I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘By the end of the week, they’ll be your farms,’ I said. ‘Why burn them?’
‘He’ll raise his cousins and his war band and we’ll — accomplish nothing.’ He all but pouted. He didn’t seem like a man in his mid-twenties, but like a very young, very angry man.
I put my arm around him. He fought me for a moment, and then he grunted, and I saw he was crying.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’ll get him.’
That’s what leaders do. We sound positive.
The Nubians were away in the wolf’s tail of dawn. We moved along the road between the fields — a dry, sun-baked track. There was a storm brewing away to the south, and thunder sounded in the distance like the grumbling of the gods.
Around mid-morning, Ka brought back another dozen horses, and Daud and Sittonax took two of them and rode off with another dozen men who could ride, doubling our scout force.
A ridge rises from the plain, about forty stades inland, and we had marched around to the east of it, and now we passed along it, keeping the ridge between us and the sea. We joined the ‘main road’ — I use the term very loosely — south of a fortified settlement called Pista.
If all was going well, our ships should be off Dyrachos by now, snapping up any fishing boats in the offing and making trouble. And being very visible. In late afternoon, after marching maybe seventy stadia, we crossed the Ardaxanos River — in late summer, it was scarcely deserving of the name. We moved right up until dark, and we camped at the top of a low hill twenty-five stadia from the town of Dyrachos. We hadn’t seen any opposition, and with twenty horsemen covering a broad arc before us, I didn’t really expect ambush. At nightfall, Daud took all the mounted men on a sweep to make sure we weren’t going to be surprised in the morning.
My intention was that we storm the town at daybreak, but the truth on the ground was very different from Neoptolymos’s description. He remembered the ridge as running right down to the town, but it wasn’t that simple, and there was open ground all the way to the coast from where we were camped. I stood on the hilltop in the last light, looking at the sea in the distance and worrying. We’d eaten our rations, and even plundering the farms we passed wasn’t feeding us. Really efficient plundering takes time, and slows a march to a crawl, and we had moved fast. Moving a force fast requires discipline and supplies.
In the morning, we would be out of food. Further, our rendezvous with our ships was for noon the next day, and if we missed it… Well, things were about to grow very complicated indeed.
I didn’t sleep well. I dreamed of the Keltoi girl throwing herself over the side. And Miltiades, the night after Marathon, saying he was with the gods. And Lydia… not speaking, but just looking at me with a face full of hate.
I rose in the dark and prayed. I’m not much of a prayer, but that morning, I felt close to death. When I rose, my joints hurt, my hands ached and the old wound in my leg burned. And away to the south was a line of dark clouds that boded ill for a sailor.
There was a sheep that had strayed onto our hill, and I walked down, trapped it against a cliff and grabbed it. I built a small fire and sacrificed the sheep to Zeus and burned its thigh bones.
And took the meat up the hill for my mess, of course.
We got a late start. Our sentries weren’t as alert as they ought to have been: we’d awakened slowly and the sun was rising by the time we cooked my sheep. Nor could I feed mutton to two hundred men from one animal. Sittonax took a dozen horsemen out, and they were back before they left, riding hard.
Brasidas spotted them returning and ordered his men to arm.
I was still greasy from mutton as I saw the dust cloud. My pais helped me into my thorax. I put on the whole panoply: it was obvious we were going to fight.
So much for my careful strategy.
Sittonax rode in about the time that I had my arm-harness on. He rode up, controlling his horse effortlessly, and dropped off.
‘Six hundred men. No kind of order, not much armour, a dozen horsemen. Headed this way.’ He shrugged. ‘I think they’ve marched all night.’
Six hundred?
I scratched my jaw. ‘Officers!’ I bellowed.
Neoptolymos looked at me. He was in his magnificent armour, and he made a brilliant show. He looked like Achilles’ son. ‘He has raised all his people,’ he said simply. ‘He has his retainers, the local lords, and his best slaves. If you had let me raise my relatives, we’d match him spear for spear.’ He shrugged.
