by Tom Holt
nobody else is going to fix it but you, and you aren’t going anywhere till it gets fixed, so although you’re so weary you can’t stand straight, let alone think, you’ve got to force yourself back into problem-solving mode, find that last scrap of energy you were saving for taking your boots off, and deal with it, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Soldiering is about climbing for two days up the only pass through the tallest mountains you’ve ever seen in your life, only to find that you’ve reached a defile so narrow you can’t get the hutches through even if you turn them on their side, so you’ve either got to unship the pickaxes and widen the bugger, chip by bone-jarring chip, or trudge back down the way you came and go the extra seventy miles south that’ll take you round the mountains, even though it means losing contact with the rest of the column. Soldiering is about breaking open the five jars of flour that are going to have to last you the three days it’ll take to get down the mountain, only to find there’s been a cock-up somewhere in Supply, and your five jars of flour are in fact three jars of lamp-oil and two jars of shield-dubbin. Soldiering is getting to the top of the next lot of mountains and looking down to where there should be a big, wide river where the barges are waiting to carry you the next sixty miles; but not only are there no barges, there’s no damn river. Soldiering is furious arguments with some other poor bastard just like you over who was supposed to have checked with Intelligence that the barges were going to be there, and finding out that really it was your fault, and the whole miserable mess is your responsibility, nobody else’s. Soldiering is dysentery, unexplained fevers that you simply haven’t got time to indulge, wrenched muscles you ignore until you’re so used to the pain you don’t notice it any more; it’s men under your command having their hands torn off by badly secured loads shifting on the crane, or falling off narrow tracks down steep gullies and breaking their backs, and you have to leave them and keep going on, because if you stay and wait for them to die, the water or the barley for the mules is going to run out, and everybody’s going to be in trouble.
Oddly enough, you historians tend to skip over most everything that makes soldiering what it is, in favour of battles and plans of campaign and a whole lot of other stuff that happens on the edges of soldiering — it’s as if you really believe that any one man, one general, is in control of the things that happen to an army as it blunders and lurches along from one wretched, inconvenient foul-up to the next, or that battles turn out the way they do because two great men in red cloaks sit down to play a game of draughts with the bodies and lives of a hundred thousand people. Obviously you don’t believe anything of the sort, because nobody that gullible ever learned to read, let alone write a book; and yet you put it down in the scroll, and people who’ve been soldiers and know what it was really like will listen to your book being read and nod their heads, maybe muttering to the man sitting next to them, ‘Actually, I was on that campaign; I’d forgotten all about that skirmish till he mentioned it just now.’ You know, you’re almost as bad as Homer and the poets for not mentioning the painfully obvious. I suppose it’s some sort of literary convention, like the way that throughout a hundred thousand verses of the Iliad, with all the fighting and speechmaking and roaring about the place in chariots, nobody ever needs to stop what they’re doing to go for a pee.
Sorry, brother, am I boring you?
That’s all right, then. I saw you yawn, and I thought you might be getting bored. Just in case you’re only being polite, I’ll tell you about something truly interesting, shall I?
There’s a city called Tyre — you’ve heard of it? Oh, good. I’m not surprised;
after all, it’s one of the biggest cities in the world, maybe the most important seaport and trading centre in Asia . This would be — what, two years after we left Greece ? Something like that. King Alexander had resolved to capture Phoenicia , to get hold of the Persian fleet and so secure his seaborne supply-lines, or some such thoroughly intelligent plan. Anyway, it was winter and in Syria , in winter, it rains. Believe me, it rains. I’ve seen wonders all right, on these travels of mine; staggering rock formations and vast rivers and amazing animals and people, but for someone like me, coming from Attica where it rains twice a year, just about enough to fill a small cup, that Syrian rain was the most amazing sight of all. Have you ever been soaked to the skin by rain, brother? Well, it’s an experience. It gets in your eyes and your mouth, it trickles down between your neck and the rim of your breastplate, it turns the dust to oily black mud that sticks to your boots and makes your feet so heavy it’s unbearable to lift them. Well, while we were struggling through all that, Alexander was picking a rather genteel fight with the city fathers of Tyre , in the hope of making a pretext that would allow him to attack the city with honour.
