And all that activity was taking place in just one tent, albeit a large one. Across the “street,” the children’s grandmother, Sisygambis, was desperately trying to shed twenty or thirty years, checking her visage in a polished brass mirror every few minutes. Despite the feverish ministrations of her ablest makeup artists, the years proved remarkably recalcitrant, reducing the old lady to ferocious and profane screaming, which could be heard throughout the tent city. But no one paid any attention. They were all busy running hither and yon, trying to capture the magic that would enable them to entice the attentions of the emperor, if only for a night. Heck, if only for a blink of an eye, most would have been thrilled.
Barsine was not caught up in the excitement of the moment. She didn’t consider herself part of the competition and didn’t expect to receive any particular notice from the emperor. Ever since they had returned to the caravan, she had done her best to blend in and, with Kobad’s assistance, she had escaped any punishment. In fact, everybody in the harem acted as if nothing had changed, and really, nothing had, except perhaps for the semiweekly nocturnal visits by Kobad the Eunuch.
Dareios arrived after they had finished their communal evening meal, after the royal ladies had primped some more, and after they had given up hope of seeing him that day. For some reason, he came into the fort wearing full armor. Perhaps he was afraid for his life, having to leave his usual bodyguard outside the walls. And who could blame him. As soon as the women heard he had arrived, they all dashed out of their tents, screaming for attention. The young eunuchs who were escorting Dareios toward Sisygambis’s tent could barely restrain them.
Dareios smiled good-naturedly, pleased at the adulation. However, that didn’t stop him from yelling at the women sternly. “Get back to your tents right now! I’ll come and visit as many of you as I can but we can’t have this kind of chaos.” And when some of the women didn’t comply with sufficient alacrity, he ordered the eunuchs to beat them. Most of the eunuchs were happy to oblige. “Careful, there!” Dareios yelled at a particularly enthusiastic eunuch. “We can’t let these women get out of hand but we don’t want to leave a mark on them either, you twerp.”
Dareios was, by nature and experience, a cautious man. He had come to power only two years earlier, relatively late in life. And he was certainly not born to power. He had been a 38-year-old career soldier when he happened to catch the eye of his emperor, Artaxerxes Tritos Ochos, who appointed him captain of the imperial bodyguard. Ochos was a barbarous, brutal, bloodthirsty, but effective emperor, who managed to occupy the Persian throne for twenty-one years, during the last four of which it had been Dareios’s responsibility to keep him alive. Despite his best efforts, Dareios had ultimately failed.
After twenty-one years in power, Ochos was poisoned by his own physician, who was supplied with the necessary poisons, incentives, and directions by Ochos’s grand vizier Bagoas. Having arranged the murder of Ochos, Bagoas also made sure that, in the usual Persian fashion, all of Ochos’s sons, nephews, and cousins were murdered as well. The only male royal survivor was Ochos’s youngest son, Arses, whom Bagoas had kept alive to serve as the puppet emperor.
Arses lasted two years. At that point, he made the fatal mistake of confusing his nominal title with actual power. Bagoas promptly poisoned him, too. Unfortunately, having killed Arses, Bagoas found himself fresh out of royal relatives. As a result, he was forced to look outside the family for the next successor to the throne. He hit upon an unassuming, reliable, 44-year-old career soldier named Kodomannos, who had been heard to say, when sufficiently inebriated, that his grandfather had been a brother of the father of the previously poisoned Artaxerxes Ochos. In fact, it was highly unlikely that Kodomannos was a distant offshoot of a junior branch of the royal family. The only thing certain was that his mother had been a royal chambermaid. He didn’t strike Bagoas as someone who would assert too much independence.
After being anointed emperor, Kodomannos took on the name of Dareios Tritos, in keeping with his pretensions to having some connection to the prior ruling family. Once in power, much to everyone’s surprise, Dareios turned out to be an accomplished survivor. His first act as emperor was to murder Bagoas, using the venomous vizier’s own inexhaustible stock of fatal potions. Next, he secured his control of the empire in the customary way – by killing every potential rival. Two years later, he was forced to deal with the nuisance of some upstart Greeks trying to foment rebellion in the western satrapies of Anatolia. But first, he had to address the much more difficult problem of getting women living in a temporary harem to simmer down.
True to his word, Dareios peeked into the tents of most of his wives and concubines, exchanging a few words with each, but his first visit was with his mother. The dowager chambermaid, despite being treated daily as an (aged) goddess descended to Earth, continued to suffer from understandable insecurities, related to her humble origins, her lack of royal training, the evident vicissitudes of life, and the inexorable ravages of time. But she loved her son and Dareios reciprocated the affection. He spent his few minutes in Sisygambis’s tent marveling at how enchanting, voluptuous, and young she looked. She was positively glowing by the time he left for the bigger tent across the “street.”
Stateira had recovered from her ailments in time for her husband’s arrival. Before she could launch herself at him, however, he told her he would see her in his bedchamber later that evening and she floated out of the tent in order to make the necessary preparations. With his wife safely out of the way, Dareios got down to the real purpose of his visit, which was to spend some time with his children, whom he hadn’t seen for several months.
