God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

shattered.

We lost three troopers wounded and two dead, and we took fifty prisoners. Best of all, the action was over in the time it takes to sing a hymn. It was a small action – no empires fell – but I feel it shows where we were as a force – what we were capable of. Persians, Thracians, Greeks and Macedonians in one force, well trained, well disciplined, and I rather like to think well led. The Indians were good, but not like us at all. They couldn’t fight from a column on a road.

That night, I was huddling by a spitting fire in the rain, happy as only a victorious commander with low casualties can be, and Bubores came to me with a wreath of some local plant – from the king, for my victory. He gave me a hug, and stayed to drink my wine.

I remember because he asked me to tell him how the fight had gone, and I just shrugged. ‘Bubores, do you think this army has ever been a better weapon than it is right now?’

The Nubian looked into the fire – the coals, anyway – for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drill—’

‘The high morale,’ I said.

‘The teamwork,’ Polystratus said at my shoulder. ‘It’s never been better.’

I nodded. ‘When it is like this,’ I said quietly, ‘I almost enjoy it. Hades, brothers – I do enjoy it. But those poor Indians never knew what hit them.’

Bubores nodded. ‘But it is only because he says he’ll go home, after.’

We all nodded, and the wine went around.

Anyway, I got a crown of laurel – or whatever India had that looked like laurel – because I captured their strategos’s chariot. I sent it to Alexander, who received it with delight.

But Porus had beaten us to the river, despite our best efforts. And five days after we left Taxila, we were staring across the river at an army with almost a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants. Porus was no fool. He covered the fords, and all the fords for parasanges up and down the river.

The rain fell.

The army moved up, and built a camp. I doubt that anyone, from footslogger to the King of Macedon, was comfortable, but one of the advantages of years of campaigning in every climate in the world is that your men learn to construct shelters, and this time, since it was clear we might be here for months, we floated logs down the river and built huts.

In fact, the king kept the troops moving, marching up and down the river, building small forts and feinting at various crossings.

Sometimes his brilliance lay in being a thorough master of his craft. For three weeks, every time a detachment marched out of camp, Porus sent twice the number of his Indian cavalry to shadow it along the far side of the river. Our men were still eager, but the wine and olive oil were mostly gone, and we were stymied in an endless quagmire of mud by a foe who outnumbered us.

I kept my lights together as a division. I enjoyed commanding them, and I expected the king to break them up into task forces every day, but he did not, and so I kept them busy, scouting the riverbanks.

Ariston found Adama Island, four parasanges north of the army, outside of Porus’s patrol area. We poured men and supplies north once we’d found it, and all the engineers – twice they tried to bridge it, first with piling driven into the swollen banks, and the second time with a bridge of boats assembled on one bank and swayed across, as we’d done against the Thracians at the Danube.

The river was falling – the rains tapering off – but they couldn’t get a bridge across.

Another week passed. Every day, the king was more difficult to live with – nervous, anxious, quick to anger. He expected Porus to find the potential crossing site any day, and build a fortification to cover it.

I had volunteered to take command at the island and get the advance guard across, and I was on my way to take my leave – already up to my ankles in mud, standing in warm rain – when Hephaestion came out of the king’s tent, his face red and angry even in the watery light.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

He grunted. ‘Going to see him? Good luck to you, Ptolemy. I’m ready to go home to Macedon and leave him.’

I gave him half a grin and went into the tent.

Alexander was staring at a sketch of the river. He looked at me. ‘What?’ he shot at me.

‘I’m on my way upriver to try and get the bridge across.’ I saluted. ‘If it can be done, I’ll do it.’

‘If it can’t be done, we’re finished,’ he said with uncharacteristic candour.

‘So?’ I asked.

He pursed his lips.

‘Answer me this, Lord King – what difference does it make? Why are we fighting Porus?’

Alexander wrinkled his nose and made a face as if I’d asked a childish question. ‘He lies across our path and you ask this?’

I shook my head. ‘We’re invading his country.’ I laughed. ‘We could just march away and not invade his country.’

‘Perhaps I should send someone else to the island,’ he said, only half joking.

We set the next night for our attempt to force the river. Alexander’s plan was subtle, but simple. He was going to march the elites upriver – the Hetaeroi with their Persian counterparts, the hypaspitoi, three cavalry commands under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrios, as well as two big phalanx divisions with all the veteran Macedonians, and my command. We would cross, and try to turn Porus’s position. At first light, on a day that promised to be fair, Craterus was to lead the main army across the river.

I had gathered every boat for ten parasanges, and floated them to our bank, as we had at the Danube. I had sixty Agrianians across already, in four forward pickets with fires.

Alexander arrived before full darkness, with the hypaspitoi. Diades floated the pontoon bridge, Helios got it staked in hard to the far bank and we had some long moments in the torchlit, soaking darkness until it swayed out into the current and stayed put. And then it broke loose.

It was just too short, and came all the way around, breaking ropes, to land against our bank. Luckily, we had dozens of Greek sailors, and they fended the boats off and then pulled them back upstream. Ropes were shifted for another try, and four more boats were lashed on to the end of the pontoon platform, and we had lost an hour.

Diades begged the king’s forgiveness. Alexander sat bareheaded in the torchlight, surrounded by his officers, and watched, his eyes never leaving the ropes, the sailors and the boats.

Again they swayed the bridge out into the current. Again we saw Helios and his men drive in palings on the far side.

This time, they got their grapples into the far bank properly, and the bridge steadied in the current. The current took the bridge and slammed it downstream, but the hawsers held.

We waited.

They held.

I caught Cyrus’s eye. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and led my household companions across the bucking bridge. But Alexander was ahead of me, with Seleucus and Lysimachus.

He cantered across the bridge. I rode more slowly.

The engineers began to hold men back, only allowing men to cross in tens, and meanwhile the infantry was embarking in the rafts and boats I had collected for a week.

The boards on the bridge were slick, the oils in the new wood combining with the water to make them treacherous. To make matters worse, the rain turned into a lightning storm, and bolts from heaven began to lash the column.

A bolt struck a file of phalangites, killing three men outright.

In midstream, with the river rushing under my horse’s feet like a live thing, the sky criss-crossed with purple lightning, as if Zeus had set up a trestle to lay siege to the sky, the banks on either shore lost in the darkness and the torrential fall of rain that was, itself, the negation of all sound, I felt as if I were no longer of this world, but had followed the king into the nether regions.

Indeed, when my charger got his forefeet on the far bank, with a loud whinny to announce himself to the waiting horses, or perhaps a prayer to Poseidon for his deliverance, the king spoke out of the flashing darkness.

‘Welcome to Tartarus,’ he said bitterly.