The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  In armour.

  The psiloi stood and threw rocks down on them, but then one brave man made it to the top, eviscerated a naked rock-thrower with his short sword, and the rest of the helots turned and ran, with the fastest of the Achaeans running along behind, cutting down the laggards. The Achaean mob gave a roar of approval and began to cross again.

  ‘Does Cercidas think that was a great feat of arms?’ Alexander muttered. ‘Zeus the Judge hear me! Let many days pass before I have to watch—’

  A galloper handed him a message.

  ‘Fucking Greeks,’ he said again, watching the hillside.

  He read the message and turned, looking off to the right.

  There, high on the shoulder of the hill called Olympos, was the Macedonian phalanx in their buff and blue cloaks. It was a third of the way up the hill, and even from five hundred paces away every observer could see that the Macedonians were being attacked in their shielded flank by little knots of peltastoi who were in the rocks of the hillside, rolling rocks down, throwing a javelin or covering a slinger, giving ground and then suddenly rushing back. The Spartan positions, with fortified hilltops and the ridge above, virtually guaranteed that every Macedonian attack could be taken in the flank.

  ‘Sir, we need to clear the centre,’ Philopoemen offered. ‘I can do it with the Achaean horse.’

  ‘Like fuck you can,’ Alexander said savagely. ‘Stay in reserve, damn your eyes. Stand here and do not move!’

  He turned his charger and galloped away to the left, to the Macedonian wedge. As soon as he rode up they could hear him shouting orders. The wedge began to evaporate, the leader turning and following the prince as he rode back towards the left so that the wedge ran out like equine sand from a military hourglass, into a long file of horsemen moving quickly along the path behind the river.

  Right in front of Alexanor, the enemy foot soldiers were growing bolder, coming in close to throw javelins at the flank of the Achaeans now across the river. Cercidas, still distinguishable by his superb crest, was waddling up and down his front rank trying to get his phalanx formed. The man was clearly already tired.

  The Boeotians had been driven all the way back across the river, on to Alexanor’s side, and they were a huddled horde and not a formed phalanx. Some men had thrown away their spears; a few, their shields.

  ‘These are the Plataeans who stopped the Persians? And the Thebans who defeated Sparta?’ Philopoemen said. ‘Epaminondas would kill himself.’

  ‘Maybe you should go tell ’em that,’ Dinaeos said.

  Philopoemen smiled. ‘Perhaps I should, at that. You are in command. I’ll be back.’

  He turned his horse on its haunches and set out at a canter for the Boeotian tangle, where a dozen men in good armour were haranguing their phalangites.

  Alexanor followed him after a glance at the slopes of Olympos. The Macedonian phalanx was halted, locked with the Spartan phalanx so that the men were helmet-crest to helmet-crest with the Spartiates. But the Spartans – reputed the best infantry in the world – were higher and had a palisade of stakes and a trench covering their front, so that the Macedonian phalangites had to cross the trench to get at the Spartans. The odds looked very long.

  It occurred to Alexanor for the first time that the Macedonians could lose the battle. He had not given any thought to what might happen afterwards, and now he was worried: worried for Leon, alone and dismounted in the Macedonian camp; worried for Phila and her women, who would be badly treated.

  Worried for himself.

  Still, he followed Philopoemen into the wreck of the Boeotian phalanx.

  ‘Boeotians!’ his friend called. His voice was still supernaturally loud, and mounted as he was, he was bigger, taller, and more imposing than any other man. ‘Boeotians!’

  There was half a breath of silence. Men turned; men who were yelling paused, and Philopoemen struck into the silence like a swordsman finding a flaw in an adversary’s defence.

  ‘The Achaeans are counting on you to hold their flank! You Boeotians are the heroes of a hundred fights – your Thespians helped hold the pass at Thermopylae! Your Thebans defeated Sparta! Your Plataeans faced the Persians at Marathon!’ He pointed with his drawn sword. ‘The river is nothing! Come on!’

  He had pushed deep into their ranks with his horse, and now he emerged, riding for the riverbank.

  Alexanor’s horse offered him no choice, and followed the horse it knew.

