Conflict of Empires

by Sam Barone

  From behind his infantry, Shulgi stared in surprise as he watched the Akkadian cavalry. They were moving east, the horses plodding along slowly, almost as if they were leaving the scene of the battle. As the line extended, a gap appeared between the Akkadian infantry and the cavalry. As Shulgi watched, that gap began to widen.

  Razrek galloped up beside him. “Is he trying to flank us? The fools don’t have enough men.”

  Shulgi ignored Razrek’s excited utterance and studied the battleground. The Akkadian infantry wasn’t moving. Every spear still pointed toward the sky. Either Eskkar was abandoning his spearmen and leaving the field of battle, or he intended to try and position himself to ride around the end of Razrek’s horsemen and launch an attack at their rear.

  “I can see men behind his cavalry,” Shulgi said. “I don’t see them carrying bows. Are they the boy slingers he’s brought with him?”

  “He’s going to turn our flank, and attack from there,” Razrek said, ignoring the comments about the slingers. “Your bowmen and infantry won’t be of any help if he attacks from that direction. They’ll be too far away. Let me attack now.”

  Shulgi had already considered that option. If he let Razrek attack without support, the Akkadian cavalry might be able to deliver a powerful blow to his own horsemen, while keeping their infantry intact. And if he moved to the attack with his infantry, Shulgi’s forces would be giving up their strengthened position behind the row of stakes. But if Eskkar’s spearmen retreated, Shulgi’s forces would have to chase after them.

  As long as he kept his forces together, Eskkar’s men couldn’t attack him effectively. He decided on a third course of action.

  “Stop your whining, Razrek. Get back to your men. Keep your horsemen in front of Eskkar’s. Don’t let him flank you, no matter what. Match his movement, but stay in line with our infantry.”

  Whatever trick Eskkar might be planning, Shulgi intended to counter it with overwhelming force.

  Razrek whirled his horse around and galloped back to the center of his men. “Form a column and move to the east. Keep the Akkadians in front of you.”

  The jeers and curses had all disappeared now, replaced by grim expressions. Word spread through the ranks of the Sumerians that King Eskkar was trying one of his usual cunning tricks. Razrek’s horsemen began to move to their left, trying to stay even with Eskkar’s slow-moving cavalry force. It took longer for the larger mass of Razrek’s horsemen to wheel to their left, but once it did, the entire Sumerian cavalry began to shift along with the Akkadians.

  Gatus, seated astride his faithful mare behind his lines of spearmen, watched the Sumerian ranks in front of him as they stared at Eskkar’s movement to the east. It was obvious that Shulgi intended to remain behind his stakes. Nevertheless, Gatus could see the heads of the Sumerian spearmen following the movement of their cavalry. Without raising a sword, Eskkar had sown some confusion in the enemy’s ranks.

  Mitrac came over to stand beside him, his longbow held easily in one hand. The archer carried two quivers slung over his shoulder. “What’s happening?”

  Gatus had the advantage of the horse’s height to give him a better view. The rest of the archers standing behind the front ranks couldn’t see much.

  “Lots of movement in the lines, but they’re holding firm. They’re sure Eskkar is up to something, but they don’t know what. But don’t worry about him. We’ll be busy soon enough.”

  Eskkar had given him the most dangerous and difficult assignment. Gatus had to not only hold off the Sumerian infantry, he also had to distract them to give Eskkar enough time to make his plan work. And the time to begin that distraction had arrived.

  “Alexar! Drakis! Move the men forward. And keep it slow!” He turned to Mitrac. “Now it’s up to you.”

  Orders were barked, and the line of spearmen rippled and shifted, spears lowered once again to the marching position. Then the three ranks began to move, taking their time, as the formation moved ever closer to Shulgi’s forces waiting behind their line of stakes.

  The Akkadians moved slowly across the gap. Mitrac trotted a dozen paces away from Gatus, to keep a better view of his own men. Now Mitrac had to worry more about the disposition of his bowmen than anything else. He was the one who would decide when to halt the formation.

