‘We have gold?’ Leon asked.
Lykortas shrugged. ‘Not much, but we made it look good. And Zophanes’ steward, Niceas, was placed to overhear what he apparently thinks was a meeting between Telemnastos and the man who commands the enemy Illyrians, Rhaeterios. And Arkas, here, sold him a set of notes …’
Arkas blushed.
‘… in Philopoemen’s own hand, describing negotiations with two Aetolians and two of the Knossian oligarchs.’ Lykortas smiled. ‘I think my favourite part of the whole plot is that I used the gold he paid Arkas for our supposed “secrets” to create the scene he saw himself. All the gold, ready to buy our enemies. Oh, by the way, about an hour ago, he slipped out of the city with his steward. I made sure he escaped.’
Philopoemen smiled. ‘Just for a moment there, I thought Arkas had actually—’
‘I would never!’ Arkas said.
‘I know,’ Philopoemen said gently. ‘Will it work?’
‘We had some luck,’ Lykortas said. ‘The gods were with us that we captured so many Illyrians yesterday, when Plator hit their convoy. But it is a pleasure to use Zophanes’ arrogance and his assumptions against him.’ He smiled unpleasantly at Alexanor. ‘I promise you, his idiot son is truly bred by his father. Greedy and gullible.’
‘Strangely just,’ Philopoemen said.
‘Most of us are punished by our own errors,’ Alexanor agreed. ‘So now we fight?’
‘Now we fight,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Tell the phylarchs and get some sleep.’
CHAPTER THREE
Vale of Gortyna
217 BCE
A little after the sun crested the mountains to the east of the Vale of Gortyna, the city’s west gate, facing Phaistos, opened, and the army began to march out. As the army of Knossos faced the east gate, it clearly puzzled many of the Gortynian hoplites, who complained as they marched. Indeed, the west gate faced hilly country and a set of deep valleys, requiring the army to toil along the paths below the walls headed west, almost away from the Spartans. But the epheboi and the psiloi, the men from the poorest classes, moved easily along the difficult ridges above them.
Before they came back to the plain at the Temple of Apollo, the army turned to the north and marched up one of the many gullies that led up the ridge that faced the city.
Once, the long climb up a steep trail on horseback would have taxed Alexanor’s skills, but now it no longer even gave him pause. He leant well forward, supporting his weight with his thighs, easing the back of his horse as the beast did the work of cresting the long ridge. Behind him, the men of the Gortynian phalanx sweated in the crisp, late summer morning air, and complained loudly of the fatiguing march and a hundred other things that helped them cover their fears.
Alexanor had spent enough time with soldiers and marines to know the sound of the morning before a fight: voices a little shrill; arguments too heated; men bragging or posturing, a few openly expressing fear. The younger men betrayed their emotions with too much excitement, too much bright chatter, an insistent edge to every word. Older men, veterans of a dozen fights, were more silent, or simply hid their fears in a torrent of complaint.
‘Fucking Achaean aristo, up and down fucking hills and what for?’ muttered a voice close to Alexanor. The man meant to be heard; free men on Crete were never afraid of speaking up.
Alexanor smiled and looked at Philopoemen.
‘That’s what the hymn to Ares should sound like,’ he said. ‘The grumbling of the veteran hoplite.’
Philopoemen crested the last of the ridge and turned his horse off the line of march. The Gortynian phalanx was advancing by pairs of files from the left of the formation they’d made when they mustered in the agora. Ahead of them were the men of Lyttos, men who’d lost everything – their wives, their homes, their city. They had been hosted in Gortyna, but they were silent, withdrawn men. They didn’t grumble or complain, but marched along, two files wide, carrying their own shields, whereas the Gortynians, closer to home, often had their spears and shields carried by their sons, or their slaves.
Away behind the phalanx of Gortyna were the white leather thorakes of the men of Polyrrhenia. Gortyna’s best ally in the war with Knossos had supplied its whole citizen levy, minus enough men to hold their town in the event of a disaster or sudden attack by the Rhodian fleet.
Philopoemen looked back at the city, rose-pink in the rising sun.
‘I don’t believe in praising Ares in any form,’ he said. ‘My patron is Zeus.’
