Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"
Автор книги: Christian Cameron
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I cut low – cut all the way around my shield – and a man groaned and fell to his knees. I kicked him and the rest pushed me back.
Something hit the crest of my helmet.
I stepped back, and a spear came over my shoulder and punched into the throat-bole of the man in front of me. And then, fast as lightning, a thrown spear hit the man to my right.
I stepped forward into the space left by the sudden corpses, and cut overhand – feint, backhand.
Another man fell.
Alexander stepped up so close that his knee was against my hip as I crouched, and he shot his spear out overhand and caught another man in the thigh, and he went down, and the knot of men behind him broke and ran for the tower.
Without speaking, we chased them – two men against a dozen.
Some fool opened the iron-bound door of the keep to let them in, and we were on them, hacking, cutting, side by side – they slammed the door, but Alexander put his spearhead into the door jamb with godlike precision, and the spear-point stuck in the wood of the jamb as he intended, and the door smashed against it and bounced from the fine steel.
The courtyard was filling with blood-mad hypaspitoi, and Seleucus led them against the door. The men inside struggled to hold it.
They failed.
We killed everyone in the tower.
Then we walked down the hill, back to camp. Alexander was delighted. He kept slapping my back and telling me he had missed me.
I kept wanting to tell him to stop playing war. I was tired, and I had a long scratch down the inside of my leg that had almost touched my testicles, and I was not in a particularly good mood. Slaughtering men raising their hands to surrender – it always sticks in my craw, like the last bite of a meal that’s too big.
At the base of the hill, the sycophant Anaxarchus the priest stood with Anximander, the seer – brothers in crime, if you ask me.
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 nota 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 belowthe 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’tand 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 doenjoy 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.
In fact, the king kept the troops moving, marching up and down the river, building small forts and feinting at various crossings.
Sometimes his brilliance lay in being a thorough master of his craft. For three weeks, every time a detachment marched out of camp, Porus sent twice the number of his Indian cavalry to shadow it along the far side of the river. Our men were still eager, but the wine and olive oil were mostly gone, and we were stymied in an endless quagmire of mud by a foe who outnumbered us.
I kept my lights together as a division. I enjoyed commanding them, and I expected the king to break them up into task forces every day, but he did not, and so I kept them busy, scouting the riverbanks.
Ariston found Adama Island, four parasanges north of the army, outside of Porus’s patrol area. We poured men and supplies north once we’d found it, and all the engineers – twice they tried to bridge it, first with piling driven into the swollen banks, and the second time with a bridge of boats assembled on one bank and swayed across, as we’d done against the Thracians at the Danube.
The river was falling – the rains tapering off – but they couldn’t get a bridge across.
Another week passed. Every day, the king was more difficult to live with – nervous, anxious, quick to anger. He expected Porus to find the potential crossing site any day, and build a fortification to cover it.
I had volunteered to take command at the island and get the advance guard across, and I was on my way to take my leave – already up to my ankles in mud, standing in warmrain – when Hephaestion came out of the king’s tent, his face red and angry even in the watery light.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He grunted. ‘Going to see him? Good luck to you, Ptolemy. I’m ready to go home to Macedon and leave him.’
I gave him half a grin and went into the tent.
Alexander was staring at a sketch of the river. He looked at me. ‘What?’ he shot at me.
‘I’m on my way upriver to try and get the bridge across.’ I saluted. ‘If it can be done, I’ll do it.’
‘If it can’t be done, we’re finished,’ he said with uncharacteristic candour.
‘So?’ I asked.
He pursed his lips.
‘Answer me this, Lord King – what difference does it make? Why are we fighting Porus?’
Alexander wrinkled his nose and made a face as if I’d asked a childish question. ‘He lies across our path and you ask this?’
I shook my head. ‘We’re invading his country.’ I laughed. ‘We could just march away and notinvade his country.’
‘Perhaps I should send someone else to the island,’ he said, only half joking.
