God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

NINETEEN

Parmenio took half the army and marched away.

Alexander gave me four thousand Greek mercenaries, my squadron of companions and Kineas and his Allied Horse, and left me to reduce the coast to obedience and complete the conquest of Caria and Cilicia.

He had a small ceremony to mark the occasion. As was his way, I had no warning – suddenly I was summoned to the command tent and given an independent command. I knew that this was a result of Parmenio marching away, and I knew that I was being given troops from Parmenio’s command. And that I was facing long odds – equal or greater numbers in fortresses for which I had no engines, or on islands I could not reach without ships.

But I accepted his commands without hesitation. He put a circlet of gold on my head and girded me with a new sword, and promoted Polystratus to the companions, which I greatly appreciated and which made Polystratus a nobleman. It was only fair – the man had been my hyperetes all campaign, and had charged with the Hetaeroi at every engagement. But it was a great reward. And this is one of the things that makes Macedon – and Greece – great. Polystratus was a good man, and now he was an aristocrat. His children would not be the sons of a freed slave, but the sons of an aristocrat. His daughters were going to have dowries and would marry the sons of other minor aristocrats. In Persia, they would live and die as slaves.

The truth of it was that our losses were heavy enough – not just battlefield losses, either, but dysentery and other sickness, accident, weather – that most of us who had brought our own grooms were not above putting them in dead men’s armour and using them to fill our ranks. The sort of distinctions that mattered enormously in lowland Macedon – birth, horse quality, armour – either mattered not at all in Asia (such as birth) or were gone (horse flesh and armour). We were all mounted on Asian horses and almost every Macedonian cavalryman regardless of social status now had a full thorax, a good helmet, a lance and a couple of javelins, a sword – and like as not, gold on his bridle and silver in his scrip.

Polystratus’s promotion mirrored mine. I arranged for all of my grooms to be formally taken into the companions, and Polystratus was then formally my hyperetes, as Niceas served Kineas. And my troop returned to near full strength of over a hundred riders. I got Coenus’s troop, as well – he was going home to Macedon with the newly married men, a move that restored the king to popularity with the rank and file, because it looked normal – the married men were supposed to go home every winter.

In fact, I was beginning to fear that the king didn’t really care what happened in Macedon. War in Asia was self-perpetuating – we were making about as much money as we needed to maintain the army, and even to increase its size. We were locked in a competition with Memnon for the service of all the mercenaries in the Greek world, and we were fighting for our lives, and Alexander loved every heartbeat of it. Why go home? What did Macedon have to offer?

Also worth noting is that as long as we were fighting for our lives in Asia, no one was going to plot against the king – well, except Parmenio, and he was right there where he could be watched.

And Olympias was a long way away, too.

Coenus marched away with the married men, and Parmenio marched away with the left wing. He went back to Sardis, as he had wanted to all along – paid off some mercenaries, and then took the rest with the siege train and began a leisurely mopping up of mountain tribes north and east of Sardis.

Alexander marched away along the coast, bypassing strongholds still held by Memnon. He had the hypaspists, the Aegema and the unmarried pezhetaeroi, and the scouting cavalry. I heard from him quite regularly for about four weeks – he seized Telmessus by a stratagem, and gave it to Nearchus to hold.

I like to think that Alexander had tired of Nearchus’s constant sycophancy, but it’s worth noticing that he’d sent me away, too.

I had four thousand men and plenty of slaves – I had seized the best portion of the city and had my men rebuild the houses. I inspected the work every day, and in two weeks we were the best-housed army in Asia. Then I kept them at work, rebuilding the temples and other houses, and after another week surviving citizens started to return.

I also sent Kineas to find the Athenian squadron and beg or borrow some engines and an engineer.

By the gods, he did me well. He came back in two weeks with ten heavy engines – or rather, the bronze parts for them – as well as Helios, a freed Cyprian slave, who had all of the problems of Pythagoras in his head and knew how to construct . . . well, almost everything. He’d been serving the Athenians as a dock builder, and he was bored. I offered him the Macedonian rate of pay as an engineer, and he signed on the spot. He was short, very short for a man, and his skin was deeply tanned, almost the colour of old wood. He had curly blond hair – hence his name – and a pleasant face. He’d been well born, but taken by slavers as a boy and treated badly.

