HE STANDS AT the waterfront, among the bustle of hawkers and shovers and pickpockets and merchants and procurers; he smells spitted meat and baking bread and his stomach growls but he cannot eat. There is too much murder in his heart.
I have to do something about this. It is him or me now.
But when he gets back to Elephant Row he cannot find the captain. The waterboys say he disappeared after the drill that morning and they haven’t seen him since. It is toward evening when someone points to him heading out of the camp. Gajendra follows him.
He looks furtive and Gajendra takes pains not to be seen. A Macedonian officer is waiting for Oxathres near an olive grove and there is something about the way they are talking that makes him cautious. They make their way along one of the irrigation channels to a hut used by the government officials whose job it is to inspect the complex system of waterways. They go inside and he hears them bar the door.
He takes off his sandals and climbs up the wooden ladder at the back of the hut and onto the flat roof. A hole has been cut for a cooking fire and if he lies beside it he can hear them talking below.
‘You look like you have the flux,’ a man’s voice says. ‘Get a hold on yourself, man, or we’ll never get this done.’
Then Oxathres: he’d know that grating whine anywhere. ‘My lord, you don’t understand the risk I am taking.’
‘You think the danger is any less for me? I’ll die with you if we’re discovered.’
‘I won’t betray you.’
‘Of course you would, if his torturer is at you with his knives and irons.’
Death? Torture? This is bad business they’re about. The gods have shaken the tree and let the captain of the elephants fall in his lap. This is not about elephants; Oxathres has more on his mind than murdering Colossus. He wonders if they can hear his heartbeat down there. It sounds too loud to him. Any moment they will look up and wonder who it is pounding on the roof with a stave.
It is getting towards evening and the sun drops behind the city. With the twilight the mosquitoes are out and swarming. He dares not swat at them. They buzz impudently in his ear as if they know his predicament. Look at me, I shall bite you on the eye and you cannot do a thing about it.
‘You have the poison?’
‘I had an apothecary in the town make it up for me.’
‘And you have tested it?’
‘Well enough.’
‘It must be slow. If he dies quick it will raise suspicion and give his friends reason to accuse me.’
‘They say it resembles a fever, like the one he had in India. Once it takes hold a man dies measure by measure, from the inside out.’
‘You had better be right. We cannot fail at this.’
‘You have the means to deliver it?’
‘My brother is Alexander’s cupbearer. What do you think?’
The itching on his bare legs is unbearable; yet he must bear it. Start slapping away at these midges now and they will be up here with their swords out to fillet him. They have said enough yet he wishes they will say something more; he has enough for accusation but not for proof.
The first stars are blinking above the desert.
‘It is harsh to kill him this way.’
‘I would rather he died frothing than drag me across that fucking desert for yet another campaign. Our men will laud us as their saviours. They want to go home.’
They have lit a candle in the room. He resists the urge to peek down. He remembers the captain’s fellow conspirator well enough: reddish hair, broad shoulders in a red cloak, the bearing of a general. He believes he has seen him before, in a procession; it is Kassander, the son and envoy of Antipater, who rules Greece in Alexander’s absence.
‘You will remember me when all is done?’ Oxathres says.
‘You will get your reward, never doubt that.’
They leave separately and he listens till their footsteps have receded before he dares a glimpse above the parapet. They are silhouetted against the evening headed in different directions and on foot. At last he can take his revenge on the midges, one of them so fat with his blood that when he squashes it, he looks as if he has been knifed in the leg.
Almost night. Above him the stars are swinging across a deepening sky. Only the gods that ride them know their future promise. If he gets back to the camp alive he at least knows what they foretell for himself and for the captain.
Alexander no longer sleeps alongside his men. Gajendra comes from a place where you would expect nothing less of a Rajah. But the Macks are in a froth about it. It seems the general can do nothing these days without the phalanx muttering into their beards and spitting into the fire.
A sense of paranoia has overtaken the great Alexander; he has abandoned the grand pavilion he captured from the Persian king, Darius. It is the size of a parade ground, you could stable horses in it. But he now prefers the palace and leaves his soldiers to sleep on the other side of the river. He fears assassins, some say; others think that as he now considers himself a god, he believes he should live like one.
Guard dogs yelp and growl behind the palace gates. A sentry looks him up and down and laughs at him when he requests entry.
‘What the fuck have you done to yourself?’ the guard asks him. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’
‘I was bitten by mosquitoes.’
‘You look like you’ve been in a fight.’
‘I have to see Alexander.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘My name’s Gajendra, I’m a mahavat with the elephant squadron.’
