God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  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.

  A wind blew a charnel-house stench – hot with furnace air from the fires in the city – over our faces, and then our tower took another direct hit from one of the discs full of hot sand, and the hides burst into flame, and archers on the walls immediately began to sweep the tower. We were a horse length from the wall – less every heartbeat. Men on the wall with huge tridents mounted on gimbals stabbed them through the leather walls of the tower and into the troops waiting inside, causing panic on the ladders.

  We had six archers at the head of the steps – Cretans armed with longbows. They stepped out on to the platform of our tower and in that moment I thought that they were the bravest men I’d ever seen – unarmoured, facing all that fire.

  They flicked arrows down on to the wall faster than I can tell it – the smallest of them was the finest archer, and he emptied his quiver before we reached the wall. Two of them were hit, but they struck back – they made me feel better, because we weren’t just standing or crouching and taking hits, we were killing the enemy, as well.

  It was all I could do to hold my sword. I had a pair of heavy javelins, and when the tower touched the wall, I cut the cord that held the great gate and it fell across the gap, giving us a ramp down into the enemy defences.

  I was hit twice before I got on to the wall – both stones, probably our own, and one all but knocked me senseless – and that after hitting my crest. A big rock. But I was on the wall and I threw my javelins – I don’t even remember throwing them, just that my right hand was suddenly empty – and I snatched my sword and moved against the nearest tower.

  One of my phylarchs fell victim to a bucket of red-hot sand and died horribly, screaming and thrashing, and he pushed men off the wall. Another phylarch cut left and right – cut beautifully with his kopis, dealing death, but a defender caught him with an axe, a murderous weapon, and the blade went in at his neck and cut through to his crotch, so that he opened like some evil flower and his guts exploded on the men around him, who flinched and died.

  The defenders were not beaten. They gave us the wall, or rather, the pile of rubble that had been the wall. Behind it, they had a second wall, about the width of a street – like Memnon’s trap at Halicarnassus, and I had fallen for it. I went to the edge of the breach and shouted for ladders. We had them, lying along the planking of the upper deck, lashed to the gunwales.

  I felt my men were being sluggish coming up the ladders.

  I remember roaring, ‘Damn it, come on!’ at the ladder men, and then I took a blow to the back and I was fighting for my life against a counter-attack. There were very few Macedonians alive on the rubble of the outer wall. The first fighting had gone against us.

  But then the Tyrians made an error. Whether on purpose or because of a misunderstood order, their engines swept the wall with stones and red-hot sand. Their own men took the bulk of the punishment, and their own reinforcements refused to come at us. By the will of the gods, none of the eight or nine of us holding the breach open was hit.

  My men were just as unwilling to come up those ladders. There were corpses all through the ship – our pair of vessels, as the first in, had drawn more than our fair share of missiles, and men had to climb over the wreckage of former men to get up the towers. That’s always hard. And some men had gone for more ladders, and then used that as an excuse to stay below.

  There was a huge cheer from the centre of the city, and then another cheer from the mole – whether ours or theirs I couldn’t tell.

  The fighting in the breach was sporadic, deadly and man to man. A few Macedonians continued to join us from the ship. I was exhausted by the time I realised that the tide had turned at the top of the ladder
s, and that we now held the breach in strength.

  Isokles found me in the dark. ‘Lads don’t like this a bit,’ he shouted. ‘We need to go forward!’

  Some brave men had come up the outside of the tower with two ladders – plain scaling ladders – and we put them against the new wall from the breach, with archers in towers virtually all around us shooting down into us. But we got the ladders up and we went up them. I led the way. It is my job.

  I was first up the first ladder on the inner wall, and two big men tried to push the ladder over with tridents, but my men were pressing against the base of the ladder. The ladder itself bent and groaned, and I raced up it as fast as my arms and legs would carry me, and I didn’t wait on the ladder to make my cut – I jumped in between them and cut back and forth – low is always better in the dark, although low cuts are an invitation to a head-cut counter in daylight. And then more or more men were beside me on the wall – Isokles, and Polystratus, and Cleomenes.

