God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

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.

My second lesson in this change was several days later, after my first bout with Diodorus. I was wiping the sand from my face – Diodorus threw me quite regularly, until I gained some muscle and some much-needed skill – and Craterus, who watched us, took me aside.

‘Do you think,’ he asked me cautiously, ‘that you are wise to let men see you be bested by an Athenian?’

I spat sand, and shook my head. ‘Herakles was a fucking Theban, and I’m pretty sure he’d put my head in the sand, too. And I’m pretty sure men would cheer.’ I gave him my best farm-boy grin. ‘No one minds if I get thrown. Who cares? It’s what I do when the bronze is shining that matters, isn’t it?’

Craterus smiled, and that smile was false. ‘Oh – of course. Absolutely.’ He withdrew, and I saw that we had changed as a group. We were keeping up appearances.

But the siege of Tyre was not about appearances, thank the gods, and by now we had machines on the end of the mole, throwing stones as big as my head – two a minute, all day, and a rank of spare machines ready for whenever the brilliant engineers on the other side managed to destroy one of ours.

Summer was becoming autumn, and the feel of the breeze had changed when I went back into the line. It was a late summer evening, and the heat of the day seemed to flow upward into the sky, and the breeze that came with the setting of the sun was like balm on wounds, and seemed to blow right through my leather-backed shirt of scales to cool my body.

I was right forward, in the line of engines, watching the teams load and loose them with a terrible precision, when there were cries – and screams – from the forward edge of the mole, and I assumed we were under attack. By this time, Alexander had forced virtually the entire servile population of Syria into our work crews, because so many slaves had died at the hands of the Tyrians – perhaps, by this time, as many as fifteen thousand or more. I had been told that armed soldiers were required now to whip the slaves forward with their loads, and to kill any who attempted to desert. And I was told that soldiers no longer worked on the mole – only slaves.

No wonder we’d slowed to a crawl. Slaves love work the way a rat loves a cat.

At any rate, I went forward with fifty men as the slaves fled in panic, shouting in five languages – Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician and Persian. I couldn’t understand them, so I pushed a few into the water as I shoved my men forward through the machine line and then past the towers – four towers, now.

I made it to the very end of the mole, and came to an abrupt halt. The Tyrians were casting red-hot sand, and the smell of it – the look of it in the air – almost made me puke.

But what I saw was far, far more horrible and awe-inspiring than red-hot sand.

There was a sea monster.

It was enormous – as long as five men. Perhaps as long as ten men. A day after the event, I had a hard time recalling exactly what the monster looked like, although hundreds of us saw it. Even as I watched, this spawn of Poseidon seemed to throw itself on to the mole. Its enormous teeth seized a slave who stood rooted in fear, and he was gone – dismembered and stripped to bloody fragments – by those rows of teeth in less time than it takes to tell it.

I was the next man closest.

I’m told that I bellowed the name of Poseidon. Good for me – all I wanted to do was get my head under the covers and wet myself.

But I saw its eye. And it saw me. Something passed – something old, something incredibly alien. And yet, it saw me. I swear to you, in that moment, I was changed by the regard of a god. An old sea god, perhaps disturbed by our mole – perhaps merely investigating the latest piece of human hubris. One of Triton’s offspring, or one of Amphytrites’, perhaps. Some bastard child of Thetis of the glistening breasts, or perhaps some titan sent to the water for some long-forgotten crime, but that god was older than man. It was in his eyes, the way you can see all the horror and torment and combat a veteran has seen in one blink, sometimes, eh? You know what I mean. It was there.

I like to think it was a true son of Poseidon, a mighty hero of the deep. I like to think that, because he nudged me aside with his face, rather than ripping me to shreds with the mighty engine of his rows of teeth – nudged me, rolled a little and slid effortlessly back into the water, and vanished into the deep next to the mole.

There was a pause, for as long as a man’s heart might beat sixty or eighty times. The world was silent.

And then the Tyrians began to loose their engines at me.

They missed.

We spent weeks discussing the sea monster. No two men saw the same thing, and of those who saw it, every man had a different theory of what it was and, more importantly, what it portended. Alexander’s seer declared that it was a god, Poseidon’s only son, and he came to show us the way into Tyre.

Well, I don’t have much time for his ilk, and even though his prognostications fitted my own desires, I didn’t like him any better for them. Alexander had not seen the monster, and seemed curiously dismissive of the event.

