I laughed. ‘Bubores – you are a soldier of the Aegema, an officer, and you stand by the king. You can tell me this any time. Why now?’
Bubores rattled the necklace of bones he wore around his neck. ‘I will die soon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘I am paying my debts. I owed you my thanks – never managed to tell you.’
I laughed. ‘Don’t be an irrational arse. You won’t die here.’
His bright eyes met mine, and his look was calm – and like the look new lovers give each other. Trust. Belief. ‘I will die soon,’ he said. ‘And so will most of us. Here? In the desert? Back at Babylon? What does it matter? The king will kill us all.’ He smiled, but it was a bitter smile. ‘It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.’ He raised his hands. ‘What does that make me?’
I had never heard him speak this way.
Laertes shook his head and Polystratus, behind me, grunted. ‘Got that right,’ he said quietly.
‘This boy is my son,’ Bubores said. ‘The mother is dead now. The boy is a good boy, and all I have left – what treasure is worth a fuck, out here? Listen, Ptolemy. You are a great man – an aristocrat, a friend of the king. When there is no more food, you will have food. When there is no more water, you will have water for a few more days. I beg you, as an old comrade, to take my son when I am dead.’
Polystratus turned. ‘Just say yes, and don’t protest. Bubores, we’ll protect your son. You have my word.’
Bubores shook my hand, and Laertes’ and Polystratus’s. And then he and the boy went back into the silent darkness.
Two days later, while I walked next to Amphitrite, I saw him. He was walking at my mare’s tail.
I looked at him, and he met my eyes.
‘Pater dead,’ he said.
I gave him water and we walked on.
When we had been fifty days in Gedrosia, give or take a few days, I was with the king. The light was gone from his face. We were burned red brown, and we hadn’t had anywater in four days. We were losing a thousand men and women a day. There were fewer than two hundred horses left.
We were marching only at night, which made it easier – if stumbling blindly across an endless waste of grit and rock, with no sandals and bleeding feet, bleeding gums, parched throat and no sweat – can be called easier –but the sun was rising and we were still going. Alexander was sure we were close to the capital of Gedrosia, called Poura.
We came over a rise, and entered a long valley – a barren, rocky valley that had ancient trees – myrrh trees, the largest any of us had ever seen, with myrrh gum so abundant that we crushed it under our feet as we marched, so that the whole valley smelled as if the gods had come to us. It was absurd, and beautiful, and the smell rose to the heavens, and we had very few dead that day. And I have hated the smell of myrrh ever since.
The next day, we were losing men so fast that I couldn’t stop to prod one without another falling over near by, and men had begun to die – literally, to die– on their feet.
I left Amphitrite and Bubores’ son with Polystratus and headed for the king at the very front.
He was walking quickly, using a spear as a staff. Perdiccas and a handful of his bodyguard were with him, and the rest of the army trailed away behind him like an army of spectres, spread, I expect, as far as three hundred stades – at the rate we were moving, there were still living men two weeks’ march behind us.
Again, we marched – or shuffled – all night, and kept going into the dawn.
I had intended to say something to the king. But now that I was following this slim figure into the dawn – with the print of blood from his reopened wounds clear on his chiton – I realised that there was nothing to say. The time to speak, or to act, was so long past . . .
Agrianians came out of the morning murk. There were half a dozen, without an officer, and they clustered around the king as I came up.
They had a Thracian helmet full of water.
It fixed our attention the way a beautiful woman can fix the attention of a hundred men in the agora. I noticed that it was not just water, but coolwater, which formed condensation on the bronze of the helmet.
The Agrianians knelt, and their leader gave the helmet to Alexander, handing it over with head bowed.
Alexander looked into the bowl of the helmet for a moment. Then he looked around. By then, in the first light of day, there must have been a thousand men, perhaps three or four women, and Bubores’ son.
He smiled.
‘Did you bring enough for everyone?’ he asked.
The Agrianians shook their heads.
Alexander poured the water out on to the sand. ‘I will drink when everyone has drunk. Now lead us to the spring.’
Sometimes, he was easy to love.
On the fifty-ninth day since we had left Patala, we marched into Poura.
We did not march. We shuffled.
Men died from drinking too much water, or too much wine.
When we mustered, six days later, we had eleven thousand infantry, seven thousand cavalry and fewer than six hundred women. Eleven children. Thirty-one horses.
One was Amphitrite.
One of the children was Bubores’ son.
And there was a letter from Thaïs waiting for me. It was lovely – I still have it. It was like water in the desert. And I know what the phrase means.
As soon as we reached civilisation, the killing began again. It was Philotas and Callisthenes and Cleitus the Black, but at a new level of horror, and there were no attacks of remorse in the aftermath. Just a feast of crows.
Cleander died. Sitalkes was killed. A row of Persian satraps, whose principal guilt lay in assuming that their barbarian conqueror would never return. Apollophanes was arrested and dismissed and then executed for failure to supply us. He hadn’t even tried. He never offered an excuse, even under torture.
Astaspes was killed, and a host of men more junior found themselves arrested and murdered. Alexander informed us – and the army – that there had been a conspiracy against him – against all of us – and that the disaster in the Gedrosian was the result of their attempt to murder the army.
Not the result of one man’s hubris.
We marched into Persepolis. More satraps were executed.
What did I do? Heroically, I kept my head down, went to the king’s tent as seldom as possible and commanded my Hetaeroi.
I have not gone into detail about the king’s adoption of Asian ways – beyond asserting that, as always, he tried to please everyone and ended pleasing no one. But after the massacre of the satraps – with Cleitus dead, Nearchus terrified, Perdiccas and I in virtual in-army exile – after that, the king did whatever he liked. And what he liked was to become the King of Kings. He adopted the court costume. He hid himself in the midst of a vast horde of perfumed functionaries who had never held a piece of wood, much less a pike.
At Susa, he held a review of his new army. He had raised a new army – I think I mentioned it – thirty thousand pikemen, all Persians and Medes, trained to a degree of perfection in drill that was both beautiful and a little scary to watch. He reviewed them at Susa, and called them ‘Successors’.
The name meant just what it seemed to mean.
His Macedonians had served their turn, and he was through with them – those he hadn’t killed in the desert, that is. And when the phalanx – that is, the old, at least partially Macedonian phalanx – grumbled, he referred to the Successors by another name. Because the assembly of the pezhetaeroi was often called the ‘Tagma’. And Alexander called his Persian phalanx the ‘Antitagma’.
Another name that meant just what it seemed to mean.
It took months for the king to lay his plans, but when he acted, he did so with the thorough planning that characterised him on the battlefield.