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

The Tyrians were running low on men. Or rather, when they put fifty ships to sea with full rowing benches, that stripped their manpower.

And what that meant was that their fleet would never dare put to sea again. We had mastery of the sea.

Diades and Alexander put it to use that very night.

Boat raids. Twenty men in the bow of a trireme, or five men in a smaller boat, rowed up to the walls, attached grapples and the crew of the trireme tried, by rowing away, to force a section of wall to collapse. In other places we set fires, or tried to scale the wall.

Helios refitted pairs of triremes with huge platforms between them – like monster catamarans – mounting large siege engines. We’d done this at Halicarnassus, and now he did it on a larger scale. We built six of them, floated them and parked them opposite the weakest portion of the wall, just about a quarter of the circuit around the wall from the mole. In two days, they brought a section of wall down. We boarded ships for an assault, but the weather worsened and we had to abandon the idea, and the next day they had rebuilt the wall.

Two more days of pounding away, and we had to rebuild all of the engines on the ships while the enemy rebuilt their wall. And then we were at it again, and with a rush, their whole line of new masonry went down, despite hoardings, and the cover of great oxhides and a dozen other contrivances.

That afternoon, however, a pair of Cypriot triremes ran across a pair of Carthaginian triremes and they fought each other to near extinction. One of the Carthaginians limped away, and both of the Cypriot vessels were turtled, although both were reclaimed later and restored to service.

Now Alexander had to fear the appearance of a great Carthaginian fleet. We might lose our mastery of the sea at any moment. The mole was pressed forward. A man could almost jump the gap. The fleet was brought in close, and Diades had four of the oldest triremes brought up to the mole so that they could be filled with stones and sunk in the channel to act as piers for his mole.

But that night, a storm hit us like no other I had experienced. It lasted three days, and every tent in the camp blew flat. I had to rescue Thaïs, still weak from the loss of our child and still so depressed that she would take little or no action to save herself. I moved her to Isokles’ tent, and then, moments later, that too collapsed and I had to lift her out through more sodden silk and canvas.

The next day was no better, and the only standing shelters in the camp were the ones built from lashed boat sails spread over heavy timbers – and tied down by sailors. And that night, when the storm hit its height, even those fell, and we huddled together, taxiarchs and strategoi and pezhetaeroi and slaves, all together in our shared fear and misery. The gods have the ability to make one feel very small, when they wish. A good storm is humbling.

When we awoke on the third day, I followed Diades down to the shore to see what had happened.

The mole was gone.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. Certainly, the sea was breaking over something, so the bulk of the earth and wood was still there, but the sea flowed over it, and it was enough to break your heart. His precious ships – full of stones, ready to be moved into position – were all gone, capsized and sunk in shallow water north of the mole.

‘Poseidon’s fury,’ he said.

‘And now we have it all to do again,’ I said.

Diades shrugged. ‘I have already stockpiled more stone than we had when we started,’ he said, with a grim smile. ‘It will go faster this time. But only if the king does not despair.’

That night, we had the stormiest command meeting I can remember.

The factions were fully developed. Parmenio, his sons and the older officers – men like Meleager who owed their careers to Parmenio, and men who were midland Macedonian landowners – and men who were tired of war.

The truth is, I should have been with Parmenio’s faction. I knew what was in the king’s mind. An abyss of endless war – a sort of infinite Iliad , with himself cast as Achilles, where an endless procession of enemies threw themselves on his heroism and his genius – and perished.

The other faction was no longer the ‘Young Men’. We were no longer so young – no man faces battle eight or ten times and counts himself young. Perdiccas and I – to name two – had the scars of men twice our age. My shoulder hurt as if pierced with ice every time the weather changed, and my hands – I awoke every morning, at age twenty-six, winter or summer, with hands that hurt enough that I often had to warm them in hot water before I could make them obey me.

This is not the life of a ‘young man’.

What distinguished us from Parmenio’s party was that we loved the king, and had grown to adulthood with him. It is not that he could do no wrong – indeed, the paradox was that we were the ones who expressed our doubts openly to Alexander.

That night after the storm, Parmenio and Alexander locked horns like two bulls.

‘We have stood here for seven months, and we have nothing to show for it.’ Parmenio didn’t trouble to hide his contempt. ‘I told you that we couldn’t take the city. We cannot take it. We have lost a year’s worth of gains and all the treasure of Issus – squandered to take this pile of rock.’

Alexander was at his most difficult – conceding nothing, absolute in his righteousness. He simply smiled. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked.

Philotas stood. ‘Lord, there is no point – if we start the mole again, we’ll face another disaster and another. For what? We don’t need the city. The strategy of taking every sea base on the coast is no longer valid – it is now we who have the larger fleet.’

Alexander’s smile was fixed. ‘I asked if anyone else wanted to speak,’ he drawled.

Philotas’s face flamed. ‘My father has led your armies and won your battles, lord. Your treatment of him is ungrateful and mean!’

Alexander nodded. ‘Let us stick to the matter at hand,’ he said.

Amyntas, the current favourite, rose to his feet. ‘We can take Tyre in four more weeks. Given the time we’ve put in, and the treasure, as Lord Parmenio has so eloquently put it, should we not finish what we started?’

Alexander’s expression did not change.

Parmenio glared at him. ‘Why don’t you speak your own view, Alexander? Instead of letting your “friends” do it for you?’

Alexander shrugged, every muscle in his body speaking contempt. ‘I am the captain general, and I will speak last.’

Parmenio crossed his arms.

‘Craterus?’ Alexander said.

Craterus looked at the carpeted floor of the tent. ‘Let us march away. Let us march home .’

Alexander looked at me. ‘Perdiccas?’ he asked.

Perdiccas looked at me, as well. He made me feel like a ringleader. A role I did not fancy. ‘Lord, I will stand with you whatever you choose.’

‘As if I would not?’ shouted Nicanor, son of Parmenio. ‘By Zeus who judges all oaths, I swear that none of us have suggested that we will not follow the king! How dare you suggest such a thing?’

‘Meleager?’ Alexander said, but his eyes were still on me.

Meleager mumbled something.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander spat, sounding very like a hoplomachos on a drill field.

Meleager took a deep breath. ‘Finish the siege,’ he said.

Parmenio looked like thunder.

Alexander’s eyes flicked back and forth in surprise. I was surprised too. I no longer had to cast the tying vote, to allow Alexander to settle the issue. Which he clearly wanted. Now my vote would decide the issue. Not that, as king, he couldn’t just order us to do it. The democracy of the council was more apparent than real.