We crashed into the centre of their line, with only two ranks of our own. We didn’t have sarissas – most men had a pair of javelins, and a few had longer spears, like the Greek dory. They were on the bad footing where the rubble was fresh, and we had them with their backs to the illumination of the fires they had lit on their own walls.

Speaking only for myself, I have seldom killed so many men in a single fight. The first man I faced flinched at the contact and I rammed my new kopis over his shield – had I mentioned my new kopis? – and into his helmet and he was dead. There’s no coming back from that wound.

He fell off my sword and there were three of them facing me, but body posture said only one was a threat, so I put the knee of my greave down hard on the stone – one of the best reasons to wear greaves in a fight – and cut low. He cut high, and sheared my crest, and I cut right through his ankle bone and severed his foot and he screamed like a soul in torment – perhaps he was.

A really showy, brutal death can shake inexperienced troops, and that’s what happened to the Tyrians. The men on either side flinched away and I followed them. One fell back, into the water, and the other missed his footing, slipped and got my kopis in his throat.

All along the front, my men had pushed the Tyrians into the water – literally. And there were corpses everywhere. I think I’ve said it before, but in a night fight, armour and discipline are everything, and we had more and better of both. These men were marines and lightly armed.

And they had no place to run.

When I saw that their centre was gone, I left the fight with Polystratus at my heels and half a dozen other men who could think on their feet, and we ran for the northern flank, where it seemed that the Tyrians had the upper hand. We hammered into the flank of their charge, a wedge of eight men, and it being dark they never saw us coming, so that each of us downed a man or two from behind before they knew what was happening – and then they ran, pure panic, given the circumstance. Armed Macedonians were pouring on to the mole, and for a few ugly moments we hunted them around the surface like so many rabbits in a field. And we killed every man who had made it on to the mole.

But while we were butchering their marines, the enemy engineers were putting grapples into our underwater trees and pulling as hard as they could, with ships and from the wall. As soon as they realised that we had slaughtered their marines, they started to pound the mole with thrown gravel and red-hot sand and fist-sized rocks. We were too thick on the mole and we took hits. Red-hot sand – even when it has crossed a stade of cool night air – is horrible – it burns into your skin, so that Thaïs had to pick each grain out with tweezers, and all of the skin infected, which in salt air is horrible enough.

But we were Macedonians, not cowards. I saw the ropes and felt the mole move, and Diades was there, and Helios – and Alexander. And Craterus and Philotas, and together we led men with axes forward into the hail of stone and sand. Hephaestion was badly burned, and Craterus took a stone to the shield that broke his arm – but we got two of the ropes cut, and then Alexander got hit, and it was all we could do to keep him alive.

Those moments – in the dark, with a helmet on my head, the haze of the red-hot sand as it fell, sometimes still twinkling, the steam from the fires and the salt water and the screams – Alexander down, and Craterus screaming – they seemed to go on for ever. I just held on, my shield pressed against his body, my head covering his head, as more shit fell on us. It would have to go through me to get to him. He was the King of Macedon, and he was not going to die here, in the dark.

Sometimes, the gods send me this moment in my dreams, and I am stuck there, for a long time. In a dream, as in reality, you can tellyourself that it will end. But you don’t really knowwhen it will end, and it seems to go on and on and on.

Then the hypaspitoi were coming up, and Bubores and Astibus came and dragged us off the king and got their shields over him, and we were all pulled clear of the killing zone. Alexander was alive, and virtually unhurt. I was covered in sand. The Tyrians mixed dog and pig shit into the sand to make it carry disease, and I missed the next month of the siege from the burns and the infection that came with them. Hephaestion was never quite so handsome again.

In fact, although I was screaming with the pain of my burns and didn’t know it at the time, they got their grapples deeply into the trees and dragged several of them from under our rebuilt mole, and caused almost half of our new work to collapse. They also managed to burn the machines we’d built on the mole, and a separate group of raiders burned the towers where they sat on the shore ready for deployment.

As I say, I missed all that. My recovery was slow, and our second child was born dead – just as I was starting to recover. The pregnancy had not been a good one; Thaïs had been depressed, anxious and sick, and her delivery was painful and hurt her in more ways than just the loss of blood and tissue . . .

And I was not really there to help. In fact, we were on two beds next to each other for a week. I was aware that she was hurt. But that was about all I could manage.

My fever broke eventually. I had lost a lot of muscle and a lot of weight, and my beloved was lying in a bed next to me, with a fever so hot you could feel her body from an arm’s length away. I fussed about uselessly, got in the way of Philip of Acarnia and a pair of midwives who were actually trying to help her, and eventually stumbled out of the tent into the brilliant sunshine of a late summer day in Syria.

Isokles found me immediately, and took me by the hand.

‘We were worried about you,’ he said. He gave me a wry smile, as if that was too much of a compliment and he thought I might bite him. ‘Hey – I’m an Athenian in a Macedonian army. No one likes me when you aren’t around. Except Kineas – and we try not to spend too much time together. It’s like committing adultery. You don’t want to give people ideas. Actually, it’s more like notcommitting adultery, but having your wife suspect you anyway.’

We walked from the officers’ lines across the camp. There was a heavy series of dust clouds running away north and east.

‘More trees?’ I asked. The dust made me cough, and the light made me blink and I was already tired. Everything seemed odd – off kilter. I’d been wounded before, but the hot sand – and the infection – was different. I felt weak.

Craterus was directing operations on the mole, and he embraced me carefully. ‘How are the burns?’ he said. ‘Lucky for you – you never had any looks to lose.’ He laughed.

People say the damnedest things.

He shrugged. ‘Hephaestion got sand all over his face,’ he said.

Then I understood.

I looked at the mole. There were four towers across the far end, and from where I stood in the heat shimmer, it seemed to be touching the walls of the city.

‘But we’re there!’ I said.

Craterus shook his head. ‘We haven’t made a yard in the last week. Rebuilding was hard enough. Alexander marched away, and both Hephaestion and Barsines taunted him for cowardice.’

I looked around. ‘I would like to have seen that,’ I said quietly.

Craterus shook his head. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Anyway, Diades kept us at it, and we rebuilt what we lost. But now there’s a deep channel – so deep our divers can’t find the bottom, and we’ve dumped . . . I have to think. Ten thousand talents of gravel? More? And trees, dirt, huge boulders—’

‘Where’s the king?’ I asked.

None of the officers on the mole would meet my eyes. ‘Hunting,’ Isokles said; because he was an Athenian, he didn’t have to care.

‘Hunting? As in, not here?’ I asked.