Fire From Heaven (23 page)

It had been built by Xerxes, to guard his rear after he had crossed the Hellespont. On the flat sea-meadow below it, he had rough-reckoned the number of his host, too vast for counting, by marching troop after troop into a square drawn around the first ten thousand men. The fort was solid; he had had no lack of slaves. But it had grown ramshackle in its century and a half of Thracians; cracks were filled in with rubble, the battlements patched with thorn like a goat-pen in the mountains. It had withstood Thracian tribal wars; till now, no more had been asked of it.

Dusk was falling as they came near. From within the walls rose the smell of cook-fires and the distant bleat of goats. Just out of arrow-shot was the camp of the Macedonians, a workmanlike shanty town of hide tents, lean-to’s roughly thatched with reeds from the Hebros river, and propped upturned carts. Drawn geometric and black against the sunset sky stood a sixty-foot wooden siege-tower; its guards, shielded by thick ox-hide housing against missiles from the ramparts, were cooking supper within its base. In the cavalry lines, the horses whinnied at their pickets. The platforms had been set up for the catapults; the great engines seemed to crouch like dragons about to spring, their timber necks extended, their massive bolt-firing bows outspread from their sides like wings. The outlying scrub stank of ordure; the nearer air smelled of woodsmoke, grilling fish, and the unwashed bodies of many men and women. The camp-followers were busy with supper; here and there one of their inci?dental children chirped or wailed. Someone was playing a lyre in need of tuning.

A little hamlet of huts, its people fled to the fort or mountains, had been cleaned out for the officers. The headman’s place, two stone rooms and a lean-to, housed the King. They saw his lamp at some distance.

Alexander moved into the lead, lest Kleitos take it on himself to deliver him like a child. His eyes and nose and ears took in the presence of war, the difference from barracks or home camp. When they reached the house, Philip’s square shape darkened the doorway. Father and son embraced, and viewed each other in the light of the watch-fire. ‘You’re taller,’ said the King.

Alexander nodded. ‘My mother,’ he said for the escort’s ears, ’sends you greeting and hopes you are in good health.’ There was a loaded pause; he went on quickly, ‘I’ve brought you a sack of apples from Mieza. They’re good this year.’

Philip’s face warmed; Mieza apples were famous. He clapped his son on the shoulder, greeted his companions, directed Philotas to his father’s lodging, and said, ‘Well, come in, come in and eat.’

Joined presently by Parmenion, they ate at a trestle, waited on by the royal squires, youths in their mid teens whose fathers’ rank entitled them to learn manners and warfare by acting as body-servants to the King. The sweet golden apples were brought in a silver dish. Two lamps stood on bronze standards. The King’s weapons and armour leaned in a corner. An ancient smell of humanity sweated out from the walls.

‘Only a day later,’ said Philip, ‘and we might have lodged you inside.’ He gestured with his apple-core at the fort.

Alexander leaned forward across the table. The long ride had sunburned him; the clear colour glowed in his cheeks, his hair and eyes caught the lamplight brilliantly; he was like kindling caught with the spark.

‘When do we attack?’

Philip grinned across at Parmenion. ‘What can one do with such a boy?’

They were to go in just before dawn.

After supper, the officers came in for briefing. They were to approach the fort in darkness; then flame-arrows were to be shot at the brushwood in the walls, the catapults and siege-tower would open covering fire to clear the ramparts while scaling-ladders were set up. Meantime the ram, slung in its mighty cradle, would be swung against the gates, the siege-tower would thrust out its drawbridge; the assault would begin.

It was an old story to the officers, only small details imposed by the site were new. ‘Good,’ Philip said. ‘Time for a little sleep, then.’

The squires had brought in a second bed to the room behind. Alexander’s eyes had followed it for a moment. Just before bedtime, when he had honed his weapons, he went out to find Hephaistion, to tell him he had arranged they should be posted together for the assault, and to explain that he himself had to share his father’s lodging. For some reason he had not thought to expect it.

When he got back, his father had just stripped, and was handing a squire his chiton. Alexander checked a moment in the doorway, then entered, saying something to seem at ease. He could not, indeed, account for the deep distaste and shame the sight of his father gave him. As far as he could remember, he had never seen him naked before.

Ê

By sun-up the fort had fallen. A pure, clear golden light came lifting from behind the hills that hid the Hellespont. A fresh breeze blew from the sea. Over the fort hung the acrid smells of smoke and smoulder, the stink of blood and entrails and grimy sweat.