  We heard more cheers – and they were absolutely not Macedonian cheers – coming from the direction of the mole.

  I looked back and saw that the second ladder/tower ship had been sunk where it had rested on the waves, and that a pair of triremes were rescuing the rowers and marines. That meant we would not have a second wave.

  The Tyrians rushed us. We had about sixty men on the inner wall, but we were between two towers and we didn’t have anywhere to hide. They shot us with arrows and then charged, but they’d left it too long and we were ready, and we blunted their attack with javelins and then gutted them as they came up the inner face of the wall.

  I turned to Isokles, but he was dead at my feet. So I looked for Cleomenes and shouted, ‘Time to go!’

  The pezhetaeroi caught my meaning immediately. Most of us didn’t wait for the ladder – we jumped down into the breach, because a turned ankle was a small price to pay for your life, and then we fled down the tower ladders to the ship below. Cleomenes and I managed to get Isokles’ corpse between us – we threw it down into the breach and then carried him down into the tower, the last men off the wall.

  Of two hundred men I took up the ladders, I lost fifty, including four phylarchs and Isokles.

  And we lost.

  The next day, in camp, you could feel the burning hatred, the dull, red-hot resentment.

  No one spoke of abandoning the siege. From the pezhetaeroi to the hypaspitoi to the Agrianians to Alexander himself, what every man wanted was revenge. But there was little love for the king.

  That night, Hephaestion invited me to take wine with him and of course, Alexander was there, with Amyntas and Nicanor son of Parmenio, which I took for a positive sign.

  ‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ I said to Hephaestion.

  His arm was in a sling. He pointed at it and said, ‘I should have waited another day.’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘Patroclus would never say such a thing. You were brilliant on the wall, my friend. We simply needed ten more like you.’ He shrugged at me. ‘We almost died. Men were slow up the ladders, and the resistance was – magnificent.’

  ‘Magnificent?’ I asked.

  ‘Aren’t things better when they are difficult?’ Alexander asked. ‘When we take Tyre, our names will live for ever!’ He grinned. ‘I feel as if I am living in the Iliad.’

  He was all but bouncing up and down. I had left fifty men dead in the breach, and Isokles’ body was burning on a pyre beyond the horse lines, and my king was living inside the Iliad.

  He had a cut across his face where a Tyrian had no doubt died trying to kill him – the sort of cut that tells the informed observer that the victim came within ten or twelve hairs of dying.

  Sometimes, I wondered if he was insane.

  He handed me a cup of wine. ‘Not you, too? Infected with the Tyrian rot? Wake up! We’ve almost taken the place, and we’ll do it in a matter of days. Three more assaults – four at most.’

  I drank the whole cup of wine. It stiffened my spine and gave wings to my thoughts. I had an angry exhortation ready – but when had anger ever moved Alexander?

  What I wanted was to get the siege over with – as quickly as possible, and with the minimum casualties. Because if he spent men like water to take Tyre, he was going to have a mutiny, or something very like it.

  I drank more wine, thinking on Alexander and the Iliad.

  Alexander was praising Nicanor for his work with the hypaspitoi. Indeed, they were superb, and I joined in the praise, which obviously surprised Nicanor. The lines of faction were beginning to run too deep – to resemble lines of fracture. In truth, in my experience faction usually breeds in the absence of power, but sometimes it can breed right under power’s nose.

  When it came to me, it was as obvious as anything in the Iliad.

  I took another cup of wine but did not drink it straight off. ‘If we were to abandon the siege,’ I said, ‘what would be the first thing that would happen?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘I have no intention of abandoning the siege.’

  I held my arm out strongly, like an orator. ‘I speak as wily Odysseus, not Farm Boy Ptolemy.’

  Alexander laughed, and Hephaestion laughed, and Nicanor nodded. He hadn’t played our boyhood games, but he was in much the same mood I was in.

  ‘I assume they’d land to burn our engines – if in fact we didn’t burn them ourselves when we retreated.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘And take the stockpiles of food, firewood and materials we have all over camp,’ Hephaestion said with a shrug.

