God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I still had my eyes on that great golden disc. I didn’t know whether it was the king’s or just the banner of the Immortals, but I killed my way towards it.

  I had a wonderful new sword – my favourite, I think, of all the swords I’d ever had. Thaïs gave it to me. It was a simple kopis, neither long nor short, not even fancy – but magnificently balanced, so that it felt like a feather – a deadly feather – in the hand. And yet, whatever I hit, parted. Flesh, leather, bronze – at one point, my beautiful sword cut through the iron rim of a Persian shield.

  My Ionians were singing the paean. I had forgotten – we Macedonians don’t usually sing it after we leave camp. But it was beautiful. And the brashness of it killed the Persians as thoroughly as our spears.

  A big man came out of the dust. A man with a hennaed beard – an officer with more gold on him than Thaïs wore as an Aegyptian priestess, and his first blow took the head off my best spear, and he hammered me with a long-handled axe, and his blows began to destroy my aspis.

  I made myself push forward into his blows, but a blow from outside my field of vision knocked the sword from my hand. I got a hand on his right elbow and shoved him – turned him – hammered the rim of my aspis into the small of his back and he roared, and I got a leg behind his as he cut back into me, put his arse against my hip and flipped him with my sword arm, over my hip and into the dust – kicked him, and then fell on him with my dagger from my side, and he was leaking in the sand and I was up and moving.

  Another man – smaller, with a hooked sword that scored past my dented aspis on my greave, but didn’t penetrate – hurt anyway – and I left my dagger in his guts. And by sheer luck and the will of Ares, or Zeus-Apis, my Athenian sword was lying so close to my feet that I all but cut my foot on the blade. I reached down and she came to my hand like a lover. I stood straight and looked around.

  I’d left all my men behind. I’m a good strategos but sometimes a poor soldier. How often did phylarchs tell new men never to leave the ranks?

  But the disc of the golden sun was right there. It was as if I could hear the king telling me: Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will.

  Off to the right, behind my head, the earth trembled. Two thousand horses went from a walk to a gallop, aimed at a gap only slightly wider than the base of Alexander’s wedge – but the shoulder of the gap was held now by the hypaspitoi, and the Persians could no longer move front-line men to fill the gap.

  I’ve used this metaphor before – but it’s like that moment in a match, in pankration or wrestling, when you know – you know – that you have made an error, and it is going to hurt. You have bought a feint, or you have missed a hold, and now, before your heart beats again or you can do anything, his elbow is going to slam into your head. You know?

  That’s what Darius must have felt. The battle proper was still less than half an hour old, and Darius must have known, right then.

  The rear ranks of the Immortals were a bloody shambles, but they were game, and every one of them was struggling to push back the front-rankers, stabilise the formation and save the standard. My moment of calm was past, and I was all but buried in opponents. Spears rang off my aspis and my helmet, and I staggered.

  But combat is a complex dance, and what can I say? I was lifted above myself. A blow pushed my helmet back against my face, and the pain transformed the fight – in an instant, I was a little faster for the rage, a little stronger . . .

  My aspis swung at nose height, flat like a plate, and two men took its force, their faces crushed, and I was into the hole like water through a breaking dam, my kopis like a predatory bird taking insects at the edge of night, and I was above it, in it, through it. I remember no one cut, but the aggregate – for a few heartbeats, I was a god, seeing each opponent, seeing his intention, seeing his eyes, the minute shift of weight, baffling with my cloak, my shield, lying with the tip of my sword or telling a final truth with the blade or the grip. I suppose that blows fell on me but I didn’t feel them, and Coenus claims that he could see me move through the Immortals the way you can watch a mole moving underground. I love the metaphor, even though I suspect he was as busy as I was and didn’t see a fucking thing. It makes one hell of a good picture.

  Under the disc were two giants.

  I was alone.

  I remember thinking, I can do this.

  I swayed, like a child trying to evade his father in a game. Then I leaped forward to the left, and my two opponents failed to follow my movement, and now I had them aligned – not both facing me at once.

