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

Another man – smaller, with a hooked sword that scored past my dented aspis on my greave, but didn’t penetrate – hurt anyway – and I left my dagger in his guts. And by sheer luck and the will of Ares, or Zeus-Apis, my Athenian sword was lying so close to my feet that I all but cut my foot on the blade. I reached down and she came to my hand like a lover. I stood straight and looked around.

I’d left all my men behind. I’m a good strategos but sometimes a poor soldier. How often did phylarchs tell new men never to leave the ranks?

But the disc of the golden sun was right there . It was as if I could hear the king telling me: Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will.

Off to the right, behind my head, the earth trembled. Two thousand horses went from a walk to a gallop, aimed at a gap only slightly wider than the base of Alexander’s wedge – but the shoulder of the gap was held now by the hypaspitoi, and the Persians could no longer move front-line men to fill the gap.

I’ve used this metaphor before – but it’s like that moment in a match, in pankration or wrestling, when you know – you know – that you have made an error, and it is going to hurt. You have bought a feint, or you have missed a hold, and now, before your heart beats again or you can do anything, his elbow is going to slam into your head. You know?

That’s what Darius must have felt. The battle proper was still less than half an hour old, and Darius must have known, right then.

The rear ranks of the Immortals were a bloody shambles, but they were game, and every one of them was struggling to push back the front-rankers, stabilise the formation and save the standard. My moment of calm was past, and I was all but buried in opponents. Spears rang off my aspis and my helmet, and I staggered.

But combat is a complex dance, and what can I say? I was lifted above myself. A blow pushed my helmet back against my face, and the pain transformed the fight – in an instant, I was a little faster for the rage, a little stronger . . .

My aspis swung at nose height, flat like a plate, and two men took its force, their faces crushed, and I was into the hole like water through a breaking dam, my kopis like a predatory bird taking insects at the edge of night, and I was above it, in it, through it. I remember no one cut, but the aggregate – for a few heartbeats, I was a god , seeing each opponent, seeing his intention, seeing his eyes, the minute shift of weight, baffling with my cloak, my shield, lying with the tip of my sword or telling a final truth with the blade or the grip. I suppose that blows fell on me but I didn’t feel them, and Coenus claims that he could see me move through the Immortals the way you can watch a mole moving underground. I love the metaphor, even though I suspect he was as busy as I was and didn’t see a fucking thing. It makes one hell of a good picture.

Under the disc were two giants.

I was alone.

I remember thinking, I can do this .

I swayed, like a child trying to evade his father in a game. Then I leaped forward to the left, and my two opponents failed to follow my movement, and now I had them aligned – not both facing me at once.

I hate fighting big men.

I had a sword that was too short to let me snipe, and my immediate opponent had a spear, and he rifled it at me. But his contempt betrayed him, and when he drew back and thrust again, I cut at the spearhead, swept his spear wide and powered forward under it, and my backcut went into his greave and his knee, and he fell like a tree in the forest, bellowing – and I got the sword clear of his leg, and the blade rose, I turned it edge on, where his partner was cutting at me, and severed all the fingers of his spear hand; they were like a shower of thrown grapes at a party as his point went past my head. Again I powered forward, and my backcut went through his crestless helmet and into his brain.

The great golden disc fell with a barbarous clang in the dirt, and they were on their way to Hades. It was like that. It was as if they stood still. Apis granted me that moment, and Herakles my ancestor. I had never been so good before, even before I took my wounds at Tyre, and I was never so good again.

But oh, the glory of it!

For the space of a hundred heartbeats, I was a god . And in those hundred heartbeats I learned what it might be like to be Alexander. What made him incomprehensible to other men was revealed to me – not in that moment, when there was nothing but the moment, but later, when I knew all the things I hadn’t thought while I was a god. I hadn’t doubted. I hadn’t cared. I had known .

My time of grace ended as the great golden disc crashed into the dust.

But by Apis, it was glorious.

Up until that moment, I’m not sure that Darius had made a mistake. It hadn’t all gone his way, but despite Alexander’s perfect timing and godlike assurance, our army was in mortal peril. We were, to all intents, surrounded. The Sakje were already sacking our baggage and razing our camp.

Thaïs was calmly shooting Sakje from their saddles with her bow, shooting out of the door of our tent. She received a Sakje arrow through her calf in return fire, but they gave up our sector of the officers’ lines as a bad job. Three hundred Thracian Psiloi and a thousand terrified, angry camp followers with spears and rocks were sufficient to keep the enemy out of the baggage wagons and the herds.

But the hypaspitoi and the Taxeis of Outer Macedon and the Taxeis of the North under Coenus crushed the front of Darius’s centre so fast that he chose to stabilise his front rather than counter Alexander’s cavalry charge.

A natural reaction, because when his horse guards charged me, I could see him, and he wasn’t so very far away. Alexander must have seemed like a distant threat.

They glittered and shone like all the flowers of the fields in the Hebrew book. Like every hero of the Iliad gathered into a single magnificent regiment. They were red and gold, purple and gold, black and gold. The only silver was the steel in their hands, thousands of folds of perfect steel, magnificent weapons that made the Athenian kopis in my hand look like a crowbar.

The best men of the whole empire.

Darius sent them into my taxeis, and I was standing about two horse lengths in front of my men, who were in no kind of order. We were in those last moments of a melee, when the losers die and the winners swirl in, faster and faster as the losers no longer have friends and file partners and men to watch their backs, and it all comes to an . . .

‘Cavalry!’ I roared.

Zeus, I was exhausted.

I set my feet. I didn’t even have a spear.

Some mighty Persian lord got his spear on to my aspis and knocked me flat, and then they rode over me.

By the will of the gods, I didn’t take a kick.

They had less than a tenth of a stade in which to launch their charge, and they were hampered by Coenus’s men and the hypaspitoi coming at them, and so they were – most of them – not much above a fast trot. And like good men the world over, they cared about their own kin in the Immortals, and so they rode too carefully.

That didn’t spare us much. But it might have been the edge between destruction and survival.

I lay in the dust and there were hooves all around me, the screams of frightened horses and maddened horses and war cries, and when they began to pack in together, I rose above my fear and the dust, got my legs under me between two horses and started cutting – heavy cuts, underhand, into the bellies of the animals and the legs of the lords.

I’ve heard versions of this story from other men – when you are deep in the enemy ranks, they are virtually defenceless. I got my feet under me, and men were off their horses and on their faces before they knew what had killed them.