There would be no fourth effort.
This, then, was it.
Alexander appeared at my bridle hand. He was smiling, and the sun gilded his helmet. He pulled it off his head, and waved it. ‘Nicely done, Ptolemy,’ he said, his eyes on the men behind me, who were following, formed in a compact mass roughly the width of the elephants to our front. The Toxitoi and the engineers and the Agrianians were all intermixed.
To my left, Amyntas was leaning forward towards the enemy as he walked behind his pike-head like a man leaning into a wind. To my right, Seleucus was almost perfectly aligned with us.
I could see men I knew, and men I had never seen before – Macedonians and Ionians and Greeks and Persians and Bactrians and Sogdians, Lydians, Agrianians. I think that I saw men who had been dead a long time – men who fell at the Danube, men who fell at Tyre, men who fell in pointless fights in Sogdiana.
I certainly saw Black Cleitus.
And next to me, Alexander made his horse rear. He laughed, and the sound of his laughter was like a battle cry, and the sarissas came down, points glittering in the last of the sun.
Alexander turned to me and laughed again. ‘Watch this,’ he said, as he used to when we were ten and he wanted to impress me.
He put his heels to his new horse, and he was off like a boy in a race – alone. We were close to the elephants, then. He rode at them all alone. I was too stunned to follow, for a moment . . .
He put his spear under the crook of his arm, and he put that horse right through the formation of enemy elephants – in a magnificent feat of horsemanship, passing between two huge beasts who appeared from three horse lengths away to be touching. But his reckless charge was not purposeless.
Oh, no.
He left his spear an arm’s length deep in the chest of the nearest elephant, and the great thing coughed blood and reared, dropping his crew to the ground and then trampling them to death.
The whole of Porus’s line shuddered, and the king rode out again, having passed behind the elephants, and he burst out of their left flank, still all alone, and rode along the front of the hypaspitoi.
That’s when the cheers started.
He killed an elephant. In single combat.
It was like the sound a summer thunderstorm makes as it rushes across a flat plain, driven by a high wind that you have yet to feel. It started well off to the right, among the royal Hetaeroi, who now launched themselves at the rallied Indian infantry.
ALEXANDER!
The hypaspitoi had the god of war himself riding in front of them, and their shouts rose like a paean.
ALEXANDER!
The pezhetaeroi picked it up, and the Agrianians, the Toxitoi. It spread and spread, and he rode to the centre, spinning a new spear in his hand, horse perfectly under control, head bare, and those horns of blond hair protruding from his brows.
ALEXANDER!
The sunset made his pale hair flare with fire, and the blood on his arms and hands glow an inhuman red.
ALEXANDER!
I happened to be in the centre of the line, and he rode to me – a little ahead of me. He paused and looked back at me, and his eyes glowed.
‘This is it!’ he shouted to me.
At the time, I think he meant that this was the end of the battle. In retrospect, I wonder if this was what his whole life had waited for. This was it – the moment, perhaps, of apotheosis. Certainly, and I was there, the gods and the ghosts were there – the fabric of the world was rent and torn like an old temple screen when a crowd rushes the image of the god, and everything was possible at once, as Heraklitus once said.
‘ CHARGE!’ he shouted.
And we all went forward together.
The rest is hardly worth telling. I wounded Porus, and captured him – with fifty men to help me. Porus’s army broke, and ours hunted them, killing any man they caught – men who have been as terrified as ours show no mercy.
The carnage of that day was enough, by itself, to change the balance of the world.
If apotheosis came at Hydaspes, the end was near.
After the turn of the year, after Porus swore fealty (which he kept) and after the gods stopped walking the earth and went back to Olympus – after it was all over, and the slaves buried our dead – Alexander went back on his promise and marched east. We marched after the summer feasts, and we marched into more rain – rain and rain, day after day.
Victory gave us wings, for a few days. Alexander gave the troops wine, oil and cash, the takings of Porus’s camp, more women, more slaves.
Cities surrendered, and cities were sacked. We marched farther east. And three weeks later, on the banks of the Beas, the army stopped.
Amyntas son of Philip caught the king’s foot as he rode across the front of the army. The army was formed to march, but the pikes were grounded, all along the line, and the cavalry were not mounted, even though the men stood by their horses.
Amyntas pulled at the king’s foot.
The king looked down at him. ‘Speak,’ he commanded.
Amyntas didn’t grovel. He met the king’s rage with a level glance. It is hard to stare upinto a man’s eyes and keep steady. But Amyntas had faced fire and stone, ice and heat, scythed chariots, insects and elephants, and the king did not terrify him.
‘Take us home, lord,’ Amyntas begged. But in that voice you could hear not terror, but steel.
Alexander tried to buy them. He ordered the army to disperse and plunder – two days of licence to rape, murder and destroy, rob, loot and seize, burn if they wanted.
They did.
And he assembled the camp followers – wives, slaves, sex toys, matrons, mothers – and promised them increased rations and better pay – manumission – anything they wanted, to convince their warriors to go east.
That night, we lay on our klines and listened to the endless rain fall outside. It was so wet that the falling rain gradually soaked the hemp fibre of the great tent, and there was a sort of mist of moisture even inside.
Hephaestion drank deep, and I heard him laugh. ‘They’re like dogs, lord. They’ll come to heel.’
Meleager laughed, and the Persians all nodded. Even Cyrus. Craterus smiled a thin smile.
Perdiccas looked at me.
I shrugged.
But Alexander caught my shrug. ‘Oh dear. Ptolemy thinks otherwise.’
He was close to the edge. I could tell. Hydaspes had taken him too high – I truly feared what was to come. I should have been careful.
I didn’t feel careful.
‘They will not change their minds. They are finished.’ I looked around. ‘They were finished years ago, but they comtinued. For you. Their god. Their living, breathing god.’ I shrugged, and my rage brewed up like the flames in a hearth when the door is opened and the wind sweeps in. ‘They are men, not dogs. They have given you everythingand you give them a district to rape.’ I shook my head. ‘They are finished. They mean what they say.’
Alexander shook his head. ‘So eloquent. But you cannot imagine that I would turn back for them.’
And then Coenus shocked me. He stood up, as I was standing. ‘Then turn back for me,’ he said. ‘I am finished. I need rest, even if you do not.’
Alexander’s eyes might have burned a man, they were so hot.
But Perdiccas stood up. ‘I stand with Coenus and Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘I will fight for you until I die, but I want to stop marching east.’
Lysimachus stood.
Craterus looked from man to man. He was looking for the main chance. Looking for his moment.
Seleucus stood.
Nearchus stood.
The king rose, and hurled his golden cup across the tent, so that it struck the statue of Herakles and seemed to explode.
‘You cannot!’ he cried. ‘We are on the verge of immortality! After this, there will be nothing worthy, nothing great – merely the maintenance of an empire and bureaucracy, where I was a god.’