by Oden, Scott
Memnon spun toward Artabazus.
“To arms! Sound the call to arms!” the satrap cried, thumping Memnon’s leather-clad chest. “Get heavier armor and meet me on the line!”
THE CALL TO ARM AND ASSEMBLE, BORNE FROM THE BRAZEN THROATS OF A dozen trumpets, came as no great shock to the rebel soldiers. If anything, the men felt a sense of relief as they doused their small cookfires and strapped on armor. The sentries who had drawn the night watch groaned as they rolled out of their cloaks and staggered to the rally point, joined by armed squires and a corps of pipers, trumpeters, and runners. Above the jangle of harness, veteran rankers cursed as they chivvied their younger companions into formation. Memnon waded through it as he made for his brother’s tent.
Mentor’s pavilion lay between the Persians and the Athenians, sharing the crest of a grassy knoll with the spreading boughs of an ancient oak. Its canvas walls reminded all of their general’s past—they were sewn from lengths of bleached scarlet sailcloth taken from the wreck of a Rhodian trireme. Memnon could still make out the outline of a great sunburst, the mark of Helios, its golden thread long since plucked out. Persian officers stood at rigid attention outside the pavilion as Mentor dispensed his final orders; he dismissed them as Memnon approached.
“What is it?” Mentor said. He wore a cuirass of polished bronze, inlaid with silver and lapis lazuli, a leather kilt, and greaves etched with the images of the Dioscuri, Castor on the left leg and Polydeuces on the right.
“I need a heavier breastplate,” Memnon said. Mentor eyed the stamped leather cuirass his brother wore. He turned to his squire, Diokles.
“Fetch my old panoply.”
The squire brought out a muscled cuirass of unadorned bronze, functional and polished to a low sheen, greaves, and an uncrested Corinthian helmet. “This looks familiar. Is it …?”
Mentor smiled. “It’s the armor Father gave me when I left Rhodes. You’ve a good memory.” He rapped the chest piece, listening to its solid ring. “Still, it’s serviceable and it should fit you well enough, for now. I was smaller back then.”
Memnon stripped off his leather and, with the squire’s aid, shrugged into the heavier bronze carapace. Mentor helped him with the buckles while Diokles knelt and fitted the greaves over Memnon’s shins.
“Keep your wits about you,” Mentor said. “Keep your shield centered and balanced, and make sure you don’t extend yourself too far beyond the allied line.”
“I’ve been in battle before, brother.”
Mentor snagged the neck of Memnon’s cuirass and hauled him close. “You’ve never been in a battle like this, so shut up and listen! When your helmet’s seated your peripheral vision’s going to be poor. Understand? You won’t be able to see from side to side, so keep friends on your flanks! Also, it’ll be damn near impossible to hear with any certainty. But, listen … when the salpinx blares, you can feel its vibrations along your scalp and down your spine. Persian trumpets don’t have the same effect.”
Memnon swallowed, nodded. He looped his baldric over his shoulder and adjusted his sword, then caught up his helmet and a pair of javelins. Mentor frowned.
“Lose those pig-stickers and get yourself a proper spear.” To Diokles, he said, “Bring him my spare shield.” The bowl-shaped aspis, with its oak chassis and bronze facing, added another twenty pounds to Memnon’s kit. He slipped his left arm into the sleeve and wrapped his hand around the gripcord. Along its inner rim, the shield-maker had carved a hymn to Athena: Sing, O Muse, of Athena Promachos, Shield-bearer, defender of men. O goddess, give me courage to escape The enemy’s charge and a violent death.
Memnon read the inscription again, and with each syllable the icy talons of phobos constricted about his throat. Could this be his last day under heaven? His last hour? The young Rhodian’s eyes wandered toward the mouth of the defile and the gently sloping plain beyond. By nightfall the ground would be a ruin, its soil churned up, harrowed by thousands of feet and enriched by the blood of the slain. Would he …?
Mentor clapped a hand on his shoulder, forestalling his thoughts. “Do your best, fight with heart and with honor, and leave the rest to the Fates.” He gestured to Diokles, who handed him a small leather flask. Mentor uncorked it, dribbled a libation of wine on the ground between them, then took a swallow and passed the flask to Memnon. “For Zeus Savior and Victory.”
Memnon exhaled and followed his brother’s lead, surprised at the steadiness in his own voice. “Zeus Savior and Victory.”
