Let no man doubt the courage of the Macedonian phalanx. Faced with a line of monsters, they walked steadily forward. For the first time in years, they sang the paean – we’d never had a field to sing on, in Sogdiana.
I was rallying my squadrons. I was never the strategos that Alexander was, but I had enough sense to see that our infantry might need help, and that help would have to come from the cavalry. But it was a mess – the Indian cavalry had mostly cut and run, but we were dreadfully intermixed, my front squadron had threaded through Coenus’s front squadron, and all the trumpets were sounding the rally. With the cries of the elephants and the tortured sounds of wounded animals, it took the will of the gods to get a man back to his place in the ranks.
I watched the two mighty lines close on each other. I waited for one or the other to flinch.
No one flinched.
When they met – when they met, it turned out that Alexander was wrong about the efficacy of the pike.
A lot of our men died, in the front rank. Veterans – men who had crossed the Granicus, men who had stood their ground at Chaeronea, stormed Thebes, crossed the Danube . . .
The men who made us what we were.
They died because elephants cared nothing for age, skill, armour, shields or the length of the spear. They snapped the spears, and their great feet crushed men, and their trunks grabbed men from their ground and lifted them high in the air, and their tusks, often sawn short and replaced with swords, swept along like the scythes on Darius’s chariots.
The taxeis were not in the same state of high training they had once been. The ranks were full of recruits and foreigners. When the phylarchs ordered whole files to double to the rear to make lanes, some taxeis, like that of Perdiccas, executed this flawlessly, and the monsters walked on, doing no harm. But in other taxeis, the attempt to manoeuvre in the face of the beasts led to chaos.
And collapse.
Meleager’s taxeis broke first. It didn’t run – because the better men weren’t capable of running. But the lesser men hesitated, the files fell apart and then suddenly the pikes were falling to the ground and men were falling back, or running, leaving their phylarchs and their half-file leaders to fight alone.
Attalus’s mob broke next. They unravelled faster, and by the time they started to go, I was in motion. I looked back for the king, and I couldn’t see him, so I acted on my own.
I led the Prodromoi forward into the flank of the Indian line. It wasn’t really a lineso much as a thin horde. They were having trouble with their bows, which probably saved a lot of Macedonian lives, but they didn’t have any trouble with their long swords, and they were using them to batter through the front of the spear wall, where the elephants caused any hesitation.
Right on the end of their line, closest to me, was a hard knot of elephants – five of the brutes.
We charged them.
Our horses baulked.
A mahout swung his animal to face us, the men on the animal’s back showering us with darts and arrows. Above us in the swirl of a cavalry fight, they had a superb advantage. It is very hard to throw a javelin up. Especially when trying to control a panicked horse.
Indian cavalry had taken refuge with their elephants, and their horses weren’t panicked by the monsters – a matter of habituation.
An old Thracian, Sitalkes – I’d sat around a hundred fires with him – downed a mahout with his javelin. Most of the Paeonians saw it, and the cry went up to kill the drivers – because no sooner did the mahout fall from between the giant beast’s ears than the animal came to a dead stop.
But it was easier said than done, and most cavalrymen had only two or three javelins, and most had spent them in the cavalry fight. Before long, we were riding in among the animals, but doing them no harm – washing about their feet as the ocean washes against the pilings of a pier.
I rode clear of the fight.
There was the king, rallying his household Hetaeroi.
I rode up and saluted. He bellowed at his trumpeter, Agon – the same man who refused to summon the guard the night that Cleitus died, a fine man and a hero many times over – bellowed for Agon to sound the rally again.
He looked back at me.
‘We’re not having any effect,’ I shouted. ‘We need javelins. Youneed javelins. And the beasts panic our horses.’
Alexander watched the melee behind me for the space of twenty heartbeats.
‘Not true,’ he said. ‘Your men have pulled five elephants out of the line. That’s something.’
‘What do we do?’ I asked.
Alexander backed his beautiful white horse – his fourth mount of the day – and fought the stallion’s desire to fidget. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said.
From any other man, that would have promoted panic.
I turned my horse, intending to go back into the melee. Not because I wanted to. Fighting elephants is pure terror – fighting them on horseback is fighting the monster, fighting your own fear and the fears of a dumb animal who controls your fate.
Alexander grabbed my shoulder. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I need you.’
So I waited.
I had never had leisure, in the middle of a fight, to watch him. I had seen him at the height of battles – but never at the height of a battle in the balance.
He rode back and forth in front of the Hetaeroi. He was learning his mount – he walked, he trotted, he sat back, he rolled his hips. Meanwhile, his men were collecting javelins from the ground, and from corpses, and the last slackers were rejoining.
To our front, the elephants were surrounded by the Paeonians and the Prodromoi. Men were trying to cut the elephants with their swords, and failing. They were brave.
They were dying.
Beyond them, the elephants were pressing forward. Closest to me, Seleucus and the hypaspists were retiring slowly, in perfect order. A dead elephant testified to their prowess, and the Indians let them go.
They were retreating because the phalanx was gone. The five taxeis were huddled in the scrubby trees.
Porus and his elephants rumbled to a stop. His Indian infantry didn’t leave the shelter of the great beasts. They reformed their line and began to loft arrows at the hypaspitoi, the last infantry on the field.
Alexander grabbed my bridle.
‘Go to the centre and rally the phalanx,’ he said. ‘Get them back on to the field. They will not want to come. Make them move.’ His eyes glinted like polished silver, and he was smiling inside his helmet. ‘Look at the five monsters you charged.’
One elephant had simply wandered away, its mahout dead. The other four had stopped. They were confused by all the horses, by the pain of a thousand minor cuts, and now they were baulking at their mahouts’ commands, turning and moving away, into the flank of the Indians. Killing their own men.
‘Get the centre back,’ he said. ‘I’ll defeat the elephants.’
He sounded very, very happy.
I rode to Seleucus, first. He was on foot – his horse had dumped him as soon as the elephants closed, a young horse and not fully broken.
He looked stricken. ‘We . . . we’ve lost?’
I managed a smile. ‘Look at the king,’ I said. ‘Does he look beaten?’
Seleucus nodded. And grunted.
‘I’m going to try to get the pezhetaeroi back on the field,’ I said. ‘Retreat slowly, and when the centre comes back, go forward.’
Alectus laughed. ‘Forward, is it?’ He pointed at a pair of elephants, tusks dripping. They had a hypaspist – both had their trunks around him – and they were both pulling. Pulling him apart. Like cats playing with a mouse.
‘Forward when I come,’ I said.