‘How much risk do you run, passing the gates?’ Alexanor asked.
The young man shrugged. ‘Some. Not enough to prevent me from trying. The Lyttian victory has stung them, regardless of what happened after, and Knossos is like a hornets’ nest after a boy kicks it, or so one of our spies claims. Another thing – Hermes, it’s hard to remember everything, and we couldn’t write anything down. There’s another rumour – Illyrians landed down the coast, at Polyrhennia.’
‘Allied to us?’ Philopoemen asked. ‘Illyrians?’
‘Who’s paying them?’ Dinaeos asked.
The young Cretan bowed. ‘It is a rumour. But it will keep the Aetolians busy another day, at least, while they try to figure out what’s going on. We’re fanning the flames. My father has sent a spy into Knossos claiming that Philip of Macedon is landing on the north coast.’
Philopoemen nodded. He didn’t seem surprised, and Alexanor wondered if his friend was more deceptive than he seemed.
‘Do you know the ground in the centre of the island?’ he asked.
Telemnastos nodded.
Philopoemen tugged at his beard. He looked at Dinaeos. He looked around at all the officers – Kleostratos, and Thodor and Dadas and Lykortas. He summoned Periander with a wave, and the Boeotian ran up, his armour gleaming.
‘We are about to move very fast,’ he said. ‘How long to Gortyna?’
‘Seven hours walking,’ the younger man said. ‘Maybe four hours on horseback.’
‘Before midnight, then,’ Philopoemen said. ‘And beyond Gortyna, is there a fort? On the road to Knossos?’
‘No,’ the Cretan said.
‘A hill we can hold? With water?’
‘What are you thinking?’ Dinaeos asked.
‘I’m thinking that if we are going to provoke a change of government in Gortyna, we also need to block a counter-strike,’ Philopoemen said.
‘If we hold the walls of Gortyna,’ Telemnastos said, cautiously, a younger man among older warriors.
‘War is really about emotion,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Men are only rational when they have time. If the Presbyteroi see an Aetolian army under their walls, they’ll hold firm. If it appears no relief is coming, even if the Aetolians are just forty stades away …’
Dinaeos nodded. ‘I see it!’
‘There’s Petra,’ Telemnastos said. ‘It’s a big rock. Not much in the way of water, but men have held it before this. There’s a low wall at the top.’
‘Garrison?’ Philopoemen asked.
‘No.’
‘Full canteens and spare water bottles. How long to get to your rock?’
‘Six hours on horseback.’ The Cretan was unsure. ‘In the dark?’
‘The boy’s right,’ Kleostratos said. ‘Even for Thracians, riding over this country in the dark …’
‘We need some help from the gods,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Let’s get up the mountain before darkness falls – that’ll help. Telemnastos can guide us. Alexanor, do you have some local boys who can help as guides?’
Alexanor went and talked to his novices, every one of whom volunteered. Before the sun had fallen into the western sea, the column was moving up the switchback trail on the cliff, the cavalry in front already outdistancing the Boeotians, who had their own guides. Alexanor was with Philopoemen.
‘Are you sure you want to participate in this?’ Philopoemen asked.
‘I’d just as soon be hanged for a lion as a lamb,’ Alexanor said. ‘And if you are taking six of my novices, someone should be here to watch them.’
Midnight on the plain of Gortyna. The moon was nearly full; it provided enough light that the cavalry force had managed to reach the valley floor without a loss. The Attic mercenaries were somewhere on the ridge behind.
There were a few lights in the city; one burnt high up on the acropolis, and others just inside the wall.
Philopoemen had his officers together; grooms held the horses, with cloaks over their heads so that they wouldn’t call out or whinny.
‘Kleostratos, Thodor – you’ll each take a third of the squadron. Ladders, escalade. Just as we practised. Dinaeos, on me, we go for the gate when Telemnastos shows a torch.’ He looked around. It was light enough that Alexanor could see his face, apparently animated and excited, but not apprehensive. Apparently. ‘Any questions?’
Dinaeos laughed. ‘Easy as kissing a widow,’ he said.
‘We should have a rearguard watching the road to Knossos,’ Thodor said.
