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

The approach to Gaza is sandy and the sea near the city is everywhere shallow. The city of Gaza is large, built upon a lofty mound around which a strong wall has been laid. It is the last city you meet, going from Phoenicia to Egypt. It is situated on the edge of the desert. When we arrived near the city on the first day, we encamped near the spot where the wall seemed to Diades most easy to assault. The engineer ordered his military engines to be constructed – those that we had with us. Most of our best and heaviest gear was still at Tyre, under repair, with Helios sending out still more parties for still more wood. But the Jews came to our aid – they had no love for the Persians, and now that we’d taken Tyre, we had a flood of support from Palestine.

As at Tyre, Alexander and Diades and all his engineers spent two days in careful examination of the city and all of its approaches, while we stripped the countryside like a host of armoured locusts for brushwood, for food and for manpower. Tyre had made us expert in what we needed, and it was all too clear to every footslogger that Gaza, even without the sea, was another tough nut and one for which digging and engineering were required in order to crack it.

The army was tired and surly, and we needed drafts from home to fill the places that disease, malnutrition and overwork had carved in our ranks. Recruits play an essential role in the long-term life of an army. They may be clueless, useless men who can’t start a fire or cook their own food or dig a decent latrine, but they bring a spirit of emulation that veterans lack – or rather, they restore a spirit of emulation and enterprise. The veterans have to work harder to show the recruits what fine men they are. The recruits band together to prove themselves worthy. We hadn’t had any recruits for a year, and I put out the word – and some gold, as a recruiting bonus.

The Persian commander in Gaza was Batis, and he rendered the siege very different from the siege at Tyre. It is worth noting that the rest of Palestine and Syria surrendered to us, but Batis, for whatever reason, determined to keep us out of Aegypt by holding Gaza.

Probably the most significant difference was that he was a professional Persian officer, a loyal servant of King Darius, and not the ‘king’ of a semi-independent town. He had a powerful garrison, thousands of troops, most of them veterans of Issus and other campaigns, and he had an excellent reputation with the local people – for justice and mercy.

Callisthenes’ propaganda got us nothing at Gaza, and his agents provided nothing from inside the town. It was, to all intents and purposes, a Persian town. And the hill on which it sat was tall, rocky and looked, to the casual eye, impregnable. Gaza was the first city we faced without Thaïs’s networks, and the difference showed immediately, at least to me. We didn’t even have a former Gazan citizen on the staff to help show us the strengths of the walls.

Callisthenes’ shortcomings showed in other ways, as well.

Far off in Greece, the Spartan king, Agis, had finally taken the bit between his teeth and declared war on Macedon. He took fistfuls of gold from the Great King and provided a haven for parts of the Persian fleet, and one of his first acts was to seize Crete, which neatly balanced our alliance with Cyprus and threatened our communications with home. He summoned home every Spartan citizen, and extended citizen’s rights to many who were not citizens, in order to prepare for war. We needed information on Sparta’s intentions and her plans, and we had nothing, because Callisthenes hadn’t seen it coming and had no sources prepared. Nor, we quickly saw, was the Pythia willing to communicate with Callisthenes. No more priests of Apollo appeared in our camp.

Sparta wasn’t our only trouble. Athens was vacillating, considering new alliances and a stab in the back to Macedon. Even there, Callisthenes had fewer sources than Thaïs had had, and he didn’t even trouble himself to make use of the Athenian officers in our army, a shocking omission.

But Kineas mentioned to me, one day when we were sparring, just as Diades began to have our horde of barbarian slaves raise the siege mound, that he thought Agis had waited too long.

‘If he’d struck before Issus, there’s many in Athens – supporters of Demosthenes – who’d have put aside their hatred for Sparta and marched on Macedon.’ He paused – we had a habit, when sparring, of falling into conversation, and when we did, it had become our custom to relax our stances deliberately so that neither would feel threatened. He smiled, perhaps ruefully. ‘But now? Most Athenians hate Sparta more than we hate anyone. Their cowardly behaviour in the great war – their lickspittle toadying to the Great King. And look you – no sooner does Agis declare war on Macedon than he accepts a great subsidy from Darius and welcomes his fleet!’ Kineas shook his head. ‘Even the lowest classes – even the most hardened thetes, even the most corrupt democrat – would hate to betray the heroic dead of Marathon and fifty fights with Sparta – just to have a go at Macedon.’

I prayed he was correct, because still, and again – even with Tyre in our hands and Cyprus – Athens was the key, and if Athens, with her three-hundred-ship navy, chose to go to open war with us, the crusade in Asia would be over.

We opened our lines on the third day – a nice phrase, which means we began serious operations. By coincidence, it was the day Aristophanes – not the comic, but the statesman – became Eponymous Archon in Athens. The sun was high and the heat was brutal. The slaves – many of whom had, a few days before, been free farmers in the region around Gaza – began to dig.

I get ahead of myself. When the slaves were collected, and the brushwood, and all the digging tools brought up from Tyre (but not the siege machines, most of which were still under repair back there), Alexander summoned all of his friends and all of the officers and allies. We expected to have a command meeting – I certainly knew from my conversations with Nicanor and Philotas that their father was fit to explode over the fact that we were settling down for another siege that might take another year.

But what we attended, instead, was a sacrifice. Alexander was waiting for us, at the top of the slope that led to the ground on which his first siege mound would be commenced. The town of Gaza seemed to tower over us from here, and the garrison was shouting insults – or at least, I assumed they were insults. Thankfully, Alexander couldn’t hear them.

A pair of gulls were fighting in the air above us. There were gulls everywhere, because an army leaves a lot of garbage about, and near the sea, the gulls outnumber the other vermin. Their cries were louder and more raucous than those of the guards on the walls, but in the same tone.

Alexander was dressed in a pure white chiton of beautiful, shining wool, with a narrow gold border. He cut the throat of his ram without getting a speck of blood on the chiton, and as the ram slumped and the king stepped back, a gull screamed and something struck Alexander on the head and he fell to one knee.

Every man present rushed to his side.

The gulls had been fighting over a bit of flesh attached to a bone – perhaps a dead lamb from another sacrifice – and the bone, falling from high above, had hit the king on the head, driving him to his knees. It had left a smear on his left shoulder and on his left thigh, as well.

He waved us away, but he was shaken, his eyes wild. Aristander, that wily charlatan, stepped forward and raised his arms. ‘An omen!’ he cried, as if we needed a priest to tell us that we’d seen an omen. ‘The king will triumph here, but he will risk his body to accomplish the deed. Take heed, O King!’