Alexander (Vol. 2)

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  He reached him soon after, ‘I am here, Didáskale. I have brought you a present,’ he said, showing him the glowing stick. He then found a sheltered spot under a hidden rock and began blowing on the embers until the flames took hold. He added twigs and then branches until there were more flames than smoke and plenty of warmth.

  Leonidas regained colour and some life. Alexander went to the pannier that was strapped to Bucephalas and took out some bread, which he crumbled for his toothless teacher, then he sat alongside him, near the fire.

  Leonidas began chewing on the bread. ‘Well then, my boy, is it true that you have taken Achilles’s weapons, and his shield, the one Homer describes? And Halicarnassus? They say the Mausoleum is as high as the Parthenon and the temple of Hera at Argos put one on top of the other – is such a thing possible? And the Halys? You have seen it, my boy. I find it difficult to believe that it can be three times as wide as our Haliakmon, but you have seen it and you will know the truth. And the Amazons? Is it true that the tomb of the Amazon Penthesilea is near the Halys? And then I was wondering if the Cilician Gates are really as narrow as they say they are and . . .’

  ‘Didáskale,’ Alexander stopped him, ‘you want to know many things. It is best if I answer one question at a time. As far as Achilles’s weapons are concerned, things went more or less like this . . .’

  And he talked with his teacher all night long and he shared his cloak with him, after having risked his life to defend him from the cold of the mountain. Safe and sound, they met up with the others the following day and because Alexander did not want him to run the risk of another winter crossing, he asked Leonidas to stay on at Tyre. He would set off again when the good weather returned.

  55

  THE NEW CAUSEWAY was ready towards the end of winter and its upper surface was levelled with beaten-down soil, to facilitate the passage of the new assault towers, which Diades had constructed incredibly quickly. On the floors corresponding to the level of the battlements, he had located batteries of catapults with torsion springs which launched heavy iron bolts horizontally, and on the top, dominating everything, were the ballistae. These devices threw not only rocks in an arching trajectory, but fireballs as well – incendiary devices steeped in pitch, oil and naphtha.

  The Tyrians’ reaction was fierce and the battlements seethed with soldiers, like the top of an anthill after a child has poked it with a stick. They too had mounted tens of catapults on the parapets and when they saw the invaders trying to burn the city gates, they poured down white-hot sand which they had heated in bronze shields over a blazing fire.

  The sand penetrated the Macedonians’ clothes and entered under their armour. The pain was terrible and it drove them to throw themselves into the sea as they sought relief from it. Others took off their breastplates, immediately presenting sitting targets for the archers, while others again were run through by harpoons and hooks launched from above by strange new machines and then dragged upwards to be left hanging and shouting until death put them out of their misery. The bloodcurdling cries of these poor souls were a torment for the King, who could find no rest, neither by day nor by night. He prowled around at all hours like a hungry lion outside a sheep-pen. And his soldiers too became progressively more brutalized at the sight of such horrors.

  Alexander, however, was reluctant to lead the final attack which would inevitably finish in a massacre and he tried to think of other, less drastic solutions that might save his honour and leave some way out for the Tyrians, whose great valour and extraordinary tenacity he greatly admired.

  He took advice from Nearchus, of all his men the one with most chance of understanding the situation and the mentality of a city of seafaring people.

  ‘Listen,’ the admiral said to him, ‘we have already wasted almost seven months here and we have suffered considerable losses. I think you should move on with the army and leave me to continue the blockade. I have one hundred warships now and others will arrive from Macedonia. No one will enter or exit from Tyre until they surrender, and then I will offer them honourable peace terms.

  ‘Tyre is a wonderful city from every possible point of view – its mariners have sailed to the Pillars of Hercules and beyond. It is said that they have visited lands no other human being has ever seen and that they even know the course that leads to the Isles of the Blessed, which lie beyond the Ocean. Consider things carefully, Alexander, when this city forms part of your empire, is it not better that it should be preserved as it is rather than destroyed altogether?’

