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

There was nothing we could do.

In the morning, we looked out and the mole wasn’t there any more. There were blackened timbers and occasional glimpses of rock. But we’d lost the work of two months in as many hours.

Alexander vanished into his tent. I didn’t see him for a week, and during that week, I heard discouraging rumours. Then, as the clean-up was under way and Diades was replanning the framework of his mole, I was summoned to the king’s side.

‘Ptolemy!’ Alexander said, as I entered. ‘How well muscled you are. I see too little of you!’

False bonhomie was never a good sign, with Alexander.

‘The mole takes all my time, lord,’ I said.

‘When we ride, I insist you ride with me so that we can catch up,’ Alexander said, as if I didn’t serve in his army. About what could we catch up? The minutiae of my taxeis?

‘Are we to go hunting?’ I asked.

Alexander bit his lip for a moment – then smiled. ‘No – I’ve decided to give up the siege. It’s dull, and it won’t get us anywhere. Tyre is not that important a city – and if we build even a small fort here on the mainland, we can deny them the ability to forage on the mainland, and they won’t be able to keep their fleet here, which is all I need.’

Well, I hated the siege, and I was considering just letting go, but I’ve never been good at keeping my mouth shut. ‘They can keep their fleet supplied in Tyre,’ I said. ‘They’re doing it right now. They just sail around us. Merchant shipping can keep them supplied.’

Alexander looked at me, and his mouth worked like a fish’s.

Hephaestion glared at me. ‘The king has made up his mind,’ he announced.

I shrugged. ‘Well, I could make an argument that we’re screwed either way. If we march away, Darius can say we’re beaten, and if we stay, we let Tyre soak up our efforts while Darius rebuilds his army.’ I gave the king a mocking, lopsided smile. ‘I know that I’d rather march away. Even if the siege is good for my physique.’

Alexander was looking at Hephaestion. Hephaestion was giving me his angry drama-queen look.

‘They will use ships to resupply their ships,’ Alexander said. ‘And be astride my rear when I march into Aegypt.’ He slumped. ‘Curses on this place. If I take it, I’m going to kill every person in it, free or slave.’

I didn’t like the sound of that – Alexander prided himself on being merciful.

We played dice for a while. And then we played Polis, and I entertained them with the tale of Marsyas and Cleomenes.

Hephaestion glowered. ‘Women only bring trouble. There should be none with the army. Nasty creatures, that dull a man and sap his strength.’

That sounded personal.

Alexander made a face. ‘Now, Hephaestion,’ he said, gently reproving.

‘If you spent less time between certain thighs, you’d be doing a better job prosecuting this siege.’ Hephaestion was all but pouting.

I chuckled, because it was funny, and the two of them turned to me as if their heads were controlled by one string.

‘It’s true!’ Hephaestion said, between anger and whining. ‘Ask him where he was the night the mole burned? Eh? Ask him.’

There’re times when it is best to think of another errand, but I was with the king, and I couldn’t think of an excuse to leave.

Alexander turned to me. ‘Do you think I’m avoiding my duties, Ptolemy?’ he asked, his voice as mild as a mother’s to a newborn.

What is the old joke? Have you beaten your wife, lately? Much the same.

‘That is too serious an accusation, lord,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t know. In fact, of the three of us, only you know whether you are fulfilling all your duties.’ There – the biter bit, and all that. Aristotle would have been proud.

When I left the tent, there was a very pretty boy in perfumes and powders waiting in the anteroom. I gathered from a chance-heard comment that he was a pet of Barsines, come to beg the king to attend her for music.

There was, too, a eunuch from the Queen Mother of Persia, also waiting.

When I emerged into the full heat of day, I noted that there were at least a hundred men and women waiting outside the command compound for audiences with the king, and not one of them was anyone I knew – or anyone to do with the army. Most of them were vultures.

We must be winning, I remember thinking. We must be winning, because all these useless mouths are following us.

I related the whole scene to Thaïs, to pass the time, because she was in the eighth month and distinctly unhappy. I don’t think any woman, no matter how well beloved, loves her heaviest month, and for Thaïs, one of the world’s beauties, to have to face Barsines every morning over sherbet – Banugul on her way out to riding with the king . . .

Thaïs was only human.

But that morning, I remember that she heard me out and sent for Barsines. I had no inkling of what she was after, so I went about my work.

It became clear in an hour that we needed a new source of timber and a great deal more rock. Helios showed me the numbers, and begged me to get Diades an audience with the king. Or even with Hephaestion.

Diades was afraid it was over. Everyone was.

I took both of them with me, picked up Perdiccas and Craterus for support, and marched the lot of them to Alexander’s pavilions, where the hypaspitoi admitted us without delay.

Astibus caught up with me as we crossed the Aegema’s parade square. ‘He has the Persian slut with him,’ he said. ‘One of them. The Greek one.’ He shrugged.

In fact, I’d have sworn that Astibus was jealous.

I brushed him off and we went to the door of Alexander’s pavilion. Hephaestion was standing outside , which never happened. I made to speak to him, but he raised a hand brusquely, and then – lest I be offended – cupped his ear.

He was listening.

‘I am not interested in your protestations of love,’ Barsines said. The words floated out of the tent, and her magnificent voice was as hard as rock.

Alexander sounded plaintive – a tone of voice I had only ever heard him use with his mother. ‘I seek only to please you,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Then take Tyre,’ she said.

Alexander was haughty. ‘I will choose to take it or not to take it as my strategy dictates.’

‘When a woman changes her mind on a whim, she does not pretend it is a strategy,’ Barsines shot back.

‘You go too far,’ Alexander spat.

Gods, he sounded just like a man. Not at all like a god.

Even the sentries were smiling.

‘You know nothing of war, nothing of strategy and nothing of how my mind works,’ he continued.

Barsines’ voice was a steel sword in a silk sheath. ‘My lord, I know none of these things. I only know that if my husband, Memnon, had set his mind to take this city, he would have taken it .’

Silence fell.

After a long, long hundred heartbeats, the most beautiful woman on the face of earth swept by me. She flashed me a small smile.

I turned my party around and marched them back out of the royal precinct.

‘Not a good time,’ I suggested to Helios and Diades, who were both deeply shaken.

But several hours later, as I went over Helios’s notes on wood consumption, Hephaestion poked his head into the command tent and grinned.

‘Back on,’ he said. He had the good grace to shake his head – he’d wanted to end the siege, but he was as much of a hero-mad fool as Alexander, and he did occasionally like to see the king taken down a peg.

And just like that, we were back to work.

We spent two weeks gathering new materials from new sources, and after the Athenian feast of Plunteria, we were back to work on the mole, and it went faster than before, because there was a broad base of gravel and rubble just below the surface to receive our work. It took us just two weeks to push the base of the mole out to where it had been before, and then we had a new enemy with which to contend. Because a stade short of the walls, the underwater ridge we’d used as the basis of our mole ran out, and we were now flinging rubble into deep water. It sank away out of sight, and after five days, we didn’t see any change.