by H A CULLEY
Most glared at him with ill-concealed hatred. They were filthy and wore cloaks made from dog skins with the head draped over one shoulder; all except one. He was fair skinned, unlike the others who were swarthy and dark haired. He was also cleaner and wore a simple blue tunic made from a length of cloth with a hole cut for his head. It was held in place by a length of rope tied around his waist. Unlike the rest, he also had a bronze collar around his neck which had chaffed his skin, resulting in two lines of bloody grazing.
He looked at Iphitos with interest and the taxiarch returned his look with a brief smile. The boy grinned back. Seeing this, the other boys started to yell at him until they were cuffed into silence by the guards.
‘Who are you, you don’t look like the others,’ he asked him in Greek.
‘I’m not,’ the boy, who looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, replied in Greek. ‘I’m a Celtic slave who has to look after these animals.’ When Iphitos looked puzzled he added ‘Keltoi’, the Greek name for the Celts.
‘How did they capture you?’
‘My tribe lives to the west, much further up the river you call the Danube. My father decided to explore the river but we were attacked by these brutes and they killed everyone except me. They took me captive and made me a slave for the priests they call the Ctistae.’
His speech was a little difficult to follow as the dialect was one he hadn’t heard before. Later on he found out that it was the common language used by the Celts, Dacians and Getae.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Weylin. It means son of the wolf.’
‘Well, son of the wolf, would you prefer to be my personal servant or stay here and take your chances with the unwashed?’
The boy laughed. ‘I would prefer to be free and return to my people, but as that’s an impossible dream, I’ll happily be your slave.’
‘Skeuphorus, not slave. You’re not a free man but your status is higher than that of a common slave. First, let’s get that collar removed from your neck.’
Now all he had to do was find a replacement for Galen.
-X-
Alexander looked around the tent. His eyes swept over Parmenion, Antigonus, Hephaestion, Iphitos, Ptolomy, Nearchos, Kleandros, Philotas and his brother Nicanor seated amongst his other senior commanders. Parmenion’s third son, Hector, stood behind the king as his aide. The first two were his strategoi, along with Antipater who had remained in Pella, and the others were all now taxiarchs, except for Nicanor who commanded his Foot Companions as a chiliarch.
‘Adelfoi,’ he began. Those attending looked at each other; the king had never addressed them as ‘my brothers’ before. ‘The transports are due to return in two or three days and so our wait to embark for Persia will shortly come to an end. Our naval patrols in the Euxine Sea report that there is no sign of another fleet which might oppose our journey down the coast, through the Bosphorus and the Propontis, to Dardanellia in the Hellespont, where we shall disembark. We need to prepare the army to embark. This will be a massive logistical exercise and I have asked Iphitos to take charge of it and liaise with the navarchs in command of the two fleets.’
Most gave Iphitos a sympathetic glance, only too thankful that this nightmare task hadn’t come their way.
Whilst Alexander had been speaking, one of the guards at the entrance to the tent had entered and beckoned to Hector, who glanced at Alexander. He gave him an impatient nod and continued with his briefing. However, when his aide returned and whispered in his ear he stopped and a look of incredulity crossed his face. This was quickly replaced by anger and his face turned red with rage. He took a deep breath and turned back to his commanders.
‘It seems that our invasion of Persia will have to wait for a few months. Antipater’s messenger has just arrived from Pella with the news that the whole of Illyria has risen in revolt and they have invaded Northern Macedon.’
Chapter Sixteen – Ambushed in Illyria
Autumn 335 BC
Iphitos looked at King Langarus warily. Whilst Alexander and the rest of the army had gone into Illyria to deal with the Dardanians and the Taulanti, he had been told to take the Pathfinders and the epihipparchia of Thracian light cavalry and assist King Langarus and four thousand of his Agriani to defeat the Autarati, an Illyrian tribe who lived in Eastern Illyria. Their king, Autarieus, had sat and plotted this revolt with Cleitus of Dardania and Glaucius of the Taulanti at the peace conference in Corinth when Alexander was elected Hegemon of Greece. The mistake they made was to assume that he would have departed for Persia by now.
The Agriani were ill-disciplined and fond of showing their prowess as individual warriors instead of fighting together as a group. Getting them to defeat the Autarati decisively wasn’t going to be easy. Only seven hundred of the tribesmen were mounted; the rest were on foot with very little armour and a motley array of weapons. These ranged from long handled axes to spears and from bronze swords to bows and slings. The only comforting thought was that the enemy would be similarly badly armed and equally ill-disciplined, with any luck.
It hadn’t helped that the Pathfinders and the Thracians didn’t try and hide the low opinion they had of the Agriani and matters were not helped by the fact that the Agriani horsemen had abandoned the Pathfinders during the battle with the Getae. The letter blamed them for the fact that Philomedes had been wounded and was not with them. He was making a good recovery, but he was on a cart in the baggage train of the main army being looked after by Myrto.
The ribald comments from his men had nearly led to a fight between them and the Agriani and he had to publically apologise to Langarus after admonishing his men. That had lowered the temperature but they were still uneasy allies.
