Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (17 page)

Understanding that this was a key moment, the Tyrians launched their counterstroke: a sulphur-caked merchant vessel, stripped of everything that would not burn, filled to the gunwales with fuel and choice accelerants. To insure that the fire ship would ground herself on the mole, they shifted its ballast aft, so that its prow was pitched free of the water. The next windy day their best oarsmen towed it into the channel and, with spirited war-cries, propelled it toward the enemy.

The ship struck home and exploded in an enormous conflagration. With particular ingenuity, the Tyrians suspended cauldrons of boiling pitch between the ship’s masts, so that when these collapsed additional fuel poured onto the blaze. Mounds of unused timber, cordage, canvas and idle catapults went up. The fire spread so quickly that the guards in Alexander’s towers were forced to dive into the sea. Enemy triremes swarmed around the helpless Macedonians, beating them senseless with clubs before taking them all as hostages. The Tyrian archers, meanwhile, drove back anyone coming out to fight the fire. The entire mole burned to the waterline.

That was when Poseidon seized his chance. Sending forth a storm, he punished the very foundation of the mole until it gave way, collapsing in a heap on the seafloor. So completely was the structure destroyed that when Alexander came out to view the damage from this attack, all signs of his months of work, wet or dry, were erased. I was there during the episode Aeschines described, when the Tyrians gathered on their wall to jeer at Alexander as he stood among the debris.

These developments provoked fresh carpings from Nearchus, who complained that the city would never be taken if the Tyrians were left in command of the sea. This was no doubt intended to dissuade Alexander, since the enemy had a strong fleet and the Macedonians had none. Alexander nevertheless ordered the mole rebuilt at twice the width and with double the number of towers. His men, weary and discouraged, stripped an even greater area around the country for materials. Alexander, meanwhile, rode north with his personal guard. He was away for seven days.

The gods alone must know what the Tyrians thought of Alexander’s disappearance. We may suppose, though, that they believed he had given up and that the siege was finished; Poseidon himself must have assumed as much, since the winter storms ceased and the sea settled down. It was on one of these calm days that their lookouts sighted a fleet approaching from the north. They cheered again, for they thought it surely must be the Persians coming to drive the besiegers away for good, or perhaps a relieving force from Tyre’s daughter city of Carthage, riding to the rescue of their ancestral temples.

These illusions were shattered as the devices painted on the fleet’s sails came into view. The fleet, 200 ships strong, was a mixed force from Sidon and Cyprus; at the prow of the very first ship stood Alexander.

Now it was the Macedonians’ turn to cheer and their adversaries to groan. With such an overwhelming force against them, the Tyrians recalled their dispersed fleet, and took the additional defensive action of blocking their north and south harbor mouths with merchantmen. Alexander’s Sidonese allies showed their value immediately by launching fire ships against the obstructing vessels; several were burned, but the enemy replaced them. Alexander ordered a blockade on the city.

With the enemy fleet out of action, work on the second mole proceeded faster than on the first. The Tyrians responded by erecting wooden towers atop their walls to increase the range of their heavy artillery. With these engines they threw heavy boulders into the sea, hoping to impede the movement of Alexander’s ships. This strategy pleased Alexander, since the enemy was providing good material for his work crews. He sent out triremes to haul up the rocks and dump them at the head of the mole.

Perceiving their mistake, the Tyrians produced up a squadron of ram ships to attack the triremes. The ram ships were great armored vessels, with even their oar-shafts clad in bronze. Though they were slow and would easily have capsized in rougher seas, they caught the Macedonians by surprise, sinking several of their vessels and, in the process, further littering the landward channel with obstructions.
 

The Tyrians, having regained control of the waters under their city walls, came up to threaten the mole again. Fighting resumed along the causeway, as Alexander’s men took refuge in their towers. Bolts from the Macedonian artillery clanked harmlessly off the metal skins of the ram ships. Alexander, furious, ordered the immediate construction of his own armored fleet. This was completed within days, and launched with selected crews from among his Sidonese and Cypriot allies. Outnumbered, the enemy withdrew.

The allied triremes resumed pulling up the stones. To frustrate them, the enemy sent out waves of divers to cut their cables from underwater. The Tyrian swimmers, who seemed able to hold their breaths for superhuman lengths of time, also assaulted the mole from below, using metal hooks to work the cobbles loose from the tree branches the Macedonians had sunk there. These attacks did real damage to Alexander’s plan. Having no divers of like skill, he ordered the anchor ropes of his triremes replaced with iron chains, and boats with archers to patrol the channel and kill the Tyrians before they could submerge. The latter tactic met with scant success, but in any case the divers could do nothing against the chains, and gave up.

With the noose tightening around the town, the Tyrians tried to break the blockade by sallying out against the enemy ships at the north end of the island. A crack force of the city’s best fighters gathered behind a canvas screen erected at the harbor mouth. Coming out in mid-afternoon, when the Macedonians were rotating their crews, thirteen Tyrian ships rowed out in complete silence and again caught their enemy by surprise. All the blockading ships were taken and either burned or cast adrift in the swift current, to founder on the rocks downstream.

Learning of this attack, Alexander rushed to the fleet blocking the southern harbor and ordered it to pull for the other side. So quickly was this order obeyed that the Macedonians caught the Tyrians still at their destructive work. Upon seeing the reinforcements, and Alexander conspicuous at their head, the Tyrians made frantic signals for their scattered force to retire. The Macedonians fell on most of these before they could find shelter in the north harbor; only a handful of the enemy escaped, making the overall losses even for both sides. It was a draw Alexander could afford more than the Tyrians, however.

A strange inactivity then came over the defenders; their artillery fell silent, and the archers just sat on the walls, watching the Macedonians come ever closer. To the workers on the causeway, this stillness was most ominous.