IT TOOK THE REBELS LESS THAN AN HOUR TO MARSHAL ON THE PLAIN, WHOLE divisions moving into place with the quiet efficiency of men bred to war. The genius of Artabazus’s strategy became apparent to Memnon as he watched the battalions dress ranks—the old satrap sought to emulate the success of the Athenians at Marathon. On the right wing, Pammenes and his Boeotians presented a front five hundred shields across and ten deep; facing them, if Mithridates clung to Persian tradition, would be light troops, levied spearmen and javelineers. The kardakes occupied the center of Artabazus’s line, their formation as close and tight as a Greek phalanx. Despite their numbers, Mentor aligned them on a front five hundred shields across, equal to the Boeotians, but only five men deep. They would need every scrap of courage they could cobble together if they hoped to survive against the cream of Mithridates’ army, his household troops and the spearmen of Babylon. Chares and his Athenians anchored the left, their formation mirroring the others. The Athenians, though, loaded each file with fourteen men. The light troops and unhorsed cavalry facing them, though numerous, stood little chance against such a mass of muscle, bronze, and iron. If all went as planned, the Persians would concentrate on the rebel center even as the Athenians and Boeotians decimated the wings and rolled up Mithridates’ flanks.
Shuffling feet sent clouds of dust into the air and with every breath Memnon tasted grit. The young Rhodian swiped his forearm across his sweat-dampened brow. He stood on the frontline, apromachos; his position one hundred thirty stations right of where the kardakes joined with the Athenians. Mentor would fight in the same position on the Boeotian side; Artabazus, with his bodyguard and standard-bearers, trumpeters and flute-players, took the middle, over Mentor’s protestations. A mile separated rebel from loyalist, a mile of rolling grassland split by the ruddy scar of the Zeleian road, by scrubby trees and rocky streamlets. At two hundred yards they would become targets for the Persian archers; at fifty yards the salpinx would sound the order to charge. “Your leg won’t bear you through that hell!” Mentor had said.
Artabazus’s eyes had flashed in anger, the sole occasion Memnon had seen that emotion turned against the satrap’s own kinsman. “Do not presume to tell me what I may or may not do! I’ve not come this far only to sit back and let others do my fighting for me!”
Tension knotted Memnon’s gut. He knew he should say something to the men around him—a word or two of encouragement, perhaps a fitting quote—but his eloquence deserted him, the first casualty of phobia. Instead, he contented himself with looking up and down the line. Each man developed his own ritual before battle, some small thing he could do to restore a measure of control over his emotions. For the veterans, something practical—a buckle readjusted, a sword loosened in its sheath, a handful of dirt abraded along the grip of a spear. Those less experienced preferred the spiritual observances—a talisman kissed and tucked away, a prayer chanted under breath, a dialogue with the gods responsible for winnowing spirits from the battlefield. As always, one or two of the soldiers possessed irrepressible humor; their jokes and the attendant laughter calmed even the most terrified among them.
Three stations to his right, in the second rank, Memnon caught sight of a familiar face: Arius, the guard from Zeleia. He had his spear propped in the crook of his shield arm as he busily patted his scaled cuirass, looking for something.
“What have you lost, Arius?” Memnon said.
“His mind,” someone from the third rank muttered. “Careful underfoot!” The Persians chuckled. Ar
ius shook his head, smiling.
“No, my mind is less precious to me. Ah, here it is.” From the hem of his armor, Arius withdrew a talisman on a broken leather thong. Memnon, his interest piqued, leaned forward. It was a coin. Arius offered it to Memnon for a closer look. “It has been in my family for generations, passed from father to son, since my ancestor earned it in the employ of Cyrus the Great. It is Lydian, from the hoard of King Croesus.” The coin, a flat, irregular disc of worn silver, bore the faint image of a lion on one side, a punch mark on the reverse. Memnon handed it back to Arius, who tucked it inside his armor.
“May it hold the luck of Cyrus,” the young Rhodian said.
Arius nodded. “For us all.”
Memnon faced front. A breeze whispered through the grass, rustling pennons and cooling his sweat-soaked forehead. Near the center of the formation, Artabazus stepped out in front of the mass of soldiers, his panoply glittering brighter than the ripples on the surface of Lake Manyas. Memnon tensed. The aging satrap raised his spear aloft, paused for effect, then bellowed. “Forward to victory!”
