God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-SIX

Gaza is just six days’ marching from Tyre, and stands on rock about twenty stades from the sea. We marched there four days after the fall of Tyre. Four days. That’s the rest we had, and two days of it were given over to a mass parade of the army and a set of games in honour of Herakles. My phalanx looked terrible at the review – exhausted men slumping, poor armour, threadbare chitons. Only a few of my decarchs – file leaders – had coerced their men into polishing their dented helmets. In fact, only about two-thirds of my remaining men had helmets. The rest had leather Boeotian caps. My only consolation was that the rest of the army – except the Hetaeroi – looked as bad or worse.

The approach to Gaza is sandy and the sea near the city is everywhere shallow. The city of Gaza is large, built upon a lofty mound around which a strong wall has been laid. It is the last city you meet, going from Phoenicia to Egypt. It is situated on the edge of the desert. When we arrived near the city on the first day, we encamped near the spot where the wall seemed to Diades most easy to assault. The engineer ordered his military engines to be constructed – those that we had with us. Most of our best and heaviest gear was still at Tyre, under repair, with Helios sending out still more parties for still more wood. But the Jews came to our aid – they had no love for the Persians, and now that we’d taken Tyre, we had a flood of support from Palestine.

As at Tyre, Alexander and Diades and all his engineers spent two days in careful examination of the city and all of its approaches, while we stripped the countryside like a host of armoured locusts for brushwood, for food and for manpower. Tyre had made us expert in what we needed, and it was all too clear to every footslogger that Gaza, even without the sea, was another tough nut and one for which digging and engineering were required in order to crack it.

The army was tired and surly, and we needed drafts from home to fill the places that disease, malnutrition and overwork had carved in our ranks. Recruits play an essential role in the long-term life of an army. They may be clueless, useless men who can’t start a fire or cook their own food or dig a decent latrine, but they bring a spirit of emulation that veterans lack – or rather, they restore a spirit of emulation and enterprise. The veterans have to work harder to show the recruits what fine men they are. The recruits band together to prove themselves worthy. We hadn’t had any recruits for a year, and I put out the word – and some gold, as a recruiting bonus.

The Persian commander in Gaza was Batis, and he rendered the siege very different from the siege at Tyre. It is worth noting that the rest of Palestine and Syria surrendered to us, but Batis, for whatever reason, determined to keep us out of Aegypt by holding Gaza.

Probably the most significant difference was that he was a professional Persian officer, a loyal servant of King Darius, and not the ‘king’ of a semi-independent town. He had a powerful garrison, thousands of troops, most of them veterans of Issus and other campaigns, and he had an excellent reputation with the local people – for justice and mercy.

Callisthenes’ propaganda got us nothing at Gaza, and his agents provided nothing from inside the town. It was, to all intents and purposes, a Persian town. And the hill on which it sat was tall, rocky and looked, to the casual eye, impregnable. Gaza was the first city we faced without Thaïs’s networks, and the difference showed immediately, at least to me. We didn’t even have a former Gazan citizen on the staff to help show us the strengths of the walls.

Callisthenes’ shortcomings showed in other ways, as well.

Far off in Greece, the Spartan king, Agis, had finally taken the bit between his teeth and declared war on Macedon. He took fistfuls of gold from the Great King and provided a haven for parts of the Persian fleet, and one of his first acts was to seize Crete, which neatly balanced our alliance with Cyprus and threatened our communications with home. He summoned home every Spartan citizen, and extended citizen’s rights to many who were not citizens, in order to prepare for war. We needed information on Sparta’s intentions and her plans, and we had nothing, because Callisthenes hadn’t seen it coming and had no sources prepared. Nor, we quickly saw, was the Pythia willing to communicate with Callisthenes. No more priests of Apollo appeared in our camp.

Sparta wasn’t our only trouble. Athens was vacillating, considering new alliances and a stab in the back to Macedon. Even there, Callisthenes had fewer sources than Thaïs had had, and he didn’t even trouble himself to make use of the Athenian officers in our army, a shocking omission.

But Kineas mentioned to me, one day when we were sparring, just as Diades began to have our horde of barbarian slaves raise the siege mound, that he thought Agis had waited too long.

‘If he’d struck before Issus, there’s many in Athens – supporters of Demosthenes – who’d have put aside their hatred for Sparta and marched on Macedon.’ He paused – we had a habit, when sparring, of falling into conversation, and when we did, it had become our custom to relax our stances deliberately so that neither would feel threatened. He smiled, perhaps ruefully. ‘But now? Most Athenians hate Sparta more than we hate anyone. Their cowardly behaviour in the great war – their lickspittle toadying to the Great King. And look you – no sooner does Agis declare war on Macedon than he accepts a great subsidy from Darius and welcomes his fleet!’ Kineas shook his head. ‘Even the lowest classes – even the most hardened thetes, even the most corrupt democrat – would hate to betray the heroic dead of Marathon and fifty fights with Sparta – just to have a go at Macedon.’

I prayed he was correct, because still, and again – even with Tyre in our hands and Cyprus – Athens was the key, and if Athens, with her three-hundred-ship navy, chose to go to open war with us, the crusade in Asia would be over.

We opened our lines on the third day – a nice phrase, which means we began serious operations. By coincidence, it was the day Aristophanes – not the comic, but the statesman – became Eponymous Archon in Athens. The sun was high and the heat was brutal. The slaves – many of whom had, a few days before, been free farmers in the region around Gaza – began to dig.

I get ahead of myself. When the slaves were collected, and the brushwood, and all the digging tools brought up from Tyre (but not the siege machines, most of which were still under repair back there), Alexander summoned all of his friends and all of the officers and allies. We expected to have a command meeting – I certainly knew from my conversations with Nicanor and Philotas that their father was fit to explode over the fact that we were settling down for another siege that might take another year.

