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

There was so much blood that it was coming through the baseboards of the wagon.

I sent Polystratus for Thaïs, and then I climbed into the wagon. She was screaming, and her mother-in-law was holding her head, and two eunuchs tried to prevent my entering the wagon and I threw one out through the door.

‘You cannot enter here!’ the other said, desperately.

I ignored him and looked at Sisygambis, the Queen Mother. She didn’t meet my eye.

Leosthenes had been checking wheels. He popped his head in.

‘Fetch the king,’ I shot at him, and his head vanished.

Thaïs came. The eunuchs continued to try to remove me, but Sisygambis said something and they desisted. Thaïs put a hand on the woman’s forehead, reached down and flung the blood-soaked sheets back and caught my eye.

Miscarriage. I’m a country boy. I knew the signs.

Philip of Acarnia came first, and then Alexander. I’d have left the wagon, but I couldn’t get out, trapped in the press. Philip looked at her, felt her pulse and exchanged a glance with Thaïs. That was the worst thing – the conspiracy of silence. The poor woman. Imagine – trapped with fifty thousand enemy soldiers, pregnant with Alexander’s bastard and marching towards your husband, who will have you executed when he sees you. With only your mother-in-law and her ladies for company.

Then Alexander came.

Philip was blunt, as he always was. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he said. ‘She won’t recover.’

Indeed, the poor thing was bleeding at such a rate that it didn’t seem possible a body could hold so much blood.

She cried out.

Alexander turned his head away in revulsion.

She flung her arms out.

Alexander stepped back.

‘She is unclean,’ he said.

‘I am cursed!’ the Queen of Persia cried out. ‘Oh, God of Light, why must I endure this!’

Alexander shot me a look of disgust. ‘Why exactly was I summoned?’ he asked.

‘You got her with child,’ I shot at him. I don’t think I had ever been so angry with him.

He didn’t meet my eye. This had never happened before, save once.

He turned and left the wagon.

Philip of Acarnia all but spat.

The Queen of Persia died in his arms, with Thaïs holding her hand and her mother-in-law holding her head.

Later, Callisthenes put it about that she died in an accident, and that’s the official version.

I followed Alexander from the wagon. I had her blood on my left hand and I let it dry there. I mounted my pretty mare, now Medea like the others, and I rode her hard to the head of the column, where Alexander sat with Hephaestion, watching the last of the main body cross.

I might not have done it, but Alexander turned as I came up. ‘The baggage is falling behind, and we have to move,’ he said.

I reached out and wiped her blood across his face. She was nothing to me – I had scarcely met her, and she openly despised us all. But I was his friend, not his slave, and no man worth a shit treats a woman like that.

He had no trouble meeting my eye. He held out his hand, and a slave put a towel in it. He wiped his face.

‘I gather you feel that needed to be done. I have other things on my mind than the troubles of women,’ he said. ‘Now get the baggage moving.’

Sometimes, he was easy to hate.

TWENTY-NINE

We turned south.

We started to intercept spies – they weren’t very clever – with offers of vast riches for the murder of Alexander.

Darius was willing to do anything to avoid the trial of battle.

To cap his other efforts, he sent a deputation of nobles to try and make a treaty. This time, he was clever enough to make it very public indeed. This time, Alexander was not going to change the wording.

They offered him everything west of the Euphrates and a royal wife.

Again, Parmenio suggested we accept.

Alexander didn’t deign to reply. But later, we heard that he allowed the head eunuch of Darius’s wife’s household to escape with the embassy.

Because the news that his wife had been unfaithful with Alexander drove Darius into a rage of madness – a paroxysm of jealousy, or so I understood later, when most of the Persian officers were my own officers – the sort of frustrated rage that all men experience when nothing seems to go their way.

Just as Alexander intended.

And then there was no more talk of peace.

The War God was riding to Babylon.

Darius concentrated his army at Arabela, and offered battle on a plain of his own choosing, which he had his engineers improve with labour gangs of slaves until it was as flat as a well-wrought table.

We heard about this battlefield when we were still hundreds of stades to the north, and as we marched closer and the rumours of the enemy’s army size became ever more inflated, we were more and more derisive. The mere fact that Darius had attempted to negotiate showed how weak he was. Our best estimates from all sources suggested that even with some help form his eastern barons, he’d have a hard time gathering twenty thousand cavalry and as many infantry. Ariston nearly lost his job for reporting twice that many on a daily basis.

And then Darius moved north from Arabela, suddenly closing the distance with us.

It’s easy to fall into hubris. Easy to forget how smart an opponent is. Darius outgeneralled Alexander before Issus. He’d planned a fairly subtle campaign this time, too, and Alexander had outmarched him – something that all of our opponents always underestimated, as we could march roughly three times as fast as anyone we ever faced. But even faced with our speed, he changed his campaign plan and moved his army – and did unexpected things.

In an afternoon, we went from deriding Darius to the knowledge that he was a day’s march to the south. Reliable men reported that his army was ‘uncountable’.

Kineas of Athens came in person to tell the king that Darius’s army covered a hundred stades of camp.

The tone of command meetings changed.

Late that evening, the army moved up a low ridge. Scouts told us that the ridge we were occupying was less than two dozen stades from Darius’s new battlefield.

Alexander summoned the old crowd to ride out with him. There was Craterus, and there was Perdiccas, and there was Black Cleitus and there was Philip the Red. And Parmenio, and Philotas, and Nicanor.

And me. He came to my tent, as in the old days, and called me by name.

A dozen of us rode out of the camp, up the ridge.

The ridge rose well above the plains, and had a good view. Perhaps too good a view.

It looked as if the Valley of the Tigris was on fire.

I will never forget the sight of Darius’s army. Their camp filled the earth – as far as the eye could see to the south and east, there were fires.

‘Zeus my father,’ Alexander muttered.

Parmenio looked for a long time.

Then he shook his head. ‘We’re fucked,’ he said.

No one disagreed, and then, after a silence, he went on, ‘Throw Hephaestion out with the cavalry as a screen, and let’s get out of here. We can vanish into the mountains. We’ll lose some men, but not what we’ll lose if we go down on to that plain.’

What I remember best is the feeling that Darius had led us the way a pretty girl can lead a drunken soldier. The ugly feeling that we’d been had.

Alexander was white. And silent.

Twice I saw him touch his forehead, where I had smeared her blood.

He was terrified. I hadn’t seen it often, but often enough to know. Terrified not of dying, but of failing.

I’d love to say that I offered a brilliant plan, but I was terrified too. We’d outmanoeuvred Darius, but in the end it was like a little man dodging a giant. The giant doesn’t care about all that dancing around, because eventually, when it comes to the clinch . . .