God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I awoke to a pounding head, a face full of bug-bites and the thought that perhaps we had an army of our own ghosts following us across Asia, waiting to go home to Macedon.

  Somehow, Ochrid got me up and dressed and armoured. I threw up twice – once the remnants of the wine, and again some bile. There was no cool water, and Ochrid didn’t like the smell of the water that the slaves had brought in the night before. I drank a little of the tepid local beer and kept it down.

  And then I mounted my second war horse, a big gelding named Thrakos, and said a prayer to Poseidon. I missed the horse every time I rode. Intelligence is the most precious ability in horse or man – Thrakos was as dumb as a post.

  We formed by camps, and we covered two parasanges, a great line with the cavalry wings thrown slightly forward and all the baggage in the rear. Remember, we’d taken all of Darius’s baggage at Arabela.

  We marched on Babylon, and as the sun climbed the dome of the heavens, we saw a vast army forming to receive us – an unbelievable multitude that filled the horizon.

  Alexander had the ‘All Officers’ sounded on the trumpet, and I responded without thinking. In fact, I was no longer commanding a phalanx; I had no command. On the other hand, no one tried to stop me.

  Alexander was in full armour, with his lion’s-head helmet, and he sat on his charger’s back, hand on his hip, and watched the Babylonians with impatience.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said. ‘If they had an army worth anything, they’d have won their independence from Persia.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a waste of our time and manpower.’

  The vast sea of enemies was coming at us across the endless plain of Mesopotamia.

  We rested our right flank on the river and refused the left, under Parmenio, and began to move forward.

  The Prodromoi went out to scout the face of the enemy army. Because we were already in formation, there was nothing else to do.

  Ten stades apart, and the number of the enemy was unbelievable. They were deeper than we, and their main body was as great as ours. And they seemed to have three or four more bodies of like size, as well as dust clouds behind them as far as the smoke of the great city.

  I was close to Alexander when Strakos rode straight into the command group and saluted. He was all but naked on his horse – like a Babylonian – deeply tanned, weaponless. I hadn’t seen him in a month. The Angeloi continued to function, although these days they mostly reported to Alexander’s permanent military secretary, Eumenes.

  ‘They aren’t armed,’ Strako called.

  Immediately, Alexander stopped talking to Hephaestion and cantered to meet the Thracian. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘There are companies of armoured cavalry among them – but that’s not an army. It is’ – Strako grinned – ‘a welcoming mob, lord. We’re in contact with the high priest, who is with a great many dignitaries under that banner in the centre – you see – the huge red cloth? He hopes to meet you in person.’

  I think we all breathed a little better.

  No battle.

  No fight for Babylon.

  If Amyntas son of Philip was unsatisfied, he was virtually alone. You could hear the news spread through the ranks – you could see the ripple of spearheads as the men heard that there was not to be a battle.

  Some men wept.

  That’s where the army was.

  And then we marched forward, into the welcoming arms of a million Babylonians.

  Every citizen and slave in the city must have been in the fields awaiting us. I don’t think any of us had ever seen so many people together in one place in all of our lives, and it was, in its own way, terrifying. I rode next to Hephaestion, and as we passed into the belt of suburbs on a street wide enough for the phalanx to enter sixteen files wide despite the absolute crush of people, he turned to me and gave a thin smile.

  ‘If every one of them threw a rock, we’d be dead in a few heartbeats,’ he said.

  It was true.

  The sheer number of people in the streets and the fields transformed my idea of conquest. It occurred to me – for the first time – that conquest has an element of social contract to it. It was obvious to anyone there that the Babylonians outnumbered us fifty to one. Our army vanished into the city.

  Who was conquering whom?

  The city itself was like a feverish dream – a riot of plants and bright colours. Every house had great urns of trees and roof gardens, streets had shade trees and every available surface was plastered and painted garishly, or fired and glazed. Expensive houses were built of fired brick with the glazes fired in, amazing patterns that baffled the eye, or towering figures of their gods that filled a wall in shiny perfection.

