Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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Alexander took a deep breath. He nodded very slowly.

Some of the older officers began to let out their long-held breaths in relief.

‘I guess we’ll just have to be on our best game, then,’ Alexander said. ‘Because in the morning, we march for Halicarnassus.’

Philotas had the advance guard. His version was two hundred Thracian Peltastoi and a hundred Thracian cavalry, well spread out in front, backed with two full squadrons of Hetaeroi and two hundred archers. Philotas didn’t like my ‘W’, and he used a more linear advance-guard formation.

We entered the mountains again at Bargylia, with Mount Lyda on our left and the sea below us on the right – a road well cut, an old road, and one that offered no cover at all. Twenty stades south of Bargylia we left the sea and started overland on the last leg of the road, through a valley pass that climbed slowly, and was at least broad enough for the advance guard to shake out into formation.

It was raining. I felt old – my hand throbbed, and all my wounds hurt as if they were new, and Thaïs and I had had a fight – about Queen Ada. A stupid fight.

I was riding with the royal escort, well back in the column, and Parmenio was well behind us – pouting, or so it seemed. Seleucus was finally healed from his wounds at Granicus, and he was back with us, in armour. Nearchus was there, and Marsyas, and most of the rest of the old guard. Kineas was with us.

‘I wish Ada could see this,’ Alexander said.

‘Aphrodite’s tits, I’m tired of Ada,’ Hephaestion said.

‘You know I do not like blasphemy,’ Alexander said coldly. ‘Or vulgarity.’

‘Ada has tits,’ Hephaestion said reasonably. ‘I assumed that you’d want to hear about them.’

Alexander turned to glare at him.

‘Well, she does!’ Hephaestion insisted with his usual foolishness. ‘I mean, they’re not much bigger than mine, but she does have tits.’

Nearchus started to laugh, and Black Cleitus, and Alexander reined in.

‘Shut up!’ he barked, and raised his hand.

Hephaestion, always happiest with an appreciative audience, ignored the king. ‘And arm muscles! Bigger than mine!’

Alexander struck him. He had a riding whip – as long as his legs – in his hand, and he hit Hephaestion in the mouth – not hard, but fast. ‘Shut your foul mouth and listen,’ Alexander said.

Hephaestion put both hands to his mouth. ‘You bastard,’ he spat.

By now I could hear what the king was hearing. ‘They’re fighting!’ I said.

Alexander put his heels to his riding horse. None of us was on war horses, but we raced up the top of the pass, crowding around the hypaspists and the second Hetaeroi squadron.

‘Arm!’ I shouted as we pushed by. ‘Shields! Armour!’

Only the advance guard marched armed for battle.

We went over the top of the pass, and below us we saw Philotas entangled with an ambush.

There were enemy hoplites, immediately identifiable by their big, round shields, in among Philotas’s archers, and farther ahead, archers were dropping arrows from high above on the Prodromoi and the Thracians.

The Thracians panicked and broke, running back along the column, just as Alexander and Seleucus and I started to get a counter-attack together. It was my squadron of Hetaeroi, after all. They were to hand, and they were good, if I don’t say so myself.

Alexander watched the Thracians break, five stades away. He looked around.

Calm as a man in his andron – calmer – Alexander looked off to the north. ‘Philotas was not ready for this. Now, if Memnon is the great man people say he is, he’ll have cavalry. And cavalry can only be . . .’

Alexander was looking right at the low hill that dominated the craggy heights to our left, and as sure as cats make kittens, just as he said this, fifty Greek cavalry emerged from behind the hill.

I had maybe twenty of my own men, and Polystratus and a few grooms.

The Greek cavalry didn’t come at us pell-mell. They formed in a neat rhomboid a stade away, and Cleomenes had time to buckle his breastplate.

‘They look professional,’ Kineas said. He pulled the cheek-plates down on his helmet. Quietly, he said, ‘Shouldn’t the king go to the rear?’

I smiled. ‘He should,’ I agreed. ‘But he won’t!’

They came forward at us, and we had about the same numbers.

Alexander took the point. There was no stopping him. He saw Kineas and smiled. ‘More Athenians over there than here,’ he said.

‘Quality over quantity,’ Kineas said. He grinned at the king.

Alexander threw his head back and roared. ‘By the gods, you are a man after my own heart,’ he said. He tossed his javelin in the air and caught it. ‘Oh, I am alive.’

As soon as we started forward, I realised that the big man with the dark skin who was coming right at me had to be Memnon himself. And these cavalrymen would be his Theban exiles.

