God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  It was ironic – in a deeply Olympian way – that we outnumbered the Tyrians about fifteen to one, but that there on the mole, they outnumbered us at least ten to one.

  I remember it because it was bad fighting on bad footing, but also because I gave one of my best battlefield speeches. Remember, they weren’t all my men – we all took shifts, so I had men from every taxeis.

  I said: ‘Remember that every man you kill here cannot face you from the top of their wall when the mole is done. Remember that we have thirty thousand Macedonians behind us, and we have only to hold these bastards for five minutes and we’ll have done a finer thing than any men have since the siege started. And remember,’ I shouted, as the boats grated against the mole, ‘that the only choice besides victory is death. I am betting victory is better!’

  I received a heartening cheer. The worst feeling in the world is going into action with men who have no heart. These men cheered, and that gave the Tyrian marines pause. Then they started to form up.

  ‘Charge!’ I called to my own. Always better to be going forward, especially in the dark.

  Our charge shattered them, even at odds of one to ten. About a third of them were out of their boats, and the arrows had stopped. What – did they think I’d just stand there and let them unload?

  We crashed into the centre of their line, with only two ranks of our own. We didn’t have sarissas – most men had a pair of javelins, and a few had longer spears, like the Greek dory. They were on the bad footing where the rubble was fresh, and we had them with their backs to the illumination of the fires they had lit on their own walls.

  Speaking only for myself, I have seldom killed so many men in a single fight. The first man I faced flinched at the contact and I rammed my new kopis over his shield – had I mentioned my new kopis? – and into his helmet and he was dead. There’s no coming back from that wound.

  He fell off my sword and there were three of them facing me, but body posture said only one was a threat, so I put the knee of my greave down hard on the stone – one of the best reasons to wear greaves in a fight – and cut low. He cut high, and sheared my crest, and I cut right through his ankle bone and severed his foot and he screamed like a soul in torment – perhaps he was.

  A really showy, brutal death can shake inexperienced troops, and that’s what happened to the Tyrians. The men on either side flinched away and I followed them. One fell back, into the water, and the other missed his footing, slipped and got my kopis in his throat.

  All along the front, my men had pushed the Tyrians into the water – literally. And there were corpses everywhere. I think I’ve said it before, but in a night fight, armour and discipline are everything, and we had more and better of both. These men were marines and lightly armed.

  And they had no place to run.

  When I saw that their centre was gone, I left the fight with Polystratus at my heels and half a dozen other men who could think on their feet, and we ran for the northern flank, where it seemed that the Tyrians had the upper hand. We hammered into the flank of their charge, a wedge of eight men, and it being dark they never saw us coming, so that each of us downed a man or two from behind before they knew what was happening – and then they ran, pure panic, given the circumstance. Armed Macedonians were pouring on to the mole, and for a few ugly moments we hunted them around the surface like so many rabbits in a field. And we killed every man who had made it on to the mole.

  But while we were butchering their marines, the enemy engineers were putting grapples into our underwater trees and pulling as hard as they could, with ships and from the wall. As soon as they realised that we had slaughtered their marines, they started to pound the mole with thrown gravel and red-hot sand and fist-sized rocks. We were too thick on the mole and we took hits. Red-hot sand – even when it has crossed a stade of cool night air – is horrible – it burns into your skin, so that Thaïs had to pick each grain out with tweezers, and all of the skin infected, which in salt air is horrible enough.

  But we were Macedonians, not cowards. I saw the ropes and felt the mole move, and Diades was there, and Helios – and Alexander. And Craterus and Philotas, and together we led men with axes forward into the hail of stone and sand. Hephaestion was badly burned, and Craterus took a stone to the shield that broke his arm – but we got two of the ropes cut, and then Alexander got hit, and it was all we could do to keep him alive.

  Those moments – in the dark, with a helmet on my head, the haze of the red-hot sand as it fell, sometimes still twinkling, the steam from the fires and the salt water and the screams – Alexander down, and Craterus screaming – they seemed to go on for ever. I just held on, my shield pressed against his body, my head covering his head, as more shit fell on us. It would have to go through me to get to him. He was the King of Macedon, and he was not going to die here, in the dark.