Well, hubris is always with us. All I’d done by marching around the mountain was to give him time to raise his troops. Of course, I had given my own troops time to shake off their sea legs and eat a few hot meals.
‘Right,’ I said, looking around. ‘We have half the heroes of Marathon. We have armour, discipline and a good night’s sleep.’
Cimon raised an eyebrow. His father used to say that all that mattered in a land fight was how many men you had.
But Cimon was good enough not to say so.
‘We’ll move right at them,’ I said. ‘Right down the road. When we’re close — really close — we form up and go right in. No mucking about and no shouting insults. They’ll try and get formed and go around our flanks. All we need to do is get Epidavros and kill him — right?’
Neoptolymos nodded.
Brasidas nodded, too. ‘I get it,’ he said.
‘Form a good phalanx,’ I said. ‘Daud — you and Ka and Sittonax stay mounted and harass them. Pick off any man on the edge of their formation — get behind them and shoot arrows. Best of all, don’t let their right flank form.’
Ka wrinkled his brow.
Daud shrugged.
‘Get in close, and crowd them, and when they come at you, ride away. Then go back. Don’t let them form their line.’ I’d watched the Saka and the Persians do it. I knew what a handful of horsemen could do to infantry.
I put a stick down on the ground. ‘This is their column, marching,’ I said. ‘At some point, when we are close enough, they pick a field and start to form. Right? And you get in on their right, and make trouble — right in their faces — while they want to be shouting orders and getting the laggards to stand in a shield wall.’
Cimon laughed. ‘Cavalry tactics from a sea-wolf.’
We ate the last of our stale bread with the last of our olive oil, and drank the last drops of our wine. To Neoptolymos, I said, ‘We’re lucky.’
He glared at me.
‘Your uncle could have cowered in his town. We’d have had to go to the ships.’ I was watching the storm to the south. It might not be today, but it was coming.
‘You think we can win?’ he asked me.
I shrugged. ‘Of course!’ I said.
When your wife asks if you think she is beautiful, what do you say?
Cimon came up to me as we prepared to march. The sun was already hot. My hands were shaking. He looked at the sky. ‘I was made for better things than dying here,’ he said.
I nodded. I remember that moment. I slapped his shoulderpiece. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Don’t die.’
He laughed, and that laugh spread over the column, because every man could hear me.
‘Let’s go!’ I shouted, and we were off.
We came down off our hill — some of you maidens may wonder why I didn’t hold the hilltop, and the answer is water. At any rate, we raced along the road, as fast as men in armour can move. We were fit, strong men and we could go quite fast.
Two stadia past the foot of the hill, we crossed a little stream. I made everyone drink, and fill their canteens. Then I stood and shook. I swear that the minutes it took those men to fill my canteens were as long as any minutes in my life. Command has a level of fear that is absent in mere service. In command, it is just you and the gods.
Two more stadia, and Daud came back to report that the enemy were just there and moving slowly, over the next low ridge. There were sheep on the ridge, and I turned to the mercenaries and Brasidas.
‘We’re going to run up that little hill,’ I said.
Brasidas nodded and checked the laces on his sandals.
Word spread down the column. Men took a slug from their canteens. And then we ran. It wasn’t a sprint, or a hoplitodromos. And almost immediately, men fell out — greaves have to fit.
A column of men in armour makes a remarkable noise, running. It raises the heart, that noise — the feet pounding together, the slap of leather and bronze. It is the sound of Ares — one of his many sounds.
Men jogging towards the enemy may tire, but they don’t have time to feel fear. Because it all hurts.
We ran up the hill. We lost about twenty men, but we reached the crest of the low ridge on the road well ahead of our enemies.
I turned to my pais. ‘Catch me a sheep,’ I said.
He nodded. Ran off.
