Memnon

by Oden, Scott

  The Spartan pursed his lips, his eyes narrowing in thought. “I will relay your words to Agis. No doubt he will find interest in them.” Callicratides extended his hand. Memnon took it.

  “Deeds speak louder than words,” the Rhodian said. “A favor, Patron? Tonight—say perhaps near midnight—bring noble Callicratides to the acropolis walls. Our talk has inspired me to undertake an experiment. I want to see if Alexander truly recognizes no boundaries.”

  “How?” Patron asked.

  Memnon smiled, devoid of humor. “With incendiaries.”

  STARS GLITTERED IN THE NIGHT SKY OVER HALICARNASSUS, THEIR SPLENDOR rivaled by the fires burning in the Macedonian camp. Exhaustion gripped both armies; yet, movement could be discerned as pickets on the ground mirrored sentries walking their routes atop the walls. Music drifted up from the harbor, from a wine shop where the fleet’s auletes staged an impromptu Dionysia.

  The sound of dueling flutes reached even to the Horn. Here, in blazing torchlight, Memnon’s men kept a close eye on the nearly filled section of the moat, insuring the Macedonians didn’t attempt to finish the job under cover of darkness. Alexander’s men, too, watched the Horn, alert for any sign that the Persians might disrupt their day’s progress.

  Memnon crouched behind an embrasure some distance from the Horn, near where he had captured the would-be traitors two nights previous. Thymondas and Amyntas crouched with him. Bareheaded, their faces daubed with soot, all three men wore cuirasses of leather rather than bronze. Lampblack dulled the sheen of their weapons; strips of cloth muffled their sheaths and baldrics. Dozens of ropes creaked as similarly camouflaged men on both sides of them lowered ladders and woven baskets full of straw-packed clay jars to their comrades outside the wall. Another three hundred raiders waited on the parapet for the Rhodian’s signal.

  “You’re clear about your orders?” Memnon asked the renegade Amyntas. The Macedonian nodded.

  “My men and I will make a hole in their sentry line near the siege train. We’ll cover Thymondas and his lads while they put those jars to good use.”

  “Thymondas?”

  The son of Mentor leaned forward. “We get in, spread the bitumen around, and get out. Nothing fancy. Once my men are clear, I’ll give the order for it to be lit.” He spat thrice, a gesture to ward off evil.

  “When Alexander sends soldiers to snuff the fires,” Memnon said, “we’ll strike from the shadows. Kill as many as you can, but when they begin fighting back—and they will—disengage and make for the Tripylon. Pharnabazus will be at the gate and he’ll sound the call to arms. His archers will cover our withdrawal.”

  Amyntas grinned, white teeth glimmering against blackened skin. “Bastards won’t know their arse from a knot hole after we’ve finished with them.”

  “Gloat when you’ve brought your men back safely, not before,” Memnon chided. He gestured to the ropes. “Let’s go.”

  Amyntas wasted no time. He scampered down the knotted line like a seasoned mountaineer. Thymondas and Memnon followed. Behind them came waves of black-clad fighters, Cretan archers and javelin-wielding kardakes, Ionian peltasts and a score of Amyntas’s fellow renegades. They reached the ground and low-crawled to the dry moat, where they quickly vanished down the ladders. Even in the pitch-black bowels of the ditch each man knew his place, his rally-point. Thymondas’s soldiers formed up on the left flank, Memnon’s on the right. Amyntas’s squad of renegades kept to the center. Weapons clattered; Memnon hoped the muffled cursing from stubbed toes or gouged thighs would not give away their position, spoil their plan. He stood still, listening.

  Silence. No cries of alarm carried on the still air; no horns or thudding hooves sounded. With an unseen nod, Memnon touched Amyntas’s shoulder. The Macedonian hissed an order; his renegades repositioned the ladders and ascended to the far bank of the moat, fading into the night in the direction of Alexander’s picket lines.

  Memnon waited. Seconds stretched on, a lifetime encompassed in each pulsing heartbeat. Hearing nothing, he gave Thymondas a low whistle. One hundred twenty Ionians followed him up the ladders, every second man carrying a jug of bitumen in the crook of his arm—a quarter of their arsenal of incendiaries.

