‘What age am I waiting to reach? I will not get any
older, if tomorrow I hand myself over to the enemy.’
Xenophon
20
On the plain of Cunaxa, by the river Euphrates, dust lay fine in the air. It had been raised by the feet of hundreds of thousands marching, kicking and bleeding into the sandy ground. Clearchus halted the Greek square when he found himself unopposed for a time. At first, he thought it was because his men had crashed through another Persian regiment and reached open ground, but he could hear cheering somewhere off to the left, a thin and distant sound that could have come from either side.
For the first time that day, he lost his sense of the battleground. For the first time in his life, he wished he had a horse to help him see further than his men, already looking to him for orders in the lull. Fighting was still going on around them. Horns were being blown over on their right, which made no sense. Yet no one advanced on the Greeks. Imperial regiments marched past at the edges of their vision, but did not swing towards them. Behind the Greeks was a great plume of dust and annihilation: all the dead and dying who had already crossed their path. There would be no second challenge from those.
Clearchus rubbed his jaw, staring in all directions and hoping for something to become clear before he had to tell his men he had no idea what was going on. He had broken the Persian left wing, though he had no doubt some of the cavalry still licked their wounds nearby. He’d turned across the face of the imperial army to lunge for the king’s position, but then he and his men had found themselves lost in an ocean of men, so that they had to defend on all sides. The Greeks had trudged and fought for hours – and killed countless numbers. In a flickering glance, Clearchus thought he had ten thousand still, despite the dead. His Spartans had held the leading edge for longest, but they’d lost the smallest number. He felt his chest swell at that. Each man was known to him, so that each one left behind on the field was like losing a brother or a son. They did not overvalue themselves, he thought in pride. Clearchus reminded himself to mention it to Menon. The Thessalian still trudged along further back, glowering away like the sour old goat he was.
‘Orders, general?’ Proxenus called on his right hand.
Clearchus almost barked a reply, as he might have done if they were still under attack. Yet ahead and to the sides, great squares moved away from them, the moment they were close enough to recognise banners or the red cloaks of the front ranks. The dust had grown thick in places, so that Clearchus felt a stab of panic almost. To lose a sense of the battlefield was a common experience for men fighting for their lives, even for the generals trying to keep them in formation. To do so in the middle of the largest enemy force in the entire world was an error that could mean their destruction.
Clearchus saw Menon pointing at something over on their flank. The Spartan set his jaw and squinted, but he could see nothing out there where the dust was thickest. He had the sudden sense that only chaos swirled around them. With a grunt, he knew he had to stop and get his bearings once more.
‘Ares protect us here!’ he growled, then raised his voice to the parade-ground bellow the men expected from him. ‘In three … paces! Square to halt! Hellenes …! Halt!’
The Spartans crashed to a stop on a left pace and brought their right legs down hard alongside. All ranks stood to attention, with sandy air spiralling around them. A breeze came from the north then, bringing the pale dust against their faces so that they had to blink. Panting men found grit in their mouths and cursed softly. The land itself seemed against them in that moment.
Clearchus tensed at the sound of horses, but he knew the men approaching, at least by sight. He struggled to remember their names but could not bring them to mind. Both had been part of the fighting, that much was obvious. They were marked with blood, though it did not seem to be their own. The nobleman had a grim look, Clearchus noted, an expression the Spartan knew very well. The other was shaking his head in beaming delight, quite unable to believe what he had seen and done that day. Clearchus also knew that reaction, and was hard-pressed not to grin at a young man who had discovered he enjoyed war.
‘I won’t hang on your foot as if I’m begging for alms,’ he called to the two mounted Greeks. ‘Dismount. Tell me what’s happening. Forgive me, I cannot recall your names.’
‘Xenophon of Athens, general,’ the first one said as he swung down and took a grip on the reins. ‘My smiling companion is Hephaestus.’
‘What of the battle? The prince? In all this dust, my messengers have not reached me for an age.’