The ladders, solid structures of undressed pine which would take two men abreast, still leaned against the fire-stained walls, with here and there a broken rung where the rush had overloaded one. Before the burst splintered gates hung the ram in its hide-roofed cradle; the gangway from the siege-tower lolled on the ramparts like a great tongue.

Inside, the Thracian men who survived were being fettered for their march to the slave-market at Amphipolis; the clink sounded musical, at a little distance. An e?xample, Philip thought, might encourage the Kypselans to surrender when their turn came. All round the huts and hovels that clung like swallows’ mud nests to the inside of the walls, the soldiers were on the hunt for women.

The King stood, with Parmenion and a couple of runners by whom he was sending orders, up on the ramparts; solid, workmanlike, relaxed, like an able farmer who has ploughed a big field and got it sown before the rain. Once or twice, when a shriek rose shrilling to hurt the ears, Alexander looked towards him; but he went on talking to Parmenion, undisturbed. The men had fought well, and deserved what meagre spoils the place could offer. Doriskos should have surrendered; then no one would have been hurt.

Alexander and Hephaistion were by themselves in the gatehouse, talking about the battle. It was a small stone room, containing besides themselves a dead Thracian, a slab carved with the name and styles of Xerxes, King of Kings; some rough wooden stools; half a loaf of black bread; and, by itself, a man’s forefinger with a black broken nail. Hephaistion had kicked it aside; it was a trifle to what they had seen already.

He had won his sword-belt. One man he had killed for certain, dead on the spot; Alexander thought it might well be three.

Alexander had taken no trophies, nor counted his men. As soon as they were on the walls, the officer who led their party had been hurled down. Alexander, giving no one else time to think, had shouted that they must take the gatehouse, whence missiles were being showered on the ram below. The appointed second-in-command, an untried man, had wavered, and in that moment had lost his men to Alexander’s certainty; they were already running after him, clambering, scrambling, stabbing and thrusting along Xerxes’ old ragged masonry, with its wild blue-stained defenders and clefts of crackling fire. The entry to the gatehouse was narrow; there had been a minute, after Alexander had hurled himself inside, when the following press had jammed in it, and he had been fighting alone.

He stood now with the blood and dust of combat on him, looking down on the other face of war. But, Hephaistion thought, he was not really seeing it. He talked quite clearly, remembered every detail where for Hephaistion things were already flowing together like a dream. For him it was fading; Alexander was living in it still. Its aura hung about him; he was in a mode of being he did not want to leave, as men linger on in a place where they saw a vision.

He had a sword-cut across his forearm. Hephaistion had stopped the bleeding with a strip of his kilt. He looked out at the pale clean sea, saying, ‘Let’s go down and bathe, to wash off the muck.’

‘Yes,’ said Alexander. ‘I ought to see Peithon first. He put out his shield to cover me when two of them were at me, and that man with the forked beard caught him under it. But for you he’d have been killed outright.’ He took off his helmet (they were both armed, at short notice, from the common stock of the Pella armoury) and ran his hand through his damp hair.

‘You ought to have waited, before you dashed in alone, to see if we’d come up with you. You know you run faster than anyone else. I could have killed you for it, when we were milling in the doorway.’

‘They were going to drop that rock there, look at the size of it. I knew you weren’t far off.’

Hephaistion was feeling the reaction, not only to his fears for Alexander, but to all he had seen and done. ‘Rock or no rock, you’d have gone in. It was written all over you. It’s only luck you’re alive.’

‘It was the help of Herakles,’ said Alexander calmly. ‘And hitting them quickly, before they could hit me.’

He had found this easier than he had foreseen. The best he had hoped from his constant weapon-practice had been some lessening of disadvantage, against seasoned men. Hephaistion, reading his thought, said, ‘These Thracians are peasants. They fight two or three times a year, in a cattle-raid or a brawl. Most of them are stupid, none of them are trained. Real sold?iers, like your father’s men, would have cut you down before you were well inside.’

‘Wait till they do it,’ said Alexander sharply, ‘and tell me about it then.’

‘You went in without me. You didn’t even look.’

Suddenly transformed, Alexander gave him a loving smile.

‘What’s the matter with you? Patroklos reproached Achilles for not fighting.’

‘He was listened to,’ said Hephaistion in a different voice.

From below in the fort, the wail of a woman keening rhythmically over some dead man broke off in a shriek of terror.