When I told Thaïs of this, she smiled. ‘He doesn’t believe there’s room at this siege for more than one god,’ she said.

She had not returned to her former work collecting information since her delivery. She wouldn’t discuss it with me, but more and more her work devolved on Callisthenes and his people. It was interesting to see the difference. She had started her work to please me and to help Alexander, and had based her collection of information on the wide circle of her friends and former lovers and partners and clients – and the Pythia.

Callisthenes used Aristotle’s circle of friends, for, as Thaïs said nastily, he had none of his own. But he was more inclined than she had ever been to spend money on information, and he was less interested in examining it, weighing it and measuring it before he sent it on to Alexander. Or rather – and we saw this almost immediately – his principal interest was information that fitted seamlessly with his own worldview and his own expectations. And Alexander’s.

In just a few weeks, Alexander’s view of the world began to narrow perceptively.

Ironically, in the way that the gods move, Thaïs’s last great triumph came in such a way that Alexander was made to realise what he had lost. A few days after the sea monster, I went into my pavilion to find Thaïs deep in conversation with a handsome, older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and large blue eyes. He wasn’t tall, but had a magnificent bearing, and he sat in my tent as if he owned it. I was prepared to hate him on the spot, but he rose graciously, took my hand and thanked me courteously for his wine and the use of my couch.

He was, in fact, the King of Cyprus – absolute ruler of more than one hundred triremes. Thaïs had been making overtures to him for more than a year, and like a fisherman with a small boat who catches a big tuna, she’d spent all that time bringing him carefully ashore.

I was sent for by the king. He was sitting with Callisthenes, getting the news of the world. I loathed Callisthenes, who neither told the king the truth nor managed to be a decent lickspittle, but played both harlot and harridan. But he paid in the end. He was a poor philosopher and a sad comment on Aristotle, although I’ve heard men say that Theophrastus was Aristotle’s real favourite, although no blood relation. Perhaps.

To me, though, Callisthenes, even at the height of his power with the king, was a paid foreigner, not a soldier or a man of account in any way. So I brushed past his protests and crooked my finger at the king. ‘A matter of some urgency,’ I said quietly.

Callisthenes stood up.

‘Just the king,’ I said to him.

‘Who is it that sends for me?’ Alexander asked.

‘Thaïs,’ I said. ‘A matter of some urgency. And delicacy.’

Callisthenes shrugged. ‘Oh, then I must come,’ he said. ‘Anything of hers is my business.’

I caught Alexander’s eye, and he nodded. ‘No,’ he said to Callisthenes. ‘Wait here.’

We walked out together. I ignored Callisthenes’ outrage – I cared little for him then, or ever. As soon as we were clear of the guards, I said, ‘Thaïs has won over the King of Cyprus. He’s in my tent. He wants only your word on certain matters, and his whole fleet is at our service.’

Alexander stopped, looked at me and then gave me a brief embrace that hurt my burns. ‘A fleet!’ he said. ‘By the gods! Poseidon’s gift! A fleet!’

He went swiftly to my tent, embraced the King of Cyprus and the thing was done.

Afterwards, and many times, Callisthenes claimed that he had turned the King of Cyprus.

And it was the last political act of Thaïs’s life for a long while.

The Cypriot fleet changed everything. Alexander kept it hidden, up the coast, and put Craterus’s taxeis aboard as marines, and went aboard himself. Several evenings later, another beautiful late-summer evening, and the Tyrians descended on the end of the mole with fifty boats, grappling hooks and a barrage of covering fire from their engines on their walls.

Alexander sprang his trap, and the Cypriot fleet raced for the entrance to Tyre’s island port – a passage the length of a trireme wide, between two enormous stone towers bristling with engines.

We cheered like madmen as the king’s galley raced into the setting sun, but the Tyrians were canny, and they fled from the mole. We only took five of their ships, but dozens of their marines were left on the mole in the panic, and we killed every one of them.

At the command meeting later that night, I pointed out that neither of the towers had loosed so much as a rock at our ships.

‘The towers were empty,’ I asserted, and Diades nodded. And thumped my back.

The Tyrians were running low on men. Or rather, when they put fifty ships to sea with full rowing benches, that stripped their manpower.

