Alexander (Vol. 2) (45 page)

‘Well, this is my plan,’ Alexander continued. ‘We will build a causeway to the island, while you will design and build towers which are higher than the walls.’

‘Sire,’ Diades pointed out, ‘that means towers higher than one hundred and fifty feet.’

‘I imagine it does mean that,’ replied the King unperturbed. ‘These machines will have to be invulnerable and equipped with battering-rams and completely new catapults. I need machines capable of throwing rocks two hundred pounds in weight a distance of some eight hundred feet.’

The illustrious engineers looked one another in the face, all of them with an expression of helplessness. Diades remained silent, tracing apparently meaningless lines on a sheet of papyrus while Alexander stared at him. Everyone felt the King’s gaze weighing more than the rocks their catapults were supposed to throw. Finally the expert lifted his head and said, ‘It can be done.’

‘Good. So you can start working on it straight away.’

In the meantime, outside, the old city resounded to the cries and shouts of the people who were being chased from their homes, together with the crashing and rumbling as roofs and walls came tumbling down. Hephaestion had had small suspended battering-rams mounted to help with the demolition. Over the following days teams of woodcutters, escorted by Agrianian shock troops, went up into the mountains to cut Lebanon cedars to be sliced into planks for constructing the machines.

Work on the causeway continued day and night, in shifts. Carts drawn by oxen and mules were used to transport the material to be thrown into the sea. From their high walls the inhabitants of Tyre laughed and mocked the Macedonians, making fun of their efforts. But by the end of the fourth month of work they had stopped laughing.

One morning, at daybreak, the sentries on duty on the battlements were shocked to see two colossal machines, each over one hundred and fifty feet high, coming towards them, creaking and groaning their way along the new dyke. These were the largest siege machines ever to have been built and as soon as they reached the end of the causeway they were put into action. Enormous rocks and crackling fireballs hissed through the air and crashed on to the battlements, spreading destruction and terror through the city.

The inhabitants of Tyre responded almost immediately by setting up catapults on the walls and aiming them at the Macedonians, who were still working on the causeway and the siege machines.

Alexander then had the wooden shelters and mobile roofs brought into action, all of them protected by animal skins which had not been tanned and which therefore could not catch fire. Work on the causeway continued almost undisturbed. The machines were pushed even further forward and their aim became ever more precise and deadly. If things had continued that way the walls would have been under close threat in a short time.

In the meantime the Sidon and Byblos fleets had arrived, together with ships from Cyprus and Rhodes which had been put under Nearchus’s command, but the Tyre fleet, moored up in its inaccessible harbours, refused to do battle. In fact they were preparing a devastating surprise counterattack.

One moonless evening, after a day of incessant battering, two triremes came out of the port towing a fire-ship – an enormous vessel, completely hollow and filled with incendiary material. From its bow there protruded two long wooden beams from which two containers hung, each full of pitch and naphtha. When they were close to the causeway, the triremes increased the rhythm of the rowing to the maximum possible before releasing the fire-ship after having set it and the forward beams alight.

The vessel, at the centre of a roaring vortex of flames, moved forwards under its impetus, while the two triremes veered to each side. The burning mass ran aground on the edge of the causeway, not far from the assault towers. The two beams on the bow had been consumed now by the flames and they snapped, dropping the two incendiary containers, which exploded, spreading fire everywhere, attacking the bases of the two towers.

Macedonian counterattack teams ran immediately from the guard posts to put out the blaze, but from the triremes there now came armed assault troops who engaged them in battle. The fighting was fierce and frightful against the warm red of the fire, in the smoke and the whirling of the sparks, in the air which was unbreathable now because of the thick fumes from the naphtha and pitch. The fire-ship disintegrated in one last final flash and the two towers were completely enveloped in flames.

The very height of the constructions increased the internal draught of the fire so that the flames and the sparks rose more than one hundred feet above the tops of the enormous trellises, lighting up the entire gulf as though it were daylight and throwing a blood-coloured reflection against the bastions of the city.

From the top of the walls came the jubilant cries of the inhabitants of Tyre, and the massacre of the troops who had landed on the causeway – cut to pieces in a furious counter-attack – together with the destruction of the two triremes, was cold comfort to the Macedonians. Months and months of work, the construction genius of the best engineers in the world, had gone up in smoke in no time.

Alexander, astride Bucephalas, arrived at a gallop along the causeway, rushing through the fires like some fury from hell. He stopped just a short distance from the towers at the very moment in which they collapsed noisily in an explosion of flames, smoke and sparks.

His companions immediately rushed up to him, followed by the engineers and the technicians who had built those wondrous machines. The chief engineer, Diades of Larissa, looked on stone-faced, his eyes full of helpless anger, but his expression itself betrayed not the slightest sign of emotion.

Alexander dismounted, looked long and hard at the city walls and then at the destroyed machines and finally at his engineers, who seemed to be paralysed before the spectacle, and ordered: ‘Rebuild them.’

A few days later, while Alexander’s engineers sought to find a way of rebuilding the machines as quickly as possible, a violent storm irreparably damaged the causeway they had worked so hard to build. It was as though the gods had suddenly turned their backs on their chosen one, and morale among the Macedonian men was sorely tested by this series of reverses.

The King became intractable and unapproachable, often riding alone along the seashore, looking out to the walled island whose inhabitants had dared mock him, or sitting on a rock contemplating the breaking of the waves on the shore.

Barsine was also in the habit of riding along the shore at dawn, before closing herself away in her tent with her handmaids, and one day she met him. He was walking, followed by Bucephalas, and his thigh still bore the scar of the wound received at Issus. His long hair was blown here and there by the wind and almost covered his face. Once more, just like the last time she had seen him, Barsine found herself shivering, almost as though the man there before her were some unreal being.

