When we were all together, Alexander pointed at the gathering mass of Indian cavalry.
‘As I may have mentioned,’ he said with insufferable smugness, ‘Porus is now moving all his cavalry to face me. The power of reputation and a really fancy helmet. Listen, my friends,’ he said, leaning forward, and his face was as open as I had ever seen it. ‘This is the last army between us and the ocean. The gods have graciously given me this one last great day – against great warriors and giant beasts, the like of which no Hellene has ever faced.’
He looked at us all. ‘I didn’t mean to make a speech,’ he said with a sudden flash of his rare humour. ‘I just wanted to say – if this is the last one, let’s make it magnificent.’
I know I grinned back at him. It’s facile to say we wanted the battle. I, for one, knew perfectly well that we were fighting an army that was merely defending its homeland. We didn’t even need to fight – the gods knew, we weren’t going to conquer all of India with sixty thousand men.
But he was infectious, like one of Apollo’s arrows, and I was infected. I wantedto be my best.
He rode that white charger to the middle of the line. Our infantry was just coming through the scrub – the Agrianians first, in skirmish order, and behind them the hypaspitoi in a long file on the right, closest to us, with the phalanx in the centre, and the left – empty. Coenus was out of sight beyond the line of poplars that seemed to demarcate the far left of our battle line.
The Indians thought we’d wait for our infantry.
I grabbed Laertes. ‘Ride to Briso with the archers. Tell him to pull all the lights back behind the phalanx and wait for orders. The Agrianians too.’
Laertes gave a nod and rode off into the grain fields. The soil underfoot was sandy, and despite days of rain, it was easy riding. And for the first time in my long military career, I was going to fight a battle with no dust.
Alexander raised his spear.
The Indians were not ready.
We were.
The king lowered his spear, and we rolled forward.
I remember a moment in that charge unlike any other charge I’ve ever been in, when I could see all the way across the front rank – remember, there was no dust. I could see Alexander, a little in advance of the line, his shoulders square, his posture relaxed, his spear-tip rising and falling a fraction with the canter of his great horse, and I could see Hephaestion just behind him, Lysimachus, far off on a magnificent bay – and our front rank, just at the edge of the gallop, was well closed up and the dress across the front was superb. The sun shone on our helmets and turned everyone’s armour to gold.
And I thought, This is all I want. And then I realised that I was seeing it as he saw it. Because I wanted something else entirely. I wanted home and a family, and he wanted – this. An eternity of this.
But in that moment, in the heart of the charge, I felt it, as one man may see, for a moment, why another man worships another woman or a god.
I had a long lance, for a change. I’d practised with it in Sogdiana, and now I held it two-handed, the way the Sauromatae use it, and we were moments from impact with a badly formed Indian squadron that compounded its doom by trying to cover more ground to our flank. They were only formed four deep, and their whole squadron vanished in a spray of blood, like an insect swatted by the hand of a god.
To resist a cavalry charge, enemy cavalry must be well formed, and, preferably, moving. Horses may well not charge a line of men – who can look like a wall or a fence, because horses are notsmart – but a line of horses is merely a challenge to the manhood of a stallion. And a loosely formed line of horses is an invitation to a war horse. Like the king, our mounts lived for these moments.
We swept through their front-rank squadrons without losing our formation and crashed into their second line, which was better formed and moving forward, and I snapped my kontos gaffing a man who seemed to be wearing armour of solid gold, and used the butt-spike to smash another helmet, and then we were through them – I could see Cyrus’s squadron to my right, and Polystratus was at my heels, and I risked a glance back – full ranks at my back – and I put my head down, thumped Triton with my heels and we were pushing forward.
Alexander’s timing was, as usual, perfect.
We crashed into their third line of cavalry, and they held us – they were the right-flank cavalry, sent to finish us off, of course, and their ranks were no firmer than ours. And we were hopelessly intermixed with the enemy. The enemy cavalry began to press us back, and I could see the king killing his way forward, but he was virtually alone.
I was damned if I was going to let him go down alone.
I had my long kopis in my hand, and no idea when I’d drawn it, but it was a better sword than anything the Indians had – their steel was poor. And my horse was the largest horse in the melee.
So I pressed forward.
Behind me, Polystratus shouted ‘The king!’ and my Hetaeroi took up the cry, and then Cyrus’s men began to shout it, in Persian – ‘The king!’
We held them. Or perhaps they held us.
I had a rumble of thunder between my legs, the most powerful war horse I’d ever ridden, and this was his first real taste of the hipposthismos – the horse push. Suddenly, like a river freezing in deep winter, the melee began to gel, the friction of horse against horse slowing movement.
But like a strong swimmer against an adverse current, Triton pushed forward. And no horse could stop him. He bit, he strained, he kicked, and I was another horse length closer to the king.
And another.
I fought, but I fought to keep Triton alive, not to put men down. Alexander was truly alone. I have often wondered whether, having seen it was his last battle, he sought to die there. I only know he’d never outridden the line by so far. Perhaps his new horse was faster than he imagined . . .
And then I was at his back. And Polystratus was at mine – Lysimachus came up, and Hephaestion, just as his white horse reared and fell and I caught him, so that he got his feet clear of the wreck of his mount, and in heartbeats he was mounted again, as Hephaestion killed a man and dumped his body from his saddle. The Indian mounts were smaller and bonier than ours, but good horses, as we had reason to know. Alexander was on one.
The enemy threw in their last line of cavalry, and the whole melee shifted again, and I was facing a sea of foes.
Elbow to elbow with an Indian – we both cut, and his sword bent, but my beautiful Athenian kopis snapped at the hilt. He leaned back to cut at me, and I got my bridle hand under his elbow and then punched my right fist and the stub of my blade at his face until the blood gouted and he was dead. He fell into the sea of horses and was swallowed up.
And then, with a roar like a river in flood, Coenus fell on their rear.
Obedient to the king’s orders, he had ridden all the way around our left, and around the rear of the enemy, and now he fell on the cavalry melee with the finality of a lion bringing down an antelope.
The Indian cavalry broke in every direction. And the battle was won.
Unfortunately, no one had told King Porus.
As Porus’s cavalry streamed from the field with the Hetaeroi and the Persians in pursuit, the phalanx, formed at last – we’d been stades ahead of them on to the field, and our charge had been swift – elected to advance. I assume that Perdiccas thought to take advantage of the chaos of our cavalry victory to press Porus right off the field.
Alexander had given the pikemen a brief pre-battle speech, or so Perdiccas told me later – on how invincible the pike was.
When you are a god, men believe everything you say.
The wall of pikes and shields pressed forward down the field.
Porus – a giant of a man, seven feet tall, on an elephant that towered almost a full head above all the other monsters on the field – didn’t even glance at the wreck of his cavalry. He raised his goad, and his bull elephant trumpeted – a sound that reached above the neigh and screams of horses and men – and his crenellated line began to move slowly down the field towards our advancing phalanx. I could see him, about two stades away, and he looked huge at that distance.