And what that meant was that their fleet would never dare put to sea again. We had mastery of the sea.

Diades and Alexander put it to use that very night.

Boat raids. Twenty men in the bow of a trireme, or five men in a smaller boat, rowed up to the walls, attached grapples and the crew of the trireme tried, by rowing away, to force a section of wall to collapse. In other places we set fires, or tried to scale the wall.

Helios refitted pairs of triremes with huge platforms between them – like monster catamarans – mounting large siege engines. We’d done this at Halicarnassus, and now he did it on a larger scale. We built six of them, floated them and parked them opposite the weakest portion of the wall, just about a quarter of the circuit around the wall from the mole. In two days, they brought a section of wall down. We boarded ships for an assault, but the weather worsened and we had to abandon the idea, and the next day they had rebuilt the wall.

Two more days of pounding away, and we had to rebuild all of the engines on the ships while the enemy rebuilt their wall. And then we were at it again, and with a rush, their whole line of new masonry went down, despite hoardings, and the cover of great oxhides and a dozen other contrivances.

That afternoon, however, a pair of Cypriot triremes ran across a pair of Carthaginian triremes and they fought each other to near extinction. One of the Carthaginians limped away, and both of the Cypriot vessels were turtled, although both were reclaimed later and restored to service.

Now Alexander had to fear the appearance of a great Carthaginian fleet. We might lose our mastery of the sea at any moment. The mole was pressed forward. A man could almost jump the gap. The fleet was brought in close, and Diades had four of the oldest triremes brought up to the mole so that they could be filled with stones and sunk in the channel to act as piers for his mole.

But that night, a storm hit us like no other I had experienced. It lasted three days, and every tent in the camp blew flat. I had to rescue Thaïs, still weak from the loss of our child and still so depressed that she would take little or no action to save herself. I moved her to Isokles’ tent, and then, moments later, that too collapsed and I had to lift her out through more sodden silk and canvas.

The next day was no better, and the only standing shelters in the camp were the ones built from lashed boat sails spread over heavy timbers – and tied down by sailors. And that night, when the storm hit its height, even those fell, and we huddled together, taxiarchs and strategoi and pezhetaeroi and slaves, all together in our shared fear and misery. The gods have the ability to make one feel very small, when they wish. A good storm is humbling.

When we awoke on the third day, I followed Diades down to the shore to see what had happened.

The mole was gone.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration. Certainly, the sea was breaking over something, so the bulk of the earth and wood was still there, but the sea flowed over it, and it was enough to break your heart. His precious ships – full of stones, ready to be moved into position – were all gone, capsized and sunk in shallow water north of the mole.

‘Poseidon’s fury,’ he said.

‘And now we have it all to do again,’ I said.

Diades shrugged. ‘I have already stockpiled more stone than we had when we started,’ he said, with a grim smile. ‘It will go faster this time. But only if the king does not despair.’

That night, we had the stormiest command meeting I can remember.

The factions were fully developed. Parmenio, his sons and the older officers – men like Meleager who owed their careers to Parmenio, and men who were midland Macedonian landowners – and men who were tired of war.

The truth is, I should have been with Parmenio’s faction. I knew what was in the king’s mind. An abyss of endless war – a sort of infinite Iliad, with himself cast as Achilles, where an endless procession of enemies threw themselves on his heroism and his genius – and perished.

The other faction was no longer the ‘Young Men’. We were no longer so young – no man faces battle eight or ten times and counts himself young. Perdiccas and I – to name two – had the scars of men twice our age. My shoulder hurt as if pierced with ice every time the weather changed, and my hands – I awoke every morning, at age twenty-six, winter or summer, with hands that hurt enough that I often had to warm them in hot water before I could make them obey me.

This is not the life of a ‘young man’.

What distinguished us from Parmenio’s party was that we loved the king, and had grown to adulthood with him. It is not that he could do no wrong – indeed, the paradox was that we were the ones who expressed our doubts openly to Alexander.

That night after the storm, Parmenio and Alexander locked horns like two bulls.

‘We have stood here for seven months, and we have nothing to show for it.’ Parmenio didn’t trouble to hide his contempt. ‘I told you that we couldn’t take the city. We cannot take it. We have lost a year’s worth of gains and all the treasure of Issus – squandered to take this pile of rock.’

Alexander was at his most difficult – conceding nothing, absolute in his righteousness. He simply smiled. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked.

