God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-THREE

The greatest victory in Greek – or Macedonian – history earned us a week. Then we were off down the coast road, headed for Syria.

To say that Alexander was insufferable doesn’t do justice to his behaviour. He retold the story of his daring charge and his chase of King Darius, of their brief struggle hand to hand, of Darius’s attack with a dagger after his sword broke, of his own brilliance in overcoming the captain of Darius’s guard while simultaneously holding Darius himself at bay.

It was all true. He had a hundred witnesses, and he liked nothing better than to make Philotas, for instance, tell how he, the king, had rescued Philotas when his horse went down and he took a wound. He insisted that I tell how and why I had sent for help, so that he could explain how he had come into the rear of the enemy Greeks like a god from a machine in a play.

It was his first victory that was all his own, against the Persians. He had triumphed – with his own feats of arms, his own battle plan, an army that followed him. Parmenio played a very small part in the battle, and that Alexander couldn’t let anyone forget.

We were weeks travelling south along the coast, through the mountains and back to the coast of Phoenicia, and every night I heard the story of Issus again.

One afternoon, when I was with the king, we rode off the road in answer to a summons from Ariston, who was commanding the advance guard. We went north from the road a stade or two, and there was a statue. It was magnificent and barbarous all at once, in black basalt.

It depicted an ancient king in a high crown, with his fingers raised on his right hand. I had to look at them from several angles before I realised that he was in the act of snapping his fingers.

I laughed.

The king shrugged at Ariston.

Ariston had the look of a man who had tried to play the courtier and please his king, and failed. He shrugged. ‘The peasants said he was the greatest king in the history of the world,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to see him.’

Alexander made a face.

‘Who is he?’ he asked.

Ariston spoke briefly to a Syrian, who cowered in the dirt. The man raised his face, like a dog expecting a bone. His Greek was halting.

‘He is the Great King Ashurbanipal,’ Ariston said.

‘What does the inscription say?’ Alexander asked. ‘I know who Ashurbanipal was. He ruled the world – or enough of it that it didn’t matter.’

Ariston spoke to the cowering Syrian.

He laughed, slapped his thigh and turned to the king. ‘According to this peasant, the inscription says, “Eat! Drink! Fuck! And the rest is not worth this!”’

‘What rest? Is not worth what? Foolish old man. Worthless!’ Alexander shook his head. ‘There’s no greatness here. A village bull might say the same.’ He looked at me, because I was sobbing with laughter. ‘What’s up with you, Ptolemy?’

I couldn’t decide what was funnier – that Ashurbanipal had raised a statue to proclaim this message (and the rest is not worth the snap of my fingers) or that Alexander didn’t get it.

Later, I thought that if only he’d mentioned war, the king would have found him worthy.

There was another change. Until we marched into Cilicia, we were liberators. It was in the official letters, and in the Military Journal, too. We had come at the behest of the League of Corinth to avenge the burning of Athens and to liberate the Greeks of Ionia and Aetolia.

That was now done. It was shown to be rather hollow by the fact that less than a month after Issus, Halicarnassus and Miletus were back in Persian hands and their fleet continued to dominate the seas.

The truth is, all we won at Issus was time. Darius had a new army within hours, and we actually lost ground after the battle.

And we only truly owned the ground under our feet. More and more, the king had to send detachments – like the one I had led, like Antigonus, like Seleucus – to hold key cities or to put down the endless rebellions in our rear. I use the term ‘rebellions’ advisedly – I didn’t work for the Military Journal any more, and I disdained their jargon and still do. We were the foreign usurpers. Why should we have expected loyalty of the satraps? They would make submission to us, but as soon as Darius showed his teeth, they all flocked to his banner. Including a great many Greeks.

On our side of the struggle, once we marched south into Phoenicia, we were conquerors, not liberators, and that had an effect on the army that I didn’t like to see. The younger men revelled in it – especially relatively new recruits fresh from the farm. Their peasant myths of their own superiority were played out. They had licence to slaughter – aye, and rape and steal – because we were Macedonians!

But the older men saw it differently. I never heard one put it just this way, but my feeling was that until we liberated the last Greek states in Asia, the old veterans could pretend to themselves that this was Philip’s son completing Philip’s crusade, and then we’d all go home.

After Issus, Alexander bragged openly that he intended to make himself Master of Asia. King of Kings. And all the veterans knew what that meant.

It meant thousands of stades of marching and a lot more fighting, that’s what it meant.

Morale plummeted, and between atrocities committed on the civilian population and suicides among the older veterans, the signs were obvious.

Phoenicia should have been easy. I can still grow angry just telling this part of the story.

