Come off it, my heart told me. If Aegina wasn't suitable for chariot-fighting, Pentheus would have mentioned it. After all, he comes from Aegina.
I didn't bother to answer that, and my heart suddenly became unusually quiet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
'You should have warned us,' yelled Prince Hipposthenes.
'Look at it, for the gods' sakes, it's a bloody mountain. We can't use chariots on that.'
We were standing on the beach. Our ships, our twelve chariot-stuffed ships, holds full of wheels and fractious, cramped horses, were bobbing gently on the wine-dark sea, while We Officers held a rather fraught staff meeting.
'Can't you?' Pentheus said.
'Of course we bloody well can't,' Hipposthenes roared. 'We couldn't go above a slow ambling walk without tipping the bloody things over. Why the hell didn't you tell us it's like this?'
Before us, separated from us by a couple of hundred paces of flat, the gradient rose steeply and kept on going. Aegina, as far as we could see, was one big mountain, with a tiny skirt of sand.
'Maybe he didn't know,' Oenophilus said quietly. 'Maybe he's never been here before in his life.'
'I don't understand,' Pentheus was saying, in a wonderfully wounded tone of voice. 'My father had war-chariots; we had twenty-seven, all packed up and stored in a long barn. We never used them, of course, because we never had to fight any wars. But because he had them, I always assumed...
It was a good recovery, one of the best I've heard in the course of a long lifetime of dealing with tale-tellers. It was good enough to deflect the suspicions of one prince, if not the wrath of the other.
'In any case,' Hipposthenes went on, 'we can't stay here. We'll just have to get back in the ships and go home.'
Another man - I have no idea what his name was, but I think he was the prince's chief shipmaster; anyway, he seemed to know a lot about boats - lifted his head. 'Not possible,' he said. 'Not today, anyway. We might get away tonight, if the wind changes, but my heart tells me it's not very likely. Besides, if you want to go back through that lot in the dark, you can steer the crowstruck ship.'
Hipposthenes' eyes opened wide, like a baby bird's mouth. 'We can't stay here,' he said. 'They'll cut us to ribbons, out in the open like this with no chariots.'
Qenophilus frowned. 'You really think so?' he said.
'This is infantry fighting. I'm a chariot fighter. I don't know spit about infantry fighting.'
'I do.'
We all looked round to see who'd spoken; well, I knew who it was, of course, it was Uncle Sarpedon. Needless to say.
'Do you really?' Hipposthenes snarled. 'Like our crown prince here knows all about his own kingdom.'
'No,' Sarpedon said calmly. 'I know about fighting on foot because I've done a lot of it. Very well too, though I say so myself.'
'Which is more than any of us have,' Qenophilus said.
Hipposthenes was getting more and more angry. 'But we've only got his word for it, dammit,' he said. 'We don't know if he's any good. We've never seen him in action.
His brother grinned ruefully. 'You could say exactly the same about Hercules, but we take it on trust that he was a great warrior. I guess we have to do the same here. Come on,' he added, 'he can't be any worse at it than you and me.'
I think Hipposthenes tried to find some words to answer his brother with, but his heart was so full he couldn't manage to squeeze them past it; so he threw his arms in the air in a gesture of utter demoralisation, nodded and stomped away.
'I think that means he agrees,' Qenophilus said. 'All right, General - I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.'
'Sarpedon.'
Qenophilus waved vaguely in the direction of the ships and the army. 'All yours,' he said. 'And the best of crowstruck luck to you.' Then he walked off to join his brother.
Sarpedon took a deep breath. 'All right,' he said. 'Cleander, Cratus, you're my adjutants.'
'What's an adjutant, Uncle?' I asked.
'You are. Follow me, and don't get in my way, understood?'
'What about me?' Pentheus said.
Sarpedon turned around, quite slowly, and looked at him for a moment, as if examining something long dead and pungent the dog had put in his slippers. 'You,' he said, 'stay the hell away from me. Is that clear?'
