Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [46]
We were the last. Miltiades and his tribe were the first. And the Thebans were waiting in ambush. It should have been a disaster. There’s no better position for a phalanx than catching your opponent strung out over a goat track.
But the Thebans moved late, and they were late straggling into their ambush site. Hoplites don’t usually ambush each other. Maybe they felt unmanly. Who knows what a Theban thinks? At any rate, they fucked it all up.
The result was that their men blundered into Miltiades in the dark. Instead of an ambush, we had a mob fight in the first light.
The first I knew was that the files started to move faster, and then they stopped, and then we could hear it – fighting. One battle made me an expert. But this didn’t sound like the fight with the Spartans. This sounded like Chaos come to earth, and it was.
Neither side ever got a phalanx formed. That’s what everyone remembers about the Battle of Parnes. Our files and theirs poured into each other in the scrubby, broken ground on the northern shoulder of the mountain, and the push of men behind kept adding fighters. It was so dark that, with your face inside your helmet, you couldn’t be sure of the man on your right or left unless you tapped their shield with your own. Twice, Epictetus stopped us without orders and formed our files up close. He was doing what he knew how to do – forming the block that would keep us safe. But both times the path soon narrowed to nothing again and we had to file off.
An hour after we first heard the fighting – exhausted with the fear of waiting and the fatigue of marching – we rounded a bend and saw the fight. The sun was a red ball on the horizon to the east, and we caught glimpses of the sea to the north as the trail climbed and dipped, and then the fight was right there, a spear’s throw away.
I could see Pater’s double plume. He was standing still, shield against his knees, arms crossed.
The valley was full of men locked in combat, and it was a swirl of death. Because the armies had never formed, no man had a front or a back, and there was no safety and no shield wall.
The Athenians were begging us to come on, COME ON! And still Pater looked out over the valley. I, for one, was in no hurry to plunge into that maelstrom.
And then Pater made his decision. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the movement of his back. He made his decision and we were moving – not down into the battle, but across the hillside to the north. Pater began to run, and the files ran after him.
It might seem a simple thing, to lead a thousand men around a battle that is only two stades or so wide. One man can run the stade in the time another man sings a song, but a thousand men take a hundred times longer, or so it seems when the fate of your city rests on the outcome. And we were scared, honey. We’d been promised a stratagem and an easy fight, and this was chaos and death.
Pater ran north and the files followed him. Just over the brow of the low hill where you first see the polis at Tanagra in the distance, he turned west, halted and ordered the files to form. That was easy. He’d picked a piece of flat ground, and each file ran up, directed by their phylarch and Pater’s spear, and they halted to the left of the file before them, so that in the time it took the sun to rise a finger’s breadth, the phalanx was formed, minus the cowards and the men who couldn’t make the run.
I made it.
Simon didn’t. I wonder what he might have done had he made it to the front, but the run left him behind. About sixty men stayed in the rear. This always happens. So the phylarchs say a few words to the men who make it to the fight, and then they close the files.
Suddenly I was in the fourth rank. My hand was cold and clammy on Deer Killer. I had a heavy javelin to go with her, and that’s all I had. I had no sword. On the other hand, I had armour like the best men.
Epictetus put me in the fourth rank because, in his opinion, I was more fit for combat