Philotas stood. ‘Lord, there is no point – if we start the mole again, we’ll face another disaster and another. For what? We don’t need the city. The strategy of taking every sea base on the coast is no longer valid – it is now we who have the larger fleet.’

Alexander’s smile was fixed. ‘I asked if anyone else wanted to speak,’ he drawled.

Philotas’s face flamed. ‘My father has led your armies and won your battles, lord. Your treatment of him is ungrateful and mean!’

Alexander nodded. ‘Let us stick to the matter at hand,’ he said.

Amyntas, the current favourite, rose to his feet. ‘We can take Tyre in four more weeks. Given the time we’ve put in, and the treasure, as Lord Parmenio has so eloquently put it, should we not finish what we started?’

Alexander’s expression did not change.

Parmenio glared at him. ‘Why don’t you speak your own view, Alexander? Instead of letting your “friends” do it for you?’

Alexander shrugged, every muscle in his body speaking contempt. ‘I am the captain general, and I will speak last.’

Parmenio crossed his arms.

‘Craterus?’ Alexander said.

Craterus looked at the carpeted floor of the tent. ‘Let us march away. Let us march home.’

Alexander looked at me. ‘Perdiccas?’ he asked.

Perdiccas looked at me, as well. He made me feel like a ringleader. A role I did not fancy. ‘Lord, I will stand with you whatever you choose.’

‘As if I would not?’ shouted Nicanor, son of Parmenio. ‘By Zeus who judges all oaths, I swear that none of us have suggested that we will not follow the king! How dare you suggest such a thing?’

‘Meleager?’ Alexander said, but his eyes were still on me.

Meleager mumbled something.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander spat, sounding very like a hoplomachos on a drill field.

Meleager took a deep breath. ‘Finish the siege,’ he said.

Parmenio looked like thunder.

Alexander’s eyes flicked back and forth in surprise. I was surprised too. I no longer had to cast the tying vote, to allow Alexander to settle the issue. Which he clearly wanted. Now my vote would decide the issue. Not that, as king, he couldn’t just order us to do it. The democracy of the council was more apparent than real.

Alexander nodded to me. ‘Ptolemy?’ he said.

‘Finish the siege,’ I said. Not because I believed in it, but because I was his friend.

Diades went to work immediately, the next day, and from our ‘stores’ of rubble and rock, we rebuilt the mole in two weeks. We had ships to cover the head of the mole and ships to move bulk rubble and ships with engines to attack the enemy batteries, and the coordination of the ships grew better every day.

Diades built superstructures for the ships so that a pair of triremes, lashed together, could hold a tower with ladders inside – the assault troops protected by wet hides and wooden hoardings.

In days, we had our own engines clearing the wall from the end of the mole.

In a week, the city must have seen that the end was near.

Two weeks to the day after the storm, a pair of Cypriot cruisers picked up a Carthaginian trireme that failed to outrun them. The ship carried a message, sealed in a bladder.

No further help was coming to Tyre.

We shot the message into the walls, and that night, in a brilliant piece of seamanship, the Cypriots sank two old triremes in the deep-water gap – both full to the gunwales with rocks. The next night, under a protective hail of stones, they performed this feat again.

Six engine ships pounded the southern walls day and night, turning every repair to rubble. Sixteen engines on the mole launched larger stones at a shorter range, so that the tallest walls on the island, those facing the land, began to crumple under the weight. Alexander was heard to joke that at the rate we were throwing stones, we were raising the level of the city and providing them with years of building material.

On the feast of Herakles, Hephaestion donned armour for the first time in a month, and we cheered him. And then we boarded assault boats and the trireme pairs with the great scaling towers.

I took the picked men of my taxeis – two hundred men in the best armour we could scrounge – and we boarded two pairs and filled the decks and the towers. Remember, a trireme ordinarily carried ten, or at most twenty, marines. With the double hulls and the towers, we could carry a hundred, but it made the ships ponderous and very, very slow. We needed near-perfect calm and bright moonlight to move and assault.

Alexander had chosen to lead the assault from the mole. The sea was never his element.

The first fight after a wound is always hard, like getting back on a horse that has thrown you. At the head of my ladder, swaying wildly, or so it seemed to me at the very top of a tower between two big ships, I had hours to consider the feel of the red-hot sand as it poured down my body and was trapped against me by my own armour, and the smell as my flesh scorched, and the feel of heavy rocks on my shield, on my helmet, on my thorax.

