God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great (50 page)

It was a brilliant stratagem.

I’d say we had five carts on our frontage. The fact that the pass was ‘v’-shaped – an inverted ‘v’ like a lambda – with the point at the top of the pass, the narrowest part, and the floor of the pass vaguely rounded out by a small watercourse, meant that all the carts tended to run towards the centre.

Of the five rolled at us, two collided and stopped on the slope above us, and two deviated off towards the pezhetaeroi and vanished.

And one came right at us.

‘Lie down!’ I roared. It seemed like an insane thing to do, with a ton of cart roaring and bouncing down at us, but Aristotle and Alexander agreed that the wheels should pass over us so fast we’d be uninjured. I got down and put my aspis, sloped slightly, over my head and upper back.

The front right wheel hit my aspis and went over it, then right over my butt and missed my right leg. The rear wheel kicked my aspis hard enough to slam it into my head – my helmeted head – and then ran off down the slope and over the file behind me.

I got to my feet.

Aristotle, damn him, was completely correct. Behind me, Nearchus got to his feet, and then Cleomenes and then Pyrrhus.

The cart that hit us stopped in the seventh file, because the shields slowed it so much. Two files had to roll it off young Calchus. But he sprang to his feet.

In the whole army, men were getting to their feet.

Which was good, because the Thracians were charging.

‘Close up!’ I roared.

I wanted my men at the closest order – the synapsis, where the shields overlapped. I might as well mention that all the Hetaeroi in the assault had aspides, albeit the smaller, rimless type Iphakrates invented.

The way to achieve that close order was to move the half-files forward into the gaps between files. But what I wanted to do was to get the full files – my right files, my very best men – to move forward through the left files – remember, the right files were all pushed to the rear by the narrowing of the pass. Right?

I could see Cleitus. He could see me. And this is where the trust part – and knowing each other like brothers – came into it.

I caught his eye and yelled, ‘Files forward! Synapsis!’ Took a breath. ‘Not half-files – the rear files! Now!’

Cleitus had it from the first syllable. He was bellowing at his phylarchs, and my front phylarchs were pushing to the right and left to make room, and the Thracians were one hundred and fifty paces away and coming down the slope at a dead run.

Changing formation in the face of the enemy is the very worst thing you can do. It requires rock-solid confidence and enormous quantities of practice. Great officers and file leaders. And no errors, because at this point, two men tripping over each other could spell doom.

But we were Macedonians.

The Thracians were about thirty paces away when the rear files locked their shields to the front-file phylarchs.

I was on the left, by choice – I wanted to be in contact with the centre. So my full-sized aspis – call me old-fashioned – locked up with Laodon, who was commanding his pezhetaeroi from the right file, which was more the norm.

‘Spears – DOWN!’ I ordered, and Laodon roared the same words, almost at the same moment, and our front ranks put their spears at the ready and the rear ranks pushed forward, locking up so that every man had his shield pushed into the back of the man ahead of him, his spear either point forward, overhand, ready to kill, or, in the rear ranks, erect, the point at the sky, safe until needed. The pezhetaeroi had sarissas, eighteen feet long, but we Hetaeroi had our cavalry spears, just eleven feet long.

No matter.

The Thracians hit us.

Ares, they were brave.

The front men, those who had run the fastest to reach us, were the bravest of the brave, men who sought to make a reputation for ferocity
among Thracians
. They were coming down a steep slope and they were
above
us, and several men leaped into the air
and fell
into our ranks, seeking to break our wall of shields and spears, shatter our formations and make room for their friends to reap us like summer wheat.

A man leaped in front of me.

My spear took him in the air and slammed him to earth, and then it was a blur of bodies and edges and threats and parries. The sun was just rising, and cast a red light over everything, and the noise was everywhere, the full-throated roar of the brazen lungs of Areas, and men died, fell wounded, collapsed to earth all around me.

The pressure of the shield at my back was gone, and I stumbled back – downhill – looking for that reassuring pressure, and it wasn’t there.

My spear broke. I remember that, because it was disorienting suddenly to have no pressure behind me and no spear. I raised my shield to cover my head and took a full step back, reaching with my back foot.

