Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (20 page)

At this point, Parmenion was so disgusted at this hubris that he left the room. For even as Alexander sat there insulting his opponent’s manhood, he bore a scar from when, in single combat, Darius had sunk a javelin into his leg. Equally chilling to Macedonian ears was the way he evaded acknowledging Philip as his true father by calling him his ‘predecessor’. But Alexander was not finished:

“If your employer takes himself for a man, he will take exception to what I say.
 
If so, let him not flee from me, but stand and fight. Rest assured that I will give him every advantage. And if the day is his, he can expect that his enemy will not run, but welcome whatever fate the victor should decree. But until that day, let him know that the Lord of Asia considers him little more than a criminal, and will pursue him to the ends of the earth until the day he appears where his servant does now, on bended knee, and begs my pardon. Now off with you!”

Soon enough, we learned the Great King’s answer to these insults.

That night Alexander received reports from scouts sent to find Darius. They found neither the enemy nor significant resistance, but did learn that an urgent call had gone out to every corner of the empire for all native levies to gather near Babylon. Rumors held that Darius blamed his defeat at Issus not on Alexander’s leadership, but on the tight topography, which restricted the movement of the superior Persian cavalry. Alexander smiled at this conceit, but must have burned inwardly; as you will hear, his desire to leave Darius no excuse for his defeat had more effect on his tactics at Gaugamela than any military consideration.

The Macedonians crossed the Tigris without the loss of a single man. After the army made camp on the easterly shore, two significant events occurred. First, there was a total eclipse of the moon, which appeared high in the sky at the change of the midnight watch. The Macedonians were not so much frightened by the apparition as uneasy about its meaning on the eve of such an important battle. Aristander interpreted the eclipse as evidence that a great contest was underway in Heaven, with the moon allied for Darius and earth for Alexander. The spectacle portended the final victory of the Macedonians.

The second event was the eclipse of Stateira, Darius’s wife. Despite Parmenion’s advice that the Great King’s family should have been left in Sidon or Damascus, Alexander had kept Sisygambus, Stateira and the rest close to him. For him, it was nothing less than a guarantee of his honor as inheritor of the Achaemenid royal house. Despite his protection, however, the Queen was somehow gotten with child, and was far along in her pregnancy. Of the circumstances of her violation I know nothing but the fact of it—I saw her expectant form myself one evening, in silhouette against the fabric of her tent. When she fell ill she sank quickly, despite the best efforts of the king’s personal doctor, Philip. Alexander grieved at her death, decreeing that her funeral be conducted in true Persian fashion.

I witnessed these curious rites. The body was placed under a white shroud and left exposed for three days beside lamps filled with aromatic oil. Instead of cremating her body in civilized fashion, the barbarians prepared a deep grave to house her bones. Believing that deities somehow care for the moral conduct of human beings, the priests of Zoroaster kept up a long series of chants in their native tongue, enjoining their gods to give the dead entrance to their heavenly paradise.

As dogs are sacred to the Persians, packs of yowling mutts kept up a constant din. They came off the leash for a particularly odd custom: the priest broke a loaf of bread into three parts, and placed the pieces on the body at the breast, stomach, and hipbone. Then a dog was invited to climb up on the bier and devour the bread. If this makes any sense at all, it is perhaps rooted in our myth of Kerberos, or in the purificatory use of dead dogs by fools and old women, though these rites seem much distorted in the minds of the barbarians.

Alexander, remarkably, took part in these honors, donning the white funeral garb and mouthing some of the prayers in the Persian tongue. Instead of distributing portions of the sacrificed animals, he forbade the consumption of any meat in the Macedonian camp. These embarrassing extremities led some to speculate that Alexander bore some tender feeling for the dead Queen. None would have denied his right to avail himself of her. Yet in the letter he sent to Darius informing the latter of his wife’s death, the King denied any such relationship. To my knowledge, no one has attested to any contact between him and the Queen since their first meeting. Those of good will assume that Alexander’s observance of the Persian rite was meant to discourage resistance to his rule. Those of ill-will may believe what they wish.

