Of Merchants & Heros (38 page)

The approach to Korinth from the eastern side is uneven and difficult, with ditches and other obstacles to hinder a rapid assault.

For this reason Lucius had concluded the defences here would be lightest. But even as we went forward at the double, carrying between us a great oaken battering ram on leather slings, the rain of arrows and missiles began, and it was clear that the defenders were prepared.

We raised our shields over our heads, to deflect the arrows. I was at the front, on the left, the most dangerous position. I had taken it deliberately. I knew, with men like these, there was no other way to win their trust.

Naturally enough, they had assumed I was some favourite of Lucius’s, thrust upon them at the last moment for some purpose that had not been explained to them. But, I calculated, such men respected bravery. I had to show them quickly I was not a coward.

At first we advanced rapidly. Then, as we drew close, we were forced down a steep grassy cutting – a deliberate earthwork to slow an enemy’s advance.

The veterans cursed as we laboured up the far side. The heavy beam of the battering ram slowed us.

Up ahead I saw the part of the wall we were aiming for. It was a place where a catapult bolt had struck. The high crenellated walkway was staved inwards, and there was a huge crack in the brickwork.

‘Here!’ I cried, and we veered left, to where the stonework looked weakest. We sprinted up the incline, levelled the beam, and struck the wall with a resounding blow.

From somewhere above, the defenders were firing down arrows and javelins and stones; they clattered on our shields. The battering ram juddered in its sling; the cracked wall splintered, and from above I heard voices cry out in alarm. They were Macedonian voices, not Korinthians. Lucius had been wrong. The defences here were not poorly defended: we were up against crack men from the garrison.

‘Again!’ the veterans cried, swinging the great oak beam a second time.

Once again it crashed into the wall. The masonry crumbled and split. From above came shouts and the sound of running feet.

Already the missile blows had grown fewer, as the men above cleared the walkways.

There was a brief lull. I glanced about me. Half a stade away there was a tower in the wall. Korinthian archers were crowded on its upper rampart, firing at us. I looked back for our own light- armed troops. They were supposed to be drawing away their fire. But they were nowhere to be seen.

I raised my shield again as a volley of arrows came my way. By the time they reached us their force was half spent. They clattered off our shields and fell about our feet. But they could still kill a man, if he was unlucky.

We drew back, and advancing at a run we struck the wall a third time. Mortar rained down upon our heads. The battering ram vibrated and sang. There was a pause, and then, like a falling tree, the wall creaked and rasped and collapsed inwards in a cloud of dust.

We dropped the ram and rushed forward, even before we could see our way. I knew then I was with good men, for all their grim, unsmiling hostility. They did not hesitate, or pause for another to go first. Without a backward look they surged after me into the breach.

The gap was no wider than a farm-cart. This was the most dangerous time, when the defenders knew they had their last chance to cut us off.

We spread out, left and right, filling the gap, stumbling on the fallen masonry, our swords drawn. The dust swirled around us.

Then, from the side nearest to me, the Macedonians charged forward, yelling out their paean.

I killed the first of them even before he finished his battle-cry.

The trooper beside me took the second. This gave our attackers pause, and for a short moment they hung back. I glanced behind me and shouted once again for the reinforcements Lucius had promised.

It was now we needed them, before the enemy formations could regroup and close around us.

Suddenly the veteran beside let out a cry. I swung round. A long javelin shaft was sticking out of his thigh, just below the protecting leather of his kilt. He hesitated, looking down at it with frowning contempt. Then he gripped the ashwood shaft with his broad hand; paused, as if taking its measure, and with a roar through gritted teeth yanked it out. Blood streamed down his leg and over his greaves.

‘Get back,’ I yelled at him.

He grimaced at me through his beard. ‘Later,’ he shouted.

‘There’s a job to do . . . watch out!’

We both ducked, deflecting with our shields another volley of spears. A new wave of defenders was coming at us from the other side.

I cursed out loud and shouted, ‘Where are the backup troops?’

There was no more time to look about. I had three men in front of me, each one advancing with a sword. We stood perhaps ten wide, fighting off thirty, and fighting still on the uneven ground of the fallen masonry. But the men of my company knew what they were doing; they fought with a calm, deadly skill, moving with the automatic reflexes that come from years of practice. We were holding our own against superior numbers, but we could not last long without support. We had to break through, or retreat.

Behind me, from the breach in the wall, I heard the approach of men. Their voices rose in the battle-cry, and I realized with a start they were not our troops, whom I had been calling for. They were Greeks. For a moment, with the small part of my mind which attended to this, I was confused. Had the enemy somehow come behind us? But then one of our company, who must have been thinking the same, cried, ‘It’s Attalos’s men!’

‘Then where are ours?’ shouted another.

‘Go and ask Lucius,’ said the first bitterly.

But it was help – from whatever quarter, and there was no time to consider it. They came crowding up, filling the breach beside us.

Finally, we began to drive the defenders back, fighting hard for every foot of ground. The gap widened as we advanced: enough for ten men, then fifteen, then twenty. As we moved beyond the rubble I saw a long shattered building with its roof crashed in, a storehouse or an animal-shed that had been struck by our catapults. A fresh wave of defenders was surging from behind it. These new men were not Macedonian troops; they wore mismatched scraps of armour and had a rough, unkempt look. Yet they were not townsfolk drafted in to defend the city: they fought too well for that. One of them cried out an order to those around him. At first I could not tell what had struck me as so strange. Then it came to me: he had not spoken in Greek, or Macedonian, which is a kind of Greek. He had spoken Latin.

My comrades exchanged frowning looks.

The man beside me, the one who had got the javelin in his thigh, cursed and nodded, and said, ‘So that’s it.’

Then they were upon us, like a pack of dogs.

Our line wavered. The far flank, where Attalos’s Greeks were fighting, buckled and broke. The men next to them, suddenly exposed, were forced to drop back, to protect their undefended side; and moments later the whole line was collapsing. A man appeared in front of me through the rising dust. His hair was cropped to his skull; he was heavy-shouldered with a broad upper body, like a rower from the fleet; and in his hand, in place of a sword, he was brandishing some kind of two-headed axe on a short chain, which he tossed expertly from one hand to the other, grinning.

I lunged at him. He stepped deftly back, twitched the strange weapon with a snap of his wrist, and in the chain of it caught the point of my sword.

I tried to pull free, but he moved with my own movement, drawing closer, holding my sword locked in the loop of the chain.

With his free hand he snatched a long curving dagger from a sheath; he lunged, and the blade of the dagger flashed like a mirror under my eyes. I shied back; something yielding caught my foot – a man’s body – and I stumbled. He had aimed to slice my throat; if I had not tripped he would have done it.

With a laughing cry he leapt over me. I looked up, and saw my own death reflected in his black eye. I shouted and thrust upwards, but he twisted, and my sword glanced harmlessly off his corselet.

Then he brought down the axe; I swerved and fell, and the blade hissed beside my ear, catching my armour.

I realized, as I tried to stand, that he had hooked my cuirass with the edge of the axe-blade. He yanked me towards him, as a fisherman reels in a fish. But then, with a sound like a cough, his eyes widened and he ceased. Protruding through his breast, red and glinting in the sunlight, like some hideous blood-stained brooch, was a sword-point. He stared at it in surprise, retched once, spewing blood, dropped the axe from his hand, and fell.

My comrade, the one with the javelin wound, had run him through from behind. He drew out his sword from the body, nodded at me, and said, ‘You could have finished him off yourself, but there is no time. Come on, lad. This battle is lost. We’re falling back to the wall.’

Later, when we had withdrawn to safety, and I was sitting with the men of my company, dressing our wounds, I thanked him for killing the axe-man. He looked at me and grunted, as if my thanks embarrassed him. Then he said, ‘Did you think we were going to leave you there to be killed by that rabble?’

The others murmured agreement. I knew then that things had changed between us, and I confess I felt a glow of triumph, for all our defeat. I was no longer on the outside. They had accepted me.

‘Who
were
those men?’ I said. ‘They weren’t Greeks . . . I heard them speaking Latin, or something like it.’

At this they all spoke up, cursing, and saying, ‘traitors’, and, ‘scum’, and ‘bastards’.

The first one said, ‘Since Zama, every deserter, out-of-work mercenary and itinerant cut-throat has been heading this way. We saw their sort in Africa, fighting for Carthage. Chaos draws such people. They will fight for anyone, so long as he pays them. And Philip’s as good a paymaster as any other.’

‘. . . Or Antiochos, or Ptolemy,’ said the man beside him. ‘But they’re not being paid now, if I’m any judge.’

‘Then what?’ I said.

‘Some fled to Philip after Zama, to avoid being captured. The rest are just looking for work, or fleeing justice of one sort or another.’

He tossed his head contemptuously in the direction of the walls, now lined with jeering defenders. ‘Korinth is the right place for that; and the right place to find a job in someone else’s army.’

I thought of the wild-eyed man with the axe and said, ‘Yet you’d think they were fighting for their very lives.’

‘They are. They know what happens to deserters.’ He made a death-sign with his hand.

A man came striding up, in the uniform of Attalos’s army.

‘Which one is Marcus?’ he said.

‘I am.’

‘The king asks to speak to you.’ He paused, just long enough for me to feel his disapproval, then added, ‘Sir.’

Attalos, as I had already guessed, was furious. He was the kind of man who goes calm when he is in a rage. Not like Lucius, who was all bluster. Seeing me he gestured his lieutenants away and said, ‘Come and walk with me, Marcus. Are you hurt?’

‘Scratches, sir. Nothing more.’

‘Then I thank the gods.’

We walked down the slope until we came to a ruined stone-built barn, and here he halted and turned to me. He was as brisk as any soldier, in spite of his great age.

‘Now tell me,’ he said, ‘what that idiot thinks he is doing. Does he want to lose the war single-handed? If so, then let him have the courtesy to tell us, and we can sail back to Pergamon.’

I met his eye, and made a hopeless gesture, and he continued, ‘If I had not come, you would have been killed in there.’

‘I know, sir,’ I said.

‘And where was that
fool
? You do not know? Then I shall tell you. He had taken the men who were supposed to back you up and was making a try on the Kenchreai Gate. He intended to throw your lives away. He thought he could force his way into Korinth while you distracted the defenders. By Zeus, Marcus! If my runner hadn’t had the sense to find me, they’d have poured out of that breach and overwhelmed your camp.’ He paused, and drew a long breath. ‘And there’s more. I haven’t told Lucius yet because I can’t find him. So I’ll tell you.’

I looked at him. I expect my fury at Lucius showed in my face.

‘What more?’ I said.

‘Philip’s general, Philokles, who unlike that buffoon Lucius knows something of the conduct of war, has taken advantage of our confusion and has landed fifteen hundred Macedonians on the western shore of the isthmus. We might have stopped them, if we had not been busy here. But now we have the enemy on both sides.

In short, Marcus, we cannot now maintain this siege. I suggest you try to find Lucius, for if he were not a Roman general who, presumably, knows something of dignity and how to behave, I should tell you that he appears to be hiding from me. His actions today have cost us Korinth; they may indeed have cost us the war. He needs to understand that.’

The siege was broken off. What we could not ship, we burnt, and from the walls the defenders – the Korinthians, the Macedonians, and the rabble of deserters and cut-throats and hired killers – cheered. It was a humiliation and a defeat, one which all of Philip’s allies in Greece would soon hear of.

But before we departed, a messenger arrived from the north, bringing news that Titus had finally broken through in Phokis.

I was with Lucius and a group of ship-pilots on the quay when the messenger arrived. A change had come over Lucius. His overbearing confidence had dissolved. His face was grey and puffy, and he would fall into long silences, broken by violent tantrums.

The messenger, a fresh-faced young tribune, knew none of this.

He had come from Titus, from an army which had at last won a victory. His eyes were bright with hope and enthusiasm, and the joy of being the bearer of good news. Little did he know that his every smile and bright-eyed look was a barb to Lucius, and as he reported how the Macedonian garrisons in Phokis had surrendered, and the citizens had welcomed Titus through the streets as a liberator, cheering and clapping and casting down wreaths and flower petals in his path, he failed to notice the signs of danger – the chewing lip, the rising colour in the grey face, the nervous fidgeting of the fingers. He talked on, taking Lucius’s silence for interest; and when, at last, Lucius burst into a frenzied rage, the poor youth almost fell over with shock.