of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.
The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.
I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.
Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and
Marsyas rose from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.
And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.
The hypaspitoi and the Bactrians under Cyrus, who had come up the gully unopposed and stormed the south wall, now butchered the garrison. No one tried to surrender, and the fighting went on and on – new pockets of resistance were found in alleys, on rooftops, and as the men began to break formation to loot and rape, they found men cowering in basements or tight-lipped in courtyards, and killed them.
Polyperchon’s men came late into the town. They had baulked, left me to die and then been threatened with decimation – death for one man in every ten – by Alexander in person, lying on a litter. I missed it, but he went mad, so I was told by Cleitus, spitting, calling them the sons of whores. Alexander, who never swore. Well, almost never.
When they came into the town, they went on an orgy of destruction and killing. The hypaspitoi had rounded up fifty or so women and some children – to be sold as slaves. Don’t imagine they were rescued for any altruistic purpose. Polyperchon’s men found them by the breach and killed them all.
And then they started killing Cyrus’s men.
At first, the Bactrians ran, or called for help, or pleaded that they were allies – friends.
Then they started fighting back.
I was sitting on a chair in the former agora – a looted chair. I had a nasty gash on my thigh and something was wrong in my lower back, and there was blood trickling from somewhere and running down my arse and my leg – all I wanted to do was sleep, or at least rest. And Polystratus, bless him, had found me some pomegranate juice – in the midst of a massacre, that’s a miracle. He’d been knocked out – clean unconscious – by a blow to the head, but taken no other wound.
I saw the fighting start across the square.
I cursed.
Got to my feet. And, I’m not ashamed to say, I finished my juice before I went to save Polyperchon’s men.
I was so angry that I didn’t bother to think. I walked up to the fighting, and I killed one of the Macedonians with a thrust to the face.
He was a phylarch, and he’d probably fought at Chaeronea. I didn’t particularly care. I put him down, and I stood over him and let my rage have voice.
‘You stupid fucks are killing our Bactrians!’ I roared.
They flinched.
I smacked one man who had his sword raised – I swung the spear so hard he moved a foot or two and fell in a heap, out cold.
‘Anyone else?’ I roared.
My friends – my own companions – began to close around me.
Alexander was there. He’d been carried into the fort on a litter, and had Hephaestion with him.
There wasn’t much I could say, standing there with the blood of a Macedonian officer on my spear.
Alexander was white with pain, but he nodded to me. ‘Your precious pezhetaeroi,’ he said. ‘The sooner have I replaced them . . .’
I had never heard him say it. Just at that moment, I was angry enough to agree, but even an hour later, I was calm, and I began to think of what it meant that Alexander no longer trusted his troops. I wondered if he even knew what was wrong.
They wanted to go home. And they
And when Cyrus embraced me, he said, ‘I tell my men! That you are not like the others.’
In other words, our Bactrians and Persians didn’t love us, either.
Two days later, Alexander was off his litter and leading another assault. I was the one on the litter – it turned out that I had an arrow in my back. It had penetrated my thorax and the wool chiton under it, and gone in the distance of a man’s finger to the first joint, right over the fat that surrounds the kidney.
Most of the men who’d taken arrow wounds were raving. The Sogdians poisoned their arrows, and while only a few men died, the rest were in pain, groaning, screaming, with fevers and sweats.
I was, it turned out, suddenly very unpopular indeed with the army. My killing of a Macedonian made me one of ‘them’. One of the men who was against the old ways. No one seemed to care that the useless fucks had left me to die in the breach. Men I’d led at Gaugamela turned away when my litter passed them.
That’s how bad the army was getting.
Alexander was wounded again at the sixth fort. He took a rock – thrown from high on the wall – to the head, and went down.
Our Bactrians and our Persians stormed the fort with the hypaspitoi. Hephaestion stood over Alexander with his shield, and Black Cleitus got him clear of the fighting.
The seventh fort surrendered, with a garrison of six thousand men. But that day, a hundred men came in from the steppe and reported that Pharnuches had been ambushed by the Sakje, or the Massagetae, or possibly Spitamenes himself. He’d lost his entire command. Fewer than three hundred men had survived.
Alexander ordered the prisoners from the last fort to be executed. He had the most recent Sogdian recruits and the men of Polyperchon’s taxeis do it as a test, or a punishment. The Sogdians were killing their own brothers. The Macedonians were performing an ugly task, and they knew why.
Eumenes convinced him
But pain made the king savage, and the atmosphere of the camp reflected it.
After a week of recuperating, we raced west to rescue Marakanda, because its loss would sever our supply chain. Spitamenes melted away, and we relieved the city.
Craterus went off with a column to pursue Spitamenes – lost him at the edge of the steppe and managed to get into a fight with a party of Sauromatae and Sakje who had disciplined Greek cavalry with them. He lost, and retreated, abandoning his wounded – our third defeat in a month. We’d lost thousands of mercenaries in the forts, in the storming actions, to Spitamenes’ raids and now to the Sauromatae on the steppe.
Alexander’s wounds were so bad that he couldn’t see from time to time, and bone splinters were continually appearing from the leg wound and his collarbone. He was in so much pain that he stayed in his tent, and the Persians he’d surrounded himself with used the time to wall the rest of us off from the king.
Worst of all, Spitamenes was gathering men on the steppe.
Using Marakanda as a headquarters, the king devised a new strategy from his bed. He had the infantry move along the rivers, fortifying. We began to plant garrisons in every valley and on every hilltop, and using the wonderful horses we were taking as tribute from every chieftain we conquered, we mounted as many men as we could and divided the mounted army into five mobile columns. The infantry garrisoned the new forts we built over the winter and the cavalry swept between the forts.