  I hate fighting big men.

  I had a sword that was too short to let me snipe, and my immediate opponent had a spear, and he rifled it at me. But his contempt betrayed him, and when he drew back and thrust again, I cut at the spearhead, swept his spear wide and powered forward under it, and my backcut went into his greave and his knee, and he fell like a tree in the forest, bellowing – and I got the sword clear of his leg, and the blade rose, I turned it edge on, where his partner was cutting at me, and severed all the fingers of his spear hand; they were like a shower of thrown grapes at a party as his point went past my head. Again I powered forward, and my backcut went through his crestless helmet and into his brain.

  The great golden disc fell with a barbarous clang in the dirt, and they were on their way to Hades. It was like that. It was as if they stood still. Apis granted me that moment, and Herakles my ancestor. I had never been so good before, even before I took my wounds at Tyre, and I was never so good again.

  But oh, the glory of it!

  For the space of a hundred heartbeats, I was a god. And in those hundred heartbeats I learned what it might be like to be Alexander. What made him incomprehensible to other men was revealed to me – not in that moment, when there was nothing but the moment, but later, when I knew all the things I hadn’t thought while I was a god. I hadn’t doubted. I hadn’t cared. I had known.

  My time of grace ended as the great golden disc crashed into the dust.

  But by Apis, it was glorious.

  Up until that moment, I’m not sure that Darius had made a mistake. It hadn’t all gone his way, but despite Alexander’s perfect timing and godlike assurance, our army was in mortal peril. We were, to all intents, surrounded. The Sakje were already sacking our baggage and razing our camp.

  Thaïs was calmly shooting Sakje from their saddles with her bow, shooting out of the door of our tent. She received a Sakje arrow through her calf in return fire, but they gave up our sector of the officers’ lines as a bad job. Three hundred Thracian Psiloi and a thousand terrified, angry camp followers with spears and rocks were sufficient to keep the enemy out of the baggage wagons and the herds.

  But the hypaspitoi and the Taxeis of Outer Macedon and the Taxeis of the North under Coenus crushed the front of Darius’s centre so fast that he chose to stabilise his front rather than counter Alexander’s cavalry charge.

  A natural reaction, because when his horse guards charged me, I could see him, and he wasn’t so very far away. Alexander must have seemed like a distant threat.

  They glittered and shone like all the flowers of the fields in the Hebrew book. Like every hero of the Iliad gathered into a single magnificent regiment. They were red and gold, purple and gold, black and gold. The only silver was the steel in their hands, thousands of folds of perfect steel, magnificent weapons that made the Athenian kopis in my hand look like a crowbar.

  The best men of the whole empire.

  Darius sent them into my taxeis, and I was standing about two horse lengths in front of my men, who were in no kind of order. We were in those last moments of a melee, when the losers die and the winners swirl in, faster and faster as the losers no longer have friends and file partners and men to watch their backs, and it all comes to an . . .

  ‘Cavalry!’ I roared.

  Zeus, I was exhausted.

  I set my feet. I didn’t even have a spear.

  So
me mighty Persian lord got his spear on to my aspis and knocked me flat, and then they rode over me.

  By the will of the gods, I didn’t take a kick.

  They had less than a tenth of a stade in which to launch their charge, and they were hampered by Coenus’s men and the hypaspitoi coming at them, and so they were – most of them – not much above a fast trot. And like good men the world over, they cared about their own kin in the Immortals, and so they rode too carefully.

  That didn’t spare us much. But it might have been the edge between destruction and survival.

  I lay in the dust and there were hooves all around me, the screams of frightened horses and maddened horses and war cries, and when they began to pack in together, I rose above my fear and the dust, got my legs under me between two horses and started cutting – heavy cuts, underhand, into the bellies of the animals and the legs of the lords.

  I’ve heard versions of this story from other men – when you are deep in the enemy ranks, they are virtually defenceless. I got my feet under me, and men were off their horses and on their faces before they knew what had killed them.