  “Far enough, Gatus!” Mitrac had both hands to the sides of his mouth as he shouted the words. “We’ve a bit of a breeze behind us.”

  “Halt!” Gatus bellowed the command, repeated by his commanders and subcommanders. The advancing spearmen stopped moving, the line almost as straight and smooth as if they were practicing back in Akkad’s barracks. According to Gatus’s count, they had advanced a little more than a hundred and twenty paces.

  Mitrac shouted another command, and his seven hundred bowmen halted, braced their feet wide apart, and put shafts to the bowstrings. The master archer paused to glance up and down the line of archers. Everyone appeared ready. His was the command that would start the actual fighting. “Draw your shafts! Loose! Shoot at will!”

  Gatus watched the first flight of arrows whistle high into the sky, level off, and begin its descent. Before they reached the highest part of their flight, another seven hundred shafts were launched. A third wave of arrows flew upwards even as the first wave descended on the enemy. At first Gatus thought Mitrac’s bowmen had stopped too soon, but then Gatus saw the arrows strike the enemy shield wall. Many shafts fell short, but most rained down on the upraised shields. The arrows sounded a soft drumming note when they struck, but Gatus also heard men screaming, as a few shafts found crevices and gaps between shields.

  “Keep shooting!” Mitrac bellowed the commands, even as he worked his own bow. “Pull every shaft to the ear! Get them up in the air!”

  The Sumerian archers fired their own weapons, but almost all the arrows landed twenty or thirty paces short of the Akkadians. A small enough distance, Gatus realized. A shift of the wind to the opposite direction could bring the enemy bowmen within range.

  But for now, at least, most of the Sumerian weapons did not have the same reach. The Akkadian archers needed months of practice to build up their strength, so as to draw the heavy bows to the maximum. Some of these men had trained with their weapons for as many as four years, had fought from the wall against the Alur Meriki horsemen.

  Gatus whirled the mare around and glanced at his rear. A steady stream of men trotted from the water’s edge, each carrying four quivers of arrows in their arms. Six of Yavtar’s supply boats had managed to reach Eskkar’s forces just after midnight, along with three fighting ships. Yavtar’s force had encountered King Shulgi’s boats and archers almost twenty miles upriver, and it had taken a hard battle before the Akkadian ships broke through, at the cost of losing five boats. Now the surviving vessels crept along the river behind the marching soldiers, carrying thousands of extra shafts, and stones for the slingers as well, although those weren’t needed yet.

  Gatus raised his eyes to the horizon, and saw nothing. Eskkar had assured him that Naxos wouldn’t come out of his city, but Gatus hadn’t been so sure. But the land behind them lay empty. Not even any of Razrek’s men had attempted to swing around behind them yet.

  Turning the horse back toward the Sumerians, Gatus glanced to his right. Eskkar and the cavalry had ever so slowly opened a gap of about two hundred paces between the two halves of the Akkadian army. That gap would tempt the Sumerians soon enough.

  The bowmen kept launching shafts into the sky, grunting now with the effort to pull each arrow back to the ear before releasing. Empty quivers littered the ground beneath them. Each archer had already emptied one quiver, and their second would be exhausted soon. Those arrows, already more than twenty thousand, would be taking their toll on the enemy, despite the Sumerian shields.

  No more carefully timed volleys now. Better to have the arrows arrive continually, Gatus knew, so that every enemy would be afraid to show his face.

  Many arrows fell short, but most reached the enemy po
sition. The Sumerian infantry had their shields raised up to cover their heads, but a few shafts here and there would slip over or under the protection, wounding or killing when they did. A shield couldn’t cover every part of the soldier’s body, not unless the man hunched himself down like a dog behind it.

  The Sumerian archers returned the volleys. Supposedly, Sumer had two thousand archers, more than twice the number of Akkadian bowmen, but, as Gatus knew, giving a man a bow didn’t make him a bowman. He turned to his right, to see Eskkar still moving slowly away from the Akkadian spearmen. At least Eskkar and his horsemen wouldn’t be under attack by Shulgi’s archers.