As we marched south, the cities surrendered one by one, and the Persian fleet lost base after base. Granted, in the north, they had retaken about a third of Ionia, and most of the islands, which, if you consider it, suggests that Alexander’s strategy was utterly hollow. The only thing that kept the Persians from counter-invading Greece and Macedon was lack of a strategos and Athens’ continued prevarication. Men like Kineas’s father did more to help Alexander than he did to help himself. That whole autumn and winter, had Athens come over to Persia, we’d have been cut off from our homes.

Sparta did, in fact, join the Persian cause, but in their own special Spartan way, they left it too late and bungled it. That happened later, of course.

We marched up to Sidon, the second-greatest city in Phoenicia, and they made submission gracefully enough, and Alexander was munificent in rewarding them for their choice. Then we marched down the coast to Tyre with four thousand Sidonese marines in our ranks.

Again, it should have been easy.

Alexander’s demands were very easy – the usual tokens of submission and a payment to the treasury to cover the cost of their submission – the costs of conquering them, so to speak. And taxes, of course. But Alexander was far too wise to impose a foreign government over them – he usually left a military governor with a few thousand troops to watch a whole region.

With Tyre, which was a city associated with Melkart, the Syrian version of our Herakles, Alexander had an additional desire – a pothos, a heroic craving. At Tyre, Alexander wanted permission to worship and sacrifice (lavishly) in person at the Tyrian Temple of Melkart. Tyre was an island fortress, a set of rocks of two stades or more forming a promontory, and the temples were magnificent – but no man might enter without the leave of the city fathers.

Alexander wanted to sacrifice there.

I was present for the negotiations, and I watched the next year of my life vanish in poor judgement.

Azemiticus was explaining that he had no interest in fighting, and Alexander was smiling away, already marching on, in his head, to our next prey, when the Tyrian shrugged.

‘As to making sacrifice at our temples,’ he said with that mock ruefulness you so easily detect as a falsehood that you know you are being mocked – then paused. He meant to offend. ‘That is the privilege of the Great King and no other.’

Alexander’s head turned as rapidly as if he had been struck. ‘There is no longer a “Great King”. I am your king, and I will worship there.’ He smiled, his lips tight – those who knew him understood what this meant. ‘All the better that it is a privilege reserved for kings alone.’

Azemiticus spread his hands wide, to indicate that it was beyond his control. ‘The ancient temple is in the ancient city, here on the mainland,’ he said. ‘Really, you should content yourself with that.’

How did this man get to be the leader of one of the most powerful cities on earth? No wonder translators so often lie about what their principals have said. Had the fool Syrian merely suggested that the land temple was older and more sacred than the island temple, we would have been done. Consensus might have been reached. Alexander might easily have been convinced that the older temple was the more important.

But the word ‘content’ and the contempt with which it was uttered settled the matter.

Alexander’s smile didn’t waver. ‘Your temple in the city, or I storm it,’ he said.

Azemiticus stood. ‘Try, barbarian.’ He grinned. Then he turned and left. I think he always meant to – I think he wanted, like so many other men, to be the man who stopped Alexander.

To be fair, Tyre was a hideously hard nut to crack and Alexander didn’t want to do it, so after a stormy council meeting with Hephaestion and Craterus and all of us, we sent three officers to the city with new terms. The king was to be allowed to sacrifice at the altars of Melkart, but in every other way, Tyre paid less gold and got less interference.

Azemiticus had all three young men executed. He stripped them naked on the walls where we could see, had spears rammed into their anuses until the spearheads came out through their mouths, and then threw them into the sea.

What a fool. In so doing, he condemned his city to death. With whom did he think he was dealing?

Diades was Alexander’s foremost engineer, after Halicarnassus. He was a pupil of Aristotle’s, not brilliant but careful and conscientious, and best of all, he was very good at making Alexander understand him. Alexander was too impatient for a siege, and it didn’t suit his temperament. Diades was a patient man.

He got a small boat and had himself rowed all around the walls. Tyre was on a large island – in fact, I’ve been told it had once been four small islands, now linked together by generations of mortar and stone. The walls facing the mainland were quite high, but some of the walls were not.

Tyre had its own fleet, and recalled a large portion of it from Persian service to face us – almost a hundred triremes, and a dozen larger ships. We had no fleet to speak of, so their sea power not only eliminated any chance that we might land troops on the lower parts of the walls, but guaranteed that they would be supplied whenever they wanted them. In fact, quite early in the siege, before we’d even begun our engineering efforts, a Carthaginian fleet arrived with food and left carrying all of the city’s women and children to safety. Carthage had the largest maritime empire in the Inner Sea, and the knowledge that they would come to the rescue of their mother city was a blow to us. Watching the ease with which their thirty-ship squadrons sailed in and out enraged Alexander, who responded with a declaration of war against Carthage. Against Carthage! Because we didn’t have enough enemies!