  Their formation was too open, as well. I went under horses’ bellies, got bitten on the thigh and kicked – a splendid bronze thorax ruined in one blow. The hoof of that horse collapsed the careful forming of the bronze-smith, and it then stayed in its new form.

  I pissed blood for two weeks. At the time, I fell to my knees and urine ran from me into the dust, and I coughed blood – all from one inglorious kick from a big horse.

  Above me in the melee, a Persian leaned down and thrust his spear at me, and the point skidded across my back and dug into my hip between the pturges.

  That’s what happens when you are alone.

  I retched. I couldn’t help it – the pain of the horse’s hoof was too much. And then I was flat on my face, and I had dust in my mouth – something hit me, or a horse stepped on me.

  I lay there and waited for the end. I couldn’t see the wound on my back, but the blood coming out of my throat suggested that I was done. I felt clear-headed, but I couldn’t move my legs.

  Clearly, through the forest of horses’ legs, I could see the golden wheels of a chariot.

  I remember thinking – perhaps my clearest memory of the day – Fuck, I’m that close to Darius.

  And the earth trembled.

  The tone changed.

  I can’t tell it any other way.

  My legs moved.

  The Persians above me in the melee had stopped raining blows on my corpse. They were looking somewhere else.

  The earth shook.

  The war god was coming. I could feel him.

  I knew. Because I was almost under the wheels of the Great King’s chariot – Alexander was coming right here.

  I got to my feet like an old man, but no one contested the ground with me.

  Someone – someone who glittered – was shouting at the man in the chariot, and the man in the chariot, who had the look of greatness, calm, dignified – was remonstrating. The man who glittered tore the reins from the Great King’s hands. He was bellowing like a bull, demanding, begging, cajoling.

  I had no idea what he was saying, but I’d guess he was begging the King of Kings to get the fuck out of there before the war god ate him.

  And I imagine that Darius was yelling – But I’m winning! I’m collapsing his flanks!

  He was, too.

  He was fighting his cousin for the reins when he saw me.

  One Macedonian. Two horse lengths from his offside lead horse. It was a four-horse chariot, and I could, if I’d had a spear, have killed one of the horses with a cast. And saved us all from tragedy, or not. Saved five years of my life, I suspect.

  I didn’t even have a dagger.

  Darius looked into my eyes. I looked into his. We were about as far apart as a man courting in Pella and his lady-love above him on the balcony of her exedra.

  And in that moment, Marsyas got his shield over my exposed side and said, ‘You fuckwit.’

  Cleomenes got his shoulder into my back, and his spear went over my head.

  Leosthenes came up on my left and locked up on me.

  And Darius looked at us, and his eyes moved from us to our right – to where the war god, heralded by the storm of hooves, was coming. He let his cousin take the reins, and raced for safety.

  The Persian horse guards rallied, and charged Alexander.

  And Alexander cut through them like a sword through straw. I saw it, while Polystratus put a bandage on my hip – that’s a nice way of saying that he ripped the chiton off his body and stuffed it, sweat-soaked, under my broken thorax to staunch the blood.

  We weren’t doing much fighting, you’ll note. There was no need; Alexander swept past us, and we roared our approval, and then, so close I could almost touch Bucephalus, his wedge slowed in the thickening sea of Persians and I saw his rage – the lion baulked at his kill by a tribe of hyenas was never so outraged as Alexander cheated of Darius.

  Even from the ground, I could still just see the golden wheels of Darius’s chariot slipping away in the press.

  Alexander swung his sword like a priest cutting up the sacrifice – heavy, professional strokes without a lick of mercy. He didn’t shout any of his battle cries – no prayers to Zeus, no imprecations to Athena or Herakles or Amon.

  He roared – in his curiously high-pitched, leopard-like cough – ‘Darius!’

  And again.

  ‘Darius!’

  And he locked his knees on his horse, cut a Persian nobleman almost in two from his eyebrow to his ribs – a superhuman stroke – rose to a position where he almost stood and roared so that his voice sounded over the whole battlefield.

  ‘DARIUS!’

