Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt
Page 55
about done, the load gets wedged fast between two rocks, or an axle pin shears
or a mule refuses to budge or some fool gets his leg trapped under a fallen
boulder or an A-frame pops its dowels or some other bloody thing goes wrong;
nobody else is going to fix it but you, and you aren’t going anywhere till it
gets fixed, so although you’re so weary you can’t stand straight, let alone
think, you’ve got to force yourself back into problem-solving mode, find that
last scrap of energy you were saving for taking your boots off, and deal with
it, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Soldiering is about climbing for two days up the only pass through the tallest
mountains you’ve ever seen in your life, only to find that you’ve reached a
defile so narrow you can’t get the hutches through even if you turn them on
their side, so you’ve either got to unship the pickaxes and widen the bugger,
chip by bone-jarring chip, or trudge back down the way you came and go the extra
seventy miles south that’ll take you round the mountains, even though it means
losing contact with the rest of the column. Soldiering is about breaking open
the five jars of flour that are going to have to last you the three days it’ll
take to get down the mountain, only to find there’s been a cock-up somewhere in
Supply, and your five jars of flour are in fact three jars of lamp-oil and two
jars of shield-dubbin. Soldiering is getting to the top of the next lot of
mountains and looking down to where there should be a big, wide river where the
barges are waiting to carry you the next sixty miles; but not only are there no
barges, there’s no damn river. Soldiering is furious arguments with some other
poor bastard just like you over who was supposed to have checked with
Intelligence that the barges were going to be there, and finding out that really
it was your fault, and the whole miserable mess is your responsibility, nobody
else’s. Soldiering is dysentery, unexplained fevers that you simply haven’t got
time to indulge, wrenched muscles you ignore until you’re so used to the pain
you don’t notice it any more; it’s men under your command having their hands
torn off by badly secured loads shifting on the crane, or falling off narrow
tracks down steep gullies and breaking their backs, and you have to leave them
and keep going on, because if you stay and wait for them to die, the water or
the barley for the mules is going to run out, and everybody’s going to be in
trouble.
Oddly enough, you historians tend to skip over most everything that makes
soldiering what it is, in favour of battles and plans of campaign and a whole
lot of other stuff that happens on the edges of soldiering — it’s as if you
really believe that any one man, one general, is in control of the things that
happen to an army as it blunders and lurches along from one wretched,
inconvenient foul-up to the next, or that battles turn out the way they do
because two great men in red cloaks sit down to play a game of draughts with the
bodies and lives of a hundred thousand people. Obviously you don’t believe
anything of the sort, because nobody that gullible ever learned to read, let
alone write a book; and yet you put it down in the scroll, and people who’ve
been soldiers and know what it was really like will listen to your book being
read and nod their heads, maybe muttering to the man sitting next to them,
‘Actually, I was on that campaign; I’d forgotten all about that skirmish till he
mentioned it just now.’ You know, you’re almost as bad as Homer and the poets
for not mentioning the painfully obvious. I suppose it’s some sort of literary
convention, like the way that throughout a hundred thousand verses of the Iliad,
with all the fighting and speechmaking and roaring about the place in chariots,
nobody ever needs to stop what they’re doing to go for a pee.
Sorry, brother, am I boring you?
That’s all right, then. I saw you yawn, and I thought you might be getting
bored. Just in case you’re only being polite, I’ll tell you about something
truly interesting, shall I?
There’s a city called Tyre — you’ve heard of it? Oh, good. I’m not surprised;
after all, it’s one of the biggest cities in the world, maybe the most important
seaport and trading centre in Asia . This would be — what, two years after we
left Greece ? Something like that. King Alexander had resolved to capture
Phoenicia , to get hold of the Persian fleet and so secure his seaborne
supply-lines, or some such thoroughly intelligent plan. Anyway, it was winter
and in Syria , in winter, it rains. Believe me, it rains. I’ve seen wonders all
right, on these travels of mine; staggering rock formations and vast rivers and
amazing animals and people, but for someone like me, coming from Attica where it
rains twice a year, just about enough to fill a small cup, that Syrian rain was
the most amazing sight of all. Have you ever been soaked to the skin by rain,
brother? Well, it’s an experience. It gets in your eyes and your mouth, it
trickles down between your neck and the rim of your breastplate, it turns the
dust to oily black mud that sticks to your boots and makes your feet so heavy
it’s unbearable to lift them. Well, while we were struggling through all that,
Alexander was picking a rather genteel fight with the city fathers of Tyre , in
the hope of making a pretext that would allow him to attack the city with
honour.
