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

Caunus, on the other hand, sat three-quarters surrounded by land – flat, well-earthed land. Helios got off his horse in the dawn – we were moving fast and light – and crawled right up to the city wall, and he returned convinced that he could tunnel under the walls in a week.

We got back to Halicarnassus late in the evening, after dark, soaked and very cold. I rode into the courtyard of my house and found it in near panic.

Queen Ada had come into my house in Halicarnassus without being announced. The cold rain poured down the gutters of the house and spat out on to the ground, and I was in a surly mood – I wanted to throw Thaïs on a bed – or a warm floor – and I didn’t want to deal with this woman.

It was as bad as I feared.

‘Why has he not written to me?’ she demanded as I entered the room.

Why indeed? Because he was done with her. Because sex with her made him feel like a mortal, not a god.

Thaïs spoke to her rapidly in a low voice.

‘You are my strategos, Lord Ptolemy?’ the queen asked, more pleasantly.

In fact, I was the absolute lord of Caria. It said so on my warrant. But Alexander had promised her independence, when it suited him, and now I was left holding this particular bag. Love, sex, war, politics. A nasty brew.

‘I command all of the king’s troops in your kingdom,’ I said, as precisely as possible. ‘I will complete the task of reconquest.’

She nodded. ‘When will he return?’ she asked.

It was pitiful – sad, awful. When I’d first met her, I’d been impressed with her vitality, her youth and her complete mastery of the situation. She was a tough woman and a warrior.

Now she was an adolescent girl at the well, begging for news that her beloved still loved her.

She looked old and she sounded foolish, and she knew it herself.

Thaïs was equal to the situation. With a long glance at me – a hopeful one, I felt – she took the queen off to the baths, and I was left with two male slaves and a basin of tepid water.

I got clean, and had them oil me. I was lying on a heated slab – Halicarnassus was a civilised city, and we rebuilt the best parts – and the masseur was pounding my back and then running the sharp edge of the strigil over it – a wonderful, clean feeling. He went on and on, and then the strigil began to scrape harder, and the wielder poked the bent front of it sharply into my armpit and I was fully awake.

I thought he’d slipped, and he did it again – this time the thing prodded me just over the hip and I jumped like a skittish horse.

‘Hey!’ I said, and rolled over to find that Thaïs was bending over me with mischief in her eyes and a string of pearls wound into her hair – as her sole ornament.

By the gods, life can be good.

It took me a year to reduce the strongholds of Caria. I won’t say it was hellish, but it was exacting, hard work, and it changed my relationships with the men under me, with Kineas, with Helios, with Polystratus, with Thaïs. I had had commands before, but this was my army, and these were my orders from the king. Like Antigonus One-Eye, I had a major command and no help whatsoever. Each of us had to make our own way. That’s what the king expected.

Unlike One-Eye, I was in the face of the real enemy. Memnon retreated from Halicarnassus only to seize Cos, just a few stades from the end of our peninsula. Thaïs’s people said he had received little opposition there, and in fact Ionia was already a little tired of Alexander. He was rather too much like a conqueror and rather too disturbing. These weren’t enslaved Greeks clamouring for freedom – they were rich, settled men and women looking to get on with their lives. He also took Mytilene on Lesbos, and all of Chios. He had a base facing us across the water – and the first stepping stone towards moving his fleet to Greece and Macedon. He had four times the number of troops I had, and the entire Persian fleet – four hundred ships. So I had to be very careful when I moved. In the whole year I was in Caria, I feared – every day – a brilliant descent on my beaches, a dashing attack on a marching column. I scouted everything.

It made me a better soldier. Memnon was to my generation and your father’s as Phokion was to Philip – fighting him made us better.

One advantage we had was the empty city of Halicarnassus. Memnon couldn’t spy on me there – there was no population base, and as they began to return, Thaïs’s people were ruthless in searching out his agents. Her finest hour came at midwinter, when she detected one of his men – a Greek soldier posing as a merchant ‘returning’ to his city. Instead of hanging him, she planted a slave on him – a slave who was, in fact, one of her own men. For the rest of the winter we fed him carefully written reports – he suborned slaves in my headquarters and bought scraps of parchment and stolen wax tablets from them, and we spent some amusing hours drafting these forgeries.

First we fed him a cheap victory. I had hired a pair of shipwrights from Miletus and they were building me a pair of triremes down the coast, but either they were charlatans or their workmen were useless. Either way, what they ended up with weren’t worth a pile of horse manure, so we allowed news of them to get to Memnon and he obligingly landed a force and burned them. That proved to us that our man was working, and also built his credibility.

Then we allowed Memnon to know of a grain ship heading for us. I had plenty of grain. He seized it, and our tame agent was delighted. Then we allowed Memnon to know that we were so terrified of his intelligence network and his fleet that we were barricaded in Halicarnassus.

And then, on a cold, rainy night, I slipped my little army out through a postern gate and raced for Caunus.

We missed storming the place by surprise – by a blade of grass. But the closing of the gates caught a third of the garrison outside the walls, gathering new bedding, and we took them prisoner. I didn’t even summon the town to surrender – I constructed my ten engines from the abundant local wood, and my first stones were flying before the sun set on the first day of the siege.

The town offered to surrender on the third day, but informed us that they could not surrender the citadel, which was in the hands of Memnon’s troops. I accepted their surrender and moved my machines up, all in one day. In the face of the outrage of the citizens, I had my slaves demolish a whole (rather rich) quarter of the city, and I used every slave in the town and many of the poorer citizens to move earth so that my platform was done in three days – to the same height as the top of the citadel wall.

They were Greeks. They didn’t expect it to be so fast. On the fifth day, my machines were smashing the parapet. It was a small citadel, less than a stade on a side, with three steep, rocky sides, but the fourth was merely a steep slope with a high wall, and I blew that wall to Hades in a day – mud brick on a stone base.

They went to work building a new wall behind the rubble of the old wall.

Before they finished it, Helios’s mine, started on the first day, reached the point he thought was correct, and we fired it, and the whole north face of their acropolis crumbled.

Helios, the former slave, accepted success and victory with a calm equanimity that made me love him. He thanked every slave and free digger, and he freed three men whose efforts had been spectacular.

And then I packed up my army, put a garrison under Pyrrhus in the town and raced back up the coast to Halicarnassus. As I expected, Memnon landed a counter-attack, but his attempt to cut the coast road missed me by a day, and I was safe in the walls of Halicarnassus when his army got back in their ships. They tried to retake Caunus by coup de main , but Pyrrhus was ready and they failed.