God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

On the fourth day, we came across a dozen war bands still in a camp that had obviously held an army. They surrendered to Alexander as soon as he rode in, and told us that this was the camp where the king had been betrayed by Bessus. The Greek mercenaries had stood by Darius and offered to protect him. The irony of this threatened to make me vomit.

Kineas picked up the Great King’s interpreter, who was seventy years old and badly dehydrated. He told us the story of the betrayal.

Alexander grew angrier and angrier.

I began to think that, at some level, he identified with the king. Was it their shared role? Was Darius his other self ? Priests talk of such things. I cannot fathom them.

But we rode on. We were making a hundred stades a day through mountains and salt desert, and now, without resting, we went straight on, all day, reminding me powerfully of the Year of Miracles. Men who hadn’t been there commented that we were attempting the impossible, but Hephaestion and I laughed. Even Alectus, by now one of the oldest men in the army, laughed.

By noon, when we stopped to change horses and drink water, there were fewer than two hundred men with the king.

I decided that it was time somebody spoke to Alexander. I left my horses with Polystratus and walked to him, where he lay between Banugul and Hephaestion.

‘The raven of misfortune,’ Alexander said, ‘come to croak at me.’

I shrugged. ‘You know that we’re down to two hundred men,’ I said. ‘You know that, ten days ago, Darius had twenty-five thousand men.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘His army is breaking up – running for cover, like fish from a shark,’ he said. ‘I can feel it. No one will stop and fight now.’

I rubbed my chin. I had stubble at the edges of my beard, my face itched and, perhaps worst of all, Banugul looked every bit as perfect, tanned, fresh and beautiful lying in the dust beside the king as she did in a tent on the Syrian plains.

‘Lord, if they turn on us, your capture loses us everything.’ I shrugged. ‘I had to say it. I won’t shirk. I won’t stop. I’ll go where you go. But this is past daring.’

Alexander grinned – not at me, or Hephaestion, but at the Persian girl. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’ he said.

So we were off again.

Three hours later, we were sixty men on a hundred horses.

When darkness fell, we were fifty men on sixty horses, and Banugul stopped and threw up.

My two Niseans paced along, light as air. Poseidon bless and keep them.

Polystratus kept up, and Cyrus, and Kineas and Diodorus.

I had the strangest thoughts. I watched Craterus carefully, and Philotas, because it occurred to me that with this few men, anyone could kill the king.

At dawn, we were in a valley and we had a stream to water our horses. We had forty-six men left and one woman.

At noon, we came to a village. Bessus had come this way – the villagers had seen him.

Alexander sat on his charger, dejected – that rarest of his moods.

I saw Banugul master herself and ride to his side.

In five minutes, we were moving again. I had missed what had passed, but we turned off the road, with its sad trail of broken wagons and dead animals. Bessus’s retreat was easy to follow, and, exactly as Alexander predicted, the enemy army was disintegrating.

I could barely think. I drank a cup of water that a village elder offered me, filled my two canteens and rode off after the king.

We rode all night.

When the sun rose, we crested a ridge – our fourth ridge of the night. We had, by then, perhaps twenty Macedonians with us. But as we rode down the east side of the knife-back, we could see Bessus’s army spread before us on the plain . . .

Thousands of men.

Tens of thousands of camp followers, beasts and wagons.

From the height, we could see that they had come around the flank of the ridge and split into three columns. And we could see all three, extending from our very feet to the far horizon.

I reined in, took my canteen and drank. Spat. My water tasted of mud and defeat. We had failed. Darius had escaped – again. As with Issus, as with Gaugamela, as at Ecbatana. We couldn’t pursue into the plains with twenty men.

Alexander rode up beside me. Looked over the plain, sat straight and smiled.

‘Got him,’ he said.

He turned and beckoned to Philotas. ‘Get the stragglers,’ he said. ‘Bring them here and await my orders. The rest of you, on me.’

We attacked Bessus’s army.

We had twenty men, and one woman.

And once again, Alexander was right.

We hit them the way a flake of snow hits a mountainside – that is, it is the flake of snow that begins the avalanche. We rode down the ridge, changed horses and struck the nearest column, hitting the stragglers in the tail, and before anyone’s sword was red, we had a hundred prisoners and the column stampeded like cattle in a storm.

We rode down the column, picking up prisoners, demanding to know where the king was. Alexander’s only interest was Darius – I think that, had we found Bessus, he would have been killed. For whatever reason, it was all about Darius.

All morning, we went east, harrying the column – if twenty men can be said to harry fifteen thousand.

By noon, Philotas had five hundred more men together, and he joined us. It shouldn’t have made a difference, but it did, and we spread our nets wider. Exhausted, bedraggled Persians and Hyrkanians threw themselves on their faces – it was incredible to see. At one point, Polystratus, Cyrus and I captured so many men we couldn’t imagine why they didn’t take us prisoner.

We ranged farther and farther from the king – up and down the columns. The southernmost column was already gone – it held together better and moved too fast for us to follow, and the two northern columns were slowed by their own chaos. We rode unopposed through the final ruin of the Persian empire. Not an arrow threatened us. The squalor of the retreat was sickening in a way that even the slaughter at Gaza had not been sickening. Perhaps it was the utter abandonment of hope. Perhaps it was having Cyrus at my side – perhaps it was my growing respect for him, which made me share his humiliation that his country had come to this.

It was late afternoon when Polystratus sent a boy for me. I was sitting under the overhang of a ruined posting station, drinking water from the well. The boy was Hyrkanian, very blond and very dirty, and he all but crawled.

I mounted my new horse and followed him. It will give you an idea of how far gone we were that I was alone.

I rode through the rout. This part of the northern column was mostly slaves and servants, and they simply trudged on, waiting to be threatened or killed. No one challenged me, and no one tried to surrender. Mostly, no one even raised their eyes.

We crossed a main flow of refugees – perhaps six hundred people. And then climbed down the shallow slope of a stony gully. At the base of the gully was a big wagon, with six dead oxen. The grass here was so poor that Polystratus’s horse was not bothering to eat it. Blood dripped from the base of the wagon bed in slow, gloopy drops. Flies gathered in the blood. I could feel a curse in the air.

Polystratus’s head emerged from the wagon. A dog barked. ‘Send the boy for the king,’ he said.

I went and looked into the wagon. There was a man lying on his back, and the wagon bed was full of blood. He had two javelins in him.

I knew him at once, even though I’d only seen him at a distance.

He was Darius.