Alexander (Vol. 3) (Alexander Trilogy) (41 page)

Ptolemy moved alongside the King, who was anxiously surveying the horizon, obscured as it was by the heat haze, and he put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go back, Alexander, there’s nothing down there, apart from noonday spectres. If the earth here swallows up its rivers before they reach the sea, there must surely be some terrible reason that we are unaware of. Could a mother ever devour her child after having given birth to it?’

Even Callisthenes looked on that disturbing phenomenon with deep concern in his eyes. His knowledge of physics and philosophy suggested rational answers that were immediately quashed by the irrational fears that rose from the depths of his soul.

‘I would like to find answers to these questions, Ptolemy,’ said the King without turning round. ‘If our energies were sufficient, I would like to follow these noontime heat demons, the spectres that inhabit the horizon. Ulysses, tied to the mast of his ship, was indeed a lucky man to hear the song of the sirens, but he never revealed to anyone what that song said. The secret died with him in a remote, hidden place, there where Tiresias’s prophecy led him, the much-longed-for destination of his final journey . . .’

They once again took the road leading towards the south and day by day, as they approached the Margianian highlands, they came across more and more water and vegetation, plants and animals. On the banks of a river the King founded another city and called it Alexandria of Margiana, peopling it with the semi-nomadic tribes that lived in the surrounding area and some of the men and women from his entourage. He left a garrison of five hundred men – Macedonian, Greek and Thessalian soldiers, all those who had set up families with the Asian women who continued to follow the army with incredible stamina and perseverance. He established those men who seemed to have forgotten the families they had left behind back home such a long time ago, a time that seemed infinitely farther than it was in reality.

They reached Bactra towards the end of the autumn with the intention of spending the winter there and it was while here that Alexander gave orders for Bessus’s trial to take place, following Persian procedure. Oxhatres assembled the council of the eldest judges and had the prisoner dragged before them. The mutilations he had suffered that dark night in the countryside around Kurushkhat had healed now, but this gave his tormented face an even more disturbing appearance, like a living skull.

The trial was over extremely quickly, and when he was asked if he wanted to defend himself against the charges, Bessus said nothing at all. He stood in silence before his enemies with all the dignity of a man who had sought to redeem the honour of the Persian Empire, humiliated by the cowardice of Darius, the King who had twice fled from the battlefield. The dignity of a man who had sought to lead an uprising against the invader.

The sentence was passed – the worst imaginable one, the one inflicted on those who assassinate the sacred person of the King of Kings and who usurp the throne of the Achaemenids – dismemberment.

Bessus was stripped and led to an open space that had been made ready for the sentence to be carried out. Two tall and slender willow trees, very close to one another, had been bent to the ground until they crossed and their tops had been fastened with a rope tied to a stake hammered into the ground. A sort of pointed arch was thus created by the two trunks and the prisoner was led there and tied by the ankles and the wrists to the two uprights as high as possible, so that he was left hanging above the ground by about five cubits. The Persians and local inhabitants were not the only ones to witness this barbarous rite; Macedonians and Greeks were among the crowds as well. Princess Stateira had come from Zadracarta specifically, impatient to see vengeance meted out for Darius, the father she had buried and mourned over for a long time in the royal necropolis of Persepolis, now abandoned. She sat there pale and motionless alongside Alexander.

At a simple nod from the supreme judge, the executioners moved towards the ropes brandishing their axes. At a second nod they both let fly with synchronized blows – straight blows that cut through them cleanly. The two trunks immediately straightened and for an instant Bessus’s powerfully muscled body tightened in the impossible strain of the tension, then he was torn apart. The left-hand section, from his shoulder to his groin, remained attached to one of the trunks, while the other, with his head and his guts, hung from the other tree, and there was still some shadow of life in Bessus’s eyes when the birds of prey, ever vigilant in that place of punishment, came down to feed on his tortured flesh.

Alexander remained at Bactra with Stateira and the court for the entire winter, spending a lot of time with Eumenes writing to the satraps of his provinces: to Antigonus, known as ‘One-eye’, who governed Anatolia, to Mazaeus in Babylon, and even Artabazos in Pamphylia. He asked how Phraates was, if he had recovered from the grief of losing his near and dear ones and if he was living a quiet life in his palace on the sea. He had given orders for his blacksmiths to make a little carriage and to send it to Phraates as a gift together with two Scythian foals.

He also received a letter from his mother, Olympias, and from Cleopatra who told him all about her life in the palace at Buthrotum and all about her homesickness:

Alexander dictated his reply, affectionate but inflexible, and he concluded with these words:

Then he turned to Eumenes. ‘Cleopatra’s prose improves with each letter she sends – she must be taking expensive lessons from some excellent teacher of rhetoric.’

‘That’s true,’ said Eumenes. ‘Yet, behind her flowery speech, behind the rhetorical ornament, there is sincere affection. Cleopatra has always loved you, she has always been a shield for you against your father’s wrath. Don’t you perhaps miss her?’

‘Terribly,’ replied Alexander. ‘I miss those days, but I cannot let myself indulge my memories: the task I have set myself keeps coming back and demanding attention, like some imperative to which everything must be sacrificed and from which I cannot escape.’

‘From which you have no wish to escape,’ replied Eumenes.