  After giving the Ionians time to disperse for their targets, Memnon led the final one hundred sixty men, the Cretans and kardakes, up and out of the ditch. The Rhodian had studied this terrain for a month, incorporating its every rise and fold into the defense of the city. He guided his men straight ahead, to where a dry streambed between two low hills, both thick with lonely olive trees and shrubs of wild myrtle, served to mask their movements from prying eyes. Loose soil and scree crunched underfoot, each step an explosion of sound to Memnon’s attenuated hearing.

  A half-mile from the walls, the whitish scar of the streambed curled around the shoulder of the hill. Memnon paused; using hand gestures, he deployed his men in a loose skirmish line, led them out of the streambed and to the crest of the slight rise. Vegetation provided added cover. Memnon could see the fires of Alexander’s camp. They were behind the siege engines, now, and even with the towers. He motioned for his men to halt.

  Pickets guarded the perimeter of the siege works, but the Rhodian couldn’t discern if they were his men or Alexander’s. Did I make a mistake in trusting Amyntas? Then he saw it. Movement. Faster than he could credit, shadows rose behind the five nearest pickets, figures that grappled and bore them to the ground. As each soldier fell, another man emerged from the undergrowth and assumed the picket’s station, leaning on his spear with feigned nonchalance. Soon after, an owl hooted twice, paused, then twice more—Amyntas’s signal for all clear.

  Memnon heard the rustle of cloth off to his right; he saw the dark shapes of Thymondas and his men making for the breach in the Macedonian picket line. The Ionians kept low, those with jars of bitumen ahead of those without. Wisely, Mentor’s son kept his raiders from rushing forward in a mass—that many men blundering about the siege train would surely have raised an alarm. Instead, he assigned himself and four others the task of spreading the flammable liquid, two jars at a time. The rest of the Ionians waited in the shadows, ready to exchange full jars for those their comrades emptied. Soon, the acrid stench of bitumen reached Memnon’s nostrils.

  A half-hour passed before the deed was done. The Ionians vanished in the darkness, followed by Amyntas and his false pickets. A remaining soldier—surely Thymondas—used a torch snatched from one sentry post to light a trail of bitumen, and then he too disappeared.

  Memnon watched as a rivulet of fire raced along the ground, spreading, igniting pools of oil. It reached one of the katapeltes first; tongues of flame licked the machine’s oil-soaked wooden chassis, gnawing at torsion cables made from twisted sinew and human hair. With a roar the fire blazed to life, consuming the engine like a corpse on a pyre. It spread to other siege machines, the conflagration following a river of bitumen from engine to ammunition cache, all the way to the base of the nearest siege tower.

  From the picket line, a salpinx cut through the din of the rising inferno. The alarm spread to the Macedonian camp; Memnon could hear the shouts and cries of engineers roused from sleep. Seeing their beloved creations devoured by flames, they rushed out naked, bearing cloaks and water skins as tools to snuff out the blaze. An officer among them recognized the stench of burning oil.

  “Dirt!” he bellowed, pointing at a mound of loose soil as more men stumbled up. “Throw dirt on it!”

  “Him,” Memnon whispered to the archer at his side, a swarthy Cretan with thick black brows. The man nodded, kissed his bow, and nocked a wickedly barbed arrow. All along the line bow-staves creaked. Memnon raised his hand, dropped it.

  The thrum of bowstrings brought to mind the sound of ripping linen.

  A hail of death dropped out of the night sky. Engineers, who seconds before cared only about saving their livelihoods now fought for their lives, clutching at arrows that punched through flesh, their cries of alarm turning to screams of agony. The fallen w
rithed or lay still.

  Though unable to follow its flight with the naked eye, Memnon saw the end result as the Cretan’s iron-head found its mark in the officer’s cervical spine. His body sprawled over the mound of dirt.

  “Hit them again!”

  Memnon’s archers sent a second and third volley into the chaos; his kardakes went after the remaining pickets, and any man foolish enough to try and fight the flames. Off to the right, Amyntas and his renegades cried out to the Macedonians in their shared tongue, begging for them to come to their aid. Those who did were slaughtered in a storm of Ionian javelins.

  The siege tower blazed, fully engulfed. By its light, Memnon spotted a wedge of Companion cavalry circling to the left; a second wedge on their heels. No doubt more were advancing from the right, along with Alexander’s own archers and a horde of Pezhetairoi. It was time to make for the safety of the Tripylon.