On a plain east of the Tigris, not far from the little town of Gaugamela, Darius gathered the force that would decide his future. We’ve all heard of the host Xerxes brought to humble Greece in the time of Pericles—his army numbered five million men, claims Herodotus. But the number we use to ennoble ourselves in the eyes of our children need not deceive us now. Xerxes brought no more than 400,000 soldiers with him into Greece, and fewer than that were at last defeated by the allied cities at Plataea. Aeschines’ claim that Darius brought a million or a half-million men to his last battle is likewise a fiction.

From every corner of the Persian Empire, arranged all around the upraised standard of the Great King, stood a many-colored host numbering some 250,000 men. I assure you that from where we stood, this seemed plenty. Looking out across the ground Darius had smoothed for the contest, we were confronted with a force that loomed like a mountain range and stretched to the horizon. There were Median spearmen in their belted tunics and trousers, waiting with daggers at their thighs and spears resting on their front feet. There were Scythian axmen in their pointed headgear, and Bactrian, Parthian and Massagetan cavalries that outnumbered the Macedonian levies five to one. There were Persian, Carian and Mardian bowmen, and Lycians in their crested felt caps, and foot soldiers and chariots of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Susian satrapies, and contingents of Syrians, Albanians, Cappadocians, Machelonians, Armenians, Daae, Hyrcanians, Uxians and Sarangae with their knee-high boots, and Mycians, Utians, Paricanians, Chorasmians and Cissians in turbans, and Arachotians, Cadusians, Arians, Gandarans, Sacesinians, Gedrosians, Sogdians, Colchians, Sitacenians, and leopard-skinned Ethiopians and Arabs. There were 200 scythed chariots, and fifteen war elephants with their breech-clothed mahouts. And, of course, there were seasoned Greek mercenaries, all eager to avenge the deaths of their comrades at Issus and the Granicus, and in some cases at Chaeronea too.

Some of the enemy, such as the so-called “Apple Bearer” battalion of Immortals who defended Darius, were clad in fine plate armor; others arrived at the field with wicker shields, or naked, or bearing only clubs. There was no chance for fancy strategy against such a motley force—the Macedonians had no idea how these barbarians would fight. Instead, Alexander made good on his promise to Aegoscephalus and simply offered battle, with a double phalanx of Foot Companions in the center, Parmenion and the Thessalian cavalry on the left, and his Hypaspists and Cavalry Companions beside him on the right. He deployed the rest of his cavalry with their lines swept back, to resist envelopment.

To say that the Macedonians confronted the day’s task with utter confidence would be a lie. With such overwhelming advantage in numbers, Darius did not need to prevail in the first clash, or even the second, third, or fourth. He needed only to hold his army together long enough to grind the Macedonians down, then crush them with wave upon wave of fresh reserves. This was not a plan that required subtle generalship.

Standing the ranks with the other hypaspists, I could sense an unease that had not been there at Issus; many of those men expected to be dead by the afternoon. When I saw Alexander early that morning, there was no trace of the arrogance that marked his treatment of Darius’s envoy. Instead, he was almost deliriously chipper, as if he would finally get his wish that day, and permanently avoid the assassin’s knife. I also noticed that he did not risk besmirching Achilles’s armor by wearing it at his likely defeat.

Now you will recall that when Aeschines told you of Gaugamela, I could not hold my peace at his lies. Of course, Aeschines was not there, so he may not know to what degree the story of this battle has been distorted. My rudeness was wrong, and I apologize for it. But be assured of these facts: the fighting at this battle was real, and it was terrible, and there are Macedonians walking around to this day who lose sleep over the horror of it.

