As he threw a leg over his horse’s neck and dropped to the ground, a great cheer rose in the throats of Philip’s soldiers. They all knew that the place Philip had chosen for himself, the very hinge of the front line, was where the fighting would be the fiercest. He slapped Alastor on the rump to send his horse cantering back to the grooms, and men rushed forward to offer him their spears and shields, even the greaves from their legs. What would they not have offered him, he who had stepped down from the majesty of his birth to be one of them, and by that single act had entered their souls?
* * *
They had drawn up their ranks perhaps four hundred paces from the city gate, and still Derdas had not attacked. Philip’s soldiers beat their shields with the butts of their spears, shouting their defiance. They shouted into the cold wind that blew down from the mountains. It seemed a raw day on which to die.
The field sloped very gently downward from the walls of Aiane, which would normally have been an advantage for the Elimoitai, but frost was still heavy two hours after sunrise and Derdas’s horses could have a difficult time on the hard, slick ground. The momentum of their assault might very well work against them.
As the challenger, Philip at least had the privilege of choosing the site of battle. The day before, he had taken Alastor out alone and spent two hours reading the features of the land. Now he had placed his forces accordingly, choosing a large patch of stony ground that was good footing for men but awkward for horses, especially at a run. To the north were patches of trees and low scrubs, which meant that an attack would have to come from either the west or, if Derdas swung his forces around in a flanking maneuver, the south. A small stream, frozen solid now, ran at a slight angle at the upper edge. It was wide enough that the enemy cavalry would not risk crossing it at a gallop, so it would have only fifty or sixty paces to regroup and focus for the charge. And all that time it would be under attack from the Macedonian archers and javelin throwers.
It was not so obvious a trap that Derdas would refuse battle, but it would work against him. Philip was pleased with his choice. He would need the edge it provided against the numerical advantage of the enemy Elimiote cavalry.
Yet it was not the cavalry his soldiers would have first to overcome. As the sun edged up in the sky, the gates opened and the Elimiote infantry began to marshal in front of the city walls.
They were at least fifteen hundred strong, but they were a mob—peasants who had been dragged off their farms, given a shield and a pike and told to fight for their king. They would have little stomach for battle, and Derdas was not such a fool as to count on them for victory. They were a sacrifice. They would die in their hundreds merely to entangle the Macedonian forces and perhaps force them to turn. Then the cavalry would come in to take advantage of the confusion and destroy what was left.
Philip knew that he had to dispose of this first attack quickly, keeping his men under discipline, or everything was lost.
The Elimiote infantry had arrayed itself into three long lines, one behind the other. Not even squares, but merely three lines—they would charge in waves. Philip could hardly believe his luck.
When the first attack came, the Elimoitai gave voice to a great battle cry as they began running down the field. It was a chilling sound, but Philip had told his men to expect it. “They will be out of breath by the time they reach us,” he had told them, and they had laughed. Now he could almost feel the Macedonians tensing for that first impact.
The Elimoitai had not even covered a hundred paces when their lines began to break apart. They were not an army now, merely individuals, each one alone with nothing but his weapon and his courage and his terrible longing for life.
Another hundred paces and the first man dropped with a Macedonian arrow through his neck. There were others, many others. Many times when they died they threw their arms out as if to welcome the stroke that killed them.
For the last hundred paces they faced the javelins as well. A javelin seems to cleave a man in half—what an appalling thing to feel that thick shaft of wood suddenly run through you from your breast to your bowels.
The second wave of attack had begun, and these had to face the added horror of running across a battlefield littered with their dead comrades. Yet they came, and they perished in their turn.
The Elimoitai had reached the little frozen stream by then. They had to take care over the slippery ice and then, when they were across and the enemy was only fifty or so paces away, they would glance about them and perhaps for the first time realize how few they had become. To go forward was certain death, if only on the spears of a Macedonian front line that must have looked like a wall, and yet they could not bring themselves to retreat. They seemed not to know what to do, and as they waited, milling about, they were cut down.
What a butcher, Philip thought. What a butcher the man is to send his subjects out to die like this. And then once more he became the soldier, the commander with a sliver of ice through his heart, as it occurred to him that the tangle of bodies would further impede Derdas’s cavalry.
But it was not only the Elimoitai who were dying, for they too knew how to use their weapons. The man next to Philip was struck in the eye by a javelin—it tore his head open, scattering blood everywhere. Philip kicked the corpse aside, and the next behind in the column stepped forward to take up the dead man’s shield and spear. Macedonians were dying everywhere, but their defenses held and when one fell another came up to stand in his place.
And their discipline had its reward. For every one of Philip’s soldiers killed, there were as many as eight or ten of the Elimoitai lying dead upon that field of slaughter.
The first two waves of Elimiote infantry had exhausted themselves and the third was just coming within range of the Macedonian archers when Philip decided it was time to end this mortal agony. He raised the tip of his spear high into the air and shouted, “Point!” The cry was taken up by row after row of men until it seemed to roll away from him in waves—it was the signal for the two center phalanxes to advance at a trot while the right and left followed at a slower pace.
