The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  On the far left, the enemy cavalry was reforming. They had clearly failed in their first attack, and the Achaean horse waited in the open ground.

  ‘That won’t work twice,’ Philopoemen said.

  A little less than a stade away, Nabis’ red cloak floated behind him as he rallied the Aetolians.

  ‘The archers were interspersed with our cavalry,’ Philopoemen said. ‘He lost a lot of horses.’ The Achaean nodded, as if talking to himself. ‘And he should be wondering where I am. I should have put Aristaenos in my cloak.’

  ‘Aristaenos is going to charge Nabis,’ Alexanor said.

  Philopoemen was watching the enemy commander. He glanced back.

  ‘That would be foolish,’ he said. ‘Where he is, he has the archers— Oh, gods.’

  Aristaenos launched his men across the valley floor. The Achaeans were well formed, a single squadron in a deep rhomboid.

  But the Aetolians, however shocked by all the bows they’d run into, were old soldiers, veterans of other ambushes, and they rallied quickly. They outnumbered the Achaean horse almost two to one, even after a volley of arrows, and the clash was explosive.

  Philopoemen watched, tight-lipped and silent, as the Achaean horse was routed. A few men broke out of the back of the mounted mêlée, and then more, and more, until the whole formation broke, and the Aetolians launched in pursuit.

  ‘Oh, gods.’

  Philopoemen seemed to deflate, and his shoulders bent forward and his head drooped as if he could not bear to watch.

  ‘I should have been there,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘You should have been everywhere,’ Alexanor said. ‘Can Telemnastos save it?’

  ‘No,’ Philopoemen said.

  And then, almost at his feet, Xaris ordered the Lyttians forward.

  The small phalanx of Lyttians marched down the hill, their order perfect. They were the best of the allies – the descendants of Spartan colonists, they used the Spartan orders and trained to the agoge. The loss of their city rendered them both hopeless and beyond despair. Xaris acted on his own; he saw the victory of the Aetolian horse and chose to attack before his own flank was lost.

  Aetolian horsemen and Lyttian hoplites passed within a stone’s throw of each other, but the cavalrymen were on the phalanx’s shielded side. The fleeing Achaeans were a safer bet, and the Aetolians pursued their defeated opponents instead of turning into the flank of the Lyttians. They, for their part, were only half as deep as the enemy mercenaries, and instead of being in a Macedonian formation, they were armed with old-fashioned aspides and spears only half as long as the enemy pikes.

  And they flinched, even in their advance, when the pikes were close. Alexanor heard Philopoemen cry aloud as the Lyttian line rippled and the pike heads struck home. Men died without avenging themselves, and the front of the Lyttians seemed to crumple as the unstoppable fist of the pikes slammed deeper and deeper into the Lyttians’ formation. Men fell.

  The Lyttians stumbled back. And back again. And back again. In a hundred heartbeats they were driven back almost as many paces.

  Philopoemen began to ride forward. Alexanor caught his reins.

  Philopoemen shook his head. ‘I’d rather die here,’ he said.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Alexanor said.

  The Lyttians were still giving ground. Their bold attack had taken them out onto the plain; now, as they were pushed back, and back, they were being pushed back onto the lower slopes of the low hill. Their two hundred files began to bend to conform to the shape of the hill.

  But the rate of their stumbling retreat began to slow.

  Almost two hundred paces back from where their brave charge had begun, their rear rankers dug in their heels. Men leant into their mates. The pikes were deep into their formation; the moment of terror was past.

  The men in the front ranks of the Lyttian formation had shorter spears, and then began to use them. Pikemen began to fall. The mercenary advance was slowed.

  Without a word, Philopoemen began to ride to his right, towards the Gortynians. But Cirdas needed no instructions. Alexanor could hear him roaring orders over the clash of a thousand shields, and the left files of the Gortynian phalanx went forward, and then the whole block. The front was disordered. Antiphatas was out in front, bellowing for men to dress the line.

  But the leftmost files slammed into the enemy mercenaries. They did so at a very slight angle, and their order was imperfect. They were armed in the old Iphikratian manner: Macedonian-style shields but short spears, just twice the height of a man. But the mercenaries had been too eager to finish the Lyttians, and their files were straining to reach the Spartan colonists. The Gortynian spears plunged into their ranks and suddenly the mercenaries were stopped dead and the Gortynian phalanx was pressing forward.