But what we attended, instead, was a sacrifice. Alexander was waiting for us, at the top of the slope that led to the ground on which his first siege mound would be commenced. The town of Gaza seemed to tower over us from here, and the garrison was shouting insults – or at least, I assumed they were insults. Thankfully, Alexander couldn’t hear them.

A pair of gulls were fighting in the air above us. There were gulls everywhere, because an army leaves a lot of garbage about, and near the sea, the gulls outnumber the other vermin. Their cries were louder and more raucous than those of the guards on the walls, but in the same tone.

Alexander was dressed in a pure white chiton of beautiful, shining wool, with a narrow gold border. He cut the throat of his ram without getting a speck of blood on the chiton, and as the ram slumped and the king stepped back, a gull screamed and something struck Alexander on the head and he fell to one knee.

Every man present rushed to his side.

The gulls had been fighting over a bit of flesh attached to a bone – perhaps a dead lamb from another sacrifice – and the bone, falling from high above, had hit the king on the head, driving him to his knees. It had left a smear on his left shoulder and on his left thigh, as well.

He waved us away, but he was shaken, his eyes wild. Aristander, that wily charlatan, stepped forward and raised his arms. ‘An omen!’ he cried, as if we needed a priest to tell us that we’d seen an omen. ‘The king will triumph here, but he will risk his body to accomplish the deed. Take heed, O King!’

Alexander was spooked. I had seen him this way as a child, especially when his witch of a mother told him peasant tales from her home, terrifying tales of children lost in the woods and being eaten by human creatures that sucked children’s marrow bones – I’m not making this up, Olympias had a thousand of them, and she revelled in them. I suspect they helped make Alexander what he was.

Whatever he was.

At any rate, I hurried to his side, exchanged glances with Hephaestion and we hustled him to his tent.

For the next week, Alexander stayed well clear of the siege lines. It took the full week before the first comments began to reach me. I had spent so much time wounded at Tyre that I was using the siege of Gaza to re-establish my place with my pezhetaeroi. I was lucky enough to get two hundred new men – mostly Ionian hoplites who willingly enlisted and could claim, at least loosely, to have relatives in the Chersonese or Amphilopolis. They were the last fruits of Isokles’ reputation and persistence in recruiting.

I was a rich man, too, and I began to lavish some of my loot on my regiment. A number of the best armourers, with large, well-trained shops of slave and free artisans, in Athens and elsewhere, sent representatives to the army. I arranged the purchase of helmets – not matching, but all similar enough, in tinned bronze – so-called Attic helmets, small, fitted to the head, with a tall crest and long cheek-plates that hinged back in hot weather but covered most of the face in combat. Many of Memnon’s officers had such helmets and I had ordered one for myself – in gilded bronze, of course, with a red, white and black crest and a pair of ostrich plumes in gilt holders.

And I paid for my front-rankers to have matching shields – the newer, lighter Macedonian aspis, because that was more practical for men who had to march every day and carry their own shield, without a slave to carry it for them – but with strong, bronze faces on the shields and ten coats of bright red – Tyrian red – paint with the Star of Macedon in the middle in white. I hung the sample from my tent, and men admired it. I announced that the helmets and shields were my treat.

On such little things rest the twin rods of command and discipline. I also paid for twelve hundred new wool chitons, and twenty-four hundred pairs of iphicratids, the sandal-boot that the great Athenian general (whose own father, so I’m told, was a shoemaker) invented.

My taxeis played kerētízein against Perdiccas’s men and then against Craterus’s taxeis. It is a game played with a stick shaped like a club or horn, and a ball. The players can only use the stick to touch the ball, although when men play the game, they often use the sticks on each other. But despite the broken heads and broken ankles, the games, and a certain amount of wine, did much to lighten the load of a second siege. I was learning how to take my men through – because I could see that Alexander was now in love with sieges.

In love, but for perhaps the first time, afraid. The mounds grew; Diades had outdone himself this time, envisioning a ring of earthworks that would seal the town in from supplies and then raising the works until our machines, coming up from the coast, could easily dominate the enemy walls.

The siege mounds grew every day. After Tyre, where we had built the mole ourselves, Gaza and its army of slave labourers seemed like a vacation. The mounds grew, and the enemy killed our slaves, and our troops dreamed of new helmets and good hockey games.

There is something intoxicating about a siege, if you are an officer. You can plan, and watch other men do the sweaty part, and it is like being a god.

Batis was, as I have said, a first-rate officer, and he was no more interested in killing our slaves than he should have been, so in the third week of the siege, just after the sun had set, he came out of three gates at the same time in a massive raid on our siege lines.

His raid was completely successful. He burned the handful of machines we had with us, and his raiders burned the wooden shoring under our most advanced siege mound and got the whole edifice to collapse. More than a hundred Macedonian soldiers were killed and a party of hypaspitoi under Alectus himself was routed. Alectus was badly wounded, and Batis got a dozen messengers through our cavalry screen.

I think that the most remarkable thing about Batis’s raid was that it had no effect on the morale of the army. For men who had fought for three solid years in Asia against Memnon, Darius and Tyre – we had seen our share of bitter mornings and brilliant enemy raids.

By the time the sun was well up, the burned pilings had been removed and replaced, and later that evening, the siege train came up from the coast, so that two days later, Batis’s men faced the full power of our artillery.

