God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  Alexander leaned down off the top of the ladder, and called to the men inside the tower: ‘No quarter. Kill everyone in the city, save those who take refuge in the Temple of Herakles.’

  I was as bloodthirsty as he – despite the fact that I knew that in his mind we were in the depth of the wooden horse, and were about to sack Troy. It occurred to me to ask him if he was now Neoptolemus and not Achilles. If his presence didn’t change the scene.

  I doubt that Alexander would even have laughed.

  I said when I started to tell the story of Tyre that it needn’t have happened. That there was arrogance and foolishness on both sides.

  And there was horror.

  We had little to fear – the walls were virtually empty, the mighty machines didn’t, most of them, throw a single rock, and when Alexander sprang out of the tower on to the rubble of the breach, it was almost like walking on to the stage of an empty theatre. The only enemy soldiers were archers – they had been left behind by the marines, and they shot as fast and as accurately as they could.

  But they could not hold even the towers, and we swept from wall to wall, using short scaling ladders to get down into the streets beyond or into the low towers on either hand.

  Very quickly, the defence collapsed. I had seen some sieges by the time I reached Tyre. I knew the signs. The enemy no longer thought he could resist. Men fled – usually to their own homes, to die in the doorways of their own houses.

  And die they did.

  I would like to say that I remember nothing of it, but I remember it all too well. I was with beasts – I was a beast. I killed men, and I killed women, and I killed young children. I killed a goat that passed in front of me. I killed anything that was not a soldier of Macedon.

  There were few women, because most of them and their children had gone to Carthage at the start of the siege. But those that there were went to the roofs and threw tiles down on us – no laughing matter, when a piece of terracotta the size of your fist hits you on the head.

  Our engineers knocked a hole in the land wall of the city facing the mole, and even as we butchered our way through the streets, Diades connected the city to the land, opened the wall and led the victorious phalanx into the devastated city to finish off any rats trapped in their homes.

  And at the end, when they knew that there would be no quarter, the population turned and fought like rats facing dogs. Such rats often give the dogs a bad bite or two before they die, and sometimes the bites infect. The simile is apt. The Macedonian army triumphed at Tyre, but the price was high, in blood, in pain, in spirit, and the results took years to play out.

  But for Tyre, the price was higher. Because before the sun set, every man, woman and child in the city was dead. Every dog was dead, every donkey, every mule, every cat. We killed everything except the handful of lucky families who took refuge in the Temple of Melkart.

  Alexander dragged them out and let them live – as slaves. Then he had the temple purified. And he made his sacrifice there, just eight months later than he had expected.

  But what I remember best is walking out of the gap in the walls, climbing down Diades’ breach to the mole, and looking back in the red sunset – the purple-red that men called ‘Tyrian Red’ after the murex dye. A haze of dust and smoke sat like a toad atop the city, and fires burned throughout, and you could smell death everywhere.

  But what I will never forget as long as I live is the sight of blood – red blood – leaking out of the foundation stones of the walls, and mixing with the seawater, so that sharks and other sea creatures began to beat themselves against the walls in the last light, as if Poseidon had turned on the town, or as if there was a portent to be read in the angry battering of the fish and the blood.

  I stood there, full of rage and hate and the kind of sick guilt that a man can only gain when he sacks a city and behaves like a beast. My hands and arms dripped blood and my feet were sticky with it.

  If I had wanted revenge, what I had was my nauseated fill of it.

  And that was Tyre.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Gaza is just six days’ marching from Tyre, and stands on rock about twenty stades from the sea. We marched there four days after the fall of Tyre. Four days. That’s the rest we had, and two days of it were given over to a mass parade of the army and a set of games in honour of Herakles. My phalanx looked terrible at the review – exhausted men slumping, poor armour, threadbare chitons. Only a few of my decarchs – file leaders – had coerced their men into polishing their dented helmets. In fact, only about two-thirds of my remaining men had helmets. The rest had leather Boeotian caps. My only consolation was that the rest of the army – except the Hetaeroi – looked as bad or worse.

  The approach to Gaza is sandy and the sea near the city is everywhere shallow. The city of Gaza is large, built upon a lofty mound around which a strong wall has been laid. It is the last city you meet, going from Phoenicia to Egypt. It is situated on the edge of the desert. When we arrived near the city on the first day, we encamped near the spot where the wall seemed to Diades most easy to assault. The engineer ordered his military engines to be constructed – those that we had with us. Most of our best and heaviest gear was still at Tyre, under repair, with Helios sending out still more parties for still more wood. But the Jews came to our aid – they had no love for the Persians, and now that we’d taken Tyre, we had a flood of support from Palestine.

  As at Tyre, Alexander and Diades and all his engineers spent two days in careful examination of the city and all of its approaches, while we stripped the countryside like a host of armoured locusts for brushwood, for food and for manpower. Tyre had made us expert in what we needed, and it was all too clear to every footslogger that Gaza, even without the sea, was another tough nut and one for which digging and engineering were required in order to crack it.

  The army was tired and surly, and we needed drafts from home to fill the places that disease, malnutrition and overwork had carved in our ranks. Recruits play an essential role in the long-term life of an army. They may be clueless, useless men who can’t start a fire or cook their own food or dig a decent latrine, but they bring a spirit of emulation that veterans lack – or rather, they restore a spirit of emulation and enterprise. The veterans have to work harder to show the recruits what fine men they are. The recruits band together to prove themselves worthy. We hadn’t had any recruits for a year, and I put out the word – and some gold, as a recruiting bonus.

  The Persian commander in Gaza was Batis, and he rendered the siege very different from the siege at Tyre. It is worth noting that the rest of Palestine and Syria surrendered to us, but Batis, for whatever reason, determined to keep us out of Aegypt by holding Gaza.