‘Do you really think I could, even if I wanted to? The gods put dreams in the hearts of men – dreams, desires, aspirations that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man corresponds to that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets for himself and the strength nature granted him when he came into the world.’

‘Like Bessus.’

‘And Philip.’

‘And Philip,’ said Eumenes, lowering his eyes.

They both fell silent, as though the spirit of the great assassinated King were somehow present in that place, evoked suddenly out of the silence and the oblivion.

Then Alexander dedicated time to maintaining contact with the cities he had founded in the farthest flung provinces of the Empire, the cities that carried his own name. He wrote personally to the military leaders and the magistrates of those small communities, encamped on the edges of inhospitable and unknown lands, and he wrote to Aristotle, describing the statutes and the constitutions of these cities, documents that would enrich the philosopher’s collection.

Occasionally he also received missives from those remote outposts, written in very poor Greek or in Macedonian dialect; almost always they were requests for help against enemy attacks, against sieges from other peoples, all of them ferociously protective of their identities. Spitamenes’ rebellion was spreading everywhere. Handing over Bessus had only cleared the way for the new leader who was now holed up in the snowy foothills of the Paropamisus.

Alexander had the same reply for everyone: ‘Hold on. We are assembling more troops, we are waiting for new reinforcements to help you, to pacify the lands on which you are raising your children.’

The whole winter went by in this way. When spring returned, fresh troops from Macedonia and Anatolia arrived, and the army set off on its march once more. On entering Bactriana, Alexander realized that the rebels had spread out into a great number of fortresses and castles and he decided to split up his forces in order to inflict a series of attacks, each aimed at a particular centre of resistance. However, when he communicated this strategy to his generals and his Companions, he found that almost no one agreed.

‘Never divide your forces!’ exclaimed the Black. ‘As far as we can gather, Alexander of Epirus, your uncle and brother-in-law, was overwhelmed by the barbarians in Italy precisely because he was forced to split up his army. To do this same thing out of one’s own free will . . . it seems like madness to me.’

‘I think we would be better off staying united,’ said Perdiccas. ‘We will take them one by one and we will crush them like fleas.’

Leonnatus nodded in approval, as if there was not even any need to discuss matters.

‘If you want to know what I think,’ Eumenes began, but Alexander cut him short with the words still in his mouth:

‘So we’re agreed then. Craterus will remain in the south near Bactra while we move northwards and eastwards into Sogdiana to find the rebels up in the mountains and at a certain stage we will spread out into a fan – five units, one for each of you, one for each of the fortresses that must be taken. Diades has planned new long-range catapults and we’ll be firing smaller, but equally effective harpoons.’

Leonnatus stopped nodding, realizing that the situation had changed and Alexander, who was watching him, asked, ‘But weren’t you in agreement?’

‘I, really, I was in agreement with you . . .’ he attempted to reply, but by now everyone was on their feet because there was nothing else to say and Alexander was accompanying them all to the door.

The plan was put into effect in the space of a few days: the King and his Companions, with more than half of the army, set off towards the entrances to the valleys where the armed rebels were waiting for them. They fought throughout the entire summer, wiping out some of the fortresses, but then the operations slowed down because of the enemy’s evasive strategy – attacking and then retreating immediately – and because of the impervious nature of the terrain. When the weather began getting worse and foodstuffs became scarcer, Alexander led the army towards Samarkand.

*

Things went rather differently for Craterus. He had been left behind and failed to reach the capital of the province before a messenger from its garrison commander arrived.

‘Spitamenes has invaded the area surrounding Bactra and has sacked the countryside and the villages. Our garrison made an initial sortie and was defeated, then we attempted a second one to give chase to Spitamenes, but we need reinforcements urgently.’

Craterus was suddenly overwhelmed by a dark presentiment. He knew Spitamenes’ cunning very well and was almost certain that the incursion into the area surrounding Bactra was only a provocation to draw the capital’s garrison into the open field and wipe it out.

‘Which way did they go?’ he asked the messenger.

‘That way,’ he said, pointing to the track that led towards the desert.

‘We will go that way as well,’ the Macedonian commander decided. ‘After having rested a little. There is no point in our passing through the capital.’

They set off on their march before dawn, crossing over a torrent at a ford, and then approached a narrow pass flanked by acacia and tamarisk trees – an ideal site for an ambush. Suddenly Koinos, commander of the second
hetairoi
squadron, approached them: ‘Look there,’ he said, pointing towards the sky.

‘What is it?’ Craterus asked, lifting his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

‘Vultures,’ replied the officer darkly.

T
HE SIGHT WAS TRULY
horrendous. Hundreds of dead Macedonian soldiers lay there before them, their bodies horribly mutilated, many of them decapitated or scalped. Others had been put on stakes, others again had been tied to trees and bore the marks of terrible torture. The Commanders, two officers of the old guard, friends of Cleitus the Black, had been crucified.

‘What are we to do now?’ asked Koinos gravely.

‘Assemble the cavalry; we’ll attack now. The infantry will follow on at double-quick pace.’

Koinos had the fall in signal sounded and then had the cavalry cross the field of the massacre in a spectral silence. He wanted the soldiers to see exactly what the enemy had done to their comrades, he wanted the anger and the fury they bore within to grow out of all measure so that their thirst for revenge would drive them headlong into the chase.