Collam shook my hand again, and through Gwan, told me that fifty horsemen had crossed his lands the night before and that as far as he knew, Brach was gone.
Fifty horsemen. I laughed. ‘They’ll need a lot of help,’ I said.
Collam offered me twenty warriors, but I patted his shoulder and told him not to worry.
We swapped belts, there on the shore. It was a little like living in the Iliad. And then we were away, into the late morning, poling hard upstream.
Gwan usually rode ahead, but I kept him by me — the best way to avoid temptation is to avoid temptation, in fact — and I sent Seckla, who was a brilliant rider, to lead a dozen other men who could run. I’ve already said that the Sequana runs like a snake: a few men, running and resting, can easily pace a convoy of boats.
It was mid-afternoon when we ran out of water. There were good landing stages; this was the point from which the Venetiae transshipped their own cargoes. A big town stood there, well fortified with heavy palisades and a stone socle under the timber ramparts.
Gwan’s father was a minor lord in these parts. But the men who were to form our donkey train didn’t seem to be part of a conspiracy: the animals were already assembled, and they had panniers sewn to hold the big pigs of tin. There were eighty animals in the train, with forty men to handle them. The whole assemblage cost us four pigs of tin.
In the town, which was both smelly and quite marvellous, I found a gem — a goldsmith whose skill, while barbaric, was still very fine. I traded him a small amount of our gold for a pair of arm rings such as the local gentry wore. I liked them, and I needed to wear my status. It is often that way, when you are among foreigners. In Boeotia, they would know who I was even if I was naked and covered in soot from the smithy. In Gaul, I needed a pair of heavy gold arm rings. Herodikles mocked me for turning barbarian, but I think the arm rings stood us all in good stead.
We drank wine, ate well, and a day later, we were away. In any place we lingered, we spent too much. I had almost one hundred and eighty men, and they cost me an amount of gold equal to the size of your little finger every day just to keep in food and wine. Let me put it this way: we took a rich treasure from the Phoenicians, and two hundred slaves. The treasure, every ounce of it, about paid for the food. It had been the same when I served with Miltiades — there isn’t much economy to piracy.
On the other hand, without two hundred hungry men with an absolute loyalty to me, I doubt that we’d ever have got so much tin over the hills.
At any rate, we enjoyed Agedinca. Gwan was feasted, and through him, Seckla and Gaius and I met the lords of the Senones, the people who controlled the upper valley of the Sequana. They were rich in good farmland, and in the possession of the trade route, and their halls were full of armour and magnificent plates and cups. Their women wore more jewellery than Persian princesses.
We camped well outside of town, and we rotated a guard of forty men on our camp. By now, every former slave had a sword, a helmet, a spear or two and a shield, and I drilled them myself, teaching them the dances of Ares each day. I had two reasons for my care: first, that they might fight well, if we had to fight; and second, to keep them busy. They were oarsmen, and they had every reason to be bored.
When our donkey train was ready to cross the hills, the King of the Senones came to see us off. He admired my warriors, and offered me a hundred more men.
I bowed respectfully and refused them. I didn’t want to have to trust him.
He shrugged. ‘The Aedui are our enemies,’ he said. ‘They often attack the tin trains. Be wary.’
Gwan nodded. After we had started up the valley, he rode up to me — we had two-dozen horses — and pointed up the pass. ‘If the Venetiae are going to ambush you,’ he said, ‘They won’t do it themselves. They’ll pay someone to attack you. The Aedui are the obvious choice — they attack trains all the time.’
‘And yet the king said nothing of the fifty horsemen,’ I noted.
Gwan looked away. ‘He is my cousin,’ Gwan said. ‘But not a friend to me or to my father. I think perhaps he takes your tin to build your train — and takes silver from the Venetiae to allow your train to be ambushed.’
Gaius said, ‘If that’s so, then the baggage-handlers and the teamsters will all desert. Or attack us.’
Gwan shook his head. ‘That would be hard to work out,’ he said.
I wanted to trust Gwan, but there was a barrier between us, deeper than the cultural divide. I truly wished that I had Daud or Sittonax with me. Leukas was Alban, and too far removed from the politics — if I may call them that — of the Gauls. Leukas distrusted Gwan all the time. Leukas was also jealous of Gwan’s continuing success with every maiden — I use the term loosely — on the river.
People are very complicated.
Men told me that it was six days over the hills to Lugdunum, the town at the head of the Rhodanus River that flows into the Inner Sea. The first night in the hills it was cold, and men pulled their cloaks tight around them and lay closer to other men, or built their fires higher. We had camped at a traders’ campsite — so it was stripped of all useful wood, you can bet. I sent fifty men off into the hills for wood, and another ten armed men to watch them. We built big fires, and shivered, and Gaius and I went from fire to fire, reminding men that we were ten days from Marsala and the Inner Sea, to encourage them that if we had to fight, it would be worth doing.
At a fire, one of the original crew of the Lydia asked me what the shares of the tin would be. It was a fair question, and one that had occupied me.
We’d started as a half-dozen men with a dream. We were coming home with more than a hundred freed slaves. Only sixteen men had died on the whole trip through accident, quarrels and Apollo’s arrows, and the men who were almost home had begun to wonder what they might receive.