‘Well, see here, Gajendra. Fuck off.’
‘But I must see Alexander.’
‘Leave a petition with his scribe in the morning.’
The gatehouse door slams.
He hammers on it with his fist. The guard comes out again, asks another guard to hold his spear and then kicks Gajendra across the street. ‘Look here, lad, I won’t have this. If you do that again, I’ll grab your ankle and bash you up against the wall like a cat. Now get out of here.’
But the commotion has woken the captain of the guard. He storms into the torchlight, still buttoning his tunic; he has been screwing a servant girl and the commotion has put him off his stroke. ‘What’s going on out here?’
The guard snaps off a salute. ‘We have here a skinny little gyppo. He wants to see Alexander and won’t fuck off when he’s told.’
‘I’m not a gyppo. I’m a mahavat with the elephants, his finest.’
The captain’s face is a study. All his men have to do is guard the door and only open it to a password, not get into brawls with elephant boys. It seems a simple enough task. ‘What are you doing here?’ he says to Gajendra, still buckling his sword belt.
‘I have to see Alexander. There is a plot against him.’
‘What’s a young lad like you got to do with plotting?’
‘I overheard two men speaking. I know one of them, I saw him riding with Alexander in procession. He plans to poison him.’
The captain stands there, considering. Gajendra feels blood trickle down his forehead where the guard has struck him.
‘How did you come by this information?’
Oh, you know, by chance. I was out looking for the captain of the elephants, planning to bash his brains in with my ankus, throw him in a ditch, hope no one notices and then here he is, plotting to kill our king. ‘I overheard him speaking. The plot is real. He fully intends to carry it out.’
The captain grabs the guard by the tunic and pushes him out of the way. His dilemma plays on his face: there’s a promotion or a horse-whipping in this.
‘You’d better come with me,’ he says to Gajendra.
They go deep into the palace, the captain’s studded sandals echoing on the stone. Torches flare in brackets on the walls. Gajendra counts six gates before they get to the final one. Once all there was between Alexander and his army was a strip of canvas and a guard’s good morning.
He is shocked by the change in the King of Asia, as he now styles himself. Alexander is sprawled on a chair surrounded by his generals. He is dressed in a white robe and sash with the royal purple at its border; he even has a blue and white diadem. A Persian nobleman would just look like a fop, which most of them are, in Gajendra’s opinion. On Alexander, such a dress looks outlandish.
Even some of his Companions are dressed the same.
Alexander does not have his usual bounce; he is yawning and bleary. Gajendra glances at the silver goblet on the table. He hopes they have not poisoned him already. It would be easy to do when he is in this state. He glances at the men hovering around him. I wonder which one of you is the assassin?
Only Alexander smiles at the captain’s approach. The silence and hard stares of the others terrify him.
‘Who is this?’ Alexander says to the captain. The glittering eye and curling wet lip are not what the army see.
‘This man came to the gate saying he needs to see you urgently. He claims he has information of a plot against your life.’
‘Another one?’ one of the generals sneers. It is Nearchus.
‘What’s your name?’ Alexander asks him.
‘Gajendra. I am a mahavat in the elephant brigade.’
‘A jumbo fucker,’ another one growls. ‘What’s he doing here?’
Alexander rouses himself from his stupor. He swings his legs around and gives the captain signal to leave. The man looks disappointed. He had hoped for commendation. He gets none.
‘I’ve seen this one in action before, haven’t I? He talks to elephants. And they seem to understand him.’
‘Does he trumpet at them with his pizzle?’ Nearchus says. ‘I should like to see that.’
The other Companions enjoy his ribald choice of imagery. Only Alexander does not laugh. ‘What do they say about me among the troops?’ he asks Gajendra.
This is unexpected. He did not expect to be interrogated about general morale. He is being tested before he has even had the chance to tell his news.
‘I don’t pay attention to the talk.’
‘Well, you should. A man who does not pay attention to the talk around him cannot use it to his advantage.’
There, you see! Gajendra thinks. You knew it was a test. He wants to see your mettle away from the elephants. That glittering eye is on you and you had best speak up, there is no point in being mealy mouthed in this company.
‘Some adore you and would follow you to the end of the earth. But you know this already. Others say that you have gone too far and that conquest has gone to your head, that you have forgotten your crease. Forgive me, but I am from Taxila. I have no idea what that means.’
The lip curls in the torchlight. ‘A crease is what we call the valley where we are raised. They mean to say that I have forgotten my own people. What else do they say?’