Gaza, for all the bravery of its defenders, the brilliance and charisma of Batis and the magnificence of its rocky eminence, was not Tyre. Tyre’s walls were solid stone, and Gaza’s were mud brick on a stone socle. Once our machines started lofting rocks, the city was doomed. Or so we thought. I was with Alexander while the first battery opened up, and we cheered together to watch the engineers (in excellent practice since Tyre) strike the walls on their third casts, resight their batteries and commence effective barrage – in minutes instead of hours. And every stone that struck the wall brought down a section, so that the battery seemed like the invisible teeth of a giant, gnawing away until the cloud of dust thrown from the shattered mud bricks obscured the target.

Diades kept throwing rocks, all day and sometimes at night. He had a new stratagem, using the stone-throwers to keep the enemy engineers off their own walls, so that repairs were either perilous to the most skilled men, or the walls didn’t get repaired.

In the fifth week of the siege, Alexander scouted the walls and ordered an assault. The town still loomed above us, almost impossibly high, but the walls were battered down in four places, and in each place it was possible for an armoured man to go up the mound and then climb the breach, because our engineers drove the poor slaves forward with whips into the arrow fire of the besieged with baskets of rubble to fill the ditch. The top of our siege mound stank from the number of corpses that were buried in the forward face and the ramp up to the enemy wall.

The first assault on Gaza – the only memorable thing about it is how badly we were suckered and how the army felt when they discovered that the king was not coming. I don’t think we’d ever assaulted anything – gone into action anywhere – without Alexander at our head. That’s what kings of Macedon do.

It is typical, I guess, of Macedonian soldiers that no man – not even the king – was ever any better than his last performance. It took them a few weeks to forget his brilliant courage – his virtually maniacal courage.

I heard it all while I buckled on my battered cuirass, once a brilliant glare of gilded bronze and now a dented, scraped and battered remnant of its once proud self, missing both silver nipples and with ringties replacing the hinges I had had and which had been ruined by the hot sand. I had new armour coming, too.

My thorax reminded me of a statue we had had in the gardens when I was a boy. My father loved it, but it had been taken to the barns to be cleaned one winter, and somehow dropped. That’s how my thorax looked, and my helmet was worse, and I was a taxiarch.

But I digress. I had to replace Isokles as company officer and as my second-in-command. Marsyas was the obvious choice. He was a friend of the king, and his brother, Antigonus, was an increasingly important man – he had just won us a fine victory over Phrygians in the north, and without him our supply lines would have been severed repeatedly and no new recruits would be reaching our army. Marsyas himself was a fine officer, if you took into account that he had his nose in the air and his head in the clouds.

He loved Thaïs, though. So I made him swear to her by Aphrodite, his chosen goddess, of whom Thaïs was a priestess, that he would never let a woman come between his duty and his men again. And on his own account, before the end of the Siege of Tyre, he went to Cleomenes and apologised for his hubris, and they were reconciled – indeed, like proper gentlemen, they were better friends than before.

Ahh. I am avoiding the first assault on Gaza. I will digress again and again. Here, pour me some more wine, there, boy.

Marsyas told me that men were complaining that the king was sulking in his tent, or worse. And moments later, I heard the same from Cleomenes.

And with that in my head, I went to the king’s pre-assault briefing. It was dark, and despite the summer, cold. All the army’s senior officers were there, and they gathered in two distinct groups. That had never happened before. One group around Parmenio, and the other around Hephaestion. Ugly.

Alexander was not in armour. It’s true – perhaps he was damned either way, but as the only man not in armour, he accentuated the fact that he was not going up the ramps and we were. Or rather – Philotas was not going up the ramps, and neither was Attalus or Amyntas, but they were in armour, as if to indicate their support.

As it happened, when the king moved to the centre to discuss the assault, I could smell him and he reeked of spikenard. I had never known him even to experiment with perfume, and he smelled – very strongly.

Diades had drawn a view of the city on a large board in charcoal, and the king pointed out our assault positions and the timing of the assaults. It was all routine, and yet somehow, every word he said struck us as odd – because he was perfumed and clean and wearing clothes more suited to a bedchamber than to the field. Hephaestion was in armour – a panoply that had once been at least as magnificent as my best, and now looked as bad or worse.

Alexander dismissed us without a smile or a speech. In fact, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. And then he went back into his tent, and we went to our units.

I remember the first assault well. My pezhetaeroi were in the first wave on the southernmost ramp, and we went as soon as we had light to see the uneven footing. That uneven footing saved my life, too. I was the first man up the ramp, and I went fast – determined to be the first man on the wall, because if you must lead an assault on a city, you have no choice but to be a hero.

I must digress, again. In Macedon – in Sparta, in Athens and even in gods-cursed Thebes – officers led from in front. The wastage among Athenian strategoi was always incredible. Men in front die. Macedonian taxiarchoi had a better survival rate only because we wore lots of armour and trained as pages to overcome anything in hand-to-hand combat. But one of the things I remember about the pre-dawn minutes at Gaza was the fear. My men were afraid, and I was afraid, and my recruits were jittery, even the many among them who were themselves veterans. I didn’t want to lead the assault. I wanted to go and join Alexander and wear perfume.

My hands shook.

I had a great deal of trouble getting my cheek-plates tied together.

My knees were weak, and my forearms felt as if I’d spent the night lifting weights.

Because, like my men, I’d done too much. Tyre was too close behind us. Alexander owed us a rest, and we hadn’t had one.

Off to my left, a red flag was lifted from the tower that was closest to the king’s command pavilion.

I sprang up from rock to rock, and the arrows fell like sleet in the Thracian mountains, and my big aspis was hit again and again, and my poor old helmet took another battering.

