Flood Tide

by Alexander Geiger

  Kleitos, Seleukos, and I were riding in the van of our small group. We were, at the time, of roughly equal rank in Alexandros’s army, each commanding a squadron of the Companion Cavalry, although there was a strict hierarchy among Alexandros’s cavalry commanders. The commander of the first squadron, then Philotas, was deemed hipparchos or the overall commander of the entire Companion Cavalry. The commanders of the first seven squadrons were known as the somatophylakes, or the bodyguards, of Alexandros. I was one of the seven. We outranked the commanders of the remaining squadrons, including Kleitos and Seleukos. There were, of course, other units in Alexandros’s army, such as the Silver Shields infantry brigade, the light infantry, the allied cavalry, the allied infantry, and the auxiliaries, and each unit had its own command structure but, at least in our own minds, the Companion Cavalry was the elite division of the entire army.

  I had brought Kleitos along because he was my friend. Seleukos was not exactly a friend but at least he was not an antagonist either, which made him unusual among the Companion Cavalry commanders. In addition, he knew more about Persia and the Persians than anyone in Alexandros’s army. I figured some local knowledge might prove useful during our wild goose chase after Memnon.

  By the time we had managed to pull out, the sun had climbed above the dark blue mountain range to our west, dissipating the last wisps of mist rising from the dense forests mantling its flanks. The plain between the Granikos River and the mountain range we were about to traverse had been, a little more than twenty-four hours earlier, a tranquil sea of green stalks of wheat, undulating gently in the morning breeze. Now, as our horses carefully picked their way toward the foothills, it was a morass of churned mud, trampled vegetation, and bloated corpses. Vultures competed raucously with crows for the tastiest morsels of putrefying flesh.

  Living men scurried among the dead, stripping them of arms, armor, clothing, and other valuables, tossing their finds into wagons stationed nearby. Teams of horses dragged chains of human cadavers and equine carcasses toward assembly points, where they were heaped indiscriminately onto large mounds and burned. Huddled upwind from the awful stench of roasting flesh sat the captured prisoners, thousands of them, waiting to be processed by their harried captors.

  The survivors of the Greek mercenary brigade that had been commanded by Memnon were penned in a separate enclosure. There weren’t supposed to be any survivors of the Greek mercenary brigade. Alexandros, who normally treated defeated adversaries with respect and compassion, had issued specific orders that the Greek mercenaries were to be slaughtered to the last man. He considered their willingness to fight on behalf of the barbarian Persians and against their fellow Greeks an unforgivable sin. In a rare instance of disobedience to orders, Macedonian infantrymen had refused to kill the mercenaries once they had thrown down their weapons and surrendered. Perhaps two thousand Greek mercenaries had survived the battle, out of an original corps of five thousand, much to Alexandros’s displeasure.

  However, that displeasure was minor compared to Alexandros’s rage at the failure of his troops to capture or kill Memnon himself. The Rhodian condottiere had a long history with Alexandros and with the Macedonian high command. When Alexandros’s father Philippos dispatched the Macedonian expeditionary corps across the Hellespont, two years earlier, to prepare the ground for the main-force invasion of Asia, the joint commanders of the corps, Parmenion and Attalos, had an easy time of it at first. The Greek-speaking inhabitants of Persian-controlled Ionia welcomed them as liberators; the local satraps, with their contingents of untrained conscripts, were finding it difficult to resist them; and the new Persian emperor Dareios was too distracted solidifying his hold on power to pay any attention to Ionia just then. Eventually, the nuisance of the Macedonian invasion reached the top of Dareios’s things-to-do list and he dispatched his most effective commander, Memnon of Rhodos, at the head of a brigade of Greek mercenaries to put a little steel into the weak native contingents and to reestablish order and control. Memnon quickly inflicted several setbacks on the Macedonian expeditionary corps and it was all that Parmenion could do (Attalos had been killed in the meantime) to maintain a beachhead around the Hellespont long enough for the main force, under Alexandros, to land. Unsurprisingly, Memnon was neither Alexandros’s nor Parmenion’s favorite commander.

