God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

his campaign, and Parmenio didn’t quibble.

The two of them had a meeting, in private, with no witnesses. I can only guess, but I will. I think that the king promised him an honourable retirement and the satrapy of Persia proper. And Parmenio accepted, secure in the knowledge that he was being given a huge command and the Royal Treasury – and thus, that he could continue to provide patronage for the officers in his ‘family’.

Hephaestion was given his first large command. He took the elite cavalry – the Hetaeroi minus the royals, the Paeonians, the Thracians and some of the allies – such as Kineas – and the Agrianian skirmishers, and he vanished into the desert. He had what appeared to be a siege train. That accorded badly with the speed his column was supposed to maintain, but rumour said he was out of the area covered by the Prodromoi in a single day, so he must have moved like lightning.

You’ve no doubt heard the story from Diodorus, eh? How they raced to the Euphrates, and threw a pontoon bridge across.

Mazaeus, the best of the remaining Persian commanders, was there with three thousand horse, and the two forces fought every day – skirmish after skirmish on the banks of the Euphrates, up and down as Hephaestion sought to outflank Mazaeus, like two skilled men fencing with sticks. And Kineas won the day, racing south, finding a ford, fighting his way across with his Athenians in the face of a determined enemy, and turning Mazaeus’s flank, so that his whole force was rolled back and Hephaestion got the bridges across. That’s where your father won his magnificent Nisean stallion, and he rode that horse for years.

If you know your Anabasis, you know that Cyrus’s army took the same route we were on. And having won the crossings of the Euphrates and built a pair of bridges, we might have turned south towards Babylon and lunged at the Persians.

That’s what Mazaeus expected, and what Darius wanted us to do – march down the east bank of the Euphrates. Like Artaxerxes before him, Darius had ordered the land between the rivers scorched, the grain removed and the most populous place on the wheel of the world depopulated, so that when Alexander made his move for empire, he would have to cross a battlefield stripped clean of food and forage.

When we marched from Tyre, it was late in Hecatombion by the Athenian festival calendar, but we marched fast – up to two hundred stades a day. The men were fresh and well rested, and well fed. And even eager. We had water with us, and we marched across dusty plains at the height of midsummer.

When Kineas rolled Mazaeus up and forced him back on the road to Babylon, the rest of us – the main army – were virtually a dust cloud on the horizon. The next day, my taxeis and the hypaspitoi marched across the bridges yoked like oxen, carrying water, and behind us came the whole army. Mazaeus retreated south along the east bank of the Euphrates for two days, and Hephaestion, on what was probably the best day of his career, pursued just the right amount, and they fought another inconclusive action in the dust.

I was still marching.

We didn’t turn south to Babylon.

The wheels of the king’s mind had turned, grinding this campaign down to a few problems, and here’s the solution he reached, as best I understand it.

If we marched in spring, as soon as the ground was dry, then the rivers would be in spate, and crossing either the Euphrates or the Tigris would have been very difficult indeed. The marching would have been better for the soldiers, but that was never a great concern of Alexander’s.

But if the rivers were full to flood – if the spring rains came late – and the countryside was empty of crops, as every set of farms on earth is empty in late spring, when all the stores have been consumed – then we might reach the Euphrates bank and starve, or be trapped between the rivers.

As it was, although I think most of the army never saw the plan, his campaign worked better than he imagined. We shot east, crossed the two bridges mere hours after they were completed, and Mazaeus, by the sort of luck that comes with good planning, was pinned back south and couldn’t explore our dispositions. Two days later, when Hephaestion had withdrawn, Mazaeus’s elite cavalry came pounding north.

And found the crossing deserted, and our army – gone. Gone to the east.

By luck, good planning and the godlike far-sightedness of Alexander, we had broken contact, and our entire army was loose in the plains of Iraq.

Mazaeus raced south, leaving his best men to try and find us. Mazaeus had a head on his shoulders – he went in person to tell the Great King that Alexander had just shredded his operational plan and was now somewhere.

In fact, we marched for twenty days, moving as fast as men and horses could move. We were north of Darius’s scorched earth, and we were in the cool foothills and not in the Mesopotamian plains, and while ‘cool’ is a relative thing to a foot soldier who has been marching for ten hours with the sun pounding him like an enemy, we were not losing men.

The best of the Prodromoi swept south in small groups – ten or twelve men under a trusted officer or phylarch, covering huge distances with six or eight horses per man. By the time we reached the Tigris river, we were receiving the first reports of Darius’s army, as scouted by Agon’s men.

Alexander flatly refused to believe what he heard. Because what he heard was that Darius, the despicable and defeated Darius, had almost a hundred thousand men covering miles of ground, and that his army outnumbered ours nearly two to one.

The speed of the army was not good for everyone. The animals suffered in the heat and dust, and the women suffered worse than the men, even when they rode in litters, and one pregnant woman suffered worse than the rest.

I was with the main body when I heard her scream.

We had reached the Tigris river the night before, and our lead elements – today, Perdiccas and the Agrianians, backed by Thracian horse – punched across against no opposition. The Tigris, contrary to Callisthenes’ sensational account, was about four fingers deep over the rocks, and we scarcely cooled our feet in it as we went.

We were flanking the baggage, and I had the rotten job of making sure that the baggage carts made the crossing in good order. I was watching my officers check the cartwheels – because any old ones would break in the middle of the river, and any loose ones would come off. And the Great King’s wife began to scream.

I can’t pretend I knew who it was, but I was the officer in charge, and I rode to her cart – more like a broad pavilion mounted on a wagon bed.

There was so much blood that it was coming through the baseboards of the wagon.

I sent Polystratus for Thais, and then I climbed into the wagon. She was screaming, and her mother-in-law was holding her head, and two eunuchs tried to prevent my entering the wagon and I threw one out through the door.

‘You cannot enter here!’ the other said, desperately.

I ignored him and looked at Sisygambis, the Queen Mother. She didn’t meet my eye.

Leosthenes had been checking wheels. He popped his head in.

‘Fetch the king,’ I shot at him, and his head vanished.

Thais came. The eunuchs continued to try to remove me, but Sisygambis said something and they desisted. Thais put a hand on the woman’s forehead, reached down and flung the blood-soaked sheets back and caught my eye.

Miscarriage. I’m a country boy. I knew the signs.

Philip of Acarnia came first, and then Alexander. I’d have left the wagon, but I couldn’t get out, trapped in the press. Philip looked at her, felt her pulse and exchanged a glance with Thais. That was the worst thing – the conspiracy of silence. The poor woman. Imagine – trapped with fifty thousand enemy soldiers, pregnant with Alexander’s bastard and marching towards your husband, who will have you executed when he sees you. With only your mother-in-law and her ladies for company.

Then Alexander came.

Philip was blunt, as he always was. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he said. ‘She won’t recover.’

Indeed, the poor thing was bleeding at such a rate that it didn’t seem possible a body could hold so much blood.

She cried out.

Alexander turned his head away in revulsion.