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

Alexander nodded to me. ‘Ptolemy?’ he said.

‘Finish the siege,’ I said. Not because I believed in it, but because I was his friend.

Diades went to work immediately, the next day, and from our ‘stores’ of rubble and rock, we rebuilt the mole in two weeks. We had ships to cover the head of the mole and ships to move bulk rubble and ships with engines to attack the enemy batteries, and the coordination of the ships grew better every day.

Diades built superstructures for the ships so that a pair of triremes, lashed together, could hold a tower with ladders inside – the assault troops protected by wet hides and wooden hoardings.

In days, we had our own engines clearing the wall from the end of the mole.

In a week, the city must have seen that the end was near.

Two weeks to the day after the storm, a pair of Cypriot cruisers picked up a Carthaginian trireme that failed to outrun them. The ship carried a message, sealed in a bladder.

No further help was coming to Tyre.

We shot the message into the walls, and that night, in a brilliant piece of seamanship, the Cypriots sank two old triremes in the deep-water gap – both full to the gunwales with rocks. The next night, under a protective hail of stones, they performed this feat again.

Six engine ships pounded the southern walls day and night, turning every repair to rubble. Sixteen engines on the mole launched larger stones at a shorter range, so that the tallest walls on the island, those facing the land, began to crumple under the weight. Alexander was heard to joke that at the rate we were throwing stones, we were raising the level of the city and providing them with years of building material.

On the feast of Herakles, Hephaestion donned armour for the first time in a month, and we cheered him. And then we boarded assault boats and the trireme pairs with the great scaling towers.

I took the picked men of my taxeis – two hundred men in the best armour we could scrounge – and we boarded two pairs and filled the decks and the towers. Remember, a trireme ordinarily carried ten, or at most twenty, marines. With the double hulls and the towers, we could carry a hundred, but it made the ships ponderous and very, very slow. We needed near-perfect calm and bright moonlight to move and assault.

Alexander had chosen to lead the assault from the mole. The sea was never his element.

The first fight after a wound is always hard, like getting back on a horse that has thrown you. At the head of my ladder, swaying wildly, or so it seemed to me at the very top of a tower between two big ships, I had hours to consider the feel of the red-hot sand as it poured down my body and was trapped against me by my own armour, and the smell as my flesh scorched, and the feel of heavy rocks on my shield, on my helmet, on my thorax.

The sea stank with eight months of refuse, garbage and human filth from the siege – uncollected corpses, offal, carcasses from all the sacrifices, excrement. The enemy engines were loosing as fast as they could be loaded, and we could hear as heavy rocks or long spears struck our ship, and once, quite early in our manoeuvring, a ballista bolt tore through the hide covering and killed three men where they waited on the ladders. There was shouting, screaming and, in the distance, the constant sound of massed prayers – hymns to Melkart. Thirty thousand voices singing together – an eerie sound.

About midnight, all of our engine ships began to launch all together. First they threw baskets of heavy gravel to clear the walls, and then multiple salvos of great rocks, chipped round by slaves, and then more gravel.

By that time, my ship was quite close, and I could see individual men on the walls. And they could see us.

A disc – like an aspis, but flung sideways so that it spun, and full of red-hot sand and burning dung – hit our tower. The sand fell harmlessly into the sea with a hiss and a burst of steam, but the burning shit stuck to the hides and they steamed.

When I peeked over the top of the tower, I could see that we were coming up against a pair of huge wooden wheels with paddles attached, almost like mill wheels placed on their sides. They turned very fast, and even as I watched, a huge bolt struck one – and was deflected by the rotation of the wheel and the struts.

But a heavy rock from one of the distant catapults struck the wheel edge on – as if striking the top of a chariot wheel’s tyre – and something gave. The wheel began to break up as it turned – pieces of wood showered off it like sparks off a sharpening stone.

By the will of the gods or ill luck, my tower would be the first to reach the walls. Despite all the engines throwing rocks, the hail of small stones and all the fire being cast, the fires burning in the city beyond and the ships afire under the walls – despite all of it, the enemy had gathered a large force where my tower would reach the wall – more men than I could count.

A wind blew a charnel-house stench – hot with furnace air from the fires in the city – over our faces, and then our tower took another direct hit from one of the discs full of hot sand, and the hides burst into flame, and archers on the walls immediately began to sweep the tower. We were a horse length from the wall – less every heartbeat. Men on the wall with huge tridents mounted on gimbals stabbed them through the leather walls of the tower and into the troops waiting inside, causing panic on the ladders.

We had six archers at the head of the steps – Cretans armed with longbows. They stepped out on to the platform of our tower and in that moment I thought that they were the bravest men I’d ever seen – unarmoured, facing all that fire.

They flicked arrows down on to the wall faster than I can tell it – the smallest of them was the finest archer, and he emptied his quiver before we reached the wall. Two of them were hit, but they struck back – they made me feel better, because we weren’t just standing or crouching and taking hits, we were killing the enemy, as well.

It was all I could do to hold my sword. I had a pair of heavy javelins, and when the tower touched the wall, I cut the cord that held the great gate and it fell across the gap, giving us a ramp down into the enemy defences.

I was hit twice before I got on to the wall – both stones, probably our own, and one all but knocked me senseless – and that after hitting my crest. A big rock. But I was on the wall and I threw my javelins – I don’t even remember throwing them, just that my right hand was suddenly empty – and I snatched my sword and moved against the nearest tower.

One of my phylarchs fell victim to a bucket of red-hot sand and died horribly, screaming and thrashing, and he pushed men off the wall. Another phylarch cut left and right – cut beautifully with his kopis, dealing death, but a defender caught him with an axe, a murderous weapon, and the blade went in at his neck and cut through to his crotch, so that he opened like some evil flower and his guts exploded on the men around him, who flinched and died.

The defenders were not beaten. They gave us the wall, or rather, the pile of rubble that had been the wall. Behind it, they had a second wall, about the width of a street – like Memnon’s trap at Halicarnassus, and I had fallen for it. I went to the edge of the breach and shouted for ladders. We had them, lying along the planking of the upper deck, lashed to the gunwales.

I felt my men were being sluggish coming up the ladders.

I remember roaring, ‘Damn it, come on!’ at the ladder men, and then I took a blow to the back and I was fighting for my life against a counter-attack. There were very few Macedonians alive on the rubble of the outer wall. The first fighting had gone against us.