The third night after the assassination of our envoys, Diades called the military council together to make his report.

He was a short, thick man with arms like old cables, and men called him ‘The Smith’. Other men called him Hephaestus. He was not old, but he was so careful in his speech that he sometimes sounded like a man of Parmenio’s generation. He had my Helios as an assistant, and Helios grinned at me when he set up the easel on which Diades arranged his drawings.

Diades rubbed his beard and waited for silence.

Philotas threw a bread pill at his brother, who responded by throwing a grape at Philotas. It missed and hit his father, splashing purple-red on Parmenio’s spotless uniform chiton. Nicanor paled.

Parmenio walked over with the grape and slapped it into his son’s hair. Then he rubbed it in.

Nicanor just allowed it to happen.

Alexander wasn’t the only man with a bad temper, let me tell you. At any rate, after a great deal of throat-clearing, Diades held out his hands.

‘Tyre,’ he said. His voice came out in an odd, loud, strangled way, and in the old temple – which we were using as both a temple and a meeting room – it was so loud that he frightened himself. He went on in a voice so soft that men behind the first row could not hear him.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander said.

Diades glared at him.

We all laughed. That seemed to help him. He steadied, looked around and rubbed his beard with his left hand.

‘You know how it is,’ he asked, ‘when you start a project and you don’t know if you can finish it? Those are always the hardest projects. Because you fear that all your work may be in vain. Whether that project is the pursuit of a woman, or the conquest of Asia, or the making of a fine gold seal – in every case, the uncertainty of completion is more of a limit to success than any limits to our skills – whether seduction, conquest or craftsmanship.’

I told you – Aristotle trained him. He was a brilliant thinker, when he put himself to it.

‘The siege of Tyre will be an extreme example of such a project. There is only one practical way of approaching the city, and that way will bring us into contact with the highest and stoutest portion of the wall. By my estimation, it will take us seven months merely to reach a point where we might say that the city is under siege. Until then, we will merely be building – building a causeway. And the citizens of Tyre will laugh at us. We won’t interrupt their food supply. We cannot even slow their trade! We cannot build engines whose stones will hit their walls, we cannot throw fire into the city itself, we cannot open trenches, we cannot undermine. We cannot storm the city, because we would have to walk across the ocean bottom to reach it.’

Alexander made to interrupt, but Diades, who knew his man, drove on.

‘But we can take the city. We will need to build a mole – a causeway – three stades long and half a stade wide. The amount of earth and stone required will make the building of this mole a greater labour than any performed by Herakles, and the gods may be jealous, because if we succeed, that mole will endure for ever. But my lord king, and all of you – if we persevere, we will succeed. Engineering is a science, not an art. If we work hard and move earth, the mole will grow a little each day, and eventually, we will have them. And if you choose not to build the mole . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We will never have them.’

He went and sat.

Alexander rose. ‘You are talking a siege of a year.’

Diades nodded. ‘At least a year, unless a fortuitous event happens, or the gods take a hand.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘We have triumphed thus far by the speed of our advance and our reputation as invincible. How will that look if we take a year to storm one city?’

Parmenio sneered, ‘We have bypassed cities before.’

Callisthenes shook his head. ‘Not cities that have defied us. Not cities that have murdered our ambassadors.’

He directed the Military Journal, and he decided what the Greeks should be allowed to know – and he wrote the florid reports of our victories. His carefully doctored lies were essential to the way the Macedonian army was perceived. More and more, he worked directly with Thaïs, whom he affected to despise, and her information and his often worked together.

I disliked him. But in this case, I agreed with him.

‘I took the Halicarnassus island forts,’ I said. ‘Or rather, Helios there, by the easel, took them. It took us seven months. Until the last three weeks, none of the garrison even thought that they were in danger.’

Diades nodded his thanks to me.

Cleitus fingered his beard. ‘If we fail here . . .’ he ventured.

Diades slammed his fist on the table. ‘We do not need to fail!’ he roared, no longer timid.

Alexander looked around. It was not like him to be so cautious, but he had been shaken by the killing of the ambassadors. The very impiety of it stung him.

‘Parmenio?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you want my opinion?’ Parmenio asked. ‘Delighted to give it. March away. Always bypass strength. Except that in this case, your whole strategy is that we can take any city along the coast that can offer a harbour to the Persian fleet – isn’t it? So your strategy requires that we take this city – and every other city from Ionia to Aegypt.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Of course, we could just march home. We’re richer than Croesus. We hold the best part of the empire. And my soldiers are tired, Alexander.’

