What saved me was that the sounding of the trumpet seemed to have the same effect on my adversaries. Perhaps they smelled a corpse. Since we moved here, thugater, we’ve come to know many noble Saka, or Sakje as they call themselves, and they are experts at ambush. Perhaps one of the leaders didn’t like what he saw.
Anyway, as soon as the horns sounded, they began to flow away.
Hipponax burst into the clearing and threw his spear, knocking a man into the dust. The man fell from his horse and his head hit one of the boundary stones of the sanctuary and split open with an awful sound – one of the few things of that fight I remember clearly.
And then the clearing was full of my oarsmen and they were cheering. Hipponax says I looked like a hedgehog and that may indeed be true. Certainly I was carrying more than twenty Saka arrows in my aspis and I had blood trickling from two punctures that had come all the way through the shield’s face.
I went back to Idomeneus. He was breathing – slowly, and in odd bursts, like a man snoring. Men took my aspis and other men pursued the Saka down the mountain. I stood and breathed and the sum of all my wounds began to sap at me. I had been hit repeatedly at Artemisium, I’d had very little sleep, and now I’d fought twenty horsemen and my skin was pierced in half a dozen places.
Hipponax got Idomeneus out of his fine thorax. He’d fallen on his back and the fall had broken the shaft of the arrow there. Or perhaps it had already broken – the cane shafts that the Persians and the Saka used were strong, but brittle once they cracked and any sort of resistance seemed to break them, especially when the weather was cold. I had the splinters of a dozen failed arrows in my forearms.
But Idomeneus was alive, if deeply unconscious. The arrow that penetrated his back plate had not gone far through the heavy muscle of his upper back.
Hector tore into the leather bag he wore and produced our salve, made of honey and oregano and a few other things, blessed by a priestess of Hera. He slathered it over the wound, wrapped the sticky stuff in his spare chiton, and he and Hipponax threw the wounded Cretan over the back of a spare horse. There were a dozen Saka horses milling about the clearing, and the more horse-oriented young men were catching them.
My mare, to my astonishment, came to me. She had an arrow standing proud of her rump, but she seemed immune to it. Nonetheless, as the salve was out, I said a prayer to Poseidon, Lord of Horses, and while a pair of my marines held the horse’s head, I made a small cut with my scabbard knife and withdrew the arrow, and then used the salve. She was none too happy with the operation, I can promise you, but I already loved her – such heart! I had never really fancied a horse before. See what a good prayer to Poseidon can get you? Eh?
I realised in the next few minutes how used I had grown to being a great man with many officers. I was unused to having to figure out each aspect of the next step – I had men I trusted for that. But Idomeneus was down and Teucer, son of Teucer, was dead and none of the rest of the Plataeans was ready to command, much less to make the sort of decisions that would allow me to think about the larger issue.
In brief, the larger issue was that Boeotia was alive with Persian cavalry. I had to assume that they were headed for Attica by the same road we were going to use, and they would be much faster than we.
I had not, to be honest, expected Xerxes to move so fast.
But let me add that it was the treason of Thebes that allowed him to do so. Thebes opened her gates, and worse, fed the Medes. So when his advance guard swept down the road they were given fodder and water for their mounts and food and wine for the troopers. Even a day’s hesitation by Thebes would have saved much, slowed the storm, held back the lightning.
In fact, Simonides, my cousin, had his own fight on the road, and his brother Ajax lost his life less than five stades from where we had our fight. Except that Simonides, who had grown to manhood in Thebes, said the men who attacked him were Thebans in a motley collection of false Persian clothes. I believe it. Thebes always hated Plataea, and they were quick to attack us. Certainly we know that it was Thebes who asked the Great King to reduce our town to rubble.
But I get ahead of myself.
I could see we had to retreat. I hoped that we had helped Alcaeus. His noble son had taken three bad wounds, any one of which would have been crippling – I hoped it was not in vain. But I couldn’t venture farther down that road, and in fact I had Hipponax sounding his horn, over and over, to gather the more impetuous oarsmen back. I found Moire and told him to get the men together on the road – I wanted to lie down and go to sleep. How often has that not been the case, friends? You just want to rest for a little, but the world and the gods and your enemies will not have it.
I pulled the boys – who were about to become officers – and Moire into a huddle while the men formed. The oar-masters made passable taxiarchoi. I wished I had Seckla.
I wished I had Ka and his Nubians. Archers – by Apollo, archers are worth their weight in gold.
However, as the women of Plataea say, if wishes were barley cakes, beggars would eat like kings. I had four hundred and fifty oarsmen, all hard men. We had donkeys and mules and food for three days and a lot of experience in war.
I started by stripping the shrine. The old Hero has always been a friend of mine, and a favourite, and I’ve given him many a libation of wine, aye, and blood, too. Styges and Idomeneus had stored grain there, in big pithoi jars set into the floors of the barn I’d built them, and wine, and we took it all, or burned it. I told my men to gather downed branches and pile them over the old entrance to the tomb – you can’t loot what you don’t see. We set fire to the huts ourselves and I took the old window of horn that some donor in the past had made – very well – for Calchus, and I put it in the tomb before we closed it up.