Clearchus glanced at the sun, which was growing red as it crept to the horizon. They had been riding and fighting all day and were exhausted. Only the prospect of another attack at any moment was keeping them awake.
‘Prince Cyrus fell, general,’ Xenophon said. He turned away rather than see the other man’s hopes crumble. ‘His brother took his head. I saw that much before I caught up with you. After that, the fighting … well, you know.’
Clearchus gave no sign of the grief and shame that rushed over him. The entire Greek force needed steady leadership in that moment. The news was already spreading through them and so he pressed his own reaction aside and smiled, though he looked older in that moment by ten years.
‘I do, son, yes. You’ve done well today. That matters.’
‘Does it, general?’ Xenophon asked. His voice was bitter, and in reply Clearchus smiled at him.
‘It means you’re alive to fight again tomorrow. Which matters to me, as I have only a few horses.’
The general looked around them, seeing once more the dark shapes of marching regiments in the distance, like pieces moving on a board where he no longer understood the rules. He felt his stomach contract at the thought. His Greeks were far from home, surrounded by the greatest military force the world could assemble – led by a god-emperor with every reason to want them cut into small pieces. Clearchus chuckled to himself.
‘The gods do like to test us, don’t they?’ he said.
Xenophon looked warily at him, clearly wondering if he’d lost his mind.
‘Mount up, lads,’ Clearchus went on. ‘We are on a hostile plain, with enemies all around. All we can do at this moment is march back to our camp. I have a little folding desk there that I do not want to see gracing a Persian tent tomorrow. Now, the setting sun is directly behind us, so we have been turned to face east again. The order is to turn about – and march fast and hard to the camp. If anyone gets in our way, charge and kill them.’
Across the Greek forces, captains and pentekosters echoed the order, turning the square in place.
‘Spartans to the front!’ Clearchus bellowed.
Menon called something in angry reply, but it was almost a ritual between them by then. Clearchus made a note to punch him in the face if they both survived – or buy him a drink, one or the other. Some of Menon’s men hooted as the Spartans came through to take up the lead once more. No, Clearchus decided. He would knock the bastard right out.
The Greeks were weary by then. It showed in stumbling steps, in the way spears dragged on the ground or were leaned upon as shepherds used a staff. Only the Spartans held theirs alongside, ready to attack. It was why Clearchus had put them to the front, though they’d borne the brunt of fighting all day. They were fitter by far than the others, in his estimation. That mattered most at the end of a battle, when men felt their limbs grow heavy and their feet become slow, so that they shuffled along where once they had walked like leopards.
In tight square formation, they marched across the battlefield, heading west. Dust clouds still roiled and spread, hiding the enemy from view. At times, the Greeks seemed to walk alone through a vast and empty landscape.
Clearchus and Proxenus looked for the Persian regiments that had come to that plain with Cyrus. They expected to encounter General Ariaeus at any moment as they crossed to where he had stood earlier that day. Yet the field lay empty before them.
Clearchus k
ept a count of paces in his head on the way back, though he knew such tallies were notoriously unreliable in a running battle. He still couldn’t work out where he’d ended up as he turned towards the camp. More than ten thousand were still there, unprotected, waiting for them. Many of his men had friends and lovers amongst them, but Clearchus had the responsibility. He could not leave them to be slaughtered, raped or taken as slaves, though he had considered it. That was the fate of those who lost battles, and Prince Cyrus had certainly lost, if the news was true. Clearchus clenched his jaw, refusing to examine the swing from triumph to disaster while it was still so fresh. His Greeks had gone through the enemy. He had been untouchable, the dream of every officer who had ever trained men – to achieve such a superiority of arms that you were unstoppable in the field. To have victory snatched away in the moment of that joy was utterly brutal. He could not think of it, for all a small voice within told him it was his task to do so. For once, he refused the greater vision and concentrated on one thing, like a junior officer. He would march to the camp. He would save the camp followers – and only after that would he consider their awful position, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by the enemy.
