Flood Tide Read online

  Flood Tide

  By Alexander Geiger

  Prime Directive (2013)

  Flood Tide (2019)

  Conquest of Persia (2019)

  Immortal Alexandros (2020)

  Funeral Games (2021)

  Book Two of the Ptolemaios Saga

  Flood Tide

  An Epic Novel of the Greek Invasion of Persia

  Alexander Geiger

  Copyright © 2019 by Alexander Geiger

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, or transmitted, in any form or by any means whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work may be sent to:

  Permissions Department

  Ptolemaios Publishing & Entertainment, LLC

  668 Stony Hill Road, Suite 150

  Yardley, PA 19067

  www.PtolemaiosPublishing.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9892584-4-9 (pbk)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9892584-5-6 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937857

  Cover Design: Scott Schmeer, Prometheus Training, LLC

  The author of this work is available to speak at live events.

  For further information, please contact the author

  at [email protected]

  First Edition

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To the memory of Emil Geiger,

  the smartest man I ever knew.

  Table of Contents

  Maps and Animated Battle Depictions

  List of Principal Characters

  Chapter 1 – Euphoria

  Chapter 2 – The Day After

  Chapter 3 – Delusions of Salvation

  Chapter 4 – Death in the Shadows

  Chapter 5 – Crossroads

  Chapter 6 – Liberation

  Chapter 7 – Ephesos

  Chapter 8 – Miletos

  Chapter 9 – Halikarnassos

  Chapter 10 – Mopping Up

  Chapter 11 – Cutting the Cord

  Chapter 12 – Issos

  Author’s Note

  Additional Materials

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men.

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” [1]

  Maps and Animated Battle Depictions

  Map 1 – Ancient Macedonia and its Environs

  Map 2 – Mainland Greece in 336 B.C.E.

  Map 3 – Lands Traversed by Alexandros in 335 and early 334 B.C.E.

  Map 4 – Lands Traversed by Alexandros between May 334 and November 333 B.C.E.

  Map 5 – Miletos and its Environs, c. 334 B.C.E.

  Map 6 – Halikarnassos, c. 334 B.C.E.

  Map 7 – Movements of the Persian and Pan-Hellenic Armies Prior to the Battle of Issos

  Battle 1 – Chaironeia – August 338 B.C.E.

  Battle 2 – Granikos – May 334 B.C.E.

  Battle 3 – Issos – November 333 B.C.E.

  List of Principal Characters

  Alexandros Aniketos (356-323)[2] – King of Macedonia (336-323)[3]

  Antigone (unk-unk) – Philotas’s mistress

  Antigonos Monophthalmos (c. 382-301) – Military commander under both Philippos and Alexandros; appointed satrap of Phrygia by Alexandros

  Antipatros (397-319) – Macedonian nobleman; served as regent under both Philippos and Alexandros

  Aristandros of Telmessos (c. 380-331) – Alexandros’s soothsayer

  Aristoteles (384-322) – Alexandros’s teacher in Mieza

  Arrhidaios (358-317) – Alexandros’s half-wit half-brother

  Artabazos (c.387-c.328) – Persian nobleman; father of Barsine and Artakama, among others

  Artakama (347-unk) – Artabazos’s daughter; Barsine’s sister

  Barsine (355-309) – Artabazos’s daughter; Artakama’s sister; Memnon’s wife; Alexandros’s mistress

  Dareios (c.380-330) – Persian Emperor (336-330)

  Hephaistion (356-324) – Alexandros’s closest friend

  Kallisthenes (c.368-327) – Aristoteles’s great nephew; accompanied Alexandros as campaign historian

  Kassandros (358-297) – Antipatros’s son

  Kleitos Melas (c.357-327)[4] – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Kleopatra (354-308) – Daughter of Philippos and Olympias; Alexandros’s sister

  Krateros (365-320) – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Lysimachos (360-282) – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Mazaios (380-328) – Persian nobleman

  Memnon of Rhodos (380-333) – Mercenary commander in Dareios’s service; Barsine’s husband

