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

Marsyas wasn’t going to tell me, but I saw through him.

‘Our taxeis is being broken for replacements, isn’t it,’ I said.

Marsyas nodded.

And that was like the death of a friend. Another death. I hadn’t started to mourn Callisthenes yet.

The rest of Babylonia fell without a fight.

That took months to play out. The welcome did not.

I was back to being a Hetaeroi. Because of my place in the battle, I was in favour, and because of my wound, I was still fevered, and I confess in advance that it added to the intensity of the experience. I was perpetually light-headed, and the sun had a quality to it that is hard to explain. It was brighter than I have ever known it, even in the endless Gedrosian desert. Even in Aegypt and Lydia. It burned into your eyes, and the grit – not really sand – rose to suffocate you, and the green of the trees was so green as to seem lurid. And the smell of human excrement, which they used for manure, fought the stink of naphtha fires and the omnipresent smell of incense. Men say that Aegypt is priest-ridden, but Babylon is god-ridden. They have gods everywhere, and they worship them to distraction.

Incense and naphtha. Smoke at the back of your throat, grit in your clothes. All the way south from Arabela to Babylon.

There was another kind of grit in my throat, and that was Mazaeus. Somehow, while I was recovering from my wound, he had come into our camp and made peace with Alexander, and he was suddenly the favourite – so much so that Hephaestion rode with me . Mazaeus had been one of Darius’s most trusted officers, and his defection was important. Because of him, Alexander received the homage of dozens of important Persian and Mede officers, and our way was made smooth.

Darius had fled the field – again – and I found it almost melancholy to hear from Mesopotamian peasants that they no longer considered him king. Greek peasants, I’m sure, would have maintained their allegiance a little longer.

Or perhaps not.

At any rate, Mazaeus was tall and handsome and dignified, long-limbed, a beautiful horseman and a fine warrior. He wasn’t ingratiating or obsequious.

But he did throw himself on his face every time he entered Alexander’s presence – the royal presence was suddenly becoming the Royal Presence. Because of his age and immense dignity, Mazaeus made the rest of us seem like clods, and he clearly thought we were – except Alexander, who he found a way to love.

Really, I have a hard time remembering how it all started. We didn’t go to war, on Alexander’s staff, about proskynesis and Persian customs for years . And yet, the whole argument, the whole cultural disagreement, could have been read on every Greek and Macedonian officer’s face, the first morning that Mazaeus made his reverence.

We rode south, away from Darius. I thought it was a mistake, and so did Parmenio. I felt that we needed to have Darius’s head on a spike, or we weren’t done. Parmenio agreed.

The old man was in a state of shock – not utter shock, but a sort of euphoric disbelief. He hadn’t expected us to win the battle, and he clearly hadn’t expected to survive the battle, and in the aftermath, he was quite naturally a little aloof, a little diffident, and genuinely generous to those who had played a role in the rescue of his wing – Diodorus, Kineas and the king. He was not hesitant in describing how desperate the situation had been.

This was not politics. This was just an honest old man thanking the team that saved him.

But Alexander’s faction didn’t hesitate to capitalise on his admissions of weakness, and Parmenio’s sons, who were not thankful and felt that Parmenio had been hung out to dry, so to speak, were in turn angered.

Two days out of Babylon, with rumours rife that the city would resist, that Darius had another army forming behind us, and that Bessus, the senior satrap who had escaped Arabela, was still in the field with all his cavalry – a force still larger than our army – Alexander ordained that all the officers would dine together.

A symposium.

I remember, because he had just promoted Astibus and Bubores to company commands in his recently expanded hypaspitoi, and they were on the next kline to mine. They were crowned in wreaths of gilded laurel. So was I, and so was Marsyas, who shared my couch. Kineas shared a couch with Diodorus, also crowned.

Whether by intention or not, half of the great circle wore crowns of valour. And the other half did not. Philotas did not have one, and neither did Nicanor, although he had led the hypaspists with flair and reckless bravery. The older men, the partisans of Parmenio, had no crowns.

Parmenio was on a couch to my left, well within earshot, and he shared the couch with Philotas.

On the third bowl of wine, Philotas sat up. ‘Why no crown for Mazaeus? He fought well enough!’

I must confess, I laughed too. It was funny. He was so ill at ease with us, in his long flowing robes. He’d probably never eaten lying on a couch, and he was desperately uncomfortable sharing his with Cleitus the Black, who glowered at him.

There were other Persian officers present. They did their best. It is almost impossible to be conquered with dignity, but they did it well enough.

But Philotas couldn’t let them go. ‘Why the long faces?’ he called. ‘We’ll all be in high hats and long robes soon enough.’

This quip was not greeted with the enthusiasm that his earlier jibe received.

The wine went instantly to my head, even well watered, and I went off to Thaïs and bed. After I left, the Persians were heckled until the king ordered the verbal attacks to stop.

Just one big happy family.

Babylon.

The morning after the symposium, we formed the entire army in battle order on the plain of Mesopotamia. Despite dykes and irrigation ditches, we could march unimpeded. Indeed, Mesopotamia was the ideal ground for infantry – three thousand years of tillage had levelled it as flat as a skillet.

We advanced on the city in battle order, and we made camp the next night within sight of the place, a great mound twinkling with lights in the middle distance. It had an air of unreality.

Babylon was, and is, one of the mightiest, if not the greatest, city on the wheel of the earth. No one knows how many people live in its mighty compass, but I have heard that it has a million inhabitants. The girdle of walls, mud brick, fired brick and stone has a greater circumference than that of any other city walls I’ve ever seen, and despite that, the suburbs spill out of the city gates like wine from a drunkard’s lips, so that there is a further girdle of intense habitation all around the city, many stades thick. The dense population is only possible because Mesopotamia has some of the finest soil and farmland in the world, and the two great rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – allow the produce to be floated directly to the city, which is also at the head of navigation, so that ocean-going ships can depart straight for the eastern seas from Babylon.

Babylon has ten times the population of Athens, the greatest city of our world.

Babylon could, all by itself, field a mighty army. Only sixty years before Marathon, a king of Babylon had challenged the whole might of Persia by himself, fielding a magnificent army of armoured cavalry and chariots. He had only narrowly been defeated.

I had a hard time sleeping. The fever was on me – the mosquitoes were like nothing I had ever seen. In god-ridden Mesopotamia, they didn’t have a mosquito god, which I found surprising. I would have done a great deal to propitiate such a god.

I eventually got to sleep, only to have a dream that took me high over the Great Pyramid at Chios, and then, as if driven by a catapult, I did not so much fall as was driven down and down, into the very top of the magnificent structure, and I awoke covered in sweat. I threw off Thaïs’s leg and my military cloak and stumbled out into the oppressive heat.