We smashed together at a fast trot. Neither side had time to get to a gallop. But because we were so slow, both sides were perfectly ordered, and we crashedtogether as if we were hoplites on foot.

Fights like that aren’t about skill, but about horse size and riding ability. We were evenly matched, and we were suddenly in our hipposthismos, pushing and cutting, and my spear was broken – I can never tell you how, it always just seems to happen.

I was sword to sword with Memnon – or rather, he cut at me with his kopis, and I blocked with the ash staff of my busted spear. I forced him to parry high, and I got my bridle hand on his elbow and started to push, and quick as a viper he put his head down and rammed my face with the crest of his helmet. But my nasal held, and he didn’t break my nose or my face. I went for my dagger, rammed it into his side and missed my blow – he caught my dagger in his bridle hand and disarmed me.

He was good.

‘Let me at him!’ Alexander shouted at my right hip.

I’d have laughed, if I hadn’t been so busy.

Memnon now had my right wrist and I had his. I had his with my left thumb down, so I started to rotate his hand by main strength and leverage. My riding horse didn’t help – too small and light for this kind of work, but she had lots of heart, and as she backed away from Memnon’s bigger stallion and took a bite to the face, she reared, and for a second I had the purchase, and I stripped the sword from Memnon’s hand, getting a slash across my neck in exchange.

He slashed a dagger at the back of my off leg, and scored deeply. When I tried to throw him to the ground, he punched me in the neck, under the helmet, and by luck, his instinctive punch was with the pommel of the dagger and not the blade, or I’d have had to end this story right there. I sagged back, and suddenly – without warning – the whole lot of them were cantering away from us, and it was all I could do to sit on my horse and breathe.

I’d never been hand to hand with another man who could wrestle on horseback as I can.

Kineas had a long cut down his sword arm, but he’d taken a prisoner.

Alexander slid from the saddle and picked up the sword at my horse’s front feet. ‘Memnon’s sword!’ he said. ‘An omen if ever there was one.’

Aristander proclaimed the omen throughout the camp that night, which was good, because the omen I saw was that Memnon’s ambush had killed a hundred archers, as many Thracians and more Hetaeroi than died at the Battle of the Granicus. And we found six bodies of his men, and Kineas took a prisoner. The worst of it was that his tiny cavalry force had only charged us to cover the rest of his ambush as they broke contact. I wasn’t an old veteran, back then, but I knew enough to be chilled at the professionalism of an ambush force that struck – and vanished. They didn’t hang around to let us bring up reinforcements – the failure of most ambushes.

Kineas’s prisoner was a Megaran aristocrat, and thus, by League law, a traitor to be executed. But all agreed he’d fought well – even when unhorsed – and Macedonians, unless their blood is up, don’t really hold with killing prisoners.

Kineas bowed to the king that night. ‘Lord, I can’t make him a slave. He’s a gentleman.’

Alexander nodded. He’d enjoyed the fight, and his mood was much better. ‘Recruit him, then,’ he told Kineas.

And that’s your friend Coenus, young man.

Fighting Memnon was the best training that the Macedonian army ever received. He was like a slap in the face – a lesson from a particularly nasty teacher.

It was good for Alexander. At the time, it was a nightmare.

We set our camp for the siege, and that night a hidden battery of engines rained rocks on us for half an hour while our camp dissolved into chaos. Memnon’s Greek engineers had time to break the machines down, burn the wood and carry the bronze parts back into the city. Only about a dozen Macedonians were killed – twice that many wounded and twice again in slaves lost – but the panic was incredible.

The second day, Memnon sent a daylight sortie – a daylight sortie. Everyone knows that you only sortie at dawn, dusk and in the light of the moon. The besieged – brave but doomed – sneak out a postern gate and try to set fire to a siege engine or two. It never works.

Memnon had two of Athens’ best commanders – Ephialtes and Thrasybulus – in his service. Thrasybulus took the picked hoplites of the garrison, waited for our noon guard change to be about one quarter complete and charged out the main gate.

I was a stade away, sitting on horseback with Kineas and Cleomenes. We were off duty, and we’d decided to go for a hunt in the hills. I’d never seen such a barren place, and I was minded to find another campsite – a place where the cavalry could camp closer to water, for example.

We’d just left the camp when the assault started – the noise alerted us. I saw the Greek hoplites teem out of the gate and slam into the pezhetaeroi, who were strung out over five stades of ground in no kind of formation. Guard duty was a formal thing. No one worried about fighting by day, in a siege.