  The King reflected long and hard on these words, but then he recalled some other news he had received recently. ‘Eumolpus of Soloi informs me that the Carthaginians have offered assistance to Tyre and that the arrival of their fleet may well be imminent. And let us not forget that the Persians are still navigating in the Aegean and they might suddenly swoop on us here if I were to leave. No, the Tyrians must surrender. But I will leave them one last way out.’

  So he decided to send another embassy to the city and chose the oldest and wisest of his councillors to participate in it. Leonidas came to hear of the initiative and asked to see the King.

  ‘My boy, let me go as well. You won’t remember, but your father Philip entrusted me with several secret missions, extremely delicate matters, and I was always successful, if I may say so, in a most accomplished manner.’

  Alexander shook his head, ‘It’s out of the question, Didáskale. This affair is extremely risky and I have no wish to expose you pointlessly to . . .’

  Leonidas put his hands on his hips. ‘Pointlessly?’ he asked. ‘You have no idea what you are saying, my boy. This mission has no chance of success without your old Leonidas. I am the most expert and capable man you have available to you, and let me add that you were still wetting the bed when I first led a delegation on your father’s orders, may his name live on for eternity. It was a mission to deal with the ferocious and barbarian Triballians and I managed to reduce them to the meekest of behaviour without any violence whatsoever. Do you still read the Iliad?’

  ‘Of course I still read it, Didaskale,’ replied the King. ‘Every evening.’

  ‘Well, then? Who did Achilles send as an envoy to the chiefs of the Achaeans? Was it not perhaps his old teacher Phoenix? And since you are the new Achilles, it goes without saying that I am the new Phoenix. Let me go, I tell you, and I guarantee I will succeed in bringing those blockheads to see reason.’

  Leonidas was so decided that Alexander felt unable to deny him this moment of glory and gave him the job. He then sent his delegates off on a ship flying flags of truce, their mission to negotiate the surrender of the city. Understandably anxious, he went into his tent at the end of the causeway to await the outcome. But time passed and nothing happened.

  Towards midday Ptolemy entered, his face dark and solemn.

  Well?’ Alexander asked. What is their response?’

  Ptolemy gestured to follow him outside, and from there he pointed to the highest towers of the city of Tyre. Five crosses had been placed up there, each with a blood-covered body nailed to it. Leonidas’s was clearly distinguishable because of his bald head and his skeletal limbs.

  ‘They tortured and crucified them,’ said Ptolemy.

  Alexander was dumbstruck, paralysed by the sight before them. His face darkened just as the sky did, black clouds deepening the intense darkness in his left eye.

  Then, suddenly, he let out a cry, an inhuman howl that seemed to come from his very innards. The raging fury of Philip and the ferocious barbarism of Olympias exploded within him at one and the same instant, unleashing a blind and devastating rage. But the King immediately regained his composure, from somewhere he found a solemn and disturbing calm, like the calm of the sky before the storm.

  He called Hephaestion and Ptolemy to his side. ‘My weapons!’ her ordered. Ptolemy nodded to his adjutants who replied, ‘At your service, Sire!’ and they ran off to get things ready and to dress him in his most shining armour, while another brought
the royal standard with the Argead star.

  ‘Trumpets!’ Alexander ordered again. ‘Give the signal for all the towers to attack!’

  The trumpets blared and shortly afterwards the din of the battering-rams hammering the walls and the hissing of the missiles launched from the catapults and the ballistae resounded across the gulf. Then he turned to his admiral: ‘Nearchus!’

  ‘At your service, Sire!’

  Alexander pointed to one of the assault towers, the one nearest the walls. ‘Take me up there on to that platform, but in the meantime take the fleet out, break into the harbour and sink all the ships you meet.’

