I had three days, and I doubt I slept. When I closed my eyes, the Greek letters danced in front of my eyes, and when I awoke, it was with the thought that I hadn’t counted on the weight of water jars in my calculations for cartage.
Alexander had an air about him – of amusement, perhaps – that I found frightening. As if he knew that the result was a foregone conclusion, but insisted on playing his part with a light heart.
Nonetheless, he signed and sealed my orders for Apollophanes, satrap of Gedrosia, and for the satraps of Carmania and Archosia. We pillaged Patala for carts and draught animals, and when we formed to march west for good, we had forty-two thousand men and twenty-two thousand women and children, as well as a little over two hundred thousand animals. And that did not include Craterus with the elephants, who took another route, nor Nearchus with the fleet, which now ventured out of the river and on to the open sea.
Alexander imagined that the fleet would be in touch with us as we marched, but most of the coastline of Gedrosia is a single massive cliff, fifty men high, and barbed like a phalanx with spears.
For two days, we were still in the plain of the Indus.
On the third day, we began to climb, and the climate grew drier, although the air was humid. We reached a set of low hills, and when we climbed them, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau between the mountains – the endless, tall, barbed mountains of Archosia – with the cliff and the sea to our left.
An army of seventy thousand men and women and children, on a single march route, with a single track just wide enough for two wagons to travel abreast – in places, it narrowed to a single cart track.
So, a little mathematics. How long is an army of seventy thousand, if there is only room for four men to march abreast?
About a hundred stades. A hundred stades. And that’s without intervals between units and divisions, without stragglers, without a single broken cartwheel or dying horse blocking the path.
And never mind the corpses.
An army strung out over a hundred stades, which only marches fifty stades a day, has to travel in multiple divisions, and they must all form at the same hour and march at the same time, or they cause each other brutal traffic delays in the boiling sun.
All of which we did.
We had excellent march discipline, or we’d all have died. But after the first two weeks, we were losing a hundred men a day, and the officers knew we couldn’t turn back. And the rocky ground had no habitation to strip, no peasants whose water and food we could forage. Even in Bactria, there had been wells and streams. Gedrosia had nothing.
Alexander seemed delighted. Because it was so hard.
After the fourth week, the king had to move up and down the column constantly to keep people moving. We were all doing it, but he was the most active. I met him, repeatedly, and he’d always halt, accept my salute and smile.
‘Not as bad as it might be,’ he’d say, while a twenty-three-year-old Persian concubine died of heat exhaustion at the feet of his riding horse.
On and on.
In the fifth week, we were losing five hundred people a day, most of them at first light when they simply refused to march. The phylarchs had orders not to waste energy on the dying, but simply to keep the men moving. We were just a day or two from the first great depot, and Alexander felt our losses so far were acceptable. I could have spent my time in rage, but I was as hot and tired as the others, and my little Arabian mare was finally showing signs of wear, and I wanted her to live, so I gave her all my water that evening.
I barely slept. Once you have no water, everything goes wrong in your body.
The next day, Laertes forced me to drink a cup of his own water. Bless him. And we started again.
Alexander came up, saluted and informed me that he was riding ahead with the Hetaeroi of the royal household to the depot.
‘I’ll be back in three hours,’ he said. He looked around. ‘When I tell them it’s only six stades away, the men will perk up.’
I wasn’t sure that was true at all, but I let him go with a wave and started to rove the column. I saw Bubores threaten to kill a man who wanted to sit down, and I saw Amyntas carry a child.
The king didn’t return until sunset.
We made about twenty-two stades, by my reckoning. A poor march.
And we didn’t get to the depot.
I was standing with Hephaestion, where we’d gathered two hundred Hetaeroi to guard the two dozen water wagons that still held water. In the animal park, we had another twelve hundred empty carts – most drawn by oxen – and the draught animals were increasingly difficult. Oxen are too big to control, when they lose their heads, and my experience as a logistics officer told me that the oxen had been taken a few marches too far.
‘We’re not going to make it,’ Hephaestion said.
I was stunned by this pronouncement. ‘It can’t be more than a day’s march to the supplies,’ I said.
Hephaestion shook his head. ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ he responded.
Perdiccas was watching a crowd of soldiers form near the baggage animals. ‘They may just decide to kill the animals in the lines,’ he said. ‘Blood is as good as water, if you can keep it down.’ He shrugged. ‘I learned that in Bactria.’
Philip the Red was dressing his troop of Hetaeroi, making a good show to overawe the pezhetaeroi and their women – women who were often as dangerous as the men – when the king rode up. He didn’t dash up to us – he rode slowly, and there were fewer than a dozen knights behind him.
We saluted.
He shook his head. ‘There’s no depot at Gelas,’ he said. ‘Not an amphora of wine, not a mythemna of water, nor of grain, not one bullock.’
We looked at him in silence.
He sat up straighter. ‘It is a betrayal. Someone wants this army dead.’ He shrugged.
We were silent. I couldn’t think what to say. Apollophanes was never much of a leader, but I didn’t see him as a traitor.
It didn’t matter, though. If there was no depot . . .
I rode over to the king’s side. ‘We must order the draught oxen slaughtered,’ I said. ‘They will provide food and drink – buy us some time.’
Alexander looked at me, and in the last light of the sun, his eyes burned like fire. ‘If only they hadn’t forced me to stop,’ he said. ‘We would all be comfortable in some marching camp on the Ganges.’
Oh, how I hated him, in that moment.
Perdiccas and I ordered the excess baggage animals slaughtered. The pezhetaeroi and their women killed them, drained their blood, and in the morning we marched, leaving a field of animal corpses, as if they had fought us, like the Mallians. And the men and women marched with brown blood flaking from their hands and mouths, because there was not one drop of water with which to wash.
Alexander took his bodyguard and rode for the coast, to find the fleet.
He came back four days later, and we were still moving. We had used up all the rest of the water, and he led us to the coast – three days out of our way – where he’d found a spring.