  Gatus knew they had reached the most dangerous time of the battle. The arrows raining down on the Sumerians would make it difficult to get their infantry moving. But if Shulgi sent his men charging toward the Akkadians spearmen, they would likely be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. Nevertheless, the Sumerians remained behind their line of stakes. They wouldn’t want to give up that position readily. And the odd movement of the Akkadian cavalry would be proving a distraction. Eskkar and Gatus had to give young Shulgi the chance to make a mistake. And making him worry about bowmen on the one side, and Eskkar’s odd maneuvering on the other, just might do the trick.

  Gatus turned his mare to the side and trotted over to where Mitrac stood, just behind his double line of bowmen. The young master archer was using his own bow, but Gatus saw that he kept his eyes on his men as well.

  “It’s up to you, Mitrac!” Gatus shouted. “You’ll have to loosen that position.”

  Mitrac nodded. “We will. Their archers can’t reach our men. We can keep shooting all day if we have to. They can’t stand up to this for long.”

  Even as Mitrac said the words, another handful of panting men arrived, carrying fresh bundles of arrows that they distributed to replace those already launched. Thanks to Yavtar’s boats, the Akkadians had plenty of shafts. The old sailor had delivered thousands of arrows with the last of his boats.

  Gatus wondered how many arrows Shulgi’s archers had with them. They’d likely lugged those arrows from Sumer to Kanesh to Larsa and now to Isin. The Sumerians would get their first surprise soon enough. They’d be expecting the number of Akkadian arrows to diminish, as the archers shot most of their shafts, but with Yavtar’s last cargo, that wasn’t going to happen, not for some time.

  The Akkadian bowmen continued their assault on the Sumerian lines. Gatus could see men going down, despite the shields. And many of the shafts were falling behind the line of spears, no doubt striking at the Sumerian archers, who had to be as close as possible to their front line to have even a hope of reaching the Akkadians. The enemy would be growing nervous, fearful, aware that death could strike at any moment from the sky. Thousands of arrows had already been loosed, with only a few Sumerian shafts able to reach Gatus’s men.

  Again Gatus stretched himself upright on his horse. He’d seen movement in the Sumerian ranks. The center, where the enemy cavalry butted against the infantry, had started to thin. Gatus snorted. Perhaps Eskkar’s luck might hold up one more time. He knew Eskkar and the cavalry would begin their charge any moment. Now was the moment to give Shulgi something else to think about. He filled his lungs with air.

  “Spearmen! Ready your weapons. Prepare to advance!” Gatus looked up and down the line, to make sure every commander stood ready. “Advance!”

  The battle cry “Akkad!” roared from more than three thousand warriors, the first sound they’d uttered today. The spearmen began marching toward the Sumerians, the front rank holding their shields to the front, the second and third ranks holding their shields high, to protect against descending arrows that would soon be arriving in greater numbers, as they closed within range of their enemy.

  Behind the spearmen, Mitrac issued his own orders. Seven hundred bowmen continued their shooting, arcing their shafts up into the air, to fall on the crowded Sumerian ranks of infantry and archers. The Akkadian archers moved forward as they shot their shafts, spread out in a ragged line and staying just far enough behind the spearmen so that they could launch their arrows. Without shields, the only protection the bowmen had came from the spearmen, and the fact that the Sumerian archers were now directing their arrows at the advancing infantry, to stop the Akkadian advance.

  “Spearmen! Halt!”

  Gatus gave the order before the men had moved another hundred paces. His soldiers expected the command, so they maintained their ranks. He waited until all the forward movement had ceased. “Spearmen! Retreat!”

  The subcommanders and leaders of ten repeated the command, and the spearmen began backing up, moving with care since they had to keep their shields up and maintain their ranks. Mitrac’s bowmen retreated also, but they kept loosing shafts as they moved, maintaining their position just behind the spearmen. For the Sumerians, this must seem a strange sight, to see their enemy first advancing, then retreating in good order and all the while maintaining their shield wall. Gatus’s men had trained for months to execute such a maneuver. It was an infantry movement he doubted the Sumerians could duplicate.

