army’s central area, and the cooks collecting the beef in their kettles, and already I could see local farmers coming into the camp with produce to sell, which we’d missed the night before by making camp too late. It was all running well, and as I watched, the first fire leaped into being in the cooking area of camp, and there were lines of men carrying wood and bedding down the hillsides . . .
Down the valley ahead of us, more fires leaped into being, and they weren’t ours.
I had to assume that was Alexander and the pages and Thessalians. But at the same time, I’d be a fool not to act as if those fires were enemies’.
The headman of the Thracians was called Alcus. That means something like ‘Butthead’ in Thracian. But Alcus and Polystratus got along well enough. I sent Polystratus for him, and after a delay that seemed eternal, he rode up and I showed him the fires to the north and west.
He nodded, tugged his beard, looked at Polystratus.
‘You want us to go and look,’ he said finally.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you are the best suited for it, you know this country. Besides . . .’
Gordias put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t explain,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell them what to do.’
Sigh. So much to learn!
‘Go any way you think best, but tell me who set those fires,’ I ordered.
Alcus pursed his lips, blew out a little puff and pulled his elaborately patterned cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘Boys won’t be happy,’ he said.
I was freezing cold, I hadn’t slept in two days and I was scared spitless that I’d run into a Thracian army.
‘Fuck that,’ I snapped. ‘Get your arse down the valley and get me a report.’
The Thracian officer looked at me for a few heartbeats, spat carefully – not a gesture of contempt, more like contemplation – and said, ‘Yes, lord,’ in a way that might have been taken for an insult.
When he was gone, Gordias laughed. ‘Not bad, lord,’ he said. ‘A little temper goes a long way, as long as you control it and it doesn’t control you.’
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Pater had hired this man as a military tutor. I never again ran across a mercenary so interested in teaching a kid.
An hour passed in a few heartbeats. In that time, I had to decide whether or not to keep the firewood and bedding collection going, or to call all the work parties in. If it turned out to be the prince up the valley, I’d look like a fool, and as the rain had started again, my men would have a miserable night. On the other hand, if five thousand Thracians were sneaking along the hillsides towards me, I’d lose my whole command when they swept us away in one attack – I had fewer than fifty men on guard in camp, and nothing else except the pages, and most of them were unblooded teenagers.
Command is glorious. I thought some hard thoughts about my prince, I can tell you.
I decided to keep my work parties at it. I sent Gordias to keep them going as fast as he could. In fact, he withdrew a third of the men and put them under arms.
I took the pages, spread them across the hillsides in a skirmish line facing north, and started probing.
It was a standard hunting formation, and I told every boy that I didn’t want them to fight, just to report if they saw Thracians, and then we were moving. It was last light, the sun was far off in the heavy clouds, and if we’d been in the bottom of the valley it would already have been night. It was horrible weather, too – sheets of rain. Our cloaks were soaked and sat on our shoulders like blankets of ice.
But the pages were trained hard, and now it paid off. We crossed a ravine in pretty good order – I remember being proud of them – and then the lightning started, and by the light of it – the Thunderer was throwing his bolts about pretty freely – we moved across the swollen watercourse at the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.
I found a trail running right along the top of the ridge. Not unexpected – if you spend enough time in the wild you get a sense for where animals and men like to walk. Trails are hard to find in the rain, but this one had some old stones along the north side, as if there had once been a wall.
Half a dozen pages huddled in behind me. The trail was so much easier than the hillside – it was natural enough.
There was a long peal of thunder, a brilliant double strike of Zeus’s heavy spear, and I was in the midst of fifty Thracians. They were all in a muddle, gathered around something on the trail.
A bearded man in a zigzag-decorated cloak had his helmet off. He looked at me in another lightning flash.
Athena inspired me.
I know a few words of Thracian.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I bellowed over the rain. It’s something you say to slaves quite a bit.
That puzzled them.
‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ I bellowed again. And then I turned my horse and rode away, waiting for the feel of a javelin between my shoulder blades. I got my horse around, got back to the lip of the ravine, and my half-dozen pages were right on my heels – I prayed to Hermes that the Thracians hadn’t seen what a beardless lot they were. We slid down the ravine and our horses got us up the other side – it was full dark now, and in dark and rain your horse is pretty much your only hope to get anywhere.
Below me on the hillside, I heard the unmistakable sound of iron ringing on iron.
The closest page was Cleomenes, no longer quite a child. I grabbed him by the hair, got his ear close to my head – the thunder was deafening, or so I remember it – and ordered him to get back to camp and tell Gordias to stand to.
‘You know where camp is?’ I yelled.
He pointed the right way.
I let him go.
I rode off down the hillside, trusting to Poseidon to get me to the fighting. He picked his way, and I had to take deep breaths and wait. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. It seemed to take an hour to go half a stade, despite the fact that we were going
After some minutes, I was suddenly flat on my back – cold water running down my breastplate and under my back. I had thought I was wet – now I was in a stream or a rivulet and I was colder and wetter and everything hurt.
We’d gone over a log and Poseidon had missed the fact that there was a ravine on the other side of the log. By the will of Ares, he didn’t break a leg, but it took me another cold, wet, dark eternity to find him and get him on his feet – eyes rolling in the lightning flashes, utterly panicked.
Down again, now with me walking in front of him, holding the reins. There hadn’t been fighting in . . . well, I’d lost track of time, and was worried I’d been unconscious when I was thrown.
So much to worry about!
Down and down. And then . . .
The first Thracian I found was a horn-blower – he had the horn at his lips, the lightning flashed and I put my spear through him. The next flash showed scarlet leaking past his lips – he coughed. And died.
I crouched. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t see anything, either. But that man I’d killed – I was queasy with it, but too busy to throw up – he’d been ready to blow a horn call. An attack?
They must be close around me.
So I froze, moved carefully to a big tree, stood with my hand over Poseidon’s mouth.
A long time passed. As the lightning played around us, I began to see them. I counted five men around me. But there had to be more – there may have been a thousand in the lightning-lit forest, with huge old trees that could hide an elephant.
Time in a crisis passes in its own way. You think of the most incongruous things. I remember thinking of kissing my farm girl at the Gardens of Midas. Her lips had a certain firmness that defined good kissing to me then – and now, for that matter. And I remember thinking that Philotas owed me a fair amount of money from knucklebones and would be delighted if I died here.
I also thought how many things I’d done wrong, including . . . well, everything. I was alone on the hillside