  ‘We’d destroy all of that, too,’ Nicanor insisted.

  ‘Not if we had to march away suddenly,’ I said. ‘To fight Darius with a fresh army, coming up behind us.’

  Alexander turned to me. ‘No one would believe such a tale.’

  But Hephaestion shook his head. ‘Desperate men would believe it. Men with nothing left but hope would believe it.’ He nodded.

  ‘And look, there’s little risk except the loss of some time and some machines. We spread the rumour that Darius has marched. The Syrians with our own army will take the news into Tyre. Then in two days, we vanish. We march for four hours and double back. Send the Cypriots to sea. Catch whatever’s ashore in late afternoon and slaughter them. And launch an immediate assault. It is, if I may say so, only a variant on the Trojan Horse. When they come to burn our machines and take our grain, we gut their land forces and cut their hope out from under them. Any lover knows that a hope destroyed is far worse than no hope at all.’

  Three days later, we marched in full armour, with all our baggage, leaving heaps of supplies for man and beast and most of our engines – although the engines had been moved away from the mole and well inland, forcing troops bent on their destruction to pass a cornucopia of logistical delights.

  It was early autumn.

  The wind was fair, and the Cypriots sailed with the dawn, even as we marched.

  I had the satisfaction of seeing the Tyrians rush to their walls to see the sight. The end of the siege.

  We marched inland less than ten stades, and then the Prodromoi and the Paeonians, Thessalians and Thracians continued, with brush tied to the tails of their horses to raise more dust, while the rest of us ate in the shade of a low valley full of olive groves. When the sun had started to decline, and the sky was a deep-blue bowl, we marched back – ranks open and men loping along. We were in top shape – we’d had seven months of carrying rocks.

  Ten stades can be run in half an hour. But we were cautious, taking on a half-moon formation to envelop as many of the enemy as we could catch.

  These things either work or they don’t. On this occasion, it worked better than we might have ever imagined, and we caught a tiger. The Tyrians were out in force – virtually their entire garrison was in the field, at least eight thousand men. But the very size of their force spelled their doom – they could not possibly get back into their boats in any kind of order.

  They had spent a great deal o
f energy on the mole, without much effect, and on burning our engines, which they had done with more jubilance than efficiency. As soon as they had warning of us coming back, they began to form – when they saw that they faced all of Alexander’s infantry, their despair was writ in their faces, and just as we engaged, when the Cypriot ships came in behind them cutting them off from the town, some actually committed suicide.

  Craterus faced the bulk of their marines, all formed up in the centre of their line. He did so because neither Alexander nor Parmenio was with the phalanx. And that day, my taxeis was not with the phalanx, either. As Craterus, Amyntas and Perdiccas rolled forward to combat the disorganised Tyrians, the hypaspitoi and all my taxeis boarded the Cypriot ships.

  Alexander always improved any plan he was offered.

  We went straight for the walls. The virtually undefended walls.

  They’d been breached in four places, before our machines stopped firing and we marched away. And the Tyrians had done some repairs, but conditions inside the city after seven months of siege were quite desperate. Very little work was done. Everyone was hungry.

  The end might have been anticlimactic, except that our thirst for revenge outweighed any sanity.

  Alexander was at the top of the ladder this time, but the enemy machines fired only sporadically, and every Cypriot ship was packed with Macedonians – ninety ships, sprinting for any place they could get a lodgement on the walls.

  We had a theatre-seat view of the back of the Tyrian army as it collapsed under the weight of our phalanx and the Hetaeroi. The people on the walls – what must they have felt, in those last hours and minutes, as their marines died – pointlessly – just a few stades away? As they saw the shiploads of Macedonians coming for them.

  I hope they felt terror. I hope they despaired, and cursed their gods, and tore their beards and hair. They had killed every prisoner they took. They had defiled our ambassadors and murdered our people, and they, if any, were the original aggressors against Greece. And they had burned me with sand, infected me with shit and killed Isokles and my unborn child.