Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [47]
I was one file from the far right. Bion was my file-leader, and Pater was about a spear’s length away when we closed our ranks and files in the synaspismos.
Then we sang the Paean. Usually men sing it before they charge, but not always. I don’t know what happened to the Paean at Oinoe – whether I have forgotten it, or whether we didn’t sing it. But I was in the phalanx at Parnes, and I remember singing, roaring my fear out inside the bronze helmet that my brother had died wearing.
In the closed ranks, you are three feet from the men on either side, so that the rim of your shield can just touch if you move to tap them – something men do all the time as they wait. You start a few feet from the men in front and behind, but as a fight goes on, everything closes in. Well, that’s what usually happens. You end up in a tight-packed mob that pushes together and sees only with the eyes of the front rank. In that fight, I had no idea what was happening in front of us from the moment that our files closed up. I could see Dionysius’s leather-clad back, and I could see Pater’s plumes and the rim of my own aspis.
We pushed forward.
We marched together to the sound of the Paean. We had a slight hill behind us and we went down the hill and then our front slammed into the fight. Friends? Enemies? The front of a phalanx has no allies. We went down into the fight, and the only sign I had that Pater was facing death was an increased pressure on my shield.
But they melted in front of us. I stepped over a man who was down. I looked down – hard enough in a helmet – and saw his eyes peeking over the rim of his shield, and the black blood on his legs. I let him live, and so did everyone else.
We started to plough through the maelstrom. Dust rose with the sun, and the battle was not ending. We pushed forward a step at a time, and I was hot and miserable, my spear held point-up so that it wouldn’t foul the men ahead of me. Sometimes the man behind me – a middle-aged farmer from two farms beyond us, a bitter man named Zotikos – pushed too hard, and I was sandwiched between the curved front of his aspis and the curved back of my own. I was too small for this, and it hurt.
Zotikos always apologized to me every time he slammed in. ‘Sorry, kid!’ he’d grunt. ‘No good at this shit!’ He was pale with fear – but he pushed.
I know – now – what happened in the front rank, but at the time I knew nothing except that Pater was alive, because I could see his plumes and hear his voice. And we should have been winning an easy victory – we were the only formed troops on the field, and the Thebans were outnumbered.
Maybe they were stubborn Boeotians, just like us.
Maybe the phalanx isn’t as important as men think. To be honest, I’ve seen unformed mobs stop a phalanx several times. Only Ares knows. We pushed forward and our front-rankers stabbed with their spears, Athenians rallied on our right and Thebans melted away, and then, suddenly, we stopped.
Calchas was right – it is the killers who are dangerous. The rest of war is very like a sport. Like pushing and pulling and spear-fencing all together. But when the killers come, it is nothing like a sport.
I don’t know who they were. A brotherhood? Some men who had trained together as boys? Or more likely, a band of aristocrats. They had good armour and they knew their business. Perhaps they were mercenaries. At any rate, they hit our phalanx when we were tired and lazy and confident that nothing would stand against us. Epictetus went down and, as I raised my head to look, Dionysius took a blow to the helmet and down he went.
And just like that, I was in the front rank, facing a killer. I had all the time it took him to push past Dionysius to see that he was clad from head to foot in bronze, with thigh guards and arm guards and knuckle guards like a professional, and he had a bronze-faced shield and a heavy spear and a double plume of red.
You must lock your shield with your neighbour’s,