  Sometimes, the gods send me this moment in my dreams, and I am stuck there, for a long time. In a dream, as in reality, you can tell yourself that it will end. But you don’t really know when it will end, and it seems to go on and on and on.

  Then the hypaspitoi were coming up, and Bubores and Astibus came and dragged us off the king and got their shields over him, and we were all pulled clear of the killing zone. Alexander was alive, and virtually unhurt. I was covered in sand. The Tyrians mixed dog and pig shit into the sand to make it carry disease, and I missed the next month of the siege from the burns and the infection that came with them. Hephaestion was never quite so handsome again.

  In fact, although I was screaming with the pain of my burns and didn’t know it at the time, they got their grapples deeply into the trees and dragged several of them from under our rebuilt mole, and caused almost half of our new work to collapse. They also managed to burn the machines we’d built on the mole, and a separate group of raiders burned the towers where they sat on the shore ready for deployment.

  As I say, I missed all that. My recovery was slow, and our second child was born dead – just as I was starting to recover. The pregnancy had not been a good one; Thaïs had been depressed, anxious and sick, and her delivery was painful and hurt her in more ways than just the loss of blood and tissue . . .

  And I was not really there to help. In fact, we were on two beds next to each other for a week. I was aware that she was hurt. But that was about all I could manage.

  My fever broke eventually. I had lost a lot of muscle and a lot of weight, and my beloved was lying in a bed next to me, with a fever so hot you could feel her body from an arm’s length away. I fussed about uselessly, got in the way of Philip of Acarnia and a pair of midwives who were actually trying to help her, and eventually stumbled out of the tent into the brilliant sunshine of a late summer day in Syria.

  Isokles found me immediately, and took me by the hand.

  ‘We were worried about you,’ he said. He gave me a wry smile, as if that was too much of a compliment and he thought I might bite him. ‘Hey – I’m an Athenian in a Macedonian army. No one likes me when you aren’t around. Except Kineas – and we try not to spend too much time together. It’s like committing adultery. You don’t want to give people ideas. Actually, it’s more like not committing adultery, but having your wife suspect you anyway.’

  We walked from the officers’ lines across the camp. There was a heavy series of dust clouds running away north and east.

  ‘More trees?’ I asked. The dust made me cough, and the light made me blink and I was already tired. Everything seemed odd – off kilter. I’d been wounded before, but the hot sand – and the infection – was different. I felt weak.

  Craterus was directing operations on the mole, and he embraced me carefully. ‘How are the burns?’ he said. ‘Lucky for you – you never had any looks to lose.’ He laughed.

  People say the damnedest things.

  He shrugged. ‘Hephaestion got sand all over his face,’ he said.

  Then I understood.

  I looked at the mole. There were four towers across the far end, and fr
om where I stood in the heat shimmer, it seemed to be touching the walls of the city.

  ‘But we’re there!’ I said.

  Craterus shook his head. ‘We haven’t made a yard in the last week. Rebuilding was hard enough. Alexander marched away, and both Hephaestion and Barsines taunted him for cowardice.’

  I looked around. ‘I would like to have seen that,’ I said quietly.

  Craterus shook his head. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Anyway, Diades kept us at it, and we rebuilt what we lost. But now there’s a deep channel – so deep our divers can’t find the bottom, and we’ve dumped . . . I have to think. Ten thousand talents of gravel? More? And trees, dirt, huge boulders—’

  ‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

  None of the officers on the mole would meet my eyes. ‘Hunting,’ Isokles said; because he was an Athenian, he didn’t have to care.

  ‘Hunting? As in, not here?’ I asked.

  Men nodded.

  ‘Ares’ spear!’ I cursed. ‘With Barsines?’

  ‘Barsines is tending to Hephaestion,’ Craterus said, with a world-weary grin.

  And then I fainted.

