We were a superb instrument of war. Even if that meant we ate men’s souls.
From a purely military standpoint, the oddest thing about the Taxila campaign was that the Raja had already made submission, and his city provided us with supplies and convoys of grain, which came from in front. The usual problem of supply is bringing it up from the rear, and supplying our army over the Hindu Kush would have been brutal. But from the front – I never experienced anything like it – all I had to do was move my cavalry and cover the convoys.
Alexander plunged into the mountains with a fervor that verged on the reckless, and got an arrow in his arm leading the first assault on a hill town a week later. I arrived a few days after, with a convoy of wine and olive oil all the way from Syria – a convoy that had come over the Hindu Kush. Greek and Macedonian soldiers need wine and olive oil. Without them, they will function, but they won’t like it. With them, they may go without food, but they will fight.
At any rate, he was lying on a kline, reading one of my reports and eating grapes. He looked up and made a face.
‘Ptolemy!’ he said.
I had to grin. It was good to be liked and valued. Again.
‘I brought you wine,’ I said. ‘Good wine. There’s some Lesbian stuff and some Chian.’ I handed him a small amphora. ‘And this. Antipater sent it.’
Alexander raised an eyebrow.
‘What happened?’ I asked, pointing at the heavy bandage on his sword arm.
‘Hephaestion will scold me,’ he said. He rolled his eyes. ‘I led an assault and I got shot.’ He shrugged. ‘It was fun. And it is just a scratch.’ He sat up on his bed. ‘I don’t mean to make a scene, Ptolemy, but take that amphora out and smash it on a rock.’
I made a face. ‘I’ll take it and drink it,’ I said.
He turned. ‘Do not,’ he said. ‘It’s sure to be poisoned, and you are one of my few remaining friends.’
I was? Who knew? I was tempted to say as much, but instead, I shook my head. ‘Antipater?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure of it,’ he said. He shrugged, winced when he moved his right shoulder. Lay back. ‘Thaïs says so,’ he went on.
That was the first I had heard that Thaïs was continuing to provide the king with information. We exchanged our own letters.
I had freed the Circassian. Cleitus’s death had that good effect – I never bedded her. Funny – when I told Thaïs the story, she shook her head, touched my face and said I was a fool.
Am I a fool? I am what I am. And I suppose that Alexander would say the same.
I stayed with him for two days, while his siege engines pounded a high stone keep to flinders and Seleucus stormed it. Then we moved on, and Alexander’s shoulder was better, and at the next big stone keep – they seemed to grow on the mountains like mushrooms – Alexander insisted on leading the assault. Again.
‘I’ll go with you,’ I said.
Alexander nodded. ‘Of course you will,’ he said.
They should have surrendered. Mind you, no bandit chief on the wheel of the earth could have imagined that the Great King, King of Kings, would drag eighty war engines through the Hindu Kush and over the Khyber Pass simply to break the tyranny of the chiefs in the Swat hills.
‘This region has raided Taxila and the plains for generations,’ Alexander said as the men behind us fidgeted in the pre-dawn mist. ‘I intend to crush the warlords and break the war bands down into manageable sizes.’
I made a face. I assumed he couldn’t see me in the dark.
But we had grown up together, and he shook his head. ‘You’re thinking that it is a lot of trouble,’ he said. I saw his teeth gleam. ‘But it is worth doing well. War is a craft like any other – but you know that – you put the food in my army’s gullet.’
‘I try,’ I said. It was nice to have him talking. ‘What about the chiefs and their retinues?’
‘Shed no tears for them. Ask any peasant in the valley what it’s like to live under – literally under – these bandits.’ He sounded passionate. Interesting.
‘These people don’t even know who we are,’ I pointed out.
‘They will before morning,’ the king said.
We crept up the hill in the last darkness. We put ten ladders up against the wall, and then, far too late to save themselves, the defenders threw lit torches into the ditch and began to loose arrows at us.
Alexander was wearing greaves, but one of the arrows caught him in the ankle and he almost fell off the ladder. I pinned him against it. Then, because going down was out of the question, we went up.
He was the first on the wall, and he moved like the athlete he was, and his sword rose and fell and stabbed the way a skilled seamstress’s needle moves, with perfect economy. I was only heartbeats behind him, and still he had killed or mortally wounded three men before I had my feet over the parapet.
There was a rush along the top of the wall, and it came at my side. I turned, put my shield into my attackers and my aspis all but filled the catwalk. They pushed me back, and I cut under the shield – and then back over. My opponents were being pushed forward by their mates. I scored across one man’s thigh under my shield and raked another’s nose – no kills, but they flinched, and I backed up a full step and then pushed, caught one man off balance and he fell off the wall.
I couldn’t risk a glance, but I did wonder where in Hades the king was.
Behind me, I could hear him. He bellowed, ‘Spear! Throw it!’
I had my right thumb in the hollow of my blade – a nasty technique I’d been taught by a hoplomachos, a Keltoi trick, and one I used when I had to fight at night. With your thumb pressed into the blade, your blade becomes the perfect companion to a circular shield. Your hand and elbow allow the blade to travel around the edge – parrying and striking in the same action.
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.