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I could hear them behind me.
‘Let the fucking Medes do it,’ one old man said. ‘They seem to like it.’
But soldiers always said such things before a fight.
It was a calm, clear morning. I could smell the sharp smell of our morning fires, and while it promised to be hot, the early-morning air was still quite pleasant. The river made a low growl off to my right, and we had so many horses in our army that they made more noise than the enemy.
But not more noise than a battery of war engines. Twenty engines loosed their bolts and baskets all together, about a stade to my left, and their noise drowned the river and the horses – the whip-crack of the torsion engines, the louder, deeper thud as the catapults released their heavier payloads. The engineers had opened breaches the night before and kept the range, despite the workings of temperature and dew on the torsion ropes. Dust rose all along the top of the breaches, as the gravel and the larger stones struck home. Someone was hit – he lay in the breach screaming.
An archer on the wall tried a long shot. He must have been good – his first shaft struck a horse length from my right foot. But his second shaft fell shorter yet, and he stopped.
We weren’t exactly going to surprise them.
I exchanged embraces and arm clasps with my friends in the front ranks. Then I turned to the pezhetaeroi.
‘Let’s get this done,’ I said. Perhaps not my best speech.
All I got in return was a low growl, but that was fine. Professionals.
I looked at Laertes, another former groom who now carried the trumpet and acted as my hyperetes, because Theophilus had been promoted to decarch.
He nodded once and sounded it, and we were off.
I didn’t see any reason to hurry, since my real attack was going in with Cyrus, and the trumpet was his signal to start up the dry gully. We marched quite well. My shield hurt my shoulder. I was reaching an age when the accumulation of my wounds had begun to bother me almost every day. Thaïs had made me concoctions – they didn’t all work, but the thought was there. Now I had nothing but what Philip of Acarnia gave me. More and more, he used opium for everything. I didn’t want opium, so I put up with a lot of aches and pains.
Four thousand sets of boots, going up the gravel to the fort.
Arrows began to fall on us. They’d been lofted high to get over our shields.
The men behind me raised their shields.
I began to go forward faster. It is the natural reaction to incoming arrows.
I was almost to the base of the main breach. We’d pounded three of them at last light, and the batteries had opened up again at first light, pounding the mud-brick wall to dirt and wrecking the attempts at repair. Baskets of gravel had cleared the workers off the walls.
We were quite good at sieges, by the Jaxartes.
Even as I reached the ditch at the base of the devastated mud-brick wall, I saw that the pioneers had filled it in with fascine bundles, and crossbow bolts were going over my head into the archers on the walls shooting down at me. It didn’t make me feel safe, but it is reassuring to a soldier to know that the other parts of the machine are functioning to support him.
The poor bastard in the breach had been unlucky. A five-talent machine had hit his feet square on and effectively pulped them, and he lay in an immense pool of his own blood and screamed. His screams were horrible, because his fate represented exactly the sort of thing we all feared.
I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.
May someone do as much for me.
Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields fullof arrows, and behind them were a dozen more officers and gentlemen.
The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.
There was no one behind my officers.
The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.
There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.
No thanks, I thought.
So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.
I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.
I was wrong.
It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.
And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.
It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.
The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.
But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.
Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.
Laertes fell atop him.
My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one of my fine Athenian spears, all blue and gilt work, with a long, heavy head and a vicious butt-spike. The haft was octagonal, which allowed me to know where the edges of the spearhead were without looking, and I’d been practising with the thing for a year.
The proper Homeric thing to do was to die standing over my friends, but I elected to go in among the archers and live a little longer.
I leaped forward from where I had straddled Marsyas. The Sogdians’ use of archery to finish us off had caused them to draw back instead of pressing the last little knot of us, and that left me space that shock troops wouldn’t have given me. I let my shield fall from my arm – it was full of arrows, and one of them was in my lower bicep by a finger’s width.
Then I put my left hand near the head of my spear as if I were boar-hunting, and stepped into their ranks. I didn’t stop moving, and Ares lent me his strength, and for as long as it takes a man to drink his canteen dry, I rampaged through their ranks, too close to be shot, too fast to be tracked, and I thrust with the spear two-handed, and cutwith the spearhead as if it were the point of a sword. I felt pain – I was taking blows, and my forearms burned, but to stop was to surrender to death.
Marsyas rose from the pile of our dead, his sword in his hand. I saw him – a flash, but a complete impression, because his armour was beautifully worked, and because his battle cry was ‘Helen’, of all things.
And then Hephaestion came up behind Marsyas, and behind him were the hypaspitoi. They ploughed over the Sogdians in the breach and I was swept along with them into a fort that had, by the time I was in control of myself, already fallen.