The effect was devastating. Where before the Elimoitai had been confronted with a solid wall of shields, from behind which arrows and javelins fell down on them like hailstones, now the wall bowed out at the center and began to advance on them as if to grind them to pieces. To men who had seen their comrades dropping all around them, it was simply too much. They turned and fled, and in their confused and terrified flight they engulfed the final wave of their own infantry. Even those whose advance had hardly reached the perimeters of the battle, when they saw what was happening—when they witnessed the panic of the men who had preceded them—they turned and ran.
Within an hour of its beginning this phase of the battle was over, leaving the Macedonians in possession of the field and with their lines unbroken.
“Let them send their horsemen!” Philip shouted, almost beside himself with exultation. “Let them come if they dare, for they see what awaits them!”
He gave the signal to withdraw back to their original positions and to straighten their lines. They had no more than a few minutes’ grace before the Elimiote cavalry began assembling outside the city gates. The final test was at hand.
The massing of the enemy horsemen took nearly an hour—they were easily seven or eight hundred strong, as large a force as Derdas could assemble on short notice—and this time he was beginning to show some tenuous grasp of tactics. He seemed to have divided his cavalry into two uneven groups, the smaller of which was breaking away and deploying itself far out to the south so that the attack could come from two directions at once.
The distance was too great for Philip to identify Derdas among the hordes of riders. It would have been useful to know where he was, for, if he understood the man correctly, the king of the Elimoitai would want to take personal command over whichever of his three groups he felt sure would deliver the decisive blow.
The question answered itself as the mass of the enemy cavalry,
which would attack head-on, began to concentrate itself, drawing in at the sides so that the horsemen were disposed in several rows, one behind the other. It looked like the infantry battle all over again.
Philip knew at once what it meant. There would be a wave of cavalry straight on, over the same ground where now lay the corpses of the Elimiote foot soldiers. Perhaps there would be two waves. These would engage the Macedonian forces while the smaller force moved in from the south. Infantry squares were notoriously vulnerable to this sort of side attack, and Derdas hoped to catch the enemy from two directions at once, giving him no opportunity to turn and shield his exposed flank. Then, when the Macedonian lines had been broken and their formations reduced to chaos, Derdas would unleash a final attack to finish them off.
It was a good plan, as far as it went. It did not make the best use of the terrain, which, considering that Derdas had grown to manhood with this patch of ground constantly under his eyes, said much about the mind that had conceived it. But its greatest flaw was that, at least in general terms, Philip had already anticipated it.
The first wave of cavalry started forward at a walk. They were within a hundred and fifty paces before they began their charge. When they were a hundred paces, and already under attack from the Macedonian archers, Philip ordered his two right phalanxes to begin a slow advance. This was what Derdas would expect—indeed, he would be counting on it to draw out the Macedonian flank. It seemed a pity to disappoint him.
When the first of the Elimoitai reached the ice-choked stream that ran across the top of the battlefield they did not break their charge and several horses lost their footing and went down. Those who followed slowed down and, after a moment or two of costly hesitation, began to pick their careful way across. They were easy targets then, and the bodies of men and horses began to pile up on both banks. The fools, Philip thought. It seemed they had not even anticipated that the stream would have frozen over.
By now the two forces were no more than forty paces apart, too close for the Elimiote charge to regain its momentum. But the Elimoitai were brave men and they threw themselves at Philip’s army with a desperate fury.
The air was rent with the screams of horses disemboweled on the Macedonian pikes, but if many died, many broke through. All along the front of the two forward phalanxes there were great tears where men were trampled to death beneath their own shields. Sometimes horse and rider, having reached the center, would be cut down, and sometimes they would blunder through to safety, scattering the Macedonian infantry as they went.
Some of the Elimiote cavalry veered off to attack the two left-hand phalanxes to the rear. They had greater momentum to make up for their smaller numbers and they inflicted terrible damage.
But Philip’s soldiers did not yield to panic. When men fell they were replaced from behind and the ranks closed like the water of a pool into which someone has thrown a pebble.
When the first wave had spent its force, Philip shouted, “Wheel left!” and his two rear phalanxes, like a boat that in midstream must swing round at right angles against the current, began a huge turn, pivoting on the center, to get ready to face the next attack, which was already beginning from the south.
Here the Elimoitai had a better field, straight and clear, and they faced only two of the Macedonian phalanxes. Here, and for the first time, Philip tasted real fear, like a copper coin on his tongue.
There is nowhere to run, he thought as the Elimiote horsemen came down on him—at fifty paces they seemed huge, like a race of giants. There is no escape from this. Yet somewhere he found the courage to think, and to issue the crucial order.
“Drop!” he shouted. The one word rippled over the front line as man after man went down on one knee, digging the butt of his pike into the earth behind him so that the point made a long row, about breast high, in front of them.
The javelin throwers now had a clear aim and they punished the Elimoitai cruelly. Men fell from their mounts, spilling backward as if pulled down from behind, and were crushed beneath the weight of their horses as these rolled over the ground, thrashing about with their hooves as they died.