‘I was attempting humour, however weak,’ Alexanor said.
‘Oh,’ Philopoemen remarked. His face was pale, his lips tight.
‘Are you in pain?’ Alexanor asked.
‘Yes,’ Philopoemen snapped.
Alexanor watched the phalanx go past. Most men lifted an arm and waved at Philopoemen, and a few even reached out and touched his horse for luck.
‘Take us in, Strategos!’ called one young man.
‘Achilles Athanatos!’ a whole taxeis chanted as they marched by, and Philopoemen flushed red.
‘No worries, mate,’ called another man. ‘Show me the fucking Spartan. I’ll show him a fight.’
‘You aren’t worried, are you?’ asked Alexanor, fascinated. ‘If I saw any other man behaving like that, I’d say he was—’
‘Of course I’m worried!’ Philopoemen snapped, his voice low. ‘I’m a fucking imposter.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve never commanded a battle before …’
‘You won Sellasia,’ Alexanor said. ‘Where is this trouble of spirit coming from? Let me see your abdomen.’
‘Do you go to the theatre, Alexanor?’
‘You know I do,’ the priest replied.
While more and more of the phalanx strode past, Alexanor unhooked the pins in the side of Philopoemen’s cavalry breastplate of bronze and iron, holding them between his lips for safekeeping. He turned Philopoemen and his horse so that the marching men wouldn’t see the wound, and he looked at the bandages. There were brown stains in two places; the wound was still leaking fluid.
‘I have been known to attend the theatre,’ Alexanor said again, somewhat muffled by the pins. ‘I’m partial to Menander. You know that.’
Philopoemen nodded. He ignored the priest’s actions, his eyes on the valley, still a little dark, far below them. Smoke rose from the poorer sections of the city. Bronze-clad sentries walked the walls; the eastern gate had a garrison so large that, as they drilled, they raised a dust cloud.
Out on the plain, a line of light marked the sun’s progress through the olive groves and fields. The Knossian camp was visible, with a long line of earthworks and an abattis of felled olive trees covering the whole front of the army. A cavalry patrol passed along the front of the camp, headed out onto the plain to the west.
‘Do you ever watch a play and think, damn it, I could write better than that? Do you ever hear a speech and think, no, the mercenary shouldn’t sound like that, he should curse more?’
Alexanor laughed. ‘Yes.’ He was re-wrapping the wound. He smiled to himself. ‘Yes, I’m always a critic.’
‘Because you can improve on the play, do you think you could write one?’ Philopoemen asked.
The Knossian cavalry patrol, probably Aetolians, were riding north, not west, headed for the foot of the ridge on which Philopoemen’s army was marching.
Alexanor closed the thorax, popping the two halves together, getting the catches that held the pins into their slots, and then taking the pins out of his mouth.
‘In my next life, I’ll be an excellent skeurophoros,’ he said. ‘I know how to wait on a man in fine armour.’
He could feel Philopoemen’s pulse. It was rapid.
‘I take your point,’ Alexanor said. ‘It’s one thing to see the enemy error at Sellasia, and another thing to plan the whole battle.’
Philopoemen’s pulse ran even faster.
‘Are you all right?’ Alexanor asked.
Out at the edge of the
sun, the Aetolian patrol turned onto one of the farm roads and began to trot, raising dust, headed east.
Alexanor felt his friend begin to breathe.
‘I have taken a ludicrous, enormous risk,’ Philopoemen said.
‘Your hands are shaking,’ Alexanor said.
‘Tell me something I don’t know. Your talent for expressing the obvious is unmatched.’
‘I could give you a little lotus flower, perhaps …’
‘I’d rather be irritable and in full control, thanks.’ Philopoemen’s pulse had slowed as soon as the cavalry turned away.
‘You are afraid that this stealthy movement will be discovered?’ Alexanor asked.
‘We will definitely be discovered. It’s all about when. If I can get the psiloi and the Lyttians down off the ridge and onto the plain, then my risk will be …’
He didn’t complete his thought. A second cavalry patrol was emerging from the head of the camp. But they merely formed in four ranks and waited.
‘Damn,’ Philopoemen said. ‘He’s alert. If Nabis was a little less competent …’
He rode ahead.
