Astibus lay dead, his body broken, where the ladder had collapsed.
Bubores . . .
I took a deep breath and looked around. There were no more ladders.
‘Climb it,’ I said. ‘Use your daggers as pegs.’
Had the top of the wall been defended, it would have been foolish suicide. But there wasn’t an enemy to be seen.
Men threw their daggers on the ground and Abreas was off, climbing the wall, and Leonnatus went behind him, handing him new daggers, and they went faster than I thought possible. Men brought billets of sharp wood, bronze rods, anything they could pillage . . .
Laertes came with a silk rope – some sort of decorative rope, but we got it up to Leonnatus.
‘The king lives!’ Abreas roared from the top of the wall, and he jumped down inside to aid the king.
Leonnatus paused to tie the silk rope to a stanchion, and then he, too, jumped down inside.
I took the rope in my hand and turned to Laertes. ‘No one climbs until I’m at the top,’ I said.
I went up the rope. Try it, lad – try climbing a narrow silk cord, in armour, in the heat of the sun, after five days without sleep.
I made it.
I looked down.
Alexander stood with Peukestas on one side and Abreas on the other, and Leonnatus was just rising, having taken an arrow in the thigh. Blood was
Even as I watched, Abreas took an arrow in the throat.
They were facing a hundred men. Or more.
They were surrounded by corpses, and it was clear that the Mallians wouldn’t face them. They were, most of them, without bows, and they threw rocks, refuse – anything.
They had half a dozen archers with the great Indian longbows, and they were the most dangerous men.
I ran along the wall.
An archer saw me, and loosed. For a heartbeat, that arrow and I were all there was in the world, and then it hissed past me, and I reached the point I had selected on the wall and jumped.
Thirty feet.
I landed behind the archers, and I killed one before I knew I’d turned my ankle. Then I killed another.
Then I realised that I was between the enemy and their own gate.
I did the bravest thing of my life. The best thought-out. The most amazing.
I turned, and ran to the gate. Away from the king. Away from the fight. With my back to the remaining archers.
I lifted the bar, and a hundred Macedonians burst into the courtyard like an avenging flood. I turned and ran back towards the king, cursing my ankle, with the daimon of combat filling me, and there was Peukestas standing over the king with the king’s shield from Troy on his arm, and the king lay at his feet, and Leonnatus was on his knees, swinging a kopis as the Mallians tried desperately to kill all three.
I ran along the colonnade, and Hermes gave me wings.
I saw the spear meant for the king.
I threw myself between the spearman and his victim without thought, as if my whole life had been lived for this moment, to save the king from a death that he richly deserved.
The spear hit my aspis and skidded away.
The king’s eyes met mine, and he smiled.
And the king was saved.
He almost died.
We killed every man, woman and child in the town.
THIRTY-NINE
We didn’t march south again until spring. The king teetered on the edge of death for two months, and blood from his lungs flowed over his breast whenever he took a deep breath.
The army became increasingly nervous, like a young horse facing an elephant. They realised that, without him, we probably wouldn’t make it home. It’s odd, but I had come to the same conclusion. We were sailing a sea of enemies. We had slaughtered so many people that we were universally feared and hated – there was no hope, now, of making an ally. And here, in the midst of the chaos he had created, if the god of war left us, we would all drown.
Or that’s how it looked, on the banks of the Indus.
He recovered around midwinter – emerged from his tent, spoke to the troops. Was cheered like a god. He ordered the surviving Mallians to build us more ships. He enslaved virtually the entire surviving population and put them to work, and in the spring, we sailed south, leaving a desert of destroyed farms, burned cities and corpses. I have heard angry young people tell me that war never changes anything.
Tell that to the Mallians.
I look at the pages of the Journal, and I see that we fought our way down the Indus. It’s a blur to me. We did not truly rest among the Mallians – no more than an exhausted man rests when he has three hours of sleep – and the spring campaign was more rapid marches and more killing. By late spring, no one in the Valley of the Indus would stand against us. Whole populations moved east, emptying towns before us.
There was one exception.
South of the land of the Osetae, we were marching – I was marching, anyway. The king had left Nearchus to command the river fleet, and the whole of the Aegema was travelling on the banks of the river, broad spring meadows carpeted in flowers. It was beautiful, unless you looked too closely and realised that these were supposed to be farm fields.
It was mid-morning, as I remember. I was riding with the king, and the Prodromoi came up to inform us that there were Indians – unarmed – in the fields ahead.
The Indians had an entire class of philosophers – fascinating men, like priests, except that they were born to their caste, and never left it – called Brahmins. Waiting in the fields were hundreds of Brahmins, dressed in the sombre colours of a funeral.
Alexander cantered over to them, with his bodyguards, fifty Hetaeroi of the household, and some hypaspists. I rode alongside him on my mare. We were a brilliant riot of colour – horses, gold and silver buckles, brilliant bronze breastplates, helmets, silk and wool and linen, strips and furs.
One man stood forth – a tall man with a long beard. As we approached, he and his companions began to stomp their feet on the ground.
Alexander laughed. He turned to one of our many interpreters – a Mallian slave. ‘Why are they stomping their feet? Is it some form of applause?’
The king’s interpreter rode forward, dismounted and touched his head to the ground respectfully. They spoke in the local language.
Then the Brahmin stepped forward. His Greek was not wonderful, but it was clear.
‘We own the ground under our feet,’ he said. ‘And you, conqueror, own no more than we.’
As a veteran of the Sogdian War, I knew we never owned any more than the ground under our feet. So I laughed.
The Brahmin glared.
Alexander nodded. ‘So very true,’ he said, with no interest at all. He turned to me. ‘Perhaps you should befriend him, Ptolemy, since his humour seems to suit you.’
We rode on.
By midsummer, we had taken Patala, the greatest city at the mouth of the Indus, and a few weeks later, I stood looking out at the Great Ocean.
It stretched, a dirty grey-white sheet of sun-sparkled seawater, to the horizon – stinking in the heat, rippled like a new-washed chiton of linen, and it was obvious to a child that this was an enormous body of water and that it
