God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (91 page)

I was a rich man, too, and I began to lavish some of my loot on my regiment. A number of the best armourers, with large, well-trained shops of slave and free artisans, in Athens and elsewhere, sent representatives to the army. I arranged the purchase of helmets – not matching, but all similar enough, in tinned bronze – so-called Attic helmets, small, fitted to the head, with a tall crest and long cheek-plates that hinged back in hot weather but covered most of the face in combat. Many of Memnon’s officers had such helmets and I had ordered one for myself – in gilded bronze, of course, with a red, white and black crest and a pair of ostrich plumes in gilt holders.

And I paid for my front-rankers to have matching shields – the newer, lighter Macedonian aspis, because that was more practical for men who had to march every day and carry their own shield, without a slave to carry it for them – but with strong, bronze faces on the shields and ten coats of bright red – Tyrian red – paint with the Star of Macedon in the middle in white. I hung the sample from my tent, and men admired it. I announced that the helmets and shields were my treat.

On such little things rest the twin rods of command and discipline. I also paid for twelve hundred new wool chitons, and twenty-four hundred pairs of iphicratids, the sandal-boot that the great Athenian general (whose own father, so I’m told, was a shoemaker) invented.

My taxeis played kerētízein against Perdiccas’s men and then against Craterus’s taxeis. It is a game played with a stick shaped like a club or horn, and a ball. The players can only use the stick to touch the ball, although when men play the game, they often use the sticks on each other. But despite the broken heads and broken ankles, the games, and a certain amount of wine, did much to lighten the load of a second siege. I was learning how to take my men through – because I could see that Alexander was now in love with sieges.

In love, but for perhaps the first time, afraid. The mounds grew; Diades had outdone himself this time, envisioning a ring of earthworks that would seal the town in from supplies and then raising the works until our machines, coming up from the coast, could easily dominate the enemy walls.

The siege mounds grew every day. After Tyre, where we had built the mole ourselves, Gaza and its army of slave labourers seemed like a vacation. The mounds grew, and the enemy killed our slaves, and our troops dreamed of new helmets and good hockey games.

There is something intoxicating about a siege, if you are an officer. You can plan, and watch other men do the sweaty part, and it is like being a god.

Batis was, as I have said, a first-rate officer, and he was no more interested in killing our slaves than he should have been, so in the third week of the siege, just after the sun had set, he came out of three gates at the same time in a massive raid on our siege lines.

His raid was completely successful. He burned the handful of machines we had with us, and his raiders burned the wooden shoring under our most advanced siege mound and got the whole edifice to collapse. More than a hundred Macedonian soldiers were killed and a party of hypaspitoi under Alectus himself was routed. Alectus was badly wounded, and Batis got a dozen messengers through our cavalry screen.

I think that the most remarkable thing about Batis’s raid was that it had no effect on the morale of the army. For men who had fought for three solid years in Asia against Memnon, Darius and Tyre – we had seen our share of bitter mornings and brilliant enemy raids.

By the time the sun was well up, the burned pilings had been removed and replaced, and later that evening, the siege train came up from the coast, so that two days later, Batis’s men faced the full power of our artillery.

Gaza, for all the bravery of its defenders, the brilliance and charisma of Batis and the magnificence of its rocky eminence, was not Tyre. Tyre’s walls were solid stone, and Gaza’s were mud brick on a stone socle. Once our machines started lofting rocks, the city was doomed. Or so we thought. I was with Alexander while the first battery opened up, and we cheered together to watch the engineers (in excellent practice since Tyre) strike the walls on their third casts, resight their batteries and commence effective barrage – in minutes instead of hours. And every stone that struck the wall brought down a section, so that the battery seemed like the invisible teeth of a giant, gnawing away until the cloud of dust thrown from the shattered mud bricks obscured the target.

Diades kept throwing rocks, all day and sometimes at night. He had a new stratagem, using the stone-throwers to keep the enemy engineers off their own walls, so that repairs were either perilous to the most skilled men, or the walls didn’t get repaired.

