God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Got him,’ he said.

  He turned and beckoned to Philotas. ‘Get the stragglers,’ he said. ‘Bring them here and await my orders. The rest of you, on me.’

  We attacked Bessus’s army.

  We had twenty men, and one woman.

  And once again, Alexander was right.

  We hit them the way a flake of snow hits a mountainside – that is, it is the flake of snow that begins the avalanche. We rode down the ridge, changed horses and struck the nearest column, hitting the stragglers in the tail, and before anyone’s sword was red, we had a hundred prisoners and the column stampeded like cattle in a storm.

  We rode down the column, picking up prisoners, demanding to know where the king was. Alexander’s only interest was Darius – I think that, had we found Bessus, he would have been killed. For whatever reason, it was all about Darius.

  All morning, we went east, harrying the column – if twenty men can be said to harry fifteen thousand.

  By noon, Philotas had five hundred more men together, and he joined us. It shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did, and we spread our nets wider. Exhausted, bedraggled Persians and Hyrkanians threw themselves on their faces – it was incredible to see. At one point, Polystratus, Cyrus and I captured so many men we couldn’t imagine why they didn’t take us prisoner.

  We ranged farther and farther from the king – up and down the columns. The southernmost column was already gone – it held together better and moved too fast for us to follow, and the two northern columns were slowed by their own chaos. We rode unopposed through the final ruin of the Persian empire. Not an arrow threatened us. The squalor of the retreat was sickening in a way that even the slaughter at Gaza had not been sickening. Perhaps it was the utter abandonment of hope. Perhaps it was having Cyrus at my side – perhaps it was my growing respect for him, which made me share his humiliation that his country had come to this.

  It was late afternoon when Polystratus sent a boy for me. I was sitting under the overhang of a ruined posting station, drinking water from the well. The boy was Hyrkanian, very blond and very dirty, and he all but crawled.

  I mounted my new horse and followed him. It will give you an idea of how far gone we were that I was alone.

  I rode through the rout. This part of the northern column was mostly slaves and servants, and they simply trudged on, waiting to be threatened or killed. No one challenged me, and no one tried to surrender. Mostly, no one even raised their eyes.

  We crossed a main flow of refugees – perhaps six hundred people. And then climbed down the shallow slope of a stony gully. At the base of the gully was a big wagon, with six dead oxen. The grass here was so poor that Polystratus’s horse was not bothering to eat it. Blood dripped from the base of the wagon bed in slow, gloopy drops. Flies gathered in the blood. I could feel a curse in the air.

  Polystratus’s head emerged from the wagon. A dog barked. ‘Send the boy for the king,’ he said.

  I went and looked into the wagon. There was a man lying on his back, and the wagon bed was full of blood. He had two javelins in him.

  I knew him at once, even though I’d only seen him at a distance.

  He was Darius.

  I looked at Polystratus. ‘Go and find Alexander,’ I said. ‘Cyrus should be at the posting station – less than a stade up the ridge. Look there first. Hurry. This will be very important to the king.’

  Polystratus left me without a word. He grunted, once. He spat when he left the wagon bed – a Thracian way of averting a curse.

  I took the King of King’s hand.

  He gave my hand a squeeze.

  Even an enemy is better company than dying alone.

  I had wine and water. I offered him both, and he took a little and gasped.

  I had some Persian, by then. So I understood when he thanked me.

  I took off my officer’s cloak and did my best to bind his wounds. Removing the spears would kill him. So I did what I could without moving him much, and I gave him more wine. He’d lost so much blood that it flushed his face.

  Cyrus came in.

  He took the king’s other hand.

  He kissed it.

  I didn’t think less of him. It’s one thing to see that a cause is lost. Another thing to leave the man who led it. I think Cyrus loved Darius, the man.

  At any rate, the next one into the wagon was Alexander.

  Darius was barely alive. And drunk. But he had been waiting. I know that. I don’t know exactly how I know that, but I could feel him waiting, holding the spirit in his body.

  Alexander came up, and I wriggled back to make room for him.

  Alexander was weeping.