The charge was blunted but by no means stopped. Many of the Elimiote riders would not be stopped, crashing through the Macedonian lines like a stone breaking down a wicker fence. Many held back, waiting for the confusion to give them a better opening. And even some of the fallen horses tumbled against the first row of shields and killed many men while avenging their death agonies.
Philip all at once felt his pike snap in two in his hands as it pierced the breast of a gray dappled warhorse. Its rider fell almost on top of him, and suddenly he found himself fighting for his life, scrambling to avoid the arc of the man’s sword. With a timing that was instinctive and unconsidered, he threw himself forward just as the Elimiote had finished his swing, wrestling him to the ground. Before he knew what he was doing, he had the shattered butt of his pike across the man’s throat and had crushed his windpipe. The Elimiote’s face was a purple, bulging horror by the time he stopped struggling, and there was blood running out of his right ear. Philip did not let up until he was sure the Elimiote was dead, but then, kneeling over the man’s chest, he felt a spasm of revulsion and shame so intense he almost vomited.
Not until he stood up again did Philip see that the front of his tunic was soaked in blood—there was a straight, shallow wound from his shoulder to his sternum where the man’s sword had nicked him. Somehow that made it better.
This will not kill me, he thought with a sudden flash of joy, and all at once he could not help but laugh. I will not die of this.
He found his shield lying in the dust at his feet. Someone handed him a pike and he went back to the front rank. The whole incident had taken no more than a few minutes.
“Straighten the lines!” he shouted, and somehow men who were fighting for their very lives found it in themselves to pick up the cry and to obey. Even in the midst of the Elimoitai’s furious attack, the phalanxes firmed up and their ranks closed.
Now it was the Elimiote cavalry that was in turmoil. It could not withdraw to regroup, and after its initial charge each of the two groups that were attacking the Macedonian left and right wings had degenerated into a milling horde. Its attack still dangerous but uncoordinated and unfocused, it would only harass the phalanxes like a swarm of gnats.
The third assault divided itself between the two wings of Philip’s infantry, which were almost at right angles from one another. It was another blow, but the phalanxes absorbed it, so that the battle was becoming a bloody stalemate in which the Elimoitai could not shatter the Macedonian ranks and the contest would only be decided, it seemed, when the last man was left standing.
It was then that the Macedonian cavalry attacked.
It had been kept in reserve and out of sight, behind the earthworks of the Macedonian camp, and now, when the Elimoitai had at last committed everything to the battle, it charged. Philip’s infantry, when they saw the Macedonian horses tearing over the ground, raised a cheer.
The surprise was total, as if the Elimoitai had forgotten that their enemy were Macedonians and knew how to ride as well as they. Only two hundred strong, they held together and punched a huge hole in the milling crowds of Elimiote horsemen. Suddenly there were dead everywhere, and one could almost smell the panic.
Yet the Elimoitai were fated to suffer another shock, for after their initial charge the Macedonians did not stop. They rode straight on until they had a clear field, then turned, keeping their wedged-shaped formation intact, and charged again.
But even before the second charge, it was over. The Elimiote cavalry had been reduced to a beaten, panic-stricken mob, mere targets for the Macedonian archers and javelin throwers. They simply were not able to offer any organized resistance and thus found themselves confronted with a plain choice—either flee or die. In their hundreds they fled.
It was only then that Philip could make out the figure of Derdas. The beaten king was perhaps fifty paces away, mo
unted on a beautiful tawny stallion he seemed barely able to control. He was waving his sword over his head and shouting, as if to rally his men, but in the confusion of battle, it was impossible to make out even the sound of his voice.
And it did not matter, for no one was listening. The Elimiote cavalry streamed back toward Aiane, in such numbers that the city gate was clogged with horses. At last Derdas too threw down his sword and ran.
It was then that Philip saw perhaps the last thing he might have suspected—the gates to Aiane beginning to close. The great wooden doors, pushing against that hysterical mass of men and animals, began to swing shut almost in Derdas’s face. Someone had given the order to seal the city, leaving the king and what was left of his men to their fate.
How many were left? Four, perhaps five hundred of the Elimoitai were still on their horses. Their refuge was cut off. They knew that unless they sued for peace they would stay only to be annihilated. The sole alternative was flight.
Derdas wheeled about on his great tawny stallion and shouted something—a curse, from the expression on his face. Then he and many others rode north, the only direction left open to them.
“Pursuit!” Philip shouted, and again the cry was taken up by many voices. Two companies of Macedonian cavalry promptly wheeled about and galloped after the king and his companions in flight. Their horses were fresher, but Derdas knew the terrain. Philip wanted him alive, yet the chances were good that he and his soldiers would escape into the mountains to be the problem of another day.
Their departure left the battlefield eerily quiet. Not even the Macedonians could bring themselves to cheer their victory. They waited in silence as, one after another, the Elimoitai dropped their swords in token of surrender.
One of them, a man of perhaps thirty, rode forward, toward the ranks of the Macedonian horsemen. It was obvious that he wished to parley.
Philip handed his pike to the man next to him—time to be a commander again.
“Which of you is leader?” the man shouted. He seemed surprised when the answer came from the ranks of the infantry.
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