we hadn’t got close enough to make out the colour of their eyes, let alone hit
anybody. At this rate, it’d be a long, dangerous crawl to the village, provided
that their arrow supply held out.
It was at this point that someone quite unexpectedly did something intelligent.
Corus, the captain of the remaining Budini (he wasn’t their regular leader; he
hadn’t made it), suddenly led a frantic charge, apparently at right-angles to
everything that was going on. It was as if he’d caught sight of that other
battle I was speculating about just now, the one that everybody else but I could
see, and had gone racing off to join it.The enemy lowered their bows and stared,
unable to fathom what the hell was going on; we were staring too, come to that.
If it hadn’t been for the drawn scimitars and levelled lances, I’d have sworn
they were running away. But they weren’t. After they’d galloped about a quarter
of a mile, they abruptly veered off to the right and swung back; they’d gone
just far enough to be behind the enemy’s line, provided they could reach it
before the enemy had a chance to get out of the way.
It was close; the war-party had to back and shuffle before they could turn round
to face the incoming attack, which was closing at a hell of a rate, and that was
when I saw it, the complicated manoeuvre in the face of the enemy — the mistake.
I scrambled to my feet and yelled for an immediate attack; Marsamleptes was way
ahead of me, and he had the wit to give the order to the trumpeters, who blew
the charge. In the event, I did well to keep up and not get trampled on.
When they saw us coming, the enemy tried to turn back again, thereby getting
themselves hopelessly tangled up. It was more by luck than judgement, but both
charges, cavalry and infantry, went home at more or less the same time. We were
holding them like a piece of hot metal in a pair of tongs. They couldn’t shoot
or run. It was just like the Granicus, only better.
Being rather slow off the mark, I ended up in the fourth row of the infantry
formation, where I couldn’t see anything past the helmet of the man in front of
me, and couldn’t contribute anything beyond my body-weight. As to what actually
happened, therefore, I have no idea; I didn’t get to see any of the cut and
thrust of hand-to-hand combat, the lunging and feinting and parrying, the
footwork and shieldplay. My experience of the battle was something like being
caught in a big, over-excited queue, like when you’re lining up to get into the
theatre or Assembly, and they open the doors and everybody surges forwards at
once, sweeping you along with them. I was scared, no question, but not of the
enemy; the immediate threat to me (and a very real one too) was from the
butt-spikes on the ends of other people’s spears, the terrifying risk of
slipping and getting trodden into the dirt, or being crushed like a bug between
two ranks of armour-clad bodies. In fact, I only have other people’s word for it
that we engaged the enemy at all. I didn’t see any of them, certainly, unless
you count one or two dead bodies I trod on when something suddenly gave way and
for a few short, scary moments we were all stumbling forward out of control.
They must have been the enemy, those dead men, because they weren’t wearing
armour; but that was all I had time to notice about them.
It’s not as if I gave a damn, anyway. Fighting and killing were the last things
on my mind just then.
From what other people told me, I gather that we sort of squeezed them into
nothing, as if you took on overripe pear in your hand and crushed it, till the
pulp squirted out between your fingers and you were left holding the core and
the pips. It was something like a hundred and seventy-odd killed, as many again
captured, while our losses were in single figures, apart from the Budini shot
down in the river (seventeen killed, twenty or so wounded). Anyway, people who
knew about this sort of thing reckoned that it was a good closing score and we’d
done well, and there was plenty of stuff for a proper trophy this time. But the
rest of them got back inside the village and shut the gates, and after we’d
caught our breath and sorted ourselves out, there was nothing else to do but go
home again. Complete waste of time, if you ask me.
‘We did well,’ Tyrsenius said, ‘considering. Of course,’ he went on, ‘we’ll have
to be very careful from now on. Very careful indeed.’
I yawned; it was late and I was very tired after all that frantic pushing and
shoving. ‘What you’re saying is,’ I replied, ‘we’ve attacked them, provoked
them, killed nearly two hundred people, and sooner or later they’re going to
attack us again.’
‘That’s a rather negative way of looking at it, don’t you think?’ Tyrsenius
said. ‘After all, we’ve just won a rather splendid victory.’
‘Which achieved nothing,’ I said. ‘If anything, we’ve made things worse. You
know what I’d do if I were in charge in that village? I’d send messages to every
Scythian community in reach, saying, Dire warning, unprovoked attack, we must
all band together now and get rid of these Greeks once and for all, or else we
don’t stand a chance. After all,’ I added, ‘isn’t that what we did?’
Prodromus the Founder looked at me. ‘I thought you were the one who wanted this
war,’ he said.
