TWENTY-FIVE

It took me two further weeks of training to get enough meat on my bones to consider leading men in combat. I wrestled with Meleager, fenced with Craterus and practised hoplomachia with Isokles, who had charged fees to train men in the armoured fighting when he was a young man in Athens, and was truly expert. Meleager was older than I and no great wrestler, and he took it ill when I threw him so that I needed a new companion, and I took to wrestling with Kineas’s friend Diodorus, who was a fine wrestler and a good weight for me – then and even now, though I’ve gained weight and he’s stayed slim, the bastard!

I noticed – perhaps because an illness is like a visit to another country – as I say, I noticed on my return to duty that there were changes throughout the army, and some of them were deep – some were changes in individuals and some were changes in the whole identity.

I think that Meleager was my key to the whole set of changes. He and I had never been friends, particularly, but we had got on well enough, and when I found that he had set up his pavilion near mine and liked to get his exercise at the rising of the sun, I thought it natural that we exercise together. But after a few mornings, he made excuses and began to exercise elsewhere. The man I had known ten years before – my superior, I would add – would have cared nothing for a little sand in his face – or would have offered to box with me, or fight with sticks or clubs and arms wrapped in our chalmyses until I was black and blue. But the older, more powerful Meleager didn’t want to take risks. Or if he did take risks, he wanted to take them under different circumstances. There was no ‘private exercise’ for Meleager. He was a public man. He cared deeply whether his subordinates saw him thrown to the earth.

My second lesson in this change was several days later, after my first bout with Diodorus. I was wiping the sand from my face – Diodorus threw me quite regularly, until I gained some muscle and some much-needed skill – and Craterus, who watched us, took me aside.

‘Do you think,’ he asked me cautiously, ‘that you are wise to let men see you be bested by an Athenian?’

I spat sand, and shook my head. ‘Herakles was a fucking Theban, and I’m pretty sure he’d put my head in the sand, too. And I’m pretty sure men would cheer.’ I gave him my best farm-boy grin. ‘No one minds if I get thrown. Who cares? It’s what I do when the bronze is shining that matters, isn’t it?’

Craterus smiled, and that smile was false. ‘Oh – of course. Absolutely.’ He withdrew, and I saw that we had changed as a group. We were keeping up appearances.

But the siege of Tyre was not about appearances, thank the gods, and by now we had machines on the end of the mole, throwing stones as big as my head – two a minute, all day, and a rank of spare machines ready for whenever the brilliant engineers on the other side managed to destroy one of ours.

Summer was becoming autumn, and the feel of the breeze had changed when I went back into the line. It was a late summer evening, and the heat of the day seemed to flow upward into the sky, and the breeze that came with the setting of the sun was like balm on wounds, and seemed to blow right through my leather-backed shirt of scales to cool my body.

I was right forward, in the line of engines, watching the teams load and loose them with a terrible precision, when there were cries – and screams – from the forward edge of the mole, and I assumed we were under attack. By this time, Alexander had forced virtually the entire servile population of Syria into our work crews, because so many slaves had died at the hands of the Tyrians – perhaps, by this time, as many as fifteen thousand or more. I had been told that armed soldiers were required now to whip the slaves forward with their loads, and to kill any who attempted to desert. And I was told that soldiers no longer worked on the mole – only slaves.

No wonder we’d slowed to a crawl. Slaves love work the way a rat loves a cat.

At any rate, I went forward with fifty men as the slaves fled in panic, shouting in five languages – Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician and Persian. I couldn’t understand them, so I pushed a few into the water as I shoved my men forward through the machine line and then past the towers – four towers, now.

I made it to the very end of the mole, and came to an abrupt halt. The Tyrians were casting red-hot sand, and the smell of it – the look of it in the air – almost made me puke.

But what I saw was far, far more horrible and awe-inspiring than red-hot sand.

There was a sea monster.

It was enormous – as long as five men. Perhaps as long as ten men. A day after the event, I had a hard time recalling exactly what the monster looked like, although hundreds of us saw it. Even as I watched, this spawn of Poseidon seemed to throw itself on to the mole. Its enormous teeth seized a slave who stood rooted in fear, and he was gone – dismembered and stripped to bloody fragments – by those rows of teeth in less time than it takes to tell it.

I was the next man closest.

I’m told that I bellowed the name of Poseidon. Good for me – all I wanted to do was get my head under the covers and wet myself.

But I saw its eye. And it saw me. Something passed – something old, something incredibly alien. And yet, it sawme. I swear to you, in that moment, I was changed by the regard of a god. An old sea god, perhaps disturbed by our mole – perhaps merely investigating the latest piece of human hubris. One of Triton’s offspring, or one of Amphytrites’, perhaps. Some bastard child of Thetis of the glistening breasts, or perhaps some titan sent to the water for some long-forgotten crime, but that god was older than man. It was in his eyes, the way you can see all the horror and torment and combat a veteran has seen in one blink, sometimes, eh? You know what I mean. It was there.

I like to think it was a true son of Poseidon, a mighty hero of the deep. I like to think that, because he nudgedme aside with his face, rather than ripping me to shreds with the mighty engine of his rows of teeth – nudged me, rolled a little and slid effortlessly back into the water, and vanished into the deep next to the mole.

There was a pause, for as long as a man’s heart might beat sixty or eighty times. The world was silent.

And then the Tyrians began to loose their engines at me.

They missed.

We spent weeks discussing the sea monster. No two men saw the same thing, and of those who saw it, every man had a different theory of what it was and, more importantly, what it portended. Alexander’s seer declared that it was a god, Poseidon’s only son, and he came to show us the way into Tyre.

Well, I don’t have much time for his ilk, and even though his prognostications fitted my own desires, I didn’t like him any better for them. Alexander had notseen the monster, and seemed curiously dismissive of the event.

When I told Thaïs of this, she smiled. ‘He doesn’t believe there’s room at this siege for more than one god,’ she said.

She had not returned to her former work collecting information since her delivery. She wouldn’t discuss it with me, but more and more her work devolved on Callisthenes and his people. It was interesting to see the difference. She had started her work to please me and to help Alexander, and had based her collection of information on the wide circle of her friends and former lovers and partners and clients – and the Pythia.

Callisthenes used Aristotle’s circle of friends, for, as Thaïs said nastily, he had none of his own. But he was more inclined than she had ever been to spend money on information, and he was less interested in examining it, weighing it and measuring it before he sent it on to Alexander. Or rather – and we saw this almost immediately – his principal interest was information that fitted seamlessly with his own worldview and his own expectations. And Alexander’s.