Basically, Alexander wanted to find a way of not attacking Tyre . It was far too
big and far too well defended to take by storm, and if we tried to lay siege to
it we’d starve to death long before they did, with their ships unloading a
thousand tons of grain a day into the town granaries. So he was trying to do
what his father had done so well: scare them into giving up without a fight. All
he really needed was a token of submission, nothing much; merely entering the
city would do, at a pinch. So he wrote to the governing council to tell them he
was proposing to visit the temple of Melkarth , of which he’d heard so much. The
Tyrians wrote back saying that in fact the city temple wasn’t anything like it
was cracked up to be; if he wanted to see a real cracker of a temple, he should
do himself a favour and visit the one ten miles or so down the coast, where they
had some absolutely stunning bas-reliefs. Alexander replied that he’d set his
heart on seeing the city temple, and he’d take it as a personal favour if they’d
just confirm that such a visit would be in order. He got no reply to that, and
declared war at once.
‘It’s obvious what he’s up to,’ somebody said to me, as we huddled underneath
the bed of a wagon for shelter from the rain. ‘ Tyre ’s the home base of the
fleet the Persians would use if they were going to send help to anti-Macedonian
rebels in Greece . Now then; Sparta ’s openly at war with the Macedonian
presence in the Peloponnese , Athens is just waiting for someone to give the
lead, and they’ll pile in too, and if Athens rebels, half of Greece will be up
in arms, provided they can get money and supplies from Persia . From the Persian
viewpoint, opening a second front back home in Greece is about the only thing
they can think of that’d get Alexander out of Asia . So; unless Alexander takes
Tyre , he could lose this war in a matter of days.’
It sounded eminently sensible under a cart in the middle of a flash rainstorm;
Tyre ’s a problem, get rid of Tyre , problem solved. Unfortunately, the nearer
to Tyre we got, the harder it became. For one thing, Tyre isn’t on the coast;
it’s on an island, or at least the old town is, and that was the part we needed
to capture. When I say island, I mean a proper island, not just some splinter of
rock; butTyre old town covered every part of it, and the sprawl of the new town
lay just across the straits on the mainland. Since the Tyrian navy controlled
the sea, we couldn’t try an amphibious attack even if we’d wanted to (not that
we’d ever want any such thing). All in all, the expression ‘hiding to nothing’
took on a whole new dimension of complex and sinister undertones in this
context. The only logical course of action was to pack our things, send a polite
note to the King of Persia apologising for any inconvenience, and go home.
I can’t remember, brother; when you were Alexander’s tutor, was logic part of
the curriculum? If it was, you made a really poor job of it.
He took one look at the island, decided the sea had to go, and ordered us to
fill it in.
It was such an awesome piece of arrogance and folly that nobody had the heart to
object. That bit of sea’s in your way? Grab a spade and shovel dirt into it. So
we did. To be precise, we set about building a causeway to link Tyre island with
the mainland. To give you an idea of what was involved— ‘Eudaemon,’ I
interrupted, ‘I’m sure this is going to be absolutely fascinating, but it’s been
a long day and I’ve got to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Do you think we
might possibly.
He gave me a look that would have turned milk into cheese instantly. ‘Fuck you,
brother,’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen each other for twenty-five years, after
tomorrow we’ll probably never see each other again, I’m explaining to you in
detail exactly how you buggered up my life, and all you can think about is
sneaking off to your pit. Well, the hell with you, brother. You can damn well
sit there and listen, and if you so much as nod, I’ll take this jug and smash it
over your thick skull. Understood?’
I shrugged. ‘Since you put it like that,’ I said, ‘go on, please. Though I still
don’t see why it’s my fault that Alexander ordered you to build a causeway
across the straits of Tyre .’
Eudaemon smiled sourly. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s because you will insist on
talking rather than listening. Well, the less you interrupt, the sooner I’ll be
done, so shut your face and pay attention.
Where was I? Oh, yes. To give you an idea of what was involved, think back to
that time when we were kids and that rich bastard — now what was his name? The
old bloke with the young wife and that incredibly ugly thing on his nose, damned
if I can remember — yes, that’s it, Philochorus — that rich bastard Philochorus
was terracing that parcel of mountain land he’d inherited from his uncle. Well,
think back to when he was going round borrowing every slave and day labourer he
could find for the job of carting the rubble and spoil for the terraces up the
mountain. It all had to be lugged up there in baskets, remember, and so he was
scrounging baskets too, every last hamper and backpack and pannier in Pallene;
only there weren’t enough, so he had to go to the Market Square and buy every
blessed scrap of wickerwork he could find; and as soon as word got around that
Philochorus the Nose was desperate for baskets, the prices climbed so high they
were having to crane their necks to look down on Olympus.