In the fifth week of the siege, Alexander scouted the walls and ordered an assault. The town still loomed above us, almost impossibly high, but the walls were battered down in four places, and in each place it was possible for an armoured man to go up the mound and then climb the breach, because our engineers drove the poor slaves forward with whips into the arrow fire of the besieged with baskets of rubble to fill the ditch. The top of our siege mound stank from the number of corpses that were buried in the forward face and the ramp up to the enemy wall.

The first assault on Gaza – the only memorable thing about it is how badly we were suckered and how the army felt when they discovered that the king was
not
coming. I don’t think we’d ever assaulted anything – gone into action anywhere – without Alexander at our head. That’s what kings of Macedon
do
.

It is typical, I guess, of Macedonian soldiers that no man – not even the king – was ever any better than his last performance. It took them a few weeks to forget his brilliant courage – his virtually maniacal courage.

I heard it all while I buckled on my battered cuirass, once a brilliant glare of gilded bronze and now a dented, scraped and battered remnant of its once proud self, missing both silver nipples and with ringties replacing the hinges I had had and which had been ruined by the hot sand. I had new armour coming, too.

My thorax reminded me of a statue we had had in the gardens when I was a boy. My father loved it, but it had been taken to the barns to be cleaned one winter, and somehow dropped. That’s how my thorax looked, and my helmet was worse, and I was a
taxiarch
.

But I digress. I had to replace Isokles as company officer and as my second-in-command. Marsyas was the obvious choice. He was a friend of the king, and his brother, Antigonus, was an increasingly important man – he had just won us a fine victory over Phrygians in the north, and without him our supply lines would have been severed repeatedly and no new recruits would be reaching our army. Marsyas himself was a fine officer, if you took into account that he had his nose in the air
and
his head in the clouds.

He loved Thaïs, though. So I made him swear to her by Aphrodite, his chosen goddess, of whom Thaïs was a priestess, that he would never let a woman come between his duty and his men again. And on his own account, before the end of the Siege of Tyre, he went to Cleomenes and apologised for his hubris, and they were reconciled – indeed, like proper gentlemen, they were better friends than before.

Ahh. I am avoiding the first assault on Gaza. I will digress again and again. Here, pour me some more wine, there, boy.

Marsyas told me that men were complaining that the king was sulking in his tent, or worse. And moments later, I heard the same from Cleomenes.

And with that in my head, I went to the king’s pre-assault briefing. It was dark, and despite the summer, cold. All the army’s senior officers were there, and they gathered in two distinct groups. That had never happened before. One group around Parmenio, and the other around Hephaestion. Ugly.

Alexander was not in armour. It’s true – perhaps he was damned either way, but as the only man not in armour, he accentuated the fact that he was not going up the ramps and we were. Or rather – Philotas was not going up the ramps, and neither was Attalus or Amyntas, but they were in armour, as if to indicate their support.

As it happened, when the king moved to the centre to discuss the assault, I could smell him and he reeked of spikenard. I had never known him even to experiment with perfume, and he smelled – very strongly.

Diades had drawn a view of the city on a large board in charcoal, and the king pointed out our assault positions and the timing of the assaults. It was all routine, and yet somehow, every word he said struck us as odd – because he was perfumed and clean and wearing clothes more suited to a bedchamber than to the field. Hephaestion was in armour – a panoply that had once been at least as magnificent as my best, and now looked as bad or worse.

Alexander dismissed us without a smile or a speech. In fact, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. And then he went back into his tent, and we went to our units.

I remember the first assault well. My pezhetaeroi were in the first wave on the southernmost ramp, and we went as soon as we had light to see the uneven footing. That uneven footing saved my life, too. I was the first man up the ramp, and I went fast – determined to be the first man on the wall, because if you must lead an assault on a city, you have no choice but to be a hero.

I must digress, again. In Macedon – in Sparta, in Athens and even in gods-cursed Thebes – officers led from in front. The wastage among Athenian strategoi was always incredible. Men in front die. Macedonian taxiarchoi had a better survival rate only because we wore lots of armour and trained as pages to overcome anything in hand-to-hand combat. But one of the things I remember about the pre-dawn minutes at Gaza was the fear. My men were afraid, and I was afraid, and my recruits were jittery, even the many among them who were themselves veterans. I didn’t want to lead the assault. I wanted to go and join Alexander and wear perfume.