  The whole battle was pivoting.

  Alexanor came over the side-crest of the central hill and there below him was the phalanx of Knossos. However unwilling they had been before the contest, they were coming on now, passing the edge of the mercenaries and crashing into their traditional enemies of Gortyna, so that, whatever their political feelings, they were pushing with spirit. The right files of the Gortynian phalanx and the whole of the allied Polyrrhenians met the oncoming Knossians with a clatter of spears and shields that filled the whole of the Vale of Gortyna with a sound of bronze-throated thunder. Shields cracked and shattered at the impact; spears broke at the head, or halfway down the shaft. The men of Knossos had the same old-fashioned arms as the men of Gortyna and Polyrrhenia, and their traditional hatred fuelled the fire.

  A hundred men died in a second. The line didn’t move by a foot.

  The two infantry centres were helmet to helmet. The men in the midst of the press could smell the breath of their enemies. In a forest of shattered spear shafts, men fought with swords and knives and bare hands. The Knossians were deeper; the Allies were uphill.

  The dead began to fall atop the wounded.

  Somewhere, a brave man gave his life, sweeping spear shafts into his own chest, and the Knossians pressed forward. The Polyrrhenians stumbled back five paces, and then held, again.

  From his vantage, Alexanor could see from the end of the Polyrrhenians all the way to the leftmost file of the Lyttians. The whole line was engaged.

  ‘Well,’ Philopoemen said. He looked back, as if measuring.

  The Aetolian cavalry was rallying behind the Lyttians. Telemnastos was loosing arrows into them, and knots of Aetolians tried to drive the archers off. But it was not in balance. Nabis had hundreds of cavalrymen, and the Lyttians were only just able to hold their part of the hill, their leftmost files already bent back, almost like a lambda, to keep the rightmost files of the mercenaries, who overlapped them, from turning their flank.

  Philopoemen nodded. ‘If they last a quarter of an hour,’ he said aloud, and touched his heels to his mount. He wore boots, and spurs, and his charger, who was not used to being spurred, burst into an angry gallop.

  Alexanor’s horse followed, as horses will, and he almost came off in the first ten strides. Then he floated along the back of the mêlée – twenty thousand men locked, head to head, face to face, on a front of four stades.

  Down in the side valley, in the fields of barley where the psiloi had ambushed the peltastoi, the Boeotian mercenaries waited, their rear ranks filled with the ‘little’ men of Gortyna.

  Opposite them, the Thracians and Illyrians came on – the Illyrians boldly, the Thracians hesitantly. The Illyrians outran their supports, bursting into a running charge through the golden barley fields.

  Periander ordered the Boeotians to retreat. The whole block, Boeotians and their new rear-rankers, stumbled back, leaving the flank of the Polyrrhenians open, but the enemy Illyrians were bent on winning, their charge too wild to be controlled with fine manoeuvring.

  Alexanor saw it in the moment before the Illyrians did.

  The retreat of the Boeotians was to expose a ditch – a ditch that the psiloi and the labou
rers had had three hours to dig, and then to line with sharpened stakes. The Illyrians slammed into it and men fell; the screams sounded even above the thunder-crashes in the centre.

  The rear ranks of the Illyrians piled forward, pushing their front ranks into the pit traps, until the Illyrians were across a bridge of their own dead and wounded, the injured shrill and desperate.

  They met a wall of professional steel. The Boeotians killed the survivors of the ditch. They held their ground, shedding the Illyrian charge like a tile roof sheds winter rain. The Illyrians huddled at the edge of the ditch, a handful of beautifully armoured warriors trying to whip the rest back into a killing frenzy. The Boeotians kept their shields up, and behind them, the Neodamodeis, the newly enfranchised psiloi, stood firm, pushing against the backs of the Boeotians, handing up javelins to the professionals so that a steady rain of death fell on the Illyrians.

  Alexanor followed Philopoemen. He rode right past the rear of the Boeotian taxeis, and then up the long ridge, through the first olive trees, to the far right of his line, where Dinaeos and his own cavalry waited, hanging off the end of the now utterly hesitant Thracians.