  And then we entered the walls – by the main gates; they were twice the height of the walls of Athens, with great gates of cypress and bronze that shone in the omnipresent sun, and the waves of cheering pounded at my head – on and on.

  Alexander met the priests outside the city, and insisted that they walk with him in procession.

  The men were tall, well fed and prosperous, tending a little to fat, with broad shoulders and tawny skin. The women were shorter than Greek women, and showed a great deal more skin, and wore gold ornaments in sufficient profusion to pay for the army for many days, and there were tens of thousands of bejewelled women.

  Alexander rode with the priests through the heart of the city to the ruins of the temple of Bel, where he mounted a rostrum that had been provided by the Angeloi. They were very much in evidence in Babylon. They had prepared the way.

  Alexander mounted the steps of the platform.

  He took off his helmet.

  He threw his arms wide, a sudden, sweeping movement that made his armour glitter in the sun, and the crowd roared like a living thing – a great beast with a million heads.

  The army kept marching. The Prodromoi, by this time, had their orders, and the army wasn’t going to be camped in the midst of the city. But the Aegema stayed by the king.

  He waited until the cheering died away. That took a long time.

  ‘I have come,’ he said, in a beautifully controlled voice, ‘to free Babylon from the Medes. And to restore your gods.’

  At his side, Strako stood with the high priest of Bel, who spoke – loud, clear and high – to the crowd in Sumerian. They didn’t even let him finish, but roared and roared – the roars became chants, and I was deafened. My horse became skittish, and all around me the Hetaeroi had a hard time keeping their mounts under control.

  They began an odd, keening chant. I think it was the name of Bel, sung in a high, nasal voice by a million throats, and it sounded – terrifying.

  But it affected Alexander like a drug, and he seemed to grow in stature. Again he lifted his arms, and again they roared their approval.

  Naphtha and incense. And shit.

  That was Babylon.

  The next day – we stayed in the royal palace, which effortlessly accommodated a thousand hypaspists and as many Hetaeroi and grooms – Alexander met the hierophants of every temple in the city. He confirmed every ancient privilege and restored the rights of the temples that had been taken away by Persia.

  Babylon was utterly ours. While I’d lingered in fever, I now understood, Eumenes the Cardian, Alexander’s military secretary, had outmanoeuvred Callisthenes for control of the Military Journal, and Thaïs supported him. Harpalus was involved somehow, as well, and Babylon was their shared triumph. They had the priests from the first – Eumenes won over the nobles, and Harpalus brought the commons. I still find it interesting that the treasurer, the secretary and the hetaera took a city of a million men without a fight. I thought about things that Aristotle had discussed with us, things I’d relearned on the couches of Athenian symposia. About the contracts between governed and governing. About what victory and defeat are, in war.

  But those were my private thoughts.

  The next day, Alexander went to visit the temples. They were incredible – as old as those at Me
mphis, or older, and if Aegypt sent chills down my spine, Babylon was just scary. That day, at the Temple of Bel, Alexander was shown the scribal entry for the Battle of Arabela. It pleased him immensely, because, as the priest noted, until that date, Darius had been called ‘King of all the Earth’. But in that entry, Alexander was called ‘King of all the Earth’. And henceforth would be known as such, in Babylon.

  Marsyas stood with me and with Black Cleitus. We were all staggered, by everything, but Marsyas’s intense curiosity never flagged. He walked over to the priests. The youngest was actually writing with a bronze stylus in clay. The hierophant stood with the king.

  ‘How far back does this record go?’ Marsyas asked, pointing at the rows of tablets that literally ran off into the dark, shelf after shelf running off to the north in the foundations of the great temple.

  ‘Ah!’ the hierophant said, his pleasure at the question evident. He was a great man – spoke Greek and Persian, Median, Aegyptian and Hebrew. Later – as you’ll hear – when I was laid low by fever, he helped tend me, and asked Thaïs thousands of questions about Athens and Greece and Aegypt.

  At any rate, he led us off into the cavernous rooms under the temple – room after room, and in every room he lifted his torch so that we could see the neat baskets of clay tablets that lined the walls. After ten rooms, the baskets were so old that the tablets had deformed them. In twenty rooms, we saw new baskets.