They had fire in pots, and in moments a half-built siege tower was engulfed in flames, and a row of torsion engines went next. Cleomenes cursed. Those were all the machines we had. The Athenians and the transport fleet had the rest of the siege train, way north at Miletus.

Kineas laughed. ‘That’s Thrasybulus!’ he said. We were close enough to see helmet crests. Yellow with two red side plumes. Thrasybulus. ‘Alexander ordered him executed.’

I must have made a face.

Kineas shrugged. ‘Would you want a Macedonian exile to prove a coward?’ he asked.

The pezhetaeroi were completely defeated, and the Greek hoplite force formed up and marched back into the city, singing a hymn to Athena.

That stung.

Next day I took my grooms and rode cross-country to Miletus with orders for the fleet. The fleet, which consisted of twenty Athenian triremes and forty transport ships, against roughly four hundred Persian warships.

Nicanor, the fleet commander, made a face. ‘The Athenians don’t love Alexander,’ he said, as if I needed to be told that. ‘And all those oarsmen have relatives serving on the walls at Halicarnassus.’

‘The king needs the siege train,’ I said.

Thaïs and Alexander and I had cooked up a plan. Each of us contributed something, although I’m sure that Alexander thought of it as his plan and I’m quite sure it was really mine.

Thaïs arranged for a prisoner to escape with news that our fleet was going to raid Cos – a large island off the coast still loyal to Persia.

Alexander tried to assault the walls four nights in a row. It cost him men, but it kept Memnon busy – too busy to brew mischief.

Nicanor sent the Athenian squadron to appear off Cos and then sail south, as if going to Cyprus or Tyre or one of the other Persian bases.

And then, naked as a babe, the transports sailed before dawn on the fourth day from Miletus with our entire siege train – nipped round Point Poseidon and landed at Iasos. Did our brilliant trickery play any role? Who knows. But the Persian fleet left Halicarnassus and sailed – to Cos – and our siege train moved down the coast unmolested.

Day seven of the siege, and we were ready to start in earnest. We built the engines well to the rear, where no sortie could reach them, and the whole army spent two days moving earth – the miserable, sandy, scrubby soil of Halicarnassus – in sacks from the more fertile regions to the west. It was brutal, and because it was brutal, we all did it. Alexander made a point of carrying sacks of earth.

Parmenio did not. He was openly derisive of the effort.

Day eight – see here, in the Military Journal? At least this part is honest – four days of rain. Autumn had come, and the wind blew, and most of our precious soil was washed away. That taught us to keep our dirt and sand in sacks. Of course, the sacks for sandbags had to come from somewhere. Sieges are a delight, I tell you – a logistician’s dream.

Memnon, damn him, had everything – bags, quarried stone, full magazines, water, oil. His engines were as good as ours and a little higher on the walls – our first earth platforms were too low, because we hurried. His engines had our range to the dactyl, and before a stone was launched we’d lost engines to his engines.

But we were learning. We put all our earth in sacks, with every camp follower and whore in the army sewing like mad, and our next artillery platforms were higher than the walls and better sited, and in two more days (days eleven and twelve) we’d blown a breach in the wall.

Day thirteen – an exhausting day bringing more earth from the west and north. Every piece of fabric between Miletus and Halicarnassus was now in our earthworks, and Ada had sent us the whole cloth inventory of her realm – thousands of pieces of woven stuff, some quite costly.

And it rained.

And we built new mounds for the second battery.

The thirteenth night of the siege, the rain stopped a little after midnight. There was no moon.

Memnon came out with his picked men, all with their faces blacked, and they burned more than half our engines. The sentries were asleep. There was no one to punish, because they died to a man.

See what I mean about training? It was as if Memnon’s job was to punish us when we failed. His scouting and intelligence were excellent.

Thaïs began to worry that he had a spy in our headquarters. Her immediate suspect was Kineas.

‘Or you,’ I pointed out. ‘You are ideally placed, and Athenian.’

She nodded. ‘If I’m a traitor, you’d already be dead,’ she noted.

Both of us worried that Parmenio was so angry at the king that he’d sell us out just to get the campaign to end. It was hard to know what exactly Parmenio was playing for. I suspected him of plotting to be king, but if so, he was far more cautious a plotter than I would ever have managed. Thaïs felt that he only plotted to defend himself against the king – that he assumed that, in time, the king would try to kill him.

Macedon, eh?