The sea stank with eight months of refuse, garbage and human filth from the siege – uncollected corpses, offal, carcasses from all the sacrifices, excrement. The enemy engines were loosing as fast as they could be loaded, and we could hear as heavy rocks or long spears struck our ship, and once, quite early in our manoeuvring, a ballista bolt tore through the hide covering and killed three men where they waited on the ladders. There was shouting, screaming and, in the distance, the constant sound of massed prayers – hymns to Melkart. Thirty thousand voices singing together – an eerie sound.

About midnight, all of our engine ships began to launch all together. First they threw baskets of heavy gravel to clear the walls, and then multiple salvos of great rocks, chipped round by slaves, and then more gravel.

By that time, my ship was quite close, and I could see individual men on the walls. And they could see us.

A disc – like an aspis, but flung sideways so that it spun, and full of red-hot sand and burning dung – hit our tower. The sand fell harmlessly into the sea with a hiss and a burst of steam, but the burning shit stuck to the hides and they steamed.

When I peeked over the top of the tower, I could see that we were coming up against a pair of huge wooden wheels with paddles attached, almost like mill wheels placed on their sides. They turned very fast, and even as I watched, a huge bolt struck one – and was deflected by the rotation of the wheel and the struts.

But a heavy rock from one of the distant catapults struck the wheel edge on – as if striking the top of a chariot wheel’s tyre – and something gave. The wheel began to break up as it turned – pieces of wood showered off it like sparks off a sharpening stone.

By the will of the gods or ill luck, my tower would be the first to reach the walls. Despite all the engines throwing rocks, the hail of small stones and all the fire being cast, the fires burning in the city beyond and the ships afire under the walls – despite all of it, the enemy had gathered a large force where my tower would reach the wall – more men than I could count.

A wind blew a charnel-house stench – hot with furnace air from the fires in the city – over our faces, and then our tower took another direct hit from one of the discs full of hot sand, and the hides burst into flame, and archers on the walls immediately began to sweep the tower. We were a horse length from the wall – less every heartbeat. Men on the wall with huge tridents mounted on gimbals stabbed them through the leather walls of the tower and into the troops waiting inside, causing panic on the ladders.

We had six archers at the head of the steps – Cretans armed with longbows. They stepped out on to the platform of our tower and in that moment I thought that they were the bravest men I’d ever seen – unarmoured, facing all that fire.

They flicked arrows down on to the wall faster than I can tell it – the smallest of them was the finest archer, and he emptied his quiver before we reached the wall. Two of them were hit, but they struck back – they made me feel better, because we weren’t just standing or crouching and taking hits, we were killing the enemy, as well.

It was all I could do to hold my sword. I had a pair of heavy javelins, and when the tower touched the wall, I cut the cord that held the great gate and it fell across the gap, giving us a ramp down into the enemy defences.

I was hit twice before I got on to the wall – both stones, probably our own, and one all but knocked me senseless – and that after hitting my crest. A big rock. But I was on the wall and I threw my javelins – I don’t even remember throwing them, just that my right hand was suddenly empty – and I snatched my sword and moved against the nearest tower.

One of my phylarchs fell victim to a bucket of red-hot sand and died horribly, screaming and thrashing, and he pushed men off the wall. Another phylarch cut left and right – cut beautifully with his kopis, dealing death, but a defender caught him with an axe, a murderous weapon, and the blade went in at his neck and cut through to his crotch, so that he opened like some evil flower and his guts exploded on the men around him, who flinched and died.

The defenders were not beaten. They gave us the wall, or rather, the pile of rubble that had been the wall. Behind it, they had a second wall, about the width of a street – like Memnon’s trap at Halicarnassus, and I had fallen for it. I went to the edge of the breach and shouted for ladders. We had them, lying along the planking of the upper deck, lashed to the gunwales.

I felt my men were being sluggish coming up the ladders.

I remember roaring, ‘Damn it, come on!’ at the ladder men, and then I took a blow to the back and I was fighting for my life against a counter-attack. There were very few Macedonians alive on the rubble of the outer wall. The first fighting had gone against us.