  ‘I was going anyway,’ Dinaeos called. ‘How is Aristaenos doing?’

  ‘Broken,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘Don’t you want to go and fight Nabis yourself?’ Lykortas asked.

  ‘My wants are neither here not there,’ Philopoemen snapped. ‘The Spartan is there, and we are here, and we can win this thing right now.’

  Gone was the morning’s hesitation, the grey face. Now he truly looked like Achilles, and the doctor in Alexanor wanted to know if his wound had stopped bleeding, too. Even I think he is superhuman.

  Dinaeos nodded sharply. ‘Yes, Strategos,’ he said.

  ‘Wait!’ Philopoemen roared. ‘Just walk them out. Let the Thracians see. We need them to run. We need to let Lykortas’ rumour and his fake gold do their work, so that our own Thracians are fresh. We need to charge the Knossian phalanx, not the Thracians. You understand?’

  Dinaeos nodded, his eyes on the enemy Thracians. ‘Forward at a walk!’ he ordered the cavalry.

  Kleostratos blew the Hipparchos’ trumpet, and every enemy Thracian head turned. They’d halted in a huddle when the Illyrians broke; now, the emergence of enemy cavalry on their flank panicked them. They turned and ran.

  Lykortas whooped as if he was himself a Thracian.

  ‘Best victory money can buy!’ he called.

  Philopoemen drew his sword. ‘Companions!’ he called. ‘We need to break the Knossians faster than Nabis can break our Lyttians.’

  ‘Not you,’ Alexanor said.

  Philopoemen shook his head. ‘I’m done here. Win or lose, this was my plan. I will ride with the charge.’

  He turned, and raised his hand, and Arkas tossed him a spear – a longche, with a heavy head and a long, double-tapered shaft.

  Alexanor reached for Philopoemen’s reins while he was distracted, just as Kleostratos put the trumpet to his lips. His fingers closed …

  On air.

  Philopoemen whipped the reins out from under his reach as the whole squadron started forward, down the ridge. He looked back.

  ‘You should come,’ Philopoemen said, as if inviting Alexanor to a party.

  That was how Alexanor always thought of him after: half turned, his horse gathered under him; the spear in his hand like a thunderbolt of Zeus; the cloak whipped back in the speed of his turn; bigger than most men, and larger still in his moment of glory.

  ‘Come with me!’ Philopoemen called, and he was away.

  Philopoemen’s veteran riders could ride through an olive grove and form at the trot into a deep line; the Thracian cavalry recruits had almost doubled their numbers.

  Alexanor’s horse was carried away, and Alexanor, having failed to grab Philopoemen’s reins, was almost instantly tucked in, a horse length behind him, following Arkas, who was himself at the strategos’ shoulder.

  The horsemen on the outside leant in, even at a canter, so that the mass of horseflesh packed together. Alexanor, caught two horses behind Philopoemen, was pressed from both sides. His knees cracked against Kleostratos’ knee on one side, and slipped behind Syrmas’ knee on the other.

  He had the most curious feeling, of belonging to a single giant organism, a huge beast of hooves and manes and bronze and steel. He couldn’t really see; he could barely ride. He simply was; he rode with the charge. He was in the charge.

  He was the charge.

  At some point, the whole mass accelerated into a gallop.

  Perhaps the leftmost files of the Knossians flinched. Perhaps men turned to see their doom and screamed; or perhaps braver men called for the end files to turn and face the threat. Perhaps, in desperation, there was heroism, or perhaps only despair, in the ranks of the Knossians.

  The juggernaut was imperfect by the time the squadron struck. The ends had begun to fray out; older horses began to slow, balking at the collision.

  But in the centre of the charge, around Dinaeos and Philopoemen, the charge went home, straight into the shielded flank of the enemy. Whole files were knocked flat, and the Thracians’ horses were more deadly than their riders, and as the outer files collapsed, the ties of liturgy and piety and family began to fail, and the Knossian phalanx unknitted. Men turned to flee. Men struck their neighbours, desperate to escape the equine tide, the teeth and hooves, the swords and heavy spears.