And, dear gods, do you remember the performance when he actually got around to
starting work? All the organisation; the relay teams and who was going to be
foreman of which shift and who was going to report to who and the water-carriers
and the muleteers suddenly coming over all snotty when they found out the masons
were getting an obol a day more than they were and the masons talking back to
the foreman because they weren’t being given enough time to do the shoring-up
before the earth-moving crews started pouring in the dirt. Wasn’t that the best
show we’d ever seen in our lives? Well, picture that in your mind’s eye, and
then try to imagine what it was like doing a similar sort of job, only with a
hundred thousand workers instead of a hundred; then factor in the complications
of the sea and the constant hail of missiles and arrows from the ramparts
ofTyre, and maybe your imagination might just get a toe wedged in the door of
what it was like.
Not, of course, that I had any part in it. I was, as we say in the army,
standing by; which means I was sitting on my bum where I’d been told to sit, all
poised and ready just in case I might be needed at some undefined future stage
in the proceedings. The first few days, of course, I really didn’t mind at all.
Our family have always relished watching other people work, and the spectacle of
all those poor fools in full armour humping enormous baskets of rubble on their
backs while trying to dodge catapult bolts without falling into the sea was
fairly engrossing, I can tell you. The amazing, the utterly astonishing thing
about it was the rate of progress. You wouldn’t have believed it possible that
ordinary men and women chucking one basketful of dirt at a time into the sea
could have achieved so much in such a short space of time. There was something
utterly inhuman about it all; it was like watching a tree grow. Maybe that’s
what it’s like for the gods; when they’re feeling lazy after a good meal, do
they lie on their stomachs in the sun watching forests sprout or rivers dig
themselves valleys between the hills? No wonder the gods don’t seem to care too
much about us. We must move so fast, they couldn’t even see us if they tried.
After a few days, though, I was so twitchy and uptight I couldn’t keep still any
longer. I broke the cardinal rule of military life, and volunteered. The staff
bastard in charge shook his head and told me I wasn’t allowed to; I was
specialist technical crew and I had to carry on standing by, whether I liked it
or not. He added that if I volunteered again he’d have me suspended from duty on
grounds of insanity, so I gave it up and went back to the tree-stump I’d been
sitting on for the past three days.
As it turned out, he’d done me a big favour, because by that point the Tyre
garrison had stopped gathering on the walls to laugh themselves silly at us,
and were getting pretty damn nervous. So they decided to stop us; they stepped
up the interference fire from the walls, they sent out war-galleys in continuous
shifts to stand off a hundred yards on either side of the causeway and shoot up
the work crews — which meant, in effect, that our people were under fire on
three sides; they were dropping like olives off a tree, though that didn’t
constitute a valid reason for
not working, and besides, they were only local
civilians, so it didn’t matter. It was only much later, when the rate of
progress had slowed by about a quarter, that Alexander realised he was going to
have to divert some manpower from the job to deal with these bastards; but that
was all right from my point of view, because finally I was allowed to do
something.
The idea was that we’d unship and assemble two of the mobile siege towers that
we carried disassembled in kit form, and wheel them up to the top of the
causeway to provide cover. Well, we set to with a vengeance, and there really
was a lot to do.
They were a fairly new addition to our stores, those towers; it was only when we
reached Lebanon that we were able to find timber long and strong enough to build
these particular designs. That meant, of course, that we’d never actually had to
unship and assemble the damned things before; we hadn’t even worked out the
drill in theory, let alone smoothed out the wrinkles in practice. I’m here to
tell you, it was a hell of a job to have to do on the fly. Those things were
enormous, they had to be in order to bear the weight of the full-size long-range
catapults that Alexander wanted installed at the top of each tower. First we had
to raise the uprights; of course, we found out at this point that half of the
tenons didn’t quite fit the mortices, because the green timber had moved a bit
since it was cut, so we had to plane and shave and chisel out on site, up to our
ankles in dust and mud and shavings, while our people were being slaughtered by
the dozen a few hundred yards away. Helps you concentrate, something like that.
Anyway; we got the frames up, laid in the ties and braces, put in the flooring
and the rails, finished up by stretching any number of green raw hides over the
frames to stop the arrows and catapult shot, and handed them over to the teams
who had the job of deploying the things. We’d done well, no doubt about it; and
those things worked, too. They were tall enough that the guys inside them could
get clear shots at the enemy on the wall and in the ships, and robust enough not
to fall to bits no matter what got slung at them. We’d had the sense, you see,