Then they came into the woods.
My heart was pounding. The enemy had a hundred men — perhaps double that. It was difficult to count them from my hiding place, but there were many of them. They entered the woods.
Their scouts moved quickly. They were conscious that they’d allowed the column to close up to them too much, and they ran.
But just about even with me, one of them stopped. He was a handsome young man, wearing only a chlamys and a petasos hat and carrying a pair of heavy spears on his shoulder. He stopped from a sprint and looked into the woods. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking away from me, staring off into the woods.
His mate stopped running and looked back.
‘See something?’ he called in Phoenician.
The first man looked and looked, and then squatted and looked at the road.
‘Men were here,’ he said.
You have to imagine, they were an arm’s-length from me. They didn’t have to shout.
Behind them, the column came rolling along the road.
I saw Alexandros move, and I glared at him. Ambush requires patience.
‘Escaped slaves,’ the second man ventured.
The first man looked all around. He was young. That’s probably what saved him. The young make piss-poor observers. He looked, but didn’t see.
A commanding voice called from behind them on the road. I couldn’t make it out, but it was doubtless their commander, telling his scouts to get a move on. Twilight was only two hours away.
The young man looked around again and shrugged.
He and his companion loped off.
I looked around. I could see Alexandros and Giannis and about fifteen other men.
I waited.
The column trudged forward.
Waited.
‘She had tits like udders — Ba’al, it was disgusting!’
‘He was an ignorant-’
‘So I said-’
‘I drank the wine.’
‘I just want to ask this again-’
They were just men. Tall, short, weak, strong, smart, foolish — they were men, walking down the road on a summer evening, headed for battle. Nervous. Over-talkative, as all men are before a fight. As the tail of the column started to pass me, I saw the last two men of the first taxis nervously checking the draw of their swords while their phylarch told them that they needed to stay together, stay together in the fighting.
‘Pirates! Just pirates. They won’t have any discipline. Like the lot we took yesterday. Don’t worry about-’
I rose from my place and roared my war cry.
We fell on the head of the column. They died, and the survivors broke and ran across the road for the shelter of the trees. Most ran a few steps into the woods before they died, because Doola and his men were on that side of the road, a little farther back.
The second taxis froze outside the woods, listening to the screams of their comrades and the sounds of one- sided hand-to-hand.
My dozen archers began to drop shafts into them.
Perhaps their officer was hit early. Perhaps he was a fool. Either way, they did the worst thing possible — they huddled like sheep and bleated, and the arrows fell.
A dozen good archers can do a lot of damage, even to armoured men, even trained men with good morale.
No one had trained men with good morale in a colony, ten thousand stades from home.
By this time, I was watching them. The fight in the woods was over before it really began — a hundred dead Phoenicians — mercenaries, in fact, mostly north Africans with some Greeks among them.
Men like me.
Heh. But not enough like me.
I started to get my oarsmen in order, and Alexandros was there, and Doola and Sittonax, his long Kelt sword red to the hilt.
I knew the second taxis would break the moment I charged it. You can read these things as easily as you read words on a page. It’s like a woman’s facial expressions. The nervous tick; the cold glance. So, by the same token, you can read the moving of spears, the shuffling of feet and the shaking of horsehair plumes. Nervous fidgets.
‘Charge!’ I roared.
We hadn’t run six paces before they broke. They ran away from our charge, and many of them threw down their shields in the flight. The archers loosed and loosed, until our charge obscured their targets.
I didn’t catch one of them. They ran so early that they easily outdistanced my people, all of whom had already fought in one combat — even an ambush is a combat — and by the time we’d crossed the clearing, it was plain to see we didn’t have the daimon to run them down.
So we went around the darkening battlefield, collecting loot. There wasn’t much. The weapons were average, the armour was leather and often already ruined, and most of the helmets were cheap, open-faced helmets or Etruscan-style salad bowls.
A few men had purses, most of them containing only copper.
Not much to die for.
At twilight, we gave up plundering the dead. There were no survivors, not even the two scouts, who’d been killed by the northern fringe of our ambush. That’s the way of it, when an ambush works.
We left the bodies for the birds, and marched back towards the mine. When we got there, we ate some meat, drank water and watched the steam rising off the ruin of the tower. Then we went to sleep.
I remember that I forgot to post sentries. Luckily, Doola wasn’t as tired, or as foolish.
Not that it mattered.
About midnight, Seckla came back. He had heads dangling from his saddlecloth, bouncing and frightening his horse. It was ghoulish.
I woke up long enough to embrace him and hear that he’d hit the survivors and harried them back to their settlement. And then I went back to sleep.
In the morning, it was grey, and the sun wasn’t going to show. My men were surly with fatigue and reaction. I knew how to cure that.
I got a dozen former slaves and some of the stronger herdsmen, and together we moved the two largest of the charred beams from the stump of the tower. With shovels, we cleared the ash and the collapsed roof materials, but the fire had burned a long time, and almost everything had been consumed.
Except the gold and silver, of course.
It took two hours, and I was beginning to doubt, but there they were — a molten puddle of gold, and another of silver, about a yard apart. A fair amount of gold, and quite a lot of silver.
We took axes and hacked it up into manageable chunks, and loaded it on to our stolen horses. Morale soared.
We gorged once more on the dwindling stock of animals, and then we marched for our ships.
We all squeezed aboard, although the conditions were probably not much better than those in the slave pens. We had two hundred and fifty men in a trireme built for two hundred, and we had sixty men in a triakonter.
Off the Tagus, I signalled to Doola to lay alongside, and he agreed to take his shallower craft over the bar and have a look at the town. It was raining, and rowing the trireme was brutal, and I already doubted whether I could get the ship home to Oiasso like this.
Now that the derring-do was over, I began to consider what had happened to my wife and her brother, my erstwhile allies. I had to assume they’d been defeated. How badly? Badly enough, perhaps, not to make it home. Or worse, badly enough to make it back to Oiasso and close it against me.
