God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

One advantage we had was the empty city of Halicarnassus. Memnon couldn’t spy on me there – there was no population base, and as they began to return, Thais’s people were ruthless in searching out his agents. Her finest hour came at midwinter, when she detected one of his men – a Greek soldier posing as a merchant ‘returning’ to his city. Instead of hanging him, she planted a slave on him – a slave who was, in fact, one of her own men. For the rest of the winter we fed him carefully written reports – he suborned slaves in my headquarters and bought scraps of parchment and stolen wax tablets from them, and we spent some amusing hours drafting these forgeries.

First we fed him a cheap victory. I had hired a pair of shipwrights from Miletus and they were building me a pair of triremes down the coast, but either they were charlatans or their workmen were useless. Either way, what they ended up with weren’t worth a pile of horse manure, so we allowed news of them to get to Memnon and he obligingly landed a force and burned them. That proved to us that our man was working, and also built his credibility.

Then we allowed Memnon to know of a grain ship heading for us. I had plenty of grain. He seized it, and our tame agent was delighted. Then we allowed Memnon to know that we were so terrified of his intelligence network and his fleet that we were barricaded in Halicarnassus.

And then, on a cold, rainy night, I slipped my little army out through a postern gate and raced for Caunus.

We missed storming the place by surprise – by a blade of grass. But the closing of the gates caught a third of the garrison outside the walls, gathering new bedding, and we took them prisoner. I didn’t even summon the town to surrender – I constructed my ten engines from the abundant local wood, and my first stones were flying before the sun set on the first day of the siege.

The town offered to surrender on the third day, but informed us that they could not surrender the citadel, which was in the hands of Memnon’s troops. I accepted their surrender and moved my machines up, all in one day. In the face of the outrage of the citizens, I had my slaves demolish a whole (rather rich) quarter of the city, and I used every slave in the town and many of the poorer citizens to move earth so that my platform was done in three days – to the same height as the top of the citadel wall.

They were Greeks. They didn’t expect it to be so fast. On the fifth day, my machines were smashing the parapet. It was a small citadel, less than a stade on a side, with three steep, rocky sides, but the fourth was merely a steep slope with a high wall, and I blew that wall to Hades in a day – mud brick on a stone base.

They went to work building a new wall behind the rubble of the old wall.

Before they finished it, Helios’s mine, started on the first day, reached the point he thought was correct, and we fired it, and the whole north face of their acropolis crumbled.

Helios, the former slave, accepted success and victory with a calm equanimity that made me love him. He thanked every slave and free digger, and he freed three men whose efforts had been spectacular.

And then I packed up my army, put a garrison under Pyrrhus in the town and raced back up the coast to Halicarnassus. As I expected, Memnon landed a counter-attack, but his attempt to cut the coast road missed me by a day, and I was safe in the walls of Halicarnassus when his army got back in their ships. They tried to retake Caunus by coup de main, but Pyrrhus was ready and they failed.

That was the easy one. But every man in my force knew we had beaten the great Memnon. I had thousands of Greek mercenaries – men who might, but for the chances of Moira, fate, Tyche, have been serving Memnon and not me. I needed some victories to convince them that I was the better boss.

Somewhere south of me, the king was marching through the snow of the high mountains. I had no idea what he was doing – or why. I knew that he intended to take every city in Asia Minor before he went inland – to cut the King of Persia off from the sea. Queen Ada fretted, and sometimes I did too.

On the other hand, Thais and I had a wonderful winter. I had enough campaigning to keep me busy, and I enjoyed – I still do – administration. They don’t call me Farm Boy for nothing. I made sure that the city was rebuilt, and I built Ada a mint. When bandits plagued her main road, I sent Kineas and his Athenian Hippeis and they destroyed the bandits and burned their camp.

Locals told Thais and her people that there came a two-week period in late winter when the storms die away and zephyrs blow. It seemed worth a try, so I collected light boats – fishing boats, which could carry ten men. We collected several hundred of them, causing grumbling and mutiny all along the coast, which moved me not at all.

When we’d had two days of golden sunshine and light winds, I put all my cavalry into the boats with the best of my Greek mercenaries and we flew under sail across Keramaeios Bay – eighty stades of pure terror, where a few big waves might have done me in. I’m no great fan of the sea. But I knew that Memnon would be insane to risk his naval supremacy at this time of year. I felt it was worth the risk.

We landed on the rocky beaches east of Knidos in the last light of evening, and we spent a hard night on the rocks north and east of the town. I got lost in the darkness and there was no moon, and we were an hour late to our rendezvous when we found Strako and his lieutenant, Anarches, waiting beneath the walls.

But after that, it went like a play. Strakos pounded his spear-butt against a low postern gate – and it opened.

He grinned at me. ‘And it didn’t cost an obol!’ he said, and that was that.

By the gods, that one was sweet. There is a special feeling when you take a great risk and pull it off. I sent a message to Kineas to send me a garrison – by land – and waited to see who would reach me first – Memnon or Kineas. I sent Strako to Thais with the same message and a note of thanks for a job well done.

Perhaps Memnon was too busy taking Mytilene, or perhaps he made an error, or maybe, just maybe, Thais’s precious agent and his false information about the size of my garrison kept him at home.

However it worked out, I took Knidos with no loss, and ten days later I left Kineas there with his Athenians and four hundred mercenaries.

We heard – from the captured garrison – that the king was in Pamphylia. Whatever the truth of it, he wasn’t communicating with me or with Ada, and he moved so fast that Thais didn’t know where he was.

I got quite a nice note of congratulations over the mountains from Parmenio. It was as flattering as the source was unexpected. He wrote from Sardis, praised my energy, diligence and success, and asked me to bring my part of the army to a rendezvous at Gordia in the late spring. The letter informed me that the married men and new recruits under Coenus would meet us there, and the king, as well.

That left me with only the three island forts to deal with.

The problem was that each fort occupied the entirety of its island, and I couldn’t lay siege without a fleet. So I once again hired naval architects – this time with input from Helios and other men to make sure I wasn’t cozened – and I started to build a quinquereme and three triremes – at Queen Ada’s expense. Caria had once been a naval power, and she fancied the idea. Helios felt that this was the smallest squadron that would give us a chance. And we built a mole under the walls of the city – a fortified mole with engine towers, to cover our ships. And to bombard the nearest island, less than a stade off the coast.

Spring burst into flower, and my mole brought my ten engines in range. Over the water, on Lesbos, Mytilene was still holding out, which gave us hope, and Mythymna promised to rebel against Memnon when we gave the word. I suspected that now that the sailing weather was here, as soon as Mytilene fell Memnon would come and try to take Halicarnassus back. And he would, too – but I might hold him long enough for Alexander or Parmenio to swoop down on him. I dreamed of such a victory.

Just after the Athenian spring feast of Demeter, Mytilene fell after a heroic resistance. These days, when men speak of the ease of Alexander’s conquest of Ionia, I want to spit. Men died – good men – fighting for Alexander or just fighting for their own beliefs and freedoms. Mytilene helped us almost as much as victory at Granicus.

A week later, Memnon had seized Miletus, too, and all the other port cities in Ionia and Aetolia hurried to surrender to him.

In three weeks, all our gains of two years were reversed. Memnon had cut Alexander off from mainland Greece, and the rumour that Thais’s agents had was that he was going to use Mytilene as a springboard to go to the island of Euboea off the coast of Boeotia, near Thebes, where the population would welcome him as a liberator from Macedonian oppression.

It wasn’t a ‘brilliant’ plan. It was merely an excellent plan that he’d worked out carefully, and he had the money, the logistics and the fleet to make it work.