God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (88 page)

We walked out together. I ignored Callisthenes’ outrage – I cared little for him then, or ever. As soon as we were clear of the guards, I said, ‘Thaïs has won over the King of Cyprus. He’s in my tent. He wants only your word on certain matters, and his whole fleet is at our service.’

Alexander stopped, looked at me and then gave me a brief embrace that hurt my burns. ‘A fleet!’ he said. ‘By the gods! Poseidon’s gift! A fleet!’

He went swiftly to my tent, embraced the King of Cyprus and the thing was done.

Afterwards, and many times, Callisthenes claimed that he had
turned
the King of Cyprus.

And it was the last political act of Thaïs’s life for a long while.

The Cypriot fleet changed everything. Alexander kept it hidden, up the coast, and put Craterus’s taxeis aboard as marines, and went aboard himself. Several evenings later, another beautiful late-summer evening, and the Tyrians descended on the end of the mole with fifty boats, grappling hooks and a barrage of covering fire from their engines on their walls.

Alexander sprang his trap, and the Cypriot fleet raced for the entrance to Tyre’s island port – a passage the length of a trireme wide, between two enormous stone towers bristling with engines.

We cheered like madmen as the king’s galley raced into the setting sun, but the Tyrians were canny, and they fled from the mole. We only took five of their ships, but dozens of their marines were left on the mole in the panic, and we killed every one of them.

At the command meeting later that night, I pointed out that neither of the towers had loosed so much as a rock at our ships.

‘The towers were empty,’ I asserted, and Diades nodded. And thumped my back.

The Tyrians were running low on men. Or rather, when they put fifty ships to sea with full rowing benches, that stripped their manpower.

And what that meant was that their fleet would never dare put to sea again. We had mastery of the sea.

Diades and Alexander put it to use that very night.

Boat raids. Twenty men in the bow of a trireme, or five men in a smaller boat, rowed up to the walls, attached grapples and the crew of the trireme tried, by rowing away, to force a section of wall to collapse. In other places we set fires, or tried to scale the wall.

Helios refitted pairs of triremes with huge platforms between them – like monster catamarans – mounting large siege engines. We’d done this at Halicarnassus, and now he did it on a larger scale. We built six of them, floated them and parked them opposite the weakest portion of the wall, just about a quarter of the circuit around the wall from the mole. In two days, they brought a section of wall down. We boarded ships for an assault, but the weather worsened and we had to abandon the idea, and the next day they had rebuilt the wall.

Two more days of pounding away, and we had to rebuild all of the engines on the ships while the enemy rebuilt their wall. And then we were at it again, and with a rush, their whole line of new masonry went down, despite hoardings, and the cover of great oxhides and a dozen other contrivances.

That afternoon, however, a pair of Cypriot triremes ran across a pair of Carthaginian triremes and they fought each other to near extinction. One of the Carthaginians limped away, and both of the Cypriot vessels were turtled, although both were reclaimed later and restored to service.

Now Alexander had to fear the appearance of a great Carthaginian fleet. We might lose our mastery of the sea at any moment. The mole was pressed forward. A man could almost jump the gap. The fleet was brought in close, and Diades had four of the oldest triremes brought up to the mole so that they could be filled with stones and sunk in the channel to act as piers for his mole.

But that night, a storm hit us like no other I had experienced. It lasted three days, and every tent in the camp blew flat. I had to rescue Thaïs, still weak from the loss of our child and still so depressed that she would take little or no action to save herself. I moved her to Isokles’ tent, and then, moments later, that too collapsed and I had to lift her out through more sodden silk and canvas.

The next day was no better, and the only standing shelters in the camp were the ones built from lashed boat sails spread over heavy timbers – and tied down by sailors. And that night, when the storm hit its height, even those fell, and we huddled together, taxiarchs and strategoi and pezhetaeroi and slaves, all together in our shared fear and misery. The gods have the ability to make one feel very small, when they wish. A good storm is humbling.

When we awoke on the third day, I followed Diades down to the shore to see what had happened.