The king moved our batteries to the south side of the city and we started all over again, with fewer engines tossing their stones against a narrower front of the wall. We worked all day on the fifteenth day and all day on the sixteenth, and on the morning of the seventeenth we started to pound the southern walls, and by nightfall we had four breaches.

We stood guard all night, waiting for the inevitable attack, because we’d blown huge holes in the walls and Memnon had to do something.

He did not.

I smelled the rat, but no one would listen to me, and at dusk on the eighteenth day, we formed up to assault the breaches. Alexander was going in person, and I was going with him – all of us were, all the king’s friends.

Dusk. The sun had burned all day, but in autumn, the evening has a bite in it, and the tireder you are, the colder it seems. My arms hurt, my abdomen hurt – I’m a cavalryman, by Poseidon! Not a dirt carrier. My thorax seemed to weigh fifty pounds, and my wrist bracers were like stones. My helmet weighed down on my neck.

And the start of the assault was slowed because Perdiccas’s taxeis was late getting into their assault positions.

Alexander stood near our bit of parapet, outwardly calm. When he saw Perdiccas’s men cutting across the ‘no man’s land’ between our works and the city wall, he frowned.

‘They’re announcing we’re coming,’ he said, and then, I could see, he was clamping down.

He kept looking up the steep ramp of rubble at the breach, which seemed to tower above us. But the breach seemed empty of men, so our surprise was still intact.

We were going first, of course. Right up the breach, all the way to the top. In one rush, with no rest and no slacking, in fifty pounds of armour.

Try it – climbing over pulverised rock in iron-shod sandals going up a forty-five degree slope into fire.

Their archers took a long time to wake up. That much of the plan worked. And Alexander had fires set – wet grass, brought from the hills to the east – and the smoke covered us for a while, although I, for one, choked on it. I threw up on the ramp. War is glorious.

So I was well behind Alexander at the top of the wall, but since he’s told me the story a hundred times, I can tell you. He was the first into the city. There was no resistance.

A dozen archers on the wall shot down into us. Men fell, but not many, and even they were only wounded. It’s awfully hard to kill an armoured man carrying an aspis with a missile from above.

Alexander ran over the rubble, light-footed as a god, spear at the ready, crested the breach and started down into the town. There appeared to be a row of houses in front of him, so he turned along the alley and ran south, towards the sea, with a dozen men at his heels. About this time I’d made it to the breach, and the pezhetaeroi were coming up the ramp behind us in big numbers, the sprinters already three-quarters of the way to the top.

Alexander was afire with the thought of being the first into the town – a great honour among Macedonians, and indeed among all Hellenes. I saw his helmet plumes ahead of me, going south, and I pushed through the hypaspitoi to get to him. I wasn’t worried about Memnon’s garrison – more fool I – but about murder. By then, I was convinced that Parmenio meant to kill the king.

I went south along the alley. I picked up the smell of new masonry – the smell of new-laid mud brick and mortar – as I ran.

Someone had walled up those houses – perhaps five days before.

We were in a cul-de-sac, and the whole attack was an ambush.

I ran as if my legs were powered by ambrosia and the gods were lifting my feet.

Alexander was standing at the head of the southern end of the alley, staring at a wall of new masonry and sandbags three men high. He only had a dozen men around him.

‘Trap!’ I screamed. ‘Run!’

That got their attention.

Hephaestion got his aspis up in front of Alexander’s head, and Nearchus put his over the king’s shoulder, and then the first volley of arrows hit – fired point blank from a few horse lengths.

Men went down. That close, and the Carian and Cretan longbows with their very heavy arrows punched through bronze. I took an arrow two fingers deep into my left shoulder and it stood clear of me like some sort of banner.

Alexander was hit four times, despite his friends covering him. There were that many arrows, and Memnon had predicted that he would be there. Memnon’s whole plan, in fact, was to kill the king.

I fell to one knee – I probably screamed. The pain was intense, and the sight of the king battered by arrows broke my heart.

I won’t soon forget that moment – the taste of vomit in my helmet, the searing pain in my shoulder, the sharp rubble under my knee.

Alexander stood straight as a blade. ‘Form the synapsismos!’ he called. There were hypaspitoi and pezhetaeroi mixed together in the breach and the alley behind it, but the king’s voice impelled instant obedience, and men formed ranks even as they died in the arrow storm. The closer they formed, the more shields there were to cover them, and the safer they were – but the requirement for discipline was incredible.

And they rose to it. There must have been a thousand men packed in the trap, and Alexander saved them – most of them.

