I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.
May someone do as much for me.
Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields full of arrows, and behind them were a dozen more officers and gentlemen.
The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.
There was no one behind my officers.
The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.
There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.
No thanks, I thought.
So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.
I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.
I was wrong.
It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.
And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.
It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.
The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.
But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.
Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.
Laertes fell atop him.
My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.
The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.
I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.
Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and cut with the spearhead as if it were the point of a sword. I felt pain – I was taking blows, and my forearms burned, but to stop was to surrender to death.
Marsyas rose from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.
And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.
The hypaspitoi and the Bactrians under Cyrus, who had come up the gully unopposed and stormed the south wall, now butchered the garrison. No one tried to surrender, and the fighting went on and on – new pockets of resistance were found in alleys, on rooftops, and as the men began to break formation to loot and rape, they found men cowering in basements or tight-lipped in courtyards, and killed them.
Polyperchon’s men came late into the town. They had baulked, left me to die and then been threatened with decimation – death for one man in every ten – by Alexander in person, lying on a litter. I missed it, but he went mad, so I was told by Cleitus, spitting, calling them the sons of whores. Alexander, who never swore. Well, almost never.
When they came into the town, they went on an orgy of destruction and killing. The hypaspitoi had rounded up fifty or so women and some children – to be sold as slaves. Don’t imagine they were rescued for any altruistic purpose. Polyperchon’s men found them by the breach and killed them all.
And then they started killing Cyrus’s men.
At first, the Bactrians ran, or called for help, or pleaded that they were allies – friends.
Then they started fighting back.
I was sitting on a chair in the former agora – a looted chair. I had a nasty gash on my thigh and something was wrong in my lower back, and there was blood trickling from somewhere and running down my arse and my leg – all I wanted to do was sleep, or at least rest. And Polystratus, bless him, had found me some pomegranate juice – in the midst of a massacre, that’s a miracle. He’d been knocked out – clean unconscious – by a blow to the head, but taken no other wound.
I saw the fighting start across the square.
I cursed.
Got to my feet. And, I’m not ashamed to say, I finished my juice before I went to save Polyperchon’s men.
I was so angry that I didn’t bother to think. I walked up to the fighting, and I killed one of the Macedonians with a thrust to the face.
He was a phylarch, and he’d probably fought at Chaeronea. I didn’t particularly care. I put him down, and I stood over him and let my rage have voice.
‘You stupid fucks are killing our Bactrians!’ I roared.
They flinched.
I smacked one man who had his sword raised – I swung the spear so hard he moved a foot or two and fell in a heap, out cold.
‘Anyone else?’ I roared.
My friends – my own companions – began to close around me.
Alexander was there. He’d been carried into the fort on a litter, and had Hephaestion with him.
There wasn’t much I could say, standing there with the blood of a Macedonian officer on my spear.
Alexander was white with pain, but he nodded to me. ‘Your precious pezhetaeroi,’ he said. ‘The sooner have I replaced them . . .’
I had never heard him say it. Just at that moment, I was angry enough to agree, but even an hour later, I was calm, and I began to think of what it meant that Alexander no longer trusted his troops. I wondered if he even knew what was wrong.
They wanted to go home. And they hated our Persian and Bactrian ‘allies’.
And when Cyrus embraced me, he said, ‘I tell my men! That you are not like the others.’
In other words, our Bactrians and Persians didn’t love us, either.