The next hour was long for Alexanor and, he suspected, even longer for the Achaean. Rain had washed out a section of the track they were following over the hills. The young shepherd guiding them along the ridge lost his way and led the Lyttians astray, and they took almost a quarter of an hour to backtrack.
Quietly, fiercely, Philopoemen demanded that they reorder their files.
‘We could be fighting as soon as we enter the plain,’ he said. ‘You need to have the same files you had when you marched off.’
This was a level of discipline seldom attempted by Cretans, and it took time to unravel the mess made by some of the Lyttians turning and walking back to the correct trail while others countermarched and dozens of men simply clambered up the rocky ridge to the higher trail. The movement raised a telltale crescent of dust, ruddy in the early morning sun.
Alexanor wondered if Philopoemen would lose his temper, but instead, as the odds of discovery went up and the Lyttians argued, he became calmer. He dismounted, heedless of the pain of his wound, and took men by the shoulder, his tone light.
‘I know it’s silly, but you need to stand here,’ he said to one man.
‘Listen, is this the spot you started in?’ he asked another.
‘No, I was behind Philip,’ the man said.
‘Better not get too far from Philip,’ Philopoemen agreed. ‘He must miss you.’
The dour Lyttians managed to laugh.
And they moved.
Out on the plain, the sun was full on the valley, and the cavalry at the head of the Knossian camp were mounting.
‘We walk all around the bleedin’ city just so we can fight outside the fucking gate?’ asked a thētes-class skirmisher. ‘My legs are already done.’
‘Maybe the Achaean thinks we need exercise,’ muttered another. ‘He’s big on exercise, from what I hear.’
‘Fucking aristos,’ a third added. ‘He has a horse.’
The three men trotted by, apparently oblivious that the strategos was behind them.
‘Another quarter of an hour,’ Philopoemen breathed. ‘If you have the ear of the gods, this is the time for prayer. Zeus, saviour of man, I never imagined that this would take so long. And we haven’t even begun to form yet.’
Below him, the psiloi were entering the olive groves on the lower slopes off the long ridge.
‘We’re spotted,’ Philopoemen said.
Sure enough, a dozen Aetolian cavalrymen emerged from the olive groves and cantered across the open ground towards the Gortynian psiloi. They were distant figures; the shouts of the Aetolians were utterly disconnected from their actions, so that a man and mount accelerated to a gallop and then, after a delay, came his shout of ‘Go, go!’
A handful of psiloi, a little clump of animated ants, sprinted into the open ground and threw javelins, the iron heads and polished shafts catching the brilliant sunlight.
A horseman fell. Another horseman turned in a swirl of dust to help his mate, and went down; at the distance, it wasn’t obvious what had happened.
The psiloi all gave a cheer and went forward, pursuing the Aetolians, mistaking their return to camp for headlong flight. And the Aetolians, stung by their losses of just two men, ran, their galloping horses leaving thin lines of dust to hang like coloured smoke in the new sunlight.
Philopoemen was shaking his head. ‘Well, that’s not what was supposed to happen,’ he said, as the psiloi cleared the olive groves and began to cross a belt of barley fields. ‘I guess this is how battles go wrong. Here I go, brother. Wish me luck.’
Alexanor was going to say something, but Philopoemen put his charger’s head at the slope and was off down it. To Alexanor, no longer a novice rider, it looked more like a controlled fall than a gallop. The horse ignored the trail and went straight down the hillside towards the distant psiloi.
Alexanor rode to the head of the Lyttians.
‘Faster, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘There’s trouble on the plain.’
The Lyttian commander, Xaris, looked back at his men.
‘On me,’ he called.
He broke into a trot, and the long file, like a bronze and iron snake that ran all the way back over the ridge, began to move faster.
Alexanor rode down the trail, passing the head of the files of epheboi, and breaking into a trot as he hit the shallower slope into the olive groves. He was still high enough on the ridge to see activity in the enemy camp, and a long double file of men on foot trotting towards him.
Then he was in the olive trees. There was now no one ahead of him; the epheboi were behind him, and he didn’t see Telemnastos and his League archers anywhere.
