Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [199]
The Thracians threw spears and javelins with the whole weight of the hill behind them, and men fell. A spear came right through my torn Boeotian and the scale shirt turned the wicked point. Ares’ hand had turned death aside – again.
The right end of my line was lapping over their shield wall and then extending further as Paramanos’s men came up. I could hear his voice and his Cyrenian Greek as he ordered them into line.
‘All together!’ I sang. My voice held, steady and high. If you want an order to carry in a storm or on a battlefield, you sing.
My Boeotian shield was flapping in pieces. I used it to bat another javelin out of the air and the spine snapped.
‘Shield!’ I roared.
An oarsman behind me passed his forward and Hermogenes held it for me. I dropped the useless corpse of a shield off my arm and thrust my left hand into the leather porpax of the cheap aspis, and then I was ready.
‘All together!’ I called again.
‘Heracles!’ they called back. It wasn’t the god’s own roar of the first shout, but it was sufficient to get us forward, and we went up the rocky ground. Someone started the Paean, and our voices rose like sacred incense to Ares, and he must have smiled on us.
Thracians fight with ferocity, but they are not competitors in an athletic event, the way Greek warriors are, and they don’t practise together, dancing the war dances and measuring the swing of their weapons. They stand too far apart to have a solid line, and their crescent-shaped shields are too small to use in a close fight, where men to the left and right – and men in the rear ranks – can all take a thrust at you when your tunnel-vision is turned on a single opponent.
They hit us hard with javelins as we started forward, though, and men fell. Gaps were opened in our wall and we weren’t deep enough for those holes to close naturally. So the fight that resulted was sheer deadly chaos, and the carnage was grotesque. Skill in arms counted for little – it was too dark. But we had the burning town behind us, and they were above us, and we could see them much better than they could see us, and in that fight, a minute advantage of vision was sufficient.
And we sang. That’s what I remember – the red light of the dying sun, and the Paean of Apollo.
It was no pushover. In the first contact, men fell like weeds cut by a housewife in the garden. I got three men so fast that when my borrowed spear fouled in the third, the first still hadn’t given up his life and fallen on his face. I dropped my spear shaft and pulled my sword again. The marines who should have been either side of me were gone, and Idomeneus was in the front rank, and Herk, of all men, his scarlet plume nodding, pushed in beside me.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the beach?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘Fuck that!’ he shouted.
We all felt the impact as the Thracian charge struck Paramanos’s end of the line. The Thracian sub-chief hadn’t waited for Paramanos to come over the crest at him. He must have been wise enough to figure that we knew he was there.
I didn’t see it, but I’ve heard the tale often enough. Paramanos went down – knocked from his feet by a barbarian – and Lekthes stood over his body until he rose. Lekthes died there, like a hero. He took three thrusts, but he didn’t fall until Paramanos was back on his feet.
I didn’t know it, but Lekthes’ moment of heroism steadied the whole line.
Paramanos’s men turned, unwilling to abandon their commander, and they stood where they might have broken. Even then, we felt the shock and our line bent back.
But Stephanos was on their other flank with Aristagoras and his sally, and the fortunes of the Thracians began to