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

We sailed along the banks of the Indus for a week. It was idyllic. Indians gathered on the banks and waved, or sang. Some knelt and prayed to Alexander as he passed, as a living god.

But where the Hydaspes and the Akesinos joined, there was a set of rapids, a narrow gorge and a whirlpool.

That is where I began to suspect that Alexander meant to kill us all. He ordered us to pass the rapids by rowing. In three days, we would have been able to unload, carry our ships across the portage and reload. We were the finest, most organised army on the face of earth, and we knew how to do such things.

He ordered us to row, and men died.

Ships were spun around, and collided with the rocks and capsized. Ships ran afoul of each other and capsized. Ships were simply sucked into the whirlpool.

We lost only seven ships, as Alexander mentioned with a laugh and a toss of his head that night, at dinner. He had the look of a smart boy who had pulled off a difficult prank.

Fifteen hundred men drowned.

South of the rapids, the river became broad and flat. We heard that the Malloi, a barbarian people, intended to resist. Alexander brightened up.

I was sitting on my bed, drinking too much, to be honest, when Theodore, Polystratus’s friend, came and banged my tent pole with his spear. ‘Message for Lord Ptolemy!’ he called.

I got up, threw a chlamys over my shoulders and went out into the brilliant sun. Even in evening, India is pounded by the sun.

Ochrid was just giving him a cup of wine.

Theodore drew himself up to attention when I came out. ‘I have a message from the king,’ he said.

I took it.

It was a wax tablet, and on it, in the king’s own writing, it said – ‘Ptolemy – too long have I missed your face over the rim of my wine bowl. Join me tonight, and stop sulking in your tent.’

Apis! He thought I was sulking ?

I reported in a clean chiton, and the king beamed at me. ‘Did I offend you?’ he asked me, clasping both my hands.

What, exactly, do you say?

‘I’ve been unwell,’ I said, with utter cowardice. But Perdiccas laughed, and Hephaestion gave me a look – of thanks?

‘Are you fit for a command?’ he asked.

It turned out that I was to have half the Hetaeroi – Black Cleitus’s former command. A dream command – with Cyrus and Polystratus as squadron commanders, and some attached Indian cavalry.

We were to be the army rearguard.

With his usual brilliance, Alexander had worked out a plan of march that would allow us to travel at intervals – spread over a thousand stades – to minimise supply difficulties, and yet allow us to recombine in any direction. Alexander was using his Aegema to flush opposition, and Hephaestion and I were the anvils against which he would crush any who opposed us.

If you leave aside the morality of it, it was a well-thought-out plan, and just executing such a complex operation was heady stuff. And damn it, it was a pleasure to be in command again.

We swept south, into the Malloi.

They didn’t deserve what happened, but then, no one did.

We found their army just south and east of the river, and it broke before Alexander was on the field. I wasn’t there – I’ve heard of this from others. Hephaestion says that he watched it – a whole army shredding and fleeing rather than face Alexander. And why did they try to stand in the first place?

Men are fools.

Idealism was no doubt involved.

We got orders by messenger to close up to the main body, and we pressed on into the darkness, so that night we caught up with Hephaestion’s forces at a sort of muddy ditch that the Prodromoi claimed was a river. I watered my latest war horse in it – my horses were dying like flies on a cold day, and I was out of Niseans and Saka horses, riding only the local bony Indian nags. But I had one fine horse left – a beautiful Arab mare, the only mare I’ve ever ridden in combat. She was a genius among horses – like my Poseidon – and I called her Amphitrite. My adoptive son loved her, and blessed her every morning.

At any rate, I ignored my grooms and took Amphitrite down to the ‘river’ to water her. If we hadn’t been in a near desert, I wouldn’t have let her drink, and even as it was, I dismounted in the lukewarm water that smelled of human excrement and only let her drink in little nips.

At dawn, Alexander took the Aegema, every man carrying his helmet full of that awful water, and headed east after the fleeing enemy.

Why?

No idea.

We followed an hour later.

We literally ran them down. As we had learned, way back in the pages. We didn’t moralise. We simply drank our foul water and kept going, killing every Mallian who slowed, or stumbled, or gave up. The path of their retreat was lined with corpses, and eventually there weren’t enough vultures to eat the dead.

And still our pursuit continued.

Perdiccas had a dozen units under his command, and Alexander sent him to ring a major town. Then Alexander stormed another Mallian city – in an hour. I hadn’t even caught up yet. They were utterly broken as a people, and still we hunted them and killed them .

Alexander rallied what troops he had under his hand – his Aegema, and the light troops under Perdiccas. Remember, I was supposed to be the rearguard – behind Hephaestion. Hephaestion was by this time behind me, and the only time I saw Alexander that day, he cursed his best friend for tardiness because the crushing of the poor Mallians was his newest pothos.

We marched back towards the river, almost due south. My scouts were in touch with Perdiccas, but I had already lost the king ahead of me. Peithon, newly promoted to command, was sent farther south, on a sweep through the jungle to destroy any Mallians hiding there, and he exterminated them.

This was our fourth day of pursuit. We were all fighting a little and killing fleeing, desperate, tired men a great deal. It was wearing, hot, sweaty and horrible.

On the fifth day, I had lost Hephaestion behind me and I had lost the king altogether, although I had Peithon just south of me and we turned west together to get to the river faster. Our cavalry needed water – abundant water – and we needed some forage. I came across Peithon, who was standing by his foundered horse, a lovely Nisean who was dying in the brilliant sunlight, the blood at her nostrils startling in its intensity.

Peithon was younger than me, and he all but hid his head. ‘I didn’t want to kill her,’ he said, deeply affected. ‘I . . . Ptolemy, when will this stop?’

I had no comfort to offer. So I put a hand on his shoulder, found him another horse and rode on.

Hephaestion caught us at midday.

‘Where’s Alexander?’ he asked me as he rode up. Even his horse was exhausted, and he had access to the king’s horses. His pikemen looked exhausted. We were all done in – a five-day pursuit? Ares’ torment.

I pointed west. ‘My scouts say there’s a fight going on right now just across the river,’ I said. it was true. The report was fifteen minutes old. Strakos was sitting on another blown horse at the brow of a low hill to my left.

‘Ares wept,’ Hephaestion said.

We didn’t pause to reorder. I rode for the river, now just five stades away, and the closer I got, the more surely I knew that there was a battle.

Just at the edge of the river was a low ridge – really, just a mound. I rode to the top, and across the river I could see an army – fifty thousand men, at least.

I turned to Polystratus. ‘Sound the rally,’ I ordered. ‘Form wedge.’

Then I did what Alexander would have done.

I sat on my horse and watched the battle.

I couldn’t find Alexander. All his white horses were dead, and he was mounted on a bay, and that made him harder to find. But mostly, he was hard to find because he was herding fifty thousand men with about two thousand cavalry. He was fighting a battle of infinite pinpricks, the way a small, agile man fights an enormous giant in a sword fight. He had only cavalry, and the Mallians – if, indeed, these were Mallians – had five hundred elephants, but they couldn’t be everywhere and wherever they were not , Alexander was.