the provender, and deeply troubled. Astibus was less concerned, but he kept looking at the rain as he chewed his three-day-old bread, and both of them were damp and less than lively company.

  Polystratus made room for Strakos, who pushed in under the shields like a dancer, carefully avoiding putting undue pressure on the supports or shaking water off the shields.

  ‘What news?’ Polystratus asked the Angelos.

  Strakos laughed. ‘Darius has a huge army, and it is still raining,’ he said. He got his cloak off and threw it out into the rain.

  Bubores looked at me from under his eyebrows. ‘It’s the wrath of the gods,’ he said quietly.

  Astibus rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t start that crap again,’ he said. ‘It’s bad weather, and it is just as bad for the Persians.’

  Bubores shrugged. ‘I know what I know,’ he muttered.

  ‘What do you know?’ I asked. Bubores had a reputation in Aegema as a seer and a bit of an astrologer – self-taught, but still respected.

  He rocked back on his heels. He could sit on his heels more comfortably than any man I’d ever seen. ‘There’s a blood offence against the gods,’ he said firmly. ‘It must be expiated.’

  This wasn’t just bad morale. This was a serious accusation. Ignoring this kind of thing is what got Parmenio into trouble. ‘Have you spoken to the king?’ I asked.

  Bubores shrugged. ‘It is the king’s to answer,’ he said in his deep voice.

  Astibus slapped his shoulder. ‘You and your dark premonitions! At Halicarnassus, you said—’

  ‘It’s the rain,’ Strakos said. ‘The Thracians are openly mutinous. Last night I heard a group of them preparing to desert to Darius.’

  Polystratus nodded. ‘There’s men among the Paeonian cavalry who are suggesting the same.’

  Polystratus handed me a cup of hot wine, and I drank it – rich with honey, the nectar of the gods. I passed it around. It was my job to tell them that this was all nonsense, and we’d be triumphant in the end, and I was just framing my reply when Cleomenes pointed to the beach below us.

  ‘Look at him,’ Cleomenes said, awe in his voice.

  Alexander
had ordered that his four-horse chariot be hitched on the beach. The horses were restless in the rain and thunder – but even in the rain, they gleamed with gold and animal magnificence. Alexander was practically at our feet – as I say, we were eating our barley in a dry cave on a steep hillside in the first light. The rain lashed us, the wind blew straight out to sea from the land, and the king’s pavilion was directly below mine.

  Alexander emerged from it naked except for a wreath of gold. He had a good body – his legs were a little short for perfection, and his shoulders were a little narrow, but he was always in top shape, every ridge on his abdomen perfectly defined, and he never minded being seen naked. Now he leaped into his chariot and whipped his horses along the beach, and as he drove them along the front of the army, men stood up, despite the rain, and cheered him.

  By the gods, he was the king.

  He looked like a god, and the rain didn’t change that. Had he driven in a sodden purple cloak, he’d have looked like a fool, but naked he looked like Poseidon’s son, or Zeus’s, as much a creature of the weather as the horses.

  I will never forget the sight. He was a god. What more can I say?

  From the far end of the beach – the end closest to the Persians, about twenty-five stades away – he turned the chariot and drove it back along the army at a dead gallop, the wheels throwing sand, the horse’s hooves shaking the earth, so that we could feel his passage upon our ridge. His hair blew out behind him despite the rain.

  And then he turned the chariot – right into the sea.

  He drove his chariot, horses and all, until the horses were swimming. The weight of their harness dragged them down. They panicked when they were too deep to save themselves – there was a steep drop just off the beach, and the whole chariot, car, team, gold and all, vanished into the dark line of water just off the beach.

  The whole beach was stunned into silence. We sat there. Thirty thousand men. Men coughed, and it disturbed the silence. That’s how quiet we were.

  The rain stopped.

  And just beyond the line where the dark water met the light water, a blond head, dark with wet and crowned with bright green kelp, surfaced.

  The sun broke through the clouds.

  I was there. The sun came out, and turned his hair to a fiery gold as he walked up the beach.

  It was the greatest, most perfect sacrifice I have ever seen, and Poseidon gave us his favour immediately. I think of it every time I make sacrifice. Impiety is for the foolish, lad. I was there.

  The army stood as one man, as if it was drill, and bellowed our cheers to Apollo Helios and to Zeus, and to Alexander, son of the gods, crowned by Poseidon.

  Bubores was beaming like the sun, pumping his fist in the air, with Astibus pounding him on the back, and even Strakos, who never betrayed emotion, was grinning from ear to ear.

  And then, in the light of the warm sun, we donned our sodden equipment and we marched towards Darius.

  We marched out of the defile where we’d camped in a column of files. Alexander’s plan was as simple as one of Parmenio’s, with the difference that Alexander played with his plans constantly, so that a string of messengers altered our dispositions all the time.

  I was at Issus, but my Issus was utterly different from everyone else’s. I’ve heard Alexander’s tale of the day, and Philotas’s, and Parmenio’s and Kineas’s, and Niceas’s – by Ares, I’ve heard a hundred versions and heard most of them told fifty times! And never heard the same story.

  Darius was, as Parmenio expected, waiting for us at the Pindarus river. He had brought his finest troops, mounted and foot – we hadn’t had to contend with them at Granicus. He also had almost twelve thousand Greek mercenaries. They were not the very best men – we had most of the best men in our army by then, or they lay dead. They were lower-class Greeks wearing the panoply, or Asians trained to look like Greeks. But they had Spartan and Athenian officers. Since everyone knows what happened at Issus, I won’t ruin my story if I say that those second-rate ‘Greeks’ almost wrecked our centre, and had they been Memnon’s men led by Memnon, I’d be dead. And so would everyone else from Macedon. Even as it was . . .