He looked at the three island citadels off Halicarnassus, and shrugged.

‘Three ways to take ’em,’ he said. He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Build a fleet and storm ’em, starve ’em, or grow wings and fly there.’

I nodded. ‘I agree,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Good. I was afraid you expected me to make something out of nothing.’

I shook my head. ‘My plan is to start with the easiest and move from there. Caunus and a town called Knidos.’ I shrugged again. ‘Never seen them myself, but they have to be easier than this.’

In fact, Thaïs had people in both, plotting revolution.

It was great fun, the two of us planning a complete campaign together. I’ve known men to freeze in high command, and it is different, but it wasn’t my first time, and she liked it too, and it was something we did together. And because she was working for me, and not for the king, I began to see how she ran her net of informants, and to watch the details of her intelligence-gathering.

For strategic intelligence – the news of politics, of the thoughts and intentions of great men and cities, of the Persian court, of the satraps – she had her web of letter-writing friends. They didn’t think of themselves as spies, and in fact she called them her Epistolaroi. And the greatest and most important of the Epistolaroi was the Pythia and her priests at Delphi.

For tactical intelligence – the immediate collection of information on local troop movements and enemy intentions in the near term, our scouts did most of the collection – most, but not all, because by this time, after almost a year in the field, Thaïs had a corps of spies she called the Angeloi, the heralds. Strakos led them, and they were mostly freemen. Their characteristics were unarmed anonymity, and superb horses. We knew every one of them by name and by sight, so that they could come and go from our lines without passwords. They seldom carried weapons openly, and they rode far and fast, gathering news. Every one of them had funds to buy information, and most of them had the personal skills to recruit their own informers on the spot.

And above all of them was Thaïs. She read every report, spoke to the returning cavalry patrols, interviewed the Angeloi, read the letters from the Epistolaroi and answered them. It was an enormous workload, but she had a secretariat of slaves and freemen, most of them taken at Granicus – slaves who read and wrote Persian, or Thracian, or Aegyptian, or Carian. All told, her establishment had a hundred people working for it, men and women. It was not a miracle of efficiency, because it was more like art than science, but her information was reliable and quickly gathered.

In the fourth week, I took a cavalry reconnaissance down the coast, with the Angeloi out in front and detailed reports on the towns already in my head, and Caunus looked the easiest, on paper and in fact. Knidos sat on the end of a 250-stade long peninsula with a mountainous spine. Riding cautiously along the coast road, or rather the coast goat path, I could see an ambush site every five stades. By pure good luck and with some tips from Thaïs’s friends, we caught about a quarter of the garrison of Knidos outside their walls and captured them. And then, reversing Alexander’s policy, I hired the lot of them, and didn’t execute them. I wanted to make it easy for men to surrender, not hard.

Caunus, on the other hand, sat three-quarters surrounded by land – flat, well-earthed land. Helios got off his horse in the dawn – we were moving fast and light – and crawled right up to the city wall, and he returned convinced that he could tunnel under the walls in a week.

We got back to Halicarnassus late in the evening, after dark, soaked and very cold. I rode into the courtyard of my house and found it in near panic.

Queen Ada had come into my house in Halicarnassus without being announced. The cold rain poured down the gutters of the house and spat out on to the ground, and I was in a surly mood – I wanted to throw Thaïs on a bed – or a warm floor – and I didn’t want to deal with this woman.

It was as bad as I feared.

‘Why has he not written to me?’ she demanded as I entered the room.

Why indeed? Because he was done with her. Because sex with her made him feel like a mortal, not a god.

Thaïs spoke to her rapidly in a low voice.

‘You are my strategos, Lord Ptolemy?’ the queen asked, more pleasantly.

In fact, I was the absolute lord of Caria. It said so on my warrant. But Alexander had promised her independence, when it suited him, and now I was left holding this particular bag. Love, sex, war, politics. A nasty brew.

‘I command all of the king’s troops in your kingdom,’ I said, as precisely as possible. ‘I will complete the task of reconquest.’