I leaned back and let my head rest against the wall. ‘I wanted to wipe out the
village,’ I said. ‘No village, no more problem. It serves me right, I suppose,
for thinking you can do that sort of thing.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Tyrsenius said. I ignored him.
‘All right,’ Prodromus said. ‘So now what are you saying? We should give up the
war? Try to negotiate peace?’
I nodded. ‘We’ve made our point, at least,’ I said. ‘And sure enough, we’ve
thinned out the war-party, got rid of a lot of the young braves who were
spoiling for a fight. We’ve got the anger out of our system too, I hope. What
I’d like to do is go back to the terms Anabruzas proposed that time, and see if
we can make anything out of those.’
Marsamleptes stroked his beard with the ball of his thumb. ‘That’s if those
terms are still open,’ he said. ‘Maybe now it’s their turn to be angry.’
I shrugged. ‘I’d have hoped we’ve killed too many of them to let them afford the
luxury of being angry,’ I replied. ‘Even though we lost control of the battle
right at the outset, they still weren’t able to do us any real harm. We’ve
proved they’re no match for us in a pitched battle.’
Marsamleptes dipped his head a little. ‘Maybe they aren’t figuring on having any
more pitched battles,’ he replied. ‘It’s not the way they do things, left to
themselves.’
I saw his point. If we were going to thump them every time we met in the open
field, the sensible thing from their perspective would be not to go to the open
field any more. But they could still launch surprise attacks, ride down our
people as they walked home from work, and then dart back behind their gates
before we could do anything about it. Then we’d have to follow s
uit, they’d step
up their attacks; and when, in the middle of all this, would any of us find the
time to do any farming? ‘So what’s your idea?’ I asked him.
‘Gather more men,’ he said. ‘Hire more soldiers. Then we lay a siege and destroy
the village.’
I sighed. ‘Back where we started, only harder,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’ve achieved
nothing.’
Marsamleptes shook his head. ‘Things have changed since we started,’ he said.
‘Back then, we could have come to an agreement. Now, we have to see it through.’
Nobody said anything after that, and the meeting broke up. Marsamleptes went off
to organise guard duty; his work wouldn’t be over much before dawn. We weren’t
supposed to be doing all this; it was summer now, but soon it would be autumn;
vintage, harvest, ploughing, sowing. In Greece , the campaigning season has
always been very rigidly defined, wars don’t drag on into vintage and get in the
way of people’s work. But in Greece , everybody knows what wars mean, they
understand the meaning of a victory or a defeat. It’s like judgement in a
lawsuit, and if the judgement goes against you, you don’t complain or try to
wriggle out of it, you pay up and get on with your life. How would it be if
every dispute over who owned which side of a ditch or who was responsible for
breakages in a consignment of jars of honey had to be carried through until one
or other of the parties was dead? That was the lesson of military history: only
fight battles if you’re prepared to abide by the result.
That didn’t seem to work here, which made the point. We weren’t in Greece any
more. We’d left all that, moved on.
Pity.
I crawled out of my clothes, which had dried on me twice that day
— once from the river-water, once from the sweat — and slumped onto my bed. I
was used to being alone in the house now, it was remarkable how quickly I’d
adapted to it. Everything had gone wrong, one way or another, and I’d accepted
it without really noticing.
I woke up in the middle of the night and realised that I’d decided to leave
Antolbia.
In a sense, there was nothing left to leave. My Antolbia was firmly based around
the notion of home, family, farm, the life I should have had if only my father
hadn’t screwed everything up by having so many sons. Now my own son was dead, my
wife had fled to Sicily with a cheese magnate, I didn’t dare go to my farm for
fear of getting shot; that didn’t leave much. The ideal society had gone the way
of all such experiments — it had lasted longer than some, and I had the
consolation of knowing that the forces tearing it apart were mostly external,
but it was still a fundamentally impossible project, as close to real life as
Homer’s version of battle. The truth was quite simple; we’d tried to found a
Greek city that wasn’t in Greece , in a place that was already somewhere else by
the time we got there. When Greeks founded Miletus and Syracuse and Cyrene and
Croton and Odessus, the world was still soft and plastic, like a ball of wet
clay that could be moulded and shaped. By the time we went to Olbia, it was
already too hard to work.