  So was Cyrus.

  I waited by Darius’s feet.

  Alexander looked at Darius. He took his hand. ‘I will avenge you,’ he said.

  Darius gave a minute shake of his head.

  Alexander bent low. ‘I would give anything for you to live. I . . . what will I do without you?’

  Darius had the will to smile. It set him very high in my opinion. He smiled, and his face had a gentle strength. ‘So . . .’ he said, very clearly. ‘So you are Alexander.’ His smile stayed, and he sighed, and with that sigh, his soul left his body.

  ‘No!’ Alexander screamed. ‘No! You will not slip away again! Damn you, Darius! What is there after this? What can possibly be worthy or great, after this!’ He was weeping, speaking wildly, and he took Darius’s head and held it in his lap. ‘Is this the end? The end of the story?’

  I got out of the wagon.

  After a time, Cyrus slipped out, too. He didn’t meet my eye.

  And when Alexander came out, I wiped the blood from him, and we said nothing. But he put his arms around me, and cried. For once, I understood. Memnon had slipped away, and now Darius. That’s not what happens, in the Iliad. In the Iliad, Achilles is filled with rage, and he kills, and feels no remorse. When he hunts Hector round the city, he kills him, and drags him behind his chariot, and feels no remorse. Only when faced with Priam, Hector’s father – and with the reality of his own death – does Achilles feel anything.

  Draw your own lesson. I’m a king, not a philosopher. Alexander loved the whole game. And when Darius died . . .

  After a time – I couldn’t tell you how long – he stopped weeping.

  ‘Ptolemy,’ he said. There was a question in his voice. ‘Is this . . . all there is?’

  Sometimes I wonder if he actually asked me that. Sometimes, I think that I read it into his tears and the tension in his body.

  But I’m pretty sure he asked.

  Because if he didn’t, then what I didn’t say wouldn’t still be stuck in my head, rattling around. I should have said it. I should have told him true.

  I should have said, You’ve traded friendship and love for adulation and power. What did you expect?

  THIRTY-TWO

  We straggled back into Ecbatana. Which occasioned the first time that Alexander himself altered the Military Journal.

  Alexander wanted to pursue Bessus immediately. But despite our success – and taking Darius, even dead, was a victory, because we immediately inherited most of his loyalists, by the law of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ that rules all civil conflict, all stasis – despite our success, our army, such as it was, was wrecked. The Hetaeroi were mostly dismounted, or their horses were ruined by the pursuit. The hypaspitoi were spread from the plains north of Ecbatana all the way beyond Hecatombion and into the Hyrkanian mountains by the pursuit, by fatigue, by the need to garrison the villages that were our lifeline to the rear.

  And Alexander was barely functional. It was terrifying, because he didn’t have a mark on him. He ranted at Craterus about pursuing Bessus, and then sat on his horse and issued no orders.

  None of us was senior. In fact, among the men who’d ended up on the point of the spear, the concept of ‘rank’ was meaningless. We were the king’s friends, his companions, and we didn’t agree about much except that we were ki
ng’s men.

  I convinced Philotas to retreat. And when he went down with the dysentery, I led the retreat.

  It was my only taste of what it must have been like to be Alexander. Now I had to ride up and down the column, looking for stragglers, issuing orders, seeing and being seen. Pretending to be calm and unruffled when in fact I was terrified that Bessus would turn and bite us – or that Alexander would snap out of his funk and kill me. He had ordered us to advance, and we were retreating, and that was my decision.

  Ecbatana was twenty-five hundred stades behind us when we started. But that’s where the main army was, and to summon them forward with no preparation would have been foolish.

  Or so I maintain.

  We didn’t all retreat. I used our new Iranian allies and a hard core of hypaspitoi to hold every oasis and every village, to start building up water supplies and depots of baked bread, grain and water.

  Craterus backed me up, and when we fell back on Rhagae and finally had enough healthy troops to fight if we had to face a force larger than twenty raiders, Craterus took command of it. I was exhausted.

  Alexander continued to be silent. He made comments, and for some hours seemed to be in command.