It took less than two hours for Dareios to complete his inspection of the harem. He had managed, during that short time, to speak to most of the wives and concubines, leaving each one more determined than ever to fight her way to the top of his totem pole. Naturally, he didn’t speak to any of the servants or slaves whom he encountered along the way, all of whom were obliged to lie face down in the dirt as he passed, making conversation difficult.
Nor did Dareios get a chance to poke his head into Barsine’s tent. Soon after he was gone, and while Barsine was still putting the girls to bed, Kobad pushed aside the entry flap. “Look, uncle Kobad has come for another visit,” the oldest girl said brightly. “Go to sleep now,” Barsine said, without turning around. “I’ll be back soon.”
*******
We approached Halikarnassos from the northeast, making camp about a mile from the Mylasa Gate. Even before we had settled in, Alexandros dispatched a scouting party, led by Perdikkas, “to take the temperature of the defenders.” They were back within an hour, nursing bruised bodies, dented armor, and wounded pride. “I think they’re ready for us,” Perdikkas reported.
Alexandros shrugged. “Get a good night’s sleep, lads. We’ll show them who’s in charge tomorrow.”
Memnon beat us to the punch. While we slept, he led a sortie of Greek mercenaries out of the Mylasa Gate and into our camp. By the time the alarm sounded, his men were back inside the walls of Halikarnassos, leaving behind four dead Macedonian sentries, a dozen seriously injured soldiers, a score of dead animals, many burning supply wagons and storage tents, and one furious Macedonian commander-in-chief.
“What in Haides happened?” Alexandros demanded to know. “Nobody, you understand, NOBODY, steals a march on me!” His voice was beginning to rise. “Least of all that son of a whore Memnon. All you guys were just lying there, making love to Morpheus, while this pervert hermaphrodite screwed us up the ass. I’d be better off surrounded by a bunch of lame dancing girls than you worthless wusses. Get out of my sight; it brings tears to my eyes to have to look at such a limp-dicked collection of flatulent fucks.”
He was starting to splutter. The rest of us remained motionless, silent, afraid to breathe. “This will not stand,” Alexandros continued, forcing his voice back to a lower register. “We are Macedonians, for Zeus’s sake. We’ve got to conquer this shithole an
d kill those bastards, every last one of them.”
Parmenion, who was after all the senior man in the tent, finally took a breath. “Yes, sire. We’ll kill every last one of them.” Then he paused, awaiting the next outburst. Alexandros said nothing.
“But it won’t be easy,” Parmenion resumed, somewhat tentatively. “This is a well-fortified, heavily-defended city.” Still no response from Alexandros.
“Our siege equipment hasn’t arrived yet,” Parmenion added after a moment. “We have to get organized.”
“On, shut up, you old fart,” Alexandros finally exploded.
Kleitos, of all people, rose to Parmenion’s rescue. “We’ll get ‘em, sire,” he said bravely. “Don’tcha worry none. We’ll cut off their dicks before they can pull ‘em out of our asses.”
Alexandros took a long, probing look at Kleitos ... and burst out laughing. “I don’t even want to picture that. Now, let’s get to work.”
All of us, Alexandros most of all, knew that Halikarnassos would be a tough nut to crack. In order to defeat Orontobates’s garrison, stiffened by Memnon’s mercenaries, we would have to make our way across rickety, narrow, portable bridges, spanning a deep, wide moat. Assuming we succeeded in that task, we would be confronted by the towering walls of Halikarnassos, which were even taller, thicker, and more solidly built than the walls of Miletos. Beyond that, only three gates led through those walls – the Mylasa Gate in the east, the Tripylon Gate in the north, and the Myndos Gate in the west. Each gate was a massive, fortified structure, topped by catwalks and flanked by guard towers. If we somehow managed to breach the city walls, we could expect savage house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat, as we fought our way uphill toward the akropolis. And even if we succeeded in routing the defenders, they always had the option of withdrawing to the akropolis, a fortified city-within-the-city, with its own set of huge, crenellated walls and formidable watchtowers. In addition, the defenders could also withdraw to the fortress of Salmakis, on a spit of land projecting into the harbor, or to the King’s Castle, splendidly protected on its own island across the harbor from Salmakis.
It didn’t help matters that Halikarnassos’s harbor was occupied by the Persian navy, with the bulk of our navy on its way back to the Greek mainland. Not only was there no possibility of a waterborne assault by our mariners through the city port, there was not even any likelihood of a successful siege, because the inhabitants and defenders of Halikarnassos could be resupplied indefinitely by ship.
“There are no easy options,” Alexandros acknowledged, as if reading our thoughts, “which is what makes it fun. Instead of looking for the easy way out, we’ll take the glorious road in – straight over the city walls.” This time, no one was brave enough to raise an objection. “As soon as the siege equipment gets here,” he added, in tacit acknowledgement of Parmenion’s point. However, he certainly didn’t apologize to the old commander for his earlier outburst. All of us would’ve been disappointed if he had.
