God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

He looked around, and my feelings were exposed on every face – even men like Craterus. Relief. Quiet joy, or merely exhaustion.

He nodded, as if he’d been talking to someone else. ‘But I have one favour to ask,’ he said. Nodded again. ‘I want you all to be at your very best. You think you are tired and far from home?’ He looked around. ‘We are living in myth. We are the cutting edge of an epic. We are the heroes of the Iliad. When we march home to Babylon and Pella, we will be leaving behind this – the existence that is greater than the merely mortal. If this is my last great campaign – make it your best. Eh?’

I don’t think his words reached Craterus. But Perdiccas met my eye. We were both smiling.

Alexander never gave speeches. Or when he did, they sounded a little forced.

Coenus was smiling, and Lysimachus, and Seleucus, now commanding the hypaspitoi.

‘I’m going to send Perdiccas and Hephaestion down the Indus, to pick off the cities on the river. Craterus, you and I and Seleucus will go north on the Choaspes. The rendezvous is Gandaris. The Raja of Taxila is our ally – Ptolemy is in contact with him already, and we have depots marked on your itineraries. The order of march is here. Any questions?’

People asked questions – Seleucus especially. He always did.

When they ran out of questions, Alexander looked around. He had set himself a Herculean task, and that put him on the plane of the gods. He was happy. He was also not wearing the diadem, not wearing a white robe. He was in a plain chitoniskos, dressed like any Macedonian aristocrat after a day of war, or hunting. First among equals.

‘Anything more?’ he asked. He looked around.

He was beaming.

‘Let’s go and conquer India, then,’ he said.

While Hephaestion took the main army straight downriver – straight being a remarkable thing to say of the upper Indus – and Alexander went off into the trackless wooded mountains of the Chaispes, I had a different role – as the linchpin between the two columns. I had my squadrons and Philip the Red with me, and together we kept the two columns in contact. I had the Paoenians and most of the Prodromoi and Ariston to command them, and all the Agrianians, who we’d mounted on mules, and Strako’s Angeloi, who’d been expanded with locals into a small squadron. It was one of my favourite commands – the perfect instrument for the job. We could cover hundreds of stades of ground – at one point I had men along both banks of the Indus all the way down to the plains below Taxila – or combine to fight. And the preponderance of scouts allowed me to gather information for the future while supporting the king and Hephaestion. And my central location allowed me to control supplies to both columns. I was in constant contact with Eumenes. Information flowed, logistics were put in place.

We were a superb instrument of war. Even if that meant we ate men’s souls.

From a purely military standpoint, the oddest thing about the Taxila campaign was that the Raja had already made submission, and his city provided us with supplies and convoys of grain, which came from in front. The usual problem of supply is bringing it up from the rear, and supplying our army over the Hindu Kush would have been brutal. But from the front – I never experienced anything like it – all I had to do was move my cavalry and cover the convoys.

Alexander plunged into the mountains with a fervor that verged on the reckless, and got an arrow in his arm leading the first assault on a hill town a week later. I arrived a few days after, with a convoy of wine and olive oil all the way from Syria – a convoy that had come over the Hindu Kush. Greek and Macedonian soldiers need wine and olive oil. Without them, they will function, but they won’t like it. With them, they may go without food, but they will fight.

At any rate, he was lying on a kline, reading one of my reports and eating grapes. He looked up and made a face.

‘Ptolemy!’ he said.

I had to grin. It was good to be liked and valued. Again.

‘I brought you wine,’ I said. ‘Good wine. There’s some Lesbian stuff and some Chian.’ I handed him a small amphora. ‘And this. Antipater sent it.’

Alexander raised an eyebrow.

‘What happened?’ I asked, pointing at the heavy bandage on his sword arm.

‘Hephaestion will scold me,’ he said. He rolled his eyes. ‘I led an assault and I got shot.’ He shrugged. ‘It was fun. And it is just a scratch.’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I don’t mean to make a scene, Ptolemy, but take that amphora out and smash it on a rock.’

I made a face. ‘I’ll take it and drink it,’ I said.

He turned. ‘Do not,’ he said. ‘It’s sure to be poisoned, and you are one of my few remaining friends.’

I was? Who knew? I was tempted to say as much, but instead, I shook my head. ‘Antipater?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure of it,’ he said. He shrugged, winced when he moved his right shoulder. Lay back. ‘Thais says so,’ he went on.

That was the first I had heard that Thais was continuing to provide the king with information. We exchanged our own letters.

I had freed the Circassian. Cleitus’s death had that good effect – I never bedded her. Funny – when I told Thais the story, she shook her head, touched my face and said I was a fool.

Am I a fool? I am what I am. And I suppose that Alexander would say the same.

I stayed with him for two days, while his siege engines pounded a high stone keep to flinders and Seleucus stormed it. Then we moved on, and Alexander’s shoulder was better, and at the next big stone keep – they seemed to grow on the mountains like mushrooms – Alexander insisted on leading the assault. Again.

‘I’ll go with you,’ I said.

Alexander nodded. ‘Of course you will,’ he said.

They should have surrendered. Mind you, no bandit chief on the wheel of the earth could have imagined that the Great King, King of Kings, would drag eighty war engines through the Hindu Kush and over the Khyber Pass simply to break the tyranny of the chiefs in the Swat hills.

‘This region has raided Taxila and the plains for generations,’ Alexander said as the men behind us fidgeted in the pre-dawn mist. ‘I intend to crush the warlords and break the war bands down into manageable sizes.’

I made a face. I assumed he couldn’t see me in the dark.

But we had grown up together, and he shook his head. ‘You’re thinking that it is a lot of trouble,’ he said. I saw his teeth gleam. ‘But it is worth doing well. War is a craft like any other – but you know that – you put the food in my army’s gullet.’

‘I try,’ I said. It was nice to have him talking. ‘What about the chiefs and their retinues?’

‘Shed no tears for them. Ask any peasant in the valley what it’s like to live under – literally under – these bandits.’ He sounded passionate. Interesting.

‘These people don’t even know who we are,’ I pointed out.

‘They will before morning,’ the king said.

We crept up the hill in the last darkness. We put ten ladders up against the wall, and then, far too late to save themselves, the defenders threw lit torches into the ditch and began to loose arrows at us.

Alexander was wearing greaves, but one of the arrows caught him in the ankle and he almost fell off the ladder. I pinned him against it. Then, because going down was out of the question, we went up.

He was the first on the wall, and he moved like the athlete he was, and his sword rose and fell and stabbed the way a skilled seamstress’s needle moves, with perfect economy. I was only heartbeats behind him, and still he had killed or mortally wounded three men before I had my feet over the parapet.

There was a rush along the top of the wall, and it came at my side. I turned, put my shield into my attackers and my aspis all but filled the catwalk. They pushed me back, and I cut under the shield – and then back over. My opponents were being pushed forward by their mates. I scored across one man’s thigh under my shield and raked another’s nose – no kills, but they flinched, and I backed up a full step and then pushed, caught one man off balance and he fell off the wall.

I couldn’t risk a glance, but I did wonder where in Hades the king was.

Behind me, I could hear him. He bellowed, ‘Spear! Throw it!’

I had my right thumb in the hollow of my blade – a nasty technique I’d been taught by a hoplomachos, a