  Nearchus looked up at the ever-darkening sky, but he obeyed and had himself transported together with the King and his companions on the quinquereme flagship. He immediately gave orders to lower all the sails and to take all the masts down, then he hoisted the battle standard and raised the anchors. From all the one hundred ships of the fleet there now came the rumble of the drums beating out in unison the rhythm for the rowers and the sea boiled with foam in the wind and the stirring movement of a thousands of oars.

  The flagship reached the platform under a rain of projectiles thrown from the heights of the walls. Alexander jumped from the gunwale, followed by his companions, and they all entered the tower, rushing up the stairs between each floor in an inferno of dust and shouting, in the deafening din of the battering-rams crashing into the walls, in the strident, continuous, rhythmic calling of the men as they kept time with the swing of the wood.

  Suddenly he appeared at the very top just as the sky, black as pitch now, was torn asunder by a dazzling flash of lightning. For an instant the spectral pallor of the crucified envoys was illuminated, together with Alexander’s golden armour and the vermilion splash of his standard.

  A bridge was lowered on to the battlement and the King, followed by his companions, set off on his attack, flanked by Leonnatus, who was armed with an axe, Hephaestion, his sword unsheathed, Perdiccas, bearing a long spear, and Ptolemy and Craterus, resplendent in shining metal. The King was immediately recognizable because of his own dazzling armour, the white crests on his helmet, the red and gold standard, and the archers and all the other defenders of Tyre tried to pick him out. One of the assault team, a Lyncestian by the name of Admetus, threw himself forwards, anxious to display his courage before the King, and was cut down, but Alexander took his place immediately, wielding his sword left and right and crushing enemy soldiers with blows from his shield, while Leonnatus cleared the way on his right flank with the devastating force of his cleaver.

  The King was already on the battlements and threw a Tyrian to the sea below while he cut another one open from the chin to the groin and proceeded to throw a third one down on the other side, to the houses below. Perdiccas ran a fourth one through with his spear, lifted him up like a harpooned fish and threw him into a group of his fellow soldiers as they approached. Alexander shouted ever louder now, dragging the torrent of his own soldiers behind him, and his fury reached its climax, almost as though it were fed by the rumble of the thunderclaps that shook both sky and earth from the celestial heights to the infernal abyss. He advanced along the battlement, unstoppable now, running now, heedless of the rain of arrows and iron bolts launched by the catapults. He ran towards Leonidas’s crucifix, not far from him as he charged on. The defenders lined up to push him back, but he knocked them aside as though they were puppets, one after another. Leonnatus, with his immeasurable energy, struck out blindly in the ruck with his axe, causing sparks to fly from the Tyrian shields and helmets, shattering swords and spears into fragments.

  Finally the King found himself under the cross where a catapult had been positioned with its crew. He shouted:

  ‘Take control of this catapult and use it against the others! Get this man off that cross! Get him down!’ And while his companions took control of the small square, he himself spotted a box of tools next to the catapult and grabbed a pair of pincers, leaving his shield to crash to the ground.

  An enemy archer took aim at that precise moment from just twenty feet away and pulled his string tight, but then a voice rang out in the King’s ear – it was his mother’s voice, full of anguish, calling out to him: ‘Alexandre!’ And, miraculously, the King spotted the danger. In a flash he pulled his dagger from his belt and threw it at the archer, planting it firmly into the man’s throat, into the hollow between his collarbones.

  His companions formed a wall with their shields and he extracted the nails, one by one, from the tortured limbs of his teacher. At that moment he saw before his eyes the naked limbs of another old man one bright afternoon at Corinth – Diogenes, the wise man with peace in his eyes, and his soul melted in his heart. He murmured, ‘Didáskale . . .’ and somehow Leonidas heard the word and his vital force, all gone now, returned for an instant, just long enough for him to move slightly and open his eyes.

  ‘My boy, I am afraid I did not manage . . .’ Then he collapsed, truly dead now, in Alexander’s arms.

  Suddenly the sky was rent open above the city and the sea, the earth and the small island full of shouting and blood, were all flooded by the torrential rain, by a tempest of wind and hail. But the elements could do nothing to extinguish the fury of the warriors. Outside the harbours, in the raging, foaming waves, the Tyrian fleet was engaged in a desperate battle with Nearchus’s powerful quinqueremes. In the city the defenders retreated from house to house, road to road, fighting on their very thresholds to the bitter end.

  Some time towards evening the sun created an opening in the clouds, illuminating the dark waters, the crumbling walls, the carcasses of the ships drifting off to sea, the bodies of the drowned. The last pockets of resistance were soon quashed.

  Many of the survivors sought refuge in the sanctuaries, embracing images of their gods, and the King gave orders for these people to be spared. But it was impossible to control the soldiers’ thirst for revenge against the Tyrians they captured on the streets.

  Two thousand of them were crucified along the causeway. Leonidas’s body was burned on a pyre and his ashes sent to Macedon where they were buried beneath the plane tree. It was in the shade of that tree that he used to teach his pupils, when the weather was fine.

  56

  ALEXANDER GAVE ORDERS for the fleet to proceed southwards and to take the disassembled war engines to Gaza, the last stronghold before the desert which separated Palestine from Egypt.

  Ten ships were sent to Macedonia to enlist new men as replacements for those who had fallen in taking Tyre. It was in this period that the King received a second letter from King Darius:

  Darius, King of Persia, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans and Lord of the Four Corners of the Earth, to Alexander, King of Macedon, Hail!

  I want you to know that I fully appreciate your valour, and the good fortune the gods have been most liberal in granting you. Once again I propose that we should become allies and even relatives.

  I offer you the hand of my daughter Stateira and if you accept I will grant you dominion over the lands extending from Ephesus to Miletus, yauna cities, up to the river Halys, as well as a gift of two thousand silver talents.

  I advise you not to challenge fate, because it is a fickle companion and might just turn its back on you at any moment. Do not forget that should you wish to continue your expedition then you will be an old man before you have crossed the full extent of my empire, even without engaging combat. Remember too that my territory is protected by enormous rivers – the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Araxes and the Hydaspes, all of them impossible to cross.

  Think well on it, and take the wisest decision.

  Alexander had it read to his war council and at the end asked, ‘What do you think? How should I reply?’

  No one dared suggest to the King what he should do and no one spoke, apart from Parmenion, who, because of his age and his prestige, felt he had the right to express his point of view. All he said was, ‘I would accept, if I were Alexander.’

&nbs
p; The King lowered his head as though wanting to reflect on that statement and then replied, coldly, ‘So would I, if I were Parmenion.’

  The old general stared at him in pained surprise; it was clear he was profoundly offended. He stood and walked away in silence. Alexander’s companions looked at one another dumbfounded, but the King simply continued, his tone composed and calm.

  ‘Of course, General Parmenion’s point of view is understandable, but I imagine you all realize that Darius is in fact offering me nothing, apart from his daughter, which I have not already conquered. On the contrary, he asks me implicitly to relinquish all of the provinces and all of the cities east of the Halys which have cost us so much. We will go on ahead. We will take Gaza and then Egypt – the oldest and richest country in the entire world.’

  So he replied to the Great King with a curt rejection and set off marching along the coast, while the fleet, led by Nearchus and Hephaestion, proceeded in convoy.

  Gaza was a well-appointed fortress, but its walls were of brick and it stood on a clayey hill some fifteen stadia from the sea. The commander of the stronghold was a black eunuch by the name of Batis, very brave and loyal to King Darius – he refused to surrender.

  Alexander therefore decided to attack and rode round the walls to see where he might be able to dig pits and where the engines might best attack the bastions. Both of these matters were complicated by the sandy ground which surrounded almost the entire hill.

  As he was thinking, a crow passed overhead and let a tuft of grass it was carrying in its claws fall on to his head. The bird continued on towards Gaza, where it perched and soon found itself stuck in the bitumen which had been used to cover the walls and which had melted in the heat of the sun.