I took one quick look when I was almost at the base of the socle. I wanted to hit the base of the breach just right. There were a dozen men just inside the breach, with heavy bows, shooting as fast as they could, and even as I looked, another arrow thudded into my aspis and I stumbled, and my left foot went into something that cracked under my weight and suddenly I was down, my left leg deep in the dirt and stone of the ramp, and something went over my head with the sound of summer thunder – or the sound of a sheet of papyrus being torn asunder by an enraged merchant. Whatever it was snapped my neck around and tore the crest right off my old helmet.

Pyrrhus, who had been with me since he was a child, simply exploded. An arm and his head flew off, and behind him, a dozen more men died in a hideous fleshy mess.

There was a ballista in the breach. Even as I tried to pull my left leg free, the men in the breach were cranking the great bow back into position and the men on the walls above the breach were throwing boiling linseed oil into our faces. I only caught a little – perhaps a cupful – on my shoulder above my shield arm, but the pain spurred me and I got my left leg free and almost vomited, because my foot had collapsed the ribcage of a corpse and my leg had slid into the body cavity – a mass of corruption and maggots – and the smell of death stuck to me like glue.

And I went up the breach anyway, because after Tyre . . .

I reached the ballista well before it was loaded, and threw my light spear into the nearest man and then my heavy spear – not really meant to be thrown – into an archer, and he and the loader fell across the enormous bow, and I drew my sword – a heavy kopis – from under my arm and continued the draw into a cut – to the rope holding the bow wound against its drum. The men on the bow screamed as the bowstring slammed into their soft bodies.

A wave of Macedonians joined me in the breach, and we killed every man we found there. And then we went down the rubble on the far side of the breach into the town.

At Tyre and Halicarnassus, the defenders had built mud walls behind the breach, to channel our attacks and make the breach a trap, but Batis had gone one better.

He let us into the town – he had more town to use for depth – and had built little battlefields for his garrison to use to fight inside the town. The houses were heavy and often stone-built, and between them there were barricades across the narrow streets – low enough to tempt assault, and high enough that such assaults weren’t worth much – the more so as every barricade was flanked by the towers of the tallest houses on the street, and every pair of towers had a small garrison of archers and slingers. Some of the barricades had a ballista. And some of the houses had assault groups waiting for us to pass them.

It was a nightmare.

When you assault a town, you know that the easiest way to achieve victory is to break the enemy’s will to resist. There comes a point in an assault when the town has so many soldiers flooding it that the defenders either surrender or simply allow themselves to die. The expectation of every man in an assault is that it is his duty to penetrate as deeply into the town as possible to cause panic.

Batis used all that against us. Our men came up the breaches like heroes and went into the town, where he wanted us to be – inside his defences, and far from the support of our dominating artillery. His defenders had superb morale, and they faced us resolutely, no matter where we met them in the town. And indeed, early on, they abandoned some positions – I assume to lure us deeper into the web of streets.

I am proud of my performance as a taxiarch that day, because I didn’t lose my head. Oh – I was fooled. I may have penetrated as deeply into the town as any Macedonian. I know that I was enraged by Pyrrhus’s death and I killed my way over a barricade despite a hail of stones. But as we overwhelmed our second barricade, losing a dozen good men in the process, I began to look around.

I had about a hundred men with me, and far too many of the officers – good for my group, bad news for my assault as a whole. I remember killing my way over the second barricade, and pausing to drink water from my canteen. I found that my strap had broken, or been cut, and I turned to Cleomenes and stopped him – carefully, as his blood was up.

‘Water, brother?’ I asked, and because I had to pop my cheek-plates to drink, I could hear and see when the enemy ambush began to filter into the street behind us.

‘Ware!’ I bellowed, and all the men on the barricade turned, and we made a shield wall – fifteen or twenty of us – and we held them. Please do not mistake me – the Persians and the Nabataeans at Gaza were brave men and well led, but they were never a match for us in combat. They lacked the armour, and they lacked the mettle. They hit us and we broke them and then we chased them back down the alley.

And now I really had time to look around, and what I saw was that we were not actually taking ground – that every stone house had defenders, and we were receiving a constant and deadly barrage wherever we went.

The problem I had – the problem every strategos always has – was information.

I gathered the men I had and we stormed a house. The fighting was bestial – kopis and xiphos against short spear and knife in rooms no larger than a large himation laid on the ground, through doorways so narrow and so low that a child would have to stoop to enter, and up steeply turning stairs that rotated to the right to cramp a fighter. At every check, the enemy put an archer or two behind a few swordsmen.

I couldn’t take more than a room or two at a time, and then I had to exchange out of the front rank. It was true of every man – fighting inside a city is a terrifying thing, every blow is a death blow. But as with fighting at night, discipline and armour make all the difference.

In the end, we stormed the tower and exterminated the garrison at the top, throwing the last bodies to the street below.

Now I could see.

There were fires throughout the town, and the dirt streets – the alleys – raised clouds of dust, so that a pall seemed to hang over the town, lit red and yellow by the flames in the early light.

It was actually quite beautiful.

But the pattern leaped to the eye. We were not penetrating the town. We were being funnelled down four corridors for the convenience of the garrison – a corridor for every breach – and each corridor led to a maze of alleys and barricades.

I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to catch my breath. Long enough for the sweat on my abdomen to start to dry. Because I had to be right.

Then I ordered my hyperetes to sound the recall.

I was the first. I remain proud of my decision.

Alexander did not feel the same way.

‘You what?’ he asked, his arms crossed. ‘You ran?’

I stank of death, and I was covered in soot, and I had two wounds. I had prepared myself for the encounter, and when I was clear of the breach, I ran – ran – all the way around the wall to Perdiccas to find him in his breach, and he, too, was coming out. And I promised him I’d explain to Alexander. I had set my mind to it as I climbed back up our siege mound, and I went straight to his tent.

