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

‘Water, brother?’ I asked, and because I had to pop my cheek-plates to drink, I could hear and see when the enemy ambush began to filter into the street behind us.

‘Ware!’ I bellowed, and all the men on the barricade turned, and we made a shield wall – fifteen or twenty of us – and we held them. Please do not mistake me – the Persians and the Nabataeans at Gaza were brave men and well led, but they were never a match for us in combat. They lacked the armour, and they lacked the mettle. They hit us and we broke them and then we chased them back down the alley.

And now I really had time to look around, and what I saw was that we were not actually taking ground – that every stone house had defenders, and we were receiving a constant and deadly barrage wherever we went.

The problem I had – the problem every strategos always has – was information.

I gathered the men I had and we stormed a house. The fighting was bestial – kopis and xiphos against short spear and knife in rooms no larger than a large himation laid on the ground, through doorways so narrow and so low that a child would have to stoop to enter, and up steeply turning stairs that rotated to the right to cramp a fighter. At every check, the enemy put an archer or two behind a few swordsmen.

I couldn’t take more than a room or two at a time, and then I had to exchange out of the front rank. It was true of every man – fighting inside a city is a terrifying thing, every blow is a death blow. But as with fighting at night, discipline and armour make all the difference.

In the end, we stormed the tower and exterminated the garrison at the top, throwing the last bodies to the street below.

Now I could see.

There were fires throughout the town, and the dirt streets – the alleys – raised clouds of dust, so that a pall seemed to hang over the town, lit red and yellow by the flames in the early light.

It was actually quite beautiful.

But the pattern leaped to the eye. We were not penetrating the town. We were being funnelled down four corridors for the convenience of the garrison – a corridor for every breach – and each corridor led to a maze of alleys and barricades.

I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to catch my breath. Long enough for the sweat on my abdomen to start to dry. Because I had to be right.

Then I ordered my hyperetes to sound the recall.

I was the first. I remain proud of my decision.

Alexander did not feel the same way.

‘You what?’ he asked, his arms crossed. ‘You ran? ’

I stank of death, and I was covered in soot, and I had two wounds. I had prepared myself for the encounter, and when I was clear of the breach, I ran – ran – all the way around the wall to Perdiccas to find him in his breach, and he, too, was coming out. And I promised him I’d explain to Alexander. I had set my mind to it as I climbed back up our siege mound, and I went straight to his tent.

And I was still not ready. I had my logic all prepared, and the king needed to know what Batis had done.

He smelled of spikenard, and he didn’t have a mark on him. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have grown used to uninterrupted victory. Or perhaps I simply cannot expect as much when I’m not there in person. I know what fear is, Ptolemy. You are forgiven.’

I suspect my mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. I don’t remember that part. What I remember is my head screaming at me to keep my mouth shut.

‘Fuck you!’ I roared at him. Alas. ‘You weren’t there – Lord King. You have no idea what we faced, and you think I panicked? You’re fucking right you should do it yourself. Because if you continue to talk like that, you may have to!’

Wise, carefully considered words they were not. I turned on my heel and walked away. But he had it coming, and then some.

The thing is, Alexander was . . . Alexander. God, monster, man, inhuman – all of them in one body.

So while Thaïs washed the crap and blood from my body, and my rage simmered and I tried – tried hard – not to turn it on my lover – Alexander came in. He had four Hetaeroi with him, and he was in armour.

He had a baton in his hand, and he put it carefully on my camp bed and came immediately to my side. He sniffed, made a face and sniffed the wound in the top of my shoulder, where you could see the white fat oozing out through the blood.

‘Do you have a wound gone bad?’ he asked. ‘You stink like a bad wound.’

‘I stepped in a corpse,’ I said, my tone carefully neutral.

‘Ah,’ he said. He took a cloth from Thaïs and cleaned my shoulder wound with what I can only call tender ruthlessness – he was as quick as he could be. He was very good with wounds.

It was all I could do not to cry out, or just cry.

When he dipped the cloth into the hot water, he said, ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. Not fighting – I cannot do it. I cannot cower in the rear. It makes me a woman. In too many ways.’

Thaïs sniffed and muttered something about childbirth.

Alexander ignored her. ‘I should have been there. But I’m told it was a trap.’

‘A well-laid defence – a trap if we were foolish enough to come into it.’ I began to breathe more easily. My first thought when he entered the tent was that I was to be stripped of my command.

‘And perhaps, had I led today, I would have died.’ He shrugged. ‘I will lead the next.’

‘Tomorrow?’ I asked. In truth, I felt weary to the bone. It was still early morning, and I wanted to sleep.

He shook his head. ‘This was bad. We lost – three hundred pezhetaeroi, and perhaps more. I will let our men rest. Five days. And then I’ll take the Hetaeroi and the hypaspitoi.’ He smiled.

I knew what men would say in camp. That my men hadn’t been up to it. But neither could we assault every time, and my men didn’t have anything to prove. I took two breaths to fight down the urge to demand to participate, and then I nodded. ‘Bless you, Lord King, for coming to me.’

He put a hand on my good shoulder. ‘I love you, Ptolemy. Even when I behave thoughtlessly.’ He kissed me on the cheek and left the tent.

Go ahead. Hate that.

I couldn’t.

I don’t remember how many days passed – ah, here it is, in the Journal. Three days.

I probably slept for two of them.

My taxeis came out of the siege lines at midnight. Morale wasn’t bad – the new armour was coming in any day, I’d just given a small pay rise to all the married men in my regiment and I’d bought meat far away at Jerusalem and had it driven on the hoof into our camp, and every man knew he had a dinner of lamb to look forward to. In fact, I was spending money as an orator spends hot air, but my men needed it or they were going to collapse. All the taxiarchs were doing all they could.

I heard Parmenio, playing Polis with Craterus, mutter that the best thing that could happen to us was that Darius would get up the nerve to attack us, because that would put spine back in the pikemen. Parmenio was deeply depressed. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke slowly and very seldom, and he and his sons had become isolated.

At any rate, we were filtering down off the siege mounds north of the city, far from the breach that had killed seventy of my men, when we heard the unmistakable sounds of combat from all the way around the city.

I was already down at the base of the siege mound, on the road that Diades had built and kept clear for rapid troop movements. I had a habit of forming the men every night before dinner, to ‘pass the word’, as we used to say, and that night it stood me in good stead.

‘Files from the left by fours – to the left – march!’ I shouted, and ran to their head. Each group of four files marched forward to the road and then wheeled in fours to the left, forming a column four wide on the road from a phalanx eight deep. Simple stuff – if you drill every day.