God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

oil into our faces. I only caught a little – perhaps a cupful – on my shoulder above my shield arm, but the pain spurred me and I got my left leg free and almost vomited, because my foot had collapsed the ribcage of a corpse and my leg had slid into the body cavity – a mass of corruption and maggots – and the smell of death stuck to me like glue.

And I went up the breach anyway, because after Tyre . . .

I reached the ballista well before it was loaded, and threw my light spear into the nearest man and then my heavy spear – not really meant to be thrown – into an archer, and he and the loader fell across the enormous bow, and I drew my sword – a heavy kopis – from under my arm and continued the draw into a cut – to the rope holding the bow wound against its drum. The men on the bow screamed as the bowstring slammed into their soft bodies.

A wave of Macedonians joined me in the breach, and we killed every man we found there. And then we went down the rubble on the far side of the breach into the town.

At Tyre and Halicarnassus, the defenders had built mud walls behind the breach, to channel our attacks and make the breach a trap, but Batis had gone one better.

He let us into the town – he had more town to use for depth – and had built little battlefields for his garrison to use to fight inside the town. The houses were heavy and often stone-built, and between them there were barricades across the narrow streets – low enough to tempt assault, and high enough that such assaults weren’t worth much – the more so as every barricade was flanked by the towers of the tallest houses on the street, and every pair of towers had a small garrison of archers and slingers. Some of the barricades had a ballista. And some of the houses had assault groups waiting for us to pass them.

It was a nightmare.

When you assault a town, you know that the easiest way to achieve victory is to break the enemy’s will to resist. There comes a point in an assault when the town has so many soldiers flooding it that the defenders either surrender or simply allow themselves to die. The expectation of every man in an assault is that it is his duty to penetrate as deeply into the town as possible to cause panic.

Batis used all that against us. Our men came up the breaches like heroes and went into the town, where he wanted us to be – inside his defences, and far from the support of our dominating artillery. His defenders had superb morale, and they faced us resolutely, no matter where we met them in the town. And indeed, early on, they abandoned some positions – I assume to lure us deeper into the web of streets.

I am proud of my performance as a taxiarch that day, because I didn’t lose my head. Oh – I was fooled. I may have penetrated as deeply into the town as any Macedonian. I know that I was enraged by Pyrrhus’s death and I killed my way over a barricade despite a hail of stones. But as we overwhelmed our second barricade, losing a dozen good men in the process, I began to look around.

I had about a hundred men with me, and far too many of the officers – good for my group, bad news for my assault as a whole. I remember killing my way over the second barricade, and pausing to drink water from my canteen. I found that my strap had broken, or been cut, and I turned to Cleomenes and stopped him – carefully, as his blood was up.

‘Water, brother?’ I asked, and because I had to pop my cheek-plates to drink, I could hear and see when the enemy ambush began to filter into the street behind us.

‘Ware!’ I bellowed, and all the men on the barricade turned, and we made a shield wall – fifteen or twenty of us – and we held them. Please do not mistake me – the Persians and the Nabataeans at Gaza were brave men and well led, but they were never a match for us in combat. They lacked the armour, and they lacked the mettle. They hit us and we broke them and then we chased them back down the alley.

And now I really had time to look around, and what I saw was that we were not actually taking ground – that every stone house had defenders, and we were receiving a constant and deadly barrage wherever we went.

The problem I had – the problem every strategos always has – was information.

I gathered the men I had and we stormed a house. The fighting was bestial – kopis and xiphos against short spear and knife in rooms no larger than a large himation laid on the ground, through doorways so narrow and so low that a child would have to stoop to enter, and up steeply turning stairs that rotated to the right to cramp a fighter. At every check, the enemy put an archer or two behind a few swordsmen.

I couldn’t take more than a room or two at a time, and then I had to exchange out of the front rank. It was true of every man – fighting inside a city is a terrifying thing, every blow is a death blow. But as with fighting at night, discipline and armour make all the difference.

In the end, we stormed the tower and exterminated the garrison at the top, throwing the last bodies to the street below.

Now I could see.

There were fires throughout the town, and the dirt streets – the alleys – raised clouds of dust, so that a pall seemed to hang over the town, lit red and yellow by the flames in the early light.

It was actually quite beautiful.

But the pattern leaped to the eye. We were not penetrating the town. We were being funnelled down four corridors for the convenience of the garrison – a corridor for every breach – and each corridor led to a maze of alleys and barricades.

I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to catch my breath. Long enough for the sweat on my abdomen to start to dry. Because I had to be right.

Then I ordered my hyperetes to sound the recall.

I was the first. I remain proud of my decision.

Alexander did not feel the same way.

‘You what?’ he asked, his arms crossed. ‘You ran?’

I stank of death, and I was covered in soot, and I had two wounds. I had prepared myself for the encounter, and when I was clear of the breach, I ran – ran – all the way around the wall to Perdiccas to find him in his breach, and he, too, was coming out. And I promised him I’d explain to Alexander. I had set my mind to it as I climbed back up our siege mound, and I went straight to his tent.

And I was still not ready. I had my logic all prepared, and the king needed to know what Batis had done.

He smelled of spikenard, and he didn’t have a mark on him. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have grown used to uninterrupted victory. Or perhaps I simply cannot expect as much when I’m not there in person. I know what fear is, Ptolemy. You are forgiven.’

I suspect my mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. I don’t remember that part. What I remember is my head screaming at me to keep my mouth shut.

‘Fuck you!’ I roared at him. Alas. ‘You weren’t there – Lord King. You have no idea what we faced, and you think I panicked? You’re fucking right you should do it yourself. Because if you continue to talk like that, you may have to!’

Wise, carefully considered words they were not. I turned on my heel and walked away. But he had it coming, and then some.

The thing is, Alexander was . . . Alexander. God, monster, man, inhuman – all of them in one body.

So while Thais washed the crap and blood from my body, and my rage simmered and I tried – tried hard – not to turn it on my lover – Alexander came in. He had four Hetaeroi with him, and he was in armour.

He had a baton in his hand, and he put it carefully on my camp bed and came immediately to my side. He sniffed, made a face and sniffed the wound in the top of my shoulder, where you could see the white fat oozing out through the blood.

‘Do you have a wound gone bad?’ he asked. ‘You stink like a bad wound.’

‘I stepped in a corpse,’ I said, my tone carefully neutral.

‘Ah,’ he said. He took a cloth from Thais and cleaned my shoulder wound with what I can only call tender ruthlessness – he was as quick as he could be. He was very good with wounds.

It was all I could do not to cry out, or just cry.

When he dipped the cloth into the hot water, he said, ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. Not fighting – I cannot do it. I cannot cower in the rear. It makes me a woman. In too many ways.’

Thais sniffed and muttered something about childbirth.

Alexander ignored her. ‘I should have been there. But I’m told it was a trap.’

‘A well-laid defence – a trap if we were foolish enough to come into it.’ I began to breathe more easily. My