and hold their position. That’s enough. Our whole company is now fixed in place. We can’t attack the riders to our rear or we imperil the foot troops we’re posted to protect, and we can’t charge the island or we leave our own rear exposed. Lucas is cursing our forward wings for not clearing this obvious blind. Perhaps they did, and found it vacant. The foe, concealed behind more distant islands, could easily have spurred forward unseen once our scouts had passed.
What other surprises has the Wolf laid for us? The island holds about two hundred men. When our infantry rushes, how many more will materialize?
Soldiers are drilled to respond without orders to certain situations. Facing an advancing front of horsemen, cavalry attacks in wedges. Ambushed from the flank, infantry assaults straight-on. Ours are crack troops; they can perform such evolutions in their sleep. But no amount of skill or valor can help us now. We are in the trap and the jaws are closing.
All glory to Spitamenes. The Desert Wolf has suckered us like bumpkins. He has used the terrain and the time of day, the length of the march and the dearth of water and fodder; he has used our arrogance and our ignorance. He has made us fight on his ground, by his rules.
Our force is equal in number to the enemy. We are better trained and disciplined, with superior armor and weaponry. But we are strung out like ducks on the water. The Wolf will “swarm” us. He will hurl his wings onto our column’s head and tail, trapping and immobilizing our mates in the center. Then he’ll cut the column into sections. His horse archers will ring each isolated element, galloping round and round, loosing their bolts point-blank upon us, then scampering out of range when we try to get to close quarters. We have no missile troops. If our infantry leave the shelter of the square, armed only with spear and sword, the mounted foe will cut them off and slaughter them in detail. If we on horseback try the same stunt, Spitamenes’ men will back off till we don’t dare pursue farther. Either way, we are finished.
It is clear what our rear guard must do, so obvious that our commanders don’t rein in even to pass the word. They simply advance to their posts, knowing each man will move on the signal. It comes. Flag leads our two wedges straight at the horsemen closing from the rear. Simultaneously our adjacent merc infantry forms up, a hundred across and four deep, and advances into the river, seeking to come to grips with the horse archers of the island. Stephanos holds back our remaining troopers, about 40, while our foot commanders retain their own reserve, 150 or so. We all know that the foe will withdraw before our charge, then hit us from the flank with concealed elements when we’ve run out too far from our base. There is nothing we can do about it. We have to strike first or the Wolf will drive us even deeper into the snare.
Ahead, our column of infantry stretches along the river for more than a mile. From the rear we can see the foe already starting to swarm them. These are tactics ancient as hell itself. But they work. Run rings round the trapped enemy, shooting at him on the run; when he rushes you, pull back; when he wears out, attack again. Against infantry with no defendable flanks, like ours along this shallow river, victory is only a matter of patience and time. We can see Spitamenes’ auxiliaries spurring up from the bluffs and the stream, leading mules and horses laden with additional arrows. The shafts are tied in bunches like sheaves, so the horse archers can grab them at the gallop and return to the fight with their saddle-quivers reloaded.
In the rear, the enemy does not wait to receive the charge of our wedges. His front parts while we’re still two hundred feet off, scattering for the bluffs on one side and the river on the other. We have no tactic to counter this. We cannot break formation to chase these bastards man-on-man. But to maintain the assault past the foe’s original front means being taken in the rear by them when they reform, which they do as swiftly as swallows, and in flank by their fellows waiting in concealment, whom we now see, in hundreds, emerging from behind the shoulders of the washes descending from the cliffs. Our unit has been tasked as reconnaissance; we don’t have the weight to take on such numbers. The Wolf knows this. He has outskulled us again. As Rags and I rein our tens, the foe’s front reunites and gallops behind us, seeking to cut us off from the body of the column. We can do nothing except wheel and spur back as fast as we can.
We’re dead and we know it. The sensation is like a game of Castle against a master, in which each move you make, no matter how right or valiant, only drives you deeper into the bag. Our minds race, seeking some ploy or stratagem that will return us to the initiative. But we are caught like thrushes in birdlime, and the more we struggle, the more furiously we are fixed. Events unravel so fast that our senses can conjure no scheme except to revert to basics: form up, face the foe, prepare to stand and die.