We set the next night for our attempt to force the river. Alexander’s plan was subtle, but simple. He was going to march the elites upriver – the Hetaeroi with their Persian counterparts, the hypaspitoi, three cavalry commands under Hephaestion, Perdiccas and Demetrios, as well as two big phalanx divisions with all the veteran Macedonians, and my command. We would cross, and try to turn Porus’s position. At first light, on a day that promised to be fair, Craterus was to lead the main army across the river.
I had gathered every boat for ten parasanges, and floated them to our bank, as we had at the Danube. I had sixty Agrianians across already, in four forward pickets with fires.
Alexander arrived before full darkness, with the hypaspitoi. Diades floated the pontoon bridge, Helios got it staked in hard to the far bank and we had some long moments in the torchlit, soaking darkness until it swayed out into the current and stayed put. And then it broke loose.
It was just too short, and came all the way around, breaking ropes, to land against our bank. Luckily, we had dozens of Greek sailors, and they fended the boats off and then pulled them back upstream. Ropes were shifted for another try, and four more boats were lashed on to the end of the pontoon platform, and we had lost an hour.
Diades begged the king’s forgiveness. Alexander sat bareheaded in the torchlight, surrounded by his officers, and watched, his eyes never leaving the ropes, the sailors and the boats.
Again they swayed the bridge out into the current. Again we saw Helios and his men drive in palings on the far side.
This time, they got their grapples into the far bank properly, and the bridge steadied in the current. The current took the bridge and slammed it downstream, but the hawsers held.
We waited.
They held.
I caught Cyrus’s eye. ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and led my household companions across the bucking bridge. But Alexander was ahead of me, with Seleucus and Lysimachus.
He cantered across the bridge. I rode more slowly.
The engineers began to hold men back, only allowing men to cross in tens, and meanwhile the infantry was embarking in the rafts and boats I had collected for a week.
The boards on the bridge were slick, the oils in the new wood combining with the water to make them treacherous. To make matters worse, the rain turned into a lightning storm, and bolts from heaven began to lash the column.
A bolt struck a file of phalangites, killing three men outright.
In midstream, with the river rushing under my horse’s feet like a live thing, the sky criss-crossed with purple lightning, as if Zeus had set up a trestle to lay siege to the sky, the banks on either shore lost in the darkness and the torrential fall of rain that was, itself, the negation of all sound, I felt as if I were no longer of this world, but had followed the king into the nether regions.
Indeed, when my charger got his forefeet on the far bank, with a loud whinny to announce himself to the waiting horses, or perhaps a prayer to Poseidon for his deliverance, the king spoke out of the flashing darkness.
‘Welcome to Tartarus,’ he said bitterly.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Follow me,’ he yelled. We could barely make ourselves heard.
It was a short ride.
The rising river had cut a new channel.
We were not on the far shore.
We were on a new island, and on the far bank, an enemy signal fire burned despite the torrential rain.
Sometimes, he was a god.
He turned to me and his face, streaming with water, was almost alight with his determination.
‘It can’t be very old,’ he shouted. ‘I’m going to try it. It can’t be deep.’
Before I could say anything, he made Bucephalus – perhaps, by then, the oldest horse in the army – jump into the water.
It was deep. But the horse swam well, and the water had almost no current to it – the channel was fresh, and had not yet cut deep. I saw no point in watching further, and urged my mount into the water – my Nisean, one of the army’s tallest horses. His feet touched the mud underneath – my feet got wet, but they were wet already. We were across in a hundred heartbeats, and we scrambled up the new far bank side by side, rode to the enemy watch fire, scattered it and killed the sentries.
My Paeonians were beginning to ford the river behind me. The Prodromoi were hard on their heels, and behind them came the Hetaeroi and their Persian equivalents.
There was an element of humour, sitting there with the king, watching them come. We were the first two across, and had the enemy been alert, Alexander’s conquest of the world could have ended in ignominious capture on the banks of the Hydaspes river.