And I was still not ready. I had my logic all prepared, and the king needed to know what Batis had done.

He smelled of spikenard, and he didn’t have a mark on him. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have grown used to uninterrupted victory. Or perhaps I simply cannot expect as much when I’m not there in person. I know what fear is, Ptolemy. You are forgiven.’

I suspect my mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. I don’t remember that part. What I remember is my head screaming at me to keep my mouth shut.

‘Fuck you!’ I roared at him. Alas. ‘You weren’t there – Lord King. You have no idea what we faced, and you think I panicked? You’re fucking right you should do it yourself. Because if you continue to talk like that, you may have to!’

Wise, carefully considered words they were not. I turned on my heel and walked away. But he had it coming, and then some.

The thing is, Alexander was . . . Alexander. God, monster, man, inhuman – all of them in one body.

So while Thaïs washed the crap and blood from my body, and my rage simmered and I tried – tried hard – not to turn it on my lover – Alexander came in. He had four Hetaeroi with him, and he was in armour.

He had a baton in his hand, and he put it carefully on my camp bed and came immediately to my side. He sniffed, made a face and sniffed the wound in the top of my shoulder, where you could see the white fat oozing out through the blood.

‘Do you have a wound gone bad?’ he asked. ‘You stink like a bad wound.’

‘I stepped in a corpse,’ I said, my tone carefully neutral.

‘Ah,’ he said. He took a cloth from Thaïs and cleaned my shoulder wound with what I can only call tender ruthlessness – he was as quick as he could be. He was very good with wounds.

It was all I could do not to cry out, or just cry.

When he dipped the cloth into the hot water, he said, ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. Not fighting – I cannot do it. I cannot cower in the rear. It makes me a woman. In too many ways.’

Thaïs sniffed and muttered something about childbirth.

Alexander ignored her. ‘I should have been there. But I’m told it was a trap.’

‘A well-laid defence – a trap if we were foolish enough to come into it.’ I began to breathe more easily. My first thought when he entered the tent was that I was to be stripped of my command.

‘And perhaps, had I led today, I would have died.’ He shrugged. ‘I will lead the next.’

‘Tomorrow?’ I asked. In truth, I felt weary to the bone. It was still early morning, and I wanted to sleep.

He shook his head. ‘This was bad. We lost – three hundred pezhetaeroi, and perhaps more. I will let our men rest. Five days. And then I’ll take the Hetaeroi and the hypaspitoi.’ He smiled.

I knew what men would say in camp. That my men hadn’t been up to it. But neither could we assault every time, and my men didn’t have anything to prove. I took two breaths to fight down the urge to demand to participate, and then I nodded. ‘Bless you, Lord King, for coming to me.’

He put a hand on my good shoulder. ‘I love you, Ptolemy. Even when I behave thoughtlessly.’ He kissed me on the cheek and left the tent.

Go ahead. Hate that.

I couldn’t.

I don’t remember how many days passed – ah, here it is, in the Journal. Three days.

I probably slept for two of them.

My taxeis came out of the siege lines at midnight. Morale wasn’t bad – the new armour was coming in any day, I’d just given a small pay rise to all the married men in my regiment and I’d bought meat far away at Jerusalem and had it driven on the hoof into our camp, and every man knew he had a dinner of lamb to look forward to. In fact, I was spending money as an orator spends hot air, but my men needed it or they were going to collapse. All the taxiarchs were doing all they could.

I heard Parmenio, playing Polis with Craterus, mutter that the best thing that could happen to us was that Darius would get up the nerve to attack us, because that would put spine back in the pikemen. Parmenio was deeply depressed. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke slowly and very seldom, and he and his sons had become isolated.

At any rate, we were filtering down off the siege mounds north of the city, far from the breach that had killed seventy of my men, when we heard the unmistakable sounds of combat from all the way around the city.

I was already down at the base of the siege mound, on the road that Diades had built and kept clear for rapid troop movements. I had a habit of forming the men every night before dinner, to ‘pass the word’, as we used to say, and that night it stood me in good stead.

‘Files from the left by fours – to the left – march!’ I shouted, and ran to their head. Each group of four files marched forward to the road and then wheeled in fours to the left, forming a column four wide on the road from a phalanx eight deep. Simple stuff – if you drill every day.

As soon as the first fours were on the road, I trotted to their head. ‘At the double! Follow me!’

It was six stades around the wall to where we heard fighting. We were not sprinting, but we made it in time.

When we came up to the southernmost siege mound – territory we knew all too well, as it is where our own assault had jumped off – there was a vicious fight – a dust cloud, darkness falling and several thousand enemy troops engaged on the front face of our siege mound. They’d clearly made it into our works, because one of our batteries was aflame, and the smell of naphtha was in the air. Amyntas’s taxeis was broken – I could see his phylarchs rallying men to my right. And the hypaspitoi were fully engaged. I looked for Alexander.

I couldn’t see him.

The hypaspitoi were being pushed back, step by step. The Persian assault was ferocious. I didn’t know why, yet. I just saw disaster looming.

So did Perdiccas and Craterus, both of whom were forming their taxeis as quickly as they could on the parade ground, just two stades away. But the time was right then, or never. The Persians outnumbered the hypaspitoi four to one or more.

I led my men down into the no man’s land between the siege works and the town, and halted a spear-cast from the flank of the Persians.

‘Form your front!’ I ordered.

The first four halted. All seven men in the four files halted, as well.

The next block of four files came at a run and fell in next to them. Now eight files wide.

Then four more files to the right and four more to the left.

