God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

I didn’t feel careful.

‘They will not change their minds. They are finished.’ I looked around. ‘They were finished years ago, but they comtinued. For you. Their god. Their living, breathing god.’ I shrugged, and my rage brewed up like the flames in a hearth when the door is opened and the wind sweeps in. ‘They are men, not dogs. They have given you everything and you give them a district to rape.’ I shook my head. ‘They are finished. They mean what they say.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘So eloquent. But you cannot imagine that I would turn back for them.’

And then Coenus shocked me. He stood up, as I was standing. ‘Then turn back for me,’ he said. ‘I am finished. I need rest, even if you do not.’

Alexander’s eyes might have burned a man, they were so hot.

But Perdiccas stood up. ‘I stand with Coenus and Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I will fight for you until I die, but I want to stop marching east.’

Lysimachus stood.

Craterus looked from man to man. He was looking for the main chance. Looking for his moment.

Seleucus stood.

Nearchus stood.

The king rose, and hurled his golden cup across the tent, so that it struck the statue of Herakles and seemed to explode.

‘You cannot!’ he cried. ‘We are on the verge of immortality! After this, there will be nothing worthy, nothing great – merely the maintenance of an empire and bureaucracy, where I was a god.’

It was a plea.

‘You seek to limit me. But what limit should a man of the noblest nature put on his labours? I, for one, do not think there should be any limit, so long as every labour leads to noble accomplishments!’ He looked around. ‘We here are like the undying. I am going from triumph to worthy triumph!’

He was standing by his couch, in a swirl of muddy water and matted wet grass where the rising rains had flooded our camp. I mention this because Coenus looked at the floor.

‘Is this Olympus, then?’ he said with a snort.

‘If you just want to know when our wars will end,’ Alexander said, ‘we are not far from the Ganges. After the Ganges is the Eastern Sea. And the Eastern Sea will link to the Hyrkanian Sea, for Aristotle says the great sea girdles the earth.’

Of course, I knew from Kineas – who had sailed the Hyrkanian Sea – that it did not join with any other body of water. And I ran the scouts. I knew that no peasant we had met could tell me how far it was to the Ganges.

‘It is more than a thousand parasanges to the Ganges,’ I said into the silence.

‘You don’t know that!’ he shouted at me.

Craterus lay on his couch, and stared into the cup of wine in his hand as if it might tell him what to say.

Hephaestion sat up on his couch. But he didn’t stand. Nor did he speak.

Alexander looked at me, and the last time I’d seen that look was the night he killed Cleitus.

But I was tired, and I met his murderous glare with indifference. Only when you have killed as many men as I have, lad, and seen as many worthless victories, can you be truly indifferent. And nothing is more effective against hubris than indifference.

‘You traitors! Worthless weaklings!’ Spittle flew from his mouth.

It’s odd, but I thought of the pezhetaeroi huddled in the woods behind our lines, indifferent to my pleas that they go forward to win the battle. Indifferent.

Yes. They weren’t cowards.

They just didn’t have any more to give.

‘If we turn back now,’ he said, once more in control, ‘the warlike tribes of the East – every spearman in that thousand-parasange plain – will rise against us, and all our conquests will be pointless, or we shall have to undertake them again, and our sons will face these men.’

I might have said, So you agree that it is a thousand parasanges to the Ganges? Or I might have said, You used this argument about defeating Bessus, and then Spitamenes. Any of us might have refuted him.

But we had heard it all before, and like the drunkard’s proverbial wife, we shook our heads, tired of his lies.

He stormed from the tent.

Alexander spent two days alone, except for his slaves. He wouldn’t see Hephaestion, or Craterus, much less us, the mutineers.

Then he sent an ultimatum to the army via Agon, his hyperetes. March, or be left behind. Alexander threatened to go forward with only his Persian levies and his subject Indian troops.

Amyntas son of Philip came to my pavilion. My floor was a hand’s breadth deep in water. He sat on an iron stool that rusted as fast as Ochrid’s slaves could polish it, and he shook his head.

‘I want to tell him,’ Amyntas began.

I raised my hand. ‘I won’t conspire,’ I said. ‘Tell him yourself, or don’t.’

Amyntas shrugged and got to his feet in the water. ‘He’s fucking insane,’ he said.

He stood there, waiting for my reaction.

‘By Zeus the saviour of the world, Lord Ptolemy, he promised!’ Amyntas cried suddenly, in almost the same tone in which Alexander had pleaded that we would end as bureaucrats.

I remember that I nodded.

Amyntas left my tent and went to the king.

A day later, Alexander emerged, summoned the command council and announced that we were turning the army and marching for home.

THIRTY-EIGHT

He never forgave any of us. Not the pezhetaeroi, and not the commanders.

What followed was horrible, and it made Sogdiana pale. Even now, I take no pleasure in the telling.

He tried to kill the army. He didn’t retreat along our lines of supply, but went down the Indus river to the sea.

Again, I return to the simile of the woman married to a drunkard. At first, we listened to the complex excuses he offered as to why we had to march down the Indus to the delta, and we affected to believe them. It scarcely mattered to us – we were going home. And I don’t think there were five hundred men in the whole army who didn’t feel the same.

But it turned out that marching down the Indus meant fighting our way through a vast, hostile plain. He wasn’t done – he was still on a binge.

And, in my opinion, he had determined to die, or achieve an even greater level of heroism, if that was possible, than he had achieved against the elephants.

He began well. He held an assembly and announced we would march back. Men applauded – men cheered him as they had cheered him when he charged the elephants. He ordered us to build twelve giant altars to the gods, and we sacrificed like the gods themselves, and we had games that went on twelve days. I did not win in a single event. My hands hurt so much when I awoke most mornings that I couldn’t hold a sword to spar. Men I’d never heard of won most of the events – recruits, just two years out from Pella, or Athens, or Amphilopolis, or Plataea.

One of Cyrus’s men won the archery.

Polystratus won the horse race, and received a golden crown, which he still wears at feasts.

His friend Laertes won the mounted javelin competition.

Then he made Porus, our erstwhile enemy, the satrap of India, and put the army to work as labourers, repairing dams and dykes and towns along the Indus. This was mostly make-work, as Nearchus and Helios and all