‘We should, but we’re spread as thinly as a slave’s opson on his bread,’ Philopoemen said. ‘All or nothing. If the Aetolians are already here, or on their way, we’re lost.’
‘We could wait for Periander,’ Kleostratos said.
‘Every moment we sit here in the dark with seventy horses, we could be discovered,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Anything else? Let’s go.’
Alexanor, who had recently vowed to do no more fighting, found himself crouched amid the hovels of non-citizens outside the gate. A dog was barking wildly on the Knossos road; another dog started up.
He could hear a woman crying in the house behind which he hid. The hut was built of rubble and clay; the walls were thin and her despair was all too evident. He could also hear snores.
And another dog.
‘Ares,’ cursed Philopoemen. But that was the only sign that the long waiting wore on him.
The night wore on. The woman’s weeping quieted; the dogs stopped barking. Off in the darkness, a horse gave a shriek of anger, and another horse answered it.
‘Fuck,’ muttered Dinaeos, whose shoulder was against Philopoemen’s back.
Then, in the gate tower above them, a voice. A shout; the clear sound of a spear clattering against a floor.
A torch on the wall. The signal.
‘Go! Go!’ Philopoemen roared in a voice of bronze.
Somewhere to their left, the sound of a ladder scraping against mud-plaster. Then he was running, Philopoemen’s backplate of figured bronze ahead shining dully in the moonlight. The main gate was open wide enough for a single man to slip through. Alexanor just had time to imagine that it was all a trap and then he was following the Achaean into the Stygian darkness of the gatehouse.
The inner gates were open a hand’s width, but the darkness under the gate tower was so deep that the moonlight seemed as bright as an oil lamp. Alexanor ignored his fears and sprinted for the inner gate. He got one door as Dinaeos got the other and both of them pulled, even as Lykortas and Philopoemen got the outer doors open with a hideous screech of metal on metal that sounded louder than a trumpet call.
Arkas and Lykon were in the gateway, spears up and ready, when the garrison came tumbling down off the wall. Armoured men, shouting the alarm.
Dinaeos put one of them down immediately, striking unseen from the shadows, and the Achaeans began to form a line. A dozen men of the garrison formed up in the square behind the gate and charged. Suddenly the darkness of the gatehouse was full of war; sparks flew as steel blades caught each other, and men shouted, cursed …
Alexanor defended himself with a spear, and then covered Lykon when the man went down. Off to his left the darkness was punctuated by Cretan war cries. The garrison were quite expert, but so were Philopoemen’s Achaeans, and the fighting was vicious in the darkness. Men grappled, blind; one of the garrison officers stabbed one of his own men in the back with a spear, and then died on the sword of another opponent.
But through it all, Philopoemen moved like the God of War. His arm was around one man’s neck, throwing him; he kicked a second, took his sword and used it on a third, as if he moved in a different river of time than his opponents, as if he could see clearly while the others were fogged with terror and the darkness.
Philopoemen was the balance of the fight. The Cretans were as good as the Achaeans, man for man, or better, and they had shields, a man’s best friend in the bronze-shot darkness and the hail of steel, which the cavalrymen lacked. But Philopoemen swirled through like a squall
tearing through the ocean, and the Cretans broke. The mounted men who had waited beyond the gate rode down the survivors.
Telemnastos roared ‘Stasis!’ at the top of his lungs – the signal for revolt, known and feared by every citizen in every Greek city. He had torches in both hands and he was on the wall, running along it up the hill towards the acropolis.
Philopoemen was kneeling on the blood-sticky marble of the gateway road. But he was looking at the wall above them, where Kleostratos was waving a spear, the head like an arc of silver in the moonlight.
‘The gods are with us,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Now we need a little time. And Periander.’
In the town, there were horns, drums, men shouting and women screaming. Lykortas came riding back. He shouted, his voice pitched high, and Arkas raised a trumpet and blew the recall. There were three dead Achaeans in the gateway; one was Lykon, the cook. Another man had lost his sword hand, cut clean off. Alexanor bound the stump.
‘I’m fucking dead,’ the man said.
Alexanor shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can save you.’
‘And I’ll see you never starve, Simos.’ Philopoemen knelt by the wounded man. ‘A farm, and slaves of your own to be your hand.’