He turned back to the south, leaving the farm track and riding down a series of terraces like shallow steps down the hillside. Halfway to the valley floor, his horse gave a great leap; he was caught unawares, but managed to stay on as they landed, and the horse ran on.
In heartbeats he was coming out of the olive groves. The sun was hotter on the valley floor, and his horse swished through the barley as if he was flying in a cloud of gold, and he could see Philopoemen ahead of him.
‘There’s men coming for you,’ Alexanor said.
‘Where away?’ Philopoemen asked.
Alexanor, looking down, realised that the barley was full of men, lying flat.
‘Right in front of us …’
‘Peltastoi,’ Philopoemen said, kneeling on his horse’s back. ‘Well spotted. Here they come. Run.’
Alexanor turned his tired horse and leant forward, using his weight to urge the horse to speed, and they were away, riding back for the olive groves.
The peltastoi behind gave a whoop and followed, plunging into the barley fields.
‘We can stop running,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Go and find Telemnastos and tell him to keep going east and not to be distracted by this.’
‘But—’
‘Go!’ Philopoemen said.
Behind him, dozens of little men with rocks and javelins and little round shields rose out of the grain and began to savage the foreign peltastoi, most of whom were Greek mercenaries.
Alexanor tapped his heels, and his horse responded, and they were away, flying back over the golden grain. But once he was in among the olive trees on the lower slope, he had no idea where to find Telemnastos. He rode part of the way up the ridge, dismounted, found the Lyttians and finally found Telemnastos, so far to the east that the ridge was a distant memory. He arrived too late for his message to have any effect; Telemnastos had done the right thing without an order.
Telemnastos passed over a lower ridge and then turned his whole force of archers south, onto the plain amid the fields of grain. The fight between the enemy peltastoi and the local psiloi was three stades to the west, now. They were to the north of the enemy camp, and almost behind it, and the camp itself was like an ants’ nest opened by the shovel of a farmer, with men going
in every direction.
A few dozen enemy skirmishers were coming in a loose knot across the fields. Telemnastos formed his archers in a line, wheeled it to the right, and unleashed a single flight of arrows when the enemy psiloi were still two hundred paces away.
The volley struck the men moving across a wheat field, and the survivors broke and ran. Half of them were down.
‘This is where he told me to be,’ Telemnastos said. ‘You want to ride back and say we’re in place?’
Alexanor mounted again and rode back as the Lyttians trotted up in two long files. But Telemnastos waved, and even as Alexanor rode by, Xaris trotted to the right end of the archers, turned into the line, and stopped, his spear extended out to the right to indicate where his men should stand. The files began to come up, the Lyttian phalanx filling in like a water tank on a rainy day.
Alexanor passed the last files of the Lyttians coming down the low, second ridge, and then the Gortynians coming up the other slope. He waved at every group as he passed.
From the top of the low ridge, he could see dust in the barley fields, but that was all. But halfway down the line of Gortynians, he encountered Philopoemen, riding the other way.
‘Hah!’ Philopoemen called.
The anxiety was clearly gone; the man seemed larger, sat straighter. He was smiling.
‘Hah?’ Alexanor said. ‘Telemnastos says that he is on the ground you assigned him, and the Lyttians were just forming their phalanx to the right of the archers.’
‘Splendid,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I mean, not really what I had planned, but I’ll take it. Antiphatas! Here!’ he roared suddenly. ‘This way!’
The commander of the Gortynian phalanx waved and followed Philopoemen.
‘Not the line I thought we’d form on. Now we’re making it up as we go along.’
Philopoemen trotted off, leaving Alexanor, who dismounted on the low ridge and rested his horse. He found a spring with a basin, gave his charger water, and drank some himself, while dozens of men from the Gortynian phalanx left the ranks, filled their canteens, and ran back.
An hour passed. The Gortynians formed loosely, with their servants, sons and slaves still among them. Off to the east, there was a cloud of dust. The Knossian camp began to spit out clumps of men, and then, almost as fast as a storm cloud brings rain, the enemy line began to form. Alexanor watched Nabis ride out, look at the Lyttians, and ride away, his dozen Thessalian bodyguards at his heels.
The New Achilles Page 36