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

Thaïs rolled her eyes, and all three women laughed.

‘Beauty fades,’ Thaïs said.

Barsines nodded. ‘I try to make myself ready,’ she said. ‘Because I do love it.’

Banugul laughed. It was a laugh of bitterness.

Thaïs clutched her child. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said suddenly to Memnon’s wife.

Barsines had tears in her eyes. ‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

She’s sorry, now that you prove so human, that she killed your man , I thought.

The next day I donned a good chiton and military sandals and went to attend the king. He’d received a formal letter from the Great King of Persia. He presented it to us – a plain letter on good papyrus, not a purple parchment with golden ink, as I’d been led to expect by Herodotus, but such things are often exaggerated.

Darius referred to Alexander, not as a fellow king, but in a slighting manner, and asked for the return of his wife and mother and his eldest son, and he offered to cede to Alexander about a third of the empire. It was a curious letter, full of false pomp and oddly arrogant for a man who ‘begged’ for the return of his wife.

We debated the letter after a fine dinner, the way Athenians debate the role of love after a symposium. As you might expect, it broke down into an argument – a nasty argument – between the two factions. The older men, Philip’s men, were for agreeing to its terms, and the younger men were for rejecting them out of hand. Despite the slowness of the siege, every one of us was sure we’d take the place. It would take time. But we were winning. The Persian Empire was beginning to shred itself – satraps were negotiating through Thaïs’s people, or directly with our king. Athens continued to sit on the fence.

Alexander stayed carefully silent.

When everyone had had too much wine, Parmenio rose to his feet and raised his cup. ‘If I were Alexander, great King of Macedon, I would accept this offer, and be done with war – victorious King of Asia.’ He raised the cup and drank.

Alexander took the cup next and smiled into Parmenio’s eyes. I thought for a moment that he meant the two of them to be reconciled.

He raised the cup. ‘If I were Parmenio,’ he said with careful malice, ‘I would accept.’ He drank the wine, and Parmenio’s face flamed with humiliation.

I helped draft the letter to Darius. A group of us did – Hephaestion, Amyntas, Nearchus, who was down in our camp for a visit.

But Alexander set the tone.

‘Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us harm although we had not done you any previous injury. I have been appointed commander-in-chief of the Greeks, and it is with the aim of punishing the Persians that I have crossed into Asia, since you are the aggressors. You gave support to the people of Perinthus, who had done my father harm, and Ochus sent a force to Thrace, which was under our rule. My father died at the hand of conspirators instigated by you, as you yourself boasted to everybody in your letters, you killed Arses with the help of Bagoas and gained your throne through unjust means, in defiance of Persian custom and doing wrong to the Persians. You sent unfriendly letters to the Greeks about me, to push them to war against me, and sent money to the Spartans and some other Greeks, which none of the other cities would accept apart from the Spartans. Your envoys corrupted my friends and sought to destroy the peace that I had established among the Greeks.

‘I therefore led an expedition against you, and you started the quarrel. But now I have defeated in battle first your generals and satraps, and now you in person and your army, and by the grace of the gods I control the country. All those who fought on your side and did not die in battle but came over to me, I hold myself responsible for them; they are not on my side under duress but are taking part in the expedition of their own free will. Approach me therefore as the lord of all Asia. If you are afraid of suffering harm at my hands by coming in person, send some of your friends to receive proper assurances. Come to me to ask and receive your mother, your wife, your children and anything else you wish. Whatever you can persuade me to give shall be yours.

‘In future whenever you communicate with me, send to me as King of Asia; do not write to me as an equal, but state your demands to the master of all your possessions. If not, I shall deal with you as a wrongdoer. If you wish to lay claim to the title of king, then stand your ground and fight for it; do not take to flight, as I shall pursue you wherever you may be.’

Humble, really. That was Alexander in full stride.

Outside, the mole got longer, and in his tent, Banugul, or Barsines, or Darius’s wife – perhaps all three at once – lay on his couch.

TWENTY-FOUR

I spent a significant portion of my life at Tyre. None of it is in the Military Journal.

After about six weeks, the Tyrians saw what was going to happen, and they became active in their defence. They flooded the sea in front of the mole with small boats, and shot arrows into the work parties. Cleomenes took an arrow through the bicep, and Marsyas stood over him with a pair of nested wicker baskets and kept him from death, and they were friends again. Thank the gods, they’d been tiresome as enemies, and Thaïs’s best efforts to reconcile them had failed on the twin rocks of pride and fatigue.

The next day, under fire, men from my taxeis, in full armour and with more men covering them with great hide-covered shields, erected two tall towers and built a wooden wall across the end of the mole. During the night we put heavy bolt-shooters into the towers, and by day the low wall was lined with Diades’ own specialists, the bowmen carrying gastraphetes and oxybeles, two-man crossbows.

The next time the Tyrians came out in their boats, we shot them out of the water. It was very satisfying, but it didn’t get the mole built, and now we had to push the towers forward every time we advanced the top of the mole any distance. That was harder than it sounds, and the towers had to be taken down in the dark and rebuilt, and Diades, who had the painful honesty of the professional engineer, reminded us that in a month we’d be in the range of their most powerful engines on the walls, and then they would be able to hit us while we worked and to cover their boats – and perhaps even batter down our towers.

Before that, however, the Tyrians tried their first serious sortie. They came at us in the dark. I wasn’t on the wall – I was sound asleep in the arms of exhaustion. Thaïs was in her eighth month and slept in a separate tent with slaves fanning her all night.

There was a rumour that Banugul put on armour and served in the ranks.

The Tyrians sacrificed a pair of ancient triremes, filling them with flammables and ramming them ashore against the mole before setting them alight. Then they bombarded the mole with showers of hot sand and gravel – red hot, glowing hot – so that we couldn’t fight the resulting fires.

I was awakened to light in the sky and screams. I slipped my sword belt over my head and ran for the head of the mole, with Isokles and Polystratus behind me. I ordered the taxeis to stand to, with phylarchs in armour and everyone else ready to work.

By the time I reached the mole, the end was an inferno. The Tyrians had packed those ships with oil and resin and old cloth and cedar. They burned so hot that they set the timber frame of the mole on fire, and it burned, and suddenly, about an hour before dawn, four weeks’ work collapsed. The end of the mole simply fell away into the sea with a massive cloud of steam that cut off the stars and then an explosion as the superheated rocks of what had been the surface of the mole fell into the water and shattered.