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

Divers measured the distance to the bottom and said that it was over ten man-heights deep.

Diades rode away for three days while we stockpiled baskets and rubble and large stones, and he returned, gathered all the oxen and rode away again with a large force of Hetaeroi.

We worked. Alexander worked with us, and Hephaestion. Parmenio took ‘his’ half of the army and marched away south to clear more coastline. There was a rumour that Alexander had ordered him north, to reconquer Ionia, and Parmenio had refused the duty. Thaïs was days from delivery, and she wasn’t paying any attention at all.

Diades returned with four hundred great trees, all with their limbs and branches intact.

He had a plan, and it wasn’t what I expected at all. I sent him fifty men with bronze axes, and he sent them back. And then, in one long day and night, he threw all four hundred trees into the water at the end of the mole.

And we levered several thousand talents of gravel and rubble on top of them.

The Tyrians pounded us with their machines, because we were within a stade of the wall. But despite the work of their machines, we got the trees in the water. We’d pin each one we put in with rubble, and then put in another. We worked fast, and men died – men were pinned in the water by trees, or pinned to the mole by arrows. When it got dark, we worked by firelight.

The Tyrians landed parties on the beach behind us in tar-blacked boats and killed men going with empty baskets for more rubble. But I had ordered my phylarchs to come out each night in armour, and Craterus and Perdiccas did the same, and after the third night, the rest of the phalanx taxiarchs did the same, and the enemy raids slackened off.

The fourth night after the trees went into the water, I was leading a work crew on the edge of the mole itself. Every night, Diades begged us to work one more night without the protection of siege towers. His reasoning was excellent – as long as we could keep it up, we had men working on the whole forward edge of the mole – perhaps a stades wide, or the width of a hundred men lying on their backs, head to toe. As soon as we put up the towers and the wall, everything slowed down, and we had all seen how the mole narrowed because men didn’t like to work directly beneath the towers, which drew the most fire – so every few days, the width men worked got a little narrower. It was like tunnelling, in reverse.

The Tyrians came at us in boats – straight on. Thirty boats fired arrows into us – the thickest salvo of arrows yet, even in the dark, and my men fell. But another dozen boats full of marines rushed the head of the mole.

I had forty men in armour – all phylarchs, all veterans. I told the workmen to run as soon as I saw the boats come forward. Then the rest of us locked our shields.

It was ironic – in a deeply Olympian way – that we outnumbered the Tyrians about fifteen to one, but that there on the mole, they outnumbered us at least ten to one.

I remember it because it was bad fighting on bad footing, but also because I gave one of my best battlefield speeches. Remember, they weren’t all my men – we all took shifts, so I had men from every taxeis.

I said: ‘Remember that every man you kill here cannot face you from the top of their wall when the mole is done. Remember that we have thirty thousand Macedonians behind us, and we have only to hold these bastards for five minutes and we’ll have done a finer thing than any men have since the siege started. And remember,’ I shouted, as the boats grated against the mole, ‘that the only choice besides victory is death. I am betting victory is better!’

I received a heartening cheer. The worst feeling in the world is going into action with men who have no heart. These men cheered, and that gave the Tyrian marines pause. Then they started to form up.

‘Charge!’ I called to my own. Always better to be going forward, especially in the dark.

Our charge shattered them, even at odds of one to ten. About a third of them were out of their boats, and the arrows had stopped. What – did they think I’d just stand there and let them unload?

We crashed into the centre of their line, with only two ranks of our own. We didn’t have sarissas – most men had a pair of javelins, and a few had longer spears, like the Greek dory. They were on the bad footing where the rubble was fresh, and we had them with their backs to the illumination of the fires they had lit on their own walls.

Speaking only for myself, I have seldom killed so many men in a single fight. The first man I faced flinched at the contact and I rammed my new kopis over his shield – had I mentioned my new kopis? – and into his helmet and he was dead. There’s no coming back from that wound.

He fell off my sword and there were three of them facing me, but body posture said only one was a threat, so I put the knee of my greave down hard on the stone – one of the best reasons to wear greaves in a fight – and cut low. He cut high, and sheared my crest, and I cut right through his ankle bone and severed his foot and he screamed like a soul in torment – perhaps he was.

A really showy, brutal death can shake inexperienced troops, and that’s what happened to the Tyrians. The men on either side flinched away and I followed them. One fell back, into the water, and the other missed his footing, slipped and got my kopis in his throat.

All along the front, my men had pushed the Tyrians into the water – literally. And there were corpses everywhere. I think I’ve said it before, but in a night fight, armour and discipline are everything, and we had more and better of both. These men were marines and lightly armed.

And they had no place to run.

When I saw that their centre was gone, I left the fight with Polystratus at my heels and half a dozen other men who could think on their feet, and we ran for the northern flank, where it seemed that the Tyrians had the upper hand. We hammered into the flank of their charge, a wedge of eight men, and it being dark they never saw us coming, so that each of us downed a man or two from behind before they knew what was happening – and then they ran, pure panic, given the circumstance. Armed Macedonians were pouring on to the mole, and for a few ugly moments we hunted them around the surface like so many rabbits in a field. And we killed every man who had made it on to the mole.

But while we were butchering their marines, the enemy engineers were putting grapples into our underwater trees and pulling as hard as they could, with ships and from the wall. As soon as they realised that we had slaughtered their marines, they started to pound the mole with thrown gravel and red-hot sand and fist-sized rocks. We were too thick on the mole and we took hits. Red-hot sand – even when it has crossed a stade of cool night air – is horrible – it burns into your skin, so that Thaïs had to pick each grain out with tweezers, and all of the skin infected, which in salt air is horrible enough.

But we were Macedonians, not cowards. I saw the ropes and felt the mole move, and Diades was there, and Helios – and Alexander. And Craterus and Philotas, and together we led men with axes forward into the hail of stone and sand. Hephaestion was badly burned, and Craterus took a stone to the shield that broke his arm – but we got two of the ropes cut, and then Alexander got hit, and it was all we could do to keep him alive.

Those moments – in the dark, with a helmet on my head, the haze of the red-hot sand as it fell, sometimes still twinkling, the steam from the fires and the salt water and the screams – Alexander down, and Craterus screaming – they seemed to go on for ever. I just held on, my shield pressed against his body, my head covering his head, as more shit fell on us. It would have to go through me to get to him. He was the King of Macedon, and he was not going to die here, in the dark.