‘He should call the men in,’ Alexander said. ‘It’s enough. I know there was nothing else worth taking, but -’

They looked along the wall; but Philip had gone off on some other business.

‘Alexander. Listen. It’s no use to be angry. When you’re a general, you’ll not be able to expose yourself like that. The King’s a brave man, but he doesn’t do it. If you’d been killed, it would have been like a battle won for Kersobleptes. And later, when you’re KingÉ’

Alexander turned round, and riveted on him that gaze of peculiar intensity with which he told a secret. Dropping his voice, a needless caution in so much noise, he said, ‘I can never not do it. I know it, I’ve felt it, it’s the truth of the god. It’s then that I-’

A sound of panting breath, catching in shrill sobs, broke in on them. A young Thracian woman rushed in from the ramparts and, without looking right or left, dashed towards the wide parapet above the gate. It was some thirty feet from the ground. As she got her knee on the sill, Alexander jumped after and grasped her arm. She screamed, and clawed at him with her free hand, till Hephaistion caught it back. She stared into Alexander’s face with the fixity of a cornered animal, writhed suddenly free, crouched down and clutched his knees.

‘Get up, we won’t harm you.’ Alexander’s Thracian had been improved by his talks with Lambaros. ‘Don’t fear, get up. Let go-’

The woman gripped harder, pouring out a stream of half-smothered words as she pressed her face with its running eyes and nose against his bare leg.

‘Get up,’ he said again. ‘We won’tÉ’ He had never learned the essential word. Hephaistion supplied a gesture of universal meaning, followed by a strongly negative sign.

The woman let go and sat back on her heels, rocking and wailing. She had red matted hair, and a dress of some coarse raw wool, torn at the shoulder. The front was splashed with blood; there were damp patches of leaked milk over the heavy breasts. She wrenched at her hair, and began to wail again. Suddenly she started, leaped to her feet, and flattened herself against the wall behind them. Footsteps approached; a thick breathless voice called, ‘I saw you, you bitch. Come here. I saw you.’ Kassandros entered. His face was crimson, his freckled brow beaded with sweat. He charged blindly in, and stopped dead.

The girl, shouting out curses, entreaties, and the incomprehensible tale of her wrongs, ran up behind Alexander and grabbed his waist, holding him like a shield. Her hot breath was in his ear; her wet softness seemed to seep even through his corselet; he was half stifled with the rank female smell of dirty flesh and hair, blood, milk and sex. Pushing her arms away, he gazed at Kassandros with mystified repugnance.

‘She’s mine,’ panted Kassandros, with an urgency hardly capable of words. ‘You don’t want her. She’s mine.’

Alexander said, ‘No. She’s a suppliant, I’ve pledged her.’

‘She’s mine.’ He spoke as if the word must produce effect, staring across at the woman. Alexander looked him over, pausing at the linen kilt below his corselet. In a withdrawn distaste he said, ‘No.’

‘I caught her once,’ Kassandros insisted. ‘But she got away.’ His face was ploughed down one side with scratches.

‘So you lost her. I found her. Go away yourself.’

Kassandros had not quite forgotten his father’s warnings. He kept his voice down. ‘You can’t interfere here. You’re a boy. You know nothing about it.’

‘Don’t dare call him a boy!’ said Hephaistion furiously. ‘He fou?ght better than you did. Ask the men.’

Kassandros, who had blundered and hacked his way through the complex obstacles of battle, confused, harassed, and intermittently scared, recalled with hatred the enraptured presence cleaving the chaos, as lucid as a point of flame. The woman, supposing all this to be concerned with her, began to pour out another flood of Thracian. Above it Kassandros shouted, ‘He was looked after! Whatever fool thing he did, they were bound to follow him! He’s the King’s son. Or so they say.’

Stupid with anger, and looking at Hephaistion, he was an instant too late for Alexander, whose standing leap at his throat took him off balance and hurled him to the rugged floor. He threshed and flailed; Alexander, intent on choking him, took kicks and blows with indifference. Hephaistion hovered, not daring to help without leave. Something rushed past him from behind. It was the woman, whom they had all forgotten. She had snatched up a three-legged stool; missing Alexander by an inch, she brought it down in a side-sweep on Kassandros’ head. Alexander rolled out of the way; with a frenzied rage she began to beat Kassandros over the body, slamming him back whenever he tried to rise; taking both hands to it, as if she were threshing corn.