Funeral Games

by Christian Cameron

The Phalanx of Aegypt shuffled. Panion laughed contemptuously. ‘Dogs pretending to be men,’ he said.

  ‘Turn and face me,’ Philokles said.

  Panion turned.

  ‘Listen, Macedonians!’ Philokles roared, and his voice carried a stade. ‘I am a man of Sparta. When we charge the enemy, see who flinches. No man in our ranks has a friend across the lines, Macedonians. No man there will offer a single one of our men mercy.’ He walked up to Panion, and stood a half a hand taller. ‘Foot Companions! Your officer is bought and paid for by the enemy.’ Philokles pulled his cloak back off his shoulder.

  ‘You lie—’ Panion began, and he raised his spear.

  ‘Let the gods say who lies!’ Philokles roared. Panion struck, but Philokles’ arm moved as fast as a thunderbolt and his spear slammed into Panion’s helmet and the man went down.

  Philokles laughed.

  Satyrus was an arm’s length from the nearest Macedonian file. They were roiling with fury.

  ‘Macedonians!’ came a roar from behind Satyrus. He turned to see Ptolemy and Seleucus on horseback, brilliantly armoured and surrounded by Hetairoi. ‘Macedonians! The enemy is Demetrios, who we will destroy in a few hours. The enemy is not next to you in line. The next man who speaks against another is a traitor - mark my words.’ He looked down at Panion, who was rising from the dust.

  ‘Fucker—’ Panion said, with something incomprehensible.

  ‘Prove the charge unfounded on the field,’ said the lord of Aegypt. He pointed at the commander of his foot-guards. ‘Myself,’ he said, just loudly enough that the front rank of both taxeis could hear. ‘Myself, I think you probably are a fucking traitor, Panion. Die well and I’ll see to your widow. Try to screw me, and I’ll put my mercenaries right into your shieldless flank and you will all die whether I win or not.’ The lord of Aegypt waved his arm at ranks and ranks of Diodorus’s Exiles, who stood by their horses on the flank of the Foot Companions.

  Then the lord of Aegypt waved, and most men cheered - not the Foot Companions - and Philokles stood and faced them. He clasped hands with Philokles and rode away, leaving Panion in the sand.

  Behind him, the elephants were closing on the toxotai.

  ‘Men of Alexandria,’ Philokles said. He paused, and even Panion’s men fell silent. ‘Yesterday, or two weeks ago, or a year ago, you were different men. You lived a different life. Some of you are rich men, and some are poor. Some of you stole, and others drank wine. Somewhere in these ranks is a man who killed for money. Another carried bricks. Some of you are Greek, and some are Aegyptian. A few of you are even Macedonian.’ He paused, and men laughed.

  ‘Today, no one cares how you lived. All that men will ever say of you is how you fought here, and how you died. Are you in debt? Desperate? The gods hate you?’ His voice rose to fill the air, as if a god was speaking - the voice of Ares come to earth. ‘Stand your ground today and die if you must, and all men will ever say of you is that you served the city. You will go with the heroes - your name will adorn a shrine. Be better than you were. Serve the city. Stand in your ranks and push when I call you. Remember that you will have no mercy at the hands of the men across the sand. Not a one of you will be spared.’

  He raised his spear over his head. ‘When I call, every man must push forward one more step. Understand?’

  ‘Yes!’ they roared.

  ‘Remember, every one of you! There is nothing but this day and this hour. Show your gods who you really are.’ He lowered his spear and walked to his place in the line, pulling his helmet down and fastening the cheekpieces.

  ‘Not your usual take on philosophy,’ Satyrus said, when his tutor took his place.

  Philokles stood straight. ‘Wisdom has a different look from the front rank,’ he said to Satyrus, with a smile that showed under his cheekpieces. ‘Prepare to march!’ he roared.

  The Aegyptian peltastai stood their ground longer than Melitta had expected. Just in front of her pit, they closed their ranks and counter-charged the enemy psiloi, running the bronze-shielded men back among their elephants. Then they lost their nerve and retreated, and their officers couldn’t hold them after a man was caught by an elephant and spitted on her sword-tipped tusks. The animal shook the dying man and he split open.

  The peltastai ran back half a stade. Melitta stopped watching them. She had targets.

  She loosed a dozen arrows at the leading elephants before she knew that her shafts were having no effect. The lead elephant had so many arrows sticking out of her back that it looked as if she’d sprouted some scraggly feathers, but the beast continued her leisurely stroll forward, still tossing the remnants of the peltastes on the twin swords around her mouth.

  None of the other archers were doing any better.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ she muttered, drawing and loosing again.

  Their arrows had cleared the last of the enemy psiloi, so that the monsters strode down the field in a long line with no infantry covering them, but that seemed to be a very minor flaw as the line plodded across the sand towards her pit.

  If they go through us, they go into the face of the phalanx, she thought. And we lose.

  Next to her, a pair of Greek archers called to each other as they lofted arrows high. ‘Their skin must be thinner somewhere,’ called Laertes, the oldest man among the toxotai.

  The beasts were now so close that the archers could try to aim for softer parts - also close enough for flight to seem like an option. She drew to her eyebrow and loosed - to see her bronze-headed barb bounce off the lead elephant’s head.

  For the first time she realized that there were men on the backs of the behemoths. Without thinking, she shot one - the range was just a few horse-lengths - and for the first time in fifteen shafts she saw a target go down, the man clutching his armpit as he fell from the beast’s back.

  She thought of the elephants in Eumenes the Cardian’s army, and how their mahout said that they were only deadly as long as there were men on their backs.

  The lead cow elephant turned her head, as if curious as to what had happened.

  Melitta shot two arrows as fast as she’d ever shot in her life. The first missed - right over the top of the cow, who was so close that Melitta was shooting up to aim at all. The second hit the other spearman on the elephant’s back, sticking in his shield but not, apparently, doing any harm.

  She looked around her and realized that the toxotai were running. She was the last archer shooting. She turned and ran herself.

  Satyrus pulled his helmet down and tied the chinstrap one-handed even as they marched forward. Flute players sounded the step, and Satyrus glanced right and left, his heart filled by the sight. As far as his eye could see, their ranks were moving. The centre was slow, and the mass of the phalanx bowed, but he could see now that the line of his own phalanx - all the army of Aegypt together - was longer than the enemy line.

  Off to the right, the cavalry was moving. Off to the left, just a stade away, Satyrus could see Diodorus sitting alone on his charger at the head of the Exiles. He seemed to be eating a sausage.

  Right in front of him, the elephants had broken the line of peltastai and toxotai. His gut clenched, his chest muscles trembled and he had to make himself stand taller. Elephants.

  Melitta ran twenty paces and stopped - in part, because Idomeneus was standing there, putting an arrow to his bow, and in part because she had to see what happened when the monsters hit the pits.

  ‘Stop running!’ Idomeneus yelled. ‘There’s nowhere to go!’ He shot.

  Forty paces away, the lead cow shuddered as her front feet slid out from under her. In seconds she had slipped most of the way into the hole - head first, and her head cap of bronze pushed the stake flat and it did her no harm. She bellowed, gathered her hindquarters and scrabbled out of the pit, shaking her head.

  Too shallow. Melitta shot. Her arrow struck in a great fore-foot.

  But something was wrong with the beast, because she stopped. She rolled her head, looking right and left, as
arrows pricked her. Her snake-like trunk touched the prone form of the man who’d come off her head when she’d stepped into the pit - he didn’t move. Melitta almost had pity as the great beast tried to move her driver.

  Her driver. Her driver.

  ‘Shoot the drivers!’ Melitta shouted. Her voice broke - it was the most feminine shout on the field - but it carried, and she didn’t care. ‘Shoot the drivers!’

  Idomeneus took up the shout. ‘Drivers!’ he said, pulling his great bow to his ear and punching a finger-thick shaft into the mahout of the next beast in line. The man threw up his hands and fell back, and the beast, riderless, stopped.

  ‘Be ready!’ Philokles roared beside him.

  Satyrus felt his arse clench, felt his guts turn and turn again. Three times now, his fear had fallen away, and every time it came back.

  Elephants.

  He looked at the front rank, and it was bending because the Foot Companions weren’t keeping up. ‘Dress up, phylarchs!’ he shouted. Really Philokles’ job, but he had his attention on the trumpets and the battle in the front. ‘Theron!’ Theron was a hundred paces distant - a hopeless distance on a battlefield. ‘Theron! Step up!’ he called, and other voices repeated it - the front rank flexed, and there was Theron, waving his spear and pushing forward. The file-followers struggled to close up from behind. A pikeman fell and the whole body of men rippled and someone cried out in pain. ‘Close up!’ Philokles bellowed.

