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

The only peace from the flies was by the fires, where the heat was worst.

A fever, high heat and bugs. I don’t think that man can know a greater torment, unless it is the pain of a bad wound and the sure knowledge of coming death.

I settled by the smoke of a fire. I had lost my way in the camp. I was lost, or uncaring. Even now, I scarcely remember it.

But Philip, the veteran phylarch of Craterus’s taxeis, came and sat by me in the smoke. He had wine, and I drank some.

‘Fucking bugs,’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’

After some time he pointed at the distant, twinkling lights. ‘Think they’ll fight?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. Thaïs was sure they wouldn’t fight. Her sources were new and untried, but we had the feeling that the Babylonians, inscrutable in their religious bigotry, hated the Persians far more than they hated us.

But a city of a million men could field an army of a hundred thousand. And again, as at Gaza, the army was tired. Victorious, but tired. The elite cavalry units had been in continuous combat since midsummer, and everyone – every single unit – had been engaged at Arabela.

I wasn’t exactly afraid.

Neither was Philip. He fingered his beard. ‘I’d rather they fought,’ he said.

‘Who?’ said another veteran, who plonked himself down by the fire and coughed in the smoke. ‘Fucking bugs. Ares, where do they come from?’

‘Farted out of Hades’ arsehole,’ Amyntas son of Philip said. A gross impiety, if you like, but it summed up what we all felt.

The other man held out his hand for the wine. ‘May I?’ he asked, and I recognised Draco, the man I’d faced – and lost to – in the pankration at Tyre.

We passed the wine and he drank, coughed, drank again. ‘Who would you rather we fought?’

‘Not we, damn it. I want to fight the Babylonians. I hear they aren’t worth shit as fighters, and if we fight them, we get to sack their city.’ He grinned. ‘Sack Babylon. Just think of it.’

Draco roared. ‘Good thought. Let’s sack it anyway. The king will forgive us eventually.’

‘What if it’s too big to sack?’ Amyntas son of Philip asked.

‘Let’s try!’ Draco said. ‘I’ve never fucked three women at once, either, and I might not be able to do it.’ He grinned. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to try.’

The wicked old man glanced at me.

I was being teased. I was an officer, in their space, and they were having a little fun.

I sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll get to sack Babylon,’ I said.

Draco nodded. ‘When exactly do we all get rich and march home?’ he asked. ‘Babylon? Susa? Persepolis?’

He grinned, but I thought he meant business.

I shrugged.

‘Well, if you don’t know, strategos—’

‘I don’t, friends. We’ll go home when Darius is beaten, I suppose, and the empire is ours.’ I noticed that there were a dozen men around the fire. We cycled almost unconsciously through the smoke – in, out, duck the bugs, get overheated, back to the bugs.

But their faces started to swim, and I began to see men who weren’t there – who couldn’t be there. Pyrrhus. Isokles. A dozen other men who had been my tent companions or my officers.

‘When will we go home?’ Pyrrhus asked.

‘My wife expects me for the planting,’ said a young spearman with a spearhead-sized hole in his chest.

‘What’s she planting, eh?’ asked Draco, with a laugh, and Isokles roared and slapped his thigh just below the groin, where blood flowed.

They were laughing, and my head was spinning . . .

Polystratus put a hand under my elbow and another under my arm and he got me on my feet and walked me back to my tent, where there wasn’t the hint of a breeze, and I lay in a wine stupor until I fell asleep.

I awoke to a pounding head, a face full of bug-bites and the thought that perhaps we had an army of our own ghosts following us across Asia, waiting to go home to Macedon.

Somehow, Ochrid got me up and dressed and armoured. I threw up twice – once the remnants of the wine, and again some bile. There was no cool water, and Ochrid didn’t like the smell of the water that the slaves had brought in the night before. I drank a little of the tepid local beer and kept it down.

And then I mounted my second war horse, a big gelding named Thrakos, and said a prayer to Poseidon. I missed the horse every time I rode. Intelligence is the most precious ability in horse or man – Thrakos was as dumb as a post.

We formed by camps, and we covered two parasanges, a great line with the cavalry wings thrown slightly forward and all the baggage in the rear. Remember, we’d taken all of Darius’s baggage at Arabela.

We marched on Babylon, and as the sun climbed the dome of the heavens, we saw a vast army forming to receive us – an unbelievable multitude that filled the horizon.

Alexander had the ‘All Officers’ sounded on the trumpet, and I responded without thinking. In fact, I was no longer commanding a phalanx; I had no command. On the other hand, no one tried to stop me.

Alexander was in full armour, with his lion’s-head helmet, and he sat on his charger’s back, hand on his hip, and watched the Babylonians with impatience.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said. ‘If they had an army worth anything, they’d have won their independence from Persia.’ He shook his head. ‘This is a waste of our time and manpower.’

The vast sea of enemies was coming at us across the endless plain of Mesopotamia.

We rested our right flank on the river and refused the left, under Parmenio, and began to move forward.

The Prodromoi went out to scout the face of the enemy army. Because we were already in formation, there was nothing else to do.

Ten stades apart, and the number of the enemy was unbelievable. They were deeper than we, and their main body was as great as ours. And they seemed to have three or four more bodies of like size, as well as dust clouds behind them as far as the smoke of the great city.

I was close to Alexander when Strakos rode straight into the command group and saluted. He was all but naked on his horse – like a Babylonian – deeply tanned, weaponless. I hadn’t seen him in a month. The Angeloi continued to function, although these days they mostly reported to Alexander’s permanent military secretary, Eumenes.

‘They aren’t armed,’ Strako called.

Immediately, Alexander stopped talking to Hephaestion and cantered to meet the Thracian. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘There are companies of armoured cavalry among them – but that’s not an army. It is’ – Strako grinned – ‘a welcoming mob, lord. We’re in contact with the high priest, who is with a great many dignitaries under that banner in the centre – you see – the huge red cloth? He hopes to meet you in person.’

I think we all breathed a little better.

No battle.

No fight for Babylon.

If Amyntas son of Philip was unsatisfied, he was virtually alone. You could hear the news spread through the ranks – you could see the ripple of spearheads as the men heard that there was not to be a battle.

Some men wept.

That’s where the army was.

And then we marched forward, into the welcoming arms of a million Babylonians.

Every citizen and slave in the city must have been in the fields awaiting us. I don’t think any of us had ever seen so many people together in one place in all of our lives, and it was, in its own way, terrifying. I rode next to Hephaestion, and as we passed into the belt of suburbs on a street wide enough for the phalanx to enter sixteen files wide despite the absolute crush of people, he turned to me and gave a thin smile.

‘If every one of them threw a rock, we’d be dead in a few heartbeats,’ he said.