Pentheus nodded. 'And if you win,' he added, 'I'll make you my Grand Marshal of the Palace.'
I think Sarpedon would have broken his arms for him if he'd had time. Instead, he stomped off towards the ships, with Cleander and me tottering along behind him through the deep sand like a couple of young dogs chasing a chariot.
'Where's he got up to?' Cleander demanded.
Gratus looked round. 'There you are,' he said. 'I was beginning to wonder if you'd died in your sleep, out there in the sun.'
'You should be so lucky,' the blind man replied, as two of the young men helped him back to his seat. 'No, I did fall asleep, but not for very long. Have you reached the bit where the princes had the dream yet?'
'Ages ago,' Cratus replied. 'I was just about to start on the battle.'
'Really? You must have missed out lots. Never mind. You shut up for a while now, and let me tell them about the battle. You don't like battles, so you won't tell it properly.'
Gratus frowned. 'Depends on what you mean by "properly",' he replied.
'I know you,' his brother said. 'You'll just say that lots of people got killed and it was all terribly, terribly sad. You know what your trouble is, Cratus? You're more interested in telling people what you think about things than the actual story.'
'Well, at least I think about things, Cleander. Sometimes I even think about them before I do them. You really ought to try it some time.
Don't mind us (Cleander said). We fight all the time, but that's just our way. That's the thing about brothers, you don't have to like them very much in order to love them.
Well, I'm assuming that he's told you all about Aegina not being suitable for chariot-fighting, and Sarpedon being asked to take command. Yes? Thought so. You can believe three quarters of what he's told you; the other quarter's probably fairly true, but not very true, if you see what I mean.
Anyway, I'll tell you all about the battle. We'd just about got ourselves sorted out and lined up when the enemy appeared. I guess they were as out of sorts as we were; at least we'd been expecting to fight some sort of battle, even if it wasn't the sort we'd thought it was going to be. I imagine that if you asked the enemy at their dinner the previous night what they thought they'd be doing the following morning, fighting a battle is probably the answer you'd have heard least. Islanders, you see; you get complacent living on an island, without neighbours constantly slipping across the border to steal cattle and work off high spirits.
So neither side was exactly at its best, I don't suppose. They must have wondered what the hell was going on - armed men disembarking on the beach, nobody even knowing who they are or what's upset them. What would you do in their position? Send a herald, of course; find out who you're dealing with, because once you know that you cut out the fear of the unknown, and things gradually start making sense. Otherwise, if you launch straight into a baffle, you don't know who you're fighting - they could be pirates, or the best warriors in the world, for all you know they could be the invulnerable fighting men that jumped up out of the ground when King Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth, against whom you don't have a chance.
So it was very sensible of Uncle Sarpedon to kill the herald.
Yes, I know, you're shocked. So was I. One moment there he was, some grave bald-headed old counsellor striding towards us with his white beard wagging in the breeze; next moment Uncle had given an order - he had to give it twice, actually - and the poor old fool was lying in the dust, with a javelin head sticking a hand's span out from between his shoulders.
If it shocked us, you can imagine the effect it had on the enemy; such a thing was never heard of, killing a herald, so what kind of people were we? They were still standing
there with their jaws dropped on to the rims of their shields when Sarpedon whirled his sword round his head (it's a wonder he didn't put someone's eye out) and yelled for us to charge. There was a tiny, tiny sliver of a moment when it was clear nobody wanted to, and then we charged. At least, we tucked our shields in close to our bodies so we wouldn't trip over them, took a deep breath and started to trot forward. I say trot; you ever tried running in ill-fitting greaves? Cratus and I, of course, we'd had to borrow armour from the princes; most of it was all right, but those greaves - I picked the best fit I could find but they were still a thumb's width too long, and every step I took they dug into my instep so hard that I wanted to scream. I don't suppose Achilles himself could have run far in those things.