  But the 46-year-old Memnon’s history with the Macedonians went back much further than that. Memnon’s father had been a leading oligarch on the Island of Rhodos. When he was killed, during one of the periodic social upheavals on that prosperous but restless island, his two adult sons escaped to Hellespontine Phrygia, where their older sister was one of the wives of the local satrap Artabazos. Hellespontine Phrygia was the most important, and powerful, satrapy guarding the western frontier of the Persian Empire and Artabazos, a grandson of emperor Artaxerxes Deuteros, was one of the salient figures of the Persian nobility.

  A man with a keen appreciation for both the marital and martial skills of the Greeks, Artabazos put his newly-arrived brothers-in-law to work training his private army. He also hired thousands of Greek mercenaries as part of an effort to turn his army into a regional force that rivaled the might of the imperial army itself. He eventually put the older brother, Mentor, in command of this growing army and, to cement the relationship, he married his prepubescent daughter Barsine to her uncle Mentor. (Artabazos had twenty-one children, so he could afford to be somewhat profligate in arranging his matrimonial alliances.)

  When Artaxerxes Deuteros died under suspicious circumstances in 228 Z.E., his son Ochos became the new emperor, assuming the name Artaxerxes Tritos. Artabazos took advantage of the resultant upheaval to lead a rebellion of satraps against the new emperor. After years of internecine fighting, with Greek mercenaries deployed in large numbers on both sides of the conflict, Ochos ultimately prevailed and Artabazos, along with his entire family, was forced to flee for his life.

  In order to escape beyond Ochos’s enormous sphere of influence, Artabazos chose to seek asylum at the court of Ochos’s most vocal adversary in the Greek world, king Philippos of Macedonia. Artabazos, his wives, his children, and his sons-in-law spent several years living at the royal palace in Pella. King Philippos’s young son Alexandros was seven when he first met Artabazos, Mentor, and Memnon. They spent an idle afternoon chatting. The trio, anxious to maintain cordial relations with King Philippos, attempted to regale the young prince with an assortment of Persian fairy tales. Alexandros was not interested in fairy tales. He wanted factual information about the extent, geography, and wealth of Persia, about the military might of the empire, the armaments of the troops, the logistics of moving such large forces through such great distances. Artabazos shook his head at the peculiarity of this child but tried to humor him by telling him, in his broken Greek, more fairy tales. Mentor took Alexandros’s inquiries more seriously and attempted to answer some of his questions but kept getting interrupted by Memnon. “You’re too young to understand,” the 31-year-old Memnon would say or “You’re way too handsome to worry your pretty head about stuff like that.” Alexandros never forgave him.

  Eventually, Mentor grew tired of the provinciality of the Macedonian capital and of his enforced idleness. He returned to Persia, begging Ochos’s forgiveness and throwing himself on Ochos’s mercy. Mentor explained that he’d been forced to command Artabazos’s army because Artabazos held his wife Barsine hostage. Ochos, who’d suffered several defeats at the hands of troops commanded by Mentor, recognized and appreciated military talent. He placed Mentor at the head of a large Persian army and tasked him with reconquering Egypt, which had slipped from Persian control some sixty years earlier. Much to Ochos’s amazement and pleasant surprise, Mentor actually succeeded in his assignment. Ochos was crowned pharaoh in Memphis and Egypt once again became a satrapy of the Persian Empire.

  Ochos bestowed munificent gifts on this soldier of fortune and appointed him permanent commander of the Greek mercenary brigade. Mentor gratefully accepted the bounty but asked for
one additional gift. He sought Ochos’s pardon for his family, including of course the entire Artabazos clan. Ochos swallowed hard but granted his victorious general’s request, forgiving all and restoring Artabazos as satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia.