But the rain was letting off, and the show of heaven’s wrath. Already, it was possible to hear the creak of oars. Already, men were singing the paean from the boats. The Paeonians and Prodromoi crossed and I sent them off into the darkness. The rest of the Agrianians crossed, and I followed them into the last of the rain. Behind us, the barges of the hypaspitoi and the pezhetaeroi were nudging the shore.
We were across. We had fourteen thousand men, to fight a hundred thousand men and two hundred elephants.
As the rain settled, Alexander took on a glow; never had I seen him so sure of himself. Suddenly he was everywhere – with Seleucus, getting the hypaspitoi moving off the riverbank, and forward with me, asking me for a report. My pathfinder Agrianians, who had been across for days, came in as soon as I lit the patterned signal fires in the locations I had briefed them on – men came from as far as four parasanges, men who had laid the trees at the edge of Porus’s camp, reporting on his troop movements. Now they told us that Porus’s son, Porus the younger, with two hundred chariots and two thousand cavalry, was coming at us out of the rain.
We manoeuvred in silence in the growing grey light. There was almost no cover, but we moved the Paeonians as far forward on the left as could be managed, and Hephaestion took the royal Hetaeroi forward on the far right, with Demetrius’s men forming the centre well back. There weren’t enough infantry across yet to make a difference.
The king himself insisted on leading the centre, and then we could see the Indians coming. They’d formed well – they probably formed right outside their camp, fearful of our speed, which shows how competent they really were. Young Porus was in a chariot, and he drove it across the front of his force, haranguing them. Then he charged our centre, and we charged his flanks. He was young and foolish, and he died. We killed or captured his entire force in about as long as it takes to tell the story, because they hadn’t expected us to outflank the ends of their line. Thorough, but not good enough. They had not faced Spitamenes, or Memnon.
We had.
When I rode up to the king, he was weeping, standing beside Bucephalus, who was putting his muzzle into the king’s hand. The old horse had four huge arrows, almost the size of javelins, in his body, and another in his neck. Even as I watched, he subsided to his knees with a sigh.
A white charger was brought up, and the king paused and kissed Bucephalus on the head. ‘Good horse,’ he said.
Better than Cleitus got.
Then he remounted, and we were off, southward.
We pursued the broken Indians as hard as we could, until we had three of the fords that the Indians had been holding for three weeks in our hands. The water was high, but Meleager and two other taxeis got across, the men soaked, their pikes unaffected.
The phalanx was starting to form.
Ahead, Ariston was watching Porus, and sending a stream of messages to the king. Porus had begun to form his battle line to our front, and he’d left adequate forces to keep Craterus bottled up across the river.
Alexander rode forward to see for himself, and I followed him. The sun was just emerging from the clouds – the first sun we’d seen in days.
I thought of Issus.
Scouts led us to a stand of acacia, where the king sat on his new charger with Ariston, Perdiccas, Coenus, Hephaestion and me, and watched Porus form his army, a seemingly endless crenellation of bow and long-sword-armed infantry as the wall, interspersed with elephants as the teeth.
Alexander sniffed. ‘There goes another one,’ he said. He meant messengers, but none of us got that. Yet. Porus was sending quite a few, and Alexander was watching them, but we hadn’t noticed.
At the flanks, Porus’s cavalry shifted. They didn’t seem to form well – especially on their right, our left, they kept moving – forward, back – it drew the eye.
Alexander watched under his hand. ‘You have to assume that his son was his most trusted commander,’ he said. ‘And hence, that he commanded the right-flank cavalry.’
He looked around, and his eyes glittered.
‘Watch the cavalry on the right. They are under an inexperienced commander, and one that Porus does not really trust.’ He smiled, watching intently.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t see anything like that. I saw a well-formed army, waiting to repel an invader. And I saw us about to fight a truly unnecessary battle.
I looked at the king. ‘How do you know the king mistrusts him?’ I asked.
Alexander laughed aloud. ‘Look! Watch!’ He looked at the battlefield. ‘And another one.’
