asked Simon what he was doing.
Simon flashed me a smile. 'I'm just clumsy,' he said. 'And this boy can't really carry the weight of his panoply.'
Epictetus peered at me. I had my helmet up on my head and I was sweating like a deer bleeding out. I tried to grin.
'Too heavy for you?' he asked.
'No,' I said. 'Simon's a bastard.'
Epictetus shot him a glare. 'Yep,' he said. Most of our file laughed. 'Watch yourself, Simon. I'm watching you.'
That's when I think Simon decided to kill us. Right there on the mountain. Up until then, I think he just hated us quietly. But I called him a bastard, and old Epictetus agreed, and everyone laughed, and the fates spun. We were the last. Miltiades and his tribe were the first. And the Thebans were waiting in ambush. It should have been a disaster. There's no better position for a phalanx than catching your opponent strung out over a goat track.
But the Thebans moved late, and they were late straggling into their ambush site. Hoplites don't usually ambush each other. Maybe they felt unmanly. Who knows what a Theban thinks? At any rate, they fucked it all up.
The result was that their men blundered into Miltiades in the dark. Instead of an ambush, we had a mob fight in the first light.
The first I knew was that the files started to move faster, and then they stopped, and then we could hear it – fighting. One battle made me an expert. But this didn't sound like the fight with the Spartans. This sounded like Chaos come to earth, and it was.
Neither side ever got a phalanx formed. That's what everyone remembers about the Battle of Parnes. Our files and theirs poured into each other in the scrubby, broken ground on the northern shoulder of the mountain, and the push of men behind kept adding fighters. It was so dark that, with your face inside your helmet, you couldn't be sure of the man on your right or left unless you tapped their shield with your own. Twice, Epictetus stopped us without orders and formed our files up close. He was doing what he knew how to do – forming the block that would keep us safe. But both times the path soon narrowed to nothing again and we had to file off.
An hour after we first heard the fighting – exhausted with the fear of waiting and the fatigue of marching – we rounded a bend and saw the fight. The sun was a red ball on the horizon to the east, and we caught glimpses of the sea to the north as the trail climbed and dipped, and then the fight was right there, a spear's throw away.
I could see Pater's double plume. He was standing still, shield against his knees, arms crossed.
The valley was full of men locked in combat, and it was a swirl of death. Because the armies had never formed, no man had a front or a back, and there was no safety and no shield wall.
The Athenians were begging us to come on, COME ON! And still Pater looked out over the valley. I, for one, was in no hurry to plunge into that maelstrom.
And then Pater made his decision. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the movement of his back. He made his decision and we were moving – not down into the battle, but across the hillside to the north. Pater began to run, and the files ran after him.
It might seem a simple thing, to lead a thousand men around a battle that is only two stades or so wide. One man can run the stade in the time another man sings a song, but a thousand men take a hundred times longer, or so it seems when the fate of your city rests on the outcome. And we were scared, honey. We'd been promised a stratagem and an easy fight, and this was chaos and death.
Pater ran north and the files followed him. Just over the brow of the low hill where you first see the polis at Tanagra in the distance, he turned west, halted and ordered the files to form. That was easy. He'd picked a piece of flat ground, and each file ran up, directed by their phylarch and Pater's spear, and they halted to the left of the file before them, so that in the time it took the sun to rise a finger's breadth, the phalanx was formed, minus the cowards and the men who couldn't make the run.
I made it.
Simon didn't. I wonder what he might have done had he made it to the front, but the run left him behind. About sixty men stayed in the rear. This always happens. So the phylarchs say a few words to the men who make it to the fight, and then they close the files.
Suddenly I was in the fourth rank. My hand was cold and clammy on Deer Killer. I had a heavy javelin to go with her, and that's all I had. I had no sword. On the other hand, I had armour like the best men.
Epictetus put me in the fourth rank because, in his opinion, I was more fit for combat than the eight men behind me. He was right. But at the time I thought him a monster for putting me so close to the front.
I was one file from the far right. Bion was my file-leader, and Pater was about a spear's length away when we closed our ranks and files in the synaspismos.
Then we sang the Paean. Usually men sing it before they charge, but not always. I don't know what happened to the Paean at Oinoe – whether I have forgotten it, or whether we didn't sing it. But I was in the phalanx at Parnes, and I remember singing, roaring my fear out inside the bronze helmet that my brother had died wearing.
In the closed ranks, you are three feet from the men on either side, so that the rim of your shield can just touch if you move to tap them – something men do all the time as they wait. You start a few feet from the men in front and behind, but as a fight goes on, everything closes in. Well, that's what usually happens. You end up in a tight-packed mob that pushes together and sees only with the eyes of the front rank. In that fight, I had no idea what was happening in front of us from the moment that our files closed up. I could see Dionysius's leather-clad back, and I could see Pater's plumes and the rim of my own aspis.
We pushed forward.
We marched together to the sound of the Paean. We had a slight hill behind us and we went down the hill and then our front slammed into the fight. Friends? Enemies? The front of a phalanx has no allies. We went down into the fight, and the only sign I had that Pater was facing death was an increased pressure on my shield.
But they melted in front of us. I stepped over a man who was down. I looked down – hard enough in a helmet – and saw his eyes peeking over the rim of his shield, and the black blood on his legs. I let him live, and so did everyone else.
We started to plough through the maelstrom. Dust rose with the sun, and the battle was not ending. We pushed forward a step at a time, and I was hot and miserable, my spear held point-up so that it wouldn't foul the men ahead of me. Sometimes the man behind me – a middle-aged farmer from two farms beyond us, a bitter man named Zotikos – pushed too hard, and I was sandwiched between the curved front of his aspis and the curved back of my own. I was too small for this, and it hurt.
Zotikos always apologized to me every time he slammed in. 'Sorry, kid!' he'd grunt. 'No good at this shit!' He was pale with fear – but he pushed.
I know – now – what happened in the front rank, but at the time I knew nothing except that Pater was alive, because I could see his plumes and hear his voice. And we should have been winning an easy victory – we were the only formed troops on the field, and the Thebans were outnumbered.
Maybe they were stubborn Boeotians, just like us.
Maybe the phalanx isn't as important as men think. To be honest, I've seen unformed mobs stop a phalanx several times. Only Ares knows. We pushed forward and our front-rankers stabbed with their spears, Athenians rallied on our right and Thebans melted away, and then, suddenly, we stopped.
Calchas was right – it is the killers who are dangerous. The rest of war is very like a sport. Like pushing and pulling and spear-fencing all together. But when the killers come, it is nothing like a sport.
I don't know who they were. A brotherhood? Some men who had trained together as boys? Or more likely, a band of aristocrats. They had good armour and they knew their business. Perhaps they were mercenaries. At any rate, they hit our phalanx when we were tired and lazy and confident that nothing would stand against us. Epictetus went down and, as I raised my head to look, Dionysius took a blow to the helmet and down he went.
And just like that, I was in the front rank, facing a killer. I had all the time it took him to push past Dionysius to see that he was clad from head to foot in bronze, with thigh guards and arm guards and knuckle guards like a professional, and he had a bronze-faced shield and a heavy spear and a double plume of red.
You must lock your shield with your neighbour's, put your head down and refuse to take chances. That's what Calchas said.
