God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

about nine hundred Macedonian recruits. At the end of the day, I had about seven hundred veterans of Memnon and about three hundred Macedonian recruits. The young die, and the old fight on.

Back and back we went.

Praise to Ares, some of Perdiccas’s men – and he himself – joined us on our southern flank. But every time we tried to stand, we were pushed back by numbers.

Over the next hour, we lost two hundred paces.

But now I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.

The Persian guards didn’t charge us in our exposed flank. I don’t know if they didn’t want to get their feet wet, or they didn’t know what was happening, or they were worried for their own king, who even then was being hunted like prey by Alexander – but they had it in their power to win the battle – one killing blow at us, and the centre was gone.

That man – the commander of Darius’s foot guards – lost Issus.

I was wounded – really wounded, a thrust from a spear that went through the top of my thorax and lodged in my breastbone – about the time that Craterus arrived with the rear files of his taxeis to try and steady mine. It still wasn’t enough. But his timing was good, because about twenty heartbeats after he slapped my shoulder and told me the king was coming, I was on my face in the blood and sand.

And that, for me, was the end of the Battle of Issus.

I suspect you know what happened, but here it is – Alexander launched his blow at the first roar of the trumpets, smashed through the line facing him and made straight for Darius, intending to kill him. Say what you will, it was a fine plan. It was a fine plan because it mostly worked.

Darius hadn’t planned on a fast battle, but on a long, slow slogging match. Darius made two mistakes – he didn’t keep a big cavalry reserve, and he assumed that we wouldn’t fight along the river front. What happened is that our failed phalanx attack still had the effect of locking all his drilled troops – his Greeks – in place while Alexander rode across his rear.

At some point, some bright Greek realised that Alexander’s charge had left the flank of the hypaspitoi hanging in the air, and the Greeks turned our flanks. Callisthenes did some very careful writing in the Military Journal to suggest that we’d lost so many officers – more than a hundred – in winning. We lost all those men – and their followers – in losing.

But Darius lost faster than we lost. I’ve heard Kineas’s version, and I’ve heard Amyntas’s version, and Parmenio didn’t really do all that well – in fact, it’s one of his poorest performances. Cleitus openly said – much later – that Parmenio left the king to get isolated behind the Persian lines and die, and kept his men together so he could retreat in good order.

I don’t buy that, either.

What really happened is that Alexander, let loose in the rear of the enemy, spread panic while chasing Darius – he got so close to the Great King that Darius’s left-hand dagger scored our king’s thigh.

The irony is that it all came down to culture.

In our culture, the king is king while he is winning. He’s worthless if he is losing. So our king attacked and kept attacking.

In the empire, they’ll do anything to protect the Great King, and when he is threatened, they hustle him out of danger. So while the battle teetered in the balance – when, in fact, those Greek mercenaries had it in the bag – Darius was dragged from the field by his cousins, and Polystratus reached Alexander. That’s right. Polystratus ignored me. He didn’t go to Parmenio. He went to Alexander, right through the gap in the Persian lines.

According to Polystratus, Alexander looked back at the dust cloud over the river, spat and said, ‘By Zeus my father, do I have to do everything myself ?’

But he came back, crashed into the rear of the Greeks and the day was ours.

I wasn’t there. I was halfway along the road to Hades.

It took me five days to recover enough to leave my beautiful Persian bed – we took their camp and got all our baggage back, although not our slaves, of course. Now we had all new slaves.

I missed all the fun. I missed Alexander meeting Darius’s wife and mother, which I gather was worth seeing – the older matron, perhaps the most dignified woman I’ve ever known, managed to assume that Hephaestion was the King of Macedon, and who wouldn’t? He was taller and handsomer and didn’t look like an insane street urchin, which our king always did, the day after a fight.

Give the old lady credit. Our army was mad with victory, and every woman in that camp got raped. Hideous, ugly – I’m no fan of rape – but that’s what happened. In Persia, a raped woman can be executed for adultery. That’s fair, eh? Lucky them. So when the king and Hephaestion and a dozen other men came into their tent, they assumed that they were for it – especially as the lot of them were as fair as any group of thirty women on the face of the world. Forgive Sisygambis her error. But I gather that it was fantastic theatre.

And Alexander kissed her gently and said, ‘Never fear. For he, too, is Alexander.’

Alexander visited the wounded, handed out the prizes as if we were the Greeks before Troy (and never doubt that under those blond curls, he thought that we were the Greeks before Troy) and praised everyone. Kineas was made bravest of the allies – he’d fallen across the river, deep in the Persian ranks, and lots of people saw this act of insane heroism. And he lived, the lucky bastard. And a dozen of us who fell holding the centre got garlands, as well. I got one. Perdiccas got one. My young Cleomenes got one.

We had a lot of dead. Alexander held a moving funeral, complete with oration, and we burned the corpses.

We were rich. Every man in the army got enough loot out of that fantastic camp to retire. We were done. Victors. We had done it, and beaten the Great King.

Alexander let us believe that for three days. I knew better immediately, of course – Thais was by my side (in later years, she said it was to keep me from the Persian girls) and she already had reports of Darius gathering troops in the eastern valleys. He was a tough fighter. And he was not beaten.

TWENTY-THREE

The greatest victory in Greek – or Macedonian – history earned us a week. Then we were off down the coast road, headed for Syria.

To say that Alexander was insufferable doesn’t do justice to his behaviour. He retold the story of his daring charge and his chase of King Darius, of their brief struggle hand to hand, of Darius’s attack with a dagger after his sword broke, of his own brilliance in overcoming the captain of Darius’s guard while simultaneously holding Darius himself at bay.

It was all true. He had a hundred witnesses, and he liked nothing better than to make Philotas, for instance, tell how he, the king, had rescued Philotas when his horse went down and he took a wound. He insisted that I tell how and why I had sent for help, so that he could explain how he had come into the rear of the enemy Greeks like a god from a machine in a play.

It was his first victory that was all his own, against the Persians. He had triumphed – with his own feats of arms, his own battle plan, an army that followed him. Parmenio played a very small part in the battle, and that Alexander couldn’t let anyone forget.

We were weeks travelling south along the coast, through the mountains and back to the coast of Phoenicia, and every night I heard the story of Issus again.

One afternoon, when I was with the king, we rode off the road in answer to a summons from Ariston, who was commanding the advance guard. We went north from the road a stade or two, and there was a statue. It was magnificent and barbarous all at once, in black basalt.

It depicted an ancient king in a high crown, with his fingers raised on his right hand. I had to look at them from several angles before I realised that he was in the act of snapping his fingers.

I laughed.

The king shrugged at Ariston.

Ariston had the look of a man who had tried to play the courtier and please his king, and failed. He shrugged. ‘The peasants said he was the greatest king in the history of the world,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to see him.’