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

But then the Tyrians made an error. Whether on purpose or because of a misunderstood order, their engines swept the wall with stones and red-hot sand. Their own men took the bulk of the punishment, and their own reinforcements refused to come at us. By the will of the gods, none of the eight or nine of us holding the breach open was hit.

My men were just as unwilling to come up those ladders. There were corpses all through the ship – our pair of vessels, as the first in, had drawn more than our fair share of missiles, and men had to climb over the wreckage of former men to get up the towers. That’s always hard. And some men had gone for more ladders, and then used that as an excuse to stay below.

There was a huge cheer from the centre of the city, and then another cheer from the mole – whether ours or theirs I couldn’t tell.

The fighting in the breach was sporadic, deadly and man to man. A few Macedonians continued to join us from the ship. I was exhausted by the time I realised that the tide had turned at the top of the ladders, and that we now held the breach in strength.

Isokles found me in the dark. ‘Lads don’t like this a bit,’ he shouted. ‘We need to go forward!’

Some brave men had come up the outside of the tower with two ladders – plain scaling ladders – and we put them against the new wall from the breach, with archers in towers virtually all around us shooting down into us. But we got the ladders up and we went up them. I led the way. It is my job.

I was first up the first ladder on the inner wall, and two big men tried to push the ladder over with tridents, but my men were pressing against the base of the ladder. The ladder itself bent and groaned, and I raced up it as fast as my arms and legs would carry me, and I didn’t wait on the ladder to make my cut – I jumped in between them and cut back and forth – low is always better in the dark, although low cuts are an invitation to a head-cut counter in daylight. And then more or more men were beside me on the wall – Isokles, and Polystratus, and Cleomenes.

We heard more cheers – and they were absolutely not Macedonian cheers – coming from the direction of the mole.

I looked back and saw that the second ladder/tower ship had been sunk where it had rested on the waves, and that a pair of triremes were rescuing the rowers and marines. That meant we would not have a second wave.

The Tyrians rushed us. We had about sixty men on the inner wall, but we were between two towers and we didn’t have anywhere to hide. They shot us with arrows and then charged, but they’d left it too long and we were ready, and we blunted their attack with javelins and then gutted them as they came up the inner face of the wall.

I turned to Isokles, but he was dead at my feet. So I looked for Cleomenes and shouted, ‘Time to go!’

The pezhetaeroi caught my meaning immediately. Most of us didn’t wait for the ladder – we jumped down into the breach, because a turned ankle was a small price to pay for your life, and then we fled down the tower ladders to the ship below. Cleomenes and I managed to get Isokles’ corpse between us – we threw it down into the breach and then carried him down into the tower, the last men off the wall.

Of two hundred men I took up the ladders, I lost fifty, including four phylarchs and Isokles.

And we lost.

The next day, in camp, you could feel the burning hatred, the dull, red-hot resentment.

No one spoke of abandoning the siege. From the pezhetaeroi to the hypaspitoi to the Agrianians to Alexander himself, what every man wanted was revenge. But there was little love for the king.

That night, Hephaestion invited me to take wine with him and of course, Alexander was there, with Amyntas and Nicanor son of Parmenio, which I took for a positive sign.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ I said to Hephaestion.

His arm was in a sling. He pointed at it and said, ‘I should have waited another day.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘Patroclus would never say such a thing. You were brilliant on the wall, my friend. We simply needed ten more like you.’ He shrugged at me. ‘We almost died. Men were slow up the ladders, and the resistance was – magnificent.’

‘Magnificent?’ I asked.

‘Aren’t things better when they are difficult?’ Alexander asked. ‘When we take Tyre, our names will live for ever!’ He grinned. ‘I feel as if I am living in the Iliad .’

He was all but bouncing up and down. I had left fifty men dead in the breach, and Isokles’ body was burning on a pyre beyond the horse lines, and my king was living inside the Iliad .

He had a cut across his face where a Tyrian had no doubt died trying to kill him – the sort of cut that tells the informed observer that the victim came within ten or twelve hairs of dying.

Sometimes, I wondered if he was insane.

He handed me a cup of wine. ‘Not you, too? Infected with the Tyrian rot? Wake up! We’ve almost taken the place, and we’ll do it in a matter of days. Three more assaults – four at most.’

I drank the whole cup of wine. It stiffened my spine and gave wings to my thoughts. I had an angry exhortation ready – but when had anger ever moved Alexander?

What I wanted was to get the siege over with – as quickly as possible, and with the minimum casualties. Because if he spent men like water to take Tyre, he was going to have a mutiny, or something very like it.

I drank more wine, thinking on Alexander and the Iliad .

Alexander was praising Nicanor for his work with the hypaspitoi. Indeed, they were superb, and I joined in the praise, which obviously surprised Nicanor. The lines of faction were beginning to run too deep – to resemble lines of fracture. In truth, in my experience faction usually breeds in the absence of power, but sometimes it can breed right under power’s nose.

When it came to me, it was as obvious as anything in the Iliad .

I took another cup of wine but did not drink it straight off. ‘If we were to abandon the siege,’ I said, ‘what would be the first thing that would happen?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘I have no intention of abandoning the siege.’

I held my arm out strongly, like an orator. ‘I speak as wily Odysseus, not Farm Boy Ptolemy.’

Alexander laughed, and Hephaestion laughed, and Nicanor nodded. He hadn’t played our boyhood games, but he was in much the same mood I was in.

‘I assume they’d land to burn our engines – if in fact we didn’t burn them ourselves when we retreated.’

He looked at me.

‘And take the stockpiles of food, firewood and materials we have all over camp,’ Hephaestion said with a shrug.

‘We’d destroy all of that, too,’ Nicanor insisted.

‘Not if we had to march away suddenly,’ I said. ‘To fight Darius with a fresh army, coming up behind us.’

Alexander turned to me. ‘No one would believe such a tale.’

But Hephaestion shook his head. ‘Desperate men would believe it. Men with nothing left but hope would believe it.’ He nodded.

‘And look, there’s little risk except the loss of some time and some machines. We spread the rumour that Darius has marched. The Syrians with our own army will take the news into Tyre. Then in two days, we vanish. We march for four hours and double back. Send the Cypriots to sea. Catch whatever’s ashore in late afternoon and slaughter them. And launch an immediate assault. It is, if I may say so, only a variant on the Trojan Horse. When they come to burn our machines and take our grain, we gut their land forces and cut their hope out from under them. Any lover knows that a hope destroyed is far worse than no hope at all.’

Three days later, we marched in full armour, with all our baggage, leaving heaps of supplies for man and beast and most of our engines – although the engines had been moved away from the mole and well inland, forcing troops bent on their destruction to pass a cornucopia of logistical delights.