God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (71 page)

He slashed a dagger at the back of my off leg, and scored deeply. When I tried to throw him to the ground, he punched me in the neck, under the helmet, and by luck, his instinctive punch was with the pommel of the dagger and not the blade, or I’d have had to end this story right there. I sagged back, and suddenly – without warning – the whole lot of them were cantering away from us, and it was all I could do to sit on my horse and breathe.

I’d never been hand to hand with another man who could wrestle on horseback as I can.

Kineas had a long cut down his sword arm, but he’d taken a prisoner.

Alexander slid from the saddle and picked up the sword at my horse’s front feet. ‘Memnon’s sword!’ he said. ‘An omen if ever there was one.’

Aristander proclaimed the omen throughout the camp that night, which was good, because the omen I saw was that Memnon’s ambush had killed a hundred archers, as many Thracians and more Hetaeroi than died at the Battle of the Granicus. And we found six bodies of his men, and Kineas took a prisoner. The worst of it was that his tiny cavalry force had only charged us to cover the rest of his ambush as they broke contact. I wasn’t an old veteran, back then, but I knew enough to be chilled at the professionalism of an ambush force that struck – and vanished. They didn’t hang around to let us bring up reinforcements – the failure of most ambushes.

Kineas’s prisoner was a Megaran aristocrat, and thus, by League law, a traitor to be executed. But all agreed he’d fought well – even when unhorsed – and Macedonians, unless their blood is up, don’t really hold with killing prisoners.

Kineas bowed to the king that night. ‘Lord, I can’t make him a slave. He’s a gentleman.’

Alexander nodded. He’d enjoyed the fight, and his mood was much better. ‘Recruit him, then,’ he told Kineas.

And that’s your friend Coenus, young man.

Fighting Memnon was the best training that the Macedonian army ever received. He was like a slap in the face – a lesson from a particularly nasty teacher.

It was good for Alexander. At the time, it was a nightmare.

We set our camp for the siege, and that night a hidden battery of engines rained rocks on us for half an hour while our camp dissolved into chaos. Memnon’s Greek engineers had time to break the machines down, burn the wood and carry the bronze parts back into the city. Only about a dozen Macedonians were killed – twice that many wounded and twice again in slaves lost – but the panic was incredible.

The second day, Memnon sent a daylight sortie – a
daylight sortie
. Everyone knows that you only sortie at dawn, dusk and in the light of the moon. The besieged – brave but doomed – sneak out a postern gate and try to set fire to a siege engine or two. It never works.

Memnon had two of Athens’ best commanders – Ephialtes and Thrasybulus – in his service. Thrasybulus took the picked hoplites of the garrison, waited for our noon guard change to be about one quarter complete and charged out the
main gate
.

I was a stade away, sitting on horseback with Kineas and Cleomenes. We were off duty, and we’d decided to go for a hunt in the hills. I’d never seen such a barren place, and I was minded to find another campsite – a place where the cavalry could camp closer to water, for example.

We’d just left the camp when the assault started – the noise alerted us. I saw the Greek hoplites teem out of the gate and slam into the pezhetaeroi, who were strung out over five stades of ground in no kind of formation. Guard duty was a formal thing. No one worried about fighting by day, in a siege.

They had fire in pots, and in moments a half-built siege tower was engulfed in flames, and a row of torsion engines went next. Cleomenes cursed. Those were all the machines we had. The Athenians and the transport fleet had the rest of the siege train, way north at Miletus.

Kineas laughed. ‘That’s Thrasybulus!’ he said. We were close enough to see helmet crests. Yellow with two red side plumes. Thrasybulus. ‘Alexander ordered him executed.’

I must have made a face.

Kineas shrugged. ‘Would you want a Macedonian exile to prove a coward?’ he asked.

The pezhetaeroi were completely defeated, and the Greek hoplite force formed up and marched back into the city, singing a hymn to Athena.

That stung.

Next day I took my grooms and rode cross-country to Miletus with orders for the fleet. The fleet, which consisted of twenty Athenian triremes and forty transport ships, against roughly four hundred Persian warships.

Nicanor, the fleet commander, made a face. ‘The Athenians don’t love Alexander,’ he said, as if I needed to be told that. ‘And all those oarsmen have relatives serving on the walls at Halicarnassus.’