  And, if this had been a fairy tale, they would have all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately for the Artabazos clan, they lived in Persia. Inevitably, people started to die. Mentor himself, the victorious general, was the first to go. He died (ostensibly of natural causes) three years after welcoming his family back to Persia. As a result, his brother Memnon took over command of the Greek mercenary brigade. By sheer happenstance, Ochos was murdered shortly thereafter and was replaced on the throne by an ineffectual youngster, named Arses, who was in turn murdered and supplanted by a very effective military officer named Kodomannos. The upstart Kodomannos, whose claim to royal blood was almost certainly entirely fictitious, decided to burnish his credentials, upon ascending to the emperorship, by taking the name Dareios Tritos. Moreover, while his claim to the throne might have been fictitious, his appreciation of military talent was entirely genuine. Accordingly, he confirmed Memnon in his position as commander of the Greek mercenary brigade and, when the Macedonian expeditionary corps crossed the Hellespont, he dispatched Memnon to deal with this nuisance while Dareios fought off various rebellions, usurpation efforts, and attempted assassinations.

  Shortly after Mentor died, Memnon also did his duty as the younger brother and married Mentor’s wife (and his niece) Barsine, who had fortuitously reached puberty by this stage. Barsine bore him three daughters and a son. Fifteen years after his encounter with the seven-year-old Alexandros in Pella and ten years after his return to Persia, Memnon commanded the Greek mercenaries against Alexandros’s army on the left bank of the Granikos River.

  As far as Alexandros was concerned, not only was Memnon a Greek fighting for the Persians but also a Greek who had lived for several years as a guest at Philippos’s palace and then betrayed his host by joining the enemy. Worst of all, he had treated a young Alexandros with condescension. And now he had slipped through Alexandros’s fingers.

  *******

  “Which way should we go?” I asked Seleukos.

  “The Royal Road to Ekbatana is that-a-way.” He pointed vaguely in a southerly direction. “At our current pace, we should get there in about a hundred days.”

  “We’ve got one. We’re expected back in time for the banquet tomorrow.”

  Seleukos laughed. He understood the absurdity of this mission just as well as I did. “Which is why we’re not coming back with Memnon. Assuming we manage to get back at all.”

  “We’ll make it back,” Kleitos cheerfully assured us, “’though I have my doubts it’ll be with Memnon in tow.”

  “Memnon is long gone,” Seleukos agreed, “and the king knows it. We’re out here because some people want you dead, Ptolemaios. And you had to drag Kleitos and me into your mess.”

  It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or just giving me a hard time; probably both. “Which way do you think Memnon would have gone?” I asked again.

  “He got over the mountains through that pass.” Seleukos pointed to the southwest. “That would’ve happened yesterday. By this morning, he’s in Daskyleion, where he’s currently organizing the local defenses. He’s also dispatched a message to Dareios by now, which will arrive in Ekbatana in about ten days.”

  “I thought you told us it would take about a hundred days,” Kleitos interrupted.

  “Yes, that’s how long it would take us to get there. The emperor’s messengers travel somewhat faster than we can. It’s about twelve hundred miles to Ekbatana. There are way stations every twenty miles or so, where the messengers can change horses. And of course the point is not to get the messenger to the emperor, only the message. Trust me, the message will be in Dareios’s hands within ten days.”

  Kleitos was having trouble keeping his horse still. “So, let’s get across the pass already. Maybe Memnon is injured or his horse is lame; maybe we can still catch him.”

  Seleukos cut him off. “Hey, gourdhead, stop being so ridiculous. Riding into that pass with our two hundred guys is crazy. There are enemy soldiers behind every tree and every rock on that mountainside. We’d all be dead before we ever reached the pass.”

  I urged my horse Pandaros into the gap between their mounts. “And yet, that’s exactly what we’ll do. Seleukos, you’re right. But so are you, Kleitos. Riding into that pass is suicide …” Seleukos nodded vigorously. “… but our orders are to chase down Memnon and bring him back. So we’ll ride in the direction of the pass, with all judicious speed, and we’ll get through it before nightfall.” Now it was Kleitos’s turn to smile broadly. “And then we’ll make camp on the other side and make sure that we don’t get ambushed overnight.”

  “And then what?” they both asked in unison.

  “Then, in the morning, we’ll return to Alexandros. And if we happen to run across Memnon during our travels, we’ll bring him back with us.”

  Seleukos nodded. Kleitos shook his head but said nothing. I could tell he was disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm for the mission but I was his friend and I was in command, so he acquiesced.