The man nodded, gritting his teeth.
Philopoemen got up, glanced at the dead cook, and turned his head away.
‘Out of the gate. Get mounted. Telemnastos, we’re going to need a guide.’
The Cretan had come off the wall. His father ran up, a bloody xiphos in his hand and an old aspis on his left arm.
‘When my son said you were coming tonight I thought my ears were playing tricks,’ the older man said.
‘Surprise is everything,’ Philopoemen said. ‘What happens now?’
‘Our people already have the agora,’ Antiphatas said. ‘We’re forming the citizens there, at least those who still have arms.’ He nodded. ‘Our people have taken most of the oligarchs. We have Zophanes, for example.’
‘No executions, I beg you,’ Philopoemen said. ‘We are here to create the League of Crete and to restore democracy – we are not initiating a new terror.’
Antiphatas nodded. ‘I’ll do this your way, Strategos.’
‘Good. I’m taking the cavalry away,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I have other plans, but also … I don’t want to tempt the Thracians beyond their ability to resist.’
‘May the gods bless you for your foresight,’ the Cretan replied. ‘I hear fighting. I must go.’
‘Go!’ Philopoemen said. ‘Periander will be here any time now, I hope, to hold the gate. I beg you not to massacre the Presbyteroi, if you take them. I beg you.’
The Cretan’s grim smile didn’t make any promises, but he nodded.
‘I understand you, Strategos. My father hates Creon, the Primarch of the oligarchs, and Zophanes, who exiled him,’ Telemnastos said as they mounted outside the gate. ‘He has to go.’
Philopoemen may have disagreed, but he was impassive in the moonlight.
‘We need to ride,’ he said. ‘Dinaeos? Are you wounded?’
‘Just tired,’ the man admitted. ‘Phil, if it’s so bloody important to keep these bastards alive we should leave someone to keep the Cretans from butchery.’
‘Antiphatas gave his word,’ Philopoemen said.
‘Brother, you are too good to be among the mortals,’ Alexanor said.
Dinaeos nodded.
‘I can’t spare a sword!’ Philopoemen said.
‘Leave Leon. And one good blade. Syrmas, perhaps,’ Dinaeos said. ‘Leon is smart, and Syrmas has a cool head.’
‘Do it,’ Philopoemen said. ‘We’re out of time.’
And then they were off into the moonlight – fifty men, a hundred horses, tearing across the fertile plain of Gortyna, past the magnificent temples, past the dark olive groves and sleeping sheep and barking dogs, pounding hooves making the earth shake. No more stealth; now it was a gallop in the darkness. Gortyna had good roads, and the cavalrymen followed one, the Knossos road.
At the base of the next ridge, they halted and slid off their horses, drank water, pissed. Kleostratos and Dadas and half a dozen Thracians stayed mounted and rode ahead.
‘Change horses,’ Philopoemen ordered. He looked at Alexanor.
Alexanor was wrapping Dinaeos’ arm, because, of course, the Achaean was wounded.
‘Are we winning?’ he asked.
‘We’ve reached a point where everything is insane. I’m wagering, simultaneously, that the Neoteroi will win the stasis in the dark, and that Periander will arrive and hold the gate, and that I can win the race to this Petra fort before the Aetolians know we’re in a race.’
He was smiling, his teeth white in the pale light of the moon.
‘You enjoy this,’ Alexanor said.
‘I’m beginning to think that I live for it. Thanks for dragging me out of my valley. I needed to be here. This is my war.’ Philopoemen’s teeth flashed in the moonlight. ‘It certainly does focus the will.’
Half an hour’s rest; the men who had fought in the gateway were beginning to sag. Alexanor and his novices served them sesame seeds in honey, a well-known restorative for tired men, and they got back on their horses.
And then they began to climb the ridge.
The ridge went on and on. Alexanor, who had only defended himself in the fighting, began to dread everything. He was so tired that every turn on the road seemed fearful in the darkness, and from the grumbling, he knew he was not alone. Up and up, the road narrowing in places to a mere trail, just wide enough for a single cart. Then they passed through a grove of oaks and there was the whole valley of Gortyna laid out below them like a mosaic floor decoration, Gortyna herself a mountain in the midst of the valley. And that mountain was on fire.