  But the only person he spent any time with was Banugul. Even Hephaestion was shut out.

  At Rhagae, he recovered. It happened all in an hour, when dispatches came in from Ecbatana. He read them, shared them with no one and started firing off orders – mostly to do with Darius’s funeral.

  He never mentioned the retreat, except that several days later, when we were already preparing the main body to march upcountry from Ecbatana, and Darius had had his burial, I was adding my notes to the Military Journal, because Eumenes was still with the headquarters back in Ecbatana.

  Alexander came into the tent. He nodded to me, went to the main copy of the Journal and leafed through it.

  He took a knife and cut the scroll at the death of Darius, and joined it to blank papyrus with a strip of linen. He did this himself. He looked at me, threw the scrap with fifteen days of retreat into the brazier, and walked out.

  Read it yourself.

  He’d never done it before. But he started to do it more and more.

  Darius was dead, and the crusade in Asia was over. That was the tenor of the king’s message, and he gave a speech to the army that was not particularly moving and raised a great deal of resentment.

  The long and short was that he was sending the allies home. Most of them were richly rewarded, and a great many of them were offered superb bonuses for staying on without their officers as our troops. Kineas, for example, was heartbroken. Alexander actually singled him out at a command meeting – a Macedonian-only meeting – when Parmenio, of all people, asked that he be kept on or even sent to the Prodromoi.

  Alexander shook his head. ‘I need friends in Athens,’ he said. ‘And Kineas is not one of us.’

  Further, he actively recruited the troopers – the rank and file men of the allied contingents.

  He released the Thessalians. Parmenio’s household troops. Men who had served Philip and Parmenio and Attalus since the first light of Macedon’s dawn. Alexander gave them rich rewards, but he sent them home. Next to the Hetaeroi, they were our best cavalry.

  I was at the staff meetings, and I knew the agenda – Alexander was clearing the army of rivals, and was preparing to function as the King of Kings. The Greeks – even Kineas – were the most intransigent about who they were, about being Hellenes. They had come to Asia to make war on Persia. To destroy the Persian Empire.

  But Alexander was getting ready to become the Persian Empire.

  He rid himself of dissent.

  And he destroyed Parmenio’s power base. He paid off the veterans – with rich bonuses. He bought mercenaries. And he paid every pikeman who stayed with us a bonus – a two-talent bonus. Two talents of gold. Per man.

  For old men like Philip, who asked where is my reward, this was the answer.

  The army of Macedon – ably assisted by the Greek allies, backed by mercenaries – took Persia and conquered Asia.

  The army that marched away from Ecbatana was Alexander’s army. It had no loyalties but those it owed to him. He was lord, god and paymaster.

  I never saw Kineas go. He took his men and his gold and his horses and all the wreaths he’d won and packed and left. Polystratus saw him go – hugged Niceas, sent a letter home to his Macedonian wife. And Thaïs held the prostitute Artemis in her arms while the younger woman cried and cried. Because she wanted to follow the army to the ends of the earth. She didn’t want to go back to Athens and face . . . well, face an aristocrat’s family.

  Thaïs sent letters home by Niceas, too. Letters asking that our child and our priestly ward be sent to us.

  It’s worth noting that Athens stood firm – or at least stood hesitantly – and Sparta died alone, their gallant hoplites outnumbered by Antipater’s mercenaries. Their king died gloriously, but he died, and the revolt, if you can call it that, was over. And so was Sparta.

  Alexander sent rewards to Athens, and treated her like the queen of Greece, which, in many ways, she was. But like Darius’s wife, she’d served her turn, and as we were all to discover, Alexander was done with her. And when he was done with things, he let them fall.

  The last night in Ecbatana. We had a dinner – a magnificent dinner. Four hundred Hellenic officers and almost that many Persians – that is to say, Iranians, Cilicians, Carians and Phrygians. Medes. Aegyptians.