Although Alexander had said that they were in joint command it was evident that Langarus, as a king – albeit a minor one, more like the chieftain of his tribe – thought that he should be in charge and that Iphitos should take orders from him. Iphitos was accustomed to using diplomacy to secure the main objective and was not a man to stand on his dignity, but in this case he could see the campaign being a disaster if he let Langarus take the lead.
‘I’m sorry Langarus, but we have no idea where the enemy army is and, until our scouts have located it, blundering into their territory blind would be extremely unwise.’
He hadn’t wanted to be so blunt but his normally calm temperament had been tested to the limit over the past two weeks.
The Agrianian king had given up trying to get Iphitos to call him basileus. As Iphitos had told him more than once, the only person he called basileus was Alexander, and then only in public. He had even refused to call him kyrios, pointing out that they were equals and therefore to call him ‘lord’ would be inappropriate.
Langarus had wanted to march into the land of the Autarati, burning their villages and laying waste the land, until the enemy were forced to meet them in battle. As the Autarati were reputed to be able to field ten to twelve thousand warriors Iphitos didn’t think that this was a terribly clever idea. He was well aware that a third of this number would be untried boys and youths but, even so, the experienced warriors would still outnumber his small army. His best chance of defeating them was in carefully selecting the ground, and then springing a surprise on them. To do that he needed to know exactly where they were.
In the end they agreed to differ. Langarus and his men would continue to pillage the country whilst Iphitos would set off separately to try to find out where the main Autaratian army had mustered. It was a risky strategy and depended on him finding them before they found out that he and Langarus had split their forces.
-X-
Alexander and Parmenion glared at each other. The king had decided to ignore the border fortress of Pelium, which the Dardanians had captured from the Macedonians, and go around it to invade Dardania. His main priority was to defeat his erstwhile friend and host, Cleitus, before he could link up with the Taulanti and the Autaranti. Although he had sent Iphitos and Langarus to deal with the lat
ter, he wasn’t hopeful of success. His main motive in detaching them had been to rid himself of the unreliable Agriani without alienating Langarus.
Parmenion, on the other hand, was worried about leaving such a strong fortress behind them where its garrison could interfere with Alexander’s lines of communication and supply back to Pella. His advice was to secure Pelium, defeat Cleitus and only then tackle the Taulanti.
‘If they link up with the Dardanians in the meantime is that so serious? You yourself said that the tribe mainly consisted of old men, women and boys.’
‘That was six years ago,’ Alexander snapped back. ‘Those boys are now young men. They breed like rabbits so every time you think that you’ve destroyed a generation they come back at you a few years later as strong as ever.’
Antigonus, the other strategos, sided with Alexander so, against Parmenion’s advice, the army bypassed Pelium using paths through the mountains and appeared north of it on the road to Scupi, the Dardanian capital. To get there they had to move along the valley through which the River Axios ran. In places this was quite steep sided until it emerged north of the mountains and, although Alexander had the sense to use his light infantry to secure the heights as he entered each gorge, Parmenion was concerned about the army’s vulnerability whilst it was confined. His concerns proved justified when his scouts came back to report the presence of a large force blocking the exit onto the plain beyond.
At first Alexander thought that this might be the Dardanians, but their numbers appeared to smaller than he had expected. Then a messenger came riding up the column at a gallop.
‘Basileus,’ he panted as he brought his lathered mount to a halt. ‘The Dardanians are behind us; thousands and thousands of them.’
Alexander groaned and glanced at Parmenion to see if he was looking smug. He had been correct all along. Now they were caught in a trap, like a walnut in the jaws of a nutcracker.
-X-
Iphitos was thankful that he had brought Enyo and Theon with him. In the end it was these two who found the Autaratian encampment. They had climbed up to a saddle between two large mountains and from there they could look down on the plain below them, through which a tributary of the Axios ran. There, beside the south bank of the river at the base of the mountains, lay a large camp. The couple spent an hour or so surveying it and estimated the numbers at around thirty thousand. However that included women, young children and old men. The number of men and youths of fighting age was probably no more than seven or eight thousand.
They reported back to Iphitos and, when the latter arrived back at the main camp and informed Langarus, he was all for charging into the camp then and there.
‘They still outnumber us, and I want to avoid the needless slaughter of women and children if I can,’ Iphitos told him coldly.
‘Why? The more boys you kill, the fewer warriors there will be in the future. The fewer women they have, the fewer babies. I don’t understand your logic,’ Langarus replied impatiently.
‘I don’t make war on women and children!’ Iphitos was getting angry now.
‘Well, I do. So I suggest that you stay out of it and leave it to us!’
‘You have half their numbers and, judging from past experience, your men will stop fighting and start to plunder their possessions and rape the women as soon as they get inside the camp. Once you lose the element of surprise, they’ll slaughter you.’
Langarus would never admit it but what Iphitos was saying had the ring of truth to it.
‘Very well, what do you suggest?’ he asked reluctantly after chewing over what the younger man had said.