And, of course, the men who had started from Marsala thought they were more worthy than the men who had been rescued from slavery. Gian told me point-blank that the former slaves now had their freedom — that was their share.
‘And weapons!’ shouted another Marsalian shepherd.
Greed. They’d been like brothers when we were rowing for our lives in the fog, but ten days from home I assured everyone that the shares would be fair. There was probably some half-truth to my statement, because I had yet to think of a simple, logical mathematical solution. But the mere promise that there would be a payout was enough.
The hills were magnificent; greener and more heavily wooded than hills in Greece. I thought they were quite high, until we climbed over the summit of the second pass and arrived at a mighty hill fort set at the top of a rocky crag and surrounded by stone walls built like any fortress wall in the Ionian Sea. It was a puzzle of giant rocks, as if the whole wall had been built by Titans. From those heights, I could see a range of mountains to the east that rose like jagged teeth. I had never seen mountains so high, even on the coast of Asia. They were breathtaking, at least in part because they were so far away. The Senones all told me they were the Alps. The hill fortress was a capital of the Aedui, but they offered us no violence. In fact, the lord of the place — I forget his name — told me that a Greek had designed his walls and taught his people to build them. I thought about what it would be like to be working so far from home. It cost me a whole pig of tin to feed my people across the hills. They had their own gold and silver here. They wanted tin.
And then we were down the other side of the pass, down the path into the high valleys of the Cares River. Fewer farms, and more trees.
My pig of tin had purchased more than just food. It purchased six more horses and some information, and I was aware that there were fifty horsemen ahead of me on the road. North of Lugdunum, where the Cares flows into the Rhodanus, we marched down the valley and I saw the sparkle and sun-dazzle of Helios on naked steel, and I knew.
I trusted my Senones by then. They didn’t seem shifty enough to be traitors, and they laughed a lot and drank hard. It is difficult for a Greek to distrust s
uch men. Despite which, I had a former oarsman stand with every Senone in the train. And then we all armoured ourselves.
You may say that I was broadcasting to the ambush that we knew they were there.
I was. Why fight? If they wanted to slip away into the hills, I wanted to let them. My guides and my drovers swore we were a day from the navigable waters of the Rhodanus. I didn’t want to fight. In fact, all I wanted to do was to get home. The charms of travel and exploration had faded; I was beginning to feel old. In fact, I was thirty years old that autumn, and the age of it was in my bones.
I watched the hills, and the steel moved, but it did not disperse. Whoever was up there had enough men to fight my two hundred.
When we were armed, I sent my dozen horsemen to scout. As an aside, Greeks are not much good as scouts. Greek cavalry tend to fight other Greek cavalry — it’s like any other Greek contest — and the losers don’t go back to tell their friends what happened, I can tell you. But Seckla’s people have different notions of scouting, and Seckla led his boys down the valley and across the fields on a long sweep while I got my train organized and pushed my main body of spearmen out in front of it. I left eighty men with the Senones — a fine reserve, and at the same time a good baggage guard. My other hundred pushed forward in a line four men deep, a small, shallow phalanx that nonetheless covered the train behind them. They weren’t closed tight — the ground was far too broken — but they were close enough to support each other, ebbing and flowing around the patches of woods and rocks like a stream of hoplites.
Seckla sprang the trap, if it could be called a trap. He encountered a blocking force at a small bridge and rode away before they could throw javelins at him — then found one of the flank forces moving along some hedges to the right. He rode back to me as we closed on the low stone bridge.
He pointed. ‘Sixty men at the bridge, lightly armed. At least a hundred to the right in the woods. Those horsemen must be somewhere, but there’s no dung on the road and no horse signs to the right.’
Friends, that’s a scouting report. Honest, factual and terse.
I had put Demetrios in charge of the baggage train, and I took command of the phalanx myself, with Gaius and Gian as my deputies. I got them all together, quickly. ‘We’re going right over the bridge,’ I said. ‘We’ll smash them and move across, and then the spearmen will switch from advance guard to rearguard while the train moves as fast as they can. We’ll be out of their reach before their flanks can close on us.’ I pointed at the bad going — the fallow fields, the marsh on our right. ‘Don’t lose your nerve. Just keep going. My only worry is that they have more men in ambush on the other side of the stream. Seckla, that’s your part — as soon as we clear the bridge, ride through and look down the road. Everyone got it?’
Everyone did.
I rode to the head of the phalanx, dismounted and gave my horse to my boy. ‘ Philoi!’ I shouted. ‘You are better men, and you are better armed. See the men by the bridge? We will sweep them aside like a woman sweeps dust off the floor. And then we will go home.’
They roared.
I was glad that they were roaring, because my stomach was somersaulting like a landed fish. My quick count was that the enemy — I had to assume they were the enemy — had three hundred warriors and another fifty cavalry. Odds of three to two sound heroic, but in a small fight, a few men are an enormous advantage. The ground was passable for cavalry; hardly ideal, but fifty Saka archers could have destroyed my whole force. Luckily, Gaulish noblemen don’t use bows. Ares be praised.