No one came to block their path in an hour or so of marching. The dust was beginning to settle around them, though the sun was setting as well, threatening to leave them blind. The two Athenian horsemen had rounded up half a dozen mounted scouts. All the riders of the prince’s personal guard had vanished and, apart from those few, the entire Greek force was on foot.
Clearchus almost called a charge when he caught sight of shields and armour ahead, but it was the battle line from that morning, or the remnants of it. Men who had gone to the plain of Cunaxa with pride and courage and the sun before them lay sightless in the dust, their skin already yellow and cold. Gingerly, with winces and shaking heads, the Greeks had to step over lines of the dead. That point was where the Persian regiments of Cyrus had first crashed together with those of King Artaxerxes. The dead were indistinguishable, though they’d carried other banners and come to that field to serve different brothers. They lay together, so tangled in death that no man could have told them apart.
One or two still moaned, their voices hoarse or reduced to a whisper. They called for water, though the Greeks had none and would not have offered the precious resource if they had. One man called for them to kill him and his prayer was answered by a Corinthian, with a slash across his throat. None of them would forget that silent part of the march, barely a mile, but over an earth strewn with strips and hills and hollows of the dead. They saw fingers lying on the sand. One of the Greeks picked up a hand on impulse, but his companions cried out in disgust and told him to throw it back. He did so with the utmost reluctance. Many more gathered fallen knives or helmets, especially if they had lost their own. Trophies were a part of war and Clearchus had to threaten them with execution on the spot when he saw some dip down to wrestle rings off dead men.
One of the few moments of satisfaction was when they came across a group of Persian scavengers engaged in the same stripping of the dead. The men looked up in horror as they realised the forces marching towards them were not their own, but the Greek enemy coming back out of the dust. Clearchus did not have to give an order. His Spartan front rank rolled right over them, leaving them with those they had tried to rob. Yet he feared the same would be happening at the camp and he pushed the men faster.
Twilight was upon them by the time they saw carts and tents. The camp lay some miles behind the battlefield and he and his men had marched right through their first steps of the day, an age and a tragedy before.
Their position had not gone unremarked, though no new challenge had come. The Persians were not short of horses and Clearchus had seen them riding close, counting numbers, gauging what strength remained. They’d vanished then for a time, no doubt to report the presence of the Greeks still on the field to their master. He’d set his jaw. There was nothing he could do about that. More horsemen had appeared after a while, cantering along the edges at a distance of a couple of hundred paces. They did not seem to fear archers or slingers. Clearchus would have loved to charge them, but with his men on foot, it would have been an exercise in exhaustion. They needed to reach the camp for water and food – and anyone alive they could protect. The rest had to wait.
The Spartan swallowed a lump in his throat when he saw the camp growing ahead of them. Ten thousand men, women and children – a town in the wilderness, all waiting for news of a great victory and a new king. It was not to be.
The air was clearer there, with the fighting all behind them, though the light was fading. Clearchus felt a vast sense of relief as he marched towards fires and tents. He could not let himself think about the prince, not then. The pain was too recent and the loss too great.
His head came up suddenly at the sound of horns. Over the hills ahead of his marching forces came a dark line of Persian horsemen, with exactly the idea he’d had. They didn’t know the prince’s gold was all gone. They imagined the camp contained the wealth of a royal house. Others would take the young and the comely as slaves. The slaughter would be terrible for the rest.
The Spartans stretched aching legs in the gloom and took a firmer grip on their swords. The enemy cavalry would reach the camp before them and yet they could not fly, nor sprint to waste their strength and arrive too weak to fight. All they could do was lope on at the best speed possible, while screams rang out ahead.
Clearchus saw the two young Athenians lead the scouts out, drawing swords as they galloped through a narrow stream and in amongst the tents of the camp.
‘Good lads,’ Clearchus muttered, feeling his chest ache and his legs grow heavy. He had marched and fought all day. He shrugged as he went. It didn’t matter. Only death would stop him and that came for everyone.
