God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (83 page)

He went and sat.

Alexander rose. ‘You are talking a siege of a year.’

Diades nodded. ‘At least a year, unless a fortuitous event happens, or the gods take a hand.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘We have triumphed thus far by the speed of our advance and our reputation as invincible. How will that look if we take a year to storm one city?’

Parmenio sneered, ‘We have bypassed cities before.’

Callisthenes shook his head. ‘Not cities that have defied us. Not cities that have murdered our ambassadors.’

He directed the Military Journal, and he decided what the Greeks should be allowed to know – and he wrote the florid reports of our victories. His carefully doctored lies were essential to the way the Macedonian army was perceived. More and more, he worked directly with Thaïs, whom he affected to despise, and her information and his often worked together.

I disliked him. But in this case, I agreed with him.

‘I took the Halicarnassus island forts,’ I said. ‘Or rather, Helios there, by the easel, took them. It took us seven months. Until the last three weeks, none of the garrison even thought that they were in danger.’

Diades nodded his thanks to me.

Cleitus fingered his beard. ‘If we fail here . . .’ he ventured.

Diades slammed his fist on the table. ‘We do not need to fail!’ he roared, no longer timid.

Alexander looked around. It was not like him to be so cautious, but he had been shaken by the killing of the ambassadors. The very impiety of it stung him.

‘Parmenio?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you want my opinion?’ Parmenio asked. ‘Delighted to give it. March away. Always bypass strength. Except that in this case, your whole strategy is that we can take any city along the coast that can offer a harbour to the Persian fleet – isn’t it? So your strategy requires that we take this city – and every other city from Ionia to Aegypt.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Of course, we could just march home. We’re richer than Croesus. We hold the best part of the empire. And my soldiers are tired, Alexander.’

Alexander nodded. ‘My soldiers, Parmenio.’ He looked past the old general to me. ‘Ptolemy?’

‘I lost half of my new levies at Issus,’ I said. ‘I’ve had eleven suicides and four murders in the last month.’ I looked around and saw a great many heads nodding. ‘I’m concerned that while we sit here, Pharnabazus is retaking Ionia behind us, rendering our efforts meaningless. But . . . I agree with Diades – if we put our minds to it, I’m sure we can do it. I would only hope that once we decide on a course, we set that course in stone.’ I stood up. ‘Again, let me mention the Halicarnassus forts. It will take a long time. But like many tasks, it is the task never begun that is impossible.’

Alexander frowned. ‘Do I ever change my mind, once I am set on a thing?’ he asked.

Like many men, Alexander had a vision of himself that was at odds with the reality. Some men see themselves as timely, but are forever late. Other men see themselves as great lovers, and women tell a different story. So with Alexander, who thought that he possessed a will of iron.

Parmenio guffawed. ‘You change your mind like a woman,’ he said.

Very helpful.

Diades alone stuck to his message. ‘We can build something worthy of a descendant of Herakles,’ he said. ‘Perhaps greater than any labour of Herakles.’

Alexander looked at him. Looked at Parmenio.

He was silent for a long time. And then he stood straight like a sword blade, and spoke like an orator.

‘Friends and allies,’ he began, and his full charm was on. ‘I see that an expedition to Aegypt will not be safe for as long as the Persians retain the sovereignty of the sea, nor is it a safe course for other reasons – and especially looking at the state of matters in Greece – for us to pursue Darius, leaving in our rear the city of Tyre itself. I would be precipitous if I were to advance with our forces towards Babylon and in pursuit of Darius and allow the Persians to reconquer the maritime districts – and with them in hand, to transfer the war into Greece with a larger army, considering that the Lacedaemonians are now waging war against us without disguise, and the city of Athens is restrained for the present rather by fear than by any goodwill towards us! But if Tyre were captured, the whole of Phoenicia would be in our possession and the fleet of the Phoenicians, which is the most numerous and the best in the Persian navy, would in all probability come over to us. For the Phoenician sailors and marines will not put to sea in order to incur danger on behalf of others when their own cities are occupied by us. After that – well, Cyprus will either yield to us without delay or it will be captured with ease at the mere arrival of a naval force – which then prosecutes the war with the ships from Macedonia in conjunction with those of the Phoenicians.’ He looked around.

