It was a plea.
‘You seek to limit me. But what limit should a man of the noblest nature put on his labours? I, for one, do not think there should be any limit, so long as every labour leads to noble accomplishments!’ He looked around. ‘We here are like the undying. I am going from triumph to worthy triumph!’
He was standing by his couch, in a swirl of muddy water and matted wet grass where the rising rains had flooded our camp. I mention this because Coenus looked at the floor.
‘Is this Olympus, then?’ he said with a snort.
‘If you just want to know when our wars will end,’ Alexander said, ‘we are not far from the Ganges. After the Ganges is the Eastern Sea. And the Eastern Sea will link to the Hyrkanian Sea, for Aristotle says the great sea girdles the earth.’
Of course, I knew from Kineas – who had sailed the Hyrkanian Sea – that it did not join with any other body of water. And I ran the scouts. I knew that no peasant we had met could tell me how far it was to the Ganges.
‘It is more than a thousand parasanges to the Ganges,’ I said into the silence.
‘ You don’t know that!’ he shouted at me.
Craterus lay on his couch, and stared into the cup of wine in his hand as if it might tell him what to say.
Hephaestion sat up on his couch. But he didn’t stand. Nor did he speak.
Alexander looked at me, and the last time I’d seen that look was the night he killed Cleitus.
But I was tired, and I met his murderous glare with indifference. Only when you have killed as many men as I have, lad, and seen as many worthless victories, can you be truly indifferent. And nothing is more effective against hubris than indifference.
‘You traitors! Worthless weaklings!’ Spittle flew from his mouth.
It’s odd, but I thought of the pezhetaeroi huddled in the woods behind our lines, indifferent to my pleas that they go forward to win the battle. Indifferent.
Yes. They weren’t cowards.
They just didn’t have any more to give.
‘If we turn back now,’ he said, once more in control, ‘the warlike tribes of the East – every spearman in that thousand-parasange plain – will rise against us, and all our conquests will be pointless, or we shall have to undertake them again, and our sons will face these men.’
I might have said, So you agree that it is a thousand parasanges to the Ganges?Or I might have said, You used this argument about defeating Bessus, and then Spitamenes. Any of us might have refuted him.
But we had heard it all before, and like the drunkard’s proverbial wife, we shook our heads, tired of his lies.
He stormed from the tent.
Alexander spent two days alone, except for his slaves. He wouldn’t see Hephaestion, or Craterus, much less us, the mutineers.
Then he sent an ultimatum to the army via Agon, his hyperetes. March, or be left behind. Alexander threatened to go forward with only his Persian levies and his subject Indian troops.
Amyntas son of Philip came to my pavilion. My floor was a hand’s breadth deep in water. He sat on an iron stool that rusted as fast as Ochrid’s slaves could polish it, and he shook his head.
‘I want to tell him,’ Amyntas began.
I raised my hand. ‘I won’t conspire,’ I said. ‘Tell him yourself, or don’t.’
Amyntas shrugged and got to his feet in the water. ‘He’s fucking insane,’ he said.
He stood there, waiting for my reaction.
‘By Zeus the saviour of the world, Lord Ptolemy, he promised!’ Amyntas cried suddenly, in almost the same tone in which Alexander had pleaded that we would end as bureaucrats.
I remember that I nodded.
Amyntas left my tent and went to the king.
A day later, Alexander emerged, summoned the command council and announced that we were turning the army and marching for home.
THIRTY-EIGHT
He never forgave any of us. Not the pezhetaeroi, and not the commanders.
What followed was horrible, and it made Sogdiana pale. Even now, I take no pleasure in the telling.
He tried to kill the army. He didn’t retreat along our lines of supply, but went down the Indus river to the sea.
Again, I return to the simile of the woman married to a drunkard. At first, we listened to the complex excuses he offered as to why we had to march down the Indus to the delta, and we affected to believe them. It scarcely mattered to us – we were going home. And I don’t think there were five hundred men in the whole army who didn’t feel the same.
But it turned out that marching down the Indus meant fighting our way through a vast, hostile plain. He wasn’t done – he was still on a binge.
And, in my opinion, he had determined to die, or achieve an even greater level of heroism, if that was possible, than he had achieved against the elephants.
He began well. He held an assembly and announced we would march back. Men applauded – men cheered him as they had cheered him when he charged the elephants. He ordered us to build twelve giant altars to the gods, and we sacrificed like the gods themselves, and we had games that went on twelve days. I did not win in a single event. My hands hurt so much when I awoke most mornings that I couldn’t hold a sword to spar. Men I’d never heard of won most of the events – recruits, just two years out from Pella, or Athens, or Amphilopolis, or Plataea.
One of Cyrus’s men won the archery.
Polystratus won the horse race, and received a golden crown, which he still wears at feasts.
His friend Laertes won the mounted javelin competition.
Then he made Porus, our erstwhile enemy, the satrap of India, and put the army to work as labourers, repairing dams and dykes and towns along the Indus. This was mostly make-work, as Nearchus and Helios and all the engineers spent the summer building triaconters – thirty-oared ships – to sail down the Indus, which we were told was navigable all the way to the great sea.
I remember that it was about this time that we met Kalanos and his disciple Apollonaris – that wasn’t his name, then. They were members of a sect that went naked but for their beards – serious ascetics, men dedicated to meditation and prayer and fasting. Hephaestion had the notion that they would make the king feel better, and brought their leader, Dandamis, to the king.
He was a great mind, and he and the king debated for hours – through interpreters—the nature of men’s souls, the size of the world, the purpose of creation. As Hephaestion had guessed, Dandamis filled a need in the king.
But the next morning, he was gone.
The king rode in person to fetch him from his camp. I wasn’t there, but I heard the story from Nearchus, and also from my son, who was there. The king found Dandamis sitting naked by a cold firepit. He sat on his horse for a while, looking down at the dirty, naked man, and then said, ‘Brother, come and follow me across the world, and we will learn together.’
Dandamis didn’t speak for a while, and the king repeated himself with great patience, according to my son.
But after the sun had moved in the heavens, the king’s horse began to fret, and the king sat up. ‘Come, philosopher,’ he said. ‘Follow the son of Zeus.’
And Dandamis laughed. ‘If you are the son of the greatest god, so am I!’ he said, and Barsulas says there was real mockery in his voice.
‘Are you a fool?’ Alexander asked. ‘You are naked, and I can clothe you – you have no fire, and I can feed you.’
Dandamis then looked at Alexander with pity. ‘You have nothing I want,’ he said. ‘Once, you might have made a passable philosopher, but now you value no opinion save your own. You wander because you cannot bear to be still – you conquer because you cannot bear to rule. Please go.’