The top of the ridge had a definite crest, and it was open — short, cropped grass rolled away down the far side. The Illyrians were coming up the hill in no particular order, and by Ares, they were close. We weren’t a stade apart. Our field was bounded by scrubby woods, that had once been an olive grove, to the north — they ran most of the way down the hill — and a low stone wall on the south of our hill that I had to hope would anchor my line. I assumed it wouldn’t have to hold anyone long, because my cavalry would slow their right flank, where, if they were like Greeks, all their best men would be.
‘Form your front,’ I called.
Men were breathing hard, but they got it done — well. Brasidas ran effortlessly along the front of his forming line, slapping, cajoling — suddenly his mouth was full of words. I noted he never swore or defamed a man. He said things like, ‘Well run, Philios!’ and, ‘You’re looking like Ares come to earth, Draco!’
Cimon had his handful of Athenians on the far right. Our front rank was brilliantly armoured, and in the centre, Neoptolymos stood out from the line. He raised his spear, and screamed a long war cry.
In the enemy line, men stopped and stared.
Of course, until that moment, Epidavros and his men thought we were a raiding party.
Neoptolymos took off his helmet, and his blond hair shone in the sun. He shouted again. I’ve heard him tell the story, so I know he was challenging his uncle to single combat.
Illyrians do that sort of thing.
But Epidavros didn’t get a chance to play the hero, or the coward, because there was a rumble, like the thunder of the day before, and suddenly all of our mounted men burst from the end of the old olive grove and rode for the flank of the column.
Battles — especially small battles — can be very complicated animals indeed. And the notion that men can really plan what happens in them is sheer hubris. Daud was on the wrong flank. He had confused — as many amateurs do — our right flank for the enemy’s right flank.
Balanced against that, his surprise as he appeared was total. The whole enemy force flinched. And he and Sittonax and Ka, Doola, Seckla and their men didn’t look like twenty-four horsemen. They looked like a thousand. Their hooves made the earth shake.
They didn’t charge home. They rode right past the tail of the column on the road, throwing javelins and shooting bows, and they circled around in short reins and came back, riding along the flank of the column. Seckla took a wound where a brave Illyrian slave stepped out of the column and stabbed at him — they were that close. But the javelins and bows put a dozen men in the dust.
‘Forward,’ I shouted.
Our line went forward.
Sometimes, it works.
Our line was formed, and theirs was not. Our cavalry had scared them, and Neoptolymos was palpably alive. To my mind, everything that was going to go our way was going our way, and it wasn’t going to get any better if we stood there at the top of the hill.
We moved at a fast walk, and our phalanx spread out. We’d only practised together a few times, on beaches and the like, so our order wasn’t perfect — gaps showed immediately.
But we were the Pyrrhiche dance team of Plataea compared to our opponents, who hadn’t yet pulled their helmets down over their faces.
Daud’s men turned like a snake for a third pass at the enemy. Seckla and another man reined in their horses and slipped off at the top of the hill. The Illyrians started to form their line.
The back end of the enemy column was slow to get the word, or perhaps hesitant. A gap opened between the centre of the enemy line and what should have been their left.
Daud put his heels to his horse and raced for the gap with all my horsemen on his tail. The Illyrians at the back of the column, who by all rights should have panicked and run, decided instead to charge — uphill, by Ares — into my horsemen.
Except for fifty or so of them, who started killing the others from behind.
Of course, Epidavros had placed his least trustworthy men on his left. Neoptolymos’s cousins.
I slowed our advance. I needed cohesion, not impact. ‘Dress the line!’ I roared. ‘On me!’
The phalanx, such as it was, closed up. Men lapped their shields over their neighbour’s to the left, and our advance slowed as men turned half sideways, and began the crab-walk that hoplites use when they are at the synaspis — the closer order.
The best-armoured man on the other side — I assumed he was Epidavros — called something to his men, and they roared and charged us.
An Illyrian charge is a fearful thing, and not very Greek. Or rather, perhaps it is exactly what we looked like at Marathon, when we ran at the Persians. But there were a lot of them, and they came at us screaming, and their front rank men had armour and big spears — they were big men, too.