Basically, Alexander wanted to find a way of not attacking Tyre . It was far too big and far too well defended to take by storm, and if we tried to lay siege to it we’d starve to death long before they did, with their ships unloading a thousand tons of grain a day into the town granaries. So he was trying to do what his father had done so well: scare them into giving up without a fight. All he really needed was a token of submission, nothing much; merely entering the city would do, at a pinch. So he wrote to the governing council to tell them he was proposing to visit the temple of Melkarth , of which he’d heard so much. The Tyrians wrote back saying that in fact the city temple wasn’t anything like it was cracked up to be; if he wanted to see a real cracker of a temple, he should do himself a favour and visit the one ten miles or so down the coast, where they had some absolutely stunning bas-reliefs. Alexander replied that he’d set his heart on seeing the city temple, and he’d take it as a personal favour if they’d just confirm that such a visit would be in order. He got no reply to that, and declared war at once.
‘It’s obvious what he’s up to,’ somebody said to me, as we huddled underneath the bed of a wagon for shelter from the rain. ‘ Tyre ’s the home base of the fleet the Persians would use if they were going to send help to anti-Macedonian rebels in Greece . Now then; Sparta ’s openly at war with the Macedonian presence in the Peloponnese , Athens is just waiting for someone to give the lead, and they’ll pile in too, and if Athens rebels, half of Greece will be up in arms, provided they can get money and supplies from Persia . From the Persian viewpoint, opening a second front back home in Greece is about the only thing they can think of that’d get Alexander out of Asia . So; unless Alexander takes Tyre , he could lose this war in a matter of days.’
It sounded eminently sensible under a cart in the middle of a flash rainstorm;
Tyre ’s a problem, get rid of Tyre , problem solved. Unfortunately, the nearer to Tyre we got, the harder it became. For one thing, Tyre isn’t on the coast;
it’s on an island, or at least the old town is, and that was the part we needed to capture. When I say island, I mean a proper island, not just some splinter of rock; butTyre old town covered every part of it, and the sprawl of the new town lay just across the straits on the mainland. Since the Tyrian navy controlled the sea, we couldn’t try an amphibious attack even if we’d wanted to (not that we’d ever want any such thing). All in all, the expression ‘hiding to nothing’
took on a whole new dimension of complex and sinister undertones in this context. The only logical course of action was to pack our things, send a polite note to the King of Persia apologising for any inconvenience, and go home.
I can’t remember, brother; when you were Alexander’s tutor, was logic part of the curriculum? If it was, you made a really poor job of it.
He took one look at the island, decided the sea had to go, and ordered us to fill it in.
It was such an awesome piece of arrogance and folly that nobody had the heart to object. That bit of sea’s in your way? Grab a spade and shovel dirt into it. So we did. To be precise, we set about building a causeway to link Tyre island with the mainland. To give you an idea of what was involved— ‘Eudaemon,’ I interrupted, ‘I’m sure
this is going to be absolutely fascinating, but it’s been a long day and I’ve got to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Do you think we might possibly.
He gave me a look that would have turned milk into cheese instantly. ‘Fuck you, brother,’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen each other for twenty-five years, after tomorrow we’ll probably never see each other again, I’m explaining to you in detail exactly how you buggered up my life, and all you can think about is sneaking off to your pit. Well, the hell with you, brother. You can damn well sit there and listen, and if you so much as nod, I’ll take this jug and smash it over your thick skull. Understood?’
I shrugged. ‘Since you put it like that,’ I said, ‘go on, please. Though I still don’t see why it’s my fault that Alexander ordered you to build a causeway across the straits of Tyre .’