  We went forward from camp in a column of files. We could see the Persian line by mid-morning, formed right across the beach where the beach and the farms of the plain were about twenty stades wide from the steep hills to the sea on our left. As the plain widened, the king kept ordering us to form to the right, and to double out into our battle formation. My taxeis was right in the middle of our line – the most junior position – and so we formed thirty-two deep by sixty wide early in the morning, when we were clear of the narrowest bottleneck; by the time we reached the Persian line, we were in normal order and just sixteen deep and one hundred and twenty wide.

  Around noon, we were less than five stades from the Persians, and their line glittered with gold.

  Alexander ordered us to halt and cook lunch. We had lost our baggage, remember – we’d lost all our slaves and all of our heavy equipment. What we hadn’t lost was our mess kettles, and old soldiers know that a hot meal matters, so most of my men, for instance, had gathered a dozen sticks before stepping off, and tied them inside their shields. We had food in minutes, our fires rising like sacrifices – or pyres.

  The Persians didn’t even cross the river to scout us.

  That made them seem cowardly. In retrospect, Darius had a polyglot army and he didn’t trust his commanders to cooperate, and now that I’ve had that experience, I feel for him, but at the time it made us confident.

  Off to our right, in the low hills, there were a great many Persian light troops, and the whole front of their army was covered by more – I don’t want to guess how many ill-armed peasants the Great King had. It’s by counting this skirmisher cloud as soldiers that men come up with the ludicrous numbers the Persians supposedly had against us. I think he had fifteen thousand Psiloi, but there wasn’t a soldier among them, and they weren’t like our Thracians or our Agrianians, who could be counted on even when the fighting got stiff. These were peasants, and they had pointed sticks and light bows, slings, bags of rocks.

  Still, there were an awful lot of them, and Alexander, who ate his sausage with me, was increasingly concerned about them and finally sent Cleitus with the Agrianians and a battalion of hypaspitoi to clear the ridge to our east. Alexander continued to eat. I was having a hard time eating.

  It was not like Granicus. I had lots of time to look and see just how many Persians there were – a sea of them filling the beach. And to remember just how terrifying Granicus had been. This had never happened to me before, and is an essential part of being a veteran. Raw men fear what they do not know. Trained, experienced men fear what they do know. I knew it was going to be horrible. The Persians were not foolish, not effeminate. Win or lose, we were going to wade through our own guts to beat them.

  After lunch, a lunch I wanted to vomit up but could not, I rode forward with Anander, Perdiccas and Craterus to have a look at the part of the plain where we’d be going. All along the line, Macedonian officers rode forward to scout the enemy lines.

  What I saw chilled my heart.

  Right in front of my position, the Great King’s bodyguard stood, with their six-foot spears tipped in long steel cutting heads, and instead of sharp iron or bronze saurouters, or butt-spikes, every spear had a solid silver apple at the base of the shaft, making them fearsome weapons. I had never faced one, but Kineas’s father had one on the wall of his andron, as I’ve mentioned, and I knew what a deadly weapon it could be.

  And I assumed that the Great King’s bodyguards would be the best.

  And worst of all, the banks of the Pindarus, right there where my lads would cross, were five feet high.

  Craterus looked it over, turned to me and said, ‘Well, you’re fucked. Better hope I can do better on your flank.’

  And Perdiccas wouldn’t meet my eye. No one would. We rode back to our battalions, all of the other officers treating me with the gentl
e regard friends pay to a dying man, or one condemned for a crime.

  Here’s how it was, five stades out. We were on a plain. It was flat – but rose steadily from the sea on our left to the steep hills on our right, so that every unit in the line was slightly uphill of the unit to its left and downhill of the unit on its right. I had Coenus to my right and the hypaspitoi just visible beyond – and past them were the king and Philotas and all the Hetaeroi. That’s where the king’s mighty blow was going to fall.

  On my left was Craterus, and beyond him Perdiccas – and beyond him, Parmenio with the rest of the army. The king started with the Thessalians but sent them quite early, round our rear to help Parmenio. I missed all of that. I was busy.

  Each of us had a front of roughly one hundred and twenty files. Each of our leftmost men locked shields with the rightmost man of the next taxeis in one continuous phalanx, but we all knew that would go to shit the moment we hit the river, because the river turned twice and the banks were all different heights, and some parts of the riverbank were heavily brushy.

  Alexander, now dry and magnificent in his gold and green patina’d antique armour and leopard-skin saddlecloth, his lion-head helmet, his purple Tyrian cloak, rode along the front – back and forth. Every man I know says he gave a different speech.

  Opposite my men, he reined in and grinned at me, gave me a little mock salute and made his horse rear, and the men roared.

  ‘Asia!’ he yelled, pointing at the glitter of gold. ‘Ours for the taking! Now we avenge Greece. Now we make ourselves masters of the greatest empire on the wheel of the earth. Now we make all that they have, ours – by the spear. Our gods are with us. Poseidon crowned me in the dawn, and I feel Athena at my shoulder, and before the sun sets, we will drive this rabble like sacrificial animals into the sea. And avenge every indignity, every burned temple, and the betrayal of Xenophon and his ten thousand!’

  That’s what I remember, anyway. And when he mentioned Xenophon, my lads – half of them Athenian street kids – cheered like madmen.