But we didn’t have bows, and their arrows were falling on the rumps of our horses. Horses were dying and their riders were left on the ground in a cavalry melee – a terrible place to be.

Had the Phrygians held on for another few minutes, they would have had us. As it was, they fell back, and Alexander ordered us to wheel around – easy enough for a small group of horsemen who had ridden together all their lives, and desperately hard for anyone else. The Medes never imagined we’d wheel – but the whole wedge spun on Alexander, men riding to the flanks in good order, as if this sort of fancy riding in the face of the enemy was an everyday thing. Which it was, for us.

We charged the Medes, and they came right at us – the Medes are the bravest nation on earth, except for ours, and they are never shy about a scramble. Our horses were blown and theirs were fresh, and they shot a flight of arrows at us from close in, and men fell – but nothing touched Alexander, and he had his spear two-handed, the butt clamped under his right armpit, and he wrenched it high just before contact, beating his opponent’s spear aside and thrusting. He must have missed – one of his few melee misses, I must admit – and the man’s spear rode down Alexander’s spear, skipped off Bucephalus’s coat and popped up into my line. I got a hand on it, slapped it clear of my body – and my opponent unhorsed himself, because he wouldn’t let go of his spear – a juvenile mistake.

Another Mede shot me from arm’s length – I had time to put my head downand my crest into his shot – it was like being punched in the head, and blackness came before my eyes – a haze at the edges, and another blow rang against the side of my helmet, and then I could see, and my spear had rammed through his chest and my spear-point was out through his back, and the weight of him broke the staff.

And then I was through, Poseidon gathering speed, and Alexander was trying to turn his horse to go back into the melee.

I gave Poseidon his head and gathered the king’s bridle in my hand as I trotted past – Bucephalus trumpeted his displeasure as his head was snapped round, but he had to follow Poseidon.

Alexander slammed his spear-butt into my side. ‘What . . .’

We were in the river. Persian cavalry was coming at the Hetaeroi from all directions, and men were down – at least a dozen, all king’s friends. Amyntas son of Amyntas was down, and Lagus son of Perdiccas, and other men I knew.

And Pyrrhus – young Pyrrhus, one of my own. I could see immediately that he was missing from my file, because when I burst out of the back of the melee, all my file followed me like good troopers, and there was Nearchus, and Cleomenes, but Pyrrhus was gone. Damn the boy.

But he was not the king.

I rode through the ford, and Alexander was screaming at me, but I had his reins.

Why, you ask?

Because in my one glimpse across the river I’d seen Philotas. He was sitting on his war horse, and he wasn’t moving to our aid. And I thought of Thaïs, and what she had said, and I made the decision – right or wrong – that it was my job to keep the king alive.

The Hetaeroi followed me.

The Medes didn’t pursue. They’d lost their prize – the king – and they could claim to have had the best of the melee, in that they held the ground. Another way of looking at it was that we’d broken through the Phrygian cavalry, whirled about and shattered the Medes, but perhaps that’s my bias speaking. Heh, heh.

I got Alexander up the Macedonian bank of the Granicus, and I turned to him – well short of the waiting squadrons of Hetaeroi, who looked angry, even at this distance. There was the margin of victory – six full squadrons, fifteen hundred Macedonian cavalry. Sitting.

‘Blame me,’ I hissed at Alexander. ‘Call me a coward, lord, but ask yourself, why is Philotas just sitting there?’

Alexander rode past me. He trotted his horse up the bank and turned to look back.

The Persians were still in disarray. But even as we watched, a magnificent regiment came up at a canter – a thousand noble Persians in fine armour – with scales, most of them, that gleamed like a million mirrors, like dancer’s bangles in the setting sun. Arsites in person, I assumed. They pushed their own Medes and Phrygians aside.

But they halted at the riverbank.

Our last files got across, pursued only by a handful of Mede arrows.

‘Not as easy as you thought, Ptolemy?’ Philotas shouted at me.

The king was angry with me, and the army would think I’d been a coward, and Philotas – I should have flashed with rage, but something inside me was tired, and cold. So I rode up the bank and right up to him.

Give him this much – he didn’t flinch or quail. I think he hoped I would strike him, so he could order me arrested.

I rode right up close. ‘You’re right,’ I said. I was only as loud as I needed to be for him to hear me. ‘But I didn’t expect to have to do it by myself.’

His eyes widened a little.

I rode past him and had my Polystratus, now my hyperetes, sound the recall from our place in the Hetaeroi line. I didn’t think that the Persians would come across the stream at us, but it would have been foolish to allow my squadron to continue to mill about in confusion.

We dismounted. All of the horses were blown – even Poseidon was tired.

Alexander left Bucephalus and came over to me. ‘I wish to apologise,’ he said.

I don’t think he’d ever apologised – at least to me. I just stood there with a foolish look on my face, no doubt.

‘But we put fear into them, did we not? Did you see me when I went through the front ranks of the Phrygians? I’ve never been so fast – I felt as if Achilles himself guided my arm.’

I was so relieved to have his forgiveness that I pressed his hand. ‘You were . . . like a god,’ I said.

Alexander’s eyes widened, just as Philotas’s had, but for the opposite reason. He positively beamed with pleasure. ‘Ptolemy! How unlike you!’ he teased me, and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘And then I missed my stroke against the Mede – did you take him?’

I smiled. In truth, the king’s need to refight his actions and praise himself was annoying – the sort of conceit you’d expect from a much lesser man. But I was relieved, strangely happy, even. ‘He unhorsed himself,’ I said. ‘I got his spear in my left hand and he fell off his horse.’

Alexander threw back his head and laughed – a high-pitched laugh that sounded utterly false.

He stopped mid-laugh.

Darkness was falling. And as if he’d become another man, the king suddenly turned his head.

‘We should be marching south,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll never reach their flank by morning.’

We’d lost more than twenty Hetaeroi, and in later years the king put up monuments to them. But we were alive, and the king was still king.

If Parmenio had another plan, he didn’t try to press it on the king. In later years, he insisted to anyone who would listen that the plan to go south around the lake was his plan, not the king’s – that all the king wanted was to ride forward and challenge Arsites to single combat.

Crap.

The king loved to fight, but we went forward to try to steal the ford from the Persians, and we missed by minutes – minutes that Philotas and Amyntas had wasted. To my mind, Parmenio only sent us forward in the hope that we’d die.

That said, though – the king propagandised his version, too. Look at what it says in the Military Journal. No mention at all of the battle at the ford. Eh? Nor any mention of Parmenio, even though it wasParmenio who marched the army off to the right behind the screen of hills and got them to the edge of the lake under cover of darkness – and into a cold camp without fires. When we rode into that camp, our horses were done, but there were grooms ready to take them, and men handed us cold food and wine and led us to our pallets to sleep – Parmenio had done a magnificent job.