  Nearchos (c.360-c.312) – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Nikanoros (358-331) – A commander in Alexandros’s army; Parmenion’s son

  Olympias (a/k/a Myrtale) (377-314) – Philippos’s 4th wife; mother of Alexandros Aniketos

  Parmenion (400-330) – Leading Macedonian general; served both Philippos and Alexandros

  Perdikkas (359-321) – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Philippos Amyntou Makedonios (382-336) – King of Macedonia (359-336); father of Alexandros

  Philippos of Akarnia (unk-unk) – Alexandros’s physician

  Philotas (360-330) – A commander in Alexandros’s army; Parmenion’s son

  Ptolemaios Metoikos (c.364-282) – A commander in Alexandros’s army; one of Alexandros’s bodyguards

  Seleukos (358-281) – A commander in Alexandros’s army

  Sisygambis (unk-323) – Dareios’s mother

  Stateira (c.365-331) – Dareios’s 1st wife

  Chapter 1 – Euphoria

  He sat, swathed in a nimbus of golden hair, and laughed. “Never had a doubt,” he exclaimed, shaking his head in wonder. Although his physician implored him to keep still, Alexandros was in an irrepressible mood.

  “No kidding,” he asked giddily. “Sliced the bastard’s arm right off, huh?”

  His informant nodded with a grin, causing Alexandros to burst into peals of laughter once again. “I don’t remember that at all.” He fought to regain his composure. “I guess I was pretty much out of it by then.”

  He was holding court, sitting on a low stool in the middle of a makeshift tent, wearing the remnants of his armor. His helmet was gone but his cuirass still hung by a strap off one shoulder, its shine dulled by shallow dents, patches of mud, a generous coating of blood, and a streak of whitish gore, splayed like a lightning bolt across the simulacrum of washboard abs. His mismatched eyes sparkled in the torchlight, moist with merriment or exhaustion or perhaps pain. He was leaning slightly forward, hands on knees, fingers tapping the upper edges of his greaves.

  His best friend Hephaistion was helping him relive the battle, especially the parts Alexandros had missed while lying unconscious on the ground, surrounded by bodyguards waging a desperate fight to prevent Persian cavalrymen from cutting off his head and hands. Of course, Hephaistion had missed those parts of the battle as well, having stayed far out of harm’s way, but that didn’t inhibit his vivid recounting of second-hand information gathered after the Persians had been routed.

  “You’re lucky, sire.” Philippos of Akarnia was peering into his young patient’s darkening mane. “It’s a clean cut, though the wound’s beginning to spread.”

  Alexandros shrugged. “It’s a scratch.”

  To me, it looked like a chasm. The scalp was severed all the way to the bone, from just above Alexandros’s hairline to beyond the crown of his head, the cleavage wide as a finger and growing wider.

  I was standing behind the king, holding a torch, trying to keep the operating field illuminated
without setting the patient’s hair on fire. My task became more complicated when the surgeon also asked me to use my other hand to hold a rag against the king’s forehead in order to keep the wine out of his eyes. When exactly had I become a surgeon’s assistant? I wondered.

  Marooned out of time, I was still trying to adjust to the paradigm shift I had experienced during the battle. Like a gyroscope wrenched from its mounting, I had lost my bearings. Admittedly, disorientation was my customary mental state but this evening I was more discombobulated than usual. What the hell am I doing here, I kept asking myself, and will I make it to the escape hatch in time?

  “This may sting a little, sire,” Philippos warned.

  Alexandros appeared not to have heard. “Somebody, go get that guy. I want to thank him in person.” The scrum of aides milling about in the tent appeared oblivious to his request.

  “It was Kleitos Melas, sire,” I said under my breath but my whisper was drowned out by the torrent of uncut wine Philippos had started to pour into the wound.

  Alexandros winced but did not utter a sound. Wine flowed everywhere: down his back, around his ears and onto his shoulders, and into the rag I was pressing against his forehead. With the wine flowed clots of blood, clumps of hair, clods of dirt, bits of skin, and shards of metal.