  Satyrus tore his eyes off the recovery of the middle ranks - he was drifting left because he’d turned his head. ‘Watch your spacing!’ Namastis growled. A deserved rebuke.

  And then, through the limited vision of his close-faced helmet, he saw that the elephants had stopped. ‘Look!’ he said to Namastis. ‘Look!’

  The monsters were in the line of pits. Almost half managed to walk right through without touching the obstacles, but they didn’t exploit their success - they had a curious morale of their own, and when the archers began to clear the crews off the backs of the animals in the pits, the whole elephant advance broke down.

  Idomeneus was the first man to run forward and Melitta loved him for it. Stripped of their psiloi, the elephants were vulnerable once they stopped. The archers ran in among them in their open formation and began massacring the crews. It wasn’t even a fight - the men on the backs of the huge beasts had no reply to make to the hundreds of shafts aimed at them, and a few even tried to surrender.

  No prisoners were taken. The archers slaughtered the crews in a paroxysm of fear and rage, and then the beasts began to turn away, the masses of sharp shafts and the point-blank shots beginning to scare them, and suddenly they were running - away.

  ‘Halt!’ sang the trumpets.

  ‘Halt!’ echoed the officers.

  The phalanx ground to a halt. All along the line, officers raced up and down ordering the line to dress. The front was disordered everywhere, and the Foot Companions were almost a full phalanx-depth to the rear.

  ‘If they hit us now, we’re wrecked,’ Philokles said to Satyrus. ‘Gods!’ He ran off along the front of the phalanx, ordering men to dress the line.

  The White Shields took up the cry first, and in a heartbeat, all discipline was forgotten. ‘The elephants run!’ men shouted, and the front ranks, the men who would have had to face the brutes first, all but danced.

  Philokles roared for silence. Ptolemy appeared from the right and rode down the front rank. ‘Look at that, boys!’ he called. ‘Every man of you owes our light troops a cup of the best! By Herakles!’ Ptolemy halted in the centre of the White Shields. He seemed to be addressing the whole line. ‘Ours to win, boys! Right here! Right now! Remember who you are!’

  The White Shields roared, and so did the Phalanx of Aegypt, but Satyrus thought that the other cheers were muted. He hoped it was just his fears.

  Philokles reached past Namastis. ‘Don’t point,’ he said. ‘It’s not all good.’

  Over to the left, the cavalry fight wasn’t going well for anyone - but suddenly, in a flaw in the battle haze, the whole line of the phalanx could see forty more elephants waiting.

  ‘Ares,’ Satyrus cursed. His heart sank. Again. So he made himself turn his head. ‘Drink water,’ he yelled.

  Philokles was nodding. ‘We have to break the phalanx in front of us before Demetrios throws those elephants into us,’ he said. ‘That just became the battle.’ He drank and spat. ‘When I fall, you take command. ’

  ‘When you fall?’ Satyrus asked.

  Philokles gave him a brilliant smile - the kind of smile his tutor scarcely ever smiled. Then the Spartan ran out of the ranks towards Ptolemy. He grabbed at his bridle, and they could see Ptolemy nod and signal to the trumpeters, and the signal for the advance rang out before Philokles was back in the ranks.

  Ptolemy turned his horse and rode away towards the cavalry fight on the left. Way off to the right, Satyrus saw Diodorus. He wasn’t eating sausage any more, but he hadn’t moved.

  The Foot Companions were still not in their place.

  Philokles jumped out of the front rank, held his spear across their chests and roared ‘Dress the line’ so loudly that Satyrus flinched, helmet and all.

  ‘Prepare to execute the marine drill!’ he called. He ran along the front rank, heedless of the javelins that were starting to fall, until he reached Theron, and then he sprinted back, fast as an athlete despite age and wine and armour.

  ‘Spears - up!’ came the order. They were less than a stade from the enemy. A handful of brave or stupid psiloi still stood between the two mighty phalanxes, but they were scattering, running for the flanks. Satyrus watched the last of their own archers running off to the right to get around the killing ground.

  Now that he could see the enemy phalanx, he could see that it looked bad - there were ripples and gaps where he assumed the elephants had burst back through, and officers were dressing the ranks.