I took my place in the ranks and raised my spear. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. And like Miltiades at Marathon, I called: ‘Let’s run!’
We ran at them.
The entire time I held my command meeting and gave my little speech, the men on the right flank had been moving forward cautiously. It is a thing men do — they sort of pretend to cling to cover, even after they have been discovered.
My archers — the same men who performed the role on board ship, but without Doola’s magnificent archery — began to drop shafts among the more confident men on the right. I don’t think they hit a man, but they slowed the right flank of the ambush to a literal belly crawl.
We ran forward to the bridge. The Aedui were in a shield wall, about forty men with javelins, big shields, a few well-armoured men in front. Gaius and I took the centre of our spearmen into them, and our flank men went right down into the stream and up the other side. In spring, I’m sure the stream was full and the bridge was required, but in mid-autumn, all they lost was their close order as they poured over the streambed.
I didn’t have time to watch. I ran forward, and despite the old wound in my leg, I flew. When I reached the Aedui shield wall, it was just me and Gaius.
We had never really fought together.
Perhaps we sought to impress one another. But neither of us would give a step, and neither of us slowed, and so we hurtled straight into their ranks. I got my aspis up and forward onto the spears and I let them slow me, and then I leaped as high as I could and threw my spear — hard — into the front rank, and came down without getting a spear in my foot or knee or head — alive, in other words.
Gaius must have thrown a pace farther out, because a man fell, and for a moment, their ranks rippled I put my shoulder into the back of my aspis as I landed, head down, and my impetus slammed a man back even as I got my kopis out of the scabbard. The long swords the Gauls used only hampered them, this close. I know, because one rang off my helmet immediately. I was in their ranks, moving among them, slashing right and left. I doubt I killed a man, but I’ll wager I hit six in as many heartbeats.
And about then, the rest of my spearmen hit their shield wall, and they folded. They began to break from the front, not the back, and suddenly they were dead men — just like that. Let me say, we outnumbered them four to one, and we had every advantage: terrain, flanks, depth and armour. But their shield wall couldn’t hold two of us.
It is a difference in attitude, eh? As many Persians would have killed us. Hmm… Or perhaps not, eh?
I burst out through the back of their shallow line, and my flankers were climbing the bank and I was almost across the low bridge. To the right, a hundred men or more were coming at the flank of the tin train. It would be close whether they got to it, or it got across the bridge.
To the left, the river guarded my flank. Or so I thought. But when I looked, there were fifty armoured horsemen swimming the river. The same low water that had allowed me to cross the streambed Well, I can be a fool, sometimes.
And my spearmen were running the Gauls down and killing them instead of stopping to rally.
Oh, for a hundred real soldiers! Even real pirates.
Men in victory are as irrational as men in defeat. Only a veteran knows the truth — that it’s not over until it is over.
Seckla hadn’t crossed yet. I held up a hand and stopped him.
‘If there’s an ambush, the spearmen will find it,’ I said. ‘Stop the horsemen. And take the archers.’
Seckla nodded and rode off, and I ran — in armour, damn it — back to the donkey train. They were trotting along the road. Demetrios was at their head.
‘Move!’ I roared. ‘ Move! ’
I looked to the right. The archers lofted another volley, and hit not one but two Aedui warriors, and the rest fell on their faces. My archers turned and followed Seckla, and the Aedui rose to their feet and came forward — slowly at first, and then with more spirit.
I had been far too confident.
Panicked men do not make good animal-handlers. Panicked men lead to panicked animals, and panicked animals run. In all directions.
In a matter of heartbeats, an easy victory had become a disaster. My train didn’t cross the bridge. It ran off, away from the charging Aedui and towards the river. A donkey with an eighty-pound ingot of tin doesn’t run all that well, but it will run as fast as it can.
The horsemen were almost across. The archers were
starting to engage them. The range was close, and the archers had time and felt safe, at least for the moment.
Horses and men began to die.
Behind me, the Aedui from the bridge were dying. But my precious spearmen had run too far, all but Alexandros’s marines and maybe a dozen others.
I could have screamed in my frustration. Even Gaius had run off after the Aedui. Gwan — I could see his Gaulish gear — was beside him, halfway down the valley.
On the other hand, when the animals broke for the river, the eighty men in reserve ceased to matter as baggage guards. That’s how it goes.
‘Demetrios!’ I called. He did not look like a great warrior; he wasn’t very tall and his helmet looked several sizes too big. ‘Face to the right!’ I called. I ran to his men.
I’d like to say that the enemy didn’t expect us to abandon our tin, but they were not under anyone’s control either, at this point. I put myself at the head of Demetrios’s baggage guards and we charged the Aedui on foot, who had been pricked by the archers and crawled across the marsh.
A few of them died, but the rest chose to run, evading our short charge and running back into the marsh. There were some desultory spear casts from both sides.
I needed a decisive result.
I wasn’t going to get one.
‘Hold them here,’ I said to Demetrios, and ran — panting, now, with effort — back to my marines and Giannis and a few comrades.
‘Follow me,’ I spat. I ran down the slope towards the river.
The cavalrymen were trying to kill Seckla