  After we had ridden in silence for a while I turned to Seleukos. “How do you know so much about Persia?” I knew he had crossed the Hellespont two years earlier, as a member of the initial Macedonian expeditionary corps, but so had ten thousand other men, without learning much about the country in which they were operating.

  “Parmenion wanted me to act as his liaison to the local populace. I’ve spent a lot of time speaking to local leaders ... and to ordinary folks.”

  Kleitos raised his eyebrows. “Do they all speak Greek?”

  “Some do, but I’ve learned to speak Aramaic as well as Persian.”

  I had heard about Seleukos’s linguistic prowess; it was one of the reasons why I had picked him for this mission. “Hey, Kleitos, didn’t I always say Seleukos was the smartest kid at Mieza?”

  The Precinct of the Nymphs in Mieza, a couple of hours’ ride from Pella, was a small, bucolic settlement, clustered around an ancient, two-room temple, hidden amidst an olive grove, that served as the home of a boarding school created by Philippos specifically to further the preparation of his son Alexandros to assume, one day, the kingship of Macedonia. Because Philippos didn’t believe in half measures, he hired the foremost thinker in Greece to head the school and staffed it with tough military trainers, progressive teachers, and accomplished artists. He also persuaded the nobility of Macedonia to send their sons of roughly the same age as Alexandros to this school to serve as classmates, playmates, and fellow trainees. Eventually, Alexandros’s classmates at Mieza became the core of the command structure of Alexandros’s army. Seleukos, a scion of a preeminent noble family from Orestis, in the highlands of Macedonia, and the son of one of Philippos’s leading generals, had been one of the students at Mieza. Kleitos and I, although neither one of us was either noble or preeminent or, in my case, even native, had found ourselves at Mieza as well.

  “That’s not true,” Seleukos demurred. “We all know who the smartest kid was at Mieza.”

  “Well, I know it wasn’t me.” I grinned. “because I wasn’t a kid by the time I arrived there.” (I had been twenty-one, Seleukos fifteen, and Kleitos fourteen.)

  They both laughed. We agreed that Alexandros had been the smartest kid at Mieza, which might have been true and was certainly the diplomatic position to take.

  *******

  Once we left the carnage of the previous day’s battle behind and entered the wooded hillside, we saw nary a human being. I sent scouts to ride ahead, as well as on either side of the path that we were following, in the hope they could warn us of any impending ambush. Fortunately, if there were any fleeing bands of enemy soldiers lurking along our route of travel, they saw us before we saw them and they chose to clear out of our way. The ominous silence of the forest around us was interrupted only by
the querulous singing of magpies, the raucous trumpeting of cranes, and the staccato drumming of woodpeckers.

  Seleukos gave voice to what we were all thinking. “I don’t like this. I can feel people out there.”

  The trees seemed to be closing in but I continued to urge Pandaros forward. “I don’t like it either but let’s just get through this pass and out of this forest before we lose the sun. Once we get to the other side, we can find a homestead somewhere, spend the night, and then make our way back.”

  A mischievous grin crossed Kleitos’s face. “What about capturing Memnon?”

  “D’you see any Memnons walking around here?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, don’t worry about it.” I fought hard to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Let’s let other people worry about Memnon.”

  *******

  One person who was definitely worried about Memnon was his wife Barsine. Even though it would be another ten days, according to Seleukos’s calculations, before anyone at the royal palace in Ekbatana received word of the Persian defeat, a nagging, low-grade concern about her husband had taken up regular residence at the back of Barsine’s mind, a kind of background brain blight that imperceptibly contaminated all her conscious thoughts.

  At that moment, however, Barsine was in acute distress. She had to pee – badly. For the women and the eunuchs of Dareios’s harem, finding an opportunity to exercise normal bodily functions was a daily challenge. Everything the inmates did and thought, from the moment they woke at dawn until the moment they woke again – if they were lucky – at the next dawn, was narrowly prescribed and rigorously enforced. The minutest details, from when they were awakened, what clothes and jewelry they wore, what makeup they applied, what they ate and drank, when they were allowed to wash up in the lavatory, what they did all day, with whom they spoke and about what, to when they went to bed and with whom, were all details dictated by others.