In heartbeats, we were thirty-two files wide. I didn’t wait. Marsyas could bring up the second half as he saw fit – the darkness was growing, the growl of the Persians was deadly and I was already afraid that I had waited too long.

‘Spears down! March!’ I ordered, as the files closed up.

The Persians had had minutes to prepare for us, and they had a body of armoured bowmen loosing into our front ranks, and men fell, but shafts that went over got lost in the forest of spears, impetus broken. The archers didn’t await our onset, and there were no spearmen to resist us, and we tore right into the side of the Persian force and men fled us. This was the eternal problem for the Persians – without good Greek infantry, they had no foot who would abide us.

I was in the front rank, and I saw the man who I later learned was Batis cursing his men and wielding an enormous long sword with one hand. He was as tall as a small tree and as wide as a rock. His arms were the size of my legs. He swung at me, I put my aspis into his sword and he caved in the face of my aspis, crushing the bronze, breaking the wood underneath and causing the wooden ribs to splinter. His blow was so powerful that it hurt my shield arm, although the edge of his sword never penetrated the bronze or I’d not be here to tell of it.

I thrust my spear at him, and it glanced off the long scale tunic he had, and I stepped in and slammed my spear butt into his head even as he reversed his sword and slammed his pommel into my head. I caught some of his blow on my spear and my helmet took the rest and I was knocked flat – conscious, but knocked straight off my feet.

He stumbled back from my blow, and my file partner, Stephanos, once one of Memnon’s men, pounded his spear-point into Batis’s chest. Again his scale and his luck held, but now he fell backwards into his own ranks, and I was on my feet again, my ears ringing. In fact, my nose was leaking blood. But that didn’t matter, because Batis was being carried to the rear, and now his men couldn’t be held – they were back-pedalling as fast as they could go.

Except in one place. Even as I struggled to reach it, another surge of Persians – led by some Aegyptian marines with big shields – pounded into our hypaspitoi over to my right and farther up the hill.

I had no idea why the Persians were so tenacious, but they were pushing the hypaspitoi back, and the hypaspitoi were literally dying in place.

So I started cutting my way towards them. As I say, the bulk of the Persians didn’t want to face us. A gap opened in their line. That happens, on battlefields, and I ran into it, and part of my phalanx followed me and the other part stayed behind and kept rolling the Persian main body back. Not according to the drill field – but on a real battlefield, you can’t stay with the textbook. I counted on my files following me, and they did.

We slammed into the Aegyptians. The fighting was chaotic – my phalangites were in no real order, just following me in a mob – the Aegyptians were trying to lap around the hypaspitoi, and were caught in the flank or rear, but they themselves had reinforcements coming up behind, and catching my men in the shielded flank.

In the time it took me to break my spear on a hippopotamus-hide shield, the fighting was man to man, and neither my flanks nor my back were safe. I hit my opponent over the head with the butt of my spear, used as a club, and then crushed the skull of another Aegyptian through his leather cap with one blow to the side of his head – my bronze sarouter made a powerful mace. A blow caught me from behind, but the bronze of my thorax held and I stumbled forward into the enemy ranks – an enemy marine swung at me and our weapons locked, and he slammed his shield into mine, roared at me and cut at my head – I could see down his throat. I bashed his fingers with my sarouter-club, and he lost his sword and threw himself on me, arms wide, shield flung aside, and I stopped him on my shield, shoved him to unbalance him and punched the pointed end of the bronze butt into his throat.

Then I almost died at the hands of a hypaspist. He shot his spear forward with the power of a desperate man, and my shield – crumpled like a trireme that’s been rammed – didn’t really turn the blow, and it slammed down into my left greave.

‘Macedon!’ I yelled at him.

He stabbed at me again.

‘Macedon!’ I roared, and he flinched. Then he thrust powerfully into another man, and I had the pleasure of hearing him mutter – I didn’t catch what he said.

I turned my side to him and backed into the ranks of the hypaspitoi.

My back foot, my right, was on a corpse.

The Aegyptian marines made another rush. I needed to be sure of my footing and glanced down, and saw that I was standing over Alexander. He had an enormous spear – I learned later it was the bolt from a ballista – in his shoulder. He was screaming, eyes blind, and the ground was wet with his blood, and there was a pile of dead hypaspitoi around him. Perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty. Even as I looked, a man grabbed his ankles to pull him, he screamed and the man with his ankles got an Aegyptian spear in his guts and fell atop him.

Zeus Soter, I thought. He’s going to die right here.

Yet even as that thought tickled my mind and the marines hit us again, my phalanx fell on their rear. There was a moment – a flurry of blows, an unendurable pressure on my chest and my shattered shield, my blows seeming too feeble to make a difference – and then they were running, abandoning their magnificent hide shields to run down the hill, and my men killed fifty of them in as many heartbeats, and we had held.

Even as the Aegyptians broke, the hypaspitoi had lifted the king. His shield – a full-sized aspis – had taken the ballista bolt. It had struck through his shield – through all seven layers of bull’s hide, wood and bronze – into the meat of his left shoulder and out the back, so that when they lifted him I could see the red-black shimmer of the metal like some obscene thing projecting from the pturges of his arm armour.

He was done screaming. His eyes were open, and they locked on mine, just for a moment. He smiled. In that moment, he was a god.

And then he screamed with the pain, again.

Philip of Acarnia removed the ballista bolt, cutting the head off and then oiling the shaft with olive oil – pouring the oil right on to the wound – and then pulling it through. Then he slathered the king’s wound with honey and bandaged it. I watched, and held Alexander while he screamed, cried and shat himself. I helped clean him, and I helped carry him to his bed. He weighed very little.

