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

Anaxarchus saw the blood flowing from the royal ankle. ‘Ah, ichor from the wound of an immortal god!’ he said. Always the man to go for the grossest flattery.

Alexander glanced at me. He flashed me a grin, and turned on Anaxarchus. ‘Blood,’ he said in weary disgust. ‘Just blood. Don’t blaspheme.’

All things to all people. Even me.

I loved him.

I went back to Hephaestion, coaxed a convoy over the brown ridges from Taxila, read reports on Porus, whose trans-Hydaspian kingdom was our immediate target south of the mountains, and was back with the king in time to see him open the siege of Nyasa. The town didn’t resist more than a day, and surrendered on terms. It was not a bandit hold, but a small town full of people who looked nothing like the other inhabitants – they had strange customs, but beautiful women; they hung their dead in cedar coffins, from trees, but they were the first people in Asia to make decent wine. The vines grew on the mountains behind Nyasa, and we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus there, and we were all royally drunk, and Alexander didn’t kill anyone.

I took another convoy north a week later, and Alexander was at the Rock of Aornus. The place was so high that the top was lost in clouds when I arrived – legend had it that Herakles and Dionysus had both failed to take the place.

Alexander refused to leave it alone. It was parasanges off our route, and we didn’t need it, as we had Nyasa, but the mere mention of Herakles and he was off, armed with a fresh pothos, to do his best to emulate or exceed the hero.

We set the siege engines, which loosed their first rocks. They went up and up, and at perihedron, they were still below the level of the walls.

A week later, and Hephaestion was at the rendezvous. He willingly took my advice and started to build a set of bridges over the Indus while the main army built a fortified camp and supply magazine – more to make work than because we needed such a thing.

Back at Aornus, I was stunned by the scale of the king’s ambition – I, who had known every one of his ambitions. He was building a trestle – a web of wood – that rose from the next mountain . It was immense .

It was almost complete. The troops were working like daimons.

Morale was incredibly high. Word was out – as the king intended – that this was the last campaign, and that the king had asked that every man do his best. It was a heady combination.

I went back south to meet another convoy from Taxila, then ordered Ariston to scout south of Taxila, and then I went back to the king.

Eight days after opening his siege, the engines mounted on the trestle of wood began to loose stones into the town. The effect was devastating, and the dry-stone wall that crowned the fortress collapsed in eight or ten hits.

We stormed the place in the morning, right over the new breaches. The defenders weren’t ready. Incredible, really.

We rolled south, linked up with Hephaestion and marched to Taxila.

THIRTY-SEVEN

South of Taxila, the hills rise once more in a shield, and then fall away into the endless plain of the Indus. We already had scouts in the plains, and we picked them up as we advanced, and used them as guides. And the Raja of Taxila, towering in the howdah of his elephant, was there in person to direct us. It was for his alliance that we were marching to fight Porus.

We marched from Taxila to the banks of the Hydaspes in two days – because we heard at Taxila that Porus was forging alliances in the plains and had eighty thousand men and two hundred elephants.

The army was just growing accustomed to elephants. We had forty of them, and we drilled alongside them, and our horses were often picketed near them – horses can be spooked by elephants; both their noises and their smell can affront even a battle-hardened mount. But we had no notion what squadrons of elephants could be like. Forty seemed like an army.

We had no notion what rain was like, either, until the monsoons broke. The king intended to fight in the monsoon, presumably because the Indians didn’t and it would add to the sense of adventure. In fact, it reduced their archery to manageable proportions, which was good, as they had expert archers with great bows of bamboo that shot shafts heavy enough to penetrate a bronze thorax.

So we marched in rain so thick that at times it was difficult to breathe, and over roads that either became swamps or torrents. Despite that, we made eight to ten parasanges a day.

The Indians of the plains used chariots, too, which added to the Homeric element for all of us – enormous battle cars, with four or six horses yoked in a line, and four archers per swordsman and a pair of drivers. I encountered one in person on our third day after Taxila, when the Paeonians and a handful of our allied Indian cavalry ran into one of Porus’s patrols across the river. The enemy commander was in a chariot as big, it seemed, as an elephant. His cavalry outnumbered mine by two to one or more.

I sent scouts out into the fields on either side, and they reported that the ground was solid enough. So I closed up my column, prepped my officers and rode straight at my opponent.

He began to deploy his cavalry.

A little more than a stade from the head of his column, and the rain stopped. I pumped my fist in the air – my only order of the hour – and my column unravelled in heartbeats. My units never attempted to form a line. Instead, as soon as any unit came up, they charged. The Indians were hit with a rolling series of squadron charges – every impact had its effect, and by the time Cyrus’s second half-squadron of Persians rolled forward, the Indians were shattered.

We lost three troopers wounded and two dead, and we took fifty prisoners. Best of all, the action was over in the time it takes to sing a hymn. It was a small action – no empires fell – but I feel it shows where we were as a force – what we were capable of. Persians, Thracians, Greeks and Macedonians in one force, well trained, well disciplined, and I rather like to think well led. The Indians were good, but not like us at all. They couldn’t fight from a column on a road.

That night, I was huddling by a spitting fire in the rain, happy as only a victorious commander with low casualties can be, and Bubores came to me with a wreath of some local plant – from the king, for my victory. He gave me a hug, and stayed to drink my wine.

I remember because he asked me to tell him how the fight had gone, and I just shrugged. ‘Bubores, do you think this army has ever been a better weapon than it is right now?’

The Nubian looked into the fire – the coals, anyway – for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The drill—’

‘The high morale,’ I said.

‘The teamwork,’ Polystratus said at my shoulder. ‘It’s never been better.’

I nodded. ‘When it is like this,’ I said quietly, ‘I almost enjoy it. Hades, brothers – I do enjoy it. But those poor Indians never knew what hit them.’

Bubores nodded. ‘But it is only because he says he’ll go home, after.’

We all nodded, and the wine went around.

Anyway, I got a crown of laurel – or whatever India had that looked like laurel – because I captured their strategos’s chariot. I sent it to Alexander, who received it with delight.

But Porus had beaten us to the river, despite our best efforts. And five days after we left Taxila, we were staring across the river at an army with almost a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants. Porus was no fool. He covered the fords, and all the fords for parasanges up and down the river.

The rain fell.

The army moved up, and built a camp. I doubt that anyone, from footslogger to the King of Macedon, was comfortable , but one of the advantages of years of campaigning in every climate in the world is that your men learn to construct shelters, and this time, since it was clear we might be here for months, we floated logs down the river and built huts.