But then the Tyrians made an error. Whether on purpose or because of a misunderstood order, their engines swept the wall with stones and red-hot sand. Their own men took the bulk of the punishment, and their own reinforcements refused to come at us. By the will of the gods, none of the eight or nine of us holding the breach open was hit.

My men were just as unwilling to come up those ladders. There were corpses all through the ship – our pair of vessels, as the first in, had drawn more than our fair share of missiles, and men had to climb over the wreckage of former men to get up the towers. That’s always hard. And some men had gone for more ladders, and then used that as an excuse to stay below.

There was a huge cheer from the centre of the city, and then another cheer from the mole – whether ours or theirs I couldn’t tell.

The fighting in the breach was sporadic, deadly and man to man. A few Macedonians continued to join us from the ship. I was exhausted by the time I realised that the tide had turned at the top of the ladders, and that we now held the breach in strength.

Isokles found me in the dark. ‘Lads don’t like this a bit,’ he shouted. ‘We need to go forward!’

Some brave men had come up the outside of the tower with two ladders – plain scaling ladders – and we put them against the new wall from the breach, with archers in towers virtually all around us shooting down into us. But we got the ladders up and we went up them. I led the way. It is my job.

I was first up the first ladder on the inner wall, and two big men tried to push the ladder over with tridents, but my men were pressing against the base of the ladder. The ladder itself bent and groaned, and I raced up it as fast as my arms and legs would carry me, and I didn’t wait on the ladder to make my cut – I jumped in between them and cut back and forth – low is always better in the dark, although low cuts are an invitation to a head-cut counter in daylight. And then more or more men were beside me on the wall – Isokles, and Polystratus, and Cleomenes.

We heard more cheers – and they were absolutely not Macedonian cheers – coming from the direction of the mole.

I looked back and saw that the second ladder/tower ship had been sunk where it had rested on the waves, and that a pair of triremes were rescuing the rowers and marines. That meant we would not have a second wave.

The Tyrians rushed us. We had about sixty men on the inner wall, but we were between two towers and we didn’t have anywhere to hide. They shot us with arrows and then charged, but they’d left it too long and we were ready, and we blunted their attack with javelins and then gutted them as they came up the inner face of the wall.

I turned to Isokles, but he was dead at my feet. So I looked for Cleomenes and shouted, ‘Time to go!’

The pezhetaeroi caught my meaning immediately. Most of us didn’t wait for the ladder – we jumped down into the breach, because a turned ankle was a small price to pay for your life, and then we fled down the tower ladders to the ship below. Cleomenes and I managed to get Isokles’ corpse between us – we threw it down into the breach and then carried him down into the tower, the last men off the wall.

Of two hundred men I took up the ladders, I lost fifty, including four phylarchs and Isokles.

And we lost.

The next day, in camp, you could feel the burning hatred, the dull, red-hot resentment.

No one spoke of abandoning the siege. From the pezhetaeroi to the hypaspitoi to the Agrianians to Alexander himself, what every man wanted was revenge. But there was little love for the king.

That night, Hephaestion invited me to take wine with him and of course, Alexander was there, with Amyntas and Nicanor son of Parmenio, which I took for a positive sign.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ I said to Hephaestion.

His arm was in a sling. He pointed at it and said, ‘I should have waited another day.’

Alexander shook his head. ‘Patroclus would never say such a thing. You were brilliant on the wall, my friend. We simply needed ten more like you.’ He shrugged at me. ‘We almost died. Men were slow up the ladders, and the resistance was – magnificent.’

‘Magnificent?’ I asked.

‘Aren’t things better when they are difficult?’ Alexander asked. ‘When we take Tyre, our names will live for ever!’ He grinned. ‘I feel as if I am living in the Iliad.’

He was all but bouncing up and down. I had left fifty men dead in the breach, and Isokles’ body was burning on a pyre beyond the horse lines, and my king was living inside the Iliad.

He had a cut across his face where a Tyrian had no doubt died trying to kill him – the sort of cut that tells the informed observer that the victim came within ten or twelve hairs of dying.

Sometimes, I wondered if he was insane.

He handed me a cup of wine. ‘Not you, too? Infected with the Tyrian rot? Wake up! We’ve almost taken the place, and we’ll do it in a matter of days. Three more assaults – four at most.’