The doctor filled him full of opium, and he went off into a drug-hazed sleep. I sat in his chair and watched him for a while, with Perdiccas and Hephaestion and some of the others.

He looked small and vulnerable and very pale.

Later that night, a pretty girl with hennaed hands and feet came to Thaïs to ask for news of the king in a very shy voice.

Thaïs came for me. ‘Memnon’s women sent her. They must be terrified – if Alexander dies, all that seductiveness has been wasted.’ She smiled, a somewhat catlike smile. ‘I feel for them. They’re likely to be passed from hand to hand if he dies,’ she said. ‘Will he die?’ she asked suddenly, her voice changed.

‘You are kind to them,’ I said. And whispered to her, ‘I fear for him. But we must not say it.’ Thaïs kissed me and nodded.

I went to the girl, who threw herself on the ground and hid her face. ‘Great lord!’ she said.

‘Tell your mistress,’ I began.

The serving girl shook her head. ‘Please come, lord. Please?’

Well – it is always pleasurable to have beautiful young women call you great lord. I followed her to her tent, and met a queen, sitting quite calmly on a couch.

‘You remember me, Ptolemy?’ she asked, voice husky, without preamble.

Banugul must have been eighteen or perhaps nineteen. I hadn’t been alone with her.

I almost couldn’t breathe.

I had Thaïs in my bed every night – widely accounted the most beautiful woman in the world.

How do we measure these things?

Banugul had, as I have described, skin and hair the colour of honey, green eyes that slanted a fraction from her nose to her temples, and fine, arched feet. The rest of her was robed in splendour.

And the only thing I could smell was spikenard.

I managed to tell her that the king would recover. She thanked me very prettily, and I left the tent, still alive.

Thaïs laughed at me for most of the next day. I would have laughed, too, except that war was everywhere, and Ares, not Aphrodite, had us in his fist.

Hephaestion led the second assault. I watched them go up the hill, in the first light of dawn, watched the engines and the boiling oil kill their share, and watched Amyntas and Philotas race each other like heroes at Troy to make the northern breach first.

They lasted about the same length of time we lasted. Perhaps an hour.

Batis met them inside the town and killed them. On the south side, his men actually held the breach – the assault never penetrated into the town. This time, according to Amyntas, who was wounded twice, Batis had concealed pits, ditches and spiked caltrops waiting for the assault troops, and local counter-attacks to cut the lead elements of the assault off from the reserves.

Hephaestion returned covered in dust and other men’s blood. He was taller and better-muscled than Alexander, and looked more like I imagined Achilles to look than any man I ever saw.

He threw his aspis on the ground, grunted and went into his tent to drink and sulk – just like Achilles.

Parmenio appeared out of nowhere and took command of the army. He did it without fuss, without asking for anyone’s approval and there was no loss of momentum or discipline.

Groups of silent men gathered outside Alexander’s tent – every morning. They never fussed or made noise, merely waited to see if Philip would emerge and tell them something of the king.

On the fifth morning after his wound, the king came out into the sunshine in person, blinking in the sun.

The cheers started from the men by the tent.

Alexander smiled, and waved with his right hand, and the cheers spread as flame spreads in a dry field, until every man in that camp was roaring, ‘Alexander! Alexander the king!’

I was with Diades, watching slaves raise the battery platforms yet higher. As the cheers spread, and we understood their cause, even the slaves began to cheer.

About an hour later, Parmenio summoned me to the king’s tent. I expected the command council and found only the strategos and the king.

Parmenio nodded when I stood before them. There was something curiously formal about the situation, so I remained standing, battered helmet under my arm, and gave them a salute.

Alexander was as pale as lamb’s parchment, and Parmenio appeared like an automaton. No emotion at all.

‘Gaza will fall to the next assault,’ Parmenio said. ‘I want your troops to spearhead it.’

I looked back and forth between them.

‘Batis is losing men as fast as we are, and we have deeper pockets.’ Parmenio shrugged. ‘He can’t keep it up. I mean to fake an assault this evening and then pound the breaches for half an hour with stones to kill his defenders. Tomorrow I expect to move the batteries forward to the new platforms. Then I’ll pound the walls for two days while Diades pushes the ramps higher and makes the footing better.’ He looked at Alexander.

Alexander smiled.

‘Then I want to go in with all six pezhetaeroi regiments, all together.’ Parmenio nodded. ‘I want you to lead it. I can’t afford to lose Craterus, and Perdiccas is too young.’

It was, in many ways, the most sincere and heady praise I ever received.

So I did.

I won’t bore you. It was anticlimactic, like the ending of a bad play. Parmenio, the professional, had it just right. The endless barrage of the last two days had broken the garrison’s spirit, and our six assault columns coming up long, shallow ramps that were virtually paved with brick ate their souls. The men facing me shot their arrows and fled while my men were only halfway to the breach, and when we got to the rubble, the two ballistas there were smashed to flinders by our barrage. In the streets beyond, we went cautiously, linked up with the other columns at the wall and refused to be channelled. It was all very slow and methodical.

In the centre of the town, there was a big open square. We surrounded it – they had fortified the square like a reserve citadel.

Batis sent a herald asking for terms.

I was, for once, unhurt. I looked around at our men, and then I looked down into the square – I’d once again stormed a house to get into its tower for the view.

Batis had about four thousand men still prepared to fight, facing twice that. And he had little food and no water.

The herald was terrified. We were the evil enemy he’d heard so much about, and he wasn’t a real herald but some Persian nobleman’s son – proud, brave and polite.

I shrugged. ‘Tell the noble Batis that he will have to surrender without terms. I have him either way.’