  I forget how many rooms there were, but by torchlight, in that endless undercroft, itself oppressive and musty, like some man-built intellectual Tartarus for burying old truths – my fever was returning, and the place terrified me, and still haunts my nightmares – eventually, the high priest raised his torch.

  ‘The First Room,’ he said to Alexander. The king nodded. This sort of thing engrossed him.

  The hierophant walked along the shelves, looking carefully into the baskets at the left end of the top shelf, until he found what he wanted, and pointed to the last basket.

  ‘First Basket,’ he said. His own awe was evident.

  ‘But how old is it?’ Marsyas persisted. This had all taken what seemed like hours.

  Reverently, two junior priests took down the First Basket and extracted the tablets, which were laid carefully on a portable table that was painted with images of their gods.

  To the best of my feverish ability, I stared at the three tablets. I was alive enough to note that the style of the squiggles was identical to those on the tablet the youngest priest was inscribing out in the main temple.

  ‘This is the First Tablet of Record,’ the hierophant said, and he kissed it. ‘It records the events of the year, as it should – the rainfall, and the maintenance of the irrigation channels.’

  ‘How old is it?’ Marsyas asked. ‘Is it five hundred years old?’

  The hierophant leaned down. He traced some marks with his fingers.

  ‘This was written down three thousand, four hundred and nine years ago, by the priests of this temple.’

  ‘By Zeus, that is before Troy!’ Alexander said.

  Marsyas drew a deep breath. ‘That is before Troy was founded.’

  The hierophant shrugged. ‘It is not our oldest record. Merely our oldest record in writing that is part of the Yearly Almanac. We have records of weather and river floods at least a thousand years before that.’

  Babylon had a way of making all of us feel small.

  Except Alexander, I think. And I think that seeing his name as King of all the Earth in that temple did . . . something.

  Two days later, while the king held a review of the Hetaeroi for the Babylonians, I fell from my horse in a dead faint. When I returned to the world, a month had passed, and I was being tended by Marsuk, the hierophant of Bel, in person. He and Thaïs had become friends – they remained correspondents until his death. And there’s little doubt in my mind that he saved my life.

  Alexander took the army east, headed for Susa. I missed an entire campaign, lying on my bed in the city of the hanging gardens. I lay about for almost three months, eating, making love to Thaïs and recovering. I read a great deal, and thought some deep thoughts. And talked them over with Thaïs. A very happy time for me.

  Not part of this story, though.

  When I was recovered, I took a party of recovered wounded, as well as sixteen hundred recruits and Greek mercenaries, and marched towards Susa. The rumour was that Alexander had stormed the Susian Gates, and was pursuing Darius through the Elymais hills.

  As we moved up to Susa, recrossing the mosquito-infested marshes and the dry, dusty plains of southern Babylon, we began to encounter the wounded from Alexander’s attempt to storm the Susian Gates and his disastrous repulse. Another thousand phalangites lost; Marsyas wounded, and on his way to Babylon to recuperate.

  I had left Leosthenes in Babylon, and he never rejoined us, for reasons that will become evident. My command was completely broken up, and I assumed – hoped – that the party of recruits and mercenaries I was taking up to Susa would become a taxeis.

  I had forgotten what happened in the hours after the death of Philip. I had been away from Alexander for three months.

  I caught up with him at a tiny village called Shakrak on the edge of a volcanic lake. Cleitus was the officer of the day.

  I reported to him. He saluted me, embraced me, held a snap inspection of my reinforcements and immediately split them up among the existing taxeis. He didn’t ask Alexander, and he didn’t ask me, and when he was done and it was too late to do anything about it, I snapped.

  ‘That was my command,’ I said. I had intended it to sound humorous – it came out the way I really meant it, as bitter.

  ‘You don’t have a command,’ Cleitus said. ‘Neither do I. Nor do most of the old boys.’ He glanced around. ‘Ask yourself why. Or don’t. But don’t be surprised if you don’t hold any more commands.’