  Half a stade, and he could see the enemy move - they had their ranks dressed - they shivered as if the phalanx was a single, living organism and the whole thing leaned forward as the enemy began their advance, and suddenly everything happened at twice the speed.

  The length of a sprint - he could see the emblems on their shields.

  ‘Spears - down!’ came the command - by trumpet, repeated by word of mouth. And the sarissas came down. In the Phalanx of Aegypt, the men in front had the shorter spears, and they lifted them over their heads in unison - a sight that literally banished fear, as training took over and Satyrus got his shoulder firmly under the rim of his aspis.

  ‘Sing the Paean!’ Philokles called, and the Alexandrians started the call to Apollo. The song carried him forward a hundred paces - literally buoyed him up - but at its end, in step and facing the foe, he still had ten horse-lengths of terror to face.

  Ten horse-lengths, and he was confronted by a wall of spears that filled his mind as Amastris’s body had filled it, so that nothing and no one could take his eyes away from the lethal glitter of twelve thousand pike points.

  The White Shields were slowing down. Ares—

  ‘Eyes front!’ Philokles roared. ‘Ready, Alexandria!’

  The taxeis growled.

  Five horse-lengths. The thicket of steel was pointed right at his throat - his head - too thick to penetrate. Thick enough to walk on.

  It was impossible that a man could face so much iron and live.

  His legs carried him forward.

  ‘Charge!’ Philokles’ voice and Rafik’s trumpet sounded together, and the front rank responded like trained beasts - left shoulder down, spear down, head down.

  Spears rang against his aspis, reaching for his guts, again and again, and he bulled forward, legs pushing, blow to his helmet, step forward, another blow and another with enough weight to shift him sideways so that he stumbled, but he pushed, he pushed, nothing but the power of his legs and the weight of a dozen spear shafts on his aspis tilted almost flat like a table, and he pushed - Diokles’ shield pushing him forward - t
hrough! UP and PUSH and he rammed his spear straight ahead, felt the weight of Diokles pushing him another half pace forward. THROUGH!

  To this right, Philokles roared like a bull and his spear hit a man’s helmet just over the nasal and burst it in a spray of blood and the man fell back and Philokles pushed—

  Suddenly, as if his wits had been restored, Satyrus saw the fight for what it was, and in one smooth motion he killed a phalangite - not the man in front of him, but the man in front of Abraham whose shield was open, and then he placed his big shield against the enemy’s and pushed and Abraham pushed forward into the new space, on his own or carried forward by his file, and now he took the file-follower by surprise and simply knocked him down, and Satyrus rammed his spear over his shield, once, twice, three times - connected with something - again and again. Glance at Philokles, cover his shoulder - and then his opponent was down and Satyrus was forward a step. Rafik’s man was uncovered to his right, and his spear was there, scoring a clean hit on the man’s helmet. His point didn’t penetrate but the man’s head snapped back and he stumbled and Rafik stepped on the man and went forward and Rafik’s file-follower put his butt-spike through the man’s chest. Satyrus’s opponent roared, pushed his shield and Diokles killed him over Satyrus’s shoulder and Satyrus leaped forward to cover Philokles, who had put another man down and was moving forward again. The men behind the man facing Philokles were flinching away.

  Now Satyrus was chest to chest with another man. His opponent dropped his sarissa and ripped his sword from the scabbard and Satyrus felt the wash of the man’s onion breath on his face and he was pushed back and the ranks locked - Abraham grunting, and Namastis shouting in Aegyptian.

  Satyrus’s spear broke in his hands, trapped against a shield. He swung the butt-spike like a mace and scored against the tip of the big Macedonian’s shoulder where his shield didn’t cover it, and then his body moved as if he was making a sacrifice - hand up, grab the hilt under his armpit, sword drawn, down, over, the feint - back cut. The Macedonian missed his parry, his kopis over-committed, and his wrist bones parted as Satyrus’s blade cut through his arm and glanced off the faceplate on the other man’s Thracian helmet. The blood from his severed hand sprayed and blinded Satyrus, and he flinched, stumbled - but forward, because Diokles shoved him and then stabbed at his next opponent over his head, saving his life. A sword scraped along Satyrus’s helmet and he lost a piece of his left ear, although he didn’t feel it.