Taking the initiative, Arridaeus directed the Macedonian line forward. This, he knew, was exactly what Darius hoped, that he would charge straight ahead and allow himself to be flanked on both sides. But this was only a bit of misdirection. At the opportune moment, he had the archers on his
 
right wing spin on their heels and push south, making a dash for an area beyond where the Persians had leveled the ground for their chariots. His plan was to make the enemy extend his lines in an undisciplined manner, so that gaps would appear for Alexander to punch through.

It didn’t work. Instead, the Bactrian cavalry on Darius’s left covered the enemy in good order. On the contrary, the rightward extension of the Macedonian line caused a wide gap to form between the archers and the Hypaspists. Darius’s Massagetan cavalry was through the hole in an instant, rampaging in the Macedonian rear. It was fortunate for us that they did not get through in enough numbers to end the battle right there. Instead, the back ranks of the Foot Companions did an about-face and presented their pikes, forcing the Massagetans to find easier prey among the baggage animals and camp followers.

Darius sent out his scythed chariots to soften up the enemy front. Contrary to what Aeschines has said, these terrible things could not be defeated by just stepping aside as they passed. The phalangites tried to do this, but the Persians had changed their tactics: instead of coming on in scattered fashion, the chariots formed a flying wedge too wide to avoid. The chariots were met by a storm of missiles, but most of them got through.

That was when the Macedonians suffered a further surprise: the Persians had modified the axles so the drivers could trigger a spring that extended the iron blades sideward. Hundreds of men were cut down at mid-body. Though I was some distance from all this, for the rest of my days I will remember the screams of the Macedonians. Later, just after the battle, I saw the place where the scythed chariots had rolled through: for a distance of hundreds of yards, there was nothing but lopped extremities and their dying remainders. So suddenly were these men killed that some of their severed legs were left upright in the mud, still standing in the straight rows of the phalanx.

What stopped the chariots at last was the simple accumulation of dead bodies. The torrents of blood pouring on the ground destroyed the footing of the horses, while piles of armored corpses slowed the vehicles down. In time the Macedonian javelins and arrows did their work, and the last chariot was brought down. But never let it be said that this was easy work!

As all this went on, small groups of Persians and even individuals were showing their courage by running out onto the field, challenging the Macedonians. More often than not, if a phalangite or hypaspist was foolish enough to meet them, the Persians won these duels. Yet each of these private victories was really a defeat, for when these impetuous Persians rushed out they opened gaps in their lines. Here, as at Marathon, Plataea, Issus and a hundred other battles, the Persians failed to understand the most important principle of modern war: to stay together, to keep the line, even at the cost of appearing cowardly.

Arridaeus was never fazed by minor reverses. Since I had trespassed on his hiding place, it seemed that further precautions were taken against discovery of his secret. Unlike the rest of the Macedonians, who wore Phrygian or Boeotian helmets that left the face exposed, Arridaeus’s head was encased in an old-style Corinthian helmet, with a visor. The horsehair mane of his helmet had also been stripped off, to make him less conspicuous. Finally, the system of signals he used to command the troops was altered: instead of sending riders to communicate with the trumpeters, which risked attracting attention, the trumpeters were stationed right next to Arridaeus.

The time came when the idiot’s unerring eye detected a significant weakness in the Persian line. The order was given, the trumpets sounded, and Alexander rode out at the apex of a cavalry wedge. He was, this time, dressed not in Achilles’ panoply but the standard gold-fringed cape of Macedonian royalty, with a mailed corselet underneath that he had stripped from the corpse of a Persian noble at Issus. But whatever he wore, we all would have recognized that distinctive half-crouch in which he rode, his shoulders squared to the enemy, spear cocked far forward.

Arridaeus was right again: the light infantry in the King’s path was too thin to stop him. Some among the enemy were riden down; the others fled, opening up a gap in the enemy front. The gap was shallow, with thousands upon thousands of reserves drawn up beyond it. Yet, unaccountably, the Persian allies did not come up to plug the hole. Instead, they stayed rooted in their spots. They wouldn’t fight.