Seleucus solved the riddle. ‘Messengers!’ he said.
‘Well reasoned!’ the king said. ‘Since I arrived in this patch of woods – no great time – Porus has sent five messengers to his right flank. Now, why does the right flank keep shifting?’
We were all silent.
Alexander slapped Seleucus on the back. ‘Some day, you will be a great general, lad. Listen, friends.’ He laughed – the sheer joy of his face made him seem like one of the deathless gods.
‘Porus is planning to pull all his cavalry off his right and use them all on the left, under a commander he trusts,’ he said.
Lysimachus grunted. I made a similar sound. He was the greatest military genius I’ve ever known or heard of, but it was an absurd conclusion to draw from the evidence.
‘Coenus – take your hipparchy and Demetrios, and all of you ride wide round our left. If Porus’s left-flank cavalry stand fast – charge them. If they cross his rear, follow them, ignoring the line of archers and elephants, and charge the rearof their cavalry.’ He nodded. ‘That’s what will happen. The right will ride around his rear to the left.’
Seleucus grinned. ‘Care to wager?’ he asked.
‘My career against yours?’ the king said, and Seleucus turned grey.
But Alexander laughed. ‘Your turn will come, young man.’
It was the first time he’d ever used that phrase in my hearing. Young man.
He turned to me. ‘Left of my line. Form your Hetaeroi, and put the Paeonians and Prodromoi behind you.’
I nodded. He was going to charge from the right in a cavalry column. As it turned out, we formed six squadrons wide and three deep – a formation not entirely unlike a wedge, except that it was more flexible.
As we came through the trees and formed, we were the only troops Porus could see. By the time the king’s squadron was forming, Porus was sending messengers to the flanks – right and left.
I had Cyrus with me, chewing on onion sausage, and Polystratus and Theodore and Laertes.
Even as we watched, squadrons from Porus’s right-flank cavalry began to wheel about and vanish behind his line of elephants and infantry.
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘I’ve known him all my life,’ I said aloud. ‘He still—’
Polystratus started to laugh, and then his face closed. ‘Company coming,’ he said, and then Alexander was there on his magnificent new white horse, almost as tall as my Triton. He had a dozen Persians around him, and no other Macedonians, and he wore the diadem on the crown of his helmet, but otherwise, he seemed himself.
He beckoned, and as I started forward, he turned his horse – merely by moving his hips, because he was part of any horse he rode – and I followed him.
When we were all together, Alexander pointed at the gathering mass of Indian cavalry.
‘As I may have mentioned,’ he said with insufferable smugness, ‘Porus is now moving all his cavalry to face me. The power of reputation and a really fancy helmet. Listen, my friends,’ he said, leaning forward, and his face was as open as I had ever seen it. ‘This is the last army between us and the ocean. The gods have graciously given me this one last great day – against great warriors and giant beasts, the like of which no Hellene has ever faced.’
He looked at us all. ‘I didn’t mean to make a speech,’ he said with a sudden flash of his rare humour. ‘I just wanted to say – if this is the last one, let’s make it magnificent.’
I know I grinned back at him. It’s facile to say we wanted the battle. I, for one, knew perfectly well that we were fighting an army that was merely defending its homeland. We didn’t even need to fight – the gods knew, we weren’t going to conquer all of India with sixty thousand men.
But he was infectious, like one of Apollo’s arrows, and I was infected. I wantedto be my best.
He rode that white charger to the middle of the line. Our infantry was just coming through the scrub – the Agrianians first, in skirmish order, and behind them the hypaspitoi in a long file on the right, closest to us, with the phalanx in the centre, and the left – empty. Coenus was out of sight beyond the line of poplars that seemed to demarcate the far left of our battle line.
The Indians thought we’d wait for our infantry.
I grabbed Laertes. ‘Ride to Briso with the archers. Tell him to pull all the lights back behind the phalanx and wait for orders. The Agrianians too.’