Alexander nodded. ‘My soldiers, Parmenio.’ He looked past the old general to me. ‘Ptolemy?’

‘I lost half of my new levies at Issus,’ I said. ‘I’ve had eleven suicides and four murders in the last month.’ I looked around and saw a great many heads nodding. ‘I’m concerned that while we sit here, Pharnabazus is retaking Ionia behind us, rendering our efforts meaningless. But . . . I agree with Diades – if we put our minds to it, I’m sure we can do it. I would only hope that once we decide on a course, we set that course in stone.’ I stood up. ‘Again, let me mention the Halicarnassus forts. It will take a long time. But like many tasks, it is the task never begun that is impossible.’

Alexander frowned. ‘Do I ever change my mind, once I am set on a thing?’ he asked.

Like many men, Alexander had a vision of himself that was at odds with the reality. Some men see themselves as timely, but are forever late. Other men see themselves as great lovers, and women tell a different story. So with Alexander, who thought that he possessed a will of iron.

Parmenio guffawed. ‘You change your mind like a woman,’ he said.

Very helpful.

Diades alone stuck to his message. ‘We can build something worthy of a descendant of Herakles,’ he said. ‘Perhaps greater than any labour of Herakles.’

Alexander looked at him. Looked at Parmenio.

He was silent for a long time. And then he stood straight like a sword blade, and spoke like an orator.

‘Friends and allies,’ he began, and his full charm was on. ‘I see that an expedition to Aegypt will not be safe for as long as the Persians retain the sovereignty of the sea, nor is it a safe course for other reasons – and especially looking at the state of matters in Greece – for us to pursue Darius, leaving in our rear the city of Tyre itself. I would be precipitous if I were to advance with our forces towards Babylon and in pursuit of Darius and allow the Persians to reconquer the maritime districts – and with them in hand, to transfer the war into Greece with a larger army, considering that the Lacedaemonians are now waging war against us without disguise, and the city of Athens is restrained for the present rather by fear than by any goodwill towards us! But if Tyre were captured, the whole of Phoenicia would be in our possession and the fleet of the Phoenicians, which is the most numerous and the best in the Persian navy, would in all probability come over to us. For the Phoenician sailors and marines will not put to sea in order to incur danger on behalf of others when their own cities are occupied by us. After that – well, Cyprus will either yield to us without delay or it will be captured with ease at the mere arrival of a naval force – which then prosecutes the war with the ships from Macedonia in conjunction with those of the Phoenicians.’ He looked around.

Alexander seldom made long speeches, and when he did, with his face shining, his whole attention on his audience, he was virtually impossible to resist. Even Parmenio was nodding along.

‘Once Cyprus is in our hands, we shall have the absolute sovereignty of the sea, and at the same time an expedition into Egypt will become easier for us. After we have brought Aegypt into subjection, no anxiety about Greece and our own land will any longer remain, and we shall be able to undertake the expedition to Babylon in safety with regard to affairs at home and at the same time with greater reputation in consequence of having cut off from the Persian empire all the maritime provinces and all the land this side of the Euphrates. And at Tyre, we shall have shown the world that we are worthy sons of Herakles!’

Sons of Herakles. As Diades intended, the very challenge fired him, and he, in turn, shot it at us. Because the men of Macedon see themselves as the heirs of Herakles.

The siege was on.

Diades rode around the countryside for ten days while the Tyrians jeered at our lack of effort. When he returned, he sat with Alexander for most of a day.

I sat with Thaïs, who was deeply depressed because she was pregnant, and because the Tyrians had executed one of her agents in their horrible way and dumped his body in the sea. I tried to console her that they’d executed three other men who were not her agents. ‘If they kill three of theirs for every one of ours, we will win the siege in a month,’ I joked.

She raised her eyes. ‘Leave me,’ she said. And she meant it. Never make a jest about defeat or death.

I wandered among my troops, watched a dice game, watched two men beat a slave, watched two more men butchering a lamb. The pezhetaeroi were sullen and didn’t want me in their camp. I went to sit and drink wine with Marsyas and Cleomenes, but they were screaming at each other like prostitutes fighting over a customer in the streets of Athens – and on the same subject.

‘She was mine,’ Cleomenes shrieked.

‘She’s not a slave. You cannot own a woman.’ Marsyas spoke in the sneering way that poets have when being superior, always the very best way to incite a riot.

Two of my officers, standing in the street, fighting over a woman. With half a thousand of their own men watching.

Cleomenes reached for the dagger he always wore. Really, we all wore them. I grabbed his hand from behind and then had to kick Marsyas in the crotch as he had drawn his and in his rage seemed to think I was pinning Cleomenes’ arms for him.

Macedon. I tell you.

