The Macedonian

by Nicholas Guild

  “The king lives and triumphs!” he shouted, holding his sword above his head. “Strike now for Philip and for Macedon!”

  The Illyrian cavalry, when it saw that now it was under attack, made one last confused effort to regroup, but it only managed to concentrate its numbers enough to make itself even easier prey. Hit from two sides at once, it would fall back from one blow only to meet another. The slaughter was terrible. Lachios himself killed four of the enemy in the first charge, one at such close range that the man’s blood spattered his face.

  Once they had broken through, the Macedonian horsemen wheeled about, reversing their formation, just as they had done in countless drills, and turned to attack a second time, but the Illyrians, those who were not already in full retreat, were so spread out that they were no longer capable of any coherent defense.

  “Leave them to the bowmen!” Lachios shouted.

  He took a quick look about him and estimated his losses at perhaps twenty. They had destroyed the Illyrian cavalry as a fighting force and were now in unquestioned possession of the no-man’s-land between the two opposing armies. A cheap success and certainly the last to be won with so little Macedonian blood spilled. Now the battle belonged once more to Philip and his foot soldiers—might the gods show them a little mercy.

  With a wave of his hand he signaled his horsemen to follow him as he rode off the field. Even before the cavalry was out of the way the two squares that made up the left wing of the Macedonian infantry began a slow inward turn, their first move toward engaging the main enemy force.

  “It is beautiful in its own way.” Korous had ridden up beside him on a small patch of high ground that allowed a view of the battleground. “Philip is perhaps the only commander in history to turn war into a work of art.”

  For just a fraction of a second Lachios was angry. He even began to say something, but then was struck by the perfect justice of the observation. It was beautiful—better than four thousand soldiers weighted down with body armor and great unwieldy pikes, wheeling around with the precision and economy of a door swinging on its hinges.

  “Now—see? He begins his advance.”

  He begins … Yes, all those men moved to but a single will. They had become Philip’s creations.

  Lachios screwed his eyes almost shut trying to pick out his lord from among the moving block of men, but he could not. Behind their shields, their faces half-covered by their helmets, any one of them could have been Philip. Had the king disappeared in the midst of his army, or was it the other way about?

  Moving now at a trot yet somehow managing to keep their lines perfectly even, the two squares of the left wing began to close with a corner of the Illyrian infantry—it was like watching the slow, irreversible collision of worlds. Three hundred paces, now two hundred and fifty, now two hundred …

  But long before the two great masses of men crashed together, flights of arrows skipped back and forth between them so that the advancing Macedonians left a trail of corpses in their wake. At a hundred paces the Illyrians let fly their first volley of javelins, almost all of which fell short. At seventy paces the Macedonians stopped for just an instant and answered back in kind, only to renew their advance even before the first of their javelins had found its mark.

  At thirty paces the front ranks of both armies dropped their spears into place so that their lines seemed to bristle. This was war in cold blood, Lachios thought—what an appalling business simply to walk into those rows of spears, offering one’s belly to be torn open.

  Not that the Macedonians walked. The last twenty paces were covered at a dead run, so that the two armies smashed into each other with an impact that could be heard even at a distance of seven hundred paces. It seemed to make the very earth shudder.

  And then war became war again. The elegant dance was over, instantly replaced by the familiar chaos of battle as men struggled and fought and were trampled under by friend and enemy alike. The harsh clang of metal against metal blended with hoarse, frightened shouting and the screams of the dying as the two armies pushed against each other like half-mad bulls.

  It seemed endless. One had the sense that time had simply stopped, that it had been replaced by an interminable cycle of killing—confused, lethal, and endless, a millstone grinding men indiscriminately to death.

  “What a way to die,” Lachios said, half under his breath. “What a brutish crush in which to surrender one’s life…”

  “He has done it!”

  Korous leaned forward over his horse’s neck, pointing frantically with his sword. He seemed beside himself with rapture.

  “Look! The Illyrians have lengthened their line to meet the attack, and now it is starting to buckle. Philip has done it!”

  Lachios strained to see, to find some pattern in the fighting, and at last he understood. The Macedonians were beginning to push their way through as the corner of the enemy square collapsed, and the Illyrians were weakening along all their lines as they tried to fend off the assault.

  And as if in response to some invisible signal, the right wing of the Macedonian infantry began moving on the Illyrian center. Within a quarter of an hour of Philip’s first advance the Illyrians found themselves attacked from two directions at once.

  For a time they seemed to hold and then, quite suddenly, their lines started to sag and then to break. More quickly than would have seemed possible, the fighting began to change character. What up to then had been a battle was becoming a massacre. The great square, comprising perhaps as many as ten thousand men, was simply falling to pieces.

  “Now it is our turn again,” Korous announced, with an almost ferocious exultation. “Philip and his peasant boys shouldn’t be allowed all the glory.”

  He slapped his horse on the rump with the flat of his sword and bolted back to his own men. Even as the hoofbeats of Korous’s horse were fading away, Lachios’s cavalry wing had begun forming up for the attack.

  “You know the drill!” he shouted to them.

  “Yes, we should,” someone called back. “We have been through it often enough.”

