I looked down. ‘A little farther,’ I said, the eternal staff officer.
Amyntas spat. Looked up. ‘How’s the daughter, then?’ he said.
‘Olympias will be ordained a full priestess at the Great Feast of Artemis,’ I said, and he grinned.
‘Good for her.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘And that nice priest boy?’
‘A stade away. A fine soldier.’
‘He is, at that,’ said the old bastard. ‘I see him all the time. And you, old man?’
‘Amyntas son of Philip, you dare call me old? Weren’t you at Marathon? Still alive?’ I took his hand. ‘And you are older, I think.’
He waved at the hills in the far distance. Men filed past us. And suddenly, he turned and said, ‘He’s fuckin’ insane, ain’t he? I mean, he’ll just march east until we all die – and then he’ll replace us with local sods, right? Am I right?’
Men around us were murmuring.
‘How’s Dion?’ I asked. Then I winced. I’d forgotten.
‘Dead at Arabela. Bloody flux,’ he said. ‘Told you that last year, when you held the sacrifice.’
‘And the young man? Charmides?’ I asked.
‘Dead – can’t exactly remember where. Hey, Red, where’d Charmides go to earth?’ he called out to a phylarch who was resting both hands on his spear and staring out over the earth.
‘After Marakanda?’ The man shrugged. There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I think. Aphrodite’s tits, Amyntas – he died – at . . . ?’
Amyntas shrugged. ‘Boys like him come and go so fast, we don’t bother to learn their names any more. The shit they send us from Pella – Zeus Soter, sir, are they out of men in Macedon?’ He looked at a dozen new recruits filling the two nearest files. They weren’t big men.
‘Antipater’s keeping the best for hisself,’ another man suggested. ‘Sending us thieves and urchins.’
‘I’m no thief!’ a young man protested with some spirit, and Amyntas stepped right up to him. His hand moved as if for a blow, but paused with perfect efficiency to stroke the boy’s cheek as gently as a mother.
‘No,’ he said, laughing. ‘If you were a thief, you’d have a useful skill. As it is, you’re not worth a fuck. And that’s the literal truth.’
The boy was shaking.
‘Go easy, soldier. You need him to press his shield into your back when we fight in India.’ I smiled at the new boy.
Amyntas spat. ‘Then I’m fuckin’ dead already, sir.’ But he laughed. ‘I’m the right phylarch, now.’ The senior file leader. The man responsible for the dressing of the battalion, the order of march – a very important man indeed.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘All the people who could do the job better are dead. That don’t say much for me.’
The column had started to move out. Sweating bearers – servants of the common soldiers – were carrying enormous bundles on their backs and heads and heavy forked sticks on their shoulders like yokes. They marched with their masters, in files in between the soldiers’ files.
The bearers picked up their packs, the soldiers took one last gulp of water or wine, and the column began to move.
‘Of the ten men in my file, when we left Macedon, I’m the only one still alive,’ Amyntas said.
Those words stuck with me, all the way down the pass.
The next night, Alexander summoned a council. It was remarkably like the old days – consciously so – and no sooner was I handed a cup of wine than I saw that he was elated, his eyes glittering, his face almost unlined, the energy glowing in his skin.
He embraced me as soon as I had a cup of wine. ‘I have missed you, Ptolemy!’ he said.
An odd remark, if you consider that I briefed him twice a week on matters related to food and logistics – and more often still about geography and intelligence. But it is true, we had had little enough to say to each other as men since before Marakanda.
‘I’m right here,’ I said, or something equally inane – but Alexander, on his way to his next embrace, stopped, and looked back. Perhaps I’d put more emotion into my statement than I meant.
‘You sound bitter, Ptolemy.’ Alexander’s eyes met mine, and they were brimful of power. Not madness. Just will.
I shook my head.
Alexander greeted Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Coenus. But he made a point of coming back and standing by me.
‘Listen, then!’ he said, and the babble of gossip stopped.
It was years since I’d seen him look so well rested – and so happy.
‘India,’ he said. ‘Our last campaign together,’ he added, with a smile in my direction. ‘I suppose there will be some hill tribes to subdue. But this is Cyrus’s last conquest – and I know you all want me to go home.’
It took my breath away – that he said it right out, without whining, or crying, or killing someone.
And yet, the cynic in my soul whispered that a wine-bibber is always telling his wife he’ll quit, too.
But it made me happy. Of course, the wine-bibber’s wife is happy, too. For a little while.
He looked around, and my feelings were exposed on every face – even men like Craterus. Relief. Quiet joy, or merely exhaustion.
He nodded, as if he’d been talking to someone else. ‘But I have one favour to ask,’ he said. Nodded again. ‘I want you all to be at your very best. You think you are tired and far from home?’ He looked around. ‘We are living in myth. We are the cutting edge of an epic. We are the heroes of the Iliad. When we march home to Babylon and Pella, we will be leaving behind this – the existence that is greater than the merely mortal. If this is my last great campaign – make it your best. Eh?’
I don’t think his words reached Craterus. But Perdiccas met my eye. We were both smiling.
Alexander never gave speeches. Or when he did, they sounded a little forced.
Coenus was smiling, and Lysimachus, and Seleucus, now commanding the hypaspitoi.
‘I’m going to send Perdiccas and Hephaestion down the Indus, to pick off the cities on the river. Craterus, you and I and Seleucus will go north on the Choaspes. The rendezvous is Gandaris. The Raja of Taxila is our ally – Ptolemy is in contact with him already, and we have depots marked on your itineraries. The order of march is here. Any questions?’
People asked questions – Seleucus especially. He always did.
When they ran out of questions, Alexander looked around. He had set himself a Herculean task, and that put him on the plane of the gods. He was happy. He was also not wearing the diadem, not wearing a white robe. He was in a plain chitoniskos, dressed like any Macedonian aristocrat after a day of war, or hunting. First among equals.
‘Anything more?’ he asked. He looked around.
He was beaming.
‘Let’s go and conquer India, then,’ he said.
While Hephaestion took the main army straight downriver – straight being a remarkable thing to say of the upper Indus – and Alexander went off into the trackless wooded mountains of the Chaispes, I had a different role – as the linchpin between the two columns. I had my squadrons and Philip the Red with me, and together we kept the two columns in contact. I had the Paoenians and most of the Prodromoi and Ariston to command them, and all the Agrianians, who we’d mounted on mules, and Strako’s Angeloi, who’d been expanded with locals into a small squadron. It was one of my favourite commands – the perfect instrument for the job. We could cover hundreds of stades of ground – at one point I had men along both banks of the Indus all the way down to the plains below Taxila – or combine to fight. And the preponderance of scouts allowed me to gather information for the future while supporting the king and Hephaestion. And my central location allowed me to control supplies to both columns. I was in constant contact with Eumenes. Information flowed, logistics were put in place.