Landing siege equipment anywhere near Halikarnassos proved to be a tricky business, since the Persian navy not only occupied the harbor but also mounted regular patrols up and down the coast. Nikanoros, whose much diminished fleet could move no faster than the ponderous barges carrying the siege equipment, was taking his sweet time making the short voyage from Miletos to Halikarnassos. His ships, skulking like thieves in the night, from hidden inlet to serpentine estuary, were careful to stay out of sight during daylight hours. Alexandros didn’t enjoy the wait. He alternated between chewing his nails, chewing our ears off, and chewing us all out. When he could stand it no longer, he dispatched companies of heavy infantry in futile sorties against the city walls, only to see them return bruised, bewildered, and demoralized.
Finally, five nights after we had made camp (and five nights after Memnon’s lightning midnight raid caught us napping in that camp) the barges arrived – in the middle of the night – landing in a rocky, deserted cove, a good two miles from our camp. Every available man was dispatched to unload the ladders, shield walls, siege towers, catapults, battering rams, and raw lumber supplies before the barges were discovered by a Persian patrol boat. Once the materials were safely on dry land, we spent the rest of the night trudging back and forth, like a giant army of ants, hauling the disassembled pieces of equipment aboard horse-drawn wagons, dragged along the ground by oxen, or simply carried on soldiers’ shoulders.
*******
The next morning, I was sitting astride Pandaros, observing an anthill of activity. What’s with all the ant metaphors, I thought. (When trying to breach the walls of a fortified city, a cavalry officer is about as useful to the siege as an erection is to a hermit, so I had plenty of time for contemplation.) In front of me, our trusty, light-armed, semi-barbarian Agrianians were busy running toward the moat, carrying baskets full of soil and rocks on their shoulders, dodging incoming missiles as they went. Our archers and other light infantrymen tried to protect them with a covering barrage of arrows and bolts, most of which fell harmlessly to the ground, well short of the defenders high up on their wall, neatly illustrating one of the benefits of holding the high ground.
After dumping their loads into the moat, the Agrianians ran back to pick up another load and test their luck once again. After a while, an enterprising group of foot soldiers harnessed teams of oxen to wagons and, sheltering beneath their shields, started ferrying loads of fill toward the moat. We lost some oxen in the process but after a few hours little mounds of soil began poking through the surface of the water in the moat.
I wondered how our effort to take Halikarnassos would turn out. Ever since the Battle of Granikos, I had been struggling to overcome my time sickness, that dizzying sense of uncertainty brought on by the loss of my ability to know what the future held in store, even in broad and hazy outline. I had known all along, of course, that unexpected accidents could happen, that time travelers were occasionally injured or even killed during their sojourns into the past, but the past itself was not supposed to change. When the pan-Hellenic invading army was not defeated at the Battle of Granikos and its leader, Alexandros, was not killed, the course of history had changed. Given the inertial tendency of the space-time continuum, however, it was only a matter of time before the torrent of history resumed its prior course. At least that was the theory drummed into our heads at the Academy. But how long it would take for temporal inertia to reassert itself was impossible to predict; it depended on the precise nature and severity of the violation and the consequent distortion. When is the correction coming, I wondered. Will Alexandros’s run in defiance of history end right here, under the walls of Halikarnassos, or will it end at the next battle after that? I simply didn’t know. And my previous knowledge of history was no help.
Questions about my own personal fate crossed my mind as well. Will I live long enough to see the correction take effect? The appearance of a slimy and wily antagonist, determined to bring about my death, diminished the prospects of my long-term survival. The solution sprang unbidden into my mind: I simply have to kill Aristandros before he can kill me. Unfortunately, this was more easily thought than done. Among other things, I was not a murderer. And, as always, there was the Prime Directive to consider.
On the other hand, surely both morality and the Prime Directive allowed for the possibility of self-defense. These excursions into the past were not supposed to be suicide missions, even when something went wrong. Besides, hadn’t I already altered the flow of history by saving Kleitos’s life? Perhaps killing Aristandros would simply help to redress the disruption.
Before I had a chance to consider means and methods, however, Seleukos rode up to join me in gazing uselessly at the efforts of our foot soldiers, putting a temporary stop to my ruminations.
*******
While we sat there, contemplating onanistic hermits and other weighty subjects, our engineers were busy erecting colossal siege towers, mounting battering rams beneath tripod supports, building portable shield walls, and assembling complex
catapults, which sprouted like an ungainly race of giants from the fields of Halikarnassos. By nightfall, two stretches of the moat were completely filled in and our troops started to roll the siege towers across the earthen dams. At the same time, a phalanx of heavy infantry, sheltering beneath shield walls, positioned one of the battering rams against Mylasa Gate and started to swing the massive, iron-tipped pole back and forth, producing a tremendous racket. No damage to the oaken panels was evident but the noise and ceaseless activity served as a useful diversion. In the sector between the siege towers and the battering ram, surreptitious sappers started digging mines under the wall, hoping to bring about its collapse. All through the night, the batterers kept up their clangor, the towermen stockpiled ammunition, and the sappers, under cover of commotion, shield walls, and darkness, continued their subterranean burrowing.
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