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

But one thing Philip taught Macedon was to pursue ruthlessly. When Philip lost, his beaten troops usually slipped away covered by his cavalry, and when he won – well, men who faced him lost and usually died. They didn’t come back to fight again.

Pursuit is an art within the art of war – a cruel, inhumane, brutal art. It requires high conditioning and discipline, because all a warrior wants when he’s won a victory is to stop. And that’s true of every man on the field. The daimon can handle only so much danger, so many brushes with death, so many parries and so many killings. The fatigue of combat is such that most men are exhausted after just a hundred heartbeats of close fighting. Or standing under a shower of sling stone, unable to reply – men are exhausted. Fear, fatigue and pain are all somehow the same thing after the first seconds of a fight. The better-conditioned man lasts longer and is braver. And so on.

Philip trained us to be ready to go on after the fight was over. It was our main duty, in many ways. Alexander had been positioned behind the centre – with all the companions – not to win the battle with a lightning strike into the enemy centre, but to exploit the victory that Philip thought he’d win on foot. That was his plan.

Now that the Thebans were breaking, it was my duty to harry them to death.

I could scarcely lift my arms, and keeping my back straight to ride was beyond me – but I found one of the troop trumpeters and started sounding the rally, and before I could drain my canteen I had twenty files of cavalry at my back.

Erygius was there. He gave me a big smile, smacked my back. ‘You’re not bad!’ he said.

That made me blush.

‘We need to get into the rout and crush them,’ I said.

The veteran nodded. He shaded his eyes – did his trick of climbing a little higher on his horse and kneeling on his back. ‘Hard to tell – the Kerata Pass must be west.’ He waved towards what had been the centre of their army. ‘Where Alexander charged. No point in carving these fools up – they’re already trapped against the hills.’

Mostly, we had Boeotian dust and sunlight, and if it hadn’t been for dead trees at the edge of the marsh, I’d have been lost.

‘Let’s head west,’ I said.

He nodded.

Our horses were tired, but we keep our animals in top shape – by riding far and fast every day – and we swept across the back of the allied position, killing or scattering any opposition. Twice we turned to the south, on to rising ground – our objective was to block the Kerata Pass, not to fight every Theban soldier.

But far short of the foot of the pass, we found the rout, and then we became killers. The Thebans were utterly broken, and the Athenian hoplites weren’t much better, although some of their best men were staying together. We slaughtered the Thebans – there’s no better word for it – and I did so in a haze of fatigue. I was so tired that I didn’t fully recognise that I’d passed from killing helpless Thebans to killing helpless Athenians until Polystratus took my bridle and pulled me up so hard I almost toppled off my mount.

We’d come pretty far – almost three stades – I’ve visited the spot since. The rout filled the pass, and men were forced up the sides like flotsam in a spring rain. My cavalrymen and Alexander’s were all through the rout, hopelessly mixed in with the enemy, killing, or in many cases merely riding along, taking prisoners, or sitting on the high ground, watching. There is, as I have said, a limit to what even the trained killer can make himself do. Until Chaeronea I had killed six men – after, I never counted again.

But Polystratus hadn’t reined me as a merciful gesture. He was pointing.

Virtually under my spear was a crouching man. His shield was gone, he had a light wound and somehow his chiton had got bunched into his zone so that his butt cheeks were showing – a pitiful sight. And he was weeping, begging me to spare him.

I fully intended to kill him in sheer disgust. But again Polystratus stopped me, pushing my spear away with his own.

‘You have ears, or what?’ he asked.

I swear that until he said that, the gods had quite literally closed my ears. I hadn’t heard anything for hours.

I must have shrugged, or something like. He grinned. ‘It’s their great man,’ Polystratus said. ‘He claims . . . well, listen to him!’

The crouching, bare-arsed man at my feet was Demosthenes the orator.

After that, I started taking prisoners. I was done killing – my whole body hurt, my right side was sticky and wet and cold with blood, and that reek – the reek of sweat and copper and excrement – was in my nose for a day – in the hair of my horse, in my own hair.

And I couldn’t kill any more men.

I just couldn’t.

I threatened, and some of them just pushed past me, as if they didn’t care either, or as if they knew I was past my limit. It’s almost like a failure of courage – your arm rises and falls, you kill and wound and maim, and then – and then, you can’t do it any more.

I gathered a dozen prisoners, and as far as I could tell, I was the southernmost Macedonian in the whole host – the rest of the pursuit had halted below me. I didn’t see Alexander anywhere.

And then the Athenian Hippeis showed what they were made of. Someone – not your pater, he was already down – kept a bunch of them together, and they came after me. I had to fall back along the rout, and as I went I picked up men – whole files, at times.

It was a curious form of war – I don’t think a single blow was struck. We were exhausted, and so were they, but they were willing to fight to protect their infantry, and we were not willing to fight them just to kill a few more of the fools.

And no sooner had the Athenians got formed than the best of the infantry started to form on them.

Not enough to prevent the aftermath, but enough to save their precious sense of honour, their arete. Myself, I wasn’t so impressed. Only later did I realise – when I was more of a veteran myself – what it took those tired, beaten men to stop running, find a little more courage, turn and stand their ground. I salute them. I didn’t know it then, but they were probably the bravest men on the field.

I found Alexander with his father, well back down the field. By then, there were thousands of dead Thebans and as many Athenians – heaps for the carrion birds. Greece died there – old Greece, the Greece of Aeschylus and Simonides and Marathon and Plataea. They spent three hundred years building a golden world. We killed it in a long afternoon.

I’ve never been happy about it. When I played Marathon as a boy, I never imagined that I would be there when the dream of Athens died in the dust of Chaeronea – nor that my hand would hold the sword.

More wine, here.

Mid-afternoon. Alexander was so elated that he was a danger to himself – when I rode up to him, he threw his arms around me and said, ‘Did you see me? Antipater says I won the battle. I did, too – Pater was getting beaten, and I saved us, and we won!’ He still had his sword in his hand, and his blue eyes had very faint white rims around them – he looked like a dog in the agora run mad in the heat. Hephaestion looked worried – deeply worried.

His sword beat against my breastplate when he embraced me, and he almost pulled me off Poseidon’s back.

‘Get him out of here,’ Antipater said to me.

I could see Philip, just a few horse lengths away. He had his back to us. His shoulders were slumped, and he looked old. He’d had a bad couple of hours.

‘He’s not making Philip happy.’ Antipater played the court game better than anyone, and I had just enough intelligence left to understand.