Eudaemon smiled sourly. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because you will insist on talking rather than listening. Well, the less you interrupt, the sooner I’ll be done, so shut your face and pay attention.
Where was I? Oh, yes. To give you an idea of what was involved, think back to that time when we were kids and that rich bastard — now what was his name? The old bloke with the young wife and that incredibly ugly thing on his nose, damned if I can remember — yes, that’s it, Philochorus — that rich bastard Philochorus was terracing that parcel of mountain land he’d inherited from his uncle. Well, think back to when he was going round borrowing every slave and day labourer he could find for the job of carting the rubble and spoil for the terraces up the mountain. It all had to be lugged up there in baskets, remember, and so he was scrounging baskets too, every last hamper and backpack and pannier in Pallene;
only there weren’t enough, so he had to go to the Market Square and buy every blessed scrap of wickerwork he could find; and as soon as word got around that Philochorus the Nose was desperate for baskets, the prices climbed so high they were having to crane their necks to look down on Olympus.
And, dear gods, do you remember the performance when he actually got around to starting work? All the organisation; the relay teams and who was going to be foreman of which shift and who was going to report to who and the water-carriers and the muleteers suddenly coming over all snotty when they found out the masons were getting an obol a day more than they were and the masons talking back to the foreman because they weren’t being given enough time to do the shoring-up before the earth-moving crews started pouring in the dirt. Wasn’t that the best show we’d ever seen in our lives? Well, picture that in your mind’s eye, and then try to imagine what it was like doing a similar sort of job, only with a hundred thousand workers instead of a hundred; then factor in the complications of the sea and the constant hail of missiles and arrows from the ramparts ofTyre, and maybe your imagination might just get a toe wedged in the door of what it was like.
Not, of course, that I had any part in it. I was, as we say in the army, standing by; which means I was sitting on my bum where I’d been told to sit, all poised and ready just in case I might be needed at some undefined future stage in the proceedings. The first few days, of course, I really didn’t mind at all.
Our family have always relished watching other people work, and the spectacle of all those poor fools in full armour humping enormous baskets of rubble on their backs while trying to dodge catapult bolts without falling into the sea was fairly engrossing, I can tell you. The amazing, the utterly astonishing thing about it was the rate of progress. You wouldn’t have believed it possible that ordinary men and women chucking one basketful of dirt at a time into the sea could have achieved so much in such a short space of time. There was something utterly inhuman about it all; it was like watching a tree grow. Maybe that’s what it’s like for the gods; when they’re feeling lazy after a good meal, do they lie on their stomachs in the sun watching forests sprout or rivers dig themselves valleys between the hills? No wonder the gods don’t seem to care too much about us. We must move so fast, they couldn’t even see us if they tried.
After a few days, though, I was so twitchy and uptight I couldn’t keep still any longer. I broke the cardinal rule of military life, and volunteered. The staff bastard in charge shook his head and told me I wasn’t allowed to; I was specialist technical crew and I had to carry on standing by, whether I liked it or not. He added that if I volunteered again he’d have me suspended from duty on grounds of insanity, so I gave it up and went back to the tree-stump I’d been sitting on for the past three days.
As it turned out, he’d done me a big favour, because by that point the Tyre garrison had stopped gathering on the walls to laugh themselves silly at us, and were getting pretty damn nervous. So they decided to stop us; they stepped up the interference fire from the walls, they sent out war-galleys in continuous shifts to stand off a hundred yards on either side of the causeway and shoot up the work crews — which meant, in effect, that our people were under fire on three sides; they were dropping like olives off a tree, though that didn’t constitute a valid reason for not working, and besides, they were only local civilians, so it didn’t matter. It was only much later, when the rate of progress had slowed by about a quarter, that Alexander realised he was going to have to divert some manpower from the job to deal with these bastards; but that was all right from my point of view, because finally I was allowed to do something.
