God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great

The naked man was an Olympic athlete who had come all this way to train Alexander’s soldiers.

Coenus – our Coenus, not your father’s friend – wouldn’t have lasted this long if he hadn’t been absolutely obedient. He turned, drew his sword and set his shield.

The naked boy came forward, edging crabwise.

Coenus struck, thrusting his shield into the man’s body and cutting hard, overhand.

The Greek slid inside the cut, broke his arm and knocked him unconscious with his club in one blow.

Fight over.

Alexander drew his bow from the gorytos, nocked an arrow and shot the Greek. The arrow went in just over his kidneys, and he fell screaming.

His screams pursued us down the ridge.

Hephaestion looked at me, and I just shook my head at him. I couldn’t think of what to say, or do, but for the first time, I considered two things.

Riding away from the army and taking my chances with the king ordering me killed.

Or killing Alexander.

That night, six of us had a secret meeting. It was a conspiracy – we all knew we could be killed for having the discussion. I swore never to repeat what we said, or who was there. It was a desperate hour, and a desperate oath. So I won’t tell you – except that we discussed options.

When we were done, Hephaestion held me back. ‘Barsines or her sister,’ he said. ‘Bagoas turns my stomach, but he’d do, too.’

Well, it was better than regicide. I nodded. ‘But we have to get through the weeks until he finds a sex toy or we can import one,’ I said.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘We need something as good as the bow was. And we need it to stay beautiful.’ His bronze hair glittered in the firelight. It was already cold in the mountains.

‘Horses? Playing Polis? How silk is made?’ I was talking to hear myself. I wanted Thaïs. I wanted to drink wine with Polystratus and Cyrus, or Marsyas. I wanted to stop being afraid.

Hephaestion shook his head. ‘He’s close to the edge,’ he said. ‘What do we do?’

I didn’t have an answer.

I went to bed.

Polystratus wakened me while the stars were still turning overhead. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘The king wants you.’

I got out of my cloak, wrapped it back around me and ran for his tent – terrified, in a sleepy, cold way, that he’d done something. Killed Hephaestion.

But they were sitting together.

He was smiling, his face easy and unlined, his eyes glittering.

‘Listen, Ptolemy!’ he said. ‘Spitamenes is in revolt, and he’s slaughtered all seven of our new garrisons.’

Hephaestion looked at me. His eyes said everything.

Alexander went on, ‘He’s raised the whole province while we were playing at archery – and he’s cut us off from the main army. We’re surrounded. And our supply lines are cut.’ He fingered his beard. And smiled.

Hephaestion smiled.

Hades, I smiled myself.

Alexander looked up from the dispatch. ‘Gentlemen, I think we might have a war on our hands,’ he said.

We were saved.

THIRTY-FIVE

Alexander’s reaction to Spitamenes was pla

We marched for the Jaxartes. And we went hard and fast.

We took four forts in three days. In each case, we took the fort by storm, and the garrisons were slaughtered in the storming action. Alexander made it clear to the Bactrians that there were to be no survivors.

In every case, Alexander led the storming party in person.

This was not misplaced Homeric heroics. We had added thousands of barbarian auxiliaries to the army, and we were so short on ‘Macedonians’ that Illyrians and even Thracians had begun to seem like close friends. And morale among the Macedonian troops was low. Alexander made it clear that we were to lead from the front, and when the assault parties went in, the entire front rank of a taxeis might be, for instance, Hetaeroi officers.

That’s what it was taking to get our men into combat.

It was bloody work, but the Bactrian levies did their part, and that meant that they were ours. After killing their cousins in Spitamenes’ service, they weren’t going to go back to the steppe or join the revolt.

The Bactrians were better soldiers than any of us expected. They had enough tribal feuds and remembered hatreds to get them going, and they were still in awe of us. The problem was that as the Bactrians began to outperform the Macedonians, the bad feeling, already present, began to escalate.

There’s a belief, common among the sort of generals who fight their battles in the baths or lying on a comfortable kline at a party, that men who have fought in a number of battles are veterans and thus better soldiers. In the main, this is true. Veterans don’t die from preventable accidents. Veterans get fewer diseases, know how to dig a latrine and know how to find food. So they can indeed wager on how new recruits will die, in the field.

Veterans have learned a few things, and one of the things they learn is that people diein war or are horribly mutilated, and that the way to avoid these fates is to be careful and not take risks. Sometimes, in combat, the raw, unblooded troops are the better fighters.

The fifth of Cyrus’s forts on the Jaxartes – the one we called Cyropolis – was the worst.

Alexander had been wounded the day before, storming the Dakhas fort. He’d taken an arrow right through the shin – Philip had it out in no time, but it left the king out of the next action, against a fort that had a garrison of seven thousand men.

So there I was, with most of my friends and my own retainers. I had set out from Macedon with twenty grooms, and I had six left. Polystratus was now a gentleman and an officer – a phylarch. His second, Theodore, was now a hetaeros, a half-file leader in a gold-plated helmet. Ochrid, who had begun our campaigns as my body slave, was now my steward, as I have noted, and about this time started to serve as my mounted groom, and usually fought with the Hetaeroi, and any day now, I was going to have to put him in the ranks and add him to my roster. This is not a complaint – Ochrid was, it turned out, a warrior to his fingers’ ends. Most men are, if they are well led. Rather I mean it as an example of how desperate our ma

As the numbers of Greeks in our ranks increased – even in the Hetaeroi – the older Macedonians grew less and less inclined to accept the Bactrians and the Persians, as if the line had to be drawn somewhere.

But I digress. Cyropolis. The fort was two hundred feet above us, and I was standing in the front rank between Polystratus and Marsyas. I had four thousand men formed behind me, and another thousand Bactrians under Cyrus, ready to go up a dry gully to the south of the place. As far as I could see, the dry gully would get them within fifty paces of the position and the useless amateurs guarding the fort had missed it. I certainly hoped so.

My four thousand were all veterans. They were a mix of mercenaries and one of Parmenio’s former taxeis – Polyperchon’s Tymphaeans. Polyperchon was down with one of Apollo’s shafts in him, and his men – some of whom were survivors of Philip’s campaigns – were none too happy to be used as assault troops.