The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  So he was more than happy to trade the conveniences of the court for the rigors of campaigning. He did not object to the mud or the almost daily rainstorms that left one soaked and freezing and without hope of finding even a dry piece of firewood. Each day’s march, he felt, carried him one day closer to the decisive victory and would silence his grandfather forever. The last time, Bardylis had spoken as if the defeat had been his instead of Perdikkas’s, whose corpse he had brought home slung over the back of a horse, but the coming battle with Philip would have an outcome admitting of no equivocation. In a few months, when Lynkos was reduced to an Illyrian province and there was not a Macedonian left in arms from the mountains to the sea, then the old man would be left with nothing to say. It would be almost as good as if he were dead—perhaps, in some ways, it would be even better.

  And by the time they reached the first Illyrian encampments on Lynkestian soil the rain had stopped. The ground was still a sea of mud, but the snow had disappeared. A few days of sunshine and the mud would dry.

  “Philip has been in Pisoderi for half a month. It is rumored he has close to eight thousand men with him.”

  He received the news even before he had dismounted his horse. The garrison commander, who owed his position to Pleuratos’s favor, looked as if he expected to be whipped as the bearer of evil tidings.

  “I did not think there were eight thousand Macedonians left.” The heir to King Bardylis’s empire laughed, but a certain narrowing of his eyes betrayed his real state of mind. “How many horse does he command?”

  “There is no way of knowing.”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t thought to send out a few patrols in force to take a look?”

  “The Macedonians have sealed off all the approaches to the south. It will take more men than I command to break through.”

  Pleuratos decided that, yes, he probably would have the man whipped. He climbed down from his horse and, without another word, went into the hastily constructed wooden building that housed the garrison command. That night, he took a jar of wine to bed with him and sat up drinking alone until almost dawn. The next morning, no one had the courage to wake him, so he slept until just before noon.

  He awoke with a frightful headache, but his temper was improved. It no longer seemed to matter that Philip’s army was almost equal in strength to his own. Philip was a boy whose experience of war was almost nothing—a few cheap victories did not make a great commander. Pleuratos was quite confident he could crush him.

  “His soldiers for the most part are green,” he told his officers. “After all, the best units of the Macedonian army fell with Perdikkas.”

  When, with the greatest possible tact, it was pointed out that this green army had beaten a much larger force of Paionians, Pleuratos had his answer. “Lyppeios is notoriously an idiot who could not lead a successful attack on a brothel. My daughter has several times refused to marry him, in spite of the fact that he is handsome as a god—that should tell you something about his powers of conquest. I think there is nothing useful we can learn from the example of Lyppeios.”

  He glared around the table at his officers, seeming to dare anyone to dispute his judgment, and when he was satisfied that the silence would remain unbroken he nodded.

  “Since young Philip is so eager for a fight, we will give it to him. We will allow our men ten days in which to rest, and then we will march south. I will take my oath on it—in half a month’s time the road to Pella will be clogged with dead Macedonians.”

  * * *

  Deucalion had kept his promise and arrived at the assembly point outside Pisoderi with an army of nearly eleven hundred men, including a hundred cavalry. Attending their lord was almost of the entire nobility of the Eordoi, many of whom had fought against Philip but now greeted their former adversaries with the enthusiasm of old comrades in arms.

  Three days later Deucalion joined Philip’s leading commanders as they accompanied the king on a tour of the northwest perimeter, just an hour’s walk beyond which the army of the Illyrians was crouched like a cat waiting beside a mouse’s burrow. Now and then they would even come within sight of enemy patrols, which would always stop for a moment, probably to take a count, and then canter away, as if they had orders not to engage the Macedonians.

  “They are waiting,” Philip said. “They do not want to provoke us into taking the offensive. They prefer not to surrender the initiative. I am content that it should be so, provided only that the battlefield remains of our choosing. Let them imagine they decide when to fight if we can say where.”

  His officers exchanged glances but said nothing—Philip was merely thinking out loud. They were accustomed to their master’s curious ways and knew he would explain his intentions when he thought the time was right.

  Two hours later, as they were passing through a broad meadow that seemed to pour out of a notch between two hills like water out of a broken pot, Philip suddenly dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and broke into a gallop, leaving his astonished companions scrambling to catch up. After covering a distance of perhaps three hundred paces he wheeled about, coming to an abrupt stop—Deucalion could see that he was laughing, although the sound of it was drowned in the pounding of horse’s hooves—and then just as suddenly galloped off at an angle. He seemed to be daring them to catch him.

  The game, if indeed that was what it was, lasted for perhaps half an hour. Mounted men raced across the wide expanse of grassland, switching directions at random as if to no purpose save that of wearing out their horses.

  And then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, it ended. All at once Philip swung a leg over his horse and dropped to his feet. When his officers reached him he was contentedly sitting on the ground, chewing on a blade of grass.

  “The battle will be here,” he said, making a gesture with his hand that swung around, taking in the whole meadow, right up to the break between the rocky hills. “Unless the Illyrians mean to take a walking tour of Lynkos there aren’t more than two or three points at which they will dare move south in such force—we must be very sure he comes through that pass. This is where we will be waiting for him.”