  I had not received a command in the new army allotment. But I had received orders – to add Cyrus and two hundred Persian nobles to my troop of Hetaeroi, doubling it in size. In fact, we lost a great many Hetaeroi at Ecbatana, and on the pursuit of Darius. I’ll backtrack and say I tried to recruit Thessalian gentlemen from the disbanded regiments, and Athenian gentlemen from the Athenian contingent. I got a few.

  Cyrus and his men were superb horsemen, well mounted, with fine armour and good discipline. But they were Iranians, and Philotas, for one, didn’t trust them at all.

  As soon as I took Cyrus into my troop, I began to walk a knife’s edge, and because of it, I have more understanding of what the king faced than most men. The common story – Callisthenes’ story – is that the king was seduced by Persian tyranny and became a Persian tyrant.

  Well – that’s not entirely untrue. Alexander was always impatient of limitations on his power, since he knew, with absolute certainty, that he was right about all decisions of rulership and the making of war. So Persian-style lordship appealed.

  But by the time we rode out of Ecbatana the second time, I understood exactly why he did as he did.

  Persian gentlemen were such excellent soldiers that you had to ask, after two weeks, how Darius had ever lost. Cyrus and his men were far more obedient than my Macedonians, who, being Macedonians, plotted, fought, lied, cheated, back-stabbed, sometimes literally and spent their spare time questioning every order I issued.

  And they hated the mirror that the Persians held up to them, which quickly translated into hatred of the Persians.

  I had a few Macedonians and a handful of Greek troopers who saw it differently – who made friendships across the line, or who found the time to listen. But I also found myself trying to be two different people – the fair and honourable commander of Cyrus and his men, and the quick-witted, argumentative king of the hill that the Macedonians expected.

  I had four hundred cavalrymen.

  Alexander had thirty-five thousand men.

  There are things he did for which I cannot love him, but his attempt to rule Persia while remaining our king was a noble effort, and he did the very best with it that could be done. He made an effort to be all things to all men – an effort that he had made since he had been a boy, in many ways. Callisthenes and some of the other Hellenophiles argued, almost from the first, that Alexander was being corrupted.

  I agree. He was being corrupted. But it wasn’t Persia that corrupted him. It was war, and the exerc
ise of power.

  The army rallied at Hecatompylos. Those were the next words in the Military Journal after the death of Darius, and they left out three weeks of supply-gathering and slow marching. And yet remained true. The contingents that Craterus, Philotas and I had left spread across southern Hyrkania were there still, and the hypaspitoi had remained well forward of the army, so that we might have been said to have ‘concentrated’ at Hecatompylos.

  But despite the bribes and the bonuses, Hecatompylos was where the army discovered that we were marching east, to Bactria. Until then, most of the troops thought we were going to crush the mountain tribes. A fairly solid rumour said that we were going to restore Banugul to her little kingdom – as a lark – on the way to the Euxine and ships for home. And even Hephaestion, who usually read the king better than this, told me confidentially one night that we were going to march north into Hyrkania and then home via a campaign against the Scythians of the Euxine.

  But at Hecatompylos, Alexander sent two full squadrons of the Hetaeroi and Ariston’s Prodromoi east, trying to re-establish contact with Bessus’s retreating columns.

  It wasn’t mutiny, but by the gods, it was close. Our second morning in the clear air of Hyrkania, and I was awakened by Ochrid to be told that the pezhetaeroi were packing their baggage for the trip home. That they had voted in the night to march away and leave the king.

  Once again, I was the one who warned him. Artemis – who had been Kineas’s lover, and left him to stay with the army – came to Thaïs in the night and told her that the pezhetaeroi intended mutiny. And old Amyntas son of Philip came to me at first light. He didn’t name names. He didn’t really meet my eye.

  ‘They mean business,’ he said. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘I can’t . . . I can’t stomach it. Though the Undying know I agree with ’em. The king’s mad with power. Ares. Ares come to earth, he is.’

  So once again I went to Hephaestion.

  Who took me to the king.

  Alexander wasn’t angry. He was frightened.

  He called the taxeis commanders one by one to his tent, and he interviewed them. Craterus knew everything, and Perdiccas. The others knew less, or admitted to less.