God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (74 page)

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, Thaïs 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 Thaïs. 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 Thaïs’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 Thaïs 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.

Thaïs 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.

Thaïs 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 Thaïs 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 Thaïs. 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. Thaïs’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.

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, Thaïs’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, Thaïs 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 Thaïs 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 Thaïs 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, Thaïs’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 Thaïs 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.