Perhaps I’m not fully explaining, as some of you look so puzzled. The shrine was the centre of our military training for Plataea. We stored food and a few weapons there and we were determined that none of this would aid the enemy. And it was an act of piety, as well, hiding the shrine, denying it to the foe. Besides, we knew it was time to build new sheds. Some of them were pretty foul.
In the middle of all this activity, Onisandros, one of the junior oar-masters, came to me and saluted.
‘I was thinking, Navarch. We could …’ he grinned, ‘chop up them dead Saka. Show ’em what we think of ’em.’
I nodded. ‘No,’ I said.
My feelings must have shown in my face, because Onisandros – a good man – stepped back. ‘Oh – pardon me, Lord!’
I shook my head. ‘Listen up!’ I called, and all the men nearest me fell silent, or stopped dragging branches, or arranging the Saka bodies. And Teucer – the only man who was dead, although a dozen were wounded – they were burying him inside the sanctuary wall.
The best we could do, under the circumstances.
Anyway – most of them turned to me. There was the usual hum – some men will never shut up, and I am one of them, I confess it.
‘We will not desecrate the dead. Why? Because we’re Greek! By Poseidon, men! Do you want to be as guilty of impiety as the Medes? Let them burn in Hades for their sacrilege. We will win this war because we are the better men, because we are above such petty things. I know you are angry. I am angry too. My brother-in-law – his head cut off, his body maimed by cowards – lies in the sand at Thermopylae, exposed by the Persians like a criminal. I am angry – but for my part, I wouldn’t do that to a dog.’
Well – something like that. Thank the gods I’d had time to think about it. And I’d already decided I wouldn’t allow such shit before I was exhausted and angry and lost Teucer’s son.
I still blame myself for that. We didn’t need to fight on the road at all – just run. Not one of my better days. And you’ll note that when I stopped at the tomb to try and save Idomeneus, I wrecked the ambush’s chance of a real victory.
Well, I can’t
regret that.
But what I’m getting at in this story is that one of the worst parts of leading men in war – and women, too – is that you make mistakes, people die or are maimed, and then you have to go right on leading them. You want to lie down and sleep, or murder some prisoners, or perhaps just take your own life in shame – and I have known all these moments, friends. The black despair after combat – the abyss, some of us called it then.
But they are all looking at you, waiting for you to give an order, when all you really want to do is cry. Or die.
More wine, here.
Where was I?
Ah – my huddle – Moire and Hipponax and Hector. I told them my plan in some detail. I sent Hector with the fastest runners to go up the trail ten stades and set an ambush. I told Hipponax that he’d be next and that, no matter what happened, he’d be taking the next group of oarsmen another ten stades, to the shoulder of the mountain overlooking Eleutherae and there he’d set another ambush. And that the two of them, each with twenty men, would play leapfrog with the column.
This is how you retreat – with a sting in the tail. Men pursuing quickly become careless. There is some part of the human animal that believes that running forward is winning and running backwards is losing, and perhaps this is even true, but in a well-conducted retreat you can use this against your enemy. I learned all this from Aristides, and some more of it from Brasidas.
Oh, how I missed him, too. I felt a fool for leaving him at the ships.
At any rate, as soon as our plans were made, Hector chose his men and led them off at a run. We loaded the last of the grain on the pack animals.
I got my own, lighter, aspis off my pack mule, replaced its weight with grain, and placed myself at the very back of the column with my picked men. My little mare was going to have an easy time of it for a few hours.
I gave the boys a ten-minute head start and then we marched.
All that time – maybe an hour we were at the shrine, with the sun getting higher in the sky – I worried that the Saka would come straight back at us. If they had, we’d have made a fight, but it would have been ugly.
Once we were moving, though, we were in better shape. A moving column funnels enemy action to the back. It is hard even for cavalry to surround marching infantry, in bad ground. Out on the steppes or on the sands of some open desert I suppose it would be terrible for the hoplites, but in the woods, we could walk almost as fast as they, when we were on a road and they had to infiltrate through the big old trees and rocks of Cithaeron’s lower slopes.
Be that as it may, we didn’t see a man or horse for two hours. We passed through our first ambush and they joined our column, then Hipponax led his men away at a run to form the next one. Tired oarsmen being forced to run half the day in their looted panoplies glared at me with death in their eyes, but I was used to making them row all day and I smiled and shouted words of encouragement, as the Spartans do – ‘Well run, Empedocles! You look like a god, Onisandros!’ – and we continued. When the sun was high in the sky we took an hour’s rest, with skope on all the high points, watching for the enemy. Just when I was picking the sausage skin out of my teeth, Kassander, one of the older oarsmen in a good leather spolas dyed bright red, called me from the rock above the road.
‘Ari! Cavalry!’
‘Arm!’ I shouted. We were resting in our ranks – a very basic precaution I’d learned at Marathon – and we got to our feet and got our aspides on our arms before the sound of hoof beats was clear.
‘Drink water!’ I shouted. It is amazing how fast fatigue and black depression falls away when you can hear your foe advancing.
Obediently, men drank from their canteens and leather water bottles, handing them round to the awkward sods who had none, and then, at my wave, Onisandros got the baggage animals moving.
