God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

did not flow into the sea near Libya or any other sea. It had tides – great tides.

I was with a cavalry patrol when I first saw it.

I remember reining Amphitrite in and sitting on her back, looking out at its white-hot immensity, and thinking that we were doomed.

But we were not doomed. We were merely very far from home. After a pause to gather supplies, Alexander reorganised the survivors, picked march routes himself without consulting any of the rest of us and marched us west towards Persia.

Morale was high, because any man who could see the sun could see that at last we’d turned west, into the setting sun, and we were marching home, or at least towards Macedon, as was evident to the meanest understanding.

Of course, they hadn’t heard of the Gedrosian Desert.

I had. I had patrols out all the time. And it was clear to me that we were about to undertake one of the labours of Herakles.

Let me be clear. We could have taken the route Craterus took, across the mountains. We knew how to do mountains, and most mountains have water.

We could have ferried the army home by sea, sending three lifts.

I was with the king, and Leonnatus, who was his new favourite (fair enough – he had saved the king’s life), lying on a couch with Perdiccas. Strako – now an officer of the Prodromoi – was going through the options.

And that useless fuck, the seer, stood and poured a libation. ‘Cyrus lost his entire army crossing the Gedrosian Desert,’ he said, the pompous fuck. ‘No army has ever crossed it, O King.’

‘My army will cross it,’ Alexander shot back. He looked around, and Leonnatus, who was another driven man, grinned.

‘Or die trying,’ Hephaestion said wearily.

‘Oh, as for that . . .’ the king said. He grinned. ‘They made me turn back. They can’t complain about my route home.’

I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

More men died in the desert than died at Hydaspes.

I ran the logistika for as long as we had any meaningful amount of supplies. I didn’t do it for the king. I did it for the army.

To be fair, he was, as usual, of two minds. He didn’t care if they died, but he wanted to get them across triumphantly. But I think he wanted enough of them to die to make it look Herculean.

He did order supplies to be gathered. He sent out members of Thais’s Angeloi on racing camels, headed north-west and due west, to the satraps, ordering them to prepare magazines for our march. I helped with this, and while I thought that the king was setting an impossible pace for his army, assuming that they could cross a hundred stades of desert a day, I nonetheless had to be satisfied with the other preparations. The satrap of Gedrosia was ordered to have fifty thousand mythemnoi of water at every depot – not enough for surfeit, but a realistic amount. The grain, the meat on the hoof, the remounts – I planned them all. Spare saddles, cloth for chitons, baskets to replace baskets, pack animals to replace dead pack animals.

I had three days, and I doubt I slept. When I closed my eyes, the Greek letters danced in front of my eyes, and when I awoke, it was with the thought that I hadn’t counted on the weight of water jars in my calculations for cartage.

Alexander had an air about him – of amusement, perhaps – that I found frightening. As if he knew that the result was a foregone conclusion, but insisted on playing his part with a light heart.

Nonetheless, he signed and sealed my orders for Apollophanes, satrap of Gedrosia, and for the satraps of Carmania and Archosia. We pillaged Patala for carts and draught animals, and when we formed to march west for good, we had forty-two thousand men and twenty-two thousand women and children, as well as a little over two hundred thousand animals. And that did not include Craterus with the elephants, who took another route, nor Nearchus with the fleet, which now ventured out of the river and on to the open sea.

Alexander imagined that the fleet would be in touch with us as we marched, but most of the coastline of Gedrosia is a single massive cliff, fifty men high, and barbed like a phalanx with spears.

For two days, we were still in the plain of the Indus.

On the third day, we began to climb, and the climate grew drier, although the air was humid. We reached a set of low hills, and when we climbed them, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau between the mountains – the endless, tall, barbed mountains of Archosia – with the cliff and the sea to our left.

An army of seventy thousand men and women and children, on a single march route, with a single track just wide enough for two wagons to travel abreast – in places, it narrowed to a single cart track.

So, a little mathematics. How long is an army of seventy thousand, if there is only room for four men to march abreast?

About a hundred stades. A hundred stades. And that’s without intervals between units and divisions, without stragglers, without a single broken cartwheel or dying horse blocking the path.

And never mind the corpses.

An army strung out over a hundred stades, which only marches fifty stades a day, has to travel in multiple divisions, and they must all form at the same hour and march at the same time, or they cause each other brutal traffic delays in the boiling sun.

All of which we did.

We had excellent march discipline, or we’d all have died. But after the first two weeks, we were losing a hundred men a day, and the officers knew we couldn’t turn back. And the rocky ground had no habitation to strip, no peasants whose water and food we could forage. Even in Bactria, there had been wells and streams. Gedrosia had nothing.

Alexander seemed delighted. Because it was so hard.

After the fourth week, the king had to move up and down the column constantly to keep people moving. We were all doing it, but he was the most active. I met him, repeatedly, and he’d always halt, accept my salute and smile.

‘Not as bad as it might be,’ he’d say, while a twenty-three-year-old Persian concubine died of heat exhaustion at the feet of his riding horse.

On and on.

In the fifth week, we were losing five hundred people a day, most of them at first light when they simply refused to march. The phylarchs had orders not to waste energy on the dying, but simply to keep the men moving. We were just a day or two from the first great depot, and Alexander felt our losses so far were acceptable. I could have spent my time in rage, but I was as hot and tired as the others, and my little Arabian mare was finally showing signs of wear, and I wanted her to live, so I gave her all my water that evening.

I barely slept. Once you have no water, everything goes wrong in your body.

The next day, Laertes forced me to drink a cup of his own water. Bless him. And we started again.

Alexander came up, saluted and informed me that he was riding ahead with the Hetaeroi of the royal household to the depot.

‘I’ll be back in three hours,’ he said. He looked around. ‘When I tell them it’s only six stades away, the men will perk up.’

I wasn’t sure that was true at all, but I let him go with a wave and started to rove the column. I saw Bubores threaten to kill a man who wanted to sit down, and I saw Amyntas carry a child.

The king didn’t return until sunset.

We made about twenty-two stades, by my reckoning. A poor march.

And we didn’t get to the depot.

I was standing with Hephaestion, where we’d gathered two hundred Hetaeroi to guard the two dozen water wagons that still held water. In the animal park, we had another twelve hundred empty carts – most drawn by oxen – and the draught animals were increasingly difficult. Oxen are too big to control, when they lose their heads, and my experience as a logistics officer told me that the oxen had been taken a few marches too far.

‘We’re not going to make it,’ Hephaestion said.

I was stunned by this pronouncement. ‘It can’t be more than a day’s march to the supplies,’ I said.