‘Back step!’ he ordered. ‘Shields up!’

Step by step. I was in the second rank, with the arrow sticking out of my shoulder until Nearchus saw it and pulled it free. The barbs, thanks to Apollo, had caught in the leather lining of my shoulder armour and had not passed my skin.

Nearchus had a small, very sharp knife inside his thorax – we all did – and he used it to cut my pauldron free of my thorax even as another volley of arrows tore into us, but the gods were with me, or too busy elsewhere to care, and I was not taken.

I got my aspis on my bleeding shoulder, and the spirit of combat filled me and kept me from fainting, and we backed step by step across the rubble with their arrows pouring in on us and Alexander calling the step like a taxiarch. Step by step.

It took for ever. I still have dreams about it – the feeling of the rubble under my sandals, the grit insidethem and inside my thorax, the feeling of blood and sweat turning cold in the morning air, the pain, and the king’s voice carrying us down the ramp a step at a time.

Memnon’s archers shot at the king. He was easy to spot, and they showered him with arrows, but the hypaspitoi and a few old sweats from the pezhetaeroi covered him with their shields and died for it. And no chance shaft killed him. He was hit again and again – I saw one shaft hit him square in the helmet crest and stick – and he continued to give orders as if on parade.

We got down the ramp, and the hypaspitoi gathered around him and carried him away to where his personal physician, Philip of Acarnia, waited with hot tongs and boiling water. Alexander had four wounds – three from arrows and a fourth where a friendly spear-tip had ripped across the back of his neck.

We all wore scarves – rolled tight and tucked into the top of our thoraces to catch the sweat and to pad the necks of our armour against our skin. When Philip pulled the king’s neckcloth off, an arrowhead fell with a clank to the wood floor of the tent. I saw this with my own eyes.

Every man present gasped. That arrow had penetrated the cloth of the neck pad, and somehow stopped against the king’s neck. There wasn’t a mark on him.

His four wounds were less onerous than my one. As soon as Philip had seen to the king, he put me on the table, gave me a leather billet to bite and cauterised my shoulder wound after cleaning it. That made me scream. But he had a light touch with the iron and his slaves were famous throughout the army, and I was on my feet the next day in time to see the King of Macedon send a herald to Memnon requesting permission to retrieve the corpses of our dead.

It was the only time Alexander ever had to do so, in all his life. In the Hellenic world, it was an admission of defeat – it entitled the other side to set up a trophy of victory. Memnon had beaten us, and worse, he’d killed three hundred veterans in the breach and rumour had it he’d lost just three men in exchange.

That morning, Parmenio openly proposed that we break the siege and march for Ephesus. ‘We can’t take this town this winter,’ he said. ‘Possibly not ever.’

He didn’t push it, however. In fact, to me, he sounded as if he was egging the king on, pushing him by teasing him. Perhaps I wronged him, but by then I had ceased to hold any affection for Parmenio.

The argument in the headquarters tent went on for hours – and was bitterly acrimonious. It was so nasty that it occurred to me that Alexander was king only by virtue of victory. I had never thought it before – but what I heard in that tent convinced me that if the king were to take a major defeat, these bastards would leave him in a moment. I was shocked, for a while.

The truth was, as usual, that Alexander’s near-inhuman perfection had a flaw. The flaw was that men doubted it, and waited to see him fail. In some perverse way, many men wanted to see him fail. And by the time of the siege of Halicarnassus the strain was beginning to show. Some of the pezhetaeroi were openly mutinous, being forced to serve past their appointed time. The harvest was in back at Pella, or nearly, and they weren’t home on their farms.

And the aristocrats were starting to realise that, under Alexander, there would only be war, followed by war. None of the delights of peace – such as plotting the king’s overthrow. They’d realised that he meant what he said – he meant to conquer all of Asia.

For four hours they yelled at each other, and then Perdiccas went off to set the guards – the two junior regiments of the pezhetaeroi.

I was not paying very close attention because my shoulder hurt, and I had reached a level of fatigue and injury that left me dull. I just knew that I’d had too much wine, my wound was throbbing, and suddenly most of the officers had left the tent, leaving Alexander and Hephaestion and Parmenio and Philotas.

Alexander stood with his arms crossed. ‘I’ll stay here all winter if that’s what it takes to take this city,’ he said.

‘You’ll burn the cream of your infantry and leave us nothing,’ Parmenio said, mixing his metaphors like mad. ‘Memnon is reading you like a book, boy.’

