God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

hearing him mutter – I didn’t catch what he said.

I turned my side to him and backed into the ranks of the hypaspitoi.

My back foot, my right, was on a corpse.

The Aegyptian marines made another rush. I needed to be sure of my footing and glanced down, and saw that I was standing over Alexander. He had an enormous spear – I learned later it was the bolt from a ballista – in his shoulder. He was screaming, eyes blind, and the ground was wet with his blood, and there was a pile of dead hypaspitoi around him. Perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty. Even as I looked, a man grabbed his ankles to pull him, he screamed and the man with his ankles got an Aegyptian spear in his guts and fell atop him.

Zeus Soter, I thought. He’s going to die right here.

Yet even as that thought tickled my mind and the marines hit us again, my phalanx fell on their rear. There was a moment – a flurry of blows, an unendurable pressure on my chest and my shattered shield, my blows seeming too feeble to make a difference – and then they were running, abandoning their magnificent hide shields to run down the hill, and my men killed fifty of them in as many heartbeats, and we had held.

Even as the Aegyptians broke, the hypaspitoi had lifted the king. His shield – a full-sized aspis – had taken the ballista bolt. It had struck through his shield – through all seven layers of bull’s hide, wood and bronze – into the meat of his left shoulder and out the back, so that when they lifted him I could see the red-black shimmer of the metal like some obscene thing projecting from the pturges of his arm armour.

He was done screaming. His eyes were open, and they locked on mine, just for a moment. He smiled. In that moment, he was a god.

And then he screamed with the pain, again.

Philip of Acarnia removed the ballista bolt, cutting the head off and then oiling the shaft with olive oil – pouring the oil right on to the wound – and then pulling it through. Then he slathered the king’s wound with honey and bandaged it. I watched, and held Alexander while he screamed, cried and shat himself. I helped clean him, and I helped carry him to his bed. He weighed very little.

The doctor filled him full of opium, and he went off into a drug-hazed sleep. I sat in his chair and watched him for a while, with Perdiccas and Hephaestion and some of the others.

He looked small and vulnerable and very pale.

Later that night, a pretty girl with hennaed hands and feet came to Thais to ask for news of the king in a very shy voice.

Thais came for me. ‘Memnon’s women sent her. They must be terrified – if Alexander dies, all that seductiveness has been wasted.’ She smiled, a somewhat catlike smile. ‘I feel for them. They’re likely to be passed from hand to hand if he dies,’ she said. ‘Will he die?’ she asked suddenly, her voice changed.

‘You are kind to them,’ I said. And whispered to her, ‘I fear for him. But we must not say it.’ Thais kissed me and nodded.

I went to the girl, who threw herself on the ground and hid her face. ‘Great lord!’ she said.

‘Tell your mistress,’ I began.

The serving girl shook her head. ‘Please come, lord. Please?’

Well – it is always pleasurable to have beautiful young women call you great lord. I followed her to her tent, and met a queen, sitting quite calmly on a couch.

‘You remember me, Ptolemy?’ she asked, voice husky, without preamble.

Banugul must have been eighteen or perhaps nineteen. I hadn’t been alone with her.

I almost couldn’t breathe.

I had Thais in my bed every night – widely accounted the most beautiful woman in the world.

How do we measure these things?

Banugul had, as I have described, skin and hair the colour of honey, green eyes that slanted a fraction from her nose to her temples, and fine, arched feet. The rest of her was robed in splendour.

And the only thing I could smell was spikenard.

I managed to tell her that the king would recover. She thanked me very prettily, and I left the tent, still alive.

Thais laughed at me for most of the next day. I would have laughed, too, except that war was everywhere, and Ares, not Aphrodite, had us in his fist.

Hephaestion led the second assault. I watched them go up the hill, in the first light of dawn, watched the engines and the boiling oil kill their share, and watched Amyntas and Philotas race each other like heroes at Troy to make the northern breach first.

They lasted about the same length of time we lasted. Perhaps an hour.

Batis met them inside the town and killed them. On the south side, his men actually held the breach – the assault never penetrated into the town. This time, according to Amyntas, who was wounded twice, Batis had concealed pits, ditches and spiked caltrops waiting for the assault troops, and local counter-attacks to cut the lead elements of the assault off from the reserves.

Hephaestion returned covered in dust and other men’s blood. He was taller and better-muscled than Alexander, and looked more like I imagined Achilles to look than any man I ever saw.

He threw his aspis on the ground, grunted and went into his tent to drink and sulk – just like Achilles.

Parmenio appeared out of nowhere and took command of the army. He did it without fuss, without asking for anyone’s approval and there was no loss of momentum or discipline.

Groups of silent men gathered outside Alexander’s tent – every morning. They never fussed or made noise, merely waited to see if Philip would emerge and tell them something of the king.

On the fifth morning after his wound, the king came out into the sunshine in person, blinking in the sun.

The cheers started from the men by the tent.

Alexander smiled, and waved with his right hand, and the cheers spread as flame spreads in a dry field, until every man in that camp was roaring, ‘Alexander! Alexander the king!’

I was with Diades, watching slaves raise the battery platforms yet higher. As the cheers spread, and we understood their cause, even the slaves began to cheer.

About an hour later, Parmenio summoned me to the king’s tent. I expected the command council and found only the strategos and the king.

Parmenio nodded when I stood before them. There was something curiously formal about the situation, so I remained standing, battered helmet under my arm, and gave them a salute.

Alexander was as pale as lamb’s parchment, and Parmenio appeared like an automaton. No emotion at all.

‘Gaza will fall to the next assault,’ Parmenio said. ‘I want your troops to spearhead it.’

I looked back and forth between them.

‘Batis is losing men as fast as we are, and we have deeper pockets.’ Parmenio shrugged. ‘He can’t keep it up. I mean to fake an assault this evening and then pound the breaches for half an hour with stones to kill his defenders. Tomorrow I expect to move the batteries forward to the new platforms. Then I’ll pound the walls for two days while Diades pushes the ramps higher and makes the footing better.’ He looked at Alexander.

Alexander smiled.

‘Then I want to go in with all six pezhetaeroi regiments, all together.’ Parmenio nodded. ‘I want you to lead it. I can’t afford to lose Craterus, and Perdiccas is too young.’

It was, in many ways, the most sincere and heady praise I ever received.

So I did.

I won’t bore you. It was anticlimactic, like the ending of a bad play. Parmenio, the professional, had it just right. The endless barrage of the last two days had broken the garrison’s spirit, and our six assault columns coming up long, shallow ramps that were virtually paved with brick ate their souls. The men facing me shot their arrows and fled while my men were only halfway to the breach, and when we got to the rubble, the two ballistas there were smashed to flinders by our barrage. In the streets beyond, we went cautiously, linked up with the other columns at the wall and refused to be channelled. It was all very slow and methodical.

In the centre of the town, there was a big open square. We surrounded it – they had fortified the square like a reserve citadel.

Batis sent a herald asking for terms.