My hands shook.

I had a great deal of trouble getting my cheek-plates tied together.

My knees were weak, and my forearms felt as if I’d spent the night lifting weights.

Because, like my men, I’d done too much. Tyre was too close behind us. Alexander owed us a rest, and we hadn’t had one.

Off to my left, a red flag was lifted from the tower that was closest to the king’s command pavilion.

I sprang up from rock to rock, and the arrows fell like sleet in the Thracian mountains, and my big aspis was hit again and again, and my poor old helmet took another battering.

I took one quick look when I was almost at the base of the socle. I wanted to hit the base of the breach
just right
. There were a dozen men just inside the breach, with heavy bows, shooting as fast as they could, and even as I looked, another arrow thudded into my aspis and I stumbled, and my left foot went into something that cracked under my weight and suddenly I was down, my left leg deep in the dirt and stone of the ramp, and something went over my head with the sound of summer thunder – or the sound of a sheet of papyrus being torn asunder by an enraged merchant. Whatever it was snapped my neck around and tore the crest right off my old helmet.

Pyrrhus, who had been with me since he was a child, simply exploded. An arm and his head flew off, and behind him, a dozen more men died in a hideous fleshy mess.

There was a ballista in the breach. Even as I tried to pull my left leg free, the men in the breach were cranking the great bow back into position and the men on the walls above the breach were throwing boiling linseed oil into our faces. I only caught a little – perhaps a cupful – on my shoulder above my shield arm, but the pain spurred me and I got my left leg free and almost vomited, because my foot had collapsed the ribcage of a corpse and my leg had slid into the body cavity – a mass of corruption and maggots – and the smell of death stuck to me like glue.

And I went up the breach anyway, because after Tyre . . .

I reached the ballista well before it was loaded, and threw my light spear into the nearest man and then my heavy spear – not really meant to be thrown – into an archer, and he and the loader fell across the enormous bow, and I drew my sword – a heavy kopis – from under my arm and continued the draw into a cut – to the rope holding the bow wound against its drum. The men on the bow screamed as the bowstring slammed into their soft bodies.

A wave of Macedonians joined me in the breach, and we killed every man we found there. And then we went down the rubble on the far side of the breach into the town.

At Tyre and Halicarnassus, the defenders had built mud walls behind the breach, to channel our attacks and make the breach a trap, but Batis had gone one better.

He let us into the town – he had more town to use for depth – and had built little battlefields for his garrison to use to fight
inside
the town. The houses were heavy and often stone-built, and between them there were barricades across the narrow streets – low enough to tempt assault, and high enough that such assaults weren’t worth much – the more so as every barricade was flanked by the towers of the tallest houses on the street, and every pair of towers had a small garrison of archers and slingers. Some of the barricades had a ballista. And some of the houses had assault groups waiting for us to pass them.

It was a nightmare.

When you assault a town, you know that the easiest way to achieve victory is to break the enemy’s will to resist. There comes a point in an assault when the town has so many soldiers flooding it that the defenders either surrender or simply allow themselves to die. The expectation of every man in an assault is that it is his duty to penetrate as deeply into the town as possible to cause panic.

Batis used all that against us. Our men came up the breaches like heroes and went into the town, where he wanted us to be – inside his defences, and far from the support of our dominating artillery. His defenders had superb morale, and they faced us resolutely, no matter where we met them in the town. And indeed, early on, they abandoned some positions – I assume to lure us deeper into the web of streets.

I am proud of my performance as a taxiarch that day, because I didn’t lose my head. Oh – I was fooled. I may have penetrated as deeply into the town as any Macedonian. I know that I was enraged by Pyrrhus’s death and I killed my way over a barricade despite a hail of stones. But as we overwhelmed our second barricade, losing a dozen good men in the process, I began to look around.