  I tried not to shoot the messenger. ‘I’ll find the king,’ I said.

  Black Cleitus shrugged. ‘Your funeral,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t.’

  I did, anyway.

  My timing was poor. I had entered Alexander’s marching camp on the heels of a dust cloud, and that cloud was the harbinger of a troop of Prodromoi with a pair of Persian traitors. The commander of the city of Persepolis – the very capital of the Persian Empire, no less – had offered to hand the city over to Alexander.

  I entered the command tent. Alectus saluted me and smiled. Hephaestion looked up to see what the interruption was, and even he managed a smile.

  Alexander was facing two handsome Persians. The one wearing a pound of gold foil was apparently named Darius, and he was the son of Tiridates, the commander at Persepolis.

  ‘My father says come now, and come quickly,’ the boy insisted. ‘Before there is looting.’

  Men were turning – Philotas gave me a little wave, and Perdiccas grinned at me. Alexander looked up. His eyes went to me – and slid right off me.

  ‘Silence, there,’ he said. ‘Will your father recognise me as King of Kings?’

  The young man gave Alexander the strangest look. ‘No. You are not the King of Kings, are you?’

  Remember, Persians value telling the truth above all things. They don’t prevaricate well.

  Alexander flushed. ‘I am the King of Kings. Are you Persians blind as well as deaf and dumb? I am the absolute master of Asia.’

  Young Darius stepped back a pace. ‘My father,’ he said again, ‘bids you come as quickly as possible.’

  Philotas shook his head. ‘Let me go, lord. It could be a trap. Where better? Their terrain, every peasant is one of theirs, and only this boy’s word on it.’

  Alexander glanced at him. ‘Never fear, Philotas. You will go. With me.’

  The Persian boy leaned forward and spoke quietly into Alexander’s ear.

  Alexander’s eyes grew wide.

  ‘Stop!’ Philotas said. ‘Tell all of us!’ He was obviously angry, and just as obviously distrusted the Persians.

  Al
exander turned on him. ‘Desist. Do not give orders under my roof. Go to your tent – I will send for you.’

  And Philotas went.

  Zeus Soter, the world had changed while I was gone.

  Alexander didn’t stop to greet me. He assembled his household cavalry and prepared to ride off to Persepolis.

  But technically, I was still a troop commander in the royal Hetaeroi, and I mounted my horse – it was bitter cold, the very edge of a two-day snowstorm in the mountains. My troopers looked at me and laughed, or slapped my back – they were all men I knew. Polystratus took the trumpet from the troop hyperetes, and no one said a word. Philip the Red had been commanding my troop, and he simply clasped my hand and fell back a rank.

  It touched my heart.

  We rode like the wind. The bridge over the river gorge was gone, destroyed by Darius. We stripped a village of roof trees – in the depths of winter – and prepared to build our own bridge. A troop of enemy cavalry hovered on the far side of the winter torrent, but they only watched us. We put a line of horses across the stream to break the current, and then men – knights of the royal household, aristocrats and veteran soldiers – stripped naked and waded in, bellowing at the cold, carrying the roof trees of the stripped village on our shoulders. We got that bridge across in two hours, and not a single arrow was lofted at us.

  We built big fires, warmed ourselves for half an hour and mounted up.

  The cold river did something good for my hip and pelvis. I’d been in pain every mile of the ride through the hills, and now, suddenly, the pain was gone. At the time, I thought my balls might be gone, too, but they remained intact.

  Up and up, into the hills.

  Just before darkness fell, my troop was in the lead – the most aristocratic Prodromoi in history, I suspect. I had Polystratus and Theodore and all his former grooms – all of whom were Hetaeroi now, of course – prowling every track we passed, but it was snowing hard enough that I had reached the point old soldiers reach too often, where I didn’t particularly care if some enemy troopers wanted to ambush me. I was too cold and tired to care, and the snow was piling up on the shoulders of my thickest cloak and starting to melt through, so that trickles of freezing water snuck down my neck and back under my breastplate. You cannot get warm once that starts to happen.