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 downinto 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 walland 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 notMacedonian 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.’