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 anothersiege 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.