‘Dammmnnnn,’ cursed Dinaeos. ‘That does not look good.’
‘Too late to worry about that,’ Philopoemen snapped in a voice that betrayed his own worries. ‘Telemnastos! How much farther?’
‘Six stades?’ the man said, his voice carrying his own uncertainty.
‘Or sixty,’ muttered Kleostratos.
‘I’m too old for this,’ Lykortas snapped. He was the youngest man present, and the troopers laughed.
Up, and up, out of the woods and on to a broad ridge with scrubby pines standing like enemy sentinels in the darkness.
Thodor loomed out of the shadows of the mountain trees like a dark apparition in the moonlight, and horses started, ears laid back, tails lashing.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We’ve been all the way to the head of the next valley. There’s a herd of sheep, a big herd with six shepherds, just as you cross the ridge crest there. We took a dozen of them, started fires.’
‘Fires?’ Philopoemen snapped.
‘Behind the crest. We’re Thracians. We know how to eat someone else’s sheep,’ the Thracian lord laughed. ‘Better than Greeks.’
The shepherds were terrified of the Thracians, and their fears were not mollified by half a hundred cavalrymen emerging from the darkness.
‘There’s Petra!’ Telemnastos said, the relief clear in his voice. ‘Next hill. Right against the stars.’
The huge rock rose above the road a few stades to the north.
‘Dinaeos, on me with the Achaeans. Thodor, as soon as your men have eaten, come and relieve us. Better yet, bring us some cooked mutton.’
‘And water,’ Dinaeos said. ‘That rock will not have water, whatever the Cretan boy says.’
The first rays of the sun breaking over the eastern edge of the world showed all of the cavalrymen carrying stones and branches. The rock was not so high that walls wouldn’t make it better, and sixty men can build a rubble wall with astonishing rapidity.
The rising sun also showed the dust of a column moving up the next valley from the north. On the road to Knossos.
‘That’s a lot of men,’ Dinaeos said.
‘Not a thousand, though,’ Philopoemen said.
He didn’t look tired, and he hadn’t tak
en a wound. He and Alexanor were just getting around to eating their shares of the mutton, which was half-cooked, bloody, and, as Alexanor found, utterly delicious. Philopoemen shared a little sheep’s horn of salt, which made it even better.
‘You’re sure those are the Aetolians?’ Alexanor asked.
‘I’m sure of nothing,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I don’t even know if there’s any point in holding this post. If Antiphatas lost the stasis in Gortyna, we should be running. but, since no one has sent us a message …’
‘I could go find out,’ said Telemnastos. He was as young as Lykortas, and he had been awake longer than any of them. The dark circles under his eyes made him look old.
Philopoemen shook his head. ‘No. We all knew this moment would come if we were successful enough to earn it. Your father will send word when the city is secure. If he fails, hopefully he will still have a gate to retreat through, and Periander to support him in retreat. I left them six horses – someone should come and tell us what’s happening.’
‘Or we’ll be surrounded by laughing Aetolians and massacred,’ Dinaeos said. ‘Bastards don’t take prisoners, right?’
‘True,’ Philopoemen said.
Dinaeos nodded. ‘Well, I have wine. Anyone want a gulp?’
Philopoemen took the skin. ‘Now I think that you are the best of the Achaeans.’
Dinaeos grinned. ‘If I’d been a hero in the Iliad, I’d have been the most practical of the Achaeans,’ he said.
The Aetolians didn’t parley. They weren’t in a cheerful mood; the Thracians had ambushed their scouts and killed them all, and then rolled some rocks on the column. The avalanche hadn’t killed anyone, but it had broken the legs of a dozen horses.
They dismounted a stade or so along the ridge.
Philopoemen waved his men into a huddle in the middle of his hasty fortification, leaving just two sentries.
‘It is traditional, before a battle, to give a speech,’ he said. He grinned with that infectious cheerfulness that was his hallmark when things were bad. ‘So here it is. I brought you here to win, not to lose. We’re not fighting for our homeland, but for someone else’s. I could spin you a tale that we’re part of a wider war and you’re all fighting for the ones you love, but really, would any of you believe me?’
The New Achilles Page 25