As Marsyas the Poet fell forward, I slammed his forehead into Cleomenes’ forehead and the two fell together to the ground.

I didn’t feel any better, but I’m sure that I helped to preserve discipline, which was going to Hades already, and we were on the day before the start of a year-long siege. Bubores, passing by, helped me take them to their tents.

‘We had a murder this morning,’ he said sullenly.

As I left Cleomenes’ tent, I couldn’t help but note that the men going on guard were drunk.

However, the finest anodyne to soldiers’ behaviour is work. And suddenly, the God of Work, with his high priest Diades, descended from the heavens. And none too soon.

He had divided the areas around the landward end of his proposed mole into districts, and he’d assigned one each to all of the pezhetaeroi commanders. We were to employ our men as labour, and gather stone and wood.

Craterus held a meeting and suggested that we refuse.

‘You have to be kidding,’ I said. I remember laughing at him. ‘It’s better than my lads deserve. I intend to work them like slaves. Until I trowel off the fat and the bad attitude.’

Perdiccas nodded. Perdiccas and I had always been rivals – but having reached high command, we were, somehow, allies. He rubbed his chin and drank wine and then nodded. ‘If I enforced the king’s law about harming civilians,’ he said, ‘I’d have no phalangites. Last night, some of my men were sending children into the hills so they could hunt them. I need this work.’

Craterus breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank Ares,’ he said. ‘I expected you all to be angry, and I was ready to back you. But in truth, there’s been too much loot and not enough discipline.’

‘Every man in camp has his girl,’ Perdiccas said. He looked at me. ‘I don’t mean you – yours does a job of work.’

‘Even Philotas has a beauty.’ Amyntas laughed. ‘And he affects to despise women.’

‘He despises all of her,’ Perdiccas laughed, ‘except when he’s on top of her.’

The next day, we began working. I mustered my full strength – we’d had some levies, so I had a little more than fourteen hundred men. With Perdiccas, my men were assigned the old city of Tyre, which we were to dismantle, stone by stone, and move to the seaside.

I stood on the bed of a four-wheel wagon and gave my orders, district by district. Isokles and I had already put out coloured tape – Tyrian red linen tape, used for marking, worth a fortune at home – to mark what streets were to be demolished and by what company.

Marsyas and Cleomenes stood well apart from each other. They both looked a little green.

I marched the taxeis over to the old city, had them strip and put them to work. One man in fifteen went into an army-wide pool to weave baskets. Every man who could handle a donkey went to the baggage train. Every man who could do fine carpentry or forge metal went to work directly for Diades.

The siege of Tyre ran on manpower. We had four hundred oxen and a little over a thousand donkeys and perhaps two hundred mules at the height of the siege, but most of the digging and most of the rubble fill was ‘mined’ by men and carried by men in baskets woven by men who needed a new basket every couple of days.

We had about twelve thousand pezhetaeroi and twice that again in slaves. Thirty-six thousand men, each needing a basket the size of a market basket every two days. To give you a notion of the scale of the siege of Tyre, let’s imagine the requirement for brush to weave baskets, at eighteen thousand baskets per day. Just for the sake of easy calculation, let us call that eighteen thousand mina of brush a day. Three thousand talents of brushwood, every day. Roughly the weight of a completed trireme with all its oars and all of its sails and equipment and fully laden with men – every day, just for baskets.

Of course, I exaggerate. Of course not every man wore out his basket – nor did the basket-makers ever keep pace. Men were lost from the work to repair their own baskets – indeed, at one point, I had almost a hundred of my own men making baskets to keep the rest at work, and Diades came and took the whole draft – slaves and soldiers as well.

Brush came from close by – for the first few days. After that, the local brush was gone, and the foragers had to go farther and farther afield, slowing the whole process. By the end of the siege, our brush was being brought from Kana and Sinde, east in the hills and down the coast in Galilee.

And then there was food, water, forage for animals, heavy beams of wood, whole trees and stone. Wine, oil, water and food for fifty thousand men. Every day.

And every man thus served could carry perhaps two hundred baskets of fill a day, if he was fast and devoted and fit. Care to guess how many men fell into that category? And men had to be detailed to destroy as well as to carry – to pull down the old houses and get at the stone in their foundation courses, or the base of the walls, the pillars of old temples. On and on.

After just six days, it seemed normal. After ten days, I joined in, because that’s how you lead troops, and stripped naked and carried a basket on my head all day. I never made two hundred, either. And two days later, my whole body hurt, but I kept at it.

We rested for major feasts, so on the nineteenth day of Mounikhion, by the Athenian festival calendar that dominated in my taxeis, we celebrated the feast of Olympian Zeus. I ordered five oxen to be sacrificed, and we feasted on them amid the rubble of Old Tyre. I gave games for my men, and pitted company against company. I couldn’t help but notice how well muscled everyone was.