  Alexanor saw none of that. All he saw was Philopoemen, his arm faster than a cat’s paw, stronger than an ox’s horns; every blow ended in a spray of red. Philopoemen’s magnificent horse passed Dinaeos, and then opened the way for the whole squadron, the way a craftsman’s chisel opens a crack in a tree trunk for the workers to split off a plank. He went forward, his spear like the bolts of great Zeus, and men fell. Even the ones who flinched away were hit, and he was without mercy, free of restraint, deeper and deeper into the Knossian phalanx as it unravelled behind him and to the side. Suddenly Alexanor burst through, no longer restrained by the tide of bodies at his feet, or his comrades, and everywhere the enemy was running, and the hippeis, instead of being pressed, were inexplicably free.

  For an instant, Alexanor was riding over open ground. He had just time to note that he was now in front, not behind, and then …

  Then, for the first time, Alexanor was fighting. Men pressed around his horse in the blink of an eye – well-armoured men who had thrown down their pikes and were fighting with swords – and Alexanor fought, his horse pressed alongside that of Kleostratos. The Thracian pulled savagely at his horse’s bit, made his stallion rear, and the enraged horse lashed out, scattering their foes. Alexanor finally got the mercenary who was trying to rip open his charger’s belly, stabbing down with some dead man’s sword.

  He turned his horse, and tried to follow Kleostratos, but the Thracian was a far better rider. His horse took him away into a flaw in the enemy formation and left Alexanor alone.

  Alexanor threw blows in every direction; his horse moved under him, and he struck. It had been his intention to merely parry and stay alive, but in the fight, he didn’t control his sword arm, and he stabbed down into men’s faces, their shoulders, the sides of their necks, with medical precision. His horse turned and turned, and at some point he realised that the armoured men he was fighting were the enemy mercenaries, not the Knossians, even as his wonderful gelding took a spear in the neck, and another in his belly, and, game to the last, slumped down. Even in death the horse was beyond praise, falling forward like a pious man kneeling before a statue of his favourite god, and then down, down so gradually that Alexanor dismounted and landed on his feet, well clear of his dying charger, and then he was in among the mercenaries.

  There was no thought – no consciousness of fighting.

  Alexanor had begun training in pankration when he was eight years old. He’d never had the body to be a champion – too small, too thin. But he’d never stopped practising; in the marines, he’d been considered so s
killed they made him an instructor. And the priests of Asklepios had their own pankration, and he’d embraced it – a faster game that emphasised speed and precision in the delivery of punches and kicks to the weakest points in the body.

  He didn’t think of any of it.

  It was black. But for the first time, there was neither terror, nor a flash on the corpses of his dead. His dead were at rest, and he was free.

  He was there, in that moment, and he struck.

  Men fell. He caught his own actions in bursts: a lock; a shattered knee, his kick passing through with a sickening crunch; a man’s head under his rotating arm; his sword left in a man’s armoured gut.

  And then he was on his back, a spear in his thigh. Blood, and worse, had turned the ground to muck. He imagined drowning in the bloody ooze. He fell, and couldn’t rise, and he raised a hand.

  There was a man above him, and he was going to die. The man’s spear went back for the killing blow, the head heavy, the shaft long and black, the man’s lips peeled back from his teeth, his sweat shining on his face.

  And then the man was gone, and there was a horse above him, the thing’s belly wet. The stink of the horse passed over him; a hoof slammed into the earth with crushing finality. The man on the horse’s back was larger than life, a Titan bestriding the world, challenging the very gods.

  I’ve taken a blow to the head, and something is wrong.

  And the horse was gone, and the sky above Alexanor was blue, and it hung, pregnant with immanence, as if somewhere a new god was being born. Far off, an eagle turned, and turned again, watching the battle. For a moment, Alexanor felt that he was one with the eagle, watching the tiny men far below, fighting and dying in the blood and the sand and the barley fields of the plain.

  ‘Achilles! Achilles Athanatos!’

  ‘ACHILLES!’

  I cannot be seeing this, he thought.

  But he was; circling above, safe, on the auspicious side of the sky, he saw the mercenary phalanx collapse as the Polyrrhenians and the Gortynians who had been fighting the Knossians turned, the pressure on their front suddenly released, and fell on the flank of the mercenaries, following the now scattered cavalry. The mercenaries were slow to fail; veterans, well aware of the consequences of defeat, they went back, and back again, bleeding men but refusing to break.