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

Azemiticus spread his hands wide, to indicate that it was beyond his control. ‘The ancient temple is in the ancient city, here on the mainland,’ he said. ‘Really, you should content yourself with that.’

How did this man get to be the leader of one of the most powerful cities on earth? No wonder translators so often lie about what their principals have said. Had the fool Syrian merely suggested that the land temple was older and more sacred than the island temple, we would have been done. Consensus might have been reached. Alexander might easily have been convinced that the older temple was the more important.

But the word ‘content’ and the contempt with which it was uttered settled the matter.

Alexander’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Your temple in the city, or I storm it,’ he said.

Azemiticus stood. ‘Try, barbarian.’ He grinned. Then he turned and left. I think he always meant to – I think he wanted, like so many other men, to be the man who stopped Alexander.

To be fair, Tyre was a hideously hard nut to crack and Alexander didn’t want to do it, so after a stormy council meeting with Hephaestion and Craterus and all of us, we sent three officers to the city with new terms. The king was to be allowed to sacrifice at the altars of Melkart, but in every other way, Tyre paid less gold and got less interference.

Azemiticus had all three young men executed. He stripped them naked on the walls where we could see, had spears rammed into their anuses until the spearheads came out through their mouths, and then threw them into the sea.

What a fool. In so doing, he condemned his city to death. With whom did he think he was dealing?

Diades was Alexander’s foremost engineer, after Halicarnassus. He was a pupil of Aristotle’s, not brilliant but careful and conscientious, and best of all, he was very good at making Alexander understand him. Alexander was too impatient for a siege, and it didn’t suit his temperament. Diades was a patient man.

He got a small boat and had himself rowed all around the walls. Tyre was on a large island – in fact, I’ve been told it had once been four small islands, now linked together by generations of mortar and stone. The walls facing the mainland were quite high, but some of the walls were not.

Tyre had its own fleet, and recalled a large portion of it from Persian service to face us – almost a hundred triremes, and a dozen larger ships. We had no fleet to speak of, so their sea power not only eliminated any chance that we might land troops on the lower parts of the walls, but guaranteed that they would be supplied whenever they wanted them. In fact, quite early in the siege, before we’d even begun our engineering efforts, a Carthaginian fleet arrived with food and left carrying all of the city’s women and children to safety. Carthage had the largest maritime empire in the Inner Sea, and the knowledge that they would come to the rescue of their mother city was a blow to us. Watching the ease with which their thirty-ship squadrons sailed in and out enraged Alexander, who responded with a declaration of war against Carthage. Against Carthage! Because we didn’t have enough enemies!

The third night after the assassination of our envoys, Diades called the military council together to make his report.

He was a short, thick man with arms like old cables, and men called him ‘The Smith’. Other men called him Hephaestus. He was not old, but he was so careful in his speech that he sometimes sounded like a man of Parmenio’s generation. He had my Helios as an assistant, and Helios grinned at me when he set up the easel on which Diades arranged his drawings.

Diades rubbed his beard and waited for silence.

Philotas threw a bread pill at his brother, who responded by throwing a grape at Philotas. It missed and hit his father, splashing purple-red on Parmenio’s spotless uniform chiton. Nicanor paled.

Parmenio walked over with the grape and slapped it into his son’s hair. Then he rubbed it in.

Nicanor just allowed it to happen.

Alexander wasn’t the only man with a bad temper, let me tell you. At any rate, after a great deal of throat-clearing, Diades held out his hands.

‘Tyre,’ he said. His voice came out in an odd, loud, strangled way, and in the old temple – which we were using as both a temple and a meeting room – it was so loud that he frightened himself. He went on in a voice so soft that men behind the first row could not hear him.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander said.

Diades glared at him.

We all laughed. That seemed to help him. He steadied, looked around and rubbed his beard with his left hand.

‘You know how it is,’ he asked, ‘when you start a project and you don’t know if you can finish it? Those are always the hardest projects. Because you fear that all your work may be in vain. Whether that project is the pursuit of a woman, or the conquest of Asia, or the making of a fine gold seal – in every case, the uncertainty of completion is more of a limit to success than any limits to our skills – whether seduction, conquest or craftsmanship.’

I told you – Aristotle trained him. He was a brilliant thinker, when he put himself to it.

‘The siege of Tyre will be an extreme example of such a project. There is only one practical way of approaching the city, and that way will bring us into contact with the highest and stoutest portion of the wall. By my estimation, it will take us seven months merely to reach a point where we might say that the city is under siege. Until then, we will merely be building – building a causeway. And the citizens of Tyre will laugh at us. We won’t interrupt their food supply. We cannot even slow their trade! We cannot build engines whose stones will hit their walls, we cannot throw fire into the city itself, we cannot open trenches, we cannot undermine. We cannot storm the city, because we would have to walk across the ocean bottom to reach it.’

Alexander made to interrupt, but Diades, who knew his man, drove on.

‘But we can take the city. We will need to build a mole – a causeway – three stades long and half a stade wide. The amount of earth and stone required will make the building of this mole a greater labour than any performed by Herakles, and the gods may be jealous, because if we succeed, that mole will endure for ever. But my lord king, and all of you – if we persevere, we will succeed. Engineering is a science, not an art. If we work hard and move earth, the mole will grow a little each day, and eventually, we will have them. And if you choose not to build the mole . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We will never have them.’

He went and sat.

Alexander rose. ‘You are talking a siege of a year.’

Diades nodded. ‘At least a year, unless a fortuitous event happens, or the gods take a hand.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘We have triumphed thus far by the speed of our advance and our reputation as invincible. How will that look if we take a year to storm one city?’

Parmenio sneered, ‘We have bypassed cities before.’

Callisthenes shook his head. ‘Not cities that have defied us. Not cities that have murdered our ambassadors.’

He directed the Military Journal, and he decided what the Greeks should be allowed to know – and he wrote the florid reports of our victories. His carefully doctored lies were essential to the way the Macedonian army was perceived. More and more, he worked directly with Thaïs, whom he affected to despise, and her information and his often worked together.

I disliked him. But in this case, I agreed with him.

‘I took the Halicarnassus island forts,’ I said. ‘Or rather, Helios there, by the easel, took them. It took us seven months. Until the last three weeks, none of the garrison even thought that they were in danger.’