On the fifth day, I had lost Hephaestion behind me and I had lost the king altogether, although I had Peithon just south of me and we turned west together to get to the river faster. Our cavalry needed water – abundant water – and we needed some forage. I came across Peithon, who was standing by his foundered horse, a lovely Nisean who was dying in the brilliant sunlight, the blood at her nostrils startling in its intensity.
Peithon was younger than me, and he all but hid his head. ‘I didn’t want to kill her,’ he said, deeply affected. ‘I . . . Ptolemy, when will this stop?’
I had no comfort to offer. So I put a hand on his shoulder, found him another horse and rode on.
Hephaestion caught us at midday.
‘Where’s Alexander?’ he asked me as he rode up. Even his horse was exhausted, and he had access to the king’s horses. His pikemen looked exhausted. We were all done in – a five-day pursuit? Ares’ torment.
I pointed west. ‘My scouts say there’s a fight going on right now just across the river,’ I said. it was true. The report was fifteen minutes old. Strakos was sitting on another blown horse at the brow of a low hill to my left.
‘Ares wept,’ Hephaestion said.
We didn’t pause to reorder. I rode for the river, now just five stades away, and the closer I got, the more surely I knew that there was a battle.
Just at the edge of the river was a low ridge – really, just a mound. I rode to the top, and across the river I could see an army – fifty thousand men, at least.
I turned to Polystratus. ‘Sound the rally,’ I ordered. ‘Form wedge.’
Then I did what Alexander would have done.
I sat on my horse and watched the battle.
I couldn’t find Alexander. All his white horses were dead, and he was mounted on a bay, and that made him harder to find. But mostly, he was hard to find because he was herding fifty thousand men with about two thousand cavalry. He was fighting a battle of infinite pinpricks, the way a small, agile man fights an enormous giant in a sword fight. He had only cavalry, and the Mallians – if, indeed, these were Mallians – had five hundred elephants, but they couldn’t be everywhere and wherever they were not, Alexander was.
He had all the Hippo-toxitoi, the horse archers from Bactria and the Saka, and they were literally riding rings around the Indians.
I sent Theodore to find the king and tell him where I was, that I had four squadrons formed and ready to charge. Then I sent Laertes for Hephaestion, and told him that the king needed the pezhetaeroi. Immediately.
Then I led the formed wedges across the river in a column, a formation that was purely expedient and worked beautifully. The Indians had no idea of our force until I displayed a line of wedges – every wedge with a thousand elite cavalrymen.
Their front shuddered.
While my line of wedges was forming, the king appeared, as if by the will of the gods. He dismounted, snapped his fingers at Leannatos, one of my Hetaeroi, and took his horse.
He grinned at me. ‘I can always count on you, my friend,’ he said warmly.
Drunkard. Wife.
He pointed at the Mallians. ‘We are outnumbered ten to one. They have more elephants on this field than we have horses.’ An exaggeration, but not much of one. ‘And they are on the defensive! I beat them across the river, and now – thanks to you – we have them.’ He looked into the dust at the rear of my column. Cyrus’s Persians were just forming on our side of the river.
Pikes glinted in the sun.
‘Hephaestion is right behind me,’ I said.
Alexander laughed.
‘We will exterminate them!’ he said.
The Mallians were not waiting to be exterminated. As soon as they saw the pikes, their army broke, and our seven thousand cavalry were not enough to destroy them. Their elephants simply rode away, and their cavalry all escaped, and the infantry glutted the roads so that we had to cut a path – a literal statement, and a disgusting task.
Alexander didn’t hesitate. He took the cream of the Aegema and ploughed through them, racing for the gates of their city. He was just too late, but he stormed the outer wall with two hundred men.
I was three stades behind him, wondering what the fuck he thought he was doing, and then I put it together. He was reliving the pursuit of Darius.
I began to cut my way forward with vigour. He was going to die.
On and on. He was going to die.
I went over the wall, where a trio of wounded Hetaeroi told me he had gone over an hour before. The city was too damned big. And it was paralysed with fear, and yet full of fight – desperate men. Rats. Rats who outnumbered us by many hundreds to one. Remember that our army had been pursuing the Mallians for five days. Horses were foundering. Men were simply coming to a stop.
I had Polystratus and Leonnatus, who, by a quirk of fate, was astride the king’s winded horse. Which was such a fine animal that it just kept going. We all dismounted at the outer wall, and after that, we were running through narrow streets, trying to reach the king through a mob of armed and unarmed Mallians who wanted only to flee.
On and on.
I stopped killing the enemy, and just ran past them.
We came to the base of the citadel wall, and a group of hypaspitoi told us that he had gone off to the left, and we ran – ran – around the wall, gathering any Macedonian or Greek or Persian we found. There were shouts and screams ahead of us to the left.
It was like a nightmare, when you wander lost through a burning city and cannot find the king.
I have such nightmares.
And then we found five men, and I knew them, and they were trying to climb the stones of the wall using plants that grew there. A broken ladder lay at their feet.
‘He went over the wall!’ screamed one. ‘He’s going to die in there!’
I had perhaps sixty men at my back.
The citadel wall was six men tall and crenellated.
Abreas, the man screaming, kept pointing at the top of the wall.
Astibus lay dead, his body broken, where the ladder had collapsed.
Bubores . . .
I took a deep breath and looked around. There were no more ladders.
‘Climb it,’ I said. ‘Use your daggers as pegs.’
Had the top of the wall been defended, it would have been foolish suicide. But there wasn’t an enemy to be seen.
Men threw their daggers on the ground and Abreas was off, climbing the wall, and Leonnatus went behind him, handing him new daggers, and they went faster than I thought possible. Men brought billets of sharp wood, bronze rods, anything they could pillage . . .
Laertes came with a silk rope – some sort of decorative rope, but we got it up to Leonnatus.
‘The king lives!’ Abreas roared from the top of the wall, and he jumped down inside to aid the king.
Leonnatus paused to tie the silk rope to a stanchion, and then he, too, jumped down inside.
I took the rope in my hand and turned to Laertes. ‘No one climbs until I’m at the top,’ I said.
I went up the rope. Try it, lad – try climbing a narrow silk cord, in armour, in the heat of the sun, after five days without sleep.
I made it.
I looked down.
Alexander stood with Peukestas on one side and Abreas on the other, and Leonnatus was just rising, having taken an arrow in the thigh. Blood was spurting out of the king’s right side, under his arm.
Even as I watched, Abreas took an arrow in the throat.
They were facing a hundred men. Or more.
They were surrounded by corpses, and it was clear that the Mallians wouldn’t face them. They were, most of them, without bows, and they threw rocks, refuse – anything.
They had half a dozen archers with the great Indian longbows, and they were the most dangerous men.