Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Alexander was looking right at the low hill that dominated the craggy heights to our left, and as sure as cats make kittens, just as he said this, fifty Greek cavalry emerged from behind the hill.

I had maybe twenty of my own men, and Polystratus and a few grooms.

The Greek cavalry didn’t come at us pell-mell. They formed in a neat rhomboid a stade away, and Cleomenes had time to buckle his breastplate.

‘They look professional,’ Kineas said. He pulled the cheek-plates down on his helmet. Quietly, he said, ‘Shouldn’t the king go to the rear?’

I smiled. ‘He should,’ I agreed. ‘But he won’t!’

They came forward at us, and we had about the same numbers.

Alexander took the point. There was no stopping him. He saw Kineas and smiled. ‘More Athenians over there than here,’ he said.

‘Quality over quantity,’ Kineas said. He grinned at the king.

Alexander threw his head back and roared. ‘By the gods, you are a man after my own heart,’ he said. He tossed his javelin in the air and caught it. ‘Oh, I am alive .’

As soon as we started forward, I realised that the big man with the dark skin who was coming right at me had to be Memnon himself. And these cavalrymen would be his Theban exiles.

We smashed together at a fast trot. Neither side had time to get to a gallop. But because we were so slow, both sides were perfectly ordered, and we crashed together as if we were hoplites on foot.

Fights like that aren’t about skill, but about horse size and riding ability. We were evenly matched, and we were suddenly in our hipposthismos, pushing and cutting, and my spear was broken – I can never tell you how, it always just seems to happen.

I was sword to sword with Memnon – or rather, he cut at me with his kopis, and I blocked with the ash staff of my busted spear. I forced him to parry high, and I got my bridle hand on his elbow and started to push, and quick as a viper he put his head down and rammed my face with the crest of his helmet. But my nasal held, and he didn’t break my nose or my face. I went for my dagger, rammed it into his side and missed my blow – he caught my dagger in his bridle hand and disarmed me.

He was good.

‘Let me at him!’ Alexander shouted at my right hip.

I’d have laughed, if I hadn’t been so busy.

Memnon now had my right wrist and I had his. I had his with my left thumb down , so I started to rotate his hand by main strength and leverage. My riding horse didn’t help – too small and light for this kind of work, but she had lots of heart, and as she backed away from Memnon’s bigger stallion and took a bite to the face, she reared, and for a second I had the purchase, and I stripped the sword from Memnon’s hand, getting a slash across my neck in exchange.

He slashed a dagger at the back of my off leg, and scored deeply. When I tried to throw him to the ground, he punched me in the neck, under the helmet, and by luck, his instinctive punch was with the pommel of the dagger and not the blade, or I’d have had to end this story right there. I sagged back, and suddenly – without warning – the whole lot of them were cantering away from us, and it was all I could do to sit on my horse and breathe.

I’d never been hand to hand with another man who could wrestle on horseback as I can.

Kineas had a long cut down his sword arm, but he’d taken a prisoner.

Alexander slid from the saddle and picked up the sword at my horse’s front feet. ‘Memnon’s sword!’ he said. ‘An omen if ever there was one.’

Aristander proclaimed the omen throughout the camp that night, which was good, because the omen I saw was that Memnon’s ambush had killed a hundred archers, as many Thracians and more Hetaeroi than died at the Battle of the Granicus. And we found six bodies of his men, and Kineas took a prisoner. The worst of it was that his tiny cavalry force had only charged us to cover the rest of his ambush as they broke contact. I wasn’t an old veteran, back then, but I knew enough to be chilled at the professionalism of an ambush force that struck – and vanished. They didn’t hang around to let us bring up reinforcements – the failure of most ambushes.

Kineas’s prisoner was a Megaran aristocrat, and thus, by League law, a traitor to be executed. But all agreed he’d fought well – even when unhorsed – and Macedonians, unless their blood is up, don’t really hold with killing prisoners.

Kineas bowed to the king that night. ‘Lord, I can’t make him a slave. He’s a gentleman.’

Alexander nodded. He’d enjoyed the fight, and his mood was much better. ‘Recruit him, then,’ he told Kineas.

And that’s your friend Coenus, young man.

Fighting Memnon was the best training that the Macedonian army ever received. He was like a slap in the face – a lesson from a particularly nasty teacher.

It was good for Alexander. At the time, it was a nightmare.

We set our camp for the siege, and that night a hidden battery of engines rained rocks on us for half an hour while our camp dissolved into chaos. Memnon’s Greek engineers had time to break the machines down, burn the wood and carry the bronze parts back into the city. Only about a dozen Macedonians were killed – twice that many wounded and twice again in slaves lost – but the panic was incredible.

The second day, Memnon sent a daylight sortie – a daylight sortie . Everyone knows that you only sortie at dawn, dusk and in the light of the moon. The besieged – brave but doomed – sneak out a postern gate and try to set fire to a siege engine or two. It never works.

Memnon had two of Athens’ best commanders – Ephialtes and Thrasybulus – in his service. Thrasybulus took the picked hoplites of the garrison, waited for our noon guard change to be about one quarter complete and charged out the main gate .

I was a stade away, sitting on horseback with Kineas and Cleomenes. We were off duty, and we’d decided to go for a hunt in the hills. I’d never seen such a barren place, and I was minded to find another campsite – a place where the cavalry could camp closer to water, for example.

We’d just left the camp when the assault started – the noise alerted us. I saw the Greek hoplites teem out of the gate and slam into the pezhetaeroi, who were strung out over five stades of ground in no kind of formation. Guard duty was a formal thing. No one worried about fighting by day, in a siege.

They had fire in pots, and in moments a half-built siege tower was engulfed in flames, and a row of torsion engines went next. Cleomenes cursed. Those were all the machines we had. The Athenians and the transport fleet had the rest of the siege train, way north at Miletus.

Kineas laughed. ‘That’s Thrasybulus!’ he said. We were close enough to see helmet crests. Yellow with two red side plumes. Thrasybulus. ‘Alexander ordered him executed.’

I must have made a face.

Kineas shrugged. ‘Would you want a Macedonian exile to prove a coward?’ he asked.

The pezhetaeroi were completely defeated, and the Greek hoplite force formed up and marched back into the city, singing a hymn to Athena.

That stung.

Next day I took my grooms and rode cross-country to Miletus with orders for the fleet. The fleet, which consisted of twenty Athenian triremes and forty transport ships, against roughly four hundred Persian warships.

Nicanor, the fleet commander, made a face. ‘The Athenians don’t love Alexander,’ he said, as if I needed to be told that. ‘And all those oarsmen have relatives serving on the walls at Halicarnassus.’

‘The king needs the siege train,’ I said.

Thaïs and Alexander and I had cooked up a plan. Each of us contributed something, although I’m sure that Alexander thought of it as his plan and I’m quite sure it was really mine.