‘That you are mad.’
There is an audible hiss as everyone catches their breath. Alexander just smiles. He still has a face like a boy’s. ‘Madness is divine,’ he says. ‘All gods are mad. Didn’t you know that?’ He stands up. He is not unsteady, despite the wine that is spilled across the table, soaking like a bloodstain into the wood. ‘And what do you think. You think me mad?’
‘I think you are all that I should like to be.’ He has spoken without thinking. There is a moment of stillness, then Alexander throws back his head and roars with laughter. He stabs Gajendra in the chest with his forefinger. ‘Who is this pup? Tell me again why he is here.’
Gajendra addresses Alexander directly. ‘I overheard two men plotting against you. They will put poison in your wine.’
‘Which men?’
‘One is Oxathres, the captain of the elephants.’
‘Well, of course it is,’ Nearchus shouts. ‘Th is raggedarsed little fucker is out for his own advancement. If you listen to every calumny that comes wheedling up to your ear we shall have the whole army settling scores by way of promotion.’ He turns on Gajendra. ‘Look at him. He comes in here, stinking of elephant, with yet another poisoner’s story.’ He reaches out and grabs Gajendra by the jaw. ‘He doesn’t even shave yet.’
‘He’s a wondrous turn with an angry elephant.’
Nearchus stands up close and Gajendra can smell the wine on his breath. ‘Sold your arse to a corporal yet? Pretty boy like you, there must be a copper or two in it.’ He turns to his fellows. ‘They all do that, these Indians. Did you fight against us at the Jhellum River?’
The calumny is ringing in his ears. The hypocrisy – being accused of buggery by one of these big-nosed Greeks – is more than he can bear. But he manages a suitable reply. ‘I would not sell my arse to a corporal,’ he says, setting his shoulders. ‘Nothing less than a captain of cavalry, thanks. But most of them are spoken for.’
Alexander laughs. He is enjoying this. Until now he was growing bored with the company.
Nearchus is irritated. ‘Who is this?’
‘I got him and his fellows as part of the truce with Porus. I asked for a core of his war elephants and the handlers to manage them.’
‘Well, this one’s no use to you. No hair on his balls yet.’
Gajendra flinches again at these insults but doesn’t take his eyes from Alexander.
‘You heard what he said. Speak up for yourself.’
‘I was just thinking that I’m older than you were when you fought against the Thracians and that you’ll be happy to smell my elephants when there’s a squadron of enemy cavalry at your right and centre and your own line’s ready to break.’ He rounds on Nearchus. ‘Let’s see if my elephants don’t smell as sweet as patchouli to you then.’
Nearchus looks suddenly too hot in his clothes. His face is red from drink and bad temper. Alexander decides to intervene. Another time he might have let his general skewer him for his impudence but tonight he will be impressed with the lad’s spunk. ‘Don’t mind him,’ he says to Gajendra. ‘He lost his nephew to an elephant at Gaugamela.’
He puts a hand on his shoulder and leads him away from the others. ‘So tell me about these men who conspire against me. One was the captain of the elephants. Did you recognize the other?’
‘Yes. He is sitting right there.’
He points to one of the couches but it is now empty. One of the guests has slipped away during the arguments.
‘Kassander!’ Nearchus hisses.
Iolaus, Alexander’s cupbearer, springs forward and grabs Gajendra by the throat, calls him a toady and a serpent. Alexander pulls him off and tells the others to find Kassander. They believe him now, even Nearchus, who was in better humour when he thought him a liar.
Everyone is in uproar except for Alexander, who looks delighted. ‘Rouse my torturer. Tell him the captain of the elephants needs stretching and twisting a little. If there’s any truth to this tale, we’ll hear it from him.’
The company is dispersed. At last only Alexander remains behind with Nearchus and Gajendra. He sits down and pours wine into his goblet from a flask. He grins. There is red wine on his teeth, making him look bloody. ‘So shall we ask how you came by this information?’
‘I was following the captain.’
‘To what purpose?’
Gajendra considers a lie, but an instinct tells him the truth will serve him better, incriminating as it is. ‘I was set to brain him and leave him in a ditch.’
‘You see?’ Nearchus says. ‘This is just revenge, not information.’
‘I might agree with you,’ Alexander says, ‘except for the empty chair at the end of the table. We’ll soon get to the bottom of this.’ He resumes his slump and regards Gajendra with a lazy grin. ‘Well. What a useful lad you’re turning out to be!’