  Lachios permitted himself a moment to join in the general laughter and then held up his arm for silence.

  “Still, one last time. Charge straight through at an angle, then regroup and hit them again face on. When they are completely scattered, form up into pursuit squads and hunt down anything that is left moving. All right?”

  His answer was a cheer and then someone took up the battle cry, “For Philip and for Macedon!” Soon they were all hurtling across the empty grassland toward the battle.

  It happened when Lachios was perhaps forty paces from the Illyrian spear carrier he had marked out as his first target. He was driving his horse hard, his sword already raised when, in the last instant of his life, he must have seen something out of the corner of his eye and reflexively turned his head. The arrow pierced his left eye. Without ever feeling the blow that killed him, he slipped from his horse’s back. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  * * *

  Pleuratos led the first cavalry charge himself. He even recognized Philip, carrying a shield and spear in the front rank of the Macedonian infantry, and tried to kill him before being driven off—what sort of king, he asked himself, commands his army on foot, fighting beside common soldiers?

  The charge, of course, was a disaster. It failed to split the enemy defenses and the Illyrians were badly mauled by the Macedonians, who somehow attacked with more force than Pleuratos had expected. Perhaps their horses were bigger.

  Yet he did not relinquish hope of victory until he saw how Philip’s infantry broke open his battle square like a fox cracking the shell of an egg with its teeth. Then, as the panic among his own men grew and spread, and the battlefield quickly changed into a killing ground, he knew that everything was lost.

  He managed to rally some thirty of his horsemen, hoping for a last charge at the attacking infantry, but the enemy cavalry, attacking from two directions at once, soon made this impossible
. The Macedonian cavalry, in one furious assault, shattered his army, turning it into little more than an armed mob with no thought except to save their lives and no plan except flight. Suddenly Pleuratos and his few remaining followers found themselves in serious danger of being overrun by their own troops.

  “We must get away from here!” one of them hissed at him. “We must escape before this crowd of cowardly riffraff so clog the pass that a man on horseback will have no chance!”

  “Better to die here—better to fall in battle under the eyes of our enemies, lest they think we are all women…”

  But no one was listening. Pleuratos looked about him and discovered he was alone. It was the most awful moment of his life.

  There is no life for me now, he thought. Not after this. It really is better to die here.

  He drew his sword and tried to urge his horse into a trot—he would show young Philip what he was made of; when they found his corpse, at least all the wounds would be in the front—but the mobs of his fleeing soldiers, swarming around him now, made any progress impossible.

  And then, and with real horror, Pleuratos realized that hands were reaching out to him, that some of them thought to drag him from his horse that they might use it for their own escape. This was the only death that awaited him—to be pulled apart by a terrified rabble.

  All at once he could think of nothing except getting away from those hands. He lashed out with his sword and struck off someone’s thumb. He had time to be astonished at how the man hardly seemed to notice, and then he reined in his horse and wheeled about to flee the way he had come.

  The Illyrians were in terrified flight and the only possible escape was back through the pass, which was strewn with boulders everywhere except down its center, a space hardly wide enough for five to walk through it abreast. Now that narrow passage was almost choked off and foot soldiers were clambering up the broken hillsides to escape the bands of Macedonian cavalrymen who were riding back and forth across the mouth of the pass killing anyone who came in their way. The corpses of the slain were almost as much an obstacle as the rocks.

  And over these—and over the bodies of living men, already trampled half to death by those luckier or more ruthless—Pleuratos urged his horse, which had been seized by the general panic and hardly needed urging. He flailed away with his sword, as if to cut a path for himself, cursing like a demon, half-mad with a mixture of fear and rage. The gods alone knew how many of his own soldiers he maimed or killed.

  It took him what seemed an eternity to make his way through, a distance of no more than a few hundred paces, and as soon as he could see the ground spreading out in front of him his heart swelled with a strange exultation. He was free. There was no one ahead of him, and doubtless his pursuers were as hindered by the mobs of fleeing Illyrians as he had been himself. He made no attempt to curb his horse as it broke into mad, headlong gallop.

  But a man’s luck, once it has deserted him, never comes back. The pass was not even half an hour behind him when his horse stumbled and threw him and, perhaps seeing its own chance of freedom, lingered hardly an instant before disappearing at a limping, ungainly run. The filthy animal was already out of sight by the time Pleuratos was able to roll over and sit up.

  This was the end.

  He was still there, the tears running shamelessly down his face, when, just before sundown, a patrol of Macedonian cavalry found him.

  46

  Nothing travels faster than bad news. Within ten days of Pleuratos’s defeat one of the few survivors from the Illyrian cavalry who had managed to elude the Macedonians was on his knees before King Bardylis. Subsequent accounts only confirmed the scope of the disaster. An army exceeding ten thousand men had been utterly destroyed. Perhaps as many as seven thousand were dead and the rest were scattered. If Philip took it into his head to move west, there was no force left to oppose him. The Illyrian empire was at his mercy.

  An emissary was dispatched to inquire whether the Macedonians might be willing to come to terms—any terms offered would probably amount to abject surrender, but there was no alternative—and to discover, if possible, the fate of Bardylis’s grandson. The emissary returned after a month and made his report.