The mole was gone.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. Certainly, the sea was breaking over something, so the bulk of the earth and wood was still there, but the sea flowed over it, and it was enough to break your heart. His precious ships – full of stones, ready to be moved into position – were all gone, capsized and sunk in shallow water north of the mole.

‘Poseidon’s fury,’ he said.

‘And now we have it all to do again,’ I said.

Diades shrugged. ‘I have already stockpiled more stone than we had when we started,’ he said, with a grim smile. ‘It will go faster this time. But only if the king does not despair.’

That night, we had the stormiest command meeting I can remember.

The factions were fully developed. Parmenio, his sons and the older officers – men like Meleager who owed their careers to Parmenio, and men who were midland Macedonian landowners – and men who were tired of war.

The truth is, I should have been with Parmenio’s faction. I knew what was in the king’s mind. An abyss of endless war – a sort of infinite
Iliad
, with himself cast as Achilles, where an endless procession of enemies threw themselves on his heroism and his genius – and perished.

The other faction was no longer the ‘Young Men’. We were no longer so young – no man faces battle eight or ten times and counts himself young. Perdiccas and I – to name two – had the scars of men twice our age. My shoulder hurt as if pierced with ice every time the weather changed, and my hands – I awoke every morning, at age twenty-six, winter or summer, with hands that hurt enough that I often had to warm them in hot water before I could make them obey me.

This is not the life of a ‘young man’.

What distinguished us from Parmenio’s party was that we loved the king, and had grown to adulthood with him. It is not that he could do no wrong – indeed, the paradox was that we were the ones who expressed our doubts openly to Alexander.

That night after the storm, Parmenio and Alexander locked horns like two bulls.

‘We have stood here for seven months, and we have nothing to show for it.’ Parmenio didn’t trouble to hide his contempt. ‘I told you that we couldn’t take the city. We cannot take it. We have lost a year’s worth of gains and all the treasure of Issus – squandered to take this pile of rock.’

Alexander was at his most difficult – conceding nothing, absolute in his righteousness. He simply smiled. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked.

Philotas stood. ‘Lord, there is no point – if we start the mole again, we’ll face another disaster and another. For what? We don’t need the city. The strategy of taking every sea base on the coast is no longer valid – it is now we who have the larger fleet.’

Alexander’s smile was fixed. ‘I asked if anyone else wanted to speak,’ he drawled.

Philotas’s face flamed. ‘My father has led your armies and won your battles, lord. Your treatment of him is ungrateful and mean!’

Alexander nodded. ‘Let us stick to the matter at hand,’ he said.

Amyntas, the current favourite, rose to his feet. ‘We can take Tyre in four more weeks. Given the time we’ve put in, and the treasure, as Lord Parmenio has so eloquently put it, should we not finish what we started?’

Alexander’s expression did not change.

Parmenio glared at him. ‘Why don’t you speak your own view, Alexander? Instead of letting your “friends” do it for you?’

Alexander shrugged, every muscle in his body speaking contempt. ‘I am the captain general, and I will speak last.’

Parmenio crossed his arms.

‘Craterus?’ Alexander said.

Craterus looked at the carpeted floor of the tent. ‘Let us march away. Let us march
home
.’

Alexander looked at me. ‘Perdiccas?’ he asked.

Perdiccas looked at me, as well. He made me feel like a ringleader. A role I did not fancy. ‘Lord, I will stand with you whatever you choose.’

‘As if I would not?’ shouted Nicanor, son of Parmenio. ‘By Zeus who judges all oaths, I swear that none of us have suggested that we will not follow the king! How dare you suggest such a thing?’

‘Meleager?’ Alexander said, but his eyes were still on me.

Meleager mumbled something.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander spat, sounding very like a hoplomachos on a drill field.

Meleager took a deep breath. ‘Finish the siege,’ he said.

Parmenio looked like thunder.

Alexander’s eyes flicked back and forth in surprise. I was surprised too. I no longer had to cast the tying vote, to allow Alexander to settle the issue. Which he clearly wanted. Now my vote would decide the issue. Not that, as king, he couldn’t just order us to do it. The democracy of the council was more apparent than real.