By the time he gets back to the straw, it seems the whole army knows what has happened. News travels faster here than fire through summer grass. Ravi rushes over to him, face creased with worry.
‘What has happened?’
‘What are people saying?’
‘Oxathres has been arrested. Some say you were part of the plot and are to be crucified in the morning. Others that it was you who denounced him and that Alexander has promoted you to general and given you a palace and your own harem.’
Who starts such talk? Gajendra wonders. ‘The truth lies somewhere in between.’
‘I was afraid for you,’ Ravi says.
He puts a hand on his uncle’s arm. ‘I was afraid for me, too.’
Something hits him hard on the side of the head. He looks up. Colossus has taken an apple from his barrel and blown it at him, using his trunk. Ravi shakes his head.
Gajendra pats his tusker’s head. He is mollified, but only after Gajendra feeds him a watermelon.
Ravi shakes his head again. ‘I swear he’s almost human sometimes,’ he says.
*
Over the next few days the stories flow thick and fast. It is like an army of old women, all gathered by the well. It amuses him to hear the stories repeated back to him in different ways: that Kassander paid Oxathres to make Colossus run amok in the maidan and trample Alexander; that he made a poison from elephant bile on the general’s orders so that he might take over the army; that all of Alexander’s Macedonians had turned against him and were preparing to rebel the moment he fell sick and Oxathres was to lead a charge against the palace with the elephants.
When you know the truth, lies become astonishing.
‘I almost feel sorry for your friend Oxathres,’ Ravi says. ‘You should have seen him when they dragged him off. He was crying and slobbering, and they hadn’t even done anything to him yet.’
He might feel sorry for him too, but then he reminds himself that Oxathres did not blanche at torturing Colossus with the hook and then the poison.
‘Kassander planned it all,’ Ravi goes on. ‘They found him halfway to Sidon and have dragged him back here to face Alexander.’
Three days later there are executions. The captain of the elephants is first. It is a chill morning, the men stand around huddled and shivering, warmed by the prospect of hearing somebody scream. Alexander strides from his tent in his golden armour, mounts his horse and parades in front of them. He does not speak. He rides up and down the lines, his horse skittish, flicking its tail and twisting its head.
Then Oxathres is dragged out, or what Gajendra believes is him. He has been badly used. He cannot stand, either from fear or from their tortures; his guards must drag him towards the cross that has been prepared. A rope of saliva spills from his mouth. He is screaming, but there are no words, just a high-pitched wail.
He has on only his tunic, and there is blood matted in his beard. Listen to him, someone says, he is crying out for pity. But no one can really understand what he is saying.
Two of the men behind Gajendra make a wager; one says he will be dead by the morning, the other bets a siglo that he will still be groaning when the crows take his eyes out.
A man standing behind Gajendra leans forward and squeezes his shoulder. ‘This must be a good day for you,’ he says.
A good day? Four days ago he wanted to pulverize this man with his fists and feet; but that was different. He wanted to do murder, but not this. ‘What did they do to him?’ he asks Ravi.
‘Hot irons and a turn on the wheel. They say he gave it all up before they started but Alexander insisted they make him scream anyway, he said it would help his digestion.’
They strip him. There are lesions all over him. Gajendra swallows down the acid in the back of his throat. ‘I hated him,’ he says to Ravi. ‘But I never hated him this much.’
‘Why should you care? He did this to himself.’
The executioners are expert, they have performed the task before. They hold him down on the cross as they apply the nails, first the wrist bones and then the ankles separately, the legs pinned either side of the stanchion.
They have dug a hole in the ground ready to plant the base of the cross, and they haul him up. It isn’t very high from the ground, Alexander’s horse could look him in the eye. Gajendra flinches and cannot watch. Could they not just kill him and be done with it?
To hear a man scream like this in the silence of a shuffling parade ground is a sobering proposition. He tries to remember Oxathres lashing at Colossus with the bull hook to make himself feel better about this.
The next wretch is brought out, Iolaus, Alexander’s cupbearer. He looks as well as a lad might who has been flayed with horse whips. Gajendra thinks he sees Alexander staring at him, but that’s impossible because even their great king could not make out one face in this crowd of thousands.
The boy is similarly prepared and hoisted up. It takes longer because he faints when they bang in the nails and Alexander insists they wake him with buckets of water so he can better enjoy the experience.
He supposes no one here this morning will be in a great hurry to be next to try and kill the King of Asia.
Alexander wishes to make his point. He spurs his horse to the front rank of soldiers, until he is close enough that they can feel his horse’s breath in their faces. Then he slowly rides around the entire parade ground, as if he is looking at each man in turn, until he has completed an entire circuit of his army.
