God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Then his face set.

I hadn’t meant to join in, but Poseidon and I were swallowed by the wedge, and I was in the place just behind the king.

It was all I could do to ride. Blood was actually running over my saddlecloth. Philotas, who had no time for me whatsoever, looked concerned.

‘Follow me!’ he called to his wedge. Turned it decidedly to the right, angled back towards Parmenio.

Alexander looked back at me, and the smile on his face, the elation in the whole set of his body, outweighed his frustration at failing to get Darius. ‘Don’t you feel alive, when the trumpet sounds?’ he asked me, and then we were away.

We charged into the flank of Mazaeus’s triumphant cavalry just as they closed the noose around Parmenio’s throat.

How bitter the Persian must have been, as he ordered the retreat.

There are a thousand ironies to the Battle of Guagamela.

It is ironic that the Persians killed so very few of us, because they were moments from massacring our entire left and with it, perhaps, the whole rear phalanx. I expect that had Alexander been ten minutes later, Darius’s defection from the field would have been meaningless.

It is ironic that to Bessus and Mazaeus, Darius – their king – betrayed them by running. Ironic as I had watched him struggle to stay and make a fight of it. I can say with assurance that had Alexander botched his final attack, Bessus would have won the battle. Darius lost his empire when he turned and ran, and he would never have been king again after that moment.

It is ironic that Alexander blamed Parmenio for costing him his pursuit of Darius, because Parmenio, in my opinion, had the weakest part of the army, faced the cream of the Persian cavalry and fought for as long as anyone could have expected, and then for a while longer – long enough to ensure that Alexander won the grandest victory of his life, and did it well enough that the battle flowed almost exactly as the king had predicted. Yet the king never forgave Parmenio for his failure.

Ironic that in victory, Alexander was so powerful that his opinions were like laws. Even men who had served in the left flank said that Parmenio had failed.

And hubris? It fell from Alexander as blood runs from a mortal wound.

About the time that Mazaeus cursed the name of his king and ordered his victorious cavalry to retreat like dogs whipped off the corpse of a lion, I was one rank behind the king, deep into a melee with the aristocracy of Babylon and Mesopotamia. They had beautiful armour and they weren’t much as fighters, and I suspect that they could read the wind as well as Mazaeus. Given our reception in Babylon, I’m not even sure they were sorry to see the golden disc of the sun fall.

But one of them, a mass of gold and bronze with armour all the way down his arms and scale mail that covered his face, exchanged sword cuts with me, and his mate drove a spear through Poseidon’s neck. Poseidon didn’t fall – by his namesake, he rose on his back feet, snapped the haft of the spear, and his mighty iron-shod forefoot crushed the chest of his killer before he slumped to the earth. And I crashed down on the same hip that had taken the wound earlier, and as Homer says, darkness covered my eyes.

PART IV

King of Kings

THIRTY-ONE

If you’ve come to listen to the end, young man, you must know that most of the glory has gone out of the story, and only the tragedy remains. Have I convinced you, yet, that Alexander is not the king you should seek to emulate?

I will.

Guagamela was Alexander’s masterpiece. He realised the plan, and he executed it perfectly – with brilliant, lightning-like changes of direction and purpose that marked his genius – instant response to the changes on the battlefield.

I am an excellent general, and I have won my fair share of battles. I could have planned Guagamela. But through all the dust I could not have seen the moment when the King of King’s centre had drifted from his right, and thrust into it.

I awoke to pain and stupor – I’d been given poppy. Thais and Philip were waiting on me personally. My eyes opened, and Thais looked at me and a smile lit her face.

That’s a good way to come back from the edge of death.

Philip leaned over, looked into my eyes and nodded. ‘No concussion,’ he said.

I was in the king’s tent. The red-purple tinge, like fresh blood, was unmistakable. Outside, the sun must have been high in the sky, and the tent cast a wine-coloured pall over everything.

Somewhere to my right, I could hear the king.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘And immediately after I shattered their centre – could you see? There is no feeling like riding at the point of the wedge. The power! And the danger! Did you see it?’

Murmurs of appreciation.

Thais made a face. ‘Please wake up and recover,’ she said. ‘I’ve had two days of it.’

Philip’s lips made the slightest twitch, acknowledging – and agreeing.

It all came back to me in a single piece of memory. The fight in the dust. The message. The wedge.

Poseidon was dead.

‘What’s the butcher’s bill on my taxeis?’ I asked. ‘Could you get me Isokles?’

Thais wiped my mouth. ‘Isokles has been dead almost a year,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ I answered, confused momentarily. ‘Pyrrhus, too.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and looked away.

‘Callisthenes, then?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘He died here,’ she said.

‘Marsyas?’ I asked. ‘Leosthenes?’

‘Leosthenes is badly wounded and in the surgeon’s tents. Marsyas is collecting Persian women and writing poetry to them.’ Thais nodded to Philip. ‘I’m going to move him.’

Philip nodded back.

Marsyas came to see me a day later. I assume he’d tried and been turned away, but he’d done all that I could have done – he’d arranged burials, sent letters and even managed to retrieve and bury mighty Poseidon.

He told me that the Taxeis of Outer Macedon had lost two hundred and thirty dead and wounded not expected to recover. Other taxeis had fared worse. Craterus had lost almost five hundred men, and altogether we’d lost almost two thousand infantry, most of them from the taxeis with Parmenio.

Marsyas wasn’t going to tell me, but I saw through him.

‘Our taxeis is being broken for replacements, isn’t it,’ I said.

Marsyas nodded.

And that was like the death of a friend. Another death. I hadn’t started to mourn Callisthenes yet.

The rest of Babylonia fell without a fight.

That took months to play out. The welcome did not.

I was back to being a Hetaeroi. Because of my place in the battle, I was in favour, and because of my wound, I was still fevered, and I confess in advance that it added to the intensity of the experience. I was perpetually light-headed, and the sun had a quality to it that is hard to explain. It was brighter than I have ever known it, even in the endless Gedrosian desert. Even in Aegypt and Lydia. It burned into your eyes, and the grit – not really sand – rose to suffocate you, and the green of the trees was so green as to seem lurid. And the smell of human excrement, which they used for manure, fought the stink of naphtha fires and the omnipresent smell of incense. Men say that Aegypt is priest-ridden, but Babylon is god-ridden. They have gods everywhere, and they worship them to distraction.