In fact, the defenders were preparing a new weapon. The slings of their torsion catapults were replaced with bronze shields, the missiles abandoned for something far more noxious. Just as the mole came up under the walls, the Macedonian workers were seen to cry out, tear off their clothing, and cast themselves into the sea. Mystified, Alexander came out to investigate.

He soon learned that the Tyrians were using artillery to project loads of red-hot sand against his men. The effect of this weapon was to send down a spreading, molten cloud that destroyed anything it touched. Siege works were scorched, lungs seared, and skin burned as the sand worked into the seams of the men’s armor.

There was no counter-measure against this horror. Work on the mole was abandoned. Alexander, in despair, punished the Tyrians by using his biggest rock throwers against the landward walls. Two full days of constant pounding worked only a few cracks in the fortifications, which the Tyrians quickly filled in from behind. The bombardment was called off.

There seemed nothing more we could do. The winter and spring had been consumed by the siege, and summer had begun; no doubt somewhere Darius was using the time to strengthen his position. Alexander’s spies in Greece reported that the Lacedaemonians were trying to enlist the Athenians in an alliance against Macedon; accounts reached him that the Persian fleet was forcing open the port of Miletus. It seemed as if Nearchus’ advice was correct after all—Tyre must be bypassed.

Then a most unusual sign appeared. The waters in the channel began to churn. Onlookers gathered on both sides and watched in wonder as the great, dark back of an enormous sea-monster parted the waves. Given their reverses, there was great nervousness at this apparition in the Macedonian ranks, and the beginnings of outright panic among some of the more ignorant Thracian and Illyrian allies.

Alexander came to the shore to view the creature in the manner of a master inspecting a fine horse. Dismissing all talk of omens, he refused to consult Aristander on the matter, instead recounting what he had learned about such creatures from his tutor, Aristotle of Stageira.

“I was told he examined one of the monsters that had washed up alive on the shores of the Thermaic Gulf,” recalled the King. “They are blooded animals, and toothless. As he undertook a vivisection, a baby sea-monster beached itself on the shore next to the other. The bigger monster then laid a fin over its calf. At this, Aristotle broke off his investigations, leaving the harmless things to die in peace.”

This account seemed to quiet his men. The Tyrians, by contrast, were in an uproar. As the monster circled the channel, they sought the favor of Poseidon, whom they called Yamm, by cutting the throats of their prisoners and casting them into the sea. They implored the monster to smash the enemy warships. Instead, it swam under the walls and paused at a place just off the south end of the island, on the seaward side. With its nose just out of the water, it seemed to be pointing to a place on the fortifications. Then it pulled itself back into the water and disappeared.

Alexander leapt on his chariot and, to everyone’s surprise, proclaimed “It is a sign! That is where we attack!”

Of the truth of this episode I have nothing to tell you. I was not there to see it, but away in the interior, attempting to learn something more about Arridaeus. I suspect it was he, and not some sea monster, who deserves the credit for identifying the weakest section of the Tyrian walls. Yet behind this tale hides an element of the truth, for it is exactly as a monster that the Macedonians saw Arridaeus—as a presence that was unexpected, inexplicable, and that filled them with dread. Curious about this, I plied Callisthenes with questions, but his indifference to this mystery was as fervent as my curiosity. There was nothing to learn from him.

To penetrate the conspiracy around the King’s half-brother was dangerous. Yet there could be no pretending that I was an historian if I preferred childish fables to the complexities of real human affairs. I therefore decided to risk learning more, even if accusers like Aeschines would eventually crawl forth to impugn me, and to tell me that I had failed in my oath to the Assembly. To my knowledge, my oath never bound me to transmit lies to my fellow citizens, both live or yet to be born. I make no apologies for this decision.

With a few silver decadrachms placed in the right hands it was not hard to find where Arridaeus was kept. He was installed some distance inland from the Levantine coast, and safely remote from the main encampment of the army, in a back room of the Temple of Herakles Palaeotyros. The place was well-guarded by Alexander’s most trusted troops, which happened to be the first division of the King’s Hypaspists. As my title in the Macedonian army was that of an officer in the second division, it was a straightforward matter to pull rank and get inside before the guards could scurry back to the main camp for instructions. Their resistance mounted the deeper I got into the temple, however, so that I became nervous that I would not reach my goal before someone of superior rank arrived to stop me.

It was only with a threat of flogging that I convinced the last sentry to step aside. My heart pounding, I pushed the door open, and then peeled aside a black curtain stretched behind it. Though it was midday outside, the room was obscured by a thick, sulphurous darkness. Peering within, I saw a corner of the room was heated with braziers, and lit by a single oil lamp. A stench like a latrine hit me full in the face.

The king’s brother was sitting on the floor. He was surrounded by miniature tin figures of soldiers, cavalry, siege engines, which he had arranged in opposing phalanxes. His armor—the only kind of clothing he would allow to touch his skin—was stacked against the wall behind him. He was naked as he sat there, rocking with a slow rhythm as he hummed to himself, absently handling the head of his penis.

Just then something moved behind him, and I realized he wasn’t alone: an old woman was there, sitting on a cushion with a bucket and mop. She was staring in my direction as the feeble light from the rest of the temple penetrated the sanctuary. When she spoke, the enclosed space made her voice seem as if she was speaking from beside me.

“He’s not hungry. Leave it.”

Arridaeus never looked up, never showed me his face, but continued to hum and rock, and would evidently continue until he soiled himself in whatever way and the old woman would clean him. And though I have no evidence that this was the totality of his life, apart from his brief appearances on the battlefield, it was not hard to believe it was so. If there were any other exits from his tomb, they were not obvious; if there were any other concessions to human companionship granted to him, I didn’t see them.