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Just at nightfall, Polystratus came in with eight light carts drawn by mules. He had another twenty mules – all the stock from one of my pater’s breeding operations. So the next morning, still wet, by the light of roaring fires, I put donkeys in the shafts of every cart. I gave the useless donkeys to the farmer whose fields we’d wrecked by camping there and we were away, moving almost twice as fast as we’d moved the day before.
One of the officers who was supposed to be ‘under’ me was Gordias, a mercenary from Ephesus. I’d never met him until we marched – now he rode with me. We were crossing flat ground, just short of the foothills of Paeonia, and he rode along, making jokes and observations, and I felt pretty competent.
‘You read Xenophon, lord?’ he asked me, out of nowhere.
‘ The March to the Sea? Of course. And On Hunting, and The Cavalry Commander.’ I ran through all the titles I’d read.
‘Ever formed a box with infantry?’ he asked.
I had to laugh. ‘Gordias, when I ordered your phalangites to cut firewood yesterday, it was the first order I’ve ever given to grown men.’
He nodded. ‘You’re doing all right. Do more. Let’s drill a little – can’t hurt, and in bad weather, it’s best to keep the lads too busy and tired to think. Let’s form the box around your baggage and see how we do.’
So we did. And we didn’t do very well.
Not my fault. Nothing to do with me. But I felt their failure in my bones. They were not a regular taxeis, but a bundle of recruits with some veteran mercenaries with recent land-grants mixed in. The veterans hadn’t taken charge yet, but were still living their own way and ignoring the useless yokels they had as file partners, and the useless yokels were still too scared of the fire-eaters to ask them for help.
They’d never formed a hollow square as a group – the recruits had done it some time or other, and the veterans a hundred times, but never together. The first time, the left files folded in too fast and the front files formed the front face and walked off, leaving the rest of the box to form without them.
Halt, reform.
The second time, the rear face of the hollow square was left behind by the rest of us. And the baggage contrived to plug the road, so that reforming took an hour.
Halt, reform, lunch. Rain.
After lunch, we got the hollow square formed – pretty much by having every officer mount up, ride around and push groups of men, and sometimes individuals, into the spot where they had to go. For almost an hour, we marched across northern Macedon in a hollow square, with our baggage protected, and then the whole thing started to shred like a reed roof in a high wind – the left face of the square ran into a marsh and the right face just kept going.
I couldn’t believe how fast we fell apart.
And then I realised that the sun was dipping and I hadn’t chosen a camp.
Zeus! So much to remember. Luckily, Polystratus had taken a dozen Thracians and gone off on his own and found a campsite.
We got our tents up before last light, and fires lit, with four hundred men up on the hillsides gathering wood and another two hundred standing to, ready to cover them. The men were wet and tired and angry, and I heard a lot about myself I didn’t want to hear. Two days of cold rain would make the Myrmidons mutinous.
But when the fires were lit and roaring, when I had wine served out from the carts, when the woodpiles were as tall as houses – well, my popularity increased. The wine wasn’t very good, but in a cold rain on a windswept night, it was delicious. I’d been suckered on the wine, too.
Our tents weren’t much – just a wedge of linen, no front or back. They kept the water off your face, and we put four men in each – and no tents for slaves or shield-bearers. They were just wet. The footsloggers weren’t much better, and the younger pages – I’d been left with all the babies – were soaked to the skin and didn’t have the experience to stay warm or dry.
I was up all night.
The next day was the third day of hard rain, and we marched anyway – lighter and faster yet. More wheels had been built during the night – Gordias kept his wheelwrights at it, I guess. Anyway, now we had spare wheels in one cart, and the wheelwrights, instead of marching with their units, stayed with the carts, so that as soon as a tyre came loose or an axle cracked, we pulled that cart out of the line, surrounded it with Thracian auxiliaries and repaired it from spares while the rest of the column marched on.
We made excellent time that day – gravel roads, better carts, and we were already better at marching. Polystratus found a camp, and we were almost in the highlands. The rain let up for a few hours, and the tents went up on dryish ground – I put half the army out to cut pine boughs and gather last year’s ferns and any other bedding they could find, and I strung the pages across the hillsides as guards.
I had halted well before dark, having learned my lesson the night before. Besides, I was tired myself.
Gordias was so useful I began to suspect that my pater had sent him to watch me. Polystratus, too – he reminded me of things every minute, like a wife. But I was getting it done – I could see beef being butchered in the army’s central area, and the cooks collecting the beef in their kettles, and already I could see local farmers coming into the camp with produce to sell, which we’d missed the night before by making camp too late. It was all ru
Down the valley ahead of us, more fires leaped into being, and they weren’t ours.
I had to assume that was Alexander and the pages and Thessalians. But at the same time, I’d be a fool not to act as if those fires were enemies’.
The headman of the Thracians was called Alcus. That means something like ‘Butthead’ in Thracian. But Alcus and Polystratus got along well enough. I sent Polystratus for him, and after a delay that seemed eternal, he rode up and I showed him the fires to the north and west.
He nodded, tugged his beard, looked at Polystratus.
‘You want us to go and look,’ he said finally.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you are the best suited for it, you know this country. Besides . . .’
Gordias put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t explain,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell them what to do.’
Sigh. So much to learn!
‘Go any way you think best, but tell me who set those fires,’ I ordered.
Alcus pursed his lips, blew out a little puff and pulled his elaborately patterned cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘Boys won’t be happy,’ he said.
I was freezing cold, I hadn’t slept in two days and I was scared spitless that I’d run into a Thracian army.
‘Fuck that,’ I snapped. ‘Get your arse down the valley and get me a report.’
The Thracian officer looked at me for a few heartbeats, spat carefully – not a gesture of contempt, more like contemplation – and said, ‘Yes, lord,’ in a way that might have been taken for an insult.
When he was gone, Gordias laughed. ‘Not bad, lord,’ he said. ‘A little temper goes a long way, as long as you control it and it doesn’t control you.’
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Pater had hired this man as a military tutor. I never again ran across a mercenary so interested in teaching a kid.
An hour passed in a few heartbeats. In that time, I had to decide whether or not to keep the firewood and bedding collection going, or to call all the work parties in. If it turned out to be the prince up the valley, I’d look like a fool, and as the rain had started again, my men would have a miserable night. On the other hand, if five thousand Thracians were sneaking along the hillsides towards me, I’d lose my whole command when they swept us away in one attack – I had fewer than fifty men on guard in camp, and nothing else except the pages, and most of them were unblooded teenagers.