  After the wound had been adequately irrigated, Philippos used a sharp knife to cut off the hair near the flapping edges of skin.

  “Sssmp.” Alexandros sucked air through clenched teeth but, embarrassed by his show of vincibility, quickly turned back to Hephaistion. “Do we have a count of our casualties yet?”

  “I’ve prepared a special potion, sire, to dull the pain,” Philippos interrupted. “Here, sip a little at a time.”

  Hephaistion snatched the proffered cup out of the physician’s hand. “What in Haides is it?”

  “Just wine, with some essence of poppies mixed in.”

  Hephaistion took a swig and we all stared at him expectantly, waiting for the effects of the poison to manifest themselves.

  He was a tall, slender, elegant young man, with a clean-shaven face, penetrating eyes, straight nose, full lips, a sculpted chin. Had he been a woman, he would have been beautiful. As a warrior, he struck some people as soft but that appraisal missed Hephaistion’s greatest talents. In addition to his good looks, he was also intelligent, cunning, and a virtuoso sycophant. He and Alexandros, both twenty-two, had grown up together and were inseparable, except possibly on the battlefield.

  As we watched, Hephaistion grabbed his neck and collapsed to the ground. Incomprehensible sounds escaped from his throat; his limbs convulsed spasmodically. His right hand reached out beseechingly to Alexandros while his left hand clutched the tainted cup against his chest. Remarkably, not a drop of the suspect potion had spilled during the entire performance. Philippos the Physician continued calmly to clean the wound.

  There was a momentary, stunned silence in the tent, until Alexandros burst out laughing. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. “Alright, let me have some!” he yelled. “This hurts, you know.”

  Hephaistion sprang to his feet and proffered the chalice to Alexandros with a theatrical flourish. The assembled men broke into boisterous laughter and loud applause in an attempt to cover up their moment of uncertainty. Hephaistion acknowledged their acclaim with a smile and a brief bow.

  Alexandros, with Hephaistion’s help, drained the chalice in no time. Hephaistion nodded toward the empty cup. “Do you have any more?”

  Philippos raised his crimson-stained hands in apology. “Just wine, with nothing in it.”

  “That’ll do.” Alexandros winked.

  Both Alexandros and Hephaistion were roaring drunk by the time Philippos finished cleaning his hands. He produced a large bronze needle from his bag, dipped it in wine, threaded it with catgut, and stitched the wound together. After inspecting his handiwork to make sure the suture was tight but sufficiently porous to permit pus to ooze out, he covered the wound with a mixture of lint, animal grease, copper oxide, and honey, creating a pleasant smelling but gross looking poultice. A thick, wine-soaked linen cover, secured by leather strips looped repeatedly over the pad and under the king’s chin, completed the ensemble.

  The effect of the finished job was rather comical and we all started to laugh. Alexandros grabbed a breastplate from the floor, rubbed it furiously with spit and wine, and tried to see himself in the resultant smudge of polished grime. I doubted he could make out anything, what with the limited reflectivity of the smeared bronze surface and the unreliability of the flickering torchlight, but after squinting dubiously at his distorted image for a moment, he broke into loud guffaws. “Now that’s a crown fit for a king!”

  Parmenion, with his usual impeccable timing, chose that moment to enter the conversation. “You’re never going to need to part your hair again, sire.” Naturally, his observation brought all levity to an abrupt halt.

  It was as if he had spoken in a foreign tongue. At sixty-six, Parmenion was the oldest man in the tent. Only hours after the battle had ended, his hands and face had been scrubbed clean, his armor immaculate, his beard neatly-trimmed, his eyes tired but hard as ever, his back bent only slightly under the pressures of responsibility, exhaustion, and age. He had been placed in overall command of infantry and allied cavalry at the start of the battle that morning. The troops under his control had performed superbly during the entire day, rolling up the enemy line rendered vulnerable by Alexandros’s reckless, albeit ultimately successful, attack against the Persian cavalry.