  A dozen men followed, and then a hundred. A man in fine armour began roaring in the Boeotian dialect, something about following young Achilles, and they were off, into the river bed. Alexanor’s gelding gave a great roll as he lost his footing and then caught himself, cat-like. Alexanor only held on by a miracle, and then he was across.

  The Boeotians streamed across behind. All of them must have come, and they came at a run, and raised spray like children playing in a stream.

  ‘Achilles! Achilles leads us!’ called the rear-rankers.

  ‘Now form your ranks! Form your ranks!’ Philopoemen was calling, his voice like a trumpet of bronze. ‘Where are your officers! Where is the Sacred Band?’

  This last was a purely historical allusion, and Alexanor knew it, but it seemed to put iron into the older men and they pushed forward, the best armoured and the richest. A dozen of them had already bloodied their spears on the psiloi who tried to hold the riverbank, and the phalanx began to form like bread rising.

  ‘Achilles! ACHILLES!’

  Alexanor felt enlarged – spiritually awakened. It was like meditation and prayer and athletics all together. Some of the Boeotians, as if attuned to his thoughts, caught up the paean. But when he turned to congratulate Philopoemen, he saw the sparkle of the sun on bronze in the distance, and a nodding of plumes.

  ‘Cavalry!’ he shouted.

  Philopoemen reined in and turned in the saddle, looking back over his shoulder.

  There, on the slope below the Macedonian phalanx, was the Spartan cavalry. And almost directly to the front of the Boeotians, the Spartan mercenaries under Eucleidas were forming in front of their redoubt, clearly intending to come down the hill and smash the Achaeans and the Boeotians.

  Philopoemen looked back and forth between them.

  ‘A very good plan, Cleomenes,’ he said aloud. He glanced at Alexanor. ‘Would you be so kind as to fetch me Dinaeos and the Megapolitan hippeis? The Exiles?’ He glanced up the hill. ‘And … can you tell a lie? In a good cause?’

  Alexanor shrugged. ‘I have told a lie or two in my time.’

  ‘I need Demetrios the Illyrian to go forward.’ Philopoemen looked back across the stream. ‘I could explain … Never mind, there is no time. Will you go?’

  ‘Why me?’ Alexanor asked. But he’d already turned his horse.

  ‘Everyone saw you with the king yesterday. You don’t think I know how to win this, do you?’

  Alexanor was watching the Macedonian phalanx.

  ‘Our first law as doctors is to never take action unless we are sure,’ he said. ‘How can you know more than the king of Macedon?’

  Philopoemen showed frustration, but he made himself sit up straight on his horse.

  ‘He is with his phalanx. Prince Alexander went to support the phalanx. They are Macedonians – they cannot imagine that the crisis of the battle could be anywhere but where they are.’

  The word ‘crisis’ was the deciding blow. Alexanor knew about crisis – the moment in a disease when the cure either succeeded or failed. It was the right word for Philopoemen to use, and it went right through Alexanor’s defences.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, and saluted as he had seen other men salute.

  He got his horse back across the stream, and then, amazingly, up the far bank. His thighs were burning, his arse hurt and he was lathered in sweat. A javelin skidded along the grass in front of him like a lethal snake, and his horse shied. A sling stone struck his horse’s withers, and another hit his thigh, leaving a bright red mark that the doctor knew would deep
en to a black bruise with time. Even at long range they were targeting him. The enemy psiloi knew he was a messenger.

  But the sling stone that stung his horse prompted the gelding to an explosive gallop, and before Alexanor could think of what to do, he was riding clear of the shower of missiles.

  He leant forward over his horse’s neck and got the gelding down to a canter. He stayed there, leaning forward like a jockey, thighs closed on the horse’s back like a jeweller’s vice, until he saw Dinaeos. He managed to sit back and use his reins in such a way that did not humiliate him; his gelding came to a stop head to head with Dinaeos’ larger stallion.

  ‘He says to take the hippeis across immediately,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘On me!’ roared Dinaeos.

  He didn’t even look back, or acknowledge the priest at all; his entire being was focused on the stream crossing.

  ‘I’m ordering the Illyrians across too!’ Alexanor called.

  Dinaeos paused, looked back and then forward at the width of the easy ford in front of them.

  ‘Halt!’ he roared.

  The Achaeans halted in confusion.