In Greece, women are forbidden the games, but in the field, all the camp followers watched, and Thaïs was no exception. Thaïs also had young Antigone, the girl who’d caused Cleomenes and Marsyas to come to blows, living in our cluster of tents. The two officers were perpetually trying to outwork each other – there was an endless amount of guilt they felt they had to expiate. I used it against them shamelessly.

At any rate, she had chairs brought for the women of the taxeis – all the women, Syrian and Jew, Greek and Persian, slave and free. They all had stools on which to watch, and our phalangites, exhausted by the labour of the siege, ran, fought, wrestled and sang, naked, while the women giggled and roared their approval. They were very fit.

When Marsyas wrestled Cleomenes, the two stripped in front of us, and Thaïs rubbed her thumb along my forearm. ‘My, my,’ she said.

I determined to improve my own physique.

We feasted for two days, and then went back to work. My body no longer hurt, and while I did not carry baskets of rock every hour, I made a point to get in several hours a day. Every day.

One day, the slim man ahead of me took his own sweet time dumping his load on the towering rubble pile at the edge of the sea. The idiot had stopped to watch the construction work on the mole with his basket still on his shoulder.

I kicked the back of his knee.

He fell and spilled his load. Then he got to his feet and came after me, face suffused with anger. Of course, working naked, we had no badges of rank.

Which was good, because the sunburned bastard trying to kick me in the nuts was Alexander. I ended up dropping my basket and holding him, and after I yelled my name a few times, he dissolved into laughter. And when the men around us realised what had happened, they stopped betting on the outcome and laughed with us.

Out on the end of the peninsula, meanwhile, Diades had built a framework of heavy timbers – superbly heavy timbers, the roof-trees of the largest houses in Old Tyre and some new-cut cedars. There was a low isthmus of sand and rock just under the sea – we were going to use it as the spine of our mole. And that day, two days after the feast of Olympian Zeus, we started to fill the frames with crushed stone and rubble.

And then the mole seemed to leap forward.

It took almost three weeks for us to use up all the rubble and stone we’d moved forward, but after the Thargellia, the feast of the children of Leo, we saw the mole grow every day – and we carried our baskets straight out to the end of it and dumped them in the frames. If we had doubted, we doubted less, now. The mole crept forward, and the sound of the taunts from the other side grew distinctly more strained.

Alexander grew distinctly more strained, as well. In the heady weeks after Issus, he’d sent Parmenio off to try and take Damascus. It was a gamble – Darius had sent his whole treasury to Damascus before the battle – but the gamble paid off and Parmenio had scooped the entire hoard. As well as all the families of Darius’s senior officers, and the Athenian ambassadors to Persia, the Spartan ambassadors – it was a good piece of theatre, I can tell you.

Parmenio also got Memnon’s wife, Barsines, and her sister, Banugul. They were identical twins, both beautiful, blond and sophisticated. I was there when they were brought from Damascus.

Their arrival set their tone. Barsines rode in an ox cart with screens against the dust, the whole cart painted elaborately with flowers and scenes of the life of Aphrodite. Barsines, as I have said, was Memnon’s wife. And she was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, although some said her sister was her rival. They were both reputed to be descended from Aphrodite, but in fact their father was the satrap of Hyrkania.

Banugul rode a horse – a Nisean stallion of which she was the master. She rode beautifully – like a Scythian, with her legs well up and her knees bent.

Hephaestion had arranged to meet them as they entered camp. I think it was now part of the king’s policy to heroise his better opponents. Memnon was now praised regularly – now that he was safely dead. And Alexander loved to appear chivalrous.

But I don’t think he’d listened to the gossip, and I know he was unprepared for the sisters.

He stood, looking at Banugul as if he’d been struck by lightning. She was dressed from head to foot as a Persian nobleman, and all the male attire, the loose trousers, the burnoose, served only to accentuate the slimness of her limbs, her athletic build, her straight back and neck – and her breasts, which defied the masculine clothing.

She leaped from her horse, leaving the reins to Tyche, and threw herself down before the king in full proskynesis. We had seen it before, of course, but we’d never seen a woman throw herself in the sand before our king.

She did it with grace, and a complete lack of submission. Somehow, she did it seductively, and yet she didn’t waggle or wiggle. Nothing gross.

The king reached out and took her hand, raised her to her knees and looked into her eyes, and then he kissed her hand.

And the gate to the ox cart opened.