  “Break off!” he called. “Break off!” One of the Cretans blew a short blast on his horn. Their withdrawal required speed rather than secrecy; making made no pretense at stealth, the Cretans stood and pelted down the hill to join the Ionians. Thymondas bellowed orders, sorted out the shuffling troops; then, as a single entity spearheaded by the renegades, they set off at a run toward the glimmering walls of Halicarnassus. Memnon and his kardakes brought up the rear.

  After a moment of uncertainty, Alexander’s Companion cavalry picked up the raiders’ trail and pounded after them, their shouts and whoops drawing the attention of the men streaming out of camp to help douse the fires. “There!” Memnon heard a Macedonian scream, followed by the pounding of hooves as horsemen changed course.

  “Aim for their mounts!” the Rhodian panted. Now!” The rearguard paused at the bottom of a shallow depression, whirled with their javelins cocked over their right shoulders, and slung the ash and iron darts pointblank into the fire-etched silhouettes bearing down on them. Horses and men screamed, all toppling as the javelins slammed into them. Flailing hooves snarled the legs of other riders to create a writhing wall of flesh. Memnon did not loiter to watch the unfolding chaos. He and his kardakes were off and running before the remaining horsemen could circle around them.

  A quarter of a mile away the walls of the city blazed with light, its torches and iron cressets beckoning to the men on the ground. Trumpets rang from the battlements. Another two hundred yards and they would be in range of Pharnabazus’s archers, who could hold the Macedonians at bay while the raiders escaped through the Tripylon Gate. Less than two hundred yards, now. Memnon cuffed sweat from his eyes …

  Hooves thundered. Unseen until the last moment, a wedge of Companion cavalry smashed into the right flank of the rearguard, splitting it into two groups. Bones snapped as horses trampled the kardakes; the soldier two paces in front of Memnon screamed when a spear ripped through his leather armor, gutting him and filling the dusty air with the stench of blood and bowel. The Macedonian’s exultant cry became a death rattle as the Rhodian jammed the blade of his javelin through his neck and rolled him off the back of his horse. Off balance, Memnon collapsed with the dying Macedonian and scuttled away from the crushing hooves of a second rider. Cursing, the fellow stabbed down at him; the Rhodian took the butt-spike of his spear deep in the hip, gritting his teeth against the pain as metal scraped on bone.

  “Son of a bitch!” Memnon caught up a fallen javelin and raked it across the horse’s belly. The screaming animal bolted; its rider lost his grip and fell, his armored spine crashing into the dust.

  Memnon was on him before he could recover. The Rhodian planted the iron tip of his javelin against the bronze cuirass protecting the rider’s chest. Metal squealed as his weight drove it through armor, flesh, and bone. The Macedonian convulsed and spewed blood. Gasping, Memnon staggered to his feet.

  The Companions, now clear of the rearguard, wheeled and made ready for another pass. Before their horses could find their rhythm, though, Memnon heard the ripping sound of Cretan bowstrings. Scores of arrows lashed from the darkness to pierce flesh and armor. The Rhodian seized the opportunity his archers afforded. “Get the wounded!” he yelled. “Get to the gate!” He limped along, his hip and leg trembling with pain. Blood sheeted down his thigh. Would you like to know the hour of your death? He heard the voice, clenched his teeth against the wave of white-hot agony. “No!” Memnon stumbled; he fell to one knee, a golden mist playing at the edges of his vision. “No!”

  Suddenly, Thymondas was there. The younger man caught Memnon by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Hurry, Uncle!” he said. “We’re almost there!” The Rhodian felt his strength return as the voice in his head receded. No, not yet.

  The final hundred yards passed in a blur; soon, the Tripylon Gate loomed above them. Its three cyclopean towers rose sixty feet above their heads, twenty feet higher than the surrounding battlements, their crenellated tops bristling with Persian archers. They drew back on their bowstrings, the smoky air thrumming as they sent flight after flight of iron-heads into the pursuing Macedonians.

  Though the Tripylon sported three towers and two bronze-and-oak gates, it had but a single wooden bridge that could be lowered over the dry moat from the center tower. Memnon grinned at the welcome rattle of chains—even as he the shouts of warning reached him from above. The Rhodian glanced over his shoulder to see a battalion of Macedonian infantry, the Pezhetairoi, emerge from the ruddy gloom, their shields canted as they advanced on the gate, oblivious to the hail of arrows.