Alexander seldom made long speeches, and when he did, with his face shining, his whole attention on his audience, he was virtually impossible to resist. Even Parmenio was nodding along.

‘Once Cyprus is in our hands, we shall have the absolute sovereignty of the sea, and at the same time an expedition into Egypt will become easier for us. After we have brought Aegypt into subjection, no anxiety about Greece and our own land will any longer remain, and we shall be able to undertake the expedition to Babylon in safety with regard to affairs at home and at the same time with greater reputation in consequence of having cut off from the Persian empire all the maritime provinces and all the land this side of the Euphrates. And at Tyre, we shall have shown the world that we are worthy sons of Herakles!’

Sons of Herakles. As Diades intended, the very challenge fired him, and he, in turn, shot it at us. Because the men of Macedon see themselves as the heirs of Herakles.

The siege was on.

Diades rode around the countryside for ten days while the Tyrians jeered at our lack of effort. When he returned, he sat with Alexander for most of a day.

I sat with Thaïs, who was deeply depressed because she was pregnant, and because the Tyrians had executed one of her agents in their horrible way and dumped his body in the sea. I tried to console her that they’d executed three other men who were not her agents. ‘If they kill three of theirs for every one of ours, we will win the siege in a month,’ I joked.

She raised her eyes. ‘Leave me,’ she said. And she meant it. Never make a jest about defeat or death.

I wandered among my troops, watched a dice game, watched two men beat a slave, watched two more men butchering a lamb. The pezhetaeroi were sullen and didn’t want me in their camp. I went to sit and drink wine with Marsyas and Cleomenes, but they were screaming at each other like prostitutes fighting over a customer in the streets of Athens – and on the same subject.

‘She was
mine
,’ Cleomenes shrieked.

‘She’s not a slave. You cannot own a woman.’ Marsyas spoke in the sneering way that poets have when being superior, always the very best way to incite a riot.

Two of my officers, standing in the street, fighting over a woman. With half a thousand of their own men watching.

Cleomenes reached for the dagger he always wore. Really, we all wore them. I grabbed his hand from behind and then had to kick Marsyas in the crotch as he had drawn his and in his rage seemed to think I was pinning Cleomenes’ arms for him.

Macedon. I tell you.

As Marsyas the Poet fell forward, I slammed his forehead into Cleomenes’ forehead and the two fell together to the ground.

I didn’t feel any better, but I’m sure that I helped to preserve discipline, which was going to Hades already, and we were on the day
before
the start of a year-long siege. Bubores, passing by, helped me take them to their tents.

‘We had a murder this morning,’ he said sullenly.

As I left Cleomenes’ tent, I couldn’t help but note that the men going on guard were drunk.

However, the finest anodyne to soldiers’ behaviour is work. And suddenly, the God of Work, with his high priest Diades, descended from the heavens. And none too soon.

He had divided the areas around the landward end of his proposed mole into districts, and he’d assigned one each to all of the pezhetaeroi commanders. We were to employ our men as labour, and gather stone and wood.

Craterus held a meeting and suggested that we refuse.

‘You have to be kidding,’ I said. I remember laughing at him. ‘It’s better than my lads deserve. I intend to work them like slaves. Until I trowel off the fat and the bad attitude.’

Perdiccas nodded. Perdiccas and I had always been rivals – but having reached high command, we were, somehow, allies. He rubbed his chin and drank wine and then nodded. ‘If I enforced the king’s law about harming civilians,’ he said, ‘I’d have no phalangites. Last night, some of my men were sending children into the hills so they could
hunt them.
I need this
work
.’

Craterus breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank Ares,’ he said. ‘I expected you all to be angry, and I was ready to back you. But in truth, there’s been too much loot and not enough discipline.’

‘Every man in camp has his girl,’ Perdiccas said. He looked at me. ‘I don’t mean you – yours does a job of work.’

‘Even Philotas has a beauty.’ Amyntas laughed. ‘And he affects to despise women.’

‘He despises all of her,’ Perdiccas laughed, ‘except when he’s on top of her.’