She nodded. ‘When will he return?’ she asked.

It was pitiful – sad, awful. When I’d first met her, I’d been impressed with her vitality, her youth and her complete mastery of the situation. She was a tough woman and a warrior.

Now she was an adolescent girl at the well, begging for news that her beloved still loved her.

She looked old and she sounded foolish, and she knew it herself.

Thaïs was equal to the situation. With a long glance at me – a hopeful one, I felt – she took the queen off to the baths, and I was left with two male slaves and a basin of tepid water.

I got clean, and had them oil me. I was lying on a heated slab – Halicarnassus was a civilised city, and we rebuilt the best parts – and the masseur was pounding my back and then running the sharp edge of the strigil over it – a wonderful, clean feeling. He went on and on, and then the strigil began to scrape harder, and the wielder poked the bent front of it sharply into my armpit and I was fully awake.

I thought he’d slipped, and he did it again – this time the thing prodded me just over the hip and I jumped like a skittish horse.

‘Hey!’ I said, and rolled over to find that Thaïs was bending over me with mischief in her eyes and a string of pearls wound into her hair – as her sole ornament.

By the gods, life can be good.

It took me a year to reduce the strongholds of Caria. I won’t say it was hellish, but it was exacting, hard work, and it changed my relationships with the men under me, with Kineas, with Helios, with Polystratus, with Thaïs. I had had commands before, but this was my army, and these were my orders from the king. Like Antigonus One-Eye, I had a major command and no help whatsoever. Each of us had to make our own way. That’s what the king expected.

Unlike One-Eye, I was in the face of the real enemy. Memnon retreated from Halicarnassus only to seize Cos, just a few stades from the end of our peninsula. Thaïs’s people said he had received little opposition there, and in fact Ionia was already a little tired of Alexander. He was rather too much like a conqueror and rather too disturbing. These weren’t enslaved Greeks clamouring for freedom – they were rich, settled men and women looking to get on with their lives. He also took Mytilene on Lesbos, and all of Chios. He had a base facing us across the water – and the first stepping stone towards moving his fleet to Greece and Macedon. He had four times the number of troops I had, and the entire Persian fleet – four hundred ships. So I had to be very careful when I moved. In the whole year I was in Caria, I feared – every day – a brilliant descent on my beaches, a dashing attack on a marching column. I scouted everything.

It made me a better soldier. Memnon was to my generation and your father’s as Phokion was to Philip – fighting him made us better.

One advantage we had was the empty city of Halicarnassus. Memnon couldn’t spy on me there – there was no population base, and as they began to return, Thaïs’s people were ruthless in searching out his agents. Her finest hour came at midwinter, when she detected one of his men – a Greek soldier posing as a merchant ‘returning’ to his city. Instead of hanging him, she planted a slave on him – a slave who was, in fact, one of her own men. For the rest of the winter we fed him carefully written reports – he suborned slaves in my headquarters and bought scraps of parchment and stolen wax tablets from them, and we spent some amusing hours drafting these forgeries.

First we fed him a cheap victory. I had hired a pair of shipwrights from Miletus and they were building me a pair of triremes down the coast, but either they were charlatans or their workmen were useless. Either way, what they ended up with weren’t worth a pile of horse manure, so we allowed news of them to get to Memnon and he obligingly landed a force and burned them. That proved to us that our man was working, and also built his credibility.

Then we allowed Memnon to know of a grain ship heading for us. I had plenty of grain. He seized it, and our tame agent was delighted. Then we allowed Memnon to know that we were so terrified of his intelligence network and his fleet that we were barricaded in Halicarnassus.

And then, on a cold, rainy night, I slipped my little army out through a postern gate and raced for Caunus.

We missed storming the place by surprise – by a blade of grass. But the closing of the gates caught a third of the garrison outside the walls, gathering new bedding, and we took them prisoner. I didn’t even summon the town to surrender – I constructed my ten engines from the abundant local wood, and my first stones were flying before the sun set on the first day of the siege.

The town offered to surrender on the third day, but informed us that they could not surrender the citadel, which was in the hands of Memnon’s troops. I accepted their surrender and moved my machines up, all in one day. In the face of the outrage of the citizens, I had my slaves demolish a whole (rather rich) quarter of the city, and I used every slave in the town and many of the poorer citizens to move earth so that my platform was done in three days – to the same height as the top of the citadel wall.

They were Greeks. They didn’t expect it to be so fast. On the fifth day, my machines were smashing the parapet. It was a small citadel, less than a stade on a side, with three steep, rocky sides, but the fourth was merely a steep slope with a high wall, and I blew that wall to Hades in a day – mud brick on a stone base.

They went to work building a new wall behind the rubble of the old wall.

Before they finished it, Helios’s mine, started on the first day, reached the point he thought was correct, and we fired it, and the whole north face of their acropolis crumbled.

Helios, the former slave, accepted success and victory with a calm equanimity that made me love him. He thanked every slave and free digger, and he freed three men whose efforts had been spectacular.

And then I packed up my army, put a garrison under Pyrrhus in the town and raced back up the coast to Halicarnassus. As I expected, Memnon landed a counter-attack, but his attempt to cut the coast road missed me by a day, and I was safe in the walls of Halicarnassus when his army got back in their ships. They tried to retake Caunus by coup de main, but Pyrrhus was ready and they failed.

That was the easy one. But every man in my force knew we had beaten the great Memnon. I had thousands of Greek mercenaries – men who might, but for the chances of Moira, fate, Tyche, have been serving Memnon and not me. I needed some victories to convince them that I was the better boss.

Somewhere south of me, the king was marching through the snow of the high mountains. I had no idea what he was doing – or why. I knew that he intended to take every city in Asia Minor before he went inland – to cut the King of Persia off from the sea. Queen Ada fretted, and sometimes I did too.

On the other hand, Thaïs and I had a wonderful winter. I had enough campaigning to keep me busy, and I enjoyed – I still do – administration. They don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. I made sure that the city was rebuilt, and I built Ada a mint. When bandits plagued her main road, I sent Kineas and his Athenian Hippeis and they destroyed the bandits and burned their camp.

Locals told Thaïs and her people that there came a two-week period in late winter when the storms die away and zephyrs blow. It seemed worth a try, so I collected light boats – fishing boats, which could carry ten men. We collected several hundred of them, causing grumbling and mutiny all along the coast, which moved me not at all.

When we’d had two days of golden sunshine and light winds, I put all my cavalry into the boats with the best of my Greek mercenaries and we flew under sail across Keramaeios Bay – eighty stades of pure terror, where a few big waves might have done me in. I’m no great fan of the sea. But I knew that Memnon would be insane to risk his naval supremacy at this time of year. I felt it was worth the risk.

We landed on the rocky beaches east of Knidos in the last light of evening, and we spent a hard night on the rocks north and east of the town. I got lost in the darkness and there was no moon, and we were an hour late to our rendezvous when we found Strako and his lieutenant, Anarches, waiting beneath the walls.

But after that, it went like a play. Strakos pounded his spear-butt against a low postern gate – and it opened.

He grinned at me. ‘And it didn’t cost an obol!’ he said, and that was that.

By the gods, that one was sweet. There is a special feeling when you take a great risk and pull it off. I sent a message to Kineas to send me a garrison – by land – and waited to see who would reach me first – Memnon or Kineas. I sent Strako to Thaïs with the same message and a note of thanks for a job well done.

Perhaps Memnon was too busy taking Mytilene, or perhaps he made an error, or maybe, just maybe, Thaïs’s precious agent and his false information about the size of my garrison kept him at home.

However it worked out, I took Knidos with no loss, and ten days later I left Kineas there with his Athenians and four hundred mercenaries.

We heard – from the captured garrison – that the king was in Pamphylia. Whatever the truth of it, he wasn’t communicating with me or with Ada, and he moved so fast that Thaïs didn’t know where he was.

I got quite a nice note of congratulations over the mountains from Parmenio. It was as flattering as the source was unexpected. He wrote from Sardis, praised my energy, diligence and success, and asked me to bring my part of the army to a rendezvous at Gordia in the late spring. The letter informed me that the married men and new recruits under Coenus would meet us there, and the king, as well.

That left me with only the three island forts to deal with.

