man. ‘How long to Hecatombion?’ he asked. That’s where our scouts and the Persian turncoats reported Darius to be.
Banugul pursed her lips. ‘Four days. Better to travel at night.’
‘You could guide me at night?’ he asked.
She simpered – you could see on her face that she was reaching for the sexual innuendo, and then realised that he meant none, and her face changed – a fascinating glimpse into her mind. ‘I could guide you blindfolded,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Ptolemy?’ he asked, without taking his eyes off her.
‘Lord?’ I answered.
‘I need you to fetch in the hypaspitoi. Go fast. Take your pick of men and horses. I’m sending Coenus south for water and remounts.’ He finally turned. ‘I need to leave here tomorrow night. But I need men, animals and water.’
As he ordered, it was done.
I rode out before the sun was up, with twenty men – Polystratus and my own former grooms, most of them now remounted on the best Niseans, fresh from the royal stud, as well as Cyrus the Persian and ten of his best men. Kineas went north, with fifty of his men, and Philotas took the very best of the Hetaeroi and went due east.
I found six more men alive, on the trail, and left a party to bury three more I found dead. Before the sun was high, I’d made fifty stades, and I found Nicanor. I had forty water bags, and his men shared them – forty bags among a thousand men – and we marched.
I spent the day riding up and down the column, telling desperate men that they had a few stades to go and no more.
And falling in love with my new horses. Tall, strong, beautiful Niseans, both steel grey, both tall like goddesses, fast – I had never been so well mounted, though it was disrespectful to Poseidon to say as much. And there in the desert, when I stopped to change – for the tenth time – I spread my arms wide and sang the whole hymn to Poseidon, and cut a lock of my hair and burned it.
Cyrus watched me. He made me uneasy – he was so silent – but despite that, I was prepared to like him.
The column had escaped while I made my prayers, and we rode along at a fast walk – anything faster might have endangered the horses, in that vast and dreadful desert – moving as fast as we dared to catch up.
Cyrus turned to me after a few minutes. ‘That was religious?’ he asked.
I nodded.
He frowned, but nodded.
‘This is the first time I have seen a Hellene pray,’ he noted.
I shrugged.
‘Hmm,’ he said. After a stade, we caught up to some stragglers sitting, defeated, in the desert, and I swore at them and got them moving.
I was afraid that if I rode past them, they’d collapse again. One of them was one of my men from the first days – Amyntas son of Philip – and I was not going to let him die.
So we rode slowly behind the three men.
‘You worship the horse?’ Cyrus asked.
I shook my head.
He looked at me, annoyed. ‘What, then?’ he asked.
‘Poseidon,’ I said. ‘Lord of horses. I had a wonderful horse. A godsent horse. He died in battle. These are the first good mounts I’ve had since the battle, and I was thanking the god.’
We rode on for as long as it takes a man to make a brief oration.
‘That is good,’ Cyrus said. He rubbed his beard. ‘Yes.’
I left him to watch the three end men, and I rode up the column, and I felt as if I were on a Persian flying carpet – one of their legends. The pace – the gait – of the Nisean is like flying.
I found Nicanor, also by the end of the column. He looked terrible – grey-faced and tired, and he admitted to me that he spent far too much time vomiting. Like Cleitus. There was something nasty going around. Apollo had shot his deadly shafts into our army, and men were dropping fast.
But when I told him we were less than five stades from the town, he showed his mettle, pulled all his men together and made them march. Men who had been shuffling their feet, barely alive, suddenly raised their eyes and saw the town at the edge of the heat shimmer.
They began to sing. Bubores was there, at the head of his company, and Astibus.
We marched into Rhagae like the elite veterans we were. Alexander emerged from his tent, and smiled.
He gathered all his officers an hour later. Nicanor looked as if he was going to die. The rest merely had sunburn. Water had restored them.
‘I have twelve hundred good horses. I need to go for six to ten days with no sleep and very little food so that we can carry enough water to keep going.’ He looked around. His eyes glittered with excitement – he was deep in the game he loved, overcoming tasks with Herculean strength and daring.
‘I need the very toughest men. The very best. Nicanor – three hundred of your best. And Ptolemy – choose me three hundred of the Hetaeroi. We will leave in four hours, and ride at night.’
I thought he made sense. Craterus and Philotas thought the risk was insane, but chose not to say so aloud.
I did not find this idea insane. Burning Persepolis – yes. Chasing Darius – well, we were close to the end. We were going to finish the last act, and be finished with Asia. We wanted to catch Darius, and our latest turncoats said that Darius’s army was on its last legs. Mazaeus’s son – Mazaeus, who was already a satrap for us in Mesopotamia – had come in while I was in the desert, surrendered, offered the proskynesis and told us that Darius had been deposed by Bessus.
Alexander had the oddest reaction to this. The fight between them – Darius and Alexander – had been very personal. Darius had wounded Alexander at Issus, and Alexander had sought across the battlefield at Gaugamela to avenge that – because he was living in the Iliad, if you ask me.
And now he vowed to avenge Darius, on Bessus.
It was difficult to credit, really. I couldn’t decide whether it was an act for our growing force of Iranian nobles, or whether Alexander had some deep fellow-feeling for Darius, or a mixture of both.
It’s worth mentioning how Cyrus’s arrival among us symbolised, to me, the change in the Persians. Up to a point, despite our victories, the Persians who came over to us were opportunists – traitors. Scum. And then – starting with Mazaeus, to be fair – they started to represent a different type of man altogether. The true Persians resented Bessus and his easterners. They didn’t all prefer Alexander but many did, and for a while we benefited from an ancient division – an east/west split in the empire – and the westerners – Lysians, western Persians, Phrygians – began to side with us of their own free will.
At any rate, just before darkness fell, we were off – six hundred men, twelve hundred horses. We had twenty carts with virtually every water skin the vanguard possessed, and we moved
When we left Rhagae, Darius and his army were six days ahead of us, already through the Caspian Gates at Hecatombion.
We rode for three days. The less said about them, the better. We moved fast, and men died, and horses died. I looked after my own.