So, with the greaves and the weight of all that kit, and me not being used to running in armour, I found the rest of the army was passing me by, and I was sort of sinking to the bottom, like dead yeast in a wine-jar. I'll admit, I wasn't too bothered about that. We had about four hundred paces to go - which is a long run if you're out of practice - and I wasn't really in a hurry. The enemy, I felt, was probably still going to be there when I arrived, even if I walked.
Of course, the fine straight line we'd made up when we started off became a ragged mess after we'd run a hundred paces; if they'd stood their ground and waited for us, like sensible human beings, we'd have been in trouble. But the god must have put Folly in their hearts; they threw their spears far too early, so that most of them pitched short (tends to happen a lot when you're nervous; waiting is the worst thing, you want to get on with the action, so the temptation is to sling your spear and get in close as soon as possible), and then drew and charged to meet us. Bad mistake on their part, because at sixty paces Uncle held up his arms for a dead stop; by the time they were thirty yards away we were stopped and more or less in line, and of course we hadn't thrown our spears yet. Well, our volley stopped them in their tracks. We didn't actually hit very many of them; if anything, most of us over pitched, and more men fell in the second and third ranks than the first. But we stopped them and frightened the life out of them; and then we charged for real, top speed (you don't mind a short sprint like that, even if your feet are all bloody and raw, if you think it's going to give you the edge), and smacked into them like a boxer's fist into the other man's jaw.
I think they'd have run if only they'd had a little bit more time. But there just wasn't enough room left for them to turn and get out of there, so the next thing I knew was the shock of my shield bashing into something, which turned out to be the shield of some Aeginetan. He was out of luck that day; I nearly muffed it, being scared and very uncomfortable because of my feet, but fortunately I'd had the manoeuvre drummed into me so often as a kid that it came as second nature. I pushed across his shield with mine until my rim slid off his rim, then I pulled back as hard as I could, a sort of hooking movement, and pulled his shield away from his body, leaving his armpit exposed. I don't know why the gods made us the way they did, but when they shaped us they left a very convenient way direct to the heart through the left armpit, and of course your armour doesn't cover it, or you wouldn't be able to move your arm. Now, when I was a boy and practising this routine, I'd always wondered if I'd have the strength in my forearm and shoulder actually to shove a sword through all that flesh and gristle, right into the heart. Take it from me, it's much easier than you'd think. I can't remember actually doing it, just this revolting shearing noise, and a sharp pain in the top joint of the first finger of my right hand, where it got trapped against the crossguard of the sword.
And that was that. He made a little grunting noise, like a happy pig, slid off my sword-blade and sort of folded up in a heap, like someone's discarded clothes. I didn't stop to check, but I'm pretty sure he was dead before he hit the ground. Poor bugger, my heart said to me, an hour ago he wouldn't even have known there was a war on. Only goes to show how suddenly things can happen, and how close we are to disaster all the time.
I've thought a lot about that encounter since; oddly enough, always in the context of games-playing. After all, fighting and competing against someone in a game are very nearly the same thing; you find yourself standing toe to toe with some other man, probably someone you've never seen before, and both of you are trying to achieve the same thing, to win - or not to lose (there's a difference, of course, but it's not relevant here). There's no malice in it, really, because the other man isn't a man, he's an opponent; all you know and all you care about him is that he's the obstacle you have to overcome - if you like, he's the great deed you have to accomplish if you want to win the prize. You don't stop to think, Is he a good man, is he the better man, which of us is more worthy to live or to win? Like I just said, he isn't human, he's a thing, an abstraction.
You speak our language pretty well, Phoenician; you've mastered the tricky way we can turn any group of words into a thing just by putting 'they or 'a 'in front of them - the-being-about-to-boil-a-cauldron-of-water, it's a thing, as real as the cauldron or the water or the fire, the way we say it. The words make it a thing, they scoop up an idea that has no shape or identity and give it - well, life, really. I reckon competition, in war or in the games, does that to your opponent. He becomes a thing, once you've put that word 'opponent' in front of him, and probably that's the way you'll always remember him; and as you grow older and the tales you tell of your youthful exploits get grander, that's the way he'll always be remembered, as a thing, an enemy, an opponent. And if you were to make scratches about him on one of your bits of wood, I suppose that's what he'll be for ever. Don't ask me what the significance of all this is, by the way; I'm just thinking aloud. It's a bad habit of mine. I guess it comes of being blind, at times you tend to think there's nobody else there.
So; I'd killed my opponent, and I looked up quickly to see what was going on.
The first thing I noticed was a rock, which came out of the air at me and dinged the side of my helmet before I could duck, smashing it to bits - it was one of those really old-fashioned cone-shaped jobs, leather core reinforced with rows and rows of boars' tusks (apparently it took the tusks from seventy boars to make just one helmet - why bother, for pity's sake?). You can tell the esteem in which I was held by the Princes of Megara by the way they issued me with a priceless family heirloom that wouldn't protect you against a sharp gust of wind, let alone violence.
So there I was in the middle of a baffle, weak at the knees with no helmet, and a couple of large, well-armed Aeginetans coming towards me. It wasn't the happiest moment of my life, and properly speaking it should have been one of the last. But for some reason best known to himself the god decided to save me; he arranged for one of the princes' men to jump out between me and the two Aeginetans, and take them on. He was a good fighter, that man; he kept off one of them with his shield long enough to land a pretty smart blow on the other one's neck with his sword, then he turned on the survivor and feinted high, struck low, aiming to get behind the knee-joint and hamstring the bugger. But the Aeginetan saw through the feint - not at first, but he figured it out just in time, and instead of raising his shield further, he brought the rim down with a mighty crack across my man's knuckles. Of course, my preserver dropped his sword, but he was just in time to jump clear; then he made a grab for a spear sticking up out of the ground about a yard away from his hand. He nearly got there in time, but not quite; just as he was pulling the spear out, the Aeginetan got between his shield and the cheek-piece of his helmet and skewered him with a short thrust. Down my man went, but not before he'd whirled the spear up and stuck it in the other man's groin. There the Aeginetan was, completely out of it, with blood pouring down his legs. I don't suppose he even saw me. It took me two goes to cut his throat; the first attempt carved a horrible long gash but missed the vein completely.
(Now, you tell me this: why is it that the man who saved me, a better fighter than me and a braver man - why is it that nobody, not even me, knows his name? He was a hero, an achiever of mighty deeds, if ev
er there was one, but nobody other than me was watching, and I couldn't put a name to him. Makes you wonder, really.)
I looked round again. The field was clear ahead of me, but on either side I could see that things weren't going too well; we were being pushed back down the hill, I was already fifteen paces or so behind the lines and in danger of getting cut off, and there was a fresh wave of the enemy bundling down the hill towards us. I couldn't see anybody I knew, standing or on the ground. I certainly couldn't see any point in staying where I was. So I did the only sensible thing: I turned and ran for it.
You're not supposed to do that, of course, and if anybody had seen me do it, I'd have been in deep trouble. But nobody was watching, just as nobody was there to see the man whose name I don't know. Wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference to me, of course, if the entire population of Elis had been lined up to see me scarpering, I'd have done it just the same. When your heart tells you to run or die, you run.
I'd have kept on running till I reached the ships, if I hadn't tripped over something and gone down on my nose. The something turned out to be a man called Ischophilus, a fairly important character around the princes' court. He was dead as a stone and his left hand had been cut off - I could see it lying a few yards away, still holding the handle of a shield. Anyway, I swore at him for getting in my way, but almost before I could get up, there were those bastard Aeginetans again, following up with a vengeance. I was in no position to do anything about them; no shield, no sword either, and I'd hurt my knee falling over the dead counsellor. Oh well, my heart said, the way they do when they think it's over; then the god put it into my mind to flop down again and sham dead until they'd gone away. Actually, it was too late to sham dead, but in the thick of a baffle shamming horribly wounded does just as well, so I did that. Did it well, too, because the enemy just scampered past me, leaving me lying in the dirt.
Olympiad Tom Holt Page 33
