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 immediateassault. 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.