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

Polystratus nodded. ‘Scribes?’ he asked. Shrugged. ‘Buy ’em food, or get the cook to shell out?’ he asked me.

‘Buy it in the market today, and get them on the barracks list tomorrow,’ I said. This was the sort of detail you had to remember with an army or with your own slaves – I’d walked off to find Polystratus and left them with no way to get food. So much to learn. Zeus, I was young!

Three days of these preparations, and I spent the last two looking at carts and donkeys and mules, watching wicker baskets filled with grain, shouting myself hoarse at merchants, bellowing with rage when I found I’d been swindled on some donkeys . . .

The fourth morning, the sun still hidden in the east. Two hundred pages, a thousand foot soldiers, a hundred of Parmenio’s Thessalian cavalry leading the way and fifty tame Thracians in our rearguard – and we were off. My baggage carts and donkeys occupied about two-thirds of the column and moved slower than beeswax in winter, and everyone found occasion to mention as much to me as we crawled out of the capital and up into the hills.

The second day out of Pella, Alexander suddenly took all the older companions – except me – and headed off north and west. Cleitus cantered up to me where I was helping get a cart repaired – a broken wheel, the hub was rotten, and I’d bought the damned thing . . .

‘The prince says it will be winter before your carts get to the Thracians!’ he said.

What could I say? I’d been swindled in every direction. I had the worst donkeys in the market and I had apparently bought every old cart in Pella.

But Alexander rode off with Laodon and all the older pages to win glory, and left me with a thousand foot soldiers and the carts. In command.

I chose a campsite on the river – with water, firewood, forage and an easy defence. And when daybreak came, it was pouring with rain and I stayed in camp. I surveyed every cart, declared half a dozen unfit and sent Polystratus to get more from the local farms. Our estates were within half a day’s ride.

Then I took Myndas aside. ‘You let me buy those carts,’ I said.

He stared at the ground.

So I punched him in the head. ‘How much did they pay you, you fuck?’ I said.

He curled into a ball and waited to be hit again. But it was obvious to me that the military contractors had paid off my slave to give me crap.

I found a dozen footsloggers who knew which end of a spokeshave was which, and put them to fixing carts. I had the rest – a thousand of them – cut wood for fires. The rain was as heavy and cold as Tartarus, and we needed those fires. Then I had them cut spruce boughs for bedding. The officers backed me. I had the feeling I was in command exactly as long as I continued to give orders that they liked, but I didn’t get hubris from a few successes because I was still so angry about the carts.

Just at nightfall, Polystratus came in with eight light carts drawn by mules. He had another twenty mules – all the stock from one of my pater’s breeding operations. So the next morning, still wet, by the light of roaring fires, I put donkeys in the shafts of every cart. I gave the useless donkeys to the farmer whose fields we’d wrecked by camping there and we were away, moving almost twice as fast as we’d moved the day before.

One of the officers who was supposed to be ‘under’ me was Gordias, a mercenary from Ephesus. I’d never met him until we marched – now he rode with me. We were crossing flat ground, just short of the foothills of Paeonia, and he rode along, making jokes and observations, and I felt pretty competent.

‘You read Xenophon, lord?’ he asked me, out of nowhere.

‘ The March to the Sea ? Of course. And On Hunting , and The Cavalry Commander .’ I ran through all the titles I’d read.

‘Ever formed a box with infantry?’ he asked.

I had to laugh. ‘Gordias, when I ordered your phalangites to cut firewood yesterday, it was the first order I’ve ever given to grown men.’

He nodded. ‘You’re doing all right. Do more. Let’s drill a little – can’t hurt, and in bad weather, it’s best to keep the lads too busy and tired to think. Let’s form the box around your baggage and see how we do.’

So we did. And we didn’t do very well.

Not my fault. Nothing to do with me. But I felt their failure in my bones. They were not a regular taxeis, but a bundle of recruits with some veteran mercenaries with recent land-grants mixed in. The veterans hadn’t taken charge yet, but were still living their own way and ignoring the useless yokels they had as file partners, and the useless yokels were still too scared of the fire-eaters to ask them for help.

They’d never formed a hollow square as a group – the recruits had done it some time or other, and the veterans a hundred times, but never together. The first time, the left files folded in too fast and the front files formed the front face and walked off, leaving the rest of the box to form without them.

Halt, reform.

The second time, the rear face of the hollow square was left behind by the rest of us. And the baggage contrived to plug the road, so that reforming took an hour.

Halt, reform, lunch. Rain.

After lunch, we got the hollow square formed – pretty much by having every officer mount up, ride around and push groups of men, and sometimes individuals, into the spot where they had to go. For almost an hour, we marched across northern Macedon in a hollow square, with our baggage protected, and then the whole thing started to shred like a reed roof in a high wind – the left face of the square ran into a marsh and the right face just kept going.

I couldn’t believe how fast we fell apart.

And then I realised that the sun was dipping and I hadn’t chosen a camp.

Zeus! So much to remember. Luckily, Polystratus had taken a dozen Thracians and gone off on his own and found a campsite.

We got our tents up before last light, and fires lit, with four hundred men up on the hillsides gathering wood and another two hundred standing to, ready to cover them. The men were wet and tired and angry, and I heard a lot about myself I didn’t want to hear. Two days of cold rain would make the Myrmidons mutinous.

But when the fires were lit and roaring, when I had wine served out from the carts, when the woodpiles were as tall as houses – well, my popularity increased. The wine wasn’t very good, but in a cold rain on a windswept night, it was delicious. I’d been suckered on the wine, too.

Our tents weren’t much – just a wedge of linen, no front or back. They kept the water off your face, and we put four men in each – and no tents for slaves or shield-bearers. They were just wet. The footsloggers weren’t much better, and the younger pages – I’d been left with all the babies – were soaked to the skin and didn’t have the experience to stay warm or dry.

I was up all night.

The next day was the third day of hard rain, and we marched anyway – lighter and faster yet. More wheels had been built during the night – Gordias kept his wheelwrights at it, I guess. Anyway, now we had spare wheels in one cart, and the wheelwrights, instead of marching with their units, stayed with the carts, so that as soon as a tyre came loose or an axle cracked, we pulled that cart out of the line, surrounded it with Thracian auxiliaries and repaired it from spares while the rest of the column marched on.

We made excellent time that day – gravel roads, better carts, and we were already better at marching. Polystratus found a camp, and we were almost in the highlands. The rain let up for a few hours, and the tents went up on dryish ground – I put half the army out to cut pine boughs and gather last year’s ferns and any other bedding they could find, and I strung the pages across the hillsides as guards.