Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [126]
Then you have to understand the Persian way. The front rank, as I say, is spearmen – sometimes the second rank as well. So all the archers have to shoot over the first two ranks, and that means that they lose the ability to pick off individual men. Master archers – the officers – decide how they will shoot. It is hard for them to detail a few men to shoot one target while the rest shoot another.
Not that I knew any of this. I just ran, and the only sound I could hear was my feet on the gravel. It was like running for a prize.
I ran fifty paces – perhaps more – before they began to shoot at me. It wasn’t the storm from before, either – it was a steady impact of single shafts against my shield. Something stung my foot, and then I felt a blow like the kick of a mule against my shin, but again the greave held and still I ran forward.
And then the world cleared for me. It is hard to describe, really. I was running and then, as if my eyes had been closed, I was running like a god. I felt as if I was a god. I had been running with my aspis held in front, and high, which made me blind to everything but the ground under my feet. Now I let my shield go down a fraction, and I ran looking at the Medes.
And they were close.
I have so much to say about this that I will only bore you, thugater. Except that something changed, and it was as if I could see, having been blind. I could see that I was going to live. I could see that I was about to be a hero. Athena granted me this, I think, or my ancestor Heracles.
Twenty paces from their shield wall, I decided not to slow down.
It is worth saying that when men run at a shield wall, they slow as they close in the last three or four paces. They have to, or they risk being spitted in the knee or thigh by a cool hand. And most men correctly dread the moment when they crash into the enemy’s shield. You are vulnerable, then. You could fall.
I didn’t even slow. I lengthened my stride like a runner finishing a race, as if a garland or a crown of laurel waited for me.
An arrow rang off the front of my helmet so hard that I almost lost my balance. And then I smashed into their wall, and all the sight and sound and smell of it hit me at once.
I killed men.
No man killed me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was one of just two men to reach their wall. But we did reach it, and I was told afterwards that we knocked holes in their shield wall like a big iron awl punching bronze.
The phalanx was close behind us, and no arrows were falling on them. They roared, although I didn’t hear it. I was in a world no bigger than the blood-soaked ground beneath my sandals and the limits of my helmet. I remember that blows fell on that helmet like Pater’s hammer on his anvil, and more blows glanced off the scales on my back and slashed my outer thighs and my right arm, but I refused to stop. I remember that. I remember deciding that I would go all the way through them and see what happened then. I pushed and stomped and killed, and I have no memory of fighting the spearmen, but only of killing archers, hacking their faces and their bows and pushing forward, always forward, and the pain of the blows on my back and my helmet, and then, faster than I tell it, I was through. I was against the rock face of the pass, and I turned. Both my spears were gone – the gods know where – and I drew my sword, put my back to the rock and cut at every Persian who came forward.
They were brave. A dozen of them, rear-rankers, inexperienced men, pressed at me. They had neither shields nor spears, and they were not much, hand to hand, and they pressed me clumsily, and despite the ringing in my head, I killed them. Not all of them. Just enough to make the rest pause and doubt themselves.
Then there was pressure, the kind of pressure you get in a nightmare, and I was crushed against big rock, and the aspis pushed into my neck and thighs, and I cried out from the pain of it.
And then men were screaming my name, and it was over.
Eualcidas was the first to embrace me. He pushed his helmet back