  Probably the most significant difference was that he was a professional Persian officer, a loyal servant of King Darius, and not the ‘king’ of a semi-independent town. He had a powerful garrison, thousands of troops, most of them veterans of Issus and other campaigns, and he had an excellent reputation with the local people – for justice and mercy.

  Callisthenes’ propaganda got us nothing at Gaza, and his agents provided nothing from inside the town. It was, to all intents and purposes, a Persian town. And the hill on which it sat was tall, rocky and looked, to the casual eye, impregnable. Gaza was the first city we faced without Thaïs’s networks, and the difference showed immediately, at least to me. We didn’t even have a former Gazan citizen on the staff to help show us the strengths of the walls.

  Callisthenes’ shortcomings showed in other ways, as well.

  Far off in Greece, the Spartan king, Agis, had finally taken the bit between his teeth and declared war on Macedon. He took fistfuls of gold from the Great King and provided a haven for parts of the Persian fleet, and one of his first acts was to seize Crete, which neatly balanced our alliance with Cyprus and threatened our communications with home. He summoned home every Spartan citizen, and extended citizen’s rights to many who were not citizens, in order to prepare for war. We need
ed information on Sparta’s intentions and her plans, and we had nothing, because Callisthenes hadn’t seen it coming and had no sources prepared. Nor, we quickly saw, was the Pythia willing to communicate with Callisthenes. No more priests of Apollo appeared in our camp.

  Sparta wasn’t our only trouble. Athens was vacillating, considering new alliances and a stab in the back to Macedon. Even there, Callisthenes had fewer sources than Thaïs had had, and he didn’t even trouble himself to make use of the Athenian officers in our army, a shocking omission.

  But Kineas mentioned to me, one day when we were sparring, just as Diades began to have our horde of barbarian slaves raise the siege mound, that he thought Agis had waited too long.

  ‘If he’d struck before Issus, there’s many in Athens – supporters of Demosthenes – who’d have put aside their hatred for Sparta and marched on Macedon.’ He paused – we had a habit, when sparring, of falling into conversation, and when we did, it had become our custom to relax our stances deliberately so that neither would feel threatened. He smiled, perhaps ruefully. ‘But now? Most Athenians hate Sparta more than we hate anyone. Their cowardly behaviour in the great war – their lickspittle toadying to the Great King. And look you – no sooner does Agis declare war on Macedon than he accepts a great subsidy from Darius and welcomes his fleet!’ Kineas shook his head. ‘Even the lowest classes – even the most hardened thetes, even the most corrupt democrat – would hate to betray the heroic dead of Marathon and fifty fights with Sparta – just to have a go at Macedon.’

  I prayed he was correct, because still, and again – even with Tyre in our hands and Cyprus – Athens was the key, and if Athens, with her three-hundred-ship navy, chose to go to open war with us, the crusade in Asia would be over.

  We opened our lines on the third day – a nice phrase, which means we began serious operations. By coincidence, it was the day Aristophanes – not the comic, but the statesman – became Eponymous Archon in Athens. The sun was high and the heat was brutal. The slaves – many of whom had, a few days before, been free farmers in the region around Gaza – began to dig.

  I get ahead of myself. When the slaves were collected, and the brushwood, and all the digging tools brought up from Tyre (but not the siege machines, most of which were still under repair back there), Alexander summoned all of his friends and all of the officers and allies. We expected to have a command meeting – I certainly knew from my conversations with Nicanor and Philotas that their father was fit to explode over the fact that we were settling down for another siege that might take another year.

  But what we attended, instead, was a sacrifice. Alexander was waiting for us, at the top of the slope that led to the ground on which his first siege mound would be commenced. The town of Gaza seemed to tower over us from here, and the garrison was shouting insults – or at least, I assumed they were insults. Thankfully, Alexander couldn’t hear them.

  A pair of gulls were fighting in the air above us. There were gulls everywhere, because an army leaves a lot of garbage about, and near the sea, the gulls outnumber the other vermin. Their cries were louder and more raucous than those of the guards on the walls, but in the same tone.

  Alexander was dressed in a pure white chiton of beautiful, shining wool, with a narrow gold border. He cut the throat of his ram without getting a speck of blood on the chiton, and as the ram slumped and the king stepped back, a gull screamed and something struck Alexander on the head and he fell to one knee.

  Every man present rushed to his side.

  The gulls had been fighting over a bit of flesh attached to a bone – perhaps a dead lamb from another sacrifice – and the bone, falling from high above, had hit the king on the head, driving him to his knees. It had left a smear on his left shoulder and on his left thigh, as well.

  He waved us away, but he was shaken, his eyes wild. Aristander, that wily charlatan, stepped forward and raised his arms. ‘An omen!’ he cried, as if we needed a priest to tell us that we’d seen an omen. ‘The king will triumph here, but he will risk his body to accomplish the deed. Take heed, O King!’

  Alexander was spooked. I had seen him this way as a child, especially when his witch of a mother told him peasant tales from her home, terrifying tales of children lost in the woods and being eaten by human creatures that sucked children’s marrow bones – I’m not making this up, Olympias had a thousand of them, and she revelled in them. I suspect they helped make Alexander what he was.

  Whatever he was.

  At any rate, I hurried to his side, exchanged glances with Hephaestion and we hustled him to his tent.

  For the next week, Alexander stayed well clear of the siege lines. It took the full week before the first comments began to reach me. I had spent so much time wounded at Tyre that I was using the siege of Gaza to re-establish my place with my pezhetaeroi. I was lucky enough to get two hundred new men – mostly Ionian hoplites who willingly enlisted and could claim, at least loosely, to have relatives in the Chersonese or Amphilopolis. They were the last fruits of Isokles’ reputation and persistence in recruiting.

  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 th
e 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.