  Every man in that tent, including Alexandros, recognized Parmenion’s political acumen and military accomplishments. He’d had a long and distinguished career as one of the leading generals under Alexandros’s father, King Philippos Deuteros. When Philippos was assassinated and the twenty-year-old Alexandros acceded to the throne, one of his first acts as the new king was to confirm Parmenion as the commander of the Macedonian expeditionary corps in Asia. After that, Parmenion had maneuvered adroitly to become Alexandros’s second-in-command when the long-awaited main-force invasion of Persia finally arrived. Several members of Parmenion’s clan, including two of his sons, held important command posts in the army. His third and youngest son, only twelve at the time, was the cavalry’s favorite mascot. Parmenion should have been the most important man in that tent, next to Alexandros himself, but he wasn’t.

  In the two short years since Alexandros had donned the diadem, Parmenion had become the voice of experience, wisdom, and caution. Somehow, he’d acquired the thankless job of trying to contain Alexandros’s reckless élan, boundless enthusiasm, and preternatural self-confidence. They were both men of action but Alexandros was also a young man chasing his destiny while Parmenion was an old man trying to preserve his legacy.

  “Will it leave a scar?” Alexandros asked Philippos, while glaring at Parmenion.

  “No, sire, the scar will be invisible,” Philippos reassured him smoothly. “No one will know it’s there, beneath all that glorious hair.”

  “It’s a shame you have to wear a helmet, Aniketos,[5]” Hephaistion joked.

  Alexandros winked. “Next time we go into battle, I’ll let my hair announce me.”

  “A helmet would do a better job of protecting that stubborn skull of yours,” Parmenion observed drily. The man just couldn’t help himself.

  Alexandros, his effervescence unquenchable, looked over his shoulder toward me. “Hey, Ptolemaios, you’re always so damned rational. What do you think? Am I better off wearing my hair or my helmet into battle?”

  “Both, I think – with the hair tucked into the helmet.”

  Everybody in the tent roared with laughter. In the aftermath of victory, every joke was a riot. Most of us – unlike Alexandros and Hephaistion – had not even drunk much wine yet but we were all excited, happy, elated. “We’re still here, alive, and the Persians are dead,” was the prevailing sentiment. “Can you believe it?”

  “There he is!” Alexandros called out when Kleito
s Melas walked into the tent. I guess he’d heard my whisper after all. “The butcher of Granikos.”

  Kleitos broke into a wide grin. “Hardly that, your majesty,” he said modestly, giving me a friendly nod when he noticed me standing behind the king.

  “Come have a drink with me, man.” Alexandros waved his arms for two cups of wine, which promptly materialized in his hands. “Tell me what happened.”

  “It was nothing, sire. We all fought to keep up with you, which is not always an easy thing to do. You made a hell of a charge, sire. I was sure my horse was gonna drop dead trying to keep up with yours.”

  “Yeah, Boukephalas was raring to go, wasn’t he?”

  “Not as raring as you, Aniketos,” Hephaistion put in.

  “By the time we caught up,” Kleitos continued, ignoring Hephaistion, “you were engulfed by the enemy. Mithridates’s unit, the best squadron in the Persian cavalry ...”

  “Used to be,” Hephaistion interjected, to much hilarity, “they’re all dead now.”

  Kleitos attempted to continue. “Mithridates’s unit was directly in front of you.”

  “And I was thrilled to see them.” Alexandros’s comment provoked fresh gales of laughter.

  “I’m sure you were,” Kleitos agreed with a broad smile, “but the rest of us were still trying to catch our breaths. Besides, other satraps, with their units, were closing in on us from all sides. I’d never seen anything like it.”

  “It was the perfect trap,” Parmenion observed, genuine admiration in his voice. “They isolated you, sire, with but a small unit around you; cut you off; surrounded you with their best heavy cavalry, led by their top commanders; and prepared to destroy you and your squadron in detail.”

  “It was great, Parmenion – fantastic!” Alexandros was buoyant. “The perfect trap, as you say. I had them exactly where I wanted them. The cream of Persian nobility, outfitted in their heavy Persian armor, sitting on their weighted-down horses, just waiting for us to mow them down.”