I was between Alexandros, one of my marines, and Sitalkes, another. I had Styges at my back and all ten of the men who blocked the road were in full panoply. In fact, I’d put on my arm and thigh guards since the last halt. I wasn’t going to eat any more splinters. They hurt.
The Saka were cautious. They came on slowly, stopped as soon as they saw us across the road, and they loosed arrows. My best aspis began to take hits.
The next hour was like a long, brutal fencing match. Between shafts, we’d back step – when we went around a curve in the road, we’d run, our ears cocked for the rush of hooves, but the Saka were too cautious, and we’d gain a hundred paces and halt, breathe. sometimes only to run again. Sometimes they’d come on.
After an hour of this, which included one all-out charge – of course we caught no one, but we surprised them and made them run – as I say, after an hour, my legs were made of rubber and I couldn’t have hurt a Saka if he’d laid down under the edge of my xiphos.
Then we switched with Moire and his ten. He was as wily as I and his ten were faster than we had been. I had to admit, watching them from the massed safety of the column, that his ten-fleet oarsmen in light armour were better at the whole game – until a Saka arrow took a man in his shin, where he had no greave. He went down, and the Saka were on him in a moment, shooting down into his body. A few began loosing light shafts at our column, but the gods had allowed our baggage animals around the next turn and the shafts only rattled around off of shields.
The road was steep. We were only making ten stades an hour and I knew we were running out of daylight and we couldn’t deal with a night on the mountain with the Saka.
I told Styges what I had in mind and I ran off along the column. I wasn’t running very well and I had to stop – often. Not my best day.
But I got to the head of the column and then I ran, still in full panoply with my aspis on my arm. I ran along the road for what seemed like an eternity, worried about what was behind me and afraid that I’d lost contact with my ambushing force …
‘Pater!’
Hipponax was on the grassy slope above me. He came out.
‘Perfect,’ I said. It was. To the left, the road fell away in a cliff that gave a magnificent view of Boeotia – the first one a traveller coming from Attica saw. Above us there were some volcanic rocks and some stubby olive trees, but the slope was gentle enough to a man to run down, and steep enough for a few rocks to be rolled.
‘I need you to stay hidden until the enemy is well past you,’ I said. ‘We can’t just frighten them. We need to kill a few and break contact.’
My son pointed proudly at his hillside. It was true – I couldn’t see a man.
‘What if they try to ride up the hill?’ I asked. But that was rhetorical.
I ran back to the column. Now, on the return run, I had to worry that they’d been savaged in my absence. Losing Teucer loomed again. I thought of Antigonus and Leonidas, their bodies shamed by barbarians.
Philosophers are always praising the solitary life, but I don’t recommend too much reflection for the captain. It can be dark in there.
At any rate, they were all still alive. I ran back to the column and immediately sent the twenty men in the front to join Hipponax – all Hector’s men, and Hector too. There wasn’t going to be another ambush. We were almost at the height of the pass and after that we’d be descending into Attica, the valley would widen, and the Saka would have every advantage.
I ran forward – or back, depending on your point of view – to my rearguard, and then I just walked and breathed for a while.
But there are some things you have to do yourself. I couldn’t send a message to make sure the ambush was ready.
That never works.
When I could breathe well, I took my men forward and relieved Moire.
By my reckoning, we were about three stades from the ambush. The ground was slowly opening to the left as we faced into Boeotia. The ground was beginning to drop away to the right.
We practised a feint charge that Brasidas taught and al
l of us knew it, so I put all twenty-two of us in one block and we backed around a corner and then charged. We went forward exactly fifty paces and then turned and ran.
They broke away from us, loosing shafts. But they were wary, and their shafts were few. They’d been on us for hours and I suspected they were tired of wasting shafts on fully armoured men with big shields.
But we’d only chased them about thirty of our fifty paces when some of them began to turn outward onto the rising ground to our left, to envelop us. Of course we broke, all together, and ran back; and then, after perhaps a ten-pace pause, we could hear hoof beats behind us.
Well – it was like running the hoplitodromos with your life on the line and I began to fall behind, because I’m no longer that fast, thanks to various wounds. And a lot of armour, I confess it.
But we passed the bend in the road, the last bend before the ambush, without losing a man. Now we had two stades to go and the road climbed away slightly. The cavalry above us on the hillside were suddenly confronted with a narrow gorge and had to come down, and they were their own roadblock for a few long strides, interfering with the rush of our pursuers.
My feet pounded the road. I was last by five strides – I, who had once been the best among an army of Greeks.
Another stride. Another.
It was like running at the Persians in the pass above Sardis, except that I was now running away.
But there are some things you cannot ask your men to do, and one of them is to be the bait in an ambush.
The last hundred strides to the next turn in the road looked very long.
But the last fifty didn’t look so bad, and my feet had wings of fear as I heard the hoof beats. The ground shook. An arrow went into my plume, and another shattered on my thorax, and made me stumble – perhaps twenty strides from the turn, and I was the only target they had. All my men had made the turn. I hoped there was a formed body waiting there, a hundred oarsmen waiting—
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