Alexander nodded to me. ‘Ptolemy?’ he said.

‘Finish the siege,’ I said. Not because I believed in it, but because I was his friend.

Diades went to work immediately, the next day, and from our ‘stores’ of rubble and rock, we rebuilt the mole in two weeks. We had ships to cover the head of the mole and ships to move bulk rubble and ships with engines to attack the enemy batteries, and the coordination of the ships grew better every day.

Diades built superstructures for the ships so that a pair of triremes, lashed together, could hold a tower with ladders inside – the assault troops protected by wet hides and wooden hoardings.

In days, we had our own engines clearing the wall from the end of the mole.

In a week, the city must have seen that the end was near.

Two weeks to the day after the storm, a pair of Cypriot cruisers picked up a Carthaginian trireme that failed to outrun them. The ship carried a message, sealed in a bladder.

No further help was coming to Tyre.

We shot the message into the walls, and that night, in a brilliant piece of seamanship, the Cypriots sank two old triremes in the deep-water gap – both full to the gunwales with rocks. The next night, under a protective hail of stones, they performed this feat again.

Six engine ships pounded the southern walls day and night, turning every repair to rubble. Sixteen engines on the mole launched larger stones at a shorter range, so that the tallest walls on the island, those facing the land, began to crumple under the weight. Alexander was heard to joke that at the rate we were throwing stones, we were raising the level of the city and providing them with years of building material.

On the feast of Herakles, Hephaestion donned armour for the first time in a month, and we cheered him. And then we boarded assault boats and the trireme pairs with the great scaling towers.

I took the picked men of my taxeis – two hundred men in the best armour we could scrounge – and we boarded two pairs and filled the decks and the towers. Remember, a trireme ordinarily carried ten, or at most twenty, marines. With the double hulls and the towers, we could carry a hundred, but it made the ships ponderous and very, very slow. We needed near-perfect calm and bright moonlight to move and assault.

Alexander had chosen to lead the assault from the mole. The sea was never his element.

The first fight after a wound is always hard, like getting back on a horse that has thrown you. At the head of my ladder, swaying wildly, or so it seemed to me at the very top of a tower between two big ships, I had hours to consider the feel of the red-hot sand as it poured down my body and was trapped against me by my own armour, and the smell as my flesh scorched, and the feel of heavy rocks on my shield, on my helmet, on my thorax.

The sea stank with eight months of refuse, garbage and human filth from the siege – uncollected corpses, offal, carcasses from all the sacrifices, excrement. The enemy engines were loosing as fast as they could be loaded, and we could hear as heavy rocks or long spears struck our ship, and once, quite early in our manoeuvring, a ballista bolt tore through the hide covering and killed three men where they waited on the ladders. There was shouting, screaming and, in the distance, the constant sound of massed prayers – hymns to Melkart. Thirty thousand voices singing together – an eerie sound.

About midnight, all of our engine ships began to launch all together. First they threw baskets of heavy gravel to clear the walls, and then multiple salvos of great rocks, chipped round by slaves, and then more gravel.

By that time, my ship was quite close, and I could see individual men on the walls. And they could see us.

A disc – like an aspis, but flung sideways so that it spun, and full of red-hot sand and burning dung – hit our tower. The sand fell harmlessly into the sea with a hiss and a burst of steam, but the burning shit stuck to the hides and they steamed.

When I peeked over the top of the tower, I could see that we were coming up against a pair of huge wooden wheels with paddles attached, almost like mill wheels placed on their sides. They turned very fast, and even as I watched, a huge bolt struck one – and was deflected by the rotation of the wheel and the struts.

But a heavy rock from one of the distant catapults struck the wheel edge on – as if striking the top of a chariot wheel’s tyre – and something gave. The wheel began to break up as it turned – pieces of wood showered off it like sparks off a sharpening stone.

By the will of the gods or ill luck, my tower would be the first to reach the walls. Despite all the engines throwing rocks, the hail of small stones and all the fire being cast, the fires burning in the city beyond and the ships afire under the walls – despite all of it, the enemy had gathered a large force where my tower would reach the wall – more men than I could count.