The idea was that we’d unship and assemble two of the mobile siege towers that we carried disassembled in kit form, and wheel them up to the top of the causeway to provide cover. Well, we set to with a vengeance, and there really was a lot to do.
They were a fairly new addition to our stores, those towers; it was only when we reached Lebanon that we were able to find timber long and strong enough to build these particular designs. That meant, of course, that we’d never actually had to unship and assemble the damned things before; we hadn’t even worked out the drill in theory, let alone smoothed out the wrinkles in practice. I’m here to tell you, it was a hell of a job to have to do on the fly. Those things were enormous, they had to be in order to bear the weight of the full-size long-range catapults that Alexander wanted installed at the top of each tower. First we had to raise the uprights; of course, we found out at this point that half of the tenons didn’t quite fit the mortices, because the green timber had moved a bit since it was cut, so we had to plane and shave and chisel out on site, up to our ankles in dust and mud and shavings, while our people were being slaughtered by the dozen a few hundred yards away. Helps you concentrate, something like that.
Anyway; we got the frames up, laid in the ties and braces, put in the flooring and the rails, finished up by stretching any number of green raw hides over the frames to stop the arrows and catapult shot, and handed them over to the teams who had the job of deploying the things. We’d done well, no doubt about it; and those things worked, too. They were tall enough that the guys inside them could get clear shots at the enemy on the wall and in the ships, and robust enough not to fall to bits no matter what got slung at them. We’d had the sense, you see, to stretch those hides pretty slack, so that arrows and such just flopped off them instead of going through.
To cut a long story short, things were going pretty much our way by this stage.
The towers were doing their job, and to increase the protection for the work crews we’d made up rawhide fences that ran the whole length of the causeway, so not a lot was getting through one way or another. Just when we thought we’d cracked it, in fact, those bastards on the island turned round and showed us we hadn’t. Let me tell you about that, brother, if you can spare the time.
It was early one morning, and there was a good stiff westerly wind blowing; we noticed two Tyrian warships cracking along at a hell of a lick, towing this enormous fat old hulk of a horse-transport. It was so broad in the beam it was practically round, and it was sitting up in the water like a dog begging. Oddest thing about it was two thin masts right forward; they looked like thin, bare saplings and they had round cauldrons hanging from the yard-arms, like a
pples on the branches of a tree.
We were staring at this thing thinking What the hell? when the warships towing it veered off on either side of the nose end of the causeway, cut cables and buggered off at top speed, letting the hulk carry on under its own momentum so that it crashed into the front end and actually rode up on the causeway broadwalk, for all the world like an otter or a seal. Under the impact the two flimsy masts bust, and those cauldrons went toppling down; turned out that they were full of this mixture of pitch and naphtha — that’s a kind of lamp-oil they draw off out of the rocks in those parts, and boy, does it burn well; doesn’t just catch fire like olive oil or lard tallow, it goes up whoosh! and the next thing you know is, people are staring at you and saying, Sorry, didn’t recognise you without the beard — along with this other secret ingredient they’ve got that actually catches alight when it comes in contact with water. Result, the mixture slops all over the wooden planking and the props and struts, not to mention the towers, the hide fences and quite a lot of people, then drains over the side into the water and wham, flares up like hell, and suddenly everything’s on fire.
Meanwhile the two warships had come back, along with a whole load of other boats, all of them with archers and catapult crews squeezed in right along the rails; first they shot the guys jumping off the burning causeway into the water, then the other guys who didn’t dare jump for fear of getting shot, and the fire took care of the rest. By the time the Tyrians had disembarked their assault parties on the causeway, there wasn’t anybody left alive to fight. So they knuckled down to their job of breaking up the causeway, while the ships covered them against our reinforcements. Between them and the fire, they did as thorough a job as you’d ever want to see, and before what was happening had really started to sink in properly, down the causeway slid, its own weight letting it simply melt down into the water.