  Alexander was – in that moment – greater than mortal. He was not a man. Bucephalus was not a mortal horse.

  ‘FACE ME, DARIUS!’ filled the air.

  Darius rode away, leaving his empire.

  Alexander killed men as if he had the fire of the gods in him and had come to scorch the earth. But though he cut a swathe you could follow with your eye, Darius was clear of the melee, and the chariot was moving faster.

  ‘Ptolemy? Lord Ptolemy?’ sounded from behind us.

  My men were in no sort of order. I seemed to have very few casualties. I was a mess, and couldn’t think.

  It sounded like Diodorus the Athenian. He was pushing his horse through my ranks, shouting hoarsely for me.

  Polystratus roared back, ‘Here! Here!’

  Ranks parted. Men were trying to get back in the right file, or trying to find the spear they’d left in some Immortal, or trying to get that damned sandal lace where it should have been all day, or drinking all the water in their canteens. They were behaving like soldiers who have survived hand-to-hand combat.

  Diodorus became visible in the battle haze, which was as bad to our rear as to our front. ‘Where is Alexander? Where is the king?’ he asked.

  Polystratus gave him wine. Diodorus looked like I felt.

  ‘The left is collapsing,’ he said.

  I pointed and Cleomenes said, ‘He’s in the thick of it – right there. In front of us.’

  Polystratus grabbed my shoulder. ‘Can you ride?’ he asked.

  A pezhetaeros brought me Poseidon, and I mounted – it took two sets of hands pushing my arse, and I screamed at one point when I had to bend the wrong way. But no one in the Hetaeroi knew Diodorus very well. And everyone knew me. Blood was flowing from under my cuirass.

  ‘Come,’ I said. ‘Leosthenes – find Coenus, link up, wheel to the left and push.’

  All three of my officers saluted. It still makes me smile.

  Men don’t salute on battlefields. Mostly they grunt.

  I don’t know how long it took me to reach Alexander, but he’d halved the distance to Darius by the time we reached him. Darius was changing from the chariot to a horse, and we could see him.

  Alexander spared me a single glance, and then looked
back, anger written clearly on his face. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Another spear!’ he shouted back at his immediate companions.

  His arms were both bleeding. I doubt he knew, or cared.

  Bucephalus was a pale golden horse, and his legs were coated in blood to the top of his fetlocks. Alexander had fought for some part of the action with a spear held high in a two-handed grip – and his arms were coated in blood to the elbow. When he cut a Persian in half, the man’s insides had exploded over him, and he had blood on his face, his chest was coated in it and his thighs were matted with ordure.

  He was the carrion god in person. Ares, come to earth. Why did Alexander ever imagine himself the son of Herakles or Zeus?

  Even on that battlefield, I could smell the blood on him, copper and shit mixed together. And over all of that, his eyes glittered like blue ice.

  ‘What?’ he demanded of me again.

  ‘The left is collapsing,’ I said.

  Diodorus said, ‘I come from Parmenio,’ and started to fall from his horse.

  Philotas caught him.

  Alexander looked at me. He might have been Darius a moment before – because he said, ‘But I’ve won the battle.’

  I was on horseback, and the Persian horse guard was mostly dead, covering the flight of their king, and as far as I could see, the Persian centre was done for. And I could see a fair way – we were out of the worst of the battle haze and in the rear of the Persian line.

  But even from here, you didn’t need to be Alexander to see that the enemy right wing was not in line with the enemy centre, and that the battle haze had a distinct kink in it.

  There was a hole in our line.

  If I could see it . . .

  ‘Fuck him,’ Alexander said, in a terrible voice. ‘My curse on him.’

  He didn’t mean Darius.

  He meant Parmenio.

  The Hetaeroi were still under control. The wedge was still recognisable, and despite the fact that Darius was slipping away, no one was leaving the right face of the wedge to run him down.

  Alexander looked. I had seen how very quickly he could read a battlefield, all my life since we were first in the field together, and I know he read that one ten times, looking for an alternative.