A chorus of trumpets blared the order to advance, holding the note for the span of a dozen heartbeats. Memnon’s hand trembled as he grasped the bottom edge of his helmet’s cheek guard and tugged it down, muffling the pipers’ wail as it cut through the din of the salpinx. In unison, the phalanx stepped off their mark, shields interleaved, spears held at the vertical. Partially robbed of sight, Memnon kept his attention riveted straight ahead, on the enemy lines. A pall of dust hid any details.
Memnon checked his right and left, sweat dripping from the inside of his helmet’s cheek guards. Unbroken, the rebel line advanced through knee-high grass. Birds exploded from thickets all around, startled at the crash and thunder of armored men marching to the shrill music of the aulos flute. The pipers’ steady pace carried the army along faster than Memnon imagined. They passed the midway point. A half-mile remained. Elements of the enemy line grew distinct with each step: wicker shields and javelins, bronze-scaled jerkins and helmets of hammered iron, pennons of purple and gold. Above the tramp of thirty thousand feet, the jangle of his harness, and the scrape of his shield rim against another, Memnon heard a distant cacophony of ox-hide drums and brazen horns as the loyalists stoked their courage to a fever pitch.
With a quarter-mile to go, the young Rhodian experienced a sudden rush of panic. As one of the promachoi, the frontline fighters, he had no avenue of escape. He couldn’t backpedal, nor dodge from side to side. The pressure of the phalanx meant he could only move forward, onto the spears of the enemy, where a wrong move, a misstep, would find him, in the words of the poet Tyrtaeus, “holding in his hands his testicles all bloody.”
The tune of the auloi quickened; the phalanx broke into a trot. Half a dozen paces later, a haze of missiles lofted skyward, arching over the heads of the enemy’s front-rankers. Arrows and javelins, their flight at once graceful and terrifying, reached their apex and descended to earth in a lethal rain of razor-tipped iron. Memnon’s bowels seized up.
He thrust his shield high, canting it so it covered his head and the right side of the man beside him. Arrows peppered the ground; they struck his shield face with the crack of a mallet on wood. Heavier javelins caromed off his bowl-shaped aspis and clattered into the grove of upraised spears behind him. Memnon heard the voices of those nearest him, mindless screams and prayers, mantras of names—fathers, mothers, wives, children, ancestors, heroes—chanted over and again at the tops of their lungs. He added his own shouts to the din as another fusillade buffeted their lines, then a third. Through it, the phalanx advanced at the double-quick, their ranks unbroken. Before the Persians loosed a fourth volley, the salpinx wailed the order to charge.
A dull roar rose from the throats of the rebels. As they surged forward, sprinting the last fifty yards or so, Memnon and the other frontline fighters leveled their spears to full horizontal. Soldiers of the next two ranks followed suit, thrusting their weapons over the shoulders of the promachoi to create a murderous hedge of ash and iron.
Forty yards, now. Thirty. Adrenalin sharpened Memnon’s perceptions. He singled out one man, straight ahead of him, a Babylonian in a bronze-scaled tunic and gold-embroidered pantaloons. Bright sunlight shone on the razored edge of his spear. The fellow stood his ground, his face grim and resolute. Twenty yards. Ten. Every muscle in Memnon’s body tensed; he angled his torso, placing his shoulder in the hollow of his shield. Iron fingers gripped the haft of his spear, knuckles cracking. The soldiers’ roar grew in volume, becoming the basso scream of a cornered animal. All fear fled as the cathartic wave of sound coalesced into a single word:
“Victory!”
The two armies collided not with a thunderous crash, but with a less climactic noise—the wet crack of bone coupled with the rasp and slither of iron, amplified a thousand times over. Spears shattered like kindling; wicker shields crunched under the impact of bronze-sheathed aspides, driven by the mass of an entire phalanx. Memnon felt the pressure of the army behind him as he barreled through his chosen target and into the second rank of Persians, his spear plunging forward. Gore sprayed from torn breasts and throats, the droplets hanging in the air like brilliant rubies cast by the hand of a benevolent tyrant. Men collapsed, writhing in a mixture of churned soil, blood, and bowel.
Caught up in the wrack of war, Memnon lost all concern for himself. Individuality vanished; he became part of a common personality, threatened by a common enemy and driven by a common desire. The soldiers fighting alongside him became precious, his brothers. His shield moved of its own accord, protecting the man to his right, just as another protected him. Memnon struck overhand with his spear, again and again, punching through the flesh and bone of his enemies.
