God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Incense and naphtha. Smoke at the back of your throat, grit in your clothes. All the way south from Arabela to Babylon.

There was another kind of grit in my throat, and that was Mazaeus. Somehow, while I was recovering from my wound, he had come into our camp and made peace with Alexander, and he was suddenly the favourite – so much so that Hephaestion rode with me. Mazaeus had been one of Darius’s most trusted officers, and his defection was important. Because of him, Alexander received the homage of dozens of important Persian and Mede officers, and our way was made smooth.

Darius had fled the field – again – and I found it almost melancholy to hear from Mesopotamian peasants that they no longer considered him king. Greek peasants, I’m sure, would have maintained their allegiance a little longer.

Or perhaps not.

At any rate, Mazaeus was tall and handsome and dignified, long-limbed, a beautiful horseman and a fine warrior. He wasn’t ingratiating or obsequious.

But he did throw himself on his face every time he entered Alexander’s presence – the royal presence was suddenly becoming the Royal Presence. Because of his age and immense dignity, Mazaeus made the rest of us seem like clods, and he clearly thought we were – except Alexander, who he found a way to love.

Really, I have a hard time remembering how it all started. We didn’t go to war, on Alexander’s staff, about proskynesis and Persian customs for years. And yet, the whole argument, the whole cultural disagreement, could have been read on every Greek and Macedonian officer’s face, the first morning that Mazaeus made his reverence.

We rode south, away from Darius. I thought it was a mistake, and so did Parmenio. I felt that we needed to have Darius’s head on a spike, or we weren’t done. Parmenio agreed.

The old man was in a state of shock – not utter shock, but a sort of euphoric disbelief. He hadn’t expected us to win the battle, and he clearly hadn’t expected to survive the battle, and in the aftermath, he was quite naturally a little aloof, a little diffident, and genuinely generous to those who had played a role in the rescue of his wing – Diodorus, Kineas and the king. He was not hesitant in describing how desperate the situation had been.

This was not politics. This was just an honest old man thanking the team that saved him.

But Alexander’s faction didn’t hesitate to capitalise on his admissions of weakness, and Parmenio’s sons, who were not thankful and felt that Parmenio had been hung out to dry, so to speak, were in turn angered.

Two days out of Babylon, with rumours rife that the city would resist, that Darius had another army forming behind us, and that Bessus, the senior satrap who had escaped Arabela, was still in the field with all his cavalry – a force still larger than our army – Alexander ordained that all the officers would dine together.

A symposium.

I remember, because he had just promoted Astibus and Bubores to company commands in his recently expanded hypaspitoi, and they were on the next kline to mine. They were crowned in wreaths of gilded laurel. So was I, and so was Marsyas, who shared my couch. Kineas shared a couch with Diodorus, also crowned.

Whether by intention or not, half of the great circle wore crowns of valour. And the other half did not. Philotas did not have one, and neither did Nicanor, although he had led the hypaspists with flair and reckless bravery. The older men, the partisans of Parmenio, had no crowns.

Parmenio was on a couch to my left, well within earshot, and he shared the couch with Philotas.

On the third bowl of wine, Philotas sat up. ‘Why no crown for Mazaeus? He fought well enough!’

I must confess, I laughed too. It was funny. He was so ill at ease with us, in his long flowing robes. He’d probably never eaten lying on a couch, and he was desperately uncomfortable sharing his with Cleitus the Black, who glowered at him.

There were other Persian officers present. They did their best. It is almost impossible to be conquered with dignity, but they did it well enough.

But Philotas couldn’t let them go. ‘Why the long faces?’ he called. ‘We’ll all be in high hats and long robes soon enough.’

This quip was not greeted with the enthusiasm that his earlier jibe received.

The wine went instantly to my head, even well watered, and I went off to Thais and bed. After I left, the Persians were heckled until the king ordered the verbal attacks to stop.

Just one big happy family.

Babylon.

The morning after the symposium, we formed the entire army in battle order on the plain of Mesopotamia. Despite dykes and irrigation ditches, we could march unimpeded. Indeed, Mesopotamia was the ideal ground for infantry – three thousand years of tillage had levelled it as flat as a skillet.

We advanced on the city in battle order, and we made camp the next night within sight of the place, a great mound twinkling with lights in the middle distance. It had an air of unreality.

Babylon was, and is, one of the mightiest, if not the greatest, city on the wheel of the earth. No one knows how many people live in its mighty compass, but I have heard that it has a million inhabitants. The girdle of walls, mud brick, fired brick and stone has a greater circumference than that of any other city walls I’ve ever seen, and despite that, the suburbs spill out of the city gates like wine from a drunkard’s lips, so that there is a further girdle of intense habitation all around the city, many stades thick. The dense population is only possible because Mesopotamia has some of the finest soil and farmland in the world, and the two great rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – allow the produce to be floated directly to the city, which is also at the head of navigation, so that ocean-going ships can depart straight for the eastern seas from Babylon.

Babylon has ten times the population of Athens, the greatest city of our world.

Babylon could, all by itself, field a mighty army. Only sixty years before Marathon, a king of Babylon had challenged the whole might of Persia by himself, fielding a magnificent army of armoured cavalry and chariots. He had only narrowly been defeated.

I had a hard time sleeping. The fever was on me – the mosquitoes were like nothing I had ever seen. In god- ridden Mesopotamia, they didn’t have a mosquito god, which I found surprising. I would have done a great deal to propitiate such a god.

I eventually got to sleep, only to have a dream that took me high over the Great Pyramid at Chios, and then, as if driven by a catapult, I did not so much fall as was driven down and down, into the very top of the magnificent structure, and I awoke covered in sweat. I threw off Thais’s leg and my military cloak and stumbled out into the oppressive heat.

The only peace from the flies was by the fires, where the heat was worst.

A fever, high heat and bugs. I don’t think that man can know a greater torment, unless it is the pain of a bad wound and the sure knowledge of coming death.

I settled by the smoke of a fire. I had lost my way in the camp. I was lost, or uncaring. Even now, I scarcely remember it.

But Philip, the veteran phylarch of Craterus’s taxeis, came and sat by me in the smoke. He had wine, and I drank some.

‘Fucking bugs,’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’

After some time he pointed at the distant, twinkling lights. ‘Think they’ll fight?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. Thais was sure they wouldn’t fight. Her sources were new and untried, but we had the feeling that the Babylonians, inscrutable in their religious bigotry, hated the Persians far more than they hated us.

But a city of a million men could field an army of a hundred thousand. And again, as at Gaza, the army was tired. Victorious, but tired. The elite cavalry units had been in continuous combat since midsummer, and everyone – every single unit – had been engaged at Arabela.

I wasn’t exactly afraid.

Neither was Philip. He fingered his beard. ‘I’d rather they fought,’ he said.

‘Who?’ said another veteran, who plonked himself down by the fire and coughed in the smoke. ‘Fucking bugs. Ares, where do they come from?’

‘Farted out of Hades’ arsehole,’ Amyntas son of Philip said. A gross impiety, if you like, but it summed up what we all felt.