Nearchus was down. I found his shield with my foot.

Got my hand on my sword.

Drew.

The Keltoi long sword doesn’t come free like the xiphos. A xiphos glides into your hand like a friendly snake, all under the comfortable cover of your shield, as fast as thought and just as safe, but the long sword has to be drawn all the way free of a scabbard almost twice as long. You have to roll your shoulders and raise the rim of the aspis. There’s a reason most men don’t carry them.

Lucky, or alert to my difficulties, a tribesman slammed into the face of my shield with his metal shield boss while I drew, and down I went, losing my weapon, cutting my hand on my own blade. I fell back down the slope, and for the second time that day my helmet absorbed a major impact – this time, when my head hit a rock.

But Tyche was with me, and my back came up against Nearchus’s aspis, so that I got my butt under me and then one foot before the Thracian could finish me, and I slammed my aspis into him two-handed, one hand in the porpax and the other holding the rim. He stumbled back.

I looked down, but couldn’t see my Keltoi sword or anything else.

He rifled his spear at me and I knocked it down.

Another thrown spear appeared and I knocked that down, too.

I backed again, still looking for a file partner, and now I was starting to panic – no weapon, and nobody behind me. Had the Hetaeroi really been broken? My helmet cut off my peripheral vision and my hearing, so I really didn’t know where the fight was.

I stepped back again. In my head, that meant I’d gone back four steps, and that was
not good.
But my booted heel was on something springy, and that meant my sword.

I knelt, put my right hand down and grabbed the hilt.

A flurry of blows hit the face of my shield. But a full-sized aspis is like a wall for a kneeling man.

A big red-haired man tried to push his spear over the top of the aspis, thrusting
down
into my neck, but I tilted my aspis and pushed to my feet, lifting his spear away and thrusting the long blade under my tabled shield, passing my right foot past my left to ram the thrust home, and he was dead.

I took a shattering blow to the head.

That’s what happens when you push forward too hard, or when men leave you. I never saw the blow, and it hit me hard enough to break my nose inside my helmet and leave me barely conscious, and another blow, from a spear, cut across the top of my bicep and by the will of Athena went in the front of my thorax instead of under my sword arm – so I got a nasty and very graphic cut across my pectoral muscle instead of a death wound under my arm.

Really, it should have been the end of me, and I stumbled.

A shield was pressed into my back. It steadied me – both physically and in spirit. Someone was there. It meant everything.

A shield slapped against the lower-left rim of my aspis. Someone was in the rank with me.

My eyes wouldn’t focus and I took a scraping blow along my helmet, and Cleomenes called, ‘Step back.’

It occurred to me that I’d been hearing that for a long time.

I nodded, rotated on my hips so that my body was inclined away from my opponent and shot my sword forward to cover my step. Cleomenes stepped up on my left, and I felt his shield wrap around my left as he muscled into place and his spear shot forward. And I was in the second rank, with blood running out from under my helmet and into my mouth. There was a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

On the other hand, I was alive.

I knelt and breathed. Spat blood.

Took a drink from my canteen in the third rank. Someone had pushed past me.

I found that I was kneeling by Nearchus. He was breathing, and had a lot of blood on
his
face, so I poured wine and water over his face and he spluttered. I ran my hand over his arm – his sword arm looked bad, with a long shallow cut – and he coughed again and gave a short scream just as I found where his arm was broken.

I got my chlamys out from under my aspis and wrapped his arm as tightly as I dared while he was out of it, and then the whole phalanx was moving. I was better – taking care of someone else is the sovereign remedy for pain – and I got my feet under me and pushed forward.

‘Let me through – front rank!’ I called. I’d fallen all the way back to the sixth or seventh rank. I pushed forward, replacing men who hadn’t fought yet and were – understandably – annoyed.

Some of Laodon’s men were in our ranks. I pushed past two pezhetaeroi to get to Cleomenes, who knocked a Thracian off his feet with a pretty move. I put my sword in the man’s throat to save Cleomenes the step, but that man must have been the last Thracian in the ‘zone’, the area where men fight. The rest were drawn up a few paces above us on the slope, throwing spears. When men settle down to throwing spears, the hard fighting is over.