The two fronts ground together like millstones, the sheer mass of the Persian center stalling the kardakes’ advance. Heels dug in; toes scrabbled for purchase amid sundered bodies, the ground slick with blood and piss. Memnon’s lungs worked like a forge bellows. Sweat and blood stung his eyes, blinding him. Persian blades sought out chinks in his defenses; they grazed his helmet, scraped along his breastplate, shattered on his shield. A red rage gripped the young Rhodian, the furious exasperation of a lion pestered by yapping hyenas. He wanted to reach out and brush his enemies aside like they were nothing more than pieces on a game board.
“Hold them!” Memnon roared, his shield mashed against a wall of flesh. “Hold the line!” The pressure at his back redoubled, driving the air from his lungs. Spears ceased to plunge as men on both sides threw everything into this shoving match. The rebels heaved and shook against the overwhelming crush of bodies, their feet plowing furrows in the blood-dampened earth. Memnon struggled for breath. “Hold!”
Inexorably, the rebel line foundered.
Against the mercurial floods of springtime, a farmer’s crude dam of sticks, rocks, and earth can save a field if the structure stays intact, unbroken. But, should one element—a twig, say, or a pebble—become dislodged, roiling water will surge into the breach and assault the cohesion of neighboring elements. Inevitably, the dam will weaken and buckle, washing away the seeds of autumn’s harvest. In the dam of rebel fighters, the first breach opened on Memnon’s shield side. He heard the man bawl as he lost his footing and collapsed, affording the Persians a toehold. Lances ripped into the rebel file. Instinctively, Memnon edged to his left, shifting his aspis to defend his now-exposed flank. The breach widened as the spearmen of Babylon, howling in fury, spiked into the heart of the rebel formation and tore it asunder.
A shoulder rammed Memnon’s midsection. He staggered back and lashed out, his spear shattering against a bronze helmet. Through a haze of dust the shape of his attacker loomed, a massive Iranian in bloodied armor, his tunic ripped and gore-blasted. The Iranian’s scimitar hammered on Memnon’s shield, driving him to his knees. Successive blows dented and cracked the bronze facing but failed to penetrate it. Desperate, Memnon fumbled with his broken spear. He reversed his grip and rammed
the butt-spike up into his attacker’s groin, twisting till it grated on bone. The Iranian doubled over, screaming and clutching himself. Memnon lurched to his feet. Snarling, he brought the edge of his shield down on the back of his foeman’s neck with such force his vertebrae shattered like pottery.
Memnon backpedaled, ripping his sword from its sheath. Around him, battle lines degenerated into a maelstrom of hand-to-hand fighting. Persians swarmed over the embattled kardakes, attacking with broken spears, swords, or knives. Even the wounded fought tooth and nail. Hands grasped at Memnon’s legs; he hacked at them as a farmer hacks at clinging brambles, oblivious of the thorns. Time and again his borrowed panoply saved his life. The wide bowl of his shield intercepted enemy lances thrusting for his heart, his head. “Re-form!” he shouted. “Re-form!”
Clouds of yellowish dust rolled across the field to create a nightmare landscape of grotesque silhouettes, half-glimpsed maenads of war cavorting in Dionysian abandon. Solitary figures pierced the veil in a swirl of blood and iron before falling back into the pandemonium. Memnon saw Arius stumble from the dust, gore-splashed, his shield and helmet lost to the fray, his arms outstretched in a gesture of succor. The young Rhodian screamed his name just as a bearded Chaldean emerged from the haze and drove his spear through Arius’s body, bearing him to the ground. With a shriek of homicidal rage, Memnon leapt, slashing his blade across the Chaldean’s face. The enemy cried in horror and reeled away. Memnon followed, bracing for a fresh Persian onslaught. What he saw through the murk, though, gave him pause.
The Persians ceased to advance. They milled about, confused. Something unseen sent ripples of alarm through their ranks. Memnon motioned to the kardakes. “Form a new line! Quickly, brothers!” In pairs and clusters, the rebels regrouped, lapping shields to create a tenuous wall.
From his left, Memnon heard the skirl of flutes. To his numbed ears, Persian cries of triumph became screams of terror. Veteran soldiers recoiled; their courage ebbed as, above the din of battle, a clear voice rang out:
