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

We ranged farther and farther from the king – up and down the columns. The southernmost column was already gone – it held together better and moved too fast for us to follow, and the two northern columns were slowed by their own chaos. We rode unopposed through the final ruin of the Persian empire. Not an arrow threatened us. The squalor of the retreat was sickening in a way that even the slaughter at Gaza had not been sickening. Perhaps it was the utter abandonment of hope. Perhaps it was having Cyrus at my side – perhaps it was my growing respect for him, which made me share his humiliation that his country had come to this.

It was late afternoon when Polystratus sent a boy for me. I was sitting under the overhang of a ruined posting station, drinking water from the well. The boy was Hyrkanian, very blond and very dirty, and he all but crawled.

I mounted my new horse and followed him. It will give you an idea of how far gone we were that I was alone.

I rode through the rout. This part of the northern column was mostly slaves and servants, and they simply trudged on, waiting to be threatened or killed. No one challenged me, and no one tried to surrender. Mostly, no one even raised their eyes.

We crossed a main flow of refugees – perhaps six hundred people. And then climbed down the shallow slope of a stony gully. At the base of the gully was a big wagon, with six dead oxen. The grass here was so poor that Polystratus’s horse was not bothering to eat it. Blood dripped from the base of the wagon bed in slow, gloopy drops. Flies gathered in the blood. I could feel a curse in the air.

Polystratus’s head emerged from the wagon. A dog barked. ‘Send the boy for the king,’ he said.

I went and looked into the wagon. There was a man lying on his back, and the wagon bed was full of blood. He had two javelins in him.

I knew him at once, even though I’d only seen him at a distance.

He was Darius.

I looked at Polystratus. ‘Go and find Alexander,’ I said. ‘Cyrus should be at the posting station – less than a stade up the ridge. Look there first. Hurry. This will be very important to the king.’

Polystratus left me without a word. He grunted, once. He spat when he left the wagon bed – a Thracian way of averting a curse.

I took the King of King’s hand.

He gave my hand a squeeze.

Even an enemy is better company than dying alone.

I had wine and water. I offered him both, and he took a little and gasped.

I had some Persian, by then. So I understood when he thanked me.

I took off my officer’s cloak and did my best to bind his wounds. Removing the spears would kill him. So I did what I could without moving him much, and I gave him more wine. He’d lost so much blood that it flushed his face.

Cyrus came in.

He took the king’s other hand.

He kissed it.

I didn’t think less of him. It’s one thing to see that a cause is lost. Another thing to leave the man who led it. I think Cyrus loved Darius, the man.

At any rate, the next one into the wagon was Alexander.

Darius was barely alive. And drunk. But he had been waiting. I know that. I don’t know exactly how I know that, but I could feel him waiting, holding the spirit in his body.

Alexander came up, and I wriggled back to make room for him.

Alexander was weeping.

So was Cyrus.

I waited by Darius’s feet.

Alexander looked at Darius. He took his hand. ‘I will avenge you,’ he said.

Darius gave a minute shake of his head.

Alexander bent low. ‘I would give anything for you to live. I . . . what will I do without you?’

Darius had the will to smile. It set him very high in my opinion. He smiled, and his face had a gentle strength. ‘So . . .’ he said, very clearly. ‘So you are Alexander.’ His smile stayed, and he sighed, and with that sigh, his soul left his body.

‘No!’ Alexander screamed. ‘No! You will not slip away again! Damn you, Darius! What is there after this? What can possibly be worthy or great, after this!’ He was weeping, speaking wildly, and he took Darius’s head and held it in his lap. ‘Is this the end? The end of the story?’

I got out of the wagon.

After a time, Cyrus slipped out, too. He didn’t meet my eye.

And when Alexander came out, I wiped the blood from him, and we said nothing. But he put his arms around me, and cried. For once, I understood. Memnon had slipped away, and now Darius. That’s not what happens, in the Iliad. In the Iliad , Achilles is filled with rage, and he kills, and feels no remorse. When he hunts Hector round the city, he kills him, and drags him behind his chariot, and feels no remorse. Only when faced with Priam, Hector’s father – and with the reality of his own death – does Achilles feel anything.

Draw your own lesson. I’m a king, not a philosopher. Alexander loved the whole game. And when Darius died . . .

After a time – I couldn’t tell you how long – he stopped weeping.

‘Ptolemy,’ he said. There was a question in his voice. ‘Is this . . . all there is?’

Sometimes I wonder if he actually asked me that. Sometimes, I think that I read it into his tears and the tension in his body.

But I’m pretty sure he asked.

Because if he didn’t, then what I didn’t say wouldn’t still be stuck in my head, rattling around. I should have said it. I should have told him true.

I should have said, You’ve traded friendship and love for adulation and power. What did you expect?

THIRTY-TWO

We straggled back into Ecbatana. Which occasioned the first time that Alexander himself altered the Military Journal.

Alexander wanted to pursue Bessus immediately. But despite our success – and taking Darius, even dead, was a victory, because we immediately inherited most of his loyalists, by the law of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ that rules all civil conflict, all stasis – despite our success, our army, such as it was, was wrecked. The Hetaeroi were mostly dismounted, or their horses were ruined by the pursuit. The hypaspitoi were spread from the plains north of Ecbatana all the way beyond Hecatombion and into the Hyrkanian mountains by the pursuit, by fatigue, by the need to garrison the villages that were our lifeline to the rear.

And Alexander was barely functional. It was terrifying, because he didn’t have a mark on him. He ranted at Craterus about pursuing Bessus, and then sat on his horse and issued no orders.

None of us was senior. In fact, among the men who’d ended up on the point of the spear, the concept of ‘rank’ was meaningless. We were the king’s friends, his companions, and we didn’t agree about much except that we were king’s men.

I convinced Philotas to retreat. And when he went down with the dysentery, I led the retreat.

It was my only taste of what it must have been like to be Alexander. Now I had to ride up and down the column, looking for stragglers, issuing orders, seeing and being seen. Pretending to be calm and unruffled when in fact I was terrified that Bessus would turn and bite us – or that Alexander would snap out of his funk and kill me. He had ordered us to advance, and we were retreating, and that was my decision.

Ecbatana was twenty-five hundred stades behind us when we started. But that’s where the main army was, and to summon them forward with no preparation would have been foolish.

Or so I maintain.

We didn’t all retreat. I used our new Iranian allies and a hard core of hypaspitoi to hold every oasis and every village, to start building up water supplies and depots of baked bread, grain and water.

Craterus backed me up, and when we fell back on Rhagae and finally had enough healthy troops to fight if we had to face a force larger than twenty raiders, Craterus took command of it. I was exhausted.