The boy gulped. ‘I . . . I was charg-ged t-to say th-that—’

‘I won’t eat you, lad. Say your piece.’ Someone brought me a bunch of grapes and I started devouring them.

‘We will fight to the end-d if y-you won’t promise us our f-freedom.’ He stood straight. ‘W-we won’t be slaves!’ he said suddenly.

Alexander had enslaved all the Greeks after Granicus. All those he didn’t massacre. I nodded. ‘That’s up to the king, lad.’

Batis, after some deliberation, decided on the better course, and surrendered. I marched his men out of the city immediately, lest he change his mind – out of the main gate and down on to the plain, surrounded by Macedonians.

Batis led his men in surrender. He was a mighty figure and a noble one, unbowed by defeat. And what a defeat! Two months, toe to toe with our entire army. I found it difficult to hate him, now that he was walking behind me. He was canny, but not mean-spirited. He released to me all of our wounded that he’d captured – he hadn’t cut their hands off, he hadn’t blinded them. He’d seen to it they had doctors. He’d actually saved twenty of my own men – men I loved and valued.

We marched out on to the plain of Gaza, and Hephaestion came with the king.

Amyntas, who was expert at currying favour, had brought some sample plunder out of the town. It was a rich town, and my troops were going through it with ruthless efficiency even as we accepted Batis’s surrender. But Amyntas found the prize – a royal chariot, possibly even one kept for Darius, sheathed in gold. He found a team to draw it, too. He led it down on to the plain, rather than driving it. And he presented it to Alexander when the king emerged from his tent.

Alexander embraced him carefully – his shoulder must have hurt like fire – and mounted the chariot. With a strange team, in front of twenty thousand men, he drove the chariot effortlessly across the sand to where Batis waited.

Batis stood as straight as an old tree. Other Persians fell on their faces. Batis looked at his conqueror with neither fear nor fawning.

Alexander stopped the chariot. Two files of hypaspitoi joined him.

He looked at me. ‘What terms, my friend?’ he asked.

That didn’t sound good. ‘No terms,’ I said. ‘But I would ask for their lives.’

Alexander nodded curtly. Now he turned and looked at Batis. ‘Say something,’ he said.

Batis locked his eyes with the king’s. He was a head taller.

He crossed his arms and stood negligently.

Alexander walked up to him. ‘I can order your garrison massacred – or sold into slavery. You are not a soldier of Darius, Batis – you are a rebel against me. You understand that? Darius is no longer King of Asia.’

Alexander was angry. His spit flew into the Persian’s face.

Batis didn’t even seem to blink.

‘I have summoned this town to surrender five times,’ Alexander said in a loud, clear voice. ‘And I was mocked each time.’

No one moved. Batis allowed himself the smallest smile of contempt.

Alexander made a motion with his hand, and the hypaspitoi seized Batis and threw him to the ground.

‘Strip him,’ Alexander said. He took a spear from another hypaspist – a dory, twice the height of a man – and snapped it in two in the middle.

Batis remained silent. Two hypaspists pinned him while a third cut his clothing off with a sharp sword. He bled. He began to struggle and Alectus slammed his fist into the Persian’s temple. Batis thrashed and Alectus hit him again.

‘When you resist, you waste my time,’ Alexander said. He took half the broken spear – the half with the head attached – and walked over to Batis. He thrust the spear into Batis’s leg, near the foot – I thought he was just prodding him, but then he leaned his weight on it, and Batis grunted, the cords in his neck showing like ropes as he struggled not to scream. He was a brave man.

Alexander punched the spearhead out through the other side of the leg at the ankle, and thrust again, against the whole weight of Batis’s thrashing leg, with superhuman strength, and his blow was sure. He penetrated the other ankle, at the back near the heel.

Batis moaned and gave a strangled cry.

Alexander looked up from his task. ‘You read about Achilles doing this,’ he said, conversationally. ‘But you have to wonder what it’s like to do it – and now I know.’ He kicked Batis’s near ankle and pulled the spear shaft through so that the spear penetrated both ankles, with several feet of haft emerging on either side.

A slave held a towel while the king wiped his hands. Hypaspitoi tied the spear shaft to the back of the chariot.

The king looked at what they’d done and shook his head. ‘You need knots outside the ankles,’ he said, conversationally. ‘Otherwise, he’ll slip off, and we’ll have to do all this again.’

He smiled at Amyntas. ‘My thanks for the chariot. A godsent opportunity.’

Batis coughed and choked – a very brave man struggling not to scream, knowing that when the first one came out, he’d never stop until he died.

In every life there are things for which we do not forgive ourselves. I cannot forgive myself for not stepping forward and putting my spear into Batis. He deserved a hero’s death.

Alexander smiled at Batis. ‘You wanted to be Hector. And now, you are!’

He cracked a whip and the horses moved, and Batis screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed.

Alexander drove up and down until the Persian was dead. Then he stopped the chariot in front of us, stepped down and nodded to Hephaestion and Parmenio, who stood as stunned as I was. The army was cheering him.

He didn’t look at me. He beckoned to Parmenio.

I knew what he was going to do. I watched, unable to make myself act, with revulsion and a certain weariness, the way I used to watch when he would go out of his way to make Philip his father unhappy, or to embarrass Aristotle.

‘Kill them all,’ Alexander said, waving his hand at the town. ‘It’s time they learned not to waste my time.’

Parmenio glanced at the garrison. ‘All?’ he asked.

Alexander made a face. ‘No, keep all the eunuchs with two left feet alive. Yes. All! Everyone!’

And then he turned and walked across the sand, surrounded by hypaspitoi. Back to his tents. And left us to the blood, and the killing.