Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Alexander watched him go. ‘I didn’t expect you to side with Parmenio,’ he said to me in a chilling voice.

‘Lord,’ I said, and I turned on him, ‘I don’t need to protest my loyalty to you, do I? You risk an open breach with Parmenio in the middle of this siege. Is that what you want?’

‘Eventually I must clean my house,’ Alexander said.

I had missed it. He was drunk. He was telling the truth, as men often do, in their cups, but he was drunk.

‘Not right now, I think. Not while we are in the face of the enemy – a very competent enemy.’ Marsyas said that – bless him. The only courtier with enough balls to agree with me in the face of the king’s drunkenness.

‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ Hephaestion said.

I nodded, glad that I, at least, was sober. ‘Parmenio cannot be trusted,’ I agreed. ‘He may even try to kill the king,’ I added quietly. ‘But he is the second most powerful man in the army, and he has the loyalty of many, many men – men we need to conquer Asia. Now is not the time. We might have civil war.’

Marsyas nodded, and Black Cleitus looked at me carefully. But Alexander turned his back on me, leaned on Hephaestion, and walked from the tent.

About six hours later, while the sun was just a hint of orange-grey in the sky over the sea to the east, Memnon struck.

He sent a thousand men with buckets of pitch and blackened faces out of a secret postern gate. They ran silently across no man’s land, overwhelmed the young men on guard duty and plunged in among the war machines. Their pitch buckets and fire pots went straight to work, and in minutes they had all the engines on the north side of the city aflame.

It was brutal, and grim, and in those flames we read our doom. We had lost our entire siege train in fewer minutes than it takes words to tell it.

The pezhetaeroi rallied to counter-attack over the batteries and men formed up with buckets of water – scarce water, many men using what was in their canteens. The pezhetaeroi stormed forward in the dark, and met a fierce resistance – the black-painted men fought like demons. The pezhetaeroi were spear to spear and shield to shield with many of Greece’s best men, and it was dark. In many ways, the situation favoured the Greeks fighting for Persia.

When the pezhetaeroi bogged down – still well short of retaking the battery platforms – Memnon sprung the second part of his trap, and released another sortie from the main gate . Again. We still weren’t ready to see troops coming out of the main gate, but they did – a major force of hoplites and a handful of cavalry, led by the two Athenian strategoi. They slammed into the flank of the pezhetaeroi, catching them at open shields, and the execution they inflicted was horrible.

And then the gods took a hand.

It was at this point, when all was lost, the machines burned and Memnon’s masterstroke was unveiled, that I arrived on the scene – in armour, thanks to Polystratus’s and Thaïs’s efforts. My shoulder was stiff and painful and I ached all over, but the sound of disaster is unmistakable. I ran for the fighting, with my grooms and a dozen friends at my back.

I found Alexander in the gloom. He was waiting for the hypaspitoi to form up. He was watching the fighting – listening, perhaps.

Alectus was forming men as fast as they piled out of their tents, and I put my grooms and any man I could lay hands on in the ranks with them and ran to Alexander’s side.

‘Good morning, Ptolemy,’ he said.

‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘Oh – terrible. But not insurmountable. Memnon has made a mistake. Very unlike him, but a good lesson to all of us.’ Alexander turned to me, and he was smiling. ‘Memnon is really very, very good. When this campaign started, he was a better general than I, but by the time we’re done, I’ll have learned what he has to teach. He does everything by misdirection. Brilliant. We Macedonians too often bludgeon. Memnon always cuts with the fine knife.’ He nodded.

I could hear the pezhetaeroi dying.

‘Memnon’s made a mistake?’ I asked.

‘He has. His raid burned our engines and his masterstroke killed our counter-attack to rescue them.’ Alexander was, as always once the fighting started, calm and detached. ‘Had he broken contact at that point, and got his force back behind the walls, we’d have lost here. And not just here. Memnon’s strategy is brilliant – to wear me out here and then take his fleet and go to Greece.’ Alexander watched the fires of the siege engines burning, his dreams of conquest going up in pitch-soaked flames and the fires reflected in his eyes and the gold of his helmet. Behind us, Alectus was roaring at stragglers.

Alexander pointed with his chin towards Parmenio’s tent on the left of the army. ‘What he cannot understand is that we are fighting for Greece, right here. If Memnon leaves us defeated here – we’re done. Most of you cannot imagine how vast the Great King’s empire is. Nor how many times we’ll have to defeat it.’

‘Ready, Lord King,’ Alectus reported.

Alexander pointed at the gates. ‘But Memnon elected to commit his troops to his victory, and even now, more and more of his precious Greek hoplites are pressing through the main gates on to a chaotic battlefield where it is as black as pitch. On to the killing ground.’ He raised his voice so that the men behind him could hear. Next to us, a battalion of old men was forming. They weren’t even all from the same taxeis – it was a formation of veterans. Philip’s veterans. Hundreds of them.

Alexander pitched his voice appropriately, as he was always able to do. ‘They have burned our engines, but they have now sent so many of the garrison outside the walls that we have it in our power to win the city on the battlefield. The pezhetaeroi have fought like young lions – have not broken. Now – you veterans of Philip – go and show them what you learned from Phokion and Charmides and on a hundred other battlefields. We are not in Asia to survive. We are in Asia to conquer.’

The veterans let out a growl like a cheer and went forward, led – in person – by Parmenio. It was odd, and more than a little ironic. The very best thing he could have done for his own plans would have been to stay in his tent. But he was not that man. He was Parmenio – the best general in Macedon – and he led his veterans to save the day because that’s what he did. Most men – and women – can plot and scheme evil, but when it comes to the day and the moment, they will be staunch to what they believe in. Thus Parmenio, in that hour, could not leave his men to die to serve his policy of humiliating the king.

He roared the king’s name, and his phalanx answered, and they went forward into the firelit darkness.

We went farther north, skirting the fire. Alexander was sure there’d be another sortie out of the gate facing the new works, and he led the hypaspitoi there. I had Kineas the Athenian on one side of me and Hephaestion on my other side, and we went into the ditch that surrounded the city and caught the Persian levies that Memnon had been using as a labour force, now given weapons and released to cause havoc. We caught them leaving the gate and we slaughtered them.

I take no joy in slaughter. I like a good fight, now and then – I like to win and I hate to lose, but I like the fight to be . . . interesting.

This was a butchery of peasants, and it went on too long.

And then we pressed forward into the dark, with Alexander’s golden lion helmet burning like a beacon in the light cast by the flames from the walls and the burning machines. He glowed with power, and we ran through the night, falling over logs and stones, cursing the darkness.

The fight at the main gate was locked in stalemate. The old men – Philip’s men – had saved the phalanx and steadied it, but they could not beat the hoplites, who, man for man, were as good or better. And darkness aids no man. Darkness robs the best swordsman of his skill and the rawest recruit of his wits. Dawn was coming up, somewhere far to the east – Athens was probably already lit by sun, and Pella was at least burning pink, but under the walls of Halicarnassus, it was still as black as new-poured pitch, lit only by fires.