  ‘Then get them fucking moving!’ Dinaeos called. ‘I want them in front of me, not coming in behind.’

  The hyperetes was calling orders and men were aligning themselves, grumbling in frustration.

  Alexanor got his horse to a trot, and then a canter, and rode down the line to the Illyrians, who faced a difficult crossing and an almost empty vale between the two hills.

  ‘Forward!’ Alexanor called as soon as he was close to the pale-eyed chieftain.

  The Illyrians heard him. They didn’t wait to hear their king translate the order. They went forward. There were perhaps two thousand of them, and they put their heads down and ran. The left of their line crossed the ford in front of the Achaean horse, and kept going up the hill. They didn’t wait for the rest of their line, either; the Illyrians were not so much a phalanx as two thousand individual warriors.

  Their appearance immediately changed the battle in front of the Achaean phalanx, though. Like the lid being taken off a boiling pot, the pressure on the front of the barely formed Achaeans was released. Hundreds of psiloi ran for their lives to avoid being spitted by half a hundred Illyrians, and the Boeotians finally pushed forward into that space and began to coalesce into a fighting group and not a mass.

  Now the Allied left began, for the first time, to press forward.

  Over to the left on the slopes of Olympos, the Macedonian phalanx was lower on the hill than it had been, and it had hundreds of infantry clawing away at its shielded flank. Cretan archers loosed shafts and helots dropped rock after rock. The Macedonians would not give more than a foot here and another there.

  The two kings were locked, spear to spear, helmet to helmet. The Spartans had every advantage. The Macedonians were the better soldiers.

  Alexanor could see the Spartan cavalry and some broad-hatted Thessalians coming down into the vale between the hills. With them came a small horde of light-armed men; many stopped pelting the Macedonians and turned into the valley, looking for easier targets.

  The Illyrians were across, and scrambling up the hillside into the waiting pikes of Eucleidas and his mercenaries, some of whom were as Macedonian as the men on the other hill. Alexanor could now see, as if written in a medical text, what Philopoemen had seen five minutes earlier – that the crisis of the battle would come in the centre between the hills.

  The Illyrians struck the front of the mercenary phalanx at its front right corner – an oblique blow, as the Illyrians were more like a tide than an army – and went straight up the valley instead of matching frontages with the Spartan mercenaries, who were torn by the first impact, and men died in heaps. But then both bodies flinched and pivoted, going forward where they had no resistance, back where they were stopped.

  The Spartan infantry began to drive the Macedonian phalanx down the hill on the left.

  The Achaean phalanx hesitated, just a few paces off the front of the Spartan mercenaries, and then, urged on by their poet-commander, they went forward. They did not charge; they seemed to stumble forward, as if the rear ranks pressed the front ranks into contact. It was scarcely a fearsome attack. Through most of the front, men huddled behind shields and thrust feebly with long spears that were yet barely long enough to strike a blow on their adversary’s shields. Most of the Achaeans were armed in the old way, with shorter spears and narrow, Gaullish shields, and they were very vulnerable in a close fight, especially as most of them had no armour.

  Alexanor was following Dinaeos, who himself followed the Illyrians across the ford and then looked for a place for his horsemen. But Alexanor had no such concerns and he continued to follow the fight just to his left.

  Philopoemen came riding across the back of the pike fight.

  Dinaeos waved. ‘Good,’ he said quietly. ‘You decide.’

  Alexanor was watching the Spartan cavalry come from the right.

  ‘They will attack the Illyrians,’ he said.

  Dinaeos shrugged. ‘So? I don’t know any Illyrians. Most of them are thieves and rapists.’

  ‘If the Illyrians are beaten –’ Alexanor was surprised to hear himself – ‘aren’t we going to lose?

  But Philopoemen saved him the effort.

  ‘Half-wheel to the right,’ he snapped as he rode up.

  ‘So nice to see you too, Philopoemen!’ Dinaeos said.

  The light-armed men with the Spartan hippeis swept forward, or were impelled, and they fell on the shieldless flank of the Illyrians. A dozen men died.

  Then a hundred died.

  ‘Wedge!’ Philopoemen told his hyperetes.

  A trumpet sounded.