Laertes gave a nod and rode off into the grain fields. The soil underfoot was sandy, and despite days of rain, it was easy riding. And for the first time in my long military career, I was going to fight a battle with no dust.
Alexander raised his spear.
The Indians were not ready.
We were.
The king lowered his spear, and we rolled forward.
I remember a moment in that charge unlike any other charge I’ve ever been in, when I could see all the way across the front rank – remember, there was no dust. I could see Alexander, a little in advance of the line, his shoulders square, his posture relaxed, his spear-tip rising and falling a fraction with the canter of his great horse, and I could see Hephaestion just behind him, Lysimachus, far off on a magnificent bay – and our front rank, just at the edge of the gallop, was well closed up and the dress across the front was superb. The sun shone on our helmets and turned everyone’s armour to gold.
And I thought, This is all I want. And then I realised that I was seeing it as he saw it. Because I wanted something else entirely. I wanted home and a family, and he wanted – this. An eternity of this.
But in that moment, in the heart of the charge, I felt it, as one man may see, for a moment, why another man worships another woman or a god.
I had a long lance, for a change. I’d practised with it in Sogdiana, and now I held it two-handed, the way the Sauromatae use it, and we were moments from impact with a badly formed Indian squadron that compounded its doom by trying to cover more ground to our flank. They were only formed four deep, and their whole squadron vanished in a spray of blood, like an insect swatted by the hand of a god.
To resist a cavalry charge, enemy cavalry must be well formed, and, preferably, moving. Horses may well not charge a line of men – who can look like a wall or a fence, because horses are notsmart – but a line of horses is merely a challenge to the manhood of a stallion. And a loosely formed line of horses is an invitation to a war horse. Like the king, our mounts lived for these moments.
We swept through their front-rank squadrons without losing our formation and crashed into their second line, which was better formed and moving forward, and I snapped my kontos gaffing a man who seemed to be wearing armour of solid gold, and used the butt-spike to smash another helmet, and then we were through them – I could see Cyrus’s squadron to my right, and Polystratus was at my heels, and I risked a glance back – full ranks at my back – and I put my head down, thumped Triton with my heels and we were pushing forward.
Alexander’s timing was, as usual, perfect.
We crashed into their third line of cavalry, and they held us – they were the right-flank cavalry, sent to finish us off, of course, and their ranks were no firmer than ours. And we were hopelessly intermixed with the enemy. The enemy cavalry began to press us back, and I could see the king killing his way forward, but he was virtually alone.
I was damned if I was going to let him go down alone.
I had my long kopis in my hand, and no idea when I’d drawn it, but it was a better sword than anything the Indians had – their steel was poor. And my horse was the largest horse in the melee.
So I pressed forward.
Behind me, Polystratus shouted ‘The king!’ and my Hetaeroi took up the cry, and then Cyrus’s men began to shout it, in Persian – ‘The king!’
We held them. Or perhaps they held us.
I had a rumble of thunder between my legs, the most powerful war horse I’d ever ridden, and this was his first real taste of the hipposthismos – the horse push. Suddenly, like a river freezing in deep winter, the melee began to gel, the friction of horse against horse slowing movement.
But like a strong swimmer against an adverse current, Triton pushed forward. And no horse could stop him. He bit, he strained, he kicked, and I was another horse length closer to the king.
And another.
I fought, but I fought to keep Triton alive, not to put men down. Alexander was truly alone. I have often wondered whether, having seen it was his last battle, he sought to die there. I only know he’d never outridden the line by so far. Perhaps his new horse was faster than he imagined . . .
And then I was at his back. And Polystratus was at mine – Lysimachus came up, and Hephaestion, just as his white horse reared and fell and I caught him, so that he got his feet clear of the wreck of his mount, and in heartbeats he was mounted again, as Hephaestion killed a man and dumped his body from his saddle. The Indian mounts were smaller and bonier than ours, but good horses, as we had reason to know. Alexander was on one.