  Memnon snarled, shook himself free of Thymondas. “Archers!” he roared. The Cretans heard him, wheeled. The kardakes and Ionians, too, ceased their withdrawal and turned, interposing themselves between the Macedonians and the yawning gates of Halicarnassus. “Kill the bastards!”

  The Macedonians could not defend against arrows shot from the walls and those loosed at close range on the ground—their shields were smaller than the traditional bowl-shaped aspides of the southern Greeks; shifting from high guard to low left them exposed, and vice versa.

  They were like wheat for the sickle.

  At close range, Cretan arrows hit with the slaughterhouse sound of a cleaver striking flesh, sinking up to their black fletching in enemy chests, bellies, and throats. Men thrashed and toppled, blood pouring from pierced organs. The front rank of Macedonians disintegrated; the second, too. The third, from what Memnon could see of their eyes, resigned themselves to death and pressed on. These were born soldiers, men who marched into battle with an obol already under their tongues, ready to pay their passage into Hades’ realm. They died well, but they died nonetheless.

  The Cretans emptied their quivers before Memnon gave the order to resume their withdrawal. As they neared the Tripylon, Ephialtes led a platoon of hoplites over the bridge and formed a protective phalanx to cover the last few yards. Firelight gleamed from their hedge of spears, from their overlapped shields and the crests of their bronze helmets. Ephialtes bellowed an order and their formation split to allow the raiders through, then turned and followed them back into the city.

  With Thymondas’s aid, Memnon limped through the gate tunnel and out into the packed street. Men cheered, pressing forward to clap the exhausted and bloody raiders on the back. The wounded were hustled off to the field hospital at the foot of the acropolis; the dead were lifted with reverence and borne away to houses where they could be washed and prepared for the pyre.

  “How many did we lose?”

  Thymondas could only shrug. “I’ll find out after I’ve seen you to the surgeons.”

  “They almost had me,” Memnon whispered. Word of his injury had spread; concerned soldiers shouted prayers at him while their officers pushed through the milling troops to be by his side, to offer their aid. Thymondas clung to him like an overprotective guardian. Pharnabazus appeared, Amyntas and Ephialtes, too. Patron and the Spartan, Callicratides, cleared well-wishers from the Rhodian’s path.

  “Did you learn anything, Memnon?” the Spartan asked.

  “That Alexander’s army isn’t invul
nerable,” he replied, gasping for breath. He coughed, spat dust and blood. “Tell your king, Callicratides … tell Agis that if he wants to ally with me against Alexander, if he wants to partake in the reduction of Macedonia, then meet me in Euboea in the spring!” The men who heard this cheered, and the cheers multiplied until it seemed the very stones of Halicarnassus vibrated with praise.

  “I will tell him,” Callicratides said over the din. Memnon gave a curt nod and motioned Thymondas along. To himself the Spartan added, “And I will pray, perhaps in vain, that the black Fates take no notice of you, Memnon of Rhodes.”

  24

  MORNING SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH SMOKE RISING FROM THE still-smoldering siege engines. Flames had destroyed one of the towers and badly damaged another before the inferno could be brought under control. The charred katapeltoi were silent, the engineers either dead or too exhausted from wounds and exertion to set about making repairs. Closer to the city, the Macedonians tried time and again to recover the corpses of the slain Pezhetairoi only to be driven back by massed volleys from the walls. “Let them rot,” the Persian archers snarled, drawing and loosing with vindictive fervor.

  Memnon expected some manner of response from Alexander, a renewal of the assault on the Horn, his men’s fury lashed to a fever pitch by their repeated failures. He expected redoubled fighting, redoubled bloodshed. What he didn’t expect Alexander to do, though, was send a herald.

  Pharnabazus fetched Memnon from the surgeon’s tent, turning a deaf ear to the doctor, a bearded Chian with a huge beak of a nose, who had swathed the Rhodian’s hip in herb-steeped compresses, bound it with strips of linen, and now vocally demanded he stay in bed. Memnon dismissed him with thanks and hobbled from the tent under his own power. The Rhodian was pale; his lips thin and hard as he limped up the stairs to the battlements, stifling a gasp of pain with each step. Pharnabazus looked no better. The Persian had not slept, and Memnon could see evidence of exhaustion in his haggard face, his glassy eyes. Adrenalin and willpower were all that kept both men mobile.