If Banugul was the Queen of the Steppes, Barsines was the Queen of the World. She stepped out of the ox cart as if, rather than travelling all day, she had been lounging in the Lyceum, listening to men recite the poets. She was dressed as a Greek woman, in a white chiton with a perfect Tyrian purple border itself edged in gold. The chiton was linen, and transparent, and the body beneath it was as perfect as the cloth of the chiton and as hard as any phalangites labouring under the walls of Tyre.

And she, too, lowered herself into the dust.

The king was transfixed. And it was as if he had taken two arrows – his eyes went back and forth between the two women.

Hephaestion cleared his throat a dozen times, and I began to wonder if the king might need rescuing.

But he raised her from the dust as elegantly as he had raised her sister, and kissed her hand. He said something, and she smiled – a perfectly genuine smile.

Her eyes were as big as a man’s hand, or so they seemed.

The king took each of the sisters by the hand and led them to his pavilions.

So many women – and men – had tried to set their hooks into the king that we, as his friends, had begun to look forward to watching them fail against his lack of interest. I have said it before – he did not look at women – or men – the way most men do. Beautiful women would come to camp, arrange an invitation to meet the king and end leaving with a small present, and he would shrug and wonder aloud why they wasted his time.

But the twins were different. Was it that he saw them as children of the goddess? As peers? They were witty, engaging, seductive, serious, well read, giggly – they were any woman he wanted them to be, with noble birth and descent from the gods thrown in. But I was there, and he was besotted instantly.

It is worth noting that, at the same time, we had Darius’s wife and her women in camp and she, too, was a great beauty. Alexander treated her with great gallantry – but it became obvious, as the siege went on, that gallantry alone was not holding their relationship together. She was a beautiful, powerful woman who had been deserted by her husband. What could you expect?

Thaïs lay with her head in the crook of my arm one night, and sighed. She sighed a great deal – it was as hot as the bowl of a helmet being forged, even at night – a horrible wet, sticky hot, that hurt a pregnant woman more than anyone. She had taken to swimming in the sea – scandalising older Macedonians – if only to have relief from the weight of the child and the heat for an hour every day.

So she lay with her head in the crook of my arm, and all the rest of her posed strategically as far from my body heat as she could arrange.

‘Alexander has discovered women,’ she said.

‘Alexander has discovered the siege of Troy,’ I said. ‘And that Helen has an identical twin sister.’

The army speculated endlessly that he was having both of them at the same time, an impractical fantasy that appealed to every Thracian, every Greek mercenary and every Macedonian – every man, and some of the women, too.

A week or so after they arrived, I entered my pavilion to find both of them sitting with Thaïs, drinking sherbet in the Persian manner. Thaïs looked beautiful, despite her pregnancy and even because of it – pregnancy enhances some things, and not just breasts – hair, and skin.

Barsines sat next to Thaïs, and Banugul closer to the door, and a pair of slaves fanned them while Bella, my love’s Libyan, brought food and wine.

I was wearing a soldier’s chiton over a naked body. I had been carrying rocks. I imagine that I smelled.

Both women rose to their feet and offered deep curtsies. I returned them – I’m a gentleman, despite being dressed as a slave.

Thaïs stayed seated. ‘My lover, the taxiarch Ptolemy,’ she said in a matter-of-fact manner.

Both women curtsied again.

Bella brought Eurydike into the tent, and Thaïs gave her a big hug and a kiss, while Eurydike looked out from the safety of her mother’s embrace at the two women. ‘Ooh!’ she said. ‘Real princesses!’ She had just begun to speak well. She was a little more than two, and she was never shy.

The two women laughed easily, and Barsines reached out for the child, who came to her quickly enough – an amazing thing, if you know children.

‘You are blessed,’ she said, touching our child.

Thaïs nodded.

Banugul turned to me. ‘You wanted a son?’ she asked.

I suppose that I frowned. I wanted Eurydike. I couldn’t remember a time when I had wanted anything else. ‘No,’ I said.

‘You are blessed,’ Banugul said, in her seductress’s voice. It wasn’t human, that voice. It was the sound of man’s desire for woman made flesh. But she was speaking to Thaïs.

And her sister kissed our daughter on the forehead. ‘I never had a child by Memnon,’ she said, with what sounded to me like genuine sadness. ‘You are very brave. Yes?’

Thaïs shrugged.

Women can be such cats to each other. But these two seemed to be above such stuff. Barsines leaned forward. ‘I was afraid to bear him,’ she said. And then looked confused, because she had said too much. ‘I loved him – too much.’ She looked at the rug on the floor of the tent.

‘Memnon?’ Thaïs said. And I realised that she had killed this woman’s husband – that Barsines, for all her seductive ways, had loved Memnon – it was graven on her face – and that Thaïs was just now understanding what every soldier learns – that every corpse you make had a sister and a brother and a wife and some children.