  It was three more days before I left my tent again. I couldn’t take a great deal of sun, because of the burns on my head and arms. So I sat with Thaïs, whose fever had broken, fed her tea and learned a little about embroidery. I read to her – at first, the Iliad. But after a day, she looked at me, gave me a wonderful, sad smile and said, ‘No more war, love. Not the Iliad. I’m . . . living in the Iliad. And it isn’t so beautiful, from inside.’ She drank some iced water – provided by Philip.

  So I began on the plays of Aristophanes, and we laughed ourselves silly over Lysistrata, the more so as Thaïs claimed descent from the lady herself – the high priestess of Athena in Socrates’ time. Laughter heals, too.

  We were laughing – we’d just read:

  Lysistrata: By the holy goddesses! You’ll have to make acquaintance with four companies of women, ready for the fray and well armed to boot.

  Magistrate: Forward, Scythians, and bind them!

  Lysistrata: Forward, my gallant companions; march forth, ye vendors of grain and eggs, garlic and vegetables, keepers of taverns and bakeries, wrench and strike and tear; come, a torrent of invective and insult! (They beat the officers.) Enough, enough! Now retire, never rob the vanquished!

  Magistrate: Here’s a fine exploit for my officers!

  Lysistrata: Ah, ha! So you thought you had only to do with a set of slave-women! You did not know the ardour that fills the bosom of free-born dames.

  Magistrate: Ardour! Yes, by Apollo, ardour enough – especially for the wine-cup!

  And for various reasons, the magistrate (that would be me) was laughing too hard to attend to the door of the tent, and the king came in.

  Thaïs stopped laughing. Her look made me glance over my shoulder.

  Alexander was angry.

  ‘In all my camp, there are only two voices laughing,’ he said. His voice was like ice, and his disdain was obvious. ‘And I find you reading that hateful play. Disgusting.’

  I had to laugh.

  His face flamed.

  ‘Is it hateful because it is against war?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Thaïs said, ‘it is the notion of women seizing political power?’

  Alexander ignored her. ‘If you are well enough to read to her,’ he said, ‘you can be with your troops.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a well-known malingerer,’ I shot back. ‘I just lie around avoiding my duty, eh?’

  It occurred to me that if I was sick and Hephaestion was wounded and Nearchus was up north ruling Lycia, there was no one supporting the king. Or keeping him out of trouble.

  Alexander was so angry that I knew he would say anything – anything – to make me hurt. That’s how he was, when the darkness came on him.

  ‘Since this bitch came into your life, you have more time for her than for your duty,’ he said.

  ‘Is that what Hephaestion said to you about Darius’s wife? Or was it about Memnon’s women? I can’t remember.’ I smiled. I was good at this – I’d known him since birth, and if he wanted to trade insults, I was happy to oblige. ‘And how is Barsines? Or is it Banugul this week?’

  He hit me. It took me by surprise and I crumpled into Thaïs’s chair, and the chair broke under us.

  The left side of my face, where his blow landed, was where I’d got a patch of sand – so it was pebbly, shiny and painful. His punch sloughed off some flesh and I began to bleed.

  Alexander stood there, and all the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His shoulders slumped.

  I stood up and got Thaïs on to the bed. He turned and strode out of the tent. As soon as I saw that Thaïs was well enough, I pushed my feet into boots and followed him, pushing past Ochrid where he stood with some cowering slaves, throwing a light chlamys over my shoulder. It was hot – Thaïs and I had been sitting naked.

  He was moving fast, headed for his own tent. Once there, he would, I suspected, order the hypaspitoi not to admit anyone, and go into the dark.

  So I ran. I called his name – once, and then again, and heads turned all over the camp.

  He all but ran away from me. He pulled a corner of his cloak over his head and got in between his guards, and Alectus stopped him, clearly meaning to ask him something – the password of the day, no doubt.

  I came up.

  ‘Alexander!’ I shouted at him from an arm’s length away.

  ‘Do not admit that man!’ Alexander yelled.

  I pushed right past the spears. Alectus was utterly loyal – and used enough to the wonderful ways of Macedon that I’m sure he saw me as capable of regicide. So he drew his sword and put himself between me and Alexander.

