God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

I had four thousand men and plenty of slaves – I had seized the best portion of the city and had my men rebuild the houses. I inspected the work every day, and in two weeks we were the best-housed army in Asia. Then I kept them at work, rebuilding the temples and other houses, and after another week surviving citizens started to return.

I also sent Kineas to find the Athenian squadron and beg or borrow some engines and an engineer.

By the gods, he did me well. He came back in two weeks with ten heavy engines – or rather, the bronze parts for them – as well as Helios, a freed Cyprian slave, who had all of the problems of Pythagoras in his head and knew how to construct . . . well, almost everything. He’d been serving the Athenians as a dock builder, and he was bored. I offered him the Macedonian rate of pay as an engineer, and he signed on the spot. He was short, very short for a man, and his skin was deeply tanned, almost the colour of old wood. He had curly blond hair – hence his name – and a pleasant face. He’d been well born, but taken by slavers as a boy and treated badly.

He looked at the three island citadels off Halicarnassus, and shrugged.

‘Three ways to take ’em,’ he said. He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Build a fleet and storm ’em, starve ’em, or grow wings and fly there.’

I nodded. ‘I agree,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Good. I was afraid you expected me to make something out of nothing.’

I shook my head. ‘My plan is to start with the easiest and move from there. Caunus and a town called Knidos.’ I shrugged again. ‘Never seen them myself, but they have to be easier than this.’

In fact, Thais had people in both, plotting revolution.

It was great fun, the two of us planning a complete campaign together. I’ve known men to freeze in high command, and it is different, but it wasn’t my first time, and she liked it too, and it was something we did together. And because she was working for me, and not for the king, I began to see how she ran her net of informants, and to watch the details of her intelligence-gathering.

For strategic intelligence – the news of politics, of the thoughts and intentions of great men and cities, of the Persian court, of the satraps – she had her web of letter-writing friends. They didn’t think of themselves as spies, and in fact she called them her Epistolaroi. And the greatest and most important of the Epistolaroi was the Pythia and her priests at Delphi.

For tactical intelligence – the immediate collection of information on local troop movements and enemy intentions in the near term, our scouts did most of the collection – most, but not all, because by this time, after almost a year in the field, Thais had a corps of spies she called the Angeloi, the heralds. Strakos led them, and they were mostly freemen. Their characteristics were unarmed anonymity, and superb horses. We knew every one of them by name and by sight, so that they could come and go from our lines without passwords. They seldom carried weapons openly, and they rode far and fast, gathering news. Every one of them had funds to buy information, and most of them had the personal skills to recruit their own informers on the spot.

And above all of them was Thais. She read every report, spoke to the returning cavalry patrols, interviewed the Angeloi, read the letters from the Epistolaroi and answered them. It was an enormous workload, but she had a secretariat of slaves and freemen, most of them taken at Granicus – slaves who read and wrote Persian, or Thracian, or Aegyptian, or Carian. All told, her establishment had a hundred people working for it, men and women. It was not a miracle of efficiency, because it was more like art than science, but her information was reliable and quickly gathered.

In the fourth week, I took a cavalry reconnaissance down the coast, with the Angeloi out in front and detailed reports on the towns already in my head, and Caunus looked the easiest, on paper and in fact. Knidos sat on the end of a 250-stade long peninsula with a mountainous spine. Riding cautiously along the coast road, or rather the coast goat path, I could see an ambush site every five stades. By pure good luck and with some tips from Thais’s friends, we caught about a quarter of the garrison of Knidos outside their walls and captured them. And then, reversing Alexander’s policy, I hired the lot of them, and didn’t execute them. I wanted to make it easy for men to surrender, not hard.

Caunus, on the other hand, sat three-quarters surrounded by land – flat, well-earthed land. Helios got off his horse in the dawn – we were moving fast and light – and crawled right up to the city wall, and he returned convinced that he could tunnel under the walls in a week.

We got back to Halicarnassus late in the evening, after dark, soaked and very cold. I rode into the courtyard of my house and found it in near panic.

Queen Ada had come into my house in Halicarnassus without being announced. The cold rain poured down the gutters of the house and spat out on to the ground, and I was in a surly mood – I wanted to throw Thais on a bed – or a warm floor – and I didn’t want to deal with this woman.

It was as bad as I feared.

‘Why has he not written to me?’ she demanded as I entered the room.

Why indeed? Because he was done with her. Because sex with her made him feel like a mortal, not a god.

Thais spoke to her rapidly in a low voice.

‘You are my strategos, Lord Ptolemy?’ the queen asked, more pleasantly.

In fact, I was the absolute lord of Caria. It said so on my warrant. But Alexander had promised her independence, when it suited him, and now I was left holding this particular bag. Love, sex, war, politics. A nasty brew.

‘I command all of the king’s troops in your kingdom,’ I said, as precisely as possible. ‘I will complete the task of reconquest.’

She nodded. ‘When will he return?’ she asked.

It was pitiful – sad, awful. When I’d first met her, I’d been impressed with her vitality, her youth and her complete mastery of the situation. She was a tough woman and a warrior.

Now she was an adolescent girl at the well, begging for news that her beloved still loved her.

She looked old and she sounded foolish, and she knew it herself.

Thais was equal to the situation. With a long glance at me – a hopeful one, I felt – she took the queen off to the baths, and I was left with two male slaves and a basin of tepid water.

I got clean, and had them oil me. I was lying on a heated slab – Halicarnassus was a civilised city, and we rebuilt the best parts – and the masseur was pounding my back and then running the sharp edge of the strigil over it – a wonderful, clean feeling. He went on and on, and then the strigil began to scrape harder, and the wielder poked the bent front of it sharply into my armpit and I was fully awake.

I thought he’d slipped, and he did it again – this time the thing prodded me just over the hip and I jumped like a skittish horse.

‘Hey!’ I said, and rolled over to find that Thais was bending over me with mischief in her eyes and a string of pearls wound into her hair – as her sole ornament.

By the gods, life can be good.

It took me a year to reduce the strongholds of Caria. I won’t say it was hellish, but it was exacting, hard work, and it changed my relationships with the men under me, with Kineas, with Helios, with Polystratus, with Thais. I had had commands before, but this was my army, and these were my orders from the king. Like Antigonus One-Eye, I had a major command and no help whatsoever. Each of us had to make our own way. That’s what the king expected.

Unlike One-Eye, I was in the face of the real enemy. Memnon retreated from Halicarnassus only to seize Cos, just a few stades from the end of our peninsula. Thais’s people said he had received little opposition there, and in fact Ionia was already a little tired of Alexander. He was rather too much like a conqueror and rather too disturbing. These weren’t enslaved Greeks clamouring for freedom – they were rich, settled men and women looking to get on with their lives. He also took Mytilene on Lesbos, and all of Chios. He had a base facing us across the water – and the first stepping stone towards moving his fleet to Greece and Macedon. He had four times the number of troops I had, and the entire Persian fleet – four hundred ships. So I had to be very careful when I moved. In the whole year I was in Caria, I feared – every day – a brilliant descent on my beaches, a dashing attack on a marching column. I scouted everything.

It made me a better soldier. Memnon was to my generation and your father’s as Phokion was to Philip – fighting him made us better.