He looked at her, but said nothing, and she dismounted so as not to tower over him. She lowered her head and murmured, ‘Sire.’

Alexander approached, touched her cheek lightly with the palm of his hand and looked into her eyes, tilting his head slightly towards his right shoulder as he always did when moved by deep, intense feelings. She closed her eyes because she was unable to bear the strength of his gaze, which shone through his hair as it blew in the wind.

The King surprised her with a sudden, passionate kiss, then he leaped on to Bucephalas and galloped off along the sand and the foam of the breaking waves. When Barsine turned to look at him, he was already far off, wrapped in clouds of iridescent spray raised by the stallion’s hooves.

She returned to her tent and gave her emotions free rein as she fell, crying, on to her bed.

*

His anger assuaged, Alexander took the situation in hand once again and summoned an extended war council consisting of his generals, his architects, his engineers, together with Nearchus and the captains of the fleet.

‘Events here are not the result of the wrath of the gods, but rather the result of our own stupidity. We will remedy this and Tyre will have no escape. Firstly, the causeway: our captains will study the winds and the currents in this channel and will instruct the architects accordingly, so that they may design a new structure which makes use of the strength and direction of the natural elements rather than countering them.

‘Secondly, the siege engines,’ he said, turning to Diades and his engineers. ‘If we wait for completion of the causeway we will waste too much time. We have to make sure that the inhabitants of Tyre feel themselves to be under constant threat. They must realize that they will have no peace, neither by day nor by night. We will have two teams working at the same time – one will design and build the siege engines, which will advance along the causeway as soon as it is ready, the other will design floating assault engines.’

‘Floating, Sire?’ asked Diades, his eyes wide open.

‘Exactly. I don’t know how, but I am sure you will manage to do it, and soon. My companions have the job of quashing the tribes which inhabit the mountains of Lebanon so that our woodcutters may work undisturbed. When spring comes round once more we will take Tyre. I am sure of this, and I will explain why: I had a dream last night – I dreamed that Hercules appeared before me up on the walls of the city and with a gesture he invited me to join him up there.

‘I recounted the dream to Aristander and he interpreted it immediately – I will enter Tyre and offer a sacrifice to the hero in his temple within the walls. I want this news to be spread among our men, so that they too are certain of our victory.’

‘It will be done, Alexander,’ said Eumenes, and he thought to himself that the coming of this dream was most convenient.

Work began again immediately. The causeway was to be rebuilt following instructions from the mariners of Cyprus and Rhodes who knew those waters well, while Diades, who had the most demanding task, designed assault towers each mounted on a platform fixed across the main decks of two warships bound side by side. In the space of a month two such structures were completed, and as soon as a calm day came along, the crews began to row them into position under the walls of Tyre. When they were close enough, the vessels were anchored and the battering-rams began crashing incessantly into the stone blocks.

The inhabitants of Tyre soon reacted and sent out divers in the night to cut the ropes anchoring the vessels, sending them adrift out towards the rocks. Nearchus, who was on watch in command of the royal quinquereme, immediately sounded the alarm and set off with ten or so ships towards the floating platforms which were struggling to manoeuvre because of the wind. He came alongside them, threw lines with hooks over the gunwales, and then towed them back into position, his crew breaking their backs as they rowed. The anchor ropes were replaced with iron chains, and the battering began once again. The Tyrians, however, in the meantime had lined the outside of the walls with sacks full of seaweed to soften the blows of the battering-rams. Tyre’s stubborn resistance seemed to have no limits.

One day, while Alexander was up in the mountains engaged in operations against the increasingly aggressive Lebanese tribes, a ship from Macedonia moored at the new causeway. It brought supplies and messages and a rather special visitor, who was announced to General Parmenion. It was the King’s old tutor, Leonidas, in his eighties now, who, having heard of his pupil’s great enterprise, had decided to set off to meet him and congratulate him before dying. When the news spread all his other pupils wanted to see him – Seleucus, Leonnatus, Craterus, Perdiccas, Philotas, Ptolemy, Hephaestion and Lysimachus; they all arrived shouting like children and crying out in chorus the old rhyme that used to drive him into a rage:

‘Here comes the old crow!’

Then they started clapping their hands in rhythm, as they shouted:
‘Didáskale! Didáskale! Didáskale!’

On hearing them calling ‘Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!’ just as they used to do in greeting him every morning as they sat in the classroom with their slates on their knees, old Leonidas felt moved, but he kept his emotions well hidden and immediately sorted them out.

‘Silence!’ exclaimed the toothless old man. ‘You’re just the usual unruly lot! And I bet you haven’t read a single book since you left home.’

‘Hey, teacher!’ shouted Leonnatus. ‘You can’t start with lessons now, can’t you see we’re busy here?’

‘You really shouldn’t have set out on such a voyage,’ said Ptolemy. ‘The weather’s so bad, it’s wintertime now. Why have you come?’

‘Because I heard a tale of my boy’s achievements and I wanted to see him before giving up the ghost.’

‘And us?’ asked Hephaestion. ‘We’re not bad either, you know.’

As for giving up the ghost, Teacher, there’s plenty of time for that,’ said Perdiccas. ‘You could have waited for the fine weather, for example.’

‘Ah!’ replied Leonidas, ‘I know what I am doing, I have no need of advice from you children. Where is Alexander?’

‘The King is up in the mountains,’ explained Hephaestion. ‘He is sorting out the Lebanese tribes who are still loyal to Darius.’