  ‘By Olympian Zeus, lord over kings and men, Alexander, if you do not turn and speak to me, I will go home to Macedon and leave you here!’ I shouted at his back.

  He paused.

  ‘I will apologise,’ I said. ‘You should too.’ I paused. ‘You will feel better if you do.’

  He turned. ‘Why don’t you say that I must apologise?’ he asked, his voice crabbed with disjointed emotion. ‘Tell me!’ he insisted.

  I shrugged, through Alectus’s sword. ‘You are the king. No one can make you apologise.’

  Alexander let his cloak fall from his head. He stood up straighter. But he couldn’t meet my eye. ‘It was unworthy of me to . . . hit a wounded man.’

  I laughed in his face, pushed past Alectus, who didn’t know what to make of us, and threw my arms around him. ‘That is the lamest apology I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘I am sorry that you are in such a piss-poor mood that you had to come to my tent and vent your spleen on a wounded man and his mistress – both of whom have served you loyally every day for many years.’

  He struggled to be offended. I could see it on his face. But my embrace enfolded him, and it is very difficult to be really angry with someone who is holding you. Try it.

  I was, however, waiting to feel Alectus’s steel grate against my spine. It may have looked as if I was rushing the king. Darius had put ten thousand talents of gold on his head.

  Many loyalties were being tried at the same time.

  But suddenly, his arms were pounding my back, and he was crying. We stumbled a little, as men will do when locked in an embrace, and he cried on my shoulder, and I . . . looked over his.

  I was in his private tent, of course, not his receiving tent. And there was the table he used as his desk, and on it was a letter written in golden ink on purple paper. I didn’t have to be a genius to realise that this had to be the original of Darius’s letter. Nor did I have to be a scribe to be able to read the first three lines, in which Darius greeted Alexander as ‘My brother, the King of Asia’.

  Alexander began to make tearful apologies to me – for claiming that I was malingering, for causing me to fall on Thaïs, for a host of things for which he suddenly felt the urge to apologise. But he didn’t mention that he had falsified the letter fro
m Darius. As I read it over his shoulder, I realised that the forged letter – for surely this was the real one – left me not angry but curiously empty.

  Alexander means to fight for ever. I had never formulated the thought before, but here, in his arms, in his tent, I realised that it was not a simple pothos – he was not fighting to be lord of Asia, or King of Kings. He was fighting because war made him something that peace could never make him. What he wanted was war.

  Not conquest.

  Merely . . . war.

  I accepted his apologies and made some of my own, my daimon all but extinguished by the same realisation that many of my pezhetaeroi had made months before.

  There would be no end.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It took me two further weeks of training to get enough meat on my bones to consider leading men in combat. I wrestled with Meleager, fenced with Craterus and practised hoplomachia with Isokles, who had charged fees to train men in the armoured fighting when he was a young man in Athens, and was truly expert. Meleager was older than I and no great wrestler, and he took it ill when I threw him so that I needed a new companion, and I took to wrestling with Kineas’s friend Diodorus, who was a fine wrestler and a good weight for me – then and even now, though I’ve gained weight and he’s stayed slim, the bastard!

  I noticed – perhaps because an illness is like a visit to another country – as I say, I noticed on my return to duty that there were changes throughout the army, and some of them were deep – some were changes in individuals and some were changes in the whole identity.

  I think that Meleager was my key to the whole set of changes. He and I had never been friends, particularly, but we had got on well enough, and when I found that he had set up his pavilion near mine and liked to get his exercise at the rising of the sun, I thought it natural that we exercise together. But after a few mornings, he made excuses and began to exercise elsewhere. The man I had known ten years before – my superior, I would add – would have cared nothing for a little sand in his face – or would have offered to box with me, or fight with sticks or clubs and arms wrapped in our chalmyses until I was black and blue. But the older, more powerful Meleager didn’t want to take risks. Or if he did take risks, he wanted to take them under different circumstances. There was no ‘private exercise’ for Meleager. He was a public man. He cared deeply whether his subordinates saw him thrown to the earth.