‘It hasn’t rained for a month or more and the scrub around the campsite is bone dry. The wind blows off the mountains and across the plain. If we set fire to it at night fighting the fire will exhaust and demoralise them. With any luck it may kill a few too. Then we hit them at dawn. We ride through the camp, killing as many as we can, but don’t stop. There will be time for looting and so on later. Once clear of the camp we form up on the plain and face them in battle.’
Langarus thought about Iphitos’ plan, then nodded. ‘It’s a good plan. I shall go and discuss it with my council and let you know.’
Iphitos was left to kick his heels for an hour before Langarus returned.
‘Very well. The wind is blowing strongly at the moment and so let’s hope it continues to do so. We’ll set fire to the scrub tonight.’
-X-
Alexander, Parmenion, Antigonus and Hephaestion stood and looked at the topography. A steep scree slope dominated the right flank of their position. It was at least five hundred feet high and they couldn’t detect any movement on top of it. Nevertheless, Alexander had sent a lochus of light spearmen to secure it.
The valley at this point was nearly a mile wide; the river ran through the western part of it and the banks were scattered with large rocks, making cavalry movement difficult, and even infantry movement would be disrupted. Alexander told Lysis to site his artillery on the far bank, facing both ways with one tagma of light infantry and another of peltasts to protect them. Lysis suggested piling the smaller rocks into a makeshift wall and digging pits where possible to further impede any attack on them and Alexander nodded.
A cliff face secured one Macedonian flank and the river the other. Alexander placed the remainder of his peltasts on the slopes beyond the river, with some light spearmen to protect them, to add to the firepower provided by the gastraphetes and the katapeltikons. More spearmen were sent to join those already in place as a precaution in case the enemy tried to seize the hill tops. If they succeeded they could roll rocks down onto the Macedonian position.
He sent the cavalry back down the valley towards the Dardanians to find a side valley in which to hide. He was now ready, as far as was possible, to deal with the ambush set for him by the Illyrians.
He had expected the enemy to launch co-ordinated attacks from both ends of the gorge at once. They didn’t; the Taulanti launched their attack first. Alexander remembered Glaucias as the arrogant youth he had met when he had tried to re-instate Taulus as prince of the Taulanti six years before. It seemed that he had lost none of his arrogance. His tribesmen didn’t pause when they came into sight but picked up the pace and charged straight at the phalanx blocking the gorge.
Alexander had drawn it up with eight ranks facing one way and eight the other. Antigonus commanded the half facing the Taulanti and Parmenion the other half. Alexander sat on Bucephalus in the middle so that he could see what was happening.
Lysis watched as the tribesmen ran towards the solid phalanx, which stood there immobile and silent, awaiting their fate. The silence evidently unnerved the Taulanti as they slowed their stampede towards the phalanx. Then, suddenly, a keras blared out and two things happened. The katapeltikons fired together and the hoplites banged their sarissa against their shields as one, producing a startling and sudden explosion of sound before the first five rows lowered them into a hedge of spear points.
The sudden thunderous bang coupled with the impact of thirty long bolts smashing through the right flank of the Taulanti frightened the untried young warriors further. Glaucias rode forward, furiously urging his men to attack the Macedonians army just as a second volley from the katapeltikons hit them, accompanied by the first of the bolts from the gastraphetes. Despite this, they pushed home their attack, but it had little impact on the phalanx. Glaucias therefore withdrew and decided to attack the artillery over on the other side of the river instead. Just as the Taulanti were busy wading across the river Cleitus appeared with his much larger Dardanian army from the Pelium end of the gorge.
-X-
The first that the Autarati knew of the attack on their camp was when smoke started to billow through the camp an hour before dawn. When it reached the horse lines, the animals panicked and pulled at the ropes which tethered them until they broke free. Then they stampeded through the camp causing panic, destruction and quite a few deaths before they escaped into the night l
eaving the tribe without any cavalry.
The scrub to the west of the camp had caught alight easily when the fire arrows landed in it, but it started to burn itself out when the fire reached the encampment because the Autarati had cleared it from the site. By that time the smoke that they had inhaled had made them desperate for water. When the sun appeared over the tops of the hills most of the Autarati, men women and children, were at the river pouring water down their parched throats and washing the greasy residue of the smoke from their bodies.
Thus they were totally unprepared for the attack by the Agriani. Iphitos watched as their warriors, both on foot and on horseback, tore into them, killing indiscriminately. As they were away from the main camp there was no temptation to loot yet and the Agriani concentrated on the business in hand.
One section of the camp had escaped the worst of the smoke and it was towards here that Iphitos led his Pathfinders and Thracians. The warriors here had sent their women and children to the rear and formed up in a line some ten deep to defend them. Iphitos gave the signal to form wedges and the Pathfinders led the way, breaking the enemy formation apart for the Thracians who followed them to exploit the gaps in their defensive line.
It didn’t take long for the Autarati to break and flee. Iphitos left the Thracians to pursue the routed enemy and to round up the women and children for sale as slaves. Meanwhile he recalled his Pathfinders and led them over to where some of the Autarati had rallied by the river to fight back against the Agriani. Once more the Pathfinders formed wedges and Iphitos enjoyed the exhilaration of leading a charge into the disorganised ranks of the enemy.