  Deucalion was about to say something, but a glance from Lachios checked him. Lachios was perhaps closer to the king than any of them and knew his master’s mind and temper, when to speak, and when to let the flow of ideas run unchecked.

  “We will fortify the other positions,” Philip went on, taking the waterskin someone handed him and washing the dust out of his throat. “This one too, but the gap is so wide here and the hills so low that Pleuratos will see that it is impossible to defend. He will be looking for an ambush, of course—we will engage his scouting parties in a few sharp little skirmishes just as they come in, and that will set his mind at rest. Pleuratos is at bottom a stupid man and probably a coward. I should hate to see him seized at the last moment by an attack of idiot caution.”

  “What advantage do you think this site gives us?” Korous asked. It was merely that, a question. It was the same question that was in all their minds. All of them expected Philip to have an answer and all were surprised when he shook his head.

  “None—we will not be setting a trap, if that was what you were thinking. We will give the Illyrians what they want but probably do not expect, the chance for an equal fight. The ground is flat and one has only to look at the thickness of the grass to tell that it is not too rocky Have we not just been demonstrating its fitness for cavalry operations? I am sure it will suit us both very well—Pleuratos would probably have picked this spot himself. No, the point is not what we gain by forcing the battle here. The point is what we do not lose.”

  Deucalion had always prided himself that he knew Philip, that he understood him with the intimacy of a close and trusted friend, almost of a brother. For years he had lived with this man as a virtual member of his family, had listened to him playfully teasing his wife over breakfast, and beheld at close range the agony of his grief when his wife died. Who could know him
better?

  Yet now there was a look on the king’s face that Deucalion had never known before, the look of one haunted by a vision, and he knew that he was in the presence not of Philip the man or even Philip the ruler but of some third being who was a stranger to him. He knew that in that moment Philip was not among them but in the midst of the battle that would soon be fought on this empty stretch of grassland, which he saw in his mind as if it were happening now, before his very eyes. The child of his imagination had become real for him.

  There were such men, it was said, born with a special gift for war, as if Ares had touched them with his own divine genius. If this was blended with a natural cruelty so that they were blinded to all but war’s glory, such men were greatly blessed, but Philip was not cruel. Nothing was hidden from him and therefore he was spared nothing. If he saw victory, he also saw suffering and death. If he saw war’s glory, he also saw its senseless horror. Deucalion could not find it in his heart to envy him.

  The king of Macedon smiled, as if breaking the charm by an act of his will. It was a smile to turn one’s blood to ice water.

  “This site will allow both sides perfect freedom of maneuver,” he went on. “Our cavalry formations will hold together as they would not over broken ground and our infantry will be able to use their superior discipline to full effect. We need every advantage we can gain because it will not be enough merely to defeat Pleuratos. He can withdraw and fight again another day, but we cannot—we are stretched too thin for that. If we only defeat Pleuratos, then he will come back another time and defeat us, for we will be too weakened to withstand him. Thus we must utterly destroy him or we ourselves are lost. We will never have another chance like this.”

  * * *

  Pleuratos was growing impatient. The sun had shone brightly every day he had been in Lynkos, and his men were rested and fit. He had sent spies into the Macedonian territory, but none of them ever returned—some had even been found with their throats cut inside the Illyrian lines—and thus he had no notion of Philip’s strength or dispositions. Every day he waited, he felt himself more a prey to unreasonable fears. He knew he had to engage the enemy soon or his own anxiety would betray him into some mistake. Six days after arriving in Lynkos he issued orders that his great army would march south at dawn.

  He had decided to make his breakthrough at a wide gap between two hills, the weakest point in the enemy line. His advance parties informed him that the position was fortified but not heavily, and less than an hour of easy fighting proved enough to secure his soldiers from ambush. The defenders, when faced with so massive an attack, simply melted away.

  But the moment he was through to the broad meadow that opened up on the other side, Pleuratos grasped why the Macedonians had withdrawn with such indecent haste—it was almost as if Philip had invited him in.

  Yet it was not a trap. After that first panicky instant of recognition, when he saw that he had merely followed a lure, Pleuratos had only to look about him to realize that this could not possibly be a trap. A thousand paces across the meadow he could just make out a few Macedonian horsemen, but his scouts reported that the enemy presence was not yet large enough to pose a threat, and the terrain itself did not especially favor either side. Philip had merely chosen this as the site of their engagement, and Pleuratos had to admit that he had nothing to complain of.

  It took well over three hours to move the entire Illyrian force through the pass and onto the field of battle, and while he waited Pleuratos listened to the reports of his scouts. Philip was marshaling his army. The Macedonians numbered ten thousand infantry and perhaps as many as six hundred horse. That boy was obviously prepared to make a fight of it.

  For the first time, Pleuratos felt the darkening shadow of doubt. It was not so much that the enemy matched him in numbers since, after all, the bulk their forces had to be completely untested and therefore almost useless. More than anything it was the dawning recognition that Philip genuinely wanted to do battle. Philip had accepted the challenge, had assembled a huge army, had even picked the field. The initiative was his.