The problem was that each fort occupied the entirety of its island, and I couldn’t lay siege without a fleet. So I once again hired naval architects – this time with input from Helios and other men to make sure I wasn’t cozened – and I started to build a quinquereme and three triremes – at Queen Ada’s expense. Caria had once been a naval power, and she fancied the idea. Helios felt that this was the smallest squadron that would give us a chance. And we built a mole under the walls of the city – a fortified mole with engine towers, to cover our ships. And to bombard the nearest island, less than a stade off the coast.

Spring burst into flower, and my mole brought my ten engines in range. Over the water, on Lesbos, Mytilene was still holding out, which gave us hope, and Mythymna promised to rebel against Memnon when we gave the word. I suspected that now that the sailing weather was here, as soon as Mytilene fell Memnon would come and try to take Halicarnassus back. And he would, too – but I might hold him long enough for Alexander or Parmenio to swoop down on him. I dreamed of such a victory.

Just after the Athenian spring feast of Demeter, Mytilene fell after a heroic resistance. These days, when men speak of the ease of Alexander’s conquest of Ionia, I want to spit. Men died – good men – fighting for Alexander or just fighting for their own beliefs and freedoms. Mytilene helped us almost as much as victory at Granicus.

A week later, Memnon had seized Miletus, too, and all the other port cities in Ionia and Aetolia hurried to surrender to him.

In three weeks, all our gains of two years were reversed. Memnon had cut Alexander off from mainland Greece, and the rumour that Thaïs’s agents had was that he was going to use Mytilene as a springboard to go to the island of Euboea off the coast of Boeotia, near Thebes, where the population would welcome him as a liberator from Macedonian oppression.

It wasn’t a ‘brilliant’ plan. It was merely an excellent plan that he’d worked out carefully, and he had the money, the logistics and the fleet to make it work.

Antipater had a powerful army, and Macedon had a fleet in the Dardanelles. And Athens, bless them, wavered – they had three hundred triremes in the water, thanks to Lycurgus, and Demosthenes was demanding that his city join Memnon every day.

We were one bold stroke from ruin.

I saw no reason to stop what I was doing, so I sent a message to Parmenio telling him that I would come to the rendezvous at Gordia when I’d finished the task set me. Then I sat in my chair in the warm spring sun and watched my ten-talent engines chip away at the nearest island’s walls.

I had to pretend I had all the time in the world. It really was the most leisurely siege ever – the defenders were sure they’d be relieved, or even become the attackers, in just a few weeks – they had abundant supplies, and I had no fleet. I, on the other hand, had an inexhaustible supply of stones and ten heavy engines and a proper platform for them.

I turned their walls to rubble, and then I went to work on their inner works – or rather, Helios did. We spent forty days pounding their walls, and by the end of it, my artillerists were probably the best shots in the world, and I needed new machines – I’d worn even the crossbars to flinders.

That night, with blackened faces, my companions and I stormed the farthest island – the one out of range of my machines, the one whose garrison hadn’t had a scratch. They had no idea I had four ships, no idea that I could reach them. Helios had built high ladders on to the triremes – and lashed two of them together. We ran them in under the island’s cliffs and ran up the ladders straight to the top while the sentries tried to figure out what was happening. One sentry – a gifted fighter – killed the first three men on to the wall.

Kineas put him down with a thrown javelin.

And then we were in, and the butchery began.

I thought that perhaps, after the shock of that, the other two islands would surrender, but they did not, and now I had wasted my surprise. Or – not precisely wasted. I could now bombard both islands. I tried a daytime maritime assault on the nearest, and lost fifty men and got an arrow in my behind as a memory. That hurt, and I had scant sympathy from Thaïs. I lay there for five days, feeling like a fool, and Thaïs came and went, and mocked me gently when she had time.

It was growing hot, and the ground was dry. The campaign season was opening, and I had lots to worry about.

Thaïs came in – I remember this vividly. She was skipping like a girl, and she beamed as she took my hands.

‘Memnon is dead,’ she said.

I was speechless, and she laughed.

It took me a moment to realise what she wasn’t saying.

‘You killed him?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘I tried to. I assume that I succeeded.’