  ‘Oh, the gods are with us,’ Dinaeos said. ‘It’s fucking Nabis!’

  He was using his knees to get his horse into its place in a dense wedge. Alexanor almost wanted to join them. He looked up the vale between the hills, and he, too, recognised the magnificent helmet and fine horsehair plumes of the Spartan officer who had attempted to violate the sanctuary.

  The Exiles’ wedge was forming fast.

  The right end of the Illyrian line was collapsing. They were not formed close, and the light-armed men cut down any without armour, and now the Spartan cavalry was coming to finish the job.

  ‘He can’t even see we’re here! Dinaeos said with an aggressive satisfaction.

  Indeed, although the Achaeans could see the Spartans over the distant combat, the Spartans showed no sign of having discerned that the Illyrians had any friends.

  Philopoemen was at the point of the wedge. His helmet shone like gold; his red plume marked him.

  He raised his spear. ‘Ready! Right up the hill and into the Spartans and then straight on until we crest the ridge.’

  His cavalrymen cheered. The Achaean phalanx took up the cheer. The Boeotian calls of ‘Achilles’ rang out, and suddenly the Achaean phalanx caught it up.

  ‘A-chill-es! A-chill-es!’

  Alexanor saw heads come up among the Spartans and among the Illyrians.

  ‘Walk!’ the bronze-lunged hyperetes called.

  The hillside was rocky, but the ground was not too bad for horses. The wedge started forward.

  The Spartan cavalry were in four ranks, in a line like an equine phalanx. They were coming for the Illyrians. But the Illyrians had hundreds of war tricks and now they played one: the men facing the Spartans turned and sprinted down the hill. Some just lay flat; most ran off to the left, swelling the ranks of their friends. The Spartan charge fell on just a few, and butchered them …

  The Exiles’ wedge went forward, its order nearly perfect despite the slope and the stones.

  Philopoemen raised his hand and the hyperetes called ‘Trot.’

  The noise increased dramatically.

  Alexanor didn’t want to turn his head, but he had to know. He glanced to his left.

  The Achaean phalanx had been pushed back ten paces, flinching away from the contest but not
yet broken, and the rear rankers were shouting for their Achilles. The Spartan mercenaries were losing their order, but they were winning, except where a corner of their phalanx was helmet to helmet with the Illyrians, who fought like madmen. Or barbarians.

  Alexanor thought that there were just about twice as many Spartan cavalry as Achaean.

  The order ‘charge’ came, clear as a hawk’s call, and the wedge seemed to fly. The acceleration from trot to gallop was so sudden that it seemed as if a rope had dragged the head of the wedge forward, a stage trick, like the deus ex machina.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing with my reserve?’ Prince Alexander bellowed from close to Alexanor’s ear. He almost lost his seat. ‘Gods damn him. Ares’ balls, you fuckwits!’ The prince set about abusing the Megapolitan Exiles.

  The wedge struck the Spartan horse and cut through them like an axe cuts a chip from soft wood. The front of the Spartan cavalry seemed to collapse as if they’d ridden over a tripwire – two dozen men killed or wounded at the impact – and the Achaean hippeis continued, momentum preserved. They went right up the hill, and the Illyrians turned and went with them – the men who’d lain amid the volcanic rock and the men who’d run to join their mates. Every unengaged Illyrian turned like a barn-swallow and joined the cavalry going up the vale. The Spartan cavalry had no chance. Hundreds were unhorsed in the first moments, either by the spears of the Exiles or by the panic of their mounts.

  ‘Achilles! Achilles lives!’

  Alexanor could see Philopoemen’s scarlet helmet crest, deep in the onset. He watched with awe as the Achaean stabbed a Spartan horseman over his shield, a perfect stroke into the neck, then threw his spear into the next Spartan, deep into his body, then put his arm around another man’s neck in the close press and threw him to the ground off the back of his horse. His right hand emerged from the throw with the man’s long falcis, with which he beheaded the fourth man in the file and then he was out the back, his red plume flying behind him. His big charger knocked a smaller horse to the ground and trampled him, and Philopoemen turned back. One glance, and he cut, underhand, at a foe behind him, and his rising blade caught the man’s chin and cut up through the bone of his skull, killing him instantly.