The sun rises over the eastern hills. It is going to be a hot day. The man behind him taps him on the shoulder again. ‘A fine day to be out in the sun. His skin will be black by sunset. Two siglos.’
Gajendra shakes his head, declining the wager.
It is Kassander’s turn last of all. Gajendra wonders how it might have turned out if he had kept his nerve that night and bluffed this out. Would Alexander still have believed him if the son of Antipater had looked him in the eye and denied everything?
When he is brought out it sets up a murmur among the Macedonians. Alexander flicks at the reins and his horse spins around to face them. He sidesteps his Arab right to the first rank. The murmur dies to silence.
Unlike the others Kassander walks with his head held up. Behind him comes a squadron of a dozen archers, marching single file.
They chain him to a post facing the Macedonian ranks. It is clear Alexander wants them all to have a good view. Kassander spares a glance for his two fellow conspirators gasping on their trees. He appears contemptuous. You have let me down, the look seems to say.
‘Look at their faces,’ Ravi said. ‘The Macks do not adore Alexander as they once did.’
‘He’ll bring them around,’ another man said. ‘He always does. When he takes Carthage, they’ll be fighting over each other to kiss his arse.’
The archers arrange themselves in a line, facing the post, and about twenty paces from it. Alexander walks his horse towards them and with a grand gesture withdraws his sword from its scabbard. The archers each select an arrow, and raise their bows in unison.
Gajendra holds his breath. Kassander starts to make a speech and Alexander hits him around the head with the flat of the sword and he slumps in his bonds. ‘I have decided to be merciful,’ Alexander says. ‘Cut him down.’ He looks at Oxathres and Iolaus. ‘Not those two.’
Oxathres starts weeping again, not from pain, Gajendra supposes, but from envying the other’s fortune. The passage of a single day is nothing when you are in a pavilion by the river, eating sesame seeds with honey. When you are hanging on a splintered cross in the desert sun, it may as well be a hundred times a hundred years.
The army is dismissed and shuffles back to the camp, unusually silent. Gajendra turns to Ravi. ‘Have you ever done something and you’re not sure afterwards if it’s a good thing or a bad thing?’
‘No.’
Gajendra stares at the two men on their crosses. The cupbearer is trembling but Oxathres is quite still and he thinks that by some miracle he has died. But then he raises his weight on his skewered wrists and takes a long trembling breath before sagging to hang limp on the nails again. He wonders how many times he will do that before his strength and his will give out. He hopes the man who wagered him still alive by the morning will lose all his money.
‘Do you think Alexander will give them an hour or two and then order them killed? He won’t let them hang there all day, will he?’
Ravi shrugs. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it unlikely.’
‘So do I. They plotted to kill him. You saw the look on his face. Do one thing for me, Gajendra.’
‘What is that?’
‘If you ever rise so high that you are just like him, and I try and kill you for it, don’t hang me on a cross.’
But Ravi is deadly serious.
‘That could never happen,’ Gajendra says.
‘Oh, you never know,’ Ravi says.
‘You must get them back to their drills,’ Nearchus tells him. ‘We can’t have another debacle like last time. If it wasn’t for your big tusker it would have been a disaster.’
It seems he has been promoted from being a gyppo to Nearchus’s second in command, though no announcement has been made.
‘Can you do that?’
‘It should be Ravi. He’s the most experienced. I’m just his apprentice.’
‘Which one’s Ravi? I don’t know the names of all these fucking Indians. You don’t look like an apprentice. They listen to you. That elephant of yours is the best we have. Just do as I say.’
‘All right.’
Gajendra is rewarded with Oxathres’s position as captain of the elephants; he is even offered a place in Alexander’s outer circle. He feasts at the long table with the other junior officers of Alexander’s army. His general announces that Nearchus has been promoted in rank to Elephantarch. It is a new position, invented just for him, the first time a Macedonian general will be in command of an elephant squadron.
It demonstrates to everyone the importance their general places on his new weapons of war.
Gajendra tries to catch Alexander’s eye. He has felt a supernatural bond with him since that first day in the yard when Colossus went berserk. Or did he just imagine it? He is just another elephant boy, a minion and a foreigner, and all the Macks except Alexander hate foreigners.
He watches him embrace Nearchus. One day that will be me. For now let the sun shine on his favourite general, but soon it will shine on me, and I will blind this whole army with my brilliance and bravery.
I will never be a nothing ever again.