‘Ready spears! Ready shields!’ he called to his Spartans.
Sweat ran in rivers from him, making him shine, as heat burned in his lungs. The Greeks answered with a great coughing roar as they reached the outskirts of the camp, filling each lane between the tents and sighting the enemy.
The Persian horsemen had been enjoying the best sport they could have hoped to see. A camp without defenders, in the middle of flat, dry ground. They’d galloped in as hunters and whooped to one another. Then they saw the red-cloaks coming at them between the tents and found they could not ride clear. Wherever they turned, there were more soldiers, hacking swords into their legs, throwing spears that snatched companions away. It was indeed a slaughter, but not the one they had expected.
Clearchus heard Persian officers roar new orders, calling their men back from what they now believed was an ambush. Both forces had approached the camp from opposite sides; the Persian horsemen withdrew the way they had come. They’d found no gold, but they drove small groups of shrieking women and children as they went, trying to shepherd them back to a greater force. For their part, the prisoners darted away whenever they saw a gap in the chaos. They called for help at the tops of their voices and Clearchus drove his Greeks on through the camp, forcing them to keep moving. He had no idea how many enemy there were. For all he knew, a hundred thousand horsemen lay over the hills around them.
Only the shock of attack kept his momentum. He drove hard against Persians still trying to capture slaves, breaking up the small groups. Many of the women were speared by those who laid hands on them, rather than be allowed to escape back to their rescuers. It was a bloody business and the darkness was swallowing them all and making each moment harder than the last.
Clearchus found himself walking alongside Proxenus, perhaps because they were of a similar age, while younger men raced ahead. They were both panting like bellows, each as red-faced as the other. They exchanged a look that was part pain, part amusement. They could barely stand – and yet they could not stop, so they went on.
Ahead, Proxenus saw two young women of surpassing beauty dragged out of a tent by a trio of black-clad soldiers. One of the Imperials was fe
stooned with gold cups and jewellery he had found. He took one look at the two Greeks advancing and mounted up, digging in his heels.
Half a dozen Persian horsemen rushed past in the next lane. Clearchus groaned as he heard them shouting out what they had seen. They would swing back for such a glimpse of wealth. Before they could be reinforced, he attacked, batting aside the sword of the Persian who lunged at him. The soldier was forced to release his grip on a woman’s hair when Clearchus hacked through his forearm. The man screamed then, the sound quickly cut off.
The other woman ran away into the darkness, but the dark-haired one stood, panting wildly, her eyes showing the whites as she rubbed her wrists in a nervous gesture.
‘Prince Cyrus will reward you for saving me,’ she said.
Clearchus sighed, feeling the wave of grief and anger rise once more, threatening to drown him.
‘No he won’t,’ he replied.
He saw the woman’s eyes widen and her breathing grow shallow. She took a step away from him and he reached out to her automatically.
‘Tell me your name, girl. Mine is Clearchus.’
‘Pallakis,’ she said. She half-turned from him, checking the way was clear. He knew she would bolt.
‘There are Persians back there, Pallakis. They will not treat you well if you run to them. Do you understand me? I came back for the camp followers. You can come with us.’
He watched as she struggled with the desire to run from bloody knives and horrors all around her. He remembered seeing her before, wearing filmy gauzes that revealed as much as they hid her form. With Cyrus away from the camp, Pallakis wore a simple dress of white and gold that ended at her thighs, belted at the waist. She wore strap sandals but no jewellery, nor paint beyond a dark line around her eyes. Clearchus preferred the look of her day off, perhaps because it reminded him of the women at home.
The men of Proxenus and Menon still tore into every tent, killing any Persian who had thought to shelter there until they had passed. It was savage work, with muffled screams and the sounds of struggle always close around them. Clearchus saw the young woman shudder as she looked at him, her gaze suddenly fixed.
The Falcon of Sparta Page 24