God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

When Amyntas son of Philip looked over his shoulder, I did too.

That’s how it was.

In effect, the army that had left Ecbatana ceased to exist. Alexander had yet another new army – a central Asian army with a few Macedonian and Persian officers. He made a new army out of the air, and we crossed the Oxus, again outmanoeuvring the supposedly mobile Bessus.

Bessus’s nobles deposed him. In the East, men ruled by military competence, and Bessus had failed them three times – in Hyrkania, in Bactria and now at the Oxus. Many abandoned him, and his lieutenant, Spitamenes, offered to betray him and make submission to the conqueror.

I was sent – with a major portion of the army – to take Bessus from Spitamenes. In fact, the wily bastard handed over a whole company of troublemakers – his former commander, a dozen untrustworthy chiefs and some captured Saka, including three women.

One of whom was your mother, of course. I had no idea – I just saw trouble. I didn’t even find her modestly attractive at the time. Her glare of hate was enough to render her more murderous than beautiful, let me tell you. And she tried to escape.

More than Bessus did. I dragged Bessus back, and at Alexander’s orders, he was tied naked to a post by the side of the road, and the entire army marched past him.

I doubt most of the remaining pezhetaeroi even noticed him as they trudged on towards the horizon.

With the submission of Spitamenes, even I thought we were done. Alexander was fascinated by the Amazons, as he insisted on calling them, and Hephaestion, who was growing more inhuman by the day, took one and tried to rape her into submission, and was badly injured as a result. No tears from me.

But Alexander wanted to see what was north of us, and he had a notion that he could remount the Hetaeroi on the superb Saka heavy horses of the steppe. At the time, we thought – some men still do – that we were close to the Euxine. Our patrols had begun to spar with eastern Massagetae, the Saka that Cyrus the Great died fighting. Since we knew from experience that the Assagetae – your mother’s people – lived north of the Euxine and were cousins of the mighty Massagetae, the philosophers, like Callisthenes, came to the conclusion that we were close – that the Hindu Kush connected to the Caucasus mountains, that Hyrkania and Bactria were much closer than they were.

We were wrong, but Alexander believed it, and your mother’s appearance seemed to clinch the deal – a western Assagetae in Sogdiana. We went north towards the Jaxartes, to gain the submission of the Saka, and a tribute in horses that we could use, so Alexander claimed, to conquer India.

There comes a point when hubris is raised to an art form.

We marched north.

Spitamenes felt betrayed. We were, in effect, doing what we’d just told him we wouldn’t do – we were marching into his tribal areas.

He didn’t withdraw. He raised an army, and attacked.

THIRTY-FOUR

Anyone who served with Alexander that year calls it the same – the ‘Summer of Spitamenes’.

Go down to the waterfront, find a soldier’s wine shop and offer to buy a round. Then ask the men with grey hair from Macedon who was the most dangerous enemy we ever faced. Memnon was brilliant, and daring. Darius was cautious, capable and resilient.

To my mind, Spitamenes was brilliant, daring, capable and resilient. If he had known when to be cautious – if he had had any reliable troops . . .

It was the year Cephisophon was archon in Athens. We had beaten every army in the world from Sparta to Persia.

And then came Spitamenes.

Just in time. Let me explain.

We took Marakanda without a sword being loosened in its scabbard – the first town worthy of the name we’d seen north of the Oxus, and we were happy to use its markets. It was a major entrepot, too, and I received two letters – long, lovely letters – from Thais, full of love and information. Olympias was safely ensconced in the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and enclosed a note begging my forgiveness. Thais was at Babylon, with a house and forty servants and all my treasure, bless her.

I went out of my tent, I remember, and I built an altar with my own hands, out beyond the horse lines. Polystratus helped me, and Strako, and Eumenes the Cardian came when I was done. I invited Astibus and Bubares, Theophilus of the Hetaeroi, Philip the Red, Amyntas son of Philip from Craterus’s taxeis, and Ochrid, now not only a freeman but the head of my household, my steward. My son sacrificed a white ram in the dawn, and I swore to wed Thais if I made it alive back to Babylon. I swore to Zeus-Apis to build a temple in Alexandria to his glory, and I have not been a laggard in that, have I? And the others swore similar oaths. It made every one of us feel closer to home, and Barsulas spoke to us in the new light as we roasted our shares of the ram over the ashes.

‘You think the gods have forgotten you,’ he said. ‘But they are here, all around us, every day, I promise you.’

I think he was right – but I know he put heart into every one of us. Even the king loved him – and consulted him often enough that his seer and his other priests became jealous.

But enough of my life. Our supply lines now ran from the coast of the Persian Gulf upriver and over two mountain ranges. A recruit coming from Macedon had to march from Pella to the Pontus, cross on a ship, march to Babylon, then down to the gulf, take ship to Hormuz, then march upcountry to the king. New armour, good swords, decent spearheads, long ash hafts for sarissas, any kind of olive oil, letters from home – everything had to crawl up this lifeline.

Alexander was aware of it. He left four taxeis under Craterus, with ten squadrons of local cavalry, to hold Bactria behind us and he took the rest of the army north and farther east, to explore the northern borders of the Persian Empire.

It made me happy just to hear him say the word border. A border implied a limit, and if we had a limit, then perhaps some day we’d all march home.

The nightly drinking had reached epic proportions. It had started after Darius’s death – in fact, Alexander had always drunk too much when the mood was on him – but the last year, he was drunk every night.

In fact, he was bored, in the first weeks of that summer.

In a way – a distant, godlike way – it was interesting to study him when he was bored. He became increasingly irritable; he tended to focus on things of no importance whatsoever, which confused men who didn’t really know him, such as Callisthenes and Aristander. His focus could suddenly fall on exercise, on medicine, on the power of prophecy, on the colour of a man’s excrement as influenced by food. And then, for days, that focus would consume him.

We were south of the Jaxartes, in the brownest country I have ever seen. Thirty of us were lying on portable klines by a bonfire – it was the little Heraklion, and we’d had a day of contests. I hadn’t won anything, but I had that pleasant level of fatigue that comes with the agon.

Hephaestion came and lay down on my couch. I had avoided him since the torture of Philotas. He knew it. But he lay down.

‘Philotas was never one of us,’ Hephaestion said.

And at some horrible base level, that was true. I knew what he meant. He meant that he didn’t owe Philotas the kind of emotive loyalty that he owed me, or any of the other men who’d survived childhood at Philip’s court.

It was an olive branch.

‘No,’ I said. That was my dove back to him.

He nodded. His head was on his arms, and he was watching a trio of lewd slave girls writhe. They weren’t any good – they’d been used too hard, paid too little and they assumed men were brutes. It is one of the delightful, horrible complexities of the human condition – soldiers want girls who want them, not whores. They’ll take whores, but only if the whores behave as if they want the soldiers.