Eurydike had had enough of the strange princesses and came to me, and then raised her head. ‘You smell,’ she said. And giggled, aware that she was the centre of attention, and happy about it.

‘And you will have another child,’ Banugul said. She was openly curious. ‘You, who were reputed to be as beautiful as we?’

Thaïs laughed aloud. Whatever she had been thinking, the sheer hubris of Banugul’s comment didn’t gall her – it amused her. ‘I don’t think I was ever as honey-golden-beautiful as you,’ she said, coining a fine Greek word like any good poet. ‘But I do hate being pregnant. And yet . . .’ She took Eurydike back. The child glowed, put her arms around Thaïs, and said ‘Mummmmmy’, in her too-cute-to-live little-girl voice.

Thaïs rolled her eyes, and all three women laughed.

‘Beauty fades,’ Thaïs said.

Barsines nodded. ‘I try to make myself ready,’ she said. ‘Because I do love it.’

Banugul laughed. It was a laugh of bitterness.

Thaïs clutched her child. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said suddenly to Memnon’s wife.

Barsines had tears in her eyes. ‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

She’s sorry, now that you prove so human, that she killed your man, I thought.

The next day I donned a good chiton and military sandals and went to attend the king. He’d received a formal letter from the Great King of Persia. He presented it to us – a plain letter on good papyrus, not a purple parchment with golden ink, as I’d been led to expect by Herodotus, but such things are often exaggerated.

Darius referred to Alexander, not as a fellow king, but in a slighting manner, and asked for the return of his wife and mother and his eldest son, and he offered to cede to Alexander about a third of the empire. It was a curious letter, full of false pomp and oddly arrogant for a man who ‘begged’ for the return of his wife.

We debated the letter after a fine dinner, the way Athenians debate the role of love after a symposium. As you might expect, it broke down into an argument – a nasty argument – between the two factions. The older men, Philip’s men, were for agreeing to its terms, and the younger men were for rejecting them out of hand. Despite the slowness of the siege, every one of us was sure we’d take the place. It would take time. But we were winning. The Persian Empire was beginning to shred itself – satraps were negotiating through Thaïs’s people, or directly with our king. Athens continued to sit on the fence.

Alexander stayed carefully silent.

When everyone had had too much wine, Parmenio rose to his feet and raised his cup. ‘If I were Alexander, great King of Macedon, I would accept this offer, and be done with war – victorious King of Asia.’ He raised the cup and drank.

Alexander took the cup next and smiled into Parmenio’s eyes. I thought for a moment that he meant the two of them to be reconciled.

He raised the cup. ‘If I were Parmenio,’ he said with careful malice, ‘I would accept.’ He drank the wine, and Parmenio’s face flamed with humiliation.

I helped draft the letter to Darius. A group of us did – Hephaestion, Amyntas, Nearchus, who was down in our camp for a visit.

But Alexander set the tone.

‘Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us harm although we had not done you any previous injury. I have been appointed commander-in-chief of the Greeks, and it is with the aim of punishing the Persians that I have crossed into Asia, since you are the aggressors. You gave support to the people of Perinthus, who had done my father harm, and Ochus sent a force to Thrace, which was under our rule. My father died at the hand of conspirators instigated by you, as you yourself boasted to everybody in your letters, you killed Arses with the help of Bagoas and gained your throne through unjust means, in defiance of Persian custom and doing wrong to the Persians. You sent unfriendly letters to the Greeks about me, to push them to war against me, and sent money to the Spartans and some other Greeks, which none of the other cities would accept apart from the Spartans. Your envoys corrupted my friends and sought to destroy the peace that I had established among the Greeks.

‘I therefore led an expedition against you, and you started the quarrel. But now I have defeated in battle first your generals and satraps, and now you in person and your army, and by the grace of the gods I control the country. All those who fought on your side and did not die in battle but came over to me, I hold myself responsible for them; they are not on my side under duress but are taking part in the expedition of their own free will. Approach me therefore as the lord of all Asia. If you are afraid of suffering harm at my hands by coming in person, send some of your friends to receive proper assurances. Come to me to ask and receive your mother, your wife, your children and anything else you wish. Whatever you can persuade me to give shall be yours.

‘In future whenever you communicate with me, send to me as King of Asia; do not write to me as an equal, but state your demands to the master of all your possessions. If not, I shall deal with you as a wrongdoer. If you wish to lay claim to the title of king, then stand your ground and fight for it; do not take to flight, as I shall pursue you wherever you may be.’

Humble, really. That was Alexander in full stride.

Outside, the mole got longer, and in his tent, Banugul, or Barsines, or Darius’s wife – perhaps all three at once – lay on his couch.