Exactly opposite me was a towering figure, like a giant. A head taller than me, with shoulders like an ox and a giant aspis the size of a table in a taverna.
I hate fighting big men.
But my daimon was there, too. And as they roared and ran at us, I was Arimnestos of Plataea and no man’s slave or chattel. And this was my fight.
When he was three paces away, I threw my heavy spear. He was running. Try to run with your aspis covering you.
He took it in the chest. He had a bronze thorax, and his last thought was the shock that my spear went through it.
Second to last thought, I guess. He stood and looked at it for long enough that I stabbed him in the throat with my second spear, ripped it clear and stepped up onto his back to kill my second man, a roaring madman all teeth and rage. He seemed to be trying to embrace my shield. I gave him my spear tip, instead, and my spear broke, and while I drew my sword, my line gave a great roar and pushed forward. We had the hill. We were four deep, a forest of skilled spearmen, and a great many Illyrians died in the first seconds of that meeting. The line gave a push, and suddenly we were ten paces down the hill, and men were stumbling back.
Epidavros roared for his men to stand. He was a few feet from me, faced half away, and Neoptolymos shoved Brasidas aside, took his uncle’s thrust on his shield and thrust back, but the well-armoured man fell back a step and made a good shield parry.
Fair fights are for fair men.
I reached out with the tip of my sword and slapped his sauroter so that his spear turned in his hand. He half turned — the panic obvious in his open-faced helmet — as Neoptolymos’s second thrust took him in the cheek, carving through his teeth and jaw and into the back of his throat.
I knew, in some trained portion of my mind, that I had left the enemy to my left for too long, and I turned my head and thrust with my shield just in time to catch a thrust coming from that direction, but Gaius, bless him, was there, and he powered forward, shield-cut the man, forcing him to raise his aspis, and then cut beneath it into the man’s leg And we had won.
War is chaos, and a battlefield is so much a piece of the outer night that no man can really tell you exactly what happened in any one place, but from what I saw, it appeared that Neoptolymos’s Illyrian cousins cut into the back of the attempted charge at Daud’s cavalry, panicking the ene
my left, which then became a mob of frightened men and not part of an army. Daud’s charge — foolish under other circumstances — passed into the gap, killing few enemies but sewing despair. And Neoptolymos killed his uncle, our front broke their front and they ran.
I doubt the fighting lasted as long as it takes a man in armour to run the hoplitodromos. We didn’t win because of my brilliant plan; or discipline, or armour, or the hill behind us, or our cavalry. All contributed a little, but the will of the gods and a healthy draught of luck won us the day.
And the furies, their wings and claws beating at Epidavros. May he rot.
22
I’d like to say that Neoptolymos forgave his uncle’s relatives and retainers, but he didn’t, and there was a lot of blood in the next few hours. His cousins gathered around him, shouting out each indignity that they had endured at Epidavros’s hands, and they mutilated the man’s corpse. Then they started to execute the prisoners — slave and free, noble and peasant.
I could have stopped it.
But I didn’t.
I suppose that I had secretly wanted Dagon to be in the harbour. He wasn’t. But there were three Carthaginian ships, all small coasters, and we took them from the land while Dionysus closed the harbour mouth, and as the storm came up at sunset, our triremes came onto the harbour beach, safe from the storm, which raged for three days with Adriatic ferocity while the streets of the stronghold ran with blood.
I know philosophers who praise the Illyrians and the other barbarians for the purity of their way of life — the honesty of a world where a man’s strength is in his hands and his weapons. As a warrior, I realize that this may sound hopelessly pious, but as the rain-thinned blood ran down the cobbled streets of Dyrachos, and Epidavros’s relatives, retainers and womenfolk were hunted, raped and executed, I could only think of them all as barbarians. It can happen in Greece. It has happened in Greece. But by the gods, we do what we can to avoid it.
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