I think that the difference between great warriors and dead warriors is that the great ones survive their first mistakes.
I got across the scree and started down the second ridge. I could no longer see the carrion birds, but they were loud and raucous and I could hear them and I rode for them. I cantered where on any other day I’d have walked. I pictured in my mind all the pages butchered or sold as slaves, Alexander as a hostage. Because I’d failed.
Down the ridge – now I was committed because it’s easier to ride down a steep slope than to come back up, and once Poseidon got into the vale below, I wasn’t sure we’d get back up this high. I cursed under my breath, prayed, and got a lot of branches in the face. Then we came out of the trees.
There was the wall of hurdles – the deer trap. Slaves around the carcasses. I put my head down, clenched my knees and put my heels into Poseidon’s flanks, and we were off, canter and gallop and a desperate sliding stumble down another slope of loose rock above the camp, and men were looking at me.
‘The prince!’ I demanded as I reined in.
Philip the Red, one of the oldster pages, shook his head. ‘Alexander is off with Erigyus,’ Philip said. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Illyrians!’ I said. ‘A raiding party. Laodon sent me to warn the camp.’
Philip was a year older than me, a right bastard to the younger pages, an obsequious lickspittle to the older men. He looked around desperately.
There wasn’t a free adult male in camp. There were ten or twelve pages and fifty slaves and some flute girls.
Some men have it. Some men don’t.
‘Right,’ Philip said. I swear his face changed. He looked at me. ‘The prince went north. Go and warn him.’ He looked around again and saw Black Cleitus. ‘Arm the pages, Cleitus! Right now! And get every slave a bow!’
Simple orders. Obvious stuff, you say. But Philip the Red made the grade, right there. Even if he had beaten me to a pulp once.
I had a body slave – a sort of dog-of-all-work, a gift from my pater to go with my new horse – that I called Polystratus. He was older, a Thracian, and I tolerated him and he wasn’t all that fond of me. But as I turned Poseidon to head north, he was at my side with a spear and a bow. He put the spear in my hand.
Philip the Red wasn’t the only one making the grade.
Polystratus ran with my horse. It’s something city people don’t know – a horse isn’t that much faster than a man, especially over broken ground. The longer the two go on, the more even the race becomes. Over the course of a day, a man and a horse will about break even, except that over ten days, that man on the horse wins, because the man on foot is too tired.
Polystratus and I went north, over a low ridge. It was all very well for bloody Philip to tell me to find the prince, but I really had no idea how to go about it.
Polystratus did. He picked two more Thracian slaves as we went – men hauling deer carcasses into the clearing, big tattooed men with knives.
He looked up at me. ‘We follow water,’ he said. Shrugged. That was his plan – to follow the stream that fed the next meadow. It made sense – animals need water, and it was probably what Alexander had done. But he’d done it seven hours ago.
‘Listen, boys,’ I said, leaning down. ‘I’ll free all three of you if we live and find the prince. Got that?’
Grins all around. One Greek word every slave knows –
‘I’m going north of the stream. Polystratus stays on the stream. You two – spread out a stade – south of the stream and another stade farther south. And
They grunted – Thracians make Macedonians look very civilised indeed – and ran off, all together at first, and then separating by degrees as they crossed the marshy meadow.
I went due north, avoiding the meadow altogether. The first time Polystratus stopped to draw breath and shout, I heard him, and that put heart into me. Then I was back on the low mountain, riding through enormous tumbled rocks and that startling perfume of mighty Artemis, up and up again. I called and called.
After an hour I crossed a stream and realised that I was lost. The ridge had plateaued – in another marsh, and how marshes grow at the top of steep ridges is a bafflement to me still. I had to dismount to get Poseidon around the marsh, and then there was another hill to my left, and I was completely lost. Was this Polystratus’s stream? Or another stream?
I stopped at the edge of the meadow, remounted and turned Poseidon to look at the sun, and only that turn saved me.
I heard the buzz of the sling-stone. I knew it for what it was, but the information took far too long to percolate through my head. Then I put my head down and galloped for the treeline.
I crashed into the trees and looked back, and there were three men in skins – they looked like animals. Fur caps, fur leggings, furs worn as cloaks. Behind them were two men on horses – little ponies, really.
I remember saying
One of the mounted men gave a whoop, and then both of them were flying across the meadow.
I kept going through the trees. I could easily outdistance their little ponies on flat ground, but in these woods they’d have the edge.
I remember thinking, quite reasonably, just as Aristotle taught us, that I had to kill them. I couldn’t chance losing a race. And I couldn’t chance leading them to the prince.
I was over the crest of the ridge with the marsh at the top, now, and going down a shallow slope. Off to the right, I saw one of the downed giant trees.
I rode for it, staking everything on gaining its cover before they saw me.
This giant had fallen recently – in the last hundred years – and the great ball of its roots was open to the sky like a natural cage, all the dirt washed away. I rode in among the roots.
Poseidon stopped, and his breath came in great loud snorts. I could just see my back trail. I gripped my short spear at mid-haft and waited. And waited.
When they came, they were loud and fast. But they had cast far to the west of my line – possibly because they were not fools, but Illyrians – and they passed a quarter of a stade from my ambush, robbing me of any surprise. So I let them pass. There was nothing else I could do, really, except charge them and die.
But I did follow them, moving from cover to cover on horseback the way we were taught, both hunting and scouting. Since the penalty for failure was almost always a heavy beating, doing it with the risk of losing one’s life wasn’t so bad.
The big downed trees were my salvation – that and my excellent horse, which never snorted and never lost his edge. We ranged along with them, half a stade distant, and went north and west. After half an hour, we crossed the track Laodon and I had used in the morning, and I knew where I was. I wasn’t sure quite what I was doing – but I had passed from prey to predator, and I was scouting, or so I thought.
The sun was well down in the sky when they came to a cross-track, and one of them dismounted to look at the ground. He frowned, and then he grew a spear in his back and flopped full length on the ground.
His partner whirled his pony.
Laodon was empty-handed, but he came straight at the man on his smaller horse. He took the man’s sword cut on his forearm – I winced, even as I pressed my knees into Poseidon’s sides – and his right hand grabbed the headstall and ripped the Illyrian’s bridle right off his horse’s head.
The Illyrian’s horse bolted. He threw his arms around the horse’s neck.
I put my spear into him as he went by. He probably never knew I was there until he fell from his horse. He hit the ground heavily and screamed – oh, such a scream as I hope never to hear again. And then he screamed again.
I’d never killed a man, and I’d lost my spear in the shock of the successful stroke, and Poseidon did not want to go near the writhing thing on the ground, covered in leaf mould and blood, bellowing and shrieking.
‘Finish him!’ Laodon shouted. ‘Or we’ll have all his friends on us!’
I had an eating knife.
