The fifth of Cyrus’s forts on the Jaxartes – the one we called Cyropolis – was the worst.
Alexander had been wounded the day before, storming the Dakhas fort. He’d taken an arrow right through the shin – Philip had it out in no time, but it left the king out of the next action, against a fort that had a garrison of seven thousand men.
So there I was, with most of my friends and my own retainers. I had set out from Macedon with twenty grooms, and I had six left. Polystratus was now a gentleman and an officer – a phylarch. His second, Theodore, was now a hetaeros, a half-file leader in a gold-plated helmet. Ochrid, who had begun our campaigns as my body slave, was now my steward, as I have noted, and about this time started to serve as my mounted groom, and usually fought with the Hetaeroi, and any day now, I was going to have to put him in the ranks and add him to my roster. This is not a complaint – Ochrid was, it turned out, a warrior to his fingers’ ends. Most men are, if they are well led. Rather I mean it as an example of how desperate our manning problems were. The lines between master and man, between ‘Greek’ and ‘Macedonian’, between ‘mercenary’ and ‘professional’, were hopelessly blurred.
As the numbers of Greeks in our ranks increased – even in the Hetaeroi – the older Macedonians grew less and less inclined to accept the Bactrians and the Persians, as if the line had to be drawn somewhere.
But I digress. Cyropolis. The fort was two hundred feet above us, and I was standing in the front rank between Polystratus and Marsyas. I had four thousand men formed behind me, and another thousand Bactrians under Cyrus, ready to go up a dry gully to the south of the place. As far as I could see, the dry gully would get them within fifty paces of the position and the useless amateurs guarding the fort had missed it. I certainly hoped so.
My four thousand were all veterans. They were a mix of mercenaries and one of Parmenio’s former taxeis – Polyperchon’s Tymphaeans. Polyperchon was down with one of Apollo’s shafts in him, and his men – some of whom were survivors of Philip’s campaigns – were none too happy to be used as assault troops.
I could hear them behind me.
‘Let the fucking Medes do it,’ one old man said. ‘They seem to like it.’
But soldiers always said such things before a fight.
It was a calm, clear morning. I could smell the sharp smell of our morning fires, and while it promised to be hot, the early-morning air was still quite pleasant. The river made a low growl off to my right, and we had so many horses in our army that they made more noise than the enemy.
But not more noise than a battery of war engines. Twenty engines loosed their bolts and baskets all together, about a stade to my left, and their noise drowned the river and the horses – the whip-crack of the torsion engines, the louder, deeper thud as the catapults released their heavier payloads. The engineers had opened breaches the night before and kept the range, despite the workings of temperature and dew on the torsion ropes. Dust rose all along the top of the breaches, as the gravel and the larger stones struck home. Someone was hit – he lay in the breach screaming.
An archer on the wall tried a long shot. He must have been good – his first shaft struck a horse length from my right foot. But his second shaft fell shorter yet, and he stopped.
We weren’t exactly going to surprise them.
I exchanged embraces and arm clasps with my friends in the front ranks. Then I turned to the pezhetaeroi.
‘Let’s get this done,’ I said. Perhaps not my best speech.
All I got in return was a low growl, but that was fine. Professionals.
I looked at Laertes, another former groom who now carried the trumpet and acted as my hyperetes, because Theophilus had been promoted to decarch.
He nodded once and sounded it, and we were off.
I didn’t see any reason to hurry, since my real attack was going in with Cyrus, and the trumpet was his signal to start up the dry gully. We marched quite well. My shield hurt my shoulder. I was reaching an age when the accumulation of my wounds had begun to bother me almost every day. Thais had made me concoctions – they didn’t all work, but the thought was there. Now I had nothing but what Philip of Acarnia gave me. More and more, he used opium for everything. I didn’t want opium, so I put up with a lot of aches and pains.
Four thousand sets of boots, going up the gravel to the fort.
Arrows began to fall on us. They’d been lofted high to get over our shields.
The men behind me raised their shields.
I began to go forward faster. It is the natural reaction to incoming arrows.
I was almost to the base of the main breach. We’d pounded three of them at last light, and the batteries had opened up again at first light, pounding the mud-brick wall to dirt and wrecking the attempts at repair. Baskets of gravel had cleared the workers off the walls.
We were quite good at sieges, by the Jaxartes.
Even as I reached the ditch at the base of the devastated mud-brick wall, I saw that the pioneers had filled it in with fascine bundles, and crossbow bolts were going over my head into the archers on the walls shooting down at me. It didn’t make me feel
The poor bastard in the breach had been unlucky. A five-talent machine had hit his feet square on and effectively pulped them, and he lay in an immense pool of his own blood and screamed. His screams were horrible, because his fate represented exactly the sort of thing we all feared.
I should have looked back to call the troops forward, and I should have kept an eye on the archers shooting down from the embrasures, but I let my focus fall on the poor bastard screaming his guts out. I ran to him and killed him – spiked him in the head. He went out like a lamp being blown out.
May someone do as much for me.
Now I was halfway up the breach. Amyntas son of Gordidas, one of my former grooms, and Marsyas were right behind me, and Laertes and Polystratus were a pace behind, their shields
The enemy tribesmen were lining the breach.
There was no one behind my officers.
The taxeis had stopped dead, about fifty paces out from the wall.
There comes a point in a charge when you can’t really go back. I was just beyond the spear range of the men in the breach. To turn and run back to the taxeis under the wall would be to turn my back on healthy enemies and run the gauntlet of their archery – again – this time with my back to them.
So I turned and charged the enemy. Or rather, fifteen or twenty of us charged a thousand or so of them.
I had assumed that when the taxeis saw us committed to the fight, they would come forward.
I was wrong.
It should have been easy. The enemy Sogdians were dismounted nomad cavalry, and they had neither shields nor armour nor real spears. They threw javelins with deadly force and excellent aim – but we were fully armoured men with heavy aspides. Their archery was deadly – but we’d survived that.
And they’d been chewed over pretty hard by our artillery.
It should have been easy, but the odds of fifteen fully armoured men against a thousand unarmoured archers were just too long, and we had no impact when we struck them. The breach we went up was only about ten men wide, and so, for a while, our little group held its own. A hundred heartbeats, perhaps.
The spear is a deadly weapon, when the wielder is armoured and shielded and his opponents are not. I must have wounded ten men in those hundred heartbeats.
But the Sogdians did something I had never seen before. They began to use their bows at point-blank range – releasing arrows from so close that there was no possibility of a miss. As they began to get around the ends of our little line, archers began to shoot into our unprotected thighs and backs, and in moments, half of my friends were down.
Marsyas gave a choked scream and dropped by my side.
Laertes fell atop him.
My spear hadn’t broken. I had a short spear that day – pikes are useless in a storming action, and I had one