I drank the whole cup of wine. It stiffened my spine and gave wings to my thoughts. I had an angry exhortation ready – but when had anger ever moved Alexander?

What I wanted was to get the siege over with – as quickly as possible, and with the minimum casualties. Because if he spent men like water to take Tyre, he was going to have a mutiny, or something very like it.

I drank more wine, thinking on Alexander and the Iliad.

Alexander was praising Nicanor for his work with the hypaspitoi. Indeed, they were superb, and I joined in the praise, which obviously surprised Nicanor. The lines of faction were beginning to run too deep – to resemble lines of fracture. In truth, in my experience faction usually breeds in the absence of power, but sometimes it can breed right under power’s nose.

When it came to me, it was as obvious as anything in the Iliad.

I took another cup of wine but did not drink it straight off. ‘If we were to abandon the siege,’ I said, ‘what would be the first thing that would happen?’

Alexander shrugged. ‘I have no intention of abandoning the siege.’

I held my arm out strongly, like an orator. ‘I speak as wily Odysseus, not Farm Boy Ptolemy.’

Alexander laughed, and Hephaestion laughed, and Nicanor nodded. He hadn’t played our boyhood games, but he was in much the same mood I was in.

‘I assume they’d land to burn our engines – if in fact we didn’t burn them ourselves when we retreated.’

He looked at me.

‘And take the stockpiles of food, firewood and materials we have all over camp,’ Hephaestion said with a shrug.

‘We’d destroy all of that, too,’ Nicanor insisted.

‘Not if we had to march away suddenly,’ I said. ‘To fight Darius with a fresh army, coming up behind us.’

Alexander turned to me. ‘No one would believe such a tale.’

But Hephaestion shook his head. ‘Desperate men would believe it. Men with nothing left but hope would believe it.’ He nodded.

‘And look, there’s little risk except the loss of some time and some machines. We spread the rumour that Darius has marched. The Syrians with our own army will take the news into Tyre. Then in two days, we vanish. We march for four hours and double back. Send the Cypriots to sea. Catch whatever’s ashore in late afternoon and slaughter them. And launch an immediate assault. It is, if I may say so, only a variant on the Trojan Horse. When they come to burn our machines and take our grain, we gut their land forces and cut their hope out from under them. Any lover knows that a hope destroyed is far worse than no hope at all.’

Three days later, we marched in full armour, with all our baggage, leaving heaps of supplies for man and beast and most of our engines – although the engines had been moved away from the mole and well inland, forcing troops bent on their destruction to pass a cornucopia of logistical delights.

It was early autumn.

The wind was fair, and the Cypriots sailed with the dawn, even as we marched.

I had the satisfaction of seeing the Tyrians rush to their walls to see the sight. The end of the siege.

We marched inland less than ten stades, and then the Prodromoi and the Paeonians, Thessalians and Thracians continued, with brush tied to the tails of their horses to raise more dust, while the rest of us ate in the shade of a low valley full of olive groves. When the sun had started to decline, and the sky was a deep-blue bowl, we marched back – ranks open and men loping along. We were in top shape – we’d had seven months of carrying rocks.

Ten stades can be run in half an hour. But we were cautious, taking on a half-moon formation to envelop as many of the enemy as we could catch.

These things either work or they don’t. On this occasion, it worked better than we might have ever imagined, and we caught a tiger. The Tyrians were out in force – virtually their entire garrison was in the field, at least eight thousand men. But the very size of their force spelled their doom – they could not possibly get back into their boats in any kind of order.

They had spent a great deal of energy on the mole, without much effect, and on burning our engines, which they had done with more jubilance than efficiency. As soon as they had warning of us coming back, they began to form – when they saw that they faced all of Alexander’s infantry, their despair was writ in their faces, and just as we engaged, when the Cypriot ships came in behind them cutting them off from the town, some actually committed suicide.

Craterus faced the bulk of their marines, all formed up in the centre of their line. He did so because neither Alexander nor Parmenio was with the phalanx. And that day, my taxeis was not with the phalanx, either. As Craterus, Amyntas and Perdiccas rolled forward to combat the disorganised Tyrians, the hypaspitoi and all my taxeis boarded the Cypriot ships.

Alexander always improved any plan he was offered.

We went straight for the walls. The virtually undefended walls.

They’d been breached in four places, before our machines stopped firing and we marched away. And the Tyrians had done some repairs, but conditions inside the city after seven months of siege were quite desperate. Very little work was done. Everyone was hungry.