‘The king needs the siege train,’ I said.

Thaïs and Alexander and I had cooked up a plan. Each of us contributed something, although I’m sure that Alexander thought of it as his plan and I’m quite sure it was really mine.

Thaïs arranged for a prisoner to escape with news that our fleet was going to raid Cos – a large island off the coast still loyal to Persia.

Alexander tried to assault the walls four nights in a row. It cost him men, but it kept Memnon busy – too busy to brew mischief.

Nicanor sent the Athenian squadron to appear off Cos and then sail south, as if going to Cyprus or Tyre or one of the other Persian bases.

And then, naked as a babe, the transports sailed before dawn on the fourth day from Miletus with our entire siege train – nipped round Point Poseidon and landed at Iasos. Did our brilliant trickery play any role? Who knows. But the Persian fleet left Halicarnassus and sailed – to Cos – and our siege train moved down the coast unmolested.

Day seven of the siege, and we were ready to start in earnest. We built the engines well to the rear, where no sortie could reach them, and the whole army spent two days moving earth – the miserable, sandy, scrubby soil of Halicarnassus – in sacks from the more fertile regions to the west. It was brutal, and because it was brutal, we all did it. Alexander made a point of carrying sacks of earth.

Parmenio did not. He was openly derisive of the effort.

Day eight – see here, in the Military Journal? At least this part is honest – four days of rain. Autumn had come, and the wind blew, and most of our precious soil was washed away. That taught us to keep our dirt and sand in sacks. Of course, the sacks for sandbags had to come from somewhere. Sieges are a delight, I tell you – a logistician’s dream.

Memnon, damn him, had everything – bags, quarried stone, full magazines, water, oil. His engines were as good as ours and a little higher on the walls – our first earth platforms were too low, because we hurried. His engines had our range to the dactyl, and before a stone was launched we’d lost engines to his engines.

But we were learning. We put all our earth in sacks, with every camp follower and whore in the army sewing like mad, and our next artillery platforms were higher than the walls and better sited, and in two more days (days eleven and twelve) we’d blown a breach in the wall.

Day thirteen – an exhausting day bringing more earth from the west and north. Every piece of fabric between Miletus and Halicarnassus was now in our earthworks, and Ada had sent us the whole cloth inventory of her realm – thousands of pieces of woven stuff, some quite costly.

And it rained.

And we built new mounds for the second battery.

The thirteenth night of the siege, the rain stopped a little after midnight. There was no moon.

Memnon came out with his picked men, all with their faces blacked, and they burned more than half our engines. The sentries were asleep. There was no one to punish, because they died to a man.

See what I mean about training? It was as if Memnon’s job was to punish us when we failed. His scouting and intelligence were excellent.

Thaïs began to worry that he had a spy in our headquarters. Her immediate suspect was Kineas.

‘Or you,’ I pointed out. ‘You are ideally placed, and Athenian.’

She nodded. ‘If I’m a traitor, you’d already be dead,’ she noted.

Both of us worried that Parmenio was so angry at the king that he’d sell us out just to get the campaign to end. It was hard to know what exactly Parmenio was playing for. I suspected him of plotting to be king, but if so, he was far more cautious a plotter than I would ever have managed. Thaïs felt that he only plotted to defend himself against the king – that he assumed that, in time, the king would try to kill him.

Macedon, eh?

The king moved our batteries to the south side of the city and we started all over again, with fewer engines tossing their stones against a narrower front of the wall. We worked all day on the fifteenth day and all day on the sixteenth, and on the morning of the seventeenth we started to pound the southern walls, and by nightfall we had four breaches.

We stood guard all night, waiting for the inevitable attack, because we’d blown huge holes in the walls and Memnon had to do something.

He did not.

I smelled the rat, but no one would listen to me, and at dusk on the eighteenth day, we formed up to assault the breaches. Alexander was going in person, and I was going with him – all of us were, all the king’s friends.

Dusk. The sun had burned all day, but in autumn, the evening has a bite in it, and the tireder you are, the colder it seems. My arms hurt, my abdomen hurt – I’m a cavalryman, by Poseidon! Not a dirt carrier. My thorax seemed to weigh fifty pounds, and my wrist bracers were like stones. My helmet weighed down on my neck.

