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

When we rode back to camp, there was still a streak of summer light in the sky, red-pink and angry, and Alexander ordered the duty taxeis to dig in. Amyntas’s men – and they didn’t love it. Nor did mine, on duty next. We worked half the night, and we kept men awake.

Because I had the night duty, I knew that the king was awake. There was light in his tent.

But I didn’t go to him.

I’ve heard a hundred legends about that night, but I was there. He didn’t summon a council. He didn’t consult the auguries. He didn’t feast, and he didn’t drink wine.

Nor did he summon Barsines or her sister.

What he did was to lie awake, silent, on his camp bed, staring at the ceiling of the tent and the flies.

At some point, according to Hephaestion, he fell asleep, and son of god or not, he snored. We all heard it.

There is something immensely reassuring about the sound of your warrior king snoring in the face of the enemy.

I was about to rotate the duty with Alectus of the hypaspitoi when Ochrid came and told me that the king wanted the duty officer.

I entered his tent. He was awake.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I’m glad it is someone intelligent. I have written down my dispositions for the morning. Please see that the army is formed. I will no doubt sleep late.’

The arrogance – the bored assurance – of his voice would have angered me at any time – but just then, his arrogance was rope in the hands of a drowning army.

‘Formed’ could only mean one thing. I nodded and took the parchment, and he smiled at me and lay down on the bed and was almost instantly asleep.

I cast my eye over the dispositions. But they only confirmed the word ‘formed’. We were going to fight.

We were going to fight.

My hands shook as I left his tent.

And yet – I took his orders to Parmenio, left them with a slave, disarmed myself and lay down with Thaïs, and I was asleep in a few heartbeats.

Odd.

THIRTY

Other men have told the story of that morning. Read Callisthenes, or read the Military Journal, if you must.

He really did sleep late. He left the forming of the army to Parmenio. I think it was drama – I think he was awake and armed, awaiting his moment to come onstage. But perhaps not.

He formed us in a very similar manner to the traditional, Philip of Macedon formation. The phalanx was in the middle, with cavalry on the flanks and a strong second line posted to our rear.

The differences were subtle.

The second line was very strong.

The cavalry was equally balanced in numbers, but the right flank had our best shock cavalry and our best skirmishers.

And perhaps most interesting of all, we refused both flanks as soon as we began to march out of camp.

The old man did his part. Parmenio was up with the dawn, out with his own Thessalians, riding Darius’s carefully manicured battlefield. He dismounted and walked, counting his paces across the frontage that the field would have.

It was like fighting on a good wool blanket. It was flat. However, on Darius’s side of the field there was a patch of . . . I wouldn’t call it brush, but let’s say unmanicured ground that stretched from the ridge on our right down towards Darius’s centre. To be honest, on most battlefields it would have been considered good going, but here, where slaves with heavy rollers had rolled the anthills flat and other slaves with shovels had filled in the holes, the patch of untended ground leaped to the eye.

Darius’s left flank was going to rest on it. As if it was actually bad ground, brush or marsh. We could see that even at first light, because Darius, who did not have an army as well trained as ours (by a long shot), had unit markers already in place in the warm yellow light of early morning.

Parmenio counted off his frontage. He turned and looked at me. I was riding with Nicanor, because I was up and it soothed my nerves. To the south, a dozen Prodromoi covered us, and a little farther south, as many Persian cavalrymen watched them the way hawks watch distant prey.

Parmenio stopped walking.

‘Anyone have a tablet?’ he asked, and I did. That made me their secretary.

‘You here to spy on us?’ Parmenio asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m here to fight Darius,’ I said.

Philotas chewed on a blade of late-summer grass. ‘If we lose here, none of us will make it home,’ he said quietly.

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to share my opinions with Philotas.

Besides, Parmenio began to call out numbers, and I scratched them in the wax.

My taxeis, at normal order, is eight deep and two hundred men wide, each man using about three paces, giving a frontage of six hundred paces. Roughly three stades. And we had seven front-line taxeis.

They alone took up twenty-one stades at normal order. If we closed to our tightest order, of course, we could almost halve our frontage.

But the Plain of Gaugamela is vast, a carpet of bronze-burned summer pasture grass and naked ochre earth that rolled away to distant ridges – room for all the soldiers in the world to fight, if the gods ordained it. The Greeks might have called Boeotia the dance floor of Ares, but the Plain of Gaugamela was surely laid down by the gods for war, and Darius had improved it.

When we reached the nominal position of the right marker of my taxeis, I dismounted and built a small cairn of stones.

Polystratus, mounted on a pony behind me, spat. ‘Fucking dust,’ he said. He pointed to where his plodding pony’s hooves were raising puffs of fine grit with every step the animal took.

‘This field will be one impenetrable cloud of dust from horizon to horizon as soon as we march on,’ I said.

Polystratus spat again and nodded. ‘I said that. You just used more words.’

It took us two hours, from sun-up to breakfast, to measure the battle front. Philotas calculated unit frontages, Parmenio paced them off in the dust and I marked the unit down with the final measurement on the wax. The wax got softer and softer as the sun climbed, until my stylus started to strip the wax off the boards.

When we reached the last nominal position on our left, we all turned our mounts and stared across the plain.

Our leftmost unit would match up with the centre of Darius’s right flank, to judge from the positions of his markers. Put another way, his right flank would overlap our left by at least six stades.

Parmenio looked back at me. ‘Still here to fight Darius, boy?’

I wrote down the last figures. The wax was growing too soft to hold the letters, and the morning was young.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good looks and luck won’t win this,’ Parmenio said.

It is one of the oddities of my make-up that I could flare into rage at the slightest provocation from the king, but Parmenio never affected me that way. I merely shrugged.

‘He’s insane,’ Philotas said, suddenly at my elbow.

Medea fidgeted, and I curbed her.

‘He’s insane and he’s going to get us killed here,’ Philotas insisted.

Parmenio looked away, as if carefully detaching himself from the scene.

Polystratus coughed.

‘You don’t think any better of him than I do. I saw your face when the Persian woman died,’ Philotas said. ‘For the love of all the gods, Ptolemy! He’s not our king any more. He’s becoming a monster!’ Philotas read in my face that he’d gone too far. ‘We do all the work, and he’ll fuck it away,’ he said bitterly.

I glanced at Polystratus, who looked mad enough to punch Philotas, which wouldn’t have gone well.

‘We wouldn’t be here on this plain, ready to fight for the dominion of all Asia, unless Alexander brought us here,’ I said. ‘And the very power that renders him able to conquer Asia contains the set of flaws that make me angry at him.’ I turned from Philotas to Parmenio. ‘You, sir, are as blind as he, if you cannot see that he is leading this army and you are not.’