God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ he responded.

Perdiccas was watching a crowd of soldiers form near the baggage animals. ‘They may just decide to kill the animals in the lines,’ he said. ‘Blood is as good as water, if you can keep it down.’ He shrugged. ‘I learned that in Bactria.’

Philip the Red was dressing his troop of Hetaeroi, making a good show to overawe the pezhetaeroi and their women – women who were often as dangerous as the men – when the king rode up. He didn’t dash up to us – he rode slowly, and there were fewer than a dozen knights behind him.

We saluted.

He shook his head. ‘There’s no depot at Gelas,’ he said. ‘Not an amphora of wine, not a mythemna of water, nor of grain, not one bullock.’

We looked at him in silence.

He sat up straighter. ‘It is a betrayal. Someone wants this army dead.’ He shrugged.

We were silent. I couldn’t think what to say. Apollophanes was never much of a leader, but I didn’t see him as a traitor.

It didn’t matter, though. If there was no depot . . .

I rode over to the king’s side. ‘We must order the draught oxen slaughtered,’ I said. ‘They will provide food and drink – buy us some time.’

Alexander looked at me, and in the last light of the sun, his eyes burned like fire. ‘If only they hadn’t forced me to stop,’ he said. ‘We would all be comfortable in some marching camp on the Ganges.’

Oh, how I hated him, in that moment.

Perdiccas and I ordered the excess baggage animals slaughtered. The pezhetaeroi and their women killed them, drained their blood, and in the morning we marched, leaving a field of animal corpses, as if they had fought us, like the Mallians. And the men and women marched with brown blood flaking from their hands and mouths, because there was not one drop of water with which to wash.

Alexander took his bodyguard and rode for the coast, to find the fleet.

He came back four days later, and we were still moving. We had used up all the rest of the water, and he led us to the coast – three days out of our way – where he’d found a spring.

We marched along the coast for six days, and we filled the remaining sixty wagons with water in skins and jars and anything that would hold it, and men marched with their helmets in their arms, full of water, children tried to walk holding a poor cup of water.

There weren’t many children left.

I do not remember when it happened. I merely remember that one night Bubores came into my camp – I should explain. I was sitting on my saddlecloth, with my military cloak wrapped around me. Laertes and I were repairing our tack, to make our horses’ lives as easy as we could. We had no tents, no baggage of any kind – everything I owned was on my body or on Amphitrite’s rump. I’d killed my last riding horse the night before, for food, and from him I’d fed forty Hetaeroi and all the surviving Angeloi.

At any rate, Bubores came, and sat on his haunches in that African way in the dying light of the sun. He had a young boy with him, a wizened, dark-skinned boy of four or five.

Laertes held out a cup. ‘Share, friend,’ he said. He’d found us some water, and we didn’t ask him where. Ochrid had done the same, the day before.

Bubores took the cup and gave it to the boy. ‘You remember,’ he said, and his deep voice was strong and even, ‘when the hypaspitoi were new, and we marched on to your farm – and you had slaves and bronze kettles for every man?’ He grinned. ‘I wanted to thank you. Ever since then. I had never owned a slave before, nor had any man treated me that way.’

I laughed. ‘Bubores – you are a soldier of the Aegema, an officer, and you stand by the king. You can tell me this any time. Why now?’

Bubores rattled the necklace of bones he wore around his neck. ‘I will die soon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘I am paying my debts. I owed you my thanks – never managed to tell you.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t be an irrational arse. You won’t die here.’

His bright eyes met mine, and his look was calm – and like the look new lovers give each other. Trust. Belief. ‘I will die soon,’ he said. ‘And so will most of us. Here? In the desert? Back at Babylon? What does it matter? The king will kill us all.’ He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. ‘It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.’ He raised his hands. ‘What does that make me?’

I had never heard him speak this way.

Laertes shook his head and Polystratus, behind me, grunted. ‘Got that right,’ he said quietly.

‘This boy is my son,’ Bubores said. ‘The mother is dead now. The boy is a good boy, and all I have left – what treasure is worth a fuck, out here? Listen, Ptolemy. You are a great man – an aristocrat, a friend of the king. When there is no more food, you will have food. When there is no more water, you will have water for a few more days. I beg you, as an old comrade, to take my son when I am dead.’

Polystratus turned. ‘Just say yes, and don’t protest. Bubores, we’ll protect your son. You have my word.’

Bubores shook my hand, and Laertes’ and Polystratus’s. And then he and the boy went back into the silent darkness.

Two days later, while I walked next to Amphitrite, I saw him. He was walking at my mare’s tail.

I looked at him, and he met my eyes.

‘Pater dead,’ he said.

I gave him water and we walked on.

When we had been fifty days in Gedrosia, give or take a few days, I was with the king. The light was gone from his face. We were burned red brown, and we hadn’t had any water in four days. We were losing a thousand men and women a day. There were fewer than two hundred horses left.

We were marching only at night, which made it easier – if stumbling blindly across an endless waste of grit and rock, with no sandals and bleeding feet, bleeding gums, parched throat and no sweat – can be called easier – but the sun was rising and we were still going. Alexander was sure we were close to the capital of Gedrosia, called Poura.

We came over a rise, and entered a long valley – a barren, rocky valley that had ancient trees – myrrh trees, the largest any of us had ever seen, with myrrh gum so abundant that we crushed it under our feet as we marched, so that the whole valley smelled as if the gods had come to us. It was absurd, and beautiful, and the smell rose to the heavens, and we had very few dead that day. And I have hated the smell of myrrh ever since.

The next day, we were losing men so fast that I couldn’t stop to prod one without another falling over near by, and men had begun to die – literally, to die – on their feet.

I left Amphitrite and Bubores’ son with Polystratus and headed for the king at the very front.

He was walking quickly, using a spear as a staff. Perdiccas and a handful of his bodyguard were with him, and the rest of the army trailed away behind him like an army of spectres, spread, I expect, as far as three hundred stades – at the rate we were moving, there were still living men two weeks’ march behind us.

Again, we marched – or shuffled – all night, and kept going into the dawn.

I had intended to say something to the king. But now that I was following this slim figure into the dawn – with the print of blood from his reopened wounds clear on his chiton – I realised that there was nothing to say. The time to speak, or to act, was so long past . . .

Agrianians came out of the morning murk. There were half a dozen, without an officer, and they clustered around the king as I came up.

They had a Thracian helmet full of water.

It fixed our attention the way a beautiful woman can fix the attention of a hundred men in the agora. I noticed that it was not just water, but cool water, which formed condensation on the bronze of the helmet.

The Agrianians knelt, and their leader gave the helmet to Alexander, handing it over with head bowed.

Alexander looked into the bowl of the helmet for a moment. Then he looked around. By then, in the first light of day, there must have been a thousand men, perhaps three or four women, and Bubores’ son.

He smiled.

‘Did you bring enough for everyone?’ he asked.