by Talbot Mundy
“Oh-heh! Number One! Conops!” cried a voice in outer darkness.
“Oh-heh! Number Two! Conops!”
“Oh-heh! Number Three! Conops!”
Silence. Hurrying, staggering footfalls, deadened by the sand. Then a voice:
“Where’s master?”
“This way!”
Ten men reeled through the open gate behind another who was bow-legged and hardly higher than the others’ shoulders. Then Conops’ unmistakable voice: “Halt! ’Ten-shun! Fall out now and get yourselves a drink. Then down the hatch for a couple o’ snores and sleep like dead men! You’ll be needed at daybreak, sure as death. Stand at ease! Stand easy! Fall away!”
He shoved himself a passage between seated men and stood with his back to the fire, saluting Tros, but he couldn’t keep his one eye off the Northmen. It danced sideways. He was grinning.
“Well? What?”
“Did it, master! It was easy. They were on the march already, direction o’ Memphis. Nothing but a lot o’ lousy priests to interfere with us. So we burned the pier, too. Scuttled some boats, burned the others and stood by to be sure they were caught good. Then we cut the moorings o’ some and they drifted into dry reeds by the bank lower down. You’d ha’ thought all Egypt was burning. It stopped ’em, I reckon. We came back down-stream as fast as we could make it, and our boats were all right, with the watch awake. From that bit o’ high ground where you and I stood conning, I could see ’em in full moonlight. They’ve met that column that we saw marching southward, and there they’ve all dropped anchor. Wondering what next, I reckon. My boat’s crew are used up, master; I’ve dismissed ’em.”
“You may lie on my cloak and get some sleep yourself,” Tros answered. “You have done well.”
Conops saluted and backed away, almost into the fire. He grinned all around the circle.
“Thought I smelt herring! Well, I’ve smelt worse! Battle-axe me if here isn’t old top-mast himself, alive and growling natural! How’s Odin?”
Tros interrupted:
“Manners, you wharf-rat!”
Conops came and faced Arsinoe. He straightened his face, straightened the knife at his belt, put his hands to his sides, his heels together, and bowed low. “Your obedient servant, Princess!”
“Fall away!” Tros commanded. “Take my cloak and turn in!”
“Aye, aye, master.”
CHAPTER X
“TROS! TROS!”
TROS’ genius, like that of all true cruiser captains, was allied to the cavalry type. He habitually thought in terms of swift maneuver, ruse, economy of men, and sudden impact. But he had no cavalry. And in fighting on land he lacked experience. He knew it, but he was not the man to share that kind of secret, nor to let his men even suspect it.
Even Arsinoe, who watched him with a kind of cat-wise alertness, wondered at his apparent self-assurance. She knew, as well as he, how desperate the situation was, but she had yet to learn the first article of Tros’ faith: that luck is on the side of him who knows luck when he sees it.
Luck began to arrive, a full hour before dawn. Scores of the peasant-laborers, who had fled southward from the burning barracks, served as well as any screen of scouting cavalry. They gave ample warning of the enemy’s advance, coming phantoming back, to avoid being caught and made to carry ammunition, water and other heavy burdens. Besides, they knew where the supplies of ground millet, onions, radishes and oil were hidden in plundered tombs. So they were pounced on and looted in turn; every man in Tros’ command had had a full meal before sunrise, chopping up the gate for fuel and building their little fires behind the wall, out of sight of the advancing enemy.
Tros made his depositions long before daylight. He could not afford to occupy a wide front, against what would be overwhelming numbers, unless his force was concentrated and kept well in hand. His scouts reported six war-chariots; those would probably be manned by archers, and used for out-flanking purposes.
He chose his battle-front with chariots in mind, taking Sigurdsen, Conops and five decurions to point out to them exactly the positions they should take up, and they marked their stations to avoid confusion. He let his men lie at ease behind the wall, avoiding the usual Roman commanders’ mistake of upsetting nerves by getting tired men too soon into the battle-line.
Arsinoe came with him. There was no denying her. She was silent, but she seemed to be studying Tros and his depositions as if destiny depended, not on what he would do, but on understanding how and why he did it. A long thighed, actively striding girl, looking in her armor like a lad of eighteen. Sigurdsen paid her a good deal of attention. He told her her hair was like a Norse girl’s, and that it was a pity she should die so young and lovely.
“For here we die. But we will hew our swath first! And perhaps they will take you prisoner.”
Satisfied with his own assigned position, Sigurdsen took little interest in the rest of Tros’ arrangements, although he gave advice when asked.
The left wing was to rest on the long wall with the gate fifty yards to its rear —seamen under the command of two decurions, Pertinax and Thestius.
The right wing under Conops, consisting of the ten Jews and thirty seamen, was to rest against a honeycomb of open tombs that would make them very difficult indeed to outflank. Sigurdsen and his battle-axemen were to hold the center, facing nearly due South.
Tros himself, with three decurions and thirty men, would take position with their backs to the well, in reserve, to reenforce any part of the line that looked like breaking. Between the center and the wings, on either side, some captured laborers were put to digging short trenches, in which the archers were to keep cover and be frugal with their perilously scanty ammunition.
Facing south by southwest, with the pyramids on their left hand, they would not have the sun in their eyes, as the enemy would have, should they attempt a turning movement.
At last Arsinoe broke silence.
“And I, Lord Captain? Where is my place?”
“Your men will be distributed to fight under my decurions. I have ordered it so.”
She answered him very calmly and without heroics, but she held her chin high.
“Is this not my battle? Is it yours only? Do you think, because I am a woman, and a Ptolemy, I am unfit to lead my own men? They are my men.”
“You will obey me.”
“Then command me!”
It was true, he had ignored her. He could have told her to hide in a tomb, but he knew he would have to assign valuable men to keep her from coming out.
“You will stand by me with the reserve.”
She saluted. He returned into the enclosure and talked to the men, explaining to them what they would be called upon to do, wasting no breath on bombast.
“You men know me, and I know you,” he said finally. “Let us remember we are proud to be comrades in arms!”
There was no mistaking their answer. It was the growling roar of men who will do their ungrudging utmost. After that, he led his archers to the trenches and gave each man careful instruction.
Daybreak revealed the enemy less than half a mile distant, but Tros’ position would remain for a long while yet in shadow. The intervening sand was ominously strewn with mummies that resembled blackened corpses on a stricken battle-field. Evidently Conops had only seen about half of the men at the temple up-river; the combined forces of the enemy, in dense formation, looked like five or six hundred men. Some of them were probably non-combatants; but there seemed, too, to be armed men in reserve, in the shadow around and behind a quite small pyramid. There were six two-horsed chariots out in front, in line, and in one of them stood a woman, not in armor.
She had two fan-bearers up behind her. Fans such as those were the royal insignia. Her chariot was surrounded by a dozen footmen in splendid armor. Scouting ahead was a line of about thirty men, advancing timidly, expecting to be met by arrow-fire from ambush.
“Boidion!” Arsinoe laughed. “Boidion, you poor fool!”
N
ot Boidion’s chariot, but another, came trotting forward alone. The intention was obvious. From behind the screen of scouts its occupant proposed to harangue Tros’ men, to offer terms, and perhaps to offer a price for Tros himself, dead or alive. But there was no sign of Tros’ actual position until the chariot approached too near to the hurriedly dug trenches.
Then a bow drawn by a Cretan archer twanged . The plumed and cloaked occupant of the chariot fell backward, clutching an arrow that pierced his throat. The charioteer whirled his horses and galloped away. The dead man’s cloak became a range-mark for the arch-
IT WAS then that Conops’ trumpet sounded “battle stations!” They poured through the gate in good order, in no haste, to their appointed places in the line. It was too late then for the enemy to alter a plan of battle conceived in the dark in overconfidence; a maneuver now, at such close quarters, would have offered Tros too good an opportunity to strike and rout themaneuvering companies.
Nor was it possible to come at his flank without being thrown into confusion by the honeycomb of open tombs; and to get behind him would entail a long march, leaving a reduced force facing them.
Their strategy was as evident as daylight: failing overtures, to rely on overwhelming numbers. They could no more afford to try to starve Tros out than could he afford to refuse battle. They must snatch swift victory or else abandon hope of taking Memphis. The city would surely not surrender to them, and incur the risk of Cleopatra’s subsequent revenge, if there were a queen’s force, undefeated, within striking distance. Alexis might know that the Queen had no trustworthy forces to send to Tros’ support, but Memphis didn’t know that. What Memphis did know was, that the queen held hostage and would be ruthless. It was fight, or fail before rebellion had well begun.
So the chariots wheeled away to the enemy’s left flank. A fanfare of trumpets split the morning air. There arose a roar from the enemy’s ranks, and the advance commenced, with barely space enough between the serried companies to cushion the inevitable pressure of the wings on the center as they charged a narrower front than their own.
Tros, up on the well-coping with his back to the wooden gallows-post, groaned for his trireme’s arrow-engines. They were a motley host that came against him—men of all races, armed as happened. There were Greeks in light hoplite armor; archers in bronze and leather; pikemen in heavy armor, helmeted like Roman gladiators; coal-black Nubians in lion-skin with ox-hide shields and iron-bladed stabbing spears that danced in the sun to the time of their thundering song.
In the center marched a heavy phalanx, eighty strong, of men who looked like Thracians. A scattering of Roman uniforms; some turbaned Parthians; Arabs; but no native Egyptians, except the wretched peasantry, who lugged heavy arrow-baskets in the rear of the thundering ranks. Ninety per cent of the officers were kilted Greeks, out in front of their men.
It was a force that should have wilted away under the fire of well-drilled archers; and Tros’ archers were experts; but he had had to order them to hold fire until they could make every last arrow count at close range. Men had been told off to gather the enemy’s arrows to replenish the few dozen that each archer had stuck in the sand in the trench beside him.
Sigurdsen’s men crouched in the archers’ trenches, leaving a tempting gap for the advancing phalanx. It came on at the double—a slow, heavy-pounding jog-trot, to break Tros’ line at the gap. Tros’ archers, at less than fifty yards range, sent a sudden, screaming hail of arrows into the light infantry on either flank of the phalanx, checking, for a moment halting them in confusion.
The phalanx came on alone, led by a Macedonian protected by two swordsmen. All three fell to Sigurdsen’s axe— three swipes that split them down before they could think how to engage the unfamiliar weapon. Those were the first three to be slain in close combat.
Sigurdsen went berserk. Heaving the officer’s corpse left-handed, he hurled it against three spearmen, leaped into the gap and battle-axed a swath for his men to follow through. They went in wedge-wise. Long spears, once their front was broken, were as useless against axes as so many ornamental awning-poles.
They were worse than useless. The swinging axes shored through bronze armor, or beat men to earth by the sheer weight of the blow. The recovering, back-handed up-swing was equally deadly, cleaving arm-pits, laying bellies open, splitting unguarded chins.
The phalanx went down, and was not. Three wounded Northmen rolled into an archer’s trench, and Sigurdsen went forward, he and his men roaring their battle-cry:
“Tros! Tros!”
THAT was contrary to orders. Tros had forbidden a charge until he should perceive the right moment. Both his wings were being hard pressed. Conops on the right wing appeared to be doing well against Nubians, who were no match for the seamen who had stood off boarders in the storm off Salamis. But the seamen on the left wing under Pertinaux and Thestius were being forced backward along the wall.
The line was becoming bent like a taut bow. Two companies of the enemy formed column and rushed at a converging angle to split Tros’ line in half by storming the gap that the Northmen had left in their rear. The Northmen were cut off—surrounded— fighting back to back.
Tros went into battle then. He charged with all his reserves behind him, to make the gap good.
There was ten minutes’ carnage.
Wounded, with an arrow through the calf of his leg, recklessly protected by his seamen, Tros held the line, until at last the storming companies recoiled and Sigurdsen, ten Northmen shy, fought his way back, exhausted, bleeding, leaning on his axe to recover breath while his men rallied in line in the gap.
Tros’ archers reopened a withering fire with the enemy’s squandered arrows. The enemy’s center was beaten, discouraged, and out of control.
“Charge!” yelled Sigurdsen.
Tros smote him. There was no other way to check that battle-drunkard. The left wing was curling up. The enemy had fought their way along the wall. The wall was in the way of a right-handed man, but they had won by weight of numbers. They were forming with their backs to the wall on Tros’ flank.
Tros had forgotten Arsinoe. Now he saw her, fighting on the left wing, disobedient, but as good as a standard to rally around. She was in the midst of her own ex-pirates, plugging a gap in the recoiling left wing. They were fighting for her like well trained and determined devils.
Tros struck Sigurdsen again to get his full attention. He sent him with all his Northmen, hot-foot, to reinforce the left wing.
“Hold them until I join you!”
Tros had seen his chance—the enemy’s mistake! Five chariots and at least a hundred men had been detached to make a westward circuit, away around beyond the right wing, with the obvious intention to attack from the rear. It would take them more than an hour to make that march over wind-rippled sand —perhaps longer.
At the same time their right wing was being heavily reinforced by men marching in column, in an effort to drive a wedge between Tros and the wall. They intended to have the wall. Tros saw fit to let them have it. They had left the line toward the boats wide open; all their reserves had been detached for that encircling movement.
Tros sent a man to command Arsinoe to come away from the left wing, and meanwhile reorganized his center, he sent another man for Conops. who arrived breathless. Conops went down on his knees and carefully cut through the shaft of the arrow that had pierced Tros’ leg, leaving about two inches of the shaft protruding.
“Stand by for a hot one, master!”
He struck the protruding shaft one hard blow with the hilt of his heavy knife, then seized the arrow-point with his teeth and pulled it through. He wiped the blood off his face and looked swiftly for a dead or wounded man from whom to strip some sort of bandage.
Arsinoe had come. Tros was swearing at her. She had on a gossamer linen dress beneath her chain mail. Conops, as quick as lightning, knifed off yards of the thin material, and she laughed as he bound it around Tros’ leg, artfully placing a pad to stop the ble
eding.
“What now, master?”
Tros used terse sea-phrases to explain a land maneuver.
“East-south-east in line ahead until I change helm!”
“Aye, aye!”
Conops returned to the right wing. Within a minute there began one of those brilliant maneuvers that, if they succeed, are reckoned proof of military genius, but, if they fail, are denounced as rash, unmartial errors of a fool. An impossible maneuver without splendid discipline. It almost failed, because Sigurdsen hated to yield ground. Tros threw his whole line into column, Conops leading, and himself in command of the rear that had been his left wing. He outflanked the enemy’s left!
The very suddenness of the maneuver threw the enemy into confusion. They found themselves, some with their flank against the wall, some with their backs to the wall, some of them holding the line that Tros had held, and their left wing reeling, routed, as the astonishing column changed front. Their baggage-guard bolted; there was not much baggage; it was principally arrows.
Again the amazing column changed front—a mere eighty battle-weary men. Conops’ golden trumpet sounded the charge and Tros led them, limping. They were into the enemy’s rear before they knew what to expect. Their commander was shot down. They milled, broke, tried to retreat through the gap in the walled enclosure, throwing all the rest of the force into hopeless confusion, into which Tros’ archers poured a devastating hail of captured arrows.
The one chariot that had not been sent with the reserves on that fatal encircling movement tried to escape in the direction of the Nile. Tros’ archers mowed down the horses. Boidion was in the chariot—Boidion, Alexis and one other—a man in Roman equestrian uniform—a hook-nosed, mean-faced Etruscan named Lars Tarquinius.