  He isn’t afraid, Pleuratos thought. He welcomes this.

  It was almost as if he could hear old Bardylis’s mocking, scornful laughter.

  45

  “The Illyrians are forming their infantry up into a defensive square.”

  Lachios, in command of the cavalry’s left wing, dismounted his horse and crouched beside his king, who was sitting on an overturned water bucket, mending a sandal. Philip was frowning with concentration as he trimmed the end of a leather strap—at first he seemed not to have heard.

  “How extraordinary,” he said at last, as if to himself. “They like to go on the attack, so Pleuratos must be frightened. Only one square?”

  “Only one.”

  “How are they positioning their cavalry?”

  “The bulk are clustered on the right.”

  “In what numbers?”

  “By rough count, about five hundred in both wings.”

  Philip put his cobbler’s knife back into a little wooden toolbox and slipped the sandal onto his foot. Then for the first time he turned his full attention to Lachios.

  “They will be good for only one charge, but that will be ferocious. All we have to do is give them a target and they will attack—they will not be able to help themselves. We will absorb that first charge as best we can and then you and Korous hit them as they try to regroup.”

  Lachios nodded. He had heard all this before, but he did not resent being reminded, because it was something that Philip always did. One grew accustomed to it. In fact, it was almost reassuring.

  “And then we will go for the opening,” he answered as if continuing his master’s sentence.

  Philip nodded in his turn.

  “Yes. The infantry will crack them on the right corner—since they are so intent on guarding it, that must be where they feel their weakness—and then the cavalry will do the rest.”

  “You are not to be dissuaded, then?”

  “No. The key will be the infantry assault, and that is where I must be.”

  “A king should take better care of his life, particularly if he has no successor. If you are killed, it will be worse than if we lost.”

  The king of Macedon laughed.

  “We have had this conversation before,” he said. “Admit it, Lachios—you simply think it is undignified to go into battle without a horse between one’s knees.”

  Lachios smiled and gave a little shrug. “There is something to what you say. I am offended by the idea of you rubbing shoulders with peasant boys. It is not the way a gentleman should fight.”

  “It is the way the Thebans fight.”

  “Who claims the Thebans are gentlemen?”

  They could both laugh now.

  And then for a moment neither man spoke. A soldier on the eve of combat learns to deal with his fear as best he can, knowing that courage will come when it is needed, yet it is good at such times not to be alone.

  “How many times have we been through this, Philip?”

  “You mean fighting on the same side?”

  They laughed again, and the burden lightened for a moment.

  “I know what you mean, though. There always seems to be just one more battle we have to fight, and then we will be safe. So we fight the battle, and then there is one more. Sometimes I think it will not end until the gods grow sick of our folly and destroy the race of men utterly.”

  Lachios shaded his eyes with his hand and looked up at the sun. “It is already an hour past noon.”

  “There will be plenty of time—never fear. We had a full moon last night, so we can keep on fighting well past dark. I wonder if it has yet dawned on Pleuratos what will happen if today goes against him.”

  Lachios gave his head a mystified shake.

  “I did not like to speak of it before,” Philip went on. “It seemed bad luck. But I did not choose this spot simply because the ground is even and good for cavalry. Did you
see how long it took the Illyrians to make their way through the pass?”

  “Then you have set a trap.” Lachios smiled with wolfish rapacity. “We can retreat in good order, but if the Illyrians try to flee, they will block up their only escape like apples trying to pass through the neck of a wine jar. The slaughter will be terrible.”

  “Yes, it will be terrible. I have not forgotten that these are the men who massacred my brother and four thousand of his soldiers. I propose to make certain that none of them will ever kill another Macedonian again.”

  * * *

  As Philip had predicted, the battle began with a massed charge by the Illyrian cavalry. For Lachios that was the hardest moment, to watch them galloping across the battlefield, many of them straight at the outside corner of the third infantry square, where the king was waiting for them in the front line. It did not seem possible that men on foot could possibly survive, let alone repel such an attack.

  Yet the squares held. Perhaps a hundred of the Illyrian horsemen never lived to get within twenty paces of striking a blow—the open space between the two armies was strewn with fallen men and horses—but many more than that reached the Macedonian formations to spread panic and death. The front line was a tangle of fighting as some of the Illyrians, oblivious to the long pikes, even jumped their horses over the wall of shields to land crashing down on the tightly packed columns of men who had nowhere to run. It was an appalling thing to watch.

  Yet the squares held. Common soldiers said that the king’s presence turned a line of soldiers into an iron wall, and that day it seemed no more than the literal truth. The Illyrians, who at least were not cowards, struck out with their swords and slashed at the men whose greedy hands reached up to pull them down. Thus they killed and died, and at last those who were left alive found they had to fight their way free. And behind them the front ranks of Philip’s infantry simply refilled and closed.

  Then suddenly, above the noise of battle, there arose from the Macedonian lines the sound of swords being beaten against shields, a rhythmic pulse that seemed to make the very air shake. That was the signal Lachios had been waiting for.