And the start of the assault was slowed because Perdiccas’s taxeis was late getting into their assault positions.

Alexander stood near our bit of parapet, outwardly calm. When he saw Perdiccas’s men cutting across the ‘no man’s land’ between our works and the city wall, he frowned.

‘They’re announcing we’re coming,’ he said, and then, I could see, he was clamping down.

He kept looking up the steep ramp of rubble at the breach, which seemed to tower above us. But the breach seemed empty of men, so our surprise was still intact.

We were going first, of course. Right up the breach, all the way to the top. In one rush, with no rest and no slacking, in fifty pounds of armour.

Try it – climbing over pulverised rock in iron-shod sandals going up a forty-five degree slope into fire.

Their archers took a long time to wake up. That much of the plan worked. And Alexander had fires set – wet grass, brought from the hills to the east – and the smoke covered us for a while, although I, for one, choked on it. I threw up on the ramp. War is glorious.

So I was well behind Alexander at the top of the wall, but since he’s told me the story a hundred times, I can tell you. He was the first into the city. There was no resistance.

A dozen archers on the wall shot down into us. Men fell, but not many, and even they were only wounded. It’s awfully hard to kill an armoured man carrying an aspis with a missile from above.

Alexander ran over the rubble, light-footed as a god, spear at the ready, crested the breach and started down into the town. There appeared to be a row of houses in front of him, so he turned along the alley and ran south, towards the sea, with a dozen men at his heels. About this time I’d made it to the breach, and the pezhetaeroi were coming up the ramp behind us in big numbers, the sprinters already three-quarters of the way to the top.

Alexander was afire with the thought of being the first into the town – a great honour among Macedonians, and indeed among all Hellenes. I saw his helmet plumes ahead of me, going south, and I pushed through the hypaspitoi to get to him. I wasn’t worried about Memnon’s garrison – more fool I – but about murder. By then, I was convinced that Parmenio meant to kill the king.

I went south along the alley. I picked up the smell of new masonry – the smell of new-laid mud brick and mortar – as I ran.

Someone had walled up those houses – perhaps five days before.

We were in a cul-de-sac, and the whole attack was an ambush.

I ran as if my legs were powered by ambrosia and the gods were lifting my feet.

Alexander was standing at the head of the southern end of the alley, staring at a wall of new masonry and sandbags three men high. He only had a dozen men around him.

‘Trap!’ I screamed. ‘Run!’

That got their attention.

Hephaestion got his aspis up in front of Alexander’s head, and Nearchus put his over the king’s shoulder, and then the first volley of arrows hit – fired point blank from a few horse lengths.

Men went down. That close, and the Carian and Cretan longbows with their very heavy arrows punched through bronze. I took an arrow two fingers deep into my left shoulder and it stood clear of me like some sort of banner.

Alexander was hit four times, despite his friends covering him. There were that many arrows, and Memnon had predicted that he would be there. Memnon’s whole plan, in fact, was to kill the king.

I fell to one knee – I probably screamed. The pain was intense, and the sight of the king battered by arrows broke my heart.

I won’t soon forget that moment – the taste of vomit in my helmet, the searing pain in my shoulder, the sharp rubble under my knee.

Alexander stood straight as a blade. ‘Form the synapsismos!’ he called. There were hypaspitoi and pezhetaeroi mixed together in the breach and the alley behind it, but the king’s voice impelled instant obedience, and men formed ranks even as they died in the arrow storm. The closer they formed, the more shields there were to cover them, and the safer they were – but the requirement for discipline was incredible.

And they rose to it. There must have been a thousand men packed in the trap, and Alexander saved them – most of them.

‘Back step!’ he ordered. ‘Shields up!’

Step by step. I was in the second rank, with the arrow sticking out of my shoulder until Nearchus saw it and pulled it free. The barbs, thanks to Apollo, had caught in the leather lining of my shoulder armour and had not passed my skin.

Nearchus had a small, very sharp knife inside his thorax – we all did – and he used it to cut my pauldron free of my thorax even as another volley of arrows tore into us, but the gods were with me, or too busy elsewhere to care, and I was not taken.