The end might have been anticlimactic, except that our thirst for revenge outweighed any sanity.

Alexander was at the top of the ladder this time, but the enemy machines fired only sporadically, and every Cypriot ship was packed with Macedonians – ninety ships, sprinting for any place they could get a lodgement on the walls.

We had a theatre-seat view of the back of the Tyrian army as it collapsed under the weight of our phalanx and the Hetaeroi. The people on the walls – what must they have felt, in those last hours and minutes, as their marines died – pointlessly – just a few stades away? As they saw the shiploads of Macedonians coming for them.

I hope they felt terror. I hope they despaired, and cursed their gods, and tore their beards and hair. They had killed every prisoner they took. They had defiled our ambassadors and murdered our people, and they, if any, were the original aggressors against Greece. And they had burned me with sand, infected me with shit and killed Isokles and my unborn child.

Alexander leaned down off the top of the ladder, and called to the men inside the tower: ‘No quarter. Kill everyone in the city, save those who take refuge in the Temple of Herakles.’

I was as bloodthirsty as he – despite the fact that I knew that in his mind we were in the depth of the wooden horse, and were about to sack Troy. It occurred to me to ask him if he was now Neoptolemus and not Achilles. If his presence didn’t change the scene.

I doubt that Alexander would even have laughed.

I said when I started to tell the story of Tyre that it needn’t have happened. That there was arrogance and foolishness on both sides.

And there was horror.

We had little to fear – the walls were virtually empty, the mighty machines didn’t, most of them, throw a single rock, and when Alexander sprang out of the tower on to the rubble of the breach, it was almost like walking on to the stage of an empty theatre. The only enemy soldiers were archers – they had been left behind by the marines, and they shot as fast and as accurately as they could.

But they could not hold even the towers, and we swept from wall to wall, using short scaling ladders to get down into the streets beyond or into the low towers on either hand.

Very quickly, the defence collapsed. I had seen some sieges by the time I reached Tyre. I knew the signs. The enemy no longer thought he could resist. Men fled – usually to their own homes, to die in the doorways of their own houses.

And die they did.

I would like to say that I remember nothing of it, but I remember it all too well. I was with beasts – I was a beast. I killed men, and I killed women, and I killed young children. I killed a goat that passed in front of me. I killed anything that was not a soldier of Macedon.

There were few women, because most of them and their children had gone to Carthage at the start of the siege. But those that there were went to the roofs and threw tiles down on us – no laughing matter, when a piece of terracotta the size of your fist hits you on the head.

Our engineers knocked a hole in the land wall of the city facing the mole, and even as we butchered our way through the streets, Diades connected the city to the land, opened the wall and led the victorious phalanx into the devastated city to finish off any rats trapped in their homes.

And at the end, when they knew that there would be no quarter, the population turned and fought like rats facing dogs. Such rats often give the dogs a bad bite or two before they die, and sometimes the bites infect. The simile is apt. The Macedonian army triumphed at Tyre, but the price was high, in blood, in pain, in spirit, and the results took years to play out.

But for Tyre, the price was higher. Because before the sun set, every man, woman and child in the city was dead. Every dog was dead, every donkey, every mule, every cat. We killed everything except the handful of lucky families who took refuge in the Temple of Melkart.

Alexander dragged them out and let them live – as slaves. Then he had the temple purified. And he made his sacrifice there, just eight months later than he had expected.

But what I remember best is walking out of the gap in the walls, climbing down Diades’ breach to the mole, and looking back in the red sunset – the purple-red that men called ‘Tyrian Red’ after the murex dye. A haze of dust and smoke sat like a toad atop the city, and fires burned throughout, and you could smell death everywhere.

But what I will never forget as long as I live is the sight of blood – red blood – leaking out of the foundation stones of the walls, and mixing with the seawater, so that sharks and other sea creatures began to beat themselves against the walls in the last light, as if Poseidon had turned on the town, or as if there was a portent to be read in the angry battering of the fish and the blood.

I stood there, full of rage and hate and the kind of sick guilt that a man can only gain when he sacks a city and behaves like a beast. My hands and arms dripped blood and my feet were sticky with it.

If I had wanted revenge, what I had was my nauseated fill of it.

And that was Tyre.