I sat there with my arse hurting and shook my head. ‘Brilliant. Don’t ever let Alexander suspect.’

She looked at me with the pity that women use on men who state the obvious.

Memnon died north of Mytilene, of a curious stomach complaint that came on suddenly. The nut of the Strychos, ground fine. It comes from India, and Aristotle taught us about it. Thaïs had her own sources, of course.

Over the next weeks, as Helios cast bronze parts for new torsion engines, as his smiths pounded iron to make new frame supports and as trains of oxen brought timber for new frames from the mountains, we watched Memnon’s plan shatter. There was no successor to his office as the Great King’s strategos. There was no man who could hold his plan, or his army, or the fleet, together.

His death changed everything.

And still the two islands wouldn’t surrender.

Memnon’s death rendered my presence in Halicarnassus somewhat unnecessary. Now there was no threat from the sea. Now there would be no relief of the garrisons. In effect, I had won, or rather, Thaïs had. Game over. No further need even to hold Caria, really. No threat to Macedon.

At the end of the planting season, we heard from Thaïs’s people that Coenus was marching the new recruits and married men by rapid stages across Thrace. And we heard that Charidemus – another Athenian-born professional – had advised the Great King to send him to Ionia to carry out the invasion of Greece. According to our source – a damned good source – Charidemus dug his grave with the truth, telling Darius that he didn’t have the troops to face Alexander in the field and shouldn’t try, but should leave the fighting to Greeks, who could bear the brunt of it.

He was a brilliant fighter, or so men said. I heard he was a good general. Whatever the truth of it, Darius had him executed and started raising an army, and the last of the Persian fleet across from us at Chios broke up and sailed away, and the two garrisons asked to meet me in an hour when we shot news of his execution into their positions.

Both garrison commanders were Athenians. Most of the best mercenaries were Athenians or Spartans, and the latter were as good or better. I gave them wine and told them what I knew.

Isokles and Plataeus, they were. Older men, almost Parmenio’s age. Plataeus was a true believer – one of Phokion’s men. He hated us, and all our ways. But he hated serving Persia, too. I knew all this from Thaïs.

I talked to them for an hour, and they surrendered their islands and I let them keep everything – their loot, their pay, their armour and weapons. Isokles joined me. Plataeus sailed away for Athens.

Pharnabazus, the last Persian friend of Memnon’s still trying to do any work, threw a major garrison into Mytilene, and ordered all the mercenaries and citizens captured there in arms to be used as forced labour rebuilding the walls. I suppose it was better than executing them, as Alexander did, but not much better. Thaïs got her agents in among them, and recruited a dozen to report to us on what was happening in Mytilene. Most of them were ignorant men, but one was literate and so gifted at spying that by the time the last garrison surrendered after the summer feast of Demeter, he himself was running a dozen other agents and had refused to be ‘rescued’. He remained in place until the city fell to us later, leading the life of a slave, leading teams of saboteurs, scouting for weak points.

I wouldn’t mention it, but that’s your friend Philokles. I never met him, until we fought along the Jaxartes river. But I’m sure it was him. It was a huge war, and yet it seemed like a very small world, and it still does. And the irony of it – Philokles hated Alexander, but he loved liberty, and he loved both Mythymna and Mytilene. And a woman, or so I’m told. It’s his story. Ask him.

At any rate, with Memnon went his intelligence-collection apparatus. We never lost another agent. Now we had the better information, and the networks in place to get the earliest reports of changes in policy. It was clear that Darius meant business. He was raising an army. He was levying troops, and raising rebellions where he could.

I sent Kineas to Parmenio with his Athenians and the promise that I would march in three weeks, when Caria was secure. Then I moved fast, south, clearing the coast road as far as Kallipolis. I gave Queen Ada the keys to her own capital, and left it . . . well, better than I might have. She was a bitter woman. But returning to her earlier armour of doubt, and probably healthier for it.

On my march north, I collected Thaïs and all my baggage, and all my men. I had been king in all but name for almost a year. I think I did pretty well. I certainly enjoyed it.

It was a happy time.

I found, as I marched north, that I hadn’t really thought of Alexander in a year.