The other faction was no longer the ‘Young Men’. We were no longer so young – no man faces battle eight or ten times and counts himself young. Perdiccas and I – to name two – had the scars of men twice our age. My shoulder hurt as if pierced with ice every time the weather changed, and my hands – I awoke every morning, at age twenty-six, winter or summer, with hands that hurt enough that I often had to warm them in hot water before I could make them obey me.

This is not the life of a ‘young man’.

What distinguished us from Parmenio’s party was that we loved the king, and had grown to adulthood with him. It is not that he could do no wrong – indeed, the paradox was that we were the ones who expressed our doubts openly to Alexander.

That night after the storm, Parmenio and Alexander locked horns like two bulls.

‘We have stood here for seven months, and we have nothing to show for it.’ Parmenio didn’t trouble to hide his contempt. ‘I told you that we couldn’t take the city. We cannot take it. We have lost a year’s worth of gains and all the treasure of Issus – squandered to take this pile of rock.’

Alexander was at his most difficult – conceding nothing, absolute in his righteousness. He simply smiled. ‘Anyone else?’ he asked.

Philotas stood. ‘Lord, there is no point – if we start the mole again, we’ll face another disaster and another. For what? We don’t need the city. The strategy of taking every sea base on the coast is no longer valid – it is now we who have the larger fleet.’

Alexander’s smile was fixed. ‘I asked if anyone else wanted to speak,’ he drawled.

Philotas’s face flamed. ‘My father has led your armies and won your battles, lord. Your treatment of him is ungrateful and mean!’

Alexander nodded. ‘Let us stick to the matter at hand,’ he said.

Amyntas, the current favourite, rose to his feet. ‘We can take Tyre in four more weeks. Given the time we’ve put in, and the treasure, as Lord Parmenio has so eloquently put it, should we not finish what we started?’

Alexander’s expression did not change.

Parmenio glared at him. ‘Why don’t you speak your own view, Alexander? Instead of letting your “friends” do it for you?’

Alexander shrugged, every muscle in his body speaking contempt. ‘I am the captain general, and I will speak last.’

Parmenio crossed his arms.

‘Craterus?’ Alexander said.

Craterus looked at the carpeted floor of the tent. ‘Let us march away. Let us march home.’

Alexander looked at me. ‘Perdiccas?’ he asked.

Perdiccas looked at me, as well. He made me feel like a ringleader. A role I did not fancy. ‘Lord, I will stand with you whatever you choose.’

‘As if I would not?’ shouted Nicanor, son of Parmenio. ‘By Zeus who judges all oaths, I swear that none of us have suggested that we will not follow the king! How dare you suggest such a thing?’

‘Meleager?’ Alexander said, but his eyes were still on me.

Meleager mumbled something.

‘Speak up!’ Alexander spat, sounding very like a hoplomachos on a drill field.

Meleager took a deep breath. ‘Finish the siege,’ he said.

Parmenio looked like thunder.

Alexander’s eyes flicked back and forth in surprise. I was surprised too. I no longer had to cast the tying vote, to allow Alexander to settle the issue. Which he clearly wanted. Now my vote would decide the issue. Not that, as king, he couldn’t just order us to do it. The democracy of the council was more apparent than real.

Alexander nodded to me. ‘Ptolemy?’ he said.

‘Finish the siege,’ I said. Not because I believed in it, but because I was his friend.

Diades went to work immediately, the next day, and from our ‘stores’ of rubble and rock, we rebuilt the mole in two weeks. We had ships to cover the head of the mole and ships to move bulk rubble and ships with engines to attack the enemy batteries, and the coordination of the ships grew better every day.

Diades built superstructures for the ships so that a pair of triremes, lashed together, could hold a tower with ladders inside – the assault troops protected by wet hides and wooden hoardings.

In days, we had our own engines clearing the wall from the end of the mole.

In a week, the city must have seen that the end was near.

Two weeks to the day after the storm, a pair of Cypriot cruisers picked up a Carthaginian trireme that failed to outrun them. The ship carried a message, sealed in a bladder.

No further help was coming to Tyre.

We shot the message into the walls, and that night, in a brilliant piece of seamanship, the Cypriots sank two old triremes in the deep-water gap – both full to the gunwales with rocks. The next night, under a protective hail of stones, they performed this feat again.

Six engine ships pounded the southern walls day and night, turning every repair to rubble. Sixteen engines on the mole launched larger stones at a shorter range, so that the tallest walls on the island, those facing the land, began to crumple under the weight. Alexander was heard to joke that at the rate we were throwing stones, we were raising the level of the city and providing them with years of building material.

On the feast of Herakles, Hephaestion donned armour for the first time in a month, and we cheered him. And then we boarded assault boats and the trireme pairs with the great scaling towers.

I took the picked men of my taxeis – two hundred men in the best armour we could scrounge – and we boarded two pairs and filled the decks and the towers. Remember, a trireme ordinarily carried ten, or at most twenty, marines. With the double hulls and the towers, we could carry a hundred, but it made the ships ponderous and very, very slow. We needed near-perfect calm and bright moonlight to move and assault.

Alexander had chosen to lead the assault from the mole. The sea was never his element.

The first fight after a wound is always hard, like getting back on a horse that has thrown you. At the head of my ladder, swaying wildly, or so it seemed to me at the very top of a tower between two big ships, I had hours to consider the feel of the red-hot sand as it poured down my body and was trapped against me by my own armour, and the smell as my flesh scorched, and the feel of heavy rocks on my shield, on my helmet, on my thorax.

The sea stank with eight months of refuse, garbage and human filth from the siege – uncollected corpses, offal, carcasses from all the sacrifices, excrement. The enemy engines were loosing as fast as they could be loaded, and we could hear as heavy rocks or long spears struck our ship, and once, quite early in our manoeuvring, a ballista bolt tore through the hide covering and killed three men where they waited on the ladders. There was shouting, screaming and, in the distance, the constant sound of massed prayers – hymns to Melkart. Thirty thousand voices singing together – an eerie sound.

About midnight, all of our engine ships began to launch all together. First they threw baskets of heavy gravel to clear the walls, and then multiple salvos of great rocks, chipped round by slaves, and then more gravel.

By that time, my ship was quite close, and I could see individual men on the walls. And they could see us.

A disc – like an aspis, but flung sideways so that it spun, and full of red-hot sand and burning dung – hit our tower. The sand fell harmlessly into the sea with a hiss and a burst of steam, but the burning shit stuck to the hides and they steamed.

When I peeked over the top of the tower, I could see that we were coming up against a pair of huge wooden wheels with paddles attached, almost like mill wheels placed on their sides. They turned very fast, and even as I watched, a huge bolt struck one – and was deflected by the rotation of the wheel and the struts.

But a heavy rock from one of the distant catapults struck the wheel edge on – as if striking the top of a chariot wheel’s tyre – and something gave. The wheel began to break up as it turned – pieces of wood showered off it like sparks off a sharpening stone.