‘You are not welcome to call me boy, Lord Parmenio. Take yourself to bed. You are drunk, sir.’ Alexander spoke carefully. I thought he was a little tipsy himself.

‘I may be drunk, but you are young. The first duty of any strategos – never mind the King of Macedon – is to protect his army. To keep it alive. To fight another day. Halicarnassus is not a fair trade for the army your father and I spent twenty years training.’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can for the pezhetaeroi, but I’ll trade them all for defeating Memnon. There’re more boys in Pella who can carry a sarissa.’

I would have shut him up if I’d been well. Hephaestion didn’t care – he shared the king’s delusions of grandeur.

Parmenio turned red.

Philotas spat. ‘Maybe if you had to train them yourself, you’d take more care with them.’

Alexander shrugged again. ‘At least I wouldn’t squander them in ambushes,’ he said.

Philotas reached for his sword, and even though I had no time for him, I managed to pin his arms against his side.

Alexander looked at him, and at Parmenio. ‘Did your son just reach for a weapon in the royal presence?’ he asked.

And I shook my head. ‘No, lord. He did not. Nor would I say he did in front of the Assembly.’ Cases of treason and lese-majesty were always tried in front of the Assembly of the freemen of the army.

Parmenio threw me a glance of thanks.

I didn’t want his thanks – I wanted the king to stop being an arse.

Alexander looked through me.

Parmenio did the right thing, took his son and his Thessalian officers and got out of the tent.

Alexander watched him go. ‘I didn’t expect you to side with Parmenio,’ he said to me in a chilling voice.

‘Lord,’ I said, and I turned on him, ‘I don’t need to protest my loyalty to you, do I? You risk an open breach with Parmenio in the middle of this siege. Is that what you want?’

‘Eventually I must clean my house,’ Alexander said.

I had missed it. He was drunk. He was telling the truth, as men often do, in their cups, but he was drunk.

‘Not right now, I think. Not while we are in the face of the enemy – a very competent enemy.’ Marsyas said that – bless him. The only courtier with enough balls to agree with me in the face of the king’s drunkenness.

‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ Hephaestion said.

I nodded, glad that I, at least, was sober. ‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ I agreed. ‘He may even try to kill the king,’ I added quietly. ‘But he is the second most powerful man in the army, and he has the loyalty of many, many men – men we need to conquer Asia. Now is not the time. We might have civil war.’

Marsyas nodded, and Black Cleitus looked at me carefully. But Alexander turned his back on me, leaned on Hephaestion, and walked from the tent.

About six hours later, while the sun was just a hint of orange-grey in the sky over the sea to the east, Memnon struck.

He sent a thousand men with buckets of pitch and blackened faces out of a secret postern gate. They ran silently across no man’s land, overwhelmed the young men on guard duty and plunged in among the war machines. Their pitch buckets and fire pots went straight to work, and in minutes they had all the engines on the north side of the city aflame.

It was brutal, and grim, and in those flames we read our doom. We had lost our entire siege train in fewer minutes than it takes words to tell it.

The pezhetaeroi rallied to counter-attack over the batteries and men formed up with buckets of water – scarce water, many men using what was in their canteens. The pezhetaeroi stormed forward in the dark, and met a fierce resistance – the black-painted men fought like demons. The pezhetaeroi were spear to spear and shield to shield with many of Greece’s best men, and it was dark. In many ways, the situation favoured the Greeks fighting for Persia.

When the pezhetaeroi bogged down – still well short of retaking the battery platforms – Memnon sprung the second part of his trap, and released anothersortie from the main gate. Again. We still weren’t ready to see troops coming out of the main gate, but they did – a major force of hoplites and a handful of cavalry, led by the two Athenian strategoi. They slammed into the flank of the pezhetaeroi, catching them at open shields, and the execution they inflicted was horrible.

And then the gods took a hand.

It was at this point, when all was lost, the machines burned and Memnon’s masterstroke was unveiled, that I arrived on the scene – in armour, thanks to Polystratus’s and Thaïs’s efforts. My shoulder was stiff and painful and I ached all over, but the sound of disaster is unmistakable. I ran for the fighting, with my grooms and a dozen friends at my back.

I found Alexander in the gloom. He was waiting for the hypaspitoi to form up. He was watching the fighting – listening, perhaps.

Alectus was forming men as fast as they piled out of their tents, and I put my grooms and any man I could lay hands on in the ranks with them and ran to Alexander’s side.

‘Good morning, Ptolemy,’ he said.