To Balkh came envoys from the king of Khwarezm, not a hushed desert waste as poets suggested, but the most powerful known kingdom to the north-west of the Oxus, where the river broadens to join the Aral Sea. It had left little mark on written history until Russian excavations revealed it as a stable and centralized kingdom, defended by its own mailed horsemen, at least from the mid-seventh century B.C. now, it hangs like a dimly discerned shadow over a thousand years of history in outer Iran. In art and writing, it shows the influence of the Persian Empire to which it had once been subject; it was a home for settled farmers, and its interests were not those of the nomads who surrounded it in the Red and Black Sand deserts. Spitamenes was using these deserts as his base, and safety inclined Khwarezm to Alexander's side. Its king even tried to divert the Macedonians against his own enemies, offering to lead them west in an expedition to the Black Sea. Alexander refused tactfully, though glad of a solid new ally: 'It did not suit him at that moment to march to the Black Sea, for India was his present concern.' It was the first hint of his future: 'When he held all Asia, he would return to Greece, and from there he would lead his entire fleet and army to the Hellespont and invade the Black Sea, as suggested.' Asia, then, was thought for the first time to include India, and not just the India of the Persian Empire. But polite refusals are no certain proof of his plans and it was easy to talk of the future in winter camp, the season when generals talk idly, it was only to hold back Spitamenes that the king of Khwarezm was wanted. Hopes in this direction had been raised for an early victory: the new reinforcements were brigaded and four Sogdian prisoners were conscripted into the Shield Bearers, because they were noticed by Alexander, going to their execution with unusual bravery. As winter passed, the traitor Bessus was sent to Hamadan, where the Medes and the Persians voted that his ears and nose should be cut off, the traditional treatment for an Oriental rebel.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Nothing says more for men's moods than how they interpret an omen, and as Alexander left Balkh in the spring of 328 for another year's fighting, he chanced on a very revealing one. When camp was pitched by the river Oxus two springs welled out of the ground near the royal tent, the one of water, the other of a liquid 'which gushed forth no different in smell or taste or brightness from olive oil, though the earth was unsuited to olive trees'. Missing their life among the oil lamps and cooking of the Mediterranean, the officers had explained petroleum by olive oil: Alexander sent for the royal prophet Aristander who pronounced the spring to be a sign of labours, but after the labours, victory. It was the first time that petroleum had been struck in Iran by westerners, and they used it to justify a patient hope for the best.

Their strategy, like the oil spring, promised victory after slow endeavour. In search of Spitamenes, the army had divided its new strength into six sections, two to remain and guard Bactria, three to cross the Oxus, and one to fortify the western oasis of Merv, long attached to the satrapy of Balkli. Though more than two hundred miles distant through wearying desert, Merv was a fertile and strategic pocket of civilization which could be strengthened to keep oft Spitamenes if he tried to export his rebellion west towards the Caspian Sea. Craterus was ordered to found an Alexandria there and fortify lesser colonies inside the oasis. As it happened, his detachment would decide the war.

Across the Oxus, the objective, annoyingly, was once more the Sogdians. Their garrisons had not restrained them from a third revolt, and town after town had to be reconquered, punished by razing and resettled with loyalists. It made a hot summer's work and not until August did the sections at last unite near Samarkand. Spitamenes had still not been lured out from the western steppes, but while waiting for news of him, the officers indulged in hard-earned relaxation. Near Bazeira, there was a wooded game reserve, watered by natural springs and thickly planted with scrub: the Iranians had once built towers as stands for the hunters but the coverts had not been drawn for a hundred years. Alexander relished the chance for sport and profit and loosed his men into the woods with orders to kill on sight. The bag is said to have totalled 4,000 animals, not so much a massacre as a necessary addition to a larder which had been short of meat for more than a year. In legend the hunt left a curious mark: a letter was invented in which Alexander described his Indian adventures to his tutor Aristotle and referred to a struggle with wild beasts which he called his Night of Te. or. The story perhaps arose from this slaughter in Sogdia, but within weeks a true Night of Terror was to follow. It was hardly as Alexander's Romance suggested.

At Samarkand, a few evenings later, Alexander was banqueting with his Greek friends and army officers. It must be remembered how trying a moment it was in his career. For a whole year, Spitamenes had kept him from entering India, and as yet there was little prospect that he would be rapidly caught. The Macedonians' one brush with him had ended in disaster; ever since they had been wearily reconquering Sogdian villages in the midsummer sun, and the process was not yet completed. At dinner the local wine flowed very freely, more a sign of frayed nerves than of the new barbarism which historians later liked to detect in Alexander, for like Philip he had always enjoyed a drinking party and now, if ever, he had some excuse in his circumstances. Heavy drinking is the corollary of survival for a traveller in a Sogdian summer and the few lasting water-springs are naturally brackish and tainted with saltpetre. Wine is the one alternative to thirst, and it was taken in quantities which would appal a European: like the natives, the Macedonians drank it neat, a practice considered too strong for Greeks, who economized by mixing their wines with a third part of water. The surroundings may explain the drinking, but they cannot excuse the sequel. As Alexander drank and dined, an incident developed, so disgraceful that Ptolemy's memoirs seem to have suppressed it, while the eighty-year-old Aristobulus was reduced once more to special pleading.

When two contemporaries were secretive it is hard to be sure of what happened. Certainly, a quarrel blew up from the heavy drinking, when wine persuaded some men to boast and flatter, others to rebut what they did not like to hear. The most argumentative guest was Cleitus, Hipparch of the Companion Cavalry and probably in his late middle-age; his sister had nursed Alexander as a little boy. He and the king began to shout and provoke each other, made petulant by all that they had drunk and there is no saying which of them did more to fire the quarrel. Alexander's temper was the first to break and once it had broken, he lost all control. Nearby guests tried to hold him down, or so they later persuaded the historians, but Cleitus's taunts continued and Alexander struggled for whatever weapon lay to hand. He is said to have pelted Cleitus with an apple from the table; then, set on murder, he reached for his sword.

But a bodyguard, it is claimed, had prudently whisked it away. So Alexander bawled for his own Shield Bearers in Macedonian dialect, 'a source of especial alarm': he ordered his trumpeter to sound a note of warning and when the man refused, he punched him in the face. Cleitus's fate, meanwhile, was arguable. According to some, he was hustled out of the room by his friends and deposited beyond a ditch and a mud-wall. But he defied all restraint and found his own way back into the dining-room, staggering through the door just as Alexander, furious, was calling 'Cleitus'. 'Here's Cleitus, Alexander,' he replied, whereupon Alexander ran him through with a sarissa. Others, more plausibly, denied that Cleitus had ever left the room: Alexander merely seized a spear from a bodyguard and killed him on the spot. The tale of Cleitus's re-entry, which even claimed that only Cleitus was to blame, is a warning of the lengths to which courtly excuses would go.