  When the men had returned almost to their starting point, Gatus called a halt. A few bodies lay scattered on the ground in front of his men, so the Sumerians had caused some damage. He saw that Mitrac, too, had lost a few bowmen dead or wounded. They had little protection, just their leather helmets and vests that might stop a shaft at this range, but not if the distance diminished.

  But the archers kept firing, and arrows kept leaping off their bows, to rise into the sky and descend on the enemy. Already the front wall of Sumerian shields appeared to be covered with arrows. Something had to break soon, he knew. Shulgi should be getting rattled by now. At least, that’s what Gatus hoped.

  57

  On the river, Yavtar watched the soldiers form up and move northward. As soon as they moved out, he issued orders and his own three fighting boats pushed away from the riverbank just after dawn. Three of the cargo ships had departed in the middle of the night, carrying wounded men and sacks of loot intended for Akkad. Yavtar had wished the boat captains good luck, and guessed they would need it. For them, the first stage of the slow passage upriver might be more dangerous today than fighting Shulgi’s army.

  Yavtar had hoped to have five or six of the big war boats here today, but Shulgi’s blockade had left him with only three. At least he had some of the rowers and archers from the lost boats, so each craft had more than its usual compliment of bowmen. His three vessels would deliver a deadly sting to the Sumerian army, but whether any of them would survive the encounter remained an unanswered question. No one – at least as far as he knew – had ever used boats as floating platforms for archers, or contemplated using them against a massive land army.

  With his three craft well away from shore, they rowed up river, already struggling to keep station with Gatus’s spearmen, whose easy strides covered the ground faster than his boat crews could row. Each ship had raised its sail, but the linen squares hung limp in the still air. Later in the morning Yavtar expected a slight breeze from the south that might help, but this early in the day, such winds seldom appeared.

  The boat crews had to row hard just to keep from being shoved downriver by the current. Since the boats carried extra men, the heavily laden vessels handled even worse than usual, each craft carrying more than twenty archers and a dozen rowers. His men struggled with the oars, thrusting them deep into the brown waters of the Euphrates and pushing with all their strength, forcing the craft forward against the current.

  The archers provided some assistance. They used the few extra paddles to help drive the boats. Yavtar had intended to take the lead, but another craft slid easier through the water, despite Yavtar’s steady cursing at his own rowers, and until finally he waved the other boatmaster ahead, settling into the second position.

  Daro, in command of all the archers, also directed the bowmen on Yavtar’s craft. Daro kept moving up and down the line, making sure the broad shields sat fi
rmly in their place, and that every man had plenty of arrows and extra bowstrings at hand.

  “Pull, you dogs!” Yavtar’s bellow carried across the water to all three craft. “Gatus is moving ahead. Damn you, pull!”

  A few men had enough breath to laugh at their commander’s eagerness to get into battle.

  Stroke by stroke, the ships clawed their way upriver, until they rode alongside Gatus and his spearmen, only a hundred paces away. “Keep rowing. We need to be ahead of them.”

  When the spearmen launched their real attack, they’d be running as fast as they could cover the ground. The sooner the infantry could close the distance, the less time the enemy archers would have to launch shafts at them. That meant Yavtar needed to be well ahead of Gatus’s infantry. Fortunately, the river widened a bit, and the boats began to move faster through the water, slowly drawing ahead of Gatus and his spearmen.

  As soon as Yavtar saw that he’d be in position, he took a moment to study the enemy. His eyes widened at the sight of so many men. No one had ever assembled such a host before. He could scarcely believe what he saw. Yavtar had heard the estimates, seen the numbers, but to actually face so many, their upright spears glinting in the sun … he wondered how Eskkar could maintain his steadfastness of purpose, let alone his belief in victory. Even more, Yavtar wondered how the soldiers marching forward maintained their trust in their commander. Eskkar’s reputation had much to do with that, of course, but most of all Eskkar believed in himself, and the men sensed and shared in that belief.

  The king had once remarked that every battle he’d ever fought, he’d been outnumbered.

  “Did you ever think of run … not fighting?” Yavtar had corrected himself just in time.

  “Every time,” Eskkar replied, smiling at his friend.