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

Alexander was hit four times, despite his friends covering him. There were that many arrows, and Memnon had predicted that he would be there. Memnon’s whole plan, in fact, was to kill the king.

I fell to one knee – I probably screamed. The pain was intense, and the sight of the king battered by arrows broke my heart.

I won’t soon forget that moment – the taste of vomit in my helmet, the searing pain in my shoulder, the sharp rubble under my knee.

Alexander stood straight as a blade. ‘Form the synapsismos!’ he called. There were hypaspitoi and pezhetaeroi mixed together in the breach and the alley behind it, but the king’s voice impelled instant obedience, and men formed ranks even as they died in the arrow storm. The closer they formed, the more shields there were to cover them, and the safer they were – but the requirement for discipline was incredible.

And they rose to it. There must have been a thousand men packed in the trap, and Alexander saved them – most of them.

‘Back step!’ he ordered. ‘Shields up!’

Step by step. I was in the second rank, with the arrow sticking out of my shoulder until Nearchus saw it and pulled it free. The barbs, thanks to Apollo, had caught in the leather lining of my shoulder armour and had not passed my skin.

Nearchus had a small, very sharp knife inside his thorax – we all did – and he used it to cut my pauldron free of my thorax even as another volley of arrows tore into us, but the gods were with me, or too busy elsewhere to care, and I was not taken.

I got my aspis on my bleeding shoulder, and the spirit of combat filled me and kept me from fainting, and we backed step by step across the rubble with their arrows pouring in on us and Alexander calling the step like a taxiarch. Step by step.

It took for ever. I still have dreams about it – the feeling of the rubble under my sandals, the grit inside them and inside my thorax, the feeling of blood and sweat turning cold in the morning air, the pain, and the king’s voice carrying us down the ramp a step at a time.

Memnon’s archers shot at the king. He was easy to spot, and they showered him with arrows, but the hypaspitoi and a few old sweats from the pezhetaeroi covered him with their shields and died for it. And no chance shaft killed him. He was hit again and again – I saw one shaft hit him square in the helmet crest and stick – and he continued to give orders as if on parade.

We got down the ramp, and the hypaspitoi gathered around him and carried him away to where his personal physician, Philip of Acarnia, waited with hot tongs and boiling water. Alexander had four wounds – three from arrows and a fourth where a friendly spear-tip had ripped across the back of his neck.

We all wore scarves – rolled tight and tucked into the top of our thoraces to catch the sweat and to pad the necks of our armour against our skin. When Philip pulled the king’s neckcloth off, an arrowhead fell with a clank to the wood floor of the tent. I saw this with my own eyes.

Every man present gasped. That arrow had penetrated the cloth of the neck pad, and somehow stopped against the king’s neck. There wasn’t a mark on him.

His four wounds were less onerous than my one. As soon as Philip had seen to the king, he put me on the table, gave me a leather billet to bite and cauterised my shoulder wound after cleaning it. That made me scream. But he had a light touch with the iron and his slaves were famous throughout the army, and I was on my feet the next day in time to see the King of Macedon send a herald to Memnon requesting permission to retrieve the corpses of our dead.

It was the only time Alexander ever had to do so, in all his life. In the Hellenic world, it was an admission of defeat – it entitled the other side to set up a trophy of victory. Memnon had beaten us, and worse, he’d killed three hundred veterans in the breach and rumour had it he’d lost just three men in exchange.

That morning, Parmenio openly proposed that we break the siege and march for Ephesus. ‘We can’t take this town this winter,’ he said. ‘Possibly not ever.’

He didn’t push it, however. In fact, to me, he sounded as if he was egging the king on, pushing him by teasing him. Perhaps I wronged him, but by then I had ceased to hold any affection for Parmenio.

The argument in the headquarters tent went on for hours – and was bitterly acrimonious. It was so nasty that it occurred to me that Alexander was king only by virtue of victory. I had never thought it before – but what I heard in that tent convinced me that if the king were to take a major defeat, these bastards would leave him in a moment. I was shocked, for a while.

The truth was, as usual, that Alexander’s near-inhuman perfection had a flaw. The flaw was that men doubted it, and waited to see him fail. In some perverse way, many men wanted to see him fail. And by the time of the siege of Halicarnassus the strain was beginning to show. Some of the pezhetaeroi were openly mutinous, being forced to serve past their appointed time. The harvest was in back at Pella, or nearly, and they weren’t home on their farms.

And the aristocrats were starting to realise that, under Alexander, there would only be war, followed by war. None of the delights of peace – such as plotting the king’s overthrow. They’d realised that he meant what he said – he meant to conquer all of Asia.

For four hours they yelled at each other, and then Perdiccas went off to set the guards – the two junior regiments of the pezhetaeroi.

I was not paying very close attention because my shoulder hurt, and I had reached a level of fatigue and injury that left me dull. I just knew that I’d had too much wine, my wound was throbbing, and suddenly most of the officers had left the tent, leaving Alexander and Hephaestion and Parmenio and Philotas.

Alexander stood with his arms crossed. ‘I’ll stay here all winter if that’s what it takes to take this city,’ he said.

‘You’ll burn the cream of your infantry and leave us nothing,’ Parmenio said, mixing his metaphors like mad. ‘Memnon is reading you like a book, boy.’

‘You are not welcome to call me boy , Lord Parmenio. Take yourself to bed. You are drunk, sir.’ Alexander spoke carefully. I thought he was a little tipsy himself.

‘I may be drunk, but you are young . The first duty of any strategos – never mind the King of Macedon – is to protect his army. To keep it alive. To fight another day. Halicarnassus is not a fair trade for the army your father and I spent twenty years training.’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can for the pezhetaeroi, but I’ll trade them all for defeating Memnon. There’re more boys in Pella who can carry a sarissa.’

I would have shut him up if I’d been well. Hephaestion didn’t care – he shared the king’s delusions of grandeur.

Parmenio turned red.

Philotas spat. ‘Maybe if you had to train them yourself, you’d take more care with them.’

Alexander shrugged again. ‘At least I wouldn’t squander them in ambushes,’ he said.

Philotas reached for his sword, and even though I had no time for him, I managed to pin his arms against his side.

Alexander looked at him, and at Parmenio. ‘Did your son just reach for a weapon in the royal presence?’ he asked.

And I shook my head. ‘No, lord. He did not. Nor would I say he did in front of the Assembly.’ Cases of treason and lese-majesty were always tried in front of the Assembly of the freemen of the army.

Parmenio threw me a glance of thanks.

I didn’t want his thanks – I wanted the king to stop being an arse.

Alexander looked through me.

Parmenio did the right thing, took his son and his Thessalian officers and got out of the tent.