We had held them.

‘Exchange!’ I croaked at Cleomenes. He shouted a war cry at the Thracians, and then peeked back at me, grinned and nodded, and we did the same dance we’d done earlier, in reverse – he pivoted back, I stepped up, and I was in his place.

Laodon was nowhere to be seen, and Pyrrhus was in the rank next to me, where there should have been a pezhetaeroi. In fact, I could see my own men for four or five files. This sort of thing happens in a hard fight, and with no disrespect to the phalangites of the pezhetaeroi, they weren’t trained men like the graduates of the royal pages. And my boys were. And they were eager – for a lot of the ‘new’ Hetaeroi, this was their first battle – certainly the first big fight on foot, where the heroes walked the earth.

Despite my pain and my wounds, I could feel their eagerness.

We were supposed to hold the Thracians here, so that the hypaspitoi could get around their flanks. If I attacked the Thracians, I’d be pushing them back up the slope, and making Alexander’s job harder.

Just then, while I thought about this and while Cleomenes, behind me, pushed against me aggressively and shouted, ‘Forward, take us forward’, and all the Hetaeroi started to take up the cry . . .

The archers got into position, and the shafts began to fall. I couldn’t even see the archers – but they had got past the flank of the Thracians, and their arrows fell on to unshielded backs. The Thracians began to look over their shoulders.

‘Take us forward!’ roared the whole right end of the battle line. It sounded to me as if the left end was still engaged, but I could see nothing over there.

There was no one to ask, either.

Cleitus told me later that I was grinning like a maniac. That’s not what I remember, but perhaps! At any rate, I stood straight and pointed my sword.

‘Silence!’ I roared.

The cries stopped as if cut off with a knife.

‘Forward!’ I called, and I took a step forward, and we fell up that hill like an avalanche. The Thracians stood, and we crashed into them, shield to shield, packed like sardines in a barrel, and then we were pushing – the rear-rank men pushing with their legs, the front-rankers trying to keep a shoulder firmly inside the aspis, so that the pressure from the rear ranks didn’t flatten them out and crush them – I’d heard of the othismos but I’d never been in it. We pushed, and they tried to stand, but we practised this and they did not, and in seconds we were pressing them back, and then they were stumbling and the pushing was over – we were cutting and thrusting with spear and sword, and they were tripping, falling, collapsing – and running. They didn’t have the cohesion to hold us. Dozens must have died there – men in my rear ranks killed the ones who tripped and fell with their saurouters.

I got an arrow in my aspis – the long iron head came right through the face and scratched my hand. One of our own.

I lowered my aspis slightly, and there was no one there.

I looked left, and the centre of our line was below me on the slope, fifty paces behind. Our left flank was even farther back.

And straight ahead, I saw Alexander leap down from the rocks – now lower and closer – into the rear of the fleeing Thracians, with Alectus and Philip Longsword on either side.

We’d won. Right there. So my new duty was to save as many of our infantry as possible. It looked to me as if the pezhetaeroi on our left were getting the worst of it.

In a flash, I had an idea, even as the hypaspitoi came pouring down from the top of the pass into the rear of the fleeing Thracians.

I pushed back into the middle ranks.

‘Forward! Phalanx forward! Half-files – halt and stand fast!’ I yelled.

That sent the pezhetaeroi and the Hetaeroi forward on the right – but men from the fifth to the eighth rank stood fast. My men were facing no resistance – they didn’t need deep files behind them to help ‘hold’ the enemy.

Then training told – long training in the snow. The half-file leaders – noble and commoner – stood fast, and as the front ranks peeled away, I had about sixty files of four men each left behind with enough space . . .

‘Half-phalanx will form from the right files to the left!’ I called. This was like rolling a carpet – the rightmost files – four files, to be exact – marched forward and wheeled smartly to the
left
, passing across the front of the new-formed half-phalanx, and every set of four files then wheeled up and joined the column as they passed, until my whole body was marching across the rear of the front files, into the gap opened by our rapid advance, and into the rear of the Thracians facing the centre and right of our army.