The next day, we began working. I mustered my full strength – we’d had some levies, so I had a little more than fourteen hundred men. With Perdiccas, my men were assigned the old city of Tyre, which we were to dismantle, stone by stone, and move to the seaside.

I stood on the bed of a four-wheel wagon and gave my orders, district by district. Isokles and I had already put out coloured tape – Tyrian red linen tape, used for marking, worth a fortune at home – to mark what streets were to be demolished and by what company.

Marsyas and Cleomenes stood well apart from each other. They both looked a little green.

I marched the taxeis over to the old city, had them strip and put them to work. One man in fifteen went into an army-wide pool to weave baskets. Every man who could handle a donkey went to the baggage train. Every man who could do fine carpentry or forge metal went to work directly for Diades.

The siege of Tyre ran on manpower. We had four hundred oxen and a little over a thousand donkeys and perhaps two hundred mules at the height of the siege, but most of the digging and most of the rubble fill was ‘mined’ by men and carried by men in baskets woven by men who needed a new basket every couple of days.

We had about twelve thousand pezhetaeroi and twice that again in slaves. Thirty-six thousand men, each needing a basket the size of a market basket every two days. To give you a notion of the scale of the siege of Tyre, let’s imagine the requirement for brush to weave baskets, at eighteen thousand baskets per day. Just for the sake of easy calculation, let us call that eighteen thousand mina of brush a day. Three thousand talents of brushwood, every day. Roughly the weight of a completed trireme with all its oars and all of its sails and equipment and fully laden with men –
every day, just for baskets.

Of course, I exaggerate. Of course not every man wore out his basket – nor did the basket-makers ever keep pace. Men were lost from the work to repair their own baskets – indeed, at one point, I had almost a hundred of my own men making baskets to keep the rest at work, and Diades came and took the whole draft – slaves and soldiers as well.

Brush came from close by – for the first few days. After that, the local brush was gone, and the foragers had to go farther and farther afield, slowing the whole process. By the end of the siege, our brush was being brought from Kana and Sinde, east in the hills and down the coast in Galilee.

And then there was food, water, forage for animals, heavy beams of wood, whole trees and stone. Wine, oil, water and food for fifty thousand men. Every day.

And every man thus served could carry perhaps two hundred baskets of fill a day, if he was fast and devoted and fit. Care to guess how many men fell into that category? And men had to be detailed to destroy as well as to carry – to pull down the old houses and get at the stone in their foundation courses, or the base of the walls, the pillars of old temples. On and on.

After just six days, it seemed normal. After ten days, I joined in, because that’s how you lead troops, and stripped naked and carried a basket on my head all day. I never made two hundred, either. And two days later, my whole body hurt, but I kept at it.

We rested for major feasts, so on the nineteenth day of Mounikhion, by the Athenian festival calendar that dominated in my taxeis, we celebrated the feast of Olympian Zeus. I ordered five oxen to be sacrificed, and we feasted on them amid the rubble of Old Tyre. I gave games for my men, and pitted company against company. I couldn’t help but notice how well muscled everyone was.

In Greece, women are forbidden the games, but in the field, all the camp followers watched, and Thaïs was no exception. Thaïs also had young Antigone, the girl who’d caused Cleomenes and Marsyas to come to blows, living in our cluster of tents. The two officers were perpetually trying to outwork each other – there was an endless amount of guilt they felt they had to expiate. I used it against them shamelessly.

At any rate, she had chairs brought for the women of the taxeis – all the women, Syrian and Jew, Greek and Persian, slave and free. They all had stools on which to watch, and our phalangites, exhausted by the labour of the siege, ran, fought, wrestled and sang, naked, while the women giggled and roared their approval. They were
very
fit.

When Marsyas wrestled Cleomenes, the two stripped in front of us, and Thaïs rubbed her thumb along my forearm. ‘My, my,’ she said.

I determined to improve my own physique.

We feasted for two days, and then went back to work. My body no longer hurt, and while I did not carry baskets of rock every hour, I made a point to get in several hours a day. Every day.

One day, the slim man ahead of me took his own sweet time dumping his load on the towering rubble pile at the edge of the sea. The idiot had stopped to watch the construction work on the mole with his basket still on his shoulder.