The only question was, when would I be free to go? Perversely, if everything had
been going well I could have walked away without a second thought (but if
everything had been going well, I wouldn’t have wanted to). True, I had no
material ties worth bothering with, and thanks to Philip of Macedon and the
battle of Chaeronea, I was the rightful heir to substantial property in Attica —
following the deaths of Eudorus and Euthyphron, half my father’s original
estate; I’d have to fight hard in the courts to get it, of course, and on that
score the sooner I left Antolbia and started my campaign, the better. But
leaving at that particular moment, either the beginning or the middle of the
war, but most certainly not the end, was something I couldn’t bring myself to
do. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t anything to do with obligation or
responsibility or honour. It was more a matter of wanting to be looking in the
right direction when the main event happened, just for once in my life —My
fellow Antolbians, it is with a heavy heart...
— And partly, of course, cowardice, because I didn’t have the nerve to stand up
in front of them and make that speech. No, if I wanted to leave now, I’d have to
sneak out of town on some pretext, like the man who tells his wife he’s just
going up to the market to buy a quarter of whitebait, and is next heard of ten
years later, as a captain of mercenaries in libya.
After a sleepless night (more to do with rough wine and anchovies than mental
turmoil, I suspect) I decided on a compromise. When we’d erased all traces of
the Scythian village, I’d be free to go. Even while I was formulating the
proposal, I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to me over the last dozen
years, to bring me to a state where I predicated my personal redemption on the
wholesale slaughter of innocents. But I explained that by saying that I was
merely reverting to type. What we’d have called genocide in Olbia would have
been considered in Athens a sensible business precaution.
I went to see Marsamleptes.
‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, in answer to my question. ‘If we had the resources,
I’d want catapults and battering-rams, plus at least three hundred specialist
archers.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford the money, or the time. What can we do with
what we’ve already got?’
He thought for a while longer. ‘Attack by night,’ he said eventually. ‘In the
dark, they can’t see to shoot. If we can force the gate before they realise what
we’re doing—’
I shook my head. ‘Is that likely?’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not really.’
I chewed my lower lip for a moment. ‘What if someone opened the gates for us?’ I
said. ‘Would that be enough, do you think?’
As always, he considered his answer carefully before replying. ‘Yes,’ he said,
‘I think it would. Basically, we’d have to use the village stockade like a net,
as if we were lamping for hares. Surround the stockade but leave the two
side-gates unblocked. Put in an assault party through the main gate, with
torches, setting fire to everything in reach and making it look like there’s
more of them than there really are. Once they realise what’s going on, they’ll
try to bolt through the side gates. That’s where we catch them and kill them.’
I looked doubtful. ‘Isn’t that over-elaborate?’ I asked. ‘Judging by how things
went the last two times, we’d better assume that anything that can go wrong,
will.’
He looked at me with a very faint smile. ‘I’m a soldier,’ he said. ‘I always
assume that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve much. Just because you know a
thing’s the weak link in the chain doesn’t mean you can do anything at all about
it. No, we’ll just have to make sure that we make as few mistakes as possible.’
He looked at me steadily. ‘Do you really think you can find someone who’ll be
willing to open the
gates?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘I think so,’ I said.
He looked older than he had the last time I saw him. His broad shoulders were
starting to get bony, the muscles of his forearms were shrinking, so that he
wore the bones like an old man wears a tunic that fitted him like a glove twenty
years ago. His hands looked bigger, and they shook a little. But he still had
the scar I’d given him all those years before, and the look in his eyes was
exactly the same as always.
‘Peace,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t think you people know the meaning of the word.’
‘We don’t,’ I replied. ‘That’s why it’s got to be done this way. Look,
Anabruzas, I’m being absolutely straight with you. If you don’t open the gates
and let us occupy the village, calmly and peacefully while everyone’s asleep,
then we’ll come along with catapults and battering-rams and break in during the
day; and I promise you, you won’t like that.’
‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘And if I felt I could trust you, it’d be a different
matter. But I don’t. How can I, after what you did the last time?’
I shrugged. ‘If you don’t co-operate,’ I said, ‘we’ll definitely storm the
stockade and kill you all. If you do what I’m telling you, there’s a chance I
might keep my word. Even half a chance is better than none at all.’
Anabruzas gave me a look of pure contempt. I wondered what I’d done to deserve
it.
‘If I do open the gates,’ he said, ‘what will you do? Just how will you go about
it?’
I smiled. ‘Do I look like I’m stupid?’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell you that.
Listen, will you? I’m talking about a chance to save lives; your people’s lives,
mine as well. I’m trying to be practical, for all our sakes. I’d have thought
that you, of all people...’
He turned away, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of me any more. ‘For your
information,’ he said, ‘my son — my other son — was killed in the battle. I’m
too old and too tired to raise any more. Do you know the story of the woman who
was captured by the Persians?’
I blinked. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘At least, I don’t think so. Is this a time to be
telling stories?’
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 45