God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

All the time Aristander was killing his beasts, the Persian line was advancing.

They weren’t Macedonians. Gaps began to open in their line as soon as they rolled forward. Indeed, the largest gap opened between the wing facing us and their cavalry in the centre. They’d put Paphlagonian or perhaps Phrygian cavalry in the centre – I couldn’t tell which – screening the Greek mercenaries to their rear. Why they placed cavalry in opposition to our phalanx I’ll never know.

But their cavalry had no intention of riding forward into our sarissas, so the centre lagged behind and Arsites’s wing plunged forward, and a gap began to open. An enormous gap.

The king waved to us, his bodyguard. ‘Hold here,’ he said.

He shouted orders to Philotas and waved at Arsites.

Philotas protested.

Alexander insisted.

Philotas shrugged, obviously angry, and barked orders at his trumpeter.

And our entire right division began to move.

Philotas didn’t want to do it. It was written in every line of his body – in the way he rode. But I don’t know what else he wanted to do.

He rolled forward with half our cavalry, and three horse lengths from the enemy, he flashed his sword and the Hetaeroi went straight to the gallop – a tactic we practised on a thousand strips of grass, in winter and summer – and the enemy were caught by surprise, suddenly turned from aggressive attackers to defenceless prey.

Then I could see nothing but the sudden onset of dust – the battle haze of the poet.

Arsites was no longer opposite us. Something else had caught his attention, and he’d taken his bodyguard out of the line. But we could still see Persian cavalrymen in beautiful tall helmets opposite us. They were rolling into the melee – fighting draws men like a magnet.

Cleitus pressed in close behind the king. ‘We should—’

‘Silence!’ Alexander said. He had one fist in the small of his back and his other hand holding the reins, legs dangling, and he was watching the enemy line where the gap had opened – watching it to the exclusion of all other things.

I watched the Persian line opposite me shred as the line of men threw themselves at Philotas.

The king turned and motioned to Arrhabaeus. The older man saluted.

‘Follow me,’ Alexander said.

Arrhabaeus saluted again and we started forward. I’d assumed that the king would take us into the flank of Philotas’s melee, where the Persians were fully committed, and Philotas was fighting against odds.

But that wasn’t the king’s intention at all.

He turned to all of us – his friends – and he had the secret smile we all came to know so well – I’d seen it before, and I knew it. ‘Now we win,’ he said. ‘Unless Philotas folds in the next thousand heartbeats, now we win. Follow me, and be heroes, and live for ever!’

I know no other man who could say such stuff with a straight face and mean it. My heart swelled to twice its size, and I felt the power of an Olympian suffuse me. And we went forward.

As soon as the king was clear of the leftmost squadrons of the Hetaeroi, he turned sharply towards the centre of the enemy line – towards the gap.

He was going for the gap.

Ares, we were going to ride past their unengaged men and plunge into the open ground between their cavalry line and their infantry.

As soon as the king saw that the Hetaeroi were forming on him and angled appropriately, he sat back and put his heels to Bucephalus and we were off at a gallop.

The Paphlagonians opposite us began to shred as soon as they saw we were going to outflank them. They lacked anything like our level of training, and they couldn’t respond in kind – they couldn’t wheel to cover the open ground, or extend files, so the end men began to ride back to cover the gap, and in a moment they were in flight, and not a blow had been struck.

I once watched a thatched roof blow to pieces in a wind storm. It was like that. First there was a solid enough line facing us, and then a few men riding to close a gap – and then, as if burned by a flash fire or blown away on the rising wind, the Paphlagonian cavalry was gone, and we were riding for the flanks of their centre division – all those Phrygians, already unwilling to face our pike men.

Arsites saw the crisis. He sent Darius’s own cousin, Mithridates, with his bodyguard and the best of his Mede cavalry, straight at us. And to our front, emboldened or perhaps harangued, a few hundred Phrygians suddenly went from vacillation to attack – and came right at us.

That was my last glimpse of the development of the battle. I never saw it, but on our left, their cavalry crashed into Parmenion and threw him back – but he didn’t break, and his Thessalians and Thracians gave ground slowly. To our right, Philotas fought against odds – heavy odds. But he had the senior squadrons of the Hetaeroi, men who had fought in the mountains and on the Danube and who believed. They held. They were even pushing the enemy back.

We crashed into the Phrygians, and Alexander killed his man, and then I was fighting, spear against spear – I went high, this time, at contact, and I remember being showered with the remnants of my man as my spear wrecked his head.

Alexander broke his spear a horse length ahead of me, and old Demaratus of Corinth gave his to the king – very sporting. But before we had time to savour our victory, we were fighting for our lives, and the king.

No sooner were we into the Phrygians than the Persians hit the right face of our wedge, and they drove straight for the king – cutting us off from Arrhabaeus.

The first I knew was an arrow in Poseidon’s flank. I whirled and saw a man behind me, nocking an arrow, and I didn’t have time to make complex decisions, my arm went back and I threw my heavy spear, and it hit his horse in the neck and knocked the horse down.

Poseidon turned on his back feet and I got my borrowed kopis out of the scabbard under my arm in time to parry a spear from a man in gorgeous armour – he might have been the King of Kings, he had so much gold on his body.

His spear scraped across me – it was that close – and he swept past me, even as Poseidon continued to turn – and the world stopped as he drove his spear into the king’s side.

Alexander’s speed and coordination were legendary among the former pages, and he leaned as far as he could, but the spear was driven hard by a man of great skill, and it hit Alexander’s green-bronze cuirass and punched through it, just as Poseidon crashed into the charging Persian’s horse.

Alexander reached down and caught the shaft of the spear in his side and pulled it free. Blood spurted.

Alexander took the spear, still wet with his blood, and threw it at the Persian, who was roaring his war cry – ‘Mithridates! Mithridates for Darius!’ in Persian.

Alexander’s throw was perfectly timed, and he caught the man high on his breastplate, where the bronze is thin, and it punched through the hardened bronze and rocked Mithridates in his saddle.

But it didn’t go deep – it cracked ribs, but it didn’t go deep into the Persian prince’s chest. Poseidon had made the Persian’s horse stumble, and as Mithridates drew his sword, Alexander swung his own spear – left-handed, no less – and caught the Persian in the face and stunned him.

I got my heels into Poseidon’s sides, and he reared over the Persian and I hit him with my kopis – a sloppy shot, but he was stunned and it cut his neck and blood sprayed and down he went.

But in moving to kill the great man, I’d left an opening in the ring around the king, and another Persian – I’d missed him – flew in like a thunderbolt and his backcut sheared the wings off the king’s helmet – cut through the bronze. I saw the blade go into his skull.

Alexander reversed his spear, took it just behind the haft with his right hand and rammed it up under the man’s armpit – with the man’s sword still sticking out of the crest of his helmet.

The Persian screamed.

But the Persian nobles were all around us like sharks around a stricken tuna. Alexander looked back at me – I was facing away from him, trying to stem the rush of the enemy’s elite – I took blows in my back, my side, my helmet, but by the grace of Zeus or Apollo or Ares none of them hit my unarmoured arms or face or neck. I backed Poseidon – I don’t really remember anything except the blows raining on me, the dust and Alexander looking at me, his mouth working, and the sword stuck in his helmet.