I ran along the wall.
An archer saw me, and loosed. For a heartbeat, that arrow and I were all there was in the world, and then it hissed past me, and I reached the point I had selected on the wall and jumped.
Thirty feet.
I landed behind the archers, and I killed one before I knew I’d turned my ankle. Then I killed another.
Then I realised that I was between the enemy and their own gate.
I did the bravest thing of my life. The best thought-out. The most amazing.
I turned, and ran to the gate. Away from the king. Away from the fight. With my back to the remaining archers.
I lifted the bar, and a hundred Macedonians burst into the courtyard like an avenging flood. I turned and ran back towards the king, cursing my ankle, with the daimon of combat filling me, and there was Peukestas standing over the king with the king’s shield from Troy on his arm, and the king lay at his feet, and Leonnatus was on his knees, swinging a kopis as the Mallians tried desperately to kill all three.
I ran along the colonnade, and Hermes gave me wings.
I saw the spear meant for the king.
I threw myself between the spearman and his victim without thought, as if my whole life had been lived for this moment, to save the king from a death that he richly deserved.
The spear hit my aspis and skidded away.
The king’s eyes met mine, and he smiled.
And the king was saved.
He almost died.
We killed every man, woman and child in the town.
THIRTY-NINE
We didn’t march south again until spring. The king teetered on the edge of death for two months, and blood from his lungs flowed over his breast whenever he took a deep breath.
The army became increasingly nervous, like a young horse facing an elephant. They realised that, without him, we probably wouldn’t make it home. It’s odd, but I had come to the same conclusion. We were sailing a sea of enemies. We had slaughtered so many people that we were universally feared and hated – there was no hope, now, of making an ally. And here, in the midst of the chaos he had created, if the god of war left us, we would all drown.
Or that’s how it looked, on the banks of the Indus.
He recovered around midwinter – emerged from his tent, spoke to the troops. Was cheered like a god. He ordered the surviving Mallians to build us more ships. He enslaved virtually the entire surviving population and put them to work, and in the spring, we sailed south, leaving a desert of destroyed farms, burned cities and corpses. I have heard angry young people tell me that war never changes anything.
Tell that to the Mallians.
I look at the pages of the Journal, and I see that we fought our way down the Indus. It’s a blur to me. We did not truly rest among the Mallians – no more than an exhausted man rests when he has three hours of sleep – and the spring campaign was more rapid marches and more killing. By late spring, no one in the Valley of the Indus would stand against us. Whole populations moved east, emptying towns before us.
There was one exception.
South of the land of the Osetae, we were marching – I was marching, anyway. The king had left Nearchus to command the river fleet, and the whole of the Aegema was travelling on the banks of the river, broad spring meadows carpeted in flowers. It was beautiful, unless you looked too closely and realised that these were supposed to be farm fields.
It was mid-morning, as I remember. I was riding with the king, and the Prodromoi came up to inform us that there were Indians – unarmed – in the fields ahead.
The Indians had an entire class of philosophers – fascinating men, like priests, except that they were born to their caste, and never left it – called Brahmins. Waiting in the fields were hundreds of Brahmins, dressed in the sombre colours of a funeral.
Alexander cantered over to them, with his bodyguards, fifty Hetaeroi of the household, and some hypaspists. I rode alongside him on my mare. We were a brilliant riot of colour – horses, gold and silver buckles, brilliant bronze breastplates, helmets, silk and wool and linen, strips and furs.
One man stood forth – a tall man with a long beard. As we approached, he and his companions began to stomp their feet on the ground.
Alexander laughed. He turned to one of our many interpreters – a Mallian slave. ‘Why are they stomping their feet? Is it some form of applause?’
The king’s interpreter rode forward, dismounted and touched his head to the ground respectfully. They spoke in the local language.
Then the Brahmin stepped forward. His Greek was not wonderful, but it was clear.
‘We own the ground under our feet,’ he said. ‘And you, conqueror, own no more than we.’
As a veteran of the Sogdian War, I knew we never owned any more than the ground under our feet. So I laughed.
The Brahmin glared.
Alexander nodded. ‘So very true,’ he said, with no interest at all. He turned to me. ‘Perhaps you should befriend him, Ptolemy, since his humour seems to suit you.’
We rode on.
By midsummer, we had taken Patala, the greatest city at the mouth of the Indus, and a few weeks later, I stood looking out at the Great Ocean.
It stretched, a dirty grey-white sheet of sun-sparkled seawater, to the horizon – stinking in the heat, rippled like a new-washed chiton of linen, and it was obvious to a child that this was an enormous body of water and that it did not flow into the sea near Libya or any other sea. It had tides – great tides.
I was with a cavalry patrol when I first saw it.
I remember reining Amphitrite in and sitting on her back, looking out at its white-hot immensity, and thinking that we were doomed.
But we were not doomed. We were merely very far from home. After a pause to gather supplies, Alexander reorganised the survivors, picked march routes himself without consulting any of the rest of us and marched us west towards Persia.
Morale was high, because any man who could see the sun could see that at last we’d turned west, into the setting sun, and we were marching home, or at least towards Macedon, as was evident to the meanest understanding.
Of course, they hadn’t heard of the Gedrosian Desert.
I had. I had patrols out all the time. And it was clear to me that we were about to undertake one of the labours of Herakles.
Let me be clear. We could have taken the route Craterus took, across the mountains. We knew how to do mountains, and most mountains have water.
We could have ferried the army home by sea, sending three lifts.
I was with the king, and Leonnatus, who was his new favourite (fair enough – he had saved the king’s life), lying on a couch with Perdiccas. Strako – now an officer of the Prodromoi – was going through the options.
And that useless fuck, the seer, stood and poured a libation. ‘Cyrus lost his entire army crossing the Gedrosian Desert,’ he said, the pompous fuck. ‘No army has ever crossed it, O King.’
‘My army will cross it,’ Alexander shot back. He looked around, and Leonnatus, who was another driven man, grinned.
‘Or die trying,’ Hephaestion said wearily.
‘Oh, as for that . . .’ the king said. He grinned. ‘They made me turn back. They can’t complain about my route home.’
I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
More men died in the desert than died at Hydaspes.
I ran the logistika for as long as we had any meaningful amount of supplies. I didn’t do it for the king. I did it for the army.
To be fair, he was, as usual, of two minds. He didn’t care if they died, but he wanted to get them across triumphantly. But I think he wanted enough of them to die to make it look Herculean.
He did order supplies to be gathered. He sent out members of Thaïs’s Angeloi on racing camels, headed north-west and due west, to the satraps, ordering them to prepare magazines for our march. I helped with this, and while I thought that the king was setting an impossible pace for his army, assuming that they could cross a hundred stades of desert a day, I nonetheless had to be satisfied with the other preparations. The satrap of Gedrosia was ordered to have fifty thousand mythemnoi of water at every depot – not enough for surfeit, but a realistic amount. The grain, the meat on the hoof, the remounts – I planned them all. Spare saddles, cloth for chitons, baskets to replace baskets, pack animals to replace dead pack animals.