  “The king received me personally,” he said with just a hint of pride. Apparently he had not expected such a courtesy.

  “Which king? Menelaos?”

  “No, King Philip himself.”

  “Then he is still in Lynkos?”

  “Yes. Menelaos was present, but he never spoke. Philip is clearly the master. The next morning I was shown the battlefield, which is now a huge gravesite, for the Illyrians who died fighting have been given decent burial. I was told that of those who surrendered or were taken captive ten were selected by lot to have their throats cut as sacrifices over the grave of some close friend of the king’s who was killed in the battle and the rest were released to find their way home.”

  Bardylis looked grave but offered no comment. Such displays of humanity he normally interpreted as signs of weakness. In this case, however, he was not so sure.

  “And my grandson?”

  “The Lord Pleuratos is alive and a prisoner.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yes, ah…”

  “Out with it.”

  “He is kept chained in the cage beside the royal kennels,” the envoy replied with obvious reluctance.

  “Chained?”

  “Yes, he is manacled, and there is an iron collar…” He made a vague embarrassed gesture toward his neck, as if he could not bring himself to speak of the matter. “He is fed the kitchen scraps.”

  “What ransom is Philip asking?”

  “He would not say.” The envoy raised his eyebrows, dissociating himself from the matter. “He was perfectly polite, but he said he was not prepared to discuss his conditions for peace with anyone except My Lord King.”

  “He wants me to come to Lynkos?”

  “Yes. He said he would be greatly pleased to welcome King Bardylis as his guest in Pisoderi.”

  The Illyrian nobles were unanimous in rejecting any such proposal. It was a trap. If the king ventured into Macedonian territory, he would certainly be killed as a prelude to a war of conquest against the entire empire. Bardylis had little patience with them.

  “If Philip wants my kingdom, there is nothing to stop him from marching in and taking it,” he pointed out. “His possession of my ancient person would not give him the slightest advantage—he doesn’t need an advantage. Besides, I am invited as a guest. King Philip is cunning, but he is not treacherous.”

  And Bardylis had his own reasons for feeling hopeful, reasons he did not see fit to confide to his nobles.

  “It is a long journey at my age,” he told them. “Yet I will undertake this duty for the sake of my people.”

  He sent a dispatch rider ahead to let Philip know that his invitation had been accepted and then set off himself with an escort of a hundred men. He was an old man and he would take his time. Bardylis only hoped Pleuratos survived until he reached Macedonian territory, for he was looking forward to the spectacle of his grandson’s humiliation.

  Twenty-three days later he found the king of all the Macedonians waiting for him before the gates of Pisoderi.

  “You must be tired,” Philip said. “You will wish to rest.”

  “I wish to talk first. I would hear your terms for a treaty of peace.”

  Philip shrugged, as if he had not considered the matter before and was not sure it was important. “A return of all tribute money received during the reigns of my two brothers.”

  “Done. Now, what of my grandson?”

  At first Philip seemed to ignore the question. He rode in silence beside the king of the Illyrians as they passed beneath the city gates. When they were in the palace courtyard he dropped quickly to the ground and himself helped Bardylis down from his horse.

  “Do you wish to see him?” he asked at last. Before the old man had a chance to answer, Philip raised his h
and in a gesture of summons and a pair of grooms appeared out of a stable doorway, holding up Pleuratos between them.

  A murmur of suppressed astonishment rippled through the Illyrian escort as their king’s heir apparent stumbled into the light. His hair and beard were a filthy tangle and he looked pale, flabby, and dispirited—hardly surprising with a man who had spent more than two months sitting on his haunches in a cage. He looked about him with bewilderment, giving no sign that he recognized anyone. Even Bardylis could not entirely quell a pang of compassion.

  “Why have you done this?” he snapped. “He is a prince of the royal blood. He is—”

  “You can ask me why?” Philip seemed to note the old man’s anger with perfect indifference. “How many women are widows this day because of his folly? How many children have lost their fathers? There will be famine among your own people this winter because the men who should be gathering in the summer’s harvest are sleeping in the earth. I do not speak of the Macedonian dead, for I know you will be heedless of them, but I lost many good soldiers and one dear friend in this war that was forced upon me and I grieve for them all. Yet you ask me why I suffer him to live thus. Inquire rather why I suffer him to live on any terms.”

  It was not until late that night, when Bardylis was sitting up alone in a strange bed in this citadel of his enemies that he at last realized Philip’s intention. If Pleuratos had fallen in battle, it would have been a different thing, but now, while he was a prisoner, to kill him would constitute an insult the Illyrians could not overlook. Whatever else Philip wanted, he did not want to create that sense of grievance, so Pleuratos would not be killed and Philip would certainly return him when his price was met. Yet he meant to destroy Pleuratos, and he had done precisely that. The members of Bardylis’s escort who had seen him chained like a beast would not forget the sight, and when they returned home everyone would know the full measure of Pleuratos’s humiliation. The Illyrians were a proud people and they would never accept his shame as their own. Thus they would never accept him as their king. Philip had as good as killed him.