Meanwhile, the Wolf has sprung the same trap on our rearguard infantry assaulting the island. Our fellows advance, up to their calves in the river. Now the foe brings more horsemen from the flank. He cuts our troops off and swarms them. His mounts are massive Parthians, seventeen-handers, whose great hooves throw up spray in the shallows, dazzling in the late light. The sight would be beautiful if its import were not so calamitous. More horsemen swing round on our rear. Flag and Stephanos take their wedges straight at them.
The fight goes exactly as we have dreaded.
The foe falls upon our infantry in two columns-one inland, paralleling the bluffs, the other at the river’s edge and in the river. In other words, he runs down both sides of our axis. At quarter-mile intervals he strikes across and severs the column. In the rear, we can’t see this. But we hear. There is no sound in the world like armored cavalry clashing with heavy infantry. Spitamenes’ Bactrians and Sogdians are disciplined troopers, main-force units recruited and trained under Persian officers. They are drilled to fight in columns and wedges; they can exploit gaps in infantry squares as efficiently as any horsemen in the world. The foe’s Daans and Massagetae are simply savages. They have no tactics but to swarm. This is enough. The Massagetae pad their mounts’ chests with thick felt-and-bronze plates called “bundlers” and armor their own legs, hip to ankle. Let such heavy horse get to close quarters with infantry and the men on the ground don’t stand a chance. That said, our mercenaries under Andromachus are among the stubbornest and best-disciplined troops in the corps. They are Greeks-Arcadians, Achaeans, and Mantineans, with their own and Spartan officers-all veterans, many over fifty years old. They have fought on the side of the throne of Persia, first under the superb commanders Memnon of Rhodes and his son Thymondas, then under Glaucus and Patron, two extraordinary captains of infantry, who served Darius till the last-and have only come over to Alexander, accepting pay to take his service, when the Persian king’s cause is utterly lost. These warriors have fought for five years across three thousand miles and endured every kind of action imaginable, in victory and defeat. Their weapon is the twelve-foot lance, a wicked anticavalry arm, and their prowess with it is without peer. The slaughter in the shallows that day surpasses any action of the Afghan war, outside of fixed battles and massacres, for neither side will yield. The Wolf’s Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae tribesmen fight for plunder and glory, to destroy the hated invader, while the mercenaries struggle simply to survive.
Where our half squadron rides, in the rear, we can see none of this. We know nothing of the other battles playing out along the forward three-quarters of the column. We have been cut off. We are eighty horse and four hundred foot. That any get out alive at all must be credited to Flag and Stephanos, who, in the midst of the melee, divine that the Wolf’s intention, structuring the ambush, is to drive our troops either in the direction of the rear or of the river (which routes seem to offer the only hope of breaking free) and that along these courses he, Spitamenes, has concealed further concentrations of horse and foot to massacre us. Our commanders drive us toward the bluffs instead. Here the enemy waits in place to pound us with javelins and hurled stones. But it’s better than facing line after line in the other directions. If our mounts had been fresher, if we had gotten one rest of even an hour during the day, the main of the company might have broken through and, once up the bluffs, gotten clear.
But the foe is fresh and we are spent. Our limbs, and our horses’, have no strength to mount the face. Hooves lose purchase in the sand; riders spill and tumble. Those who dismount are cut down where they fall; troopers who stay in the saddle wear their mounts out and crash beside them. Only handfuls get through. When our front gives way, the foe pours upon us from both flanks and begins to shove us, infantry and cavalry, in a great mass back into the river.
To fight and win is now out of the question. The only hope is to break away. I turn my ten, or what’s left of them-Lucas, Little Red, Boxer, Rags, Knuckles, and two brothers called Torch and Turtle-to force a break on the river side. Lucas has the point. The foe are all horse archers, armed with powerful compound bows of horn and bone. They shoot for our mounts. I see Lucas’s Intrepid take two shafts simultaneously, one in the chest and the other in the throat. The horse does not even slow but plunges onward; the arrow-shafts snap from the working of his great muscles, while his eyes roll white in terror. Lucas thrusts his lance into the throat of a Daan bowman. I am on his left and see the fellow’s head snap back like a doll’s and tear open at the gorge. Lucas’s lance shivers, broken by the weight of the foe; he nearly spills from the sudden dislocation. My own half-pike has splintered long since; all I have is my saber, useless as a wand against the heavily armored foe. A Daan with great mustaches
