My second lesson in this change was several days later, after my first bout with Diodorus. I was wiping the sand from my face – Diodorus threw me quite regularly, until I gained some muscle and some much-needed skill – and Craterus, who watched us, took me aside.
‘Do you think,’ he asked me cautiously, ‘that you are wise to let men see you be bested by an Athenian?’
I spat sand, and shook my head. ‘Herakles was a fucking Theban, and I’m pretty sure he’d put my head in the sand, too. And I’m pretty sure men would cheer.’ I gave him my best farm-boy grin. ‘No one minds if I get thrown. Who cares? It’s what I do when the bronze is shining that matters, isn’t it?’
Craterus smiled, and that smile was false. ‘Oh – of course. Absolutely.’ He withdrew, and I saw that we had changed as a group. We were keeping up appearances.
But the siege of Tyre was not about appearances, thank the gods, and by now we had machines on the end of the mole, throwing stones as big as my head – two a minute, all day, and a rank of spare machines ready for whenever the brilliant engineers on the other side managed to destroy one of ours.
Summer was becoming autumn, and the feel of the breeze had changed when I went back into the line. It was a late summer evening, and the heat of the day seemed to flow upward into the sky, and the breeze that came with the setting of the sun was like balm on wounds, and seemed to blow right through my leather-backed shirt of scales to cool my body.
I was right forward, in the line of engines, watching the teams load and loose them with a terrible precision, when there were cries – and screams – from the forward edge of the mole, and I assumed we were under attack. By this time, Alexander had forced virtually the entire servile population of Syria into our work crews, because so many slaves had died at the hands of the Tyrians – perhaps, by this time, as many as fifteen thousand or more. I had been told that armed soldiers were required now to whip the slaves forward with their loads, and to kill any who attempted to desert. And I was told that soldiers no longer worked on the mole – only slaves.
No wonder we’d slowed to a crawl. Slaves love work the way a rat loves a cat.
At any rate, I went forward with fifty men as the slaves fled in panic, shouting in five languages – Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician and Persian. I couldn’t understand them, so I pushed a few into the water as I shoved my men forward through the machine line and then past the towers – four towers, now.
I made it to the very end of the mole, and came to an abrupt halt. The Tyrians were casting red-hot sand, and the smell of it – the look of it in the air – almost made me puke.
But what I saw was far, far more horrible and awe-inspiring than red-hot sand.
There was a sea monster.
It was enormous – as long as five men. Perhaps as long as ten men. A day after the event, I had a hard time recalling exactly what the monster looked like, although hundreds of us saw it. Even as I watched, this spawn of Poseidon seemed to throw itself on to the mole. Its enormous teeth seized a slave who stood rooted in fear, and he was gone – dismembered and stripped to bloody fragments – by those rows of teeth in less time than it takes to tell it.
I was the next man closest.
I’m told that I bellowed the name of Poseidon. Good for me – all I wanted to do was get my head under the covers and wet myself.
But I saw its eye. And it saw me. Something passed – something old, something incredibly alien. And yet, it saw me. I swear to you, in that moment, I was changed by the regard of a god. An old sea god, perhaps disturbed by our mole – perhaps merely investigating the latest piece of human hubris. One of Triton’s offspring, or one of Amphytrites’, perhaps. Some bastard child of Thetis of the glistening breasts, or perhaps some titan sent to the water for some long-forgotten crime, but that god was older than man. It was in his eyes, the way you can see all the horror and torment and combat a veteran has seen in one blink, sometimes, eh? You know what I mean. It was there.
I like to think it was a true son of Poseidon, a mighty hero of the deep. I like to think that, because he nudged me aside with his face, rather than ripping me to shreds with the mighty engine of his rows of teeth – nudged me, rolled a little and slid effortlessly back into the water, and vanished into the deep next to the mole.
There was a pause, for as long as a man’s heart might beat sixty or eighty times. The world was silent.
And then the Tyrians began to loose their engines at me.
They missed.
We spent weeks discussing the sea monster. No two men saw the same thing, and of those who saw it, every man had a different theory of what it was and, more importantly, what it portended. Alexander’s seer declared that it was a god, Poseidon’s only son, and he came to show us the way into Tyre.
Well, I don’t have much time for his ilk, and even though his prognostications fitted my own desires, I didn’t like him any better for them. Alexander had not seen the monster, and seemed curiously dismissive of the event.
When I told Thaïs of this, she smiled. ‘He doesn’t believe there’s room at this siege for more than one god,’ she said.
She had not returned to her former work collecting information since her delivery. She wouldn’t discuss it with me, but more and more her work devolved on Callisthenes and his people. It was interesting to see the difference. She had started her work to please me and to help Alexander, and had based her collection of information on the wide circle of her friends and former lovers and partners and clients – and the Pythia.
Callisthenes used Aristotle’s circle of friends, for, as Thaïs said nastily, he had none of his own. But he was more inclined than she had ever been to spend money on information, and he was less interested in examining it, weighing it and measuring it before he sent it on to Alexander. Or rather – and we saw this almost immediately – his principal interest was information that fitted seamlessly with his own worldview and his own expectations. And Alexander’s.
In just a few weeks, Alexander’s view of the world began to narrow perceptively.
Ironically, in the way that the gods move, Thaïs’s last great triumph came in such a way that Alexander was made to realise what he had lost. A few days after the sea monster, I went into my pavilion to find Thaïs deep in conversation with a handsome, older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and large blue eyes. He wasn’t tall, but had a magnificent bearing, and he sat in my tent as if he owned it. I was prepared to hate him on the spot, but he rose graciously, took my hand and thanked me courteously for his wine and the use of my couch.
He was, in fact, the King of Cyprus – absolute ruler of more than one hundred triremes. Thaïs had been making overtures to him for more than a year, and like a fisherman with a small boat who catches a big tuna, she’d spent all that time bringing him carefully ashore.
I was sent for by the king. He was sitting with Callisthenes, getting the news of the world. I loathed Callisthenes, who neither told the king the truth nor managed to be a decent lickspittle, but played both harlot and harridan. But he paid in the end. He was a poor philosopher and a sad comment on Aristotle, although I’ve heard men say that Theophrastus was Aristotle’s real favourite, although no blood relation. Perhaps.
To me, though, Callisthenes, even at the height of his power with the king, was a paid foreigner, not a soldier or a man of account in any way. So I brushed past his protests and crooked my finger at the king. ‘A matter of some urgency,’ I said quietly.
Callisthenes stood up.
‘Just the king,’ I said to him.
‘Who is it that sends for me?’ Alexander asked.
‘Thaïs,’ I said. ‘A matter of some urgency. And delicacy.’
Callisthenes shrugged. ‘Oh, then I must come,’ he said. ‘Anything of hers is my business.’
I caught Alexander’s eye, and he nodded. ‘No,’ he said to Callisthenes. ‘Wait here.’
We walked out together. I ignored Callisthenes’ outrage – I cared little for him th
en, 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 wi
ll 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.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 67