‘If your paramour wants to run some agents, she can do it through me,’ Eumenes said.
‘No,’ I said.
He sat back. ‘Well, you’re honest.’
I crossed my arms. ‘What have you ever done, in terms of actual accomplishment? Thais gave us Memnon, took cities in Asia Minor and opened the Gates of Babylon.’
Eumenes narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ve never heard of any of these operations.’
I smiled.
He laughed. ‘Fair enough, Ptolemy. But we can’t have two separate intelligence services.’
I shrugged. ‘Why not? We have all the money in the world. And Thais says that two sources of information are always better than one.’
Eumenes turned away, and I could see he was on the point of a nasty verbal cut. But I’ve seen this before – mostly with rational Athenian gentlemen at a symposium – a man takes a verbal hit, and before he can shoot back, he absorbs the content, thinks it all through – realises the point is valid. Only a mature man or woman can do this.
The Cardian took another sip of wine. ‘Who collates the intelligence?’ he said.
I leaned forward. ‘Honesty for honesty. I can imagine that you and some other man might vie – racing to Alexander’s side with your latest scrap – the best traitor, the open gates,’ I said. I took the wine cup. ‘But Thais doesn’t need Alexander’s ear, and I have it all the time. So if you give credit where credit is due, I think Thais would be happy to send her news through you.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll have to ask her.’
‘I would like to meet her,’ Eumenes said. ‘I’ve seen her at dinners. We’ve never spoken.’
‘And if you try to go behind her back . . . well,’ I said with a smile, ‘I see the king six times a day.’
Eumenes shook his head. ‘I know that,’ he said, a little peevishly.
‘Come and have dinner with us,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk this out together.’
And that was that. Five minutes of straight talk, and we avoided a clash. After that, I got steady reports from Eumenes, and Thais shared all her information with him. And we became friends – real friends. His wife was not always with the army, but when she was, Athenais became Thais’s closest female friend.
You have the look that all boys have when they find that war runs on gold and grain and rumour and intelligence, not blood and honour. Listen. In all of Aria there was
So we marched into Bactria. We had a flood of defectors, many of whom were the last of Darius’s loyalists who would never go over to Bessus. But some had just waffled – because they had fresh reports from Bessus, who was across the Oxus river, raising troops. He was rumoured to have forty thousand cavalry.
Alexander wasn’t just low on grain. He was genuinely worried that, having marched off the edge of the world, he was going to get stuck in a fight he couldn’t win. But he was elated – Bessus was proving to be a foe, and a foe meant challenge, opposition and conquest. We summoned the main army – Cleitus with the rest of the pezhetaeroi – and marched east.
Nicanor died two days east of Aria – he’d never grown stronger after the illness, and when the king gave Parmenio the satrapy, Parmenio made his two sons swear to hold their positions with the army. Nicanor commanded the hypaspitoi and Philotas commanded the household cavalry, and that meant that Alexander was still, to some extent, in the power of Parmenio.
Nicanor’s death was sudden. There was no reason to expect it – he was sick, but he was tougher than scrap bronze.
Alexander didn’t even halt the march, and when Philotas broke down – Nicanor was
‘Stay and arrange the funeral, if that’s what suits you,’ Alexander said. ‘Bessus isn’t going to wait for us to hold games. Ptolemy – get them moving!’ he called to me, and we marched off.
I never had any time for Philotas, but Nicanor and I had long since made our peace and become friends. I left Polystratus to make my contribution.
Alexander gave me command of the Hetaeroi. I thought it odd – Philotas couldn’t be more than a day behind us.
But we were tired, hungry and I had all I could handle just getting the food arranged ahead of us. We were living day to day. Not the way the planning staff likes to live.
But two days after we entered Bactria, it was obvious that Bessus had the troops to stop us, and we had other problems. Craterus was twelve hundred stades to the south, marching with Black Cleitus and the four taxeis of the reserve army, and Bessus had more men. And worst of all, bloody Satibarzanes revolted, and so did his cousin in the south, Barseantes, the satrap of Drangiana.
Alexander took the Aegema and turned back. He sent me to lead the main army south, to the edge of Drangiana, to link up with Craterus’s column. Hephaestion went with him.
We smashed the two attempts Barseantes made to stop our march. Behind us, the king drove Satibarzanes across the Oxus and caught most of his army on a wooded mountain. Alexander surrounded the base of the mountain and set the woods on fire. It was brutal, but I can’t disapprove. He was in a hurry, had no rearguard, no base of operations, and he needed a quick victory with no losses.
I had troubles of my own, and I got a taste of what the coming years would hold, moving the main army over brutal terrain full of hostile – or sullenly apathetic – villagers, most of whom were hardy and dangerous. After just two weeks, I gave up on the notion that I could hold open a route to the logistics heads in Iran. I lost men trying to patrol the roads behind me, and leaving garrisons – well, if you have twenty thousand men, and you leave a hundred men each day in small towns in the mountains to watch your rear, how long until you have no army? You do the maths.
In the third week, I halted, recalled all my garrisons and then pressed forward. The next morning I had a staff meeting.
When I entered the Military Journal tent, Eumenes called ‘Attention!’ and most of the officers present snapped to their feet and stood as stiff as statues. It had never happened to me – although we’d all done it for Parmenio. And the king.
Cyrus bowed deeply, and so did his son and a handful of other Persian noble officers.
I decided to think about the implications later. ‘At ease,’ I called. ‘Listen up.’ I walked to the middle of the tent. Eumenes had an easel set up with a sheet of local slate. I had a piece of chalk, the kind tutors in Athens and Pella used to teach children in the agora.
‘First thing,’ I said. ‘We no longer have a road home behind us. All we have is the ground beneath our feet. All forward troops need to assume that every contact is a hostile contact. Rearguard, too. At the same time, foraging and logistics purchases will go better if we can form a market every night and get locals to come in of their own free will and sell us produce. Understand?’
I wrote the words
‘I need the Prodromoi to operate a day ahead of the army and I need the Angeloi two days ahead. At least. I need the Prodromoi to scout a box . . .’ I drew a rectangle on the board. ‘And then we can move from box to box. The Agrianians will handle security inside the day’s box, the Prodromoi scout the next one. Any questions?’
In fact, there were a hundred questions, but that became our doctrine for movement in hostile country. It changed a great many things – for one thing, Strako and the Angeloi began reporting directly to the Prodromoi, not to me – but it made our march routes far more secure, and it meant that even as we fought a battle, we already knew where our next camp would be, and it was already secure.
We fought six actions that summer, and the scouting units were in action every day or two. This sort of warfare is terribly wearing on troops, and after just two weeks, the Angeloi were exhausted and the Prodromoi had taken losses of a third and were no longer an effective unit. Again, the mathematics of war are relentless – if your scouts lose one man a day, even from bad water or accident, and there’s only a hundred of them . . .
So Eumenes began to rotate men, and later whole units, from the main body into the scouts. It was an excellent programme, and it allowed him to begin taking small commands himself. He was an honest man, but he was still a wily Greek.
We pulled all three columns together in early autumn, on the shores of Lake Seistan. Craterus and Black Cleitus came up from the south, and brought us our daughter and our newly made priest of Poseidon, fresh from
