My mind searches for reasons. “You’re thinking again,” says Flag.
In this multitude, he reasons, what’s the chance of getting news of one man? Besides, it’s almost certain Lucas got through. “They’re heroes, him and that captain. It was their report that set off this whole show.”
I want to believe it. It makes sense; the timing of it rings right. Lucas is probably in camp with forward elements right now. He’s with Coenus and Alexander, soaking up the glory.
We press on. A thaw hits. The steppe becomes a bog. Laden mules sink halfway to their hocks; wagons are mired by scores. The lane of the column’s passage looks like a field plowed by oxen. It’s so miserable, death itself sounds like a vacation. Better than another night’s kip in this slop.
It rains all day, the tenth and eleventh. Our horses are skeletons. We look like ghosts. Then on the twelfth, the temperature plummets. The heavens dump sleet, then snow. We come over a rise. Ahead: an assembly area. Quartermasters route us off the highway behind a range of hills.
We have caught up with the front. Tents and field kitchens. Mack infantry in thousands, all arming for battle. No half-pikes. Full-length sarissas. Stephanos sends me to find someone from Coenus’s brigade to report to. It’s impossible. The site spreads for miles. We’re among elements of Alexander’s elite merc cav. Their horses make ours look like dogs. Before I can spot a familiar face or a standard I recognize, a colonel’s aide calls us to mount and ride. The fight isn’t tomorrow, it’s now.
Still no one has seen Lucas.
42
I have never seen men so eager for battle. Twenty-seven months of frustration have driven our Macks more than a little mad. They want to crack skulls. They burn to make widows.
Our companies form up under Bullock in a vale alongside a line of catapults being fixed to their limbers. Unit strength is supposed to be 256. Count tops out at 91. Nobody cares. Wherever a man finds himself, let him pick a crew and slot in.
Stephanos canters the line, forming us into wedges. We’ll be backing up the merc cav. “I don’t suppose,” Flag says, “anyone has anything like actual orders.”
Stephanos indicates the mercs. “Just do what they do.”
The hired cav are Phrygians and Cappadocians. You can tell by their pointy caps. We don’t even speak the same language. Dice reins alongside Boxer and Little Red. “Welcome to gang-fuck!” He’s laughing.
The mercs pull out in column of wedges. They seem to know what they’re doing. They’re all lancers, with earflap cawls and pennants snapping on the ends of their twelve-footers. We’re trotting down a swale between tall barrows. It’s like passing between burial mounds. The battlefield, or what will become the battlefield, is just over the left-hand rise. We turn a corner and there it is.
Snow is dumping in sheaves now. Clear of the vale, the cold hits like a wall of ice. Where is the foe? The weather is deteriorating so fast we can’t see more than one wedge in front of us. With the wind and snow, we can’t hear a thing.
Where is Alexander?
Where’s Spitamenes?
In every other scrape I’ve been in, the dominant element has been confusion, succeeded by doubt and terror. Here it’s only confusion. I feel no fear at all. I keep scanning round for Lucas. Let him be all right and I’ll croak without a second thought.
Our wedges follow the mercs. The column swings right. The barrows are at our right shoulder now; we’re at the canter, paralleling them. To our left and down a long gale-scoured slope stretches a vast bowl filling up with snow. We pass company after company of light infantry advancing into this. They make no haste. They’re jabbering to each other, careless as fishwives in the market. Curtains of snow descend; you can see the troops but can’t hear them. The footing beneath my pony’s hooves is hard as stone and slick as marble.
Historians will demonstrate later that Spitamenes had no choice but to come, on this site at this hour, into the open. Alexander’s forts have compassed the Wolf, leaving him no safe patch to set down upon. The foe’s supplies have been cut off. Doubtless his hot-blood tribesmen provoke him in council. The Massagetae won’t stay the winter without some adventure after plunder. He’ll lose them and the Daans and Sacae if he doesn’t act with audacity. They’ll scatter and never rally round him as a leader again.
The Wolf has no choice but to attack. He knows Alexander wants him to. He knows our king has contrived events to give him no other option. And he knows that as soon as he does attack, Alexander will race north from his ready camp at Nautaca with every man and horse he’s got.
So be it.
A straight-up brawl at last.
Our merc cav come left in column. We follow. The mercenaries transit directly behind the light infantry, forming a second front rearward of the foot troops; then their leaders come about in that evolution called the Laconian countermarch, like racehorses round a turning pole or a team of oxen plowing a field. Dice hails me as we skipper through the blowing snow. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Just follow these bastards!” I’m as lost as he is.
Our mounted force draws up on the rim of the snow bowl, behind the broad front of infantry. We’re in the middle now, in column with our long axis flank-on to the fight; the merc cav rein on our right wing in the same formation. We can hear but not yet see the clash taking place half a mile downslope.
Alexander has sent forward in a hollow square eight hundred Lydian and Median cavalry with twelve hundred merc infantry (the same troops, we’ll learn later, that Lucas and I marched out from home with). These are the bait. Against them, Spitamenes has flung a crescent of Massagetae and Daan horsemen. The horns of the enemy’s charge have enveloped our fellows. The foe assaults the square of infantry by swarms, barbarian-style, ringing it with a great whooping mass of horsemen, who circle at the canter, keeping just out of spear and javelin range, while making rushes in groups upon our men, pulsing in and out, slinging volley after volley of arrows and darts.
Right and left, we can hear Mack trumpets. The infantry downslope of us step out now. They drop down the flank of the snow bowl at the double, their boots lifting great eddies of white. The foot troops’ front extends right and left out of sight. They make straight for the swarming circle of enemy horsemen. Stephanos wheels his gelding Parataxis, “Pitched Battle,” out front. He holds us back till the infantry has advanced about a hundred yards down the hill. Now we go. Behind the dirt-eaters, at the walk. On our right, the merc cav advance in the same manner. I still have no idea what the hell we’re supposed to do. Neither does Dice; neither does Boxer. We all strain toward Stephanos. He doesn’t know either.
This is my first real stand-up battle. Like everyone, I’ve heard a thousand accounts of such clashes, of trumpets and pennants and great thundering charges of massed troops and horses. But nothing prepares me for the scale or the sound or the mad irresistible sweep of the thing. The emotion of the animals is overwhelming. Like us, horses evacuate their innards when seized by fear and excitement. Everywhere you look, mounts are shitting and pissing; the stink cuts our nostrils; the frozen air steams with it. The ponies stamp and whinny; you can feel them slipping from their riders’ control. They are reverting to the law of the herd. So are we. Hooves fling divots of frozen sod. The earth bucks and shudders beneath us. The field puts up an inhuman, throbbing thrum.
I am a corporal; I command a litter of eight. Every sense screams to me, Grasp your orders! Take charge! This is impossible. We are caught, all of us, in the tide and current of the hour. When our horses go, we’ll go with them. Orders? Zeus himself could not make himself heard above this din, and even if he could, the momentum of the instant would overwhelm his mightiest cries. I understand more with my seat than with my senses. The infantry’s job, I see, is to screen the merc cav, to prevent the foe from discovering our advance. Out front the enemy pours squadron after squadron of tribal horsemen into his great galloping ring. He thinks to finish off our initial divisions, then turn on the advancing foot troops and pull the same stunt on them.
We’re halfway down the slope now. Battle sounds ascend from the bowl in a deafening cacophony. I see Stephanos gallop before our front; an officer of the merc cav rides beside him. This fellow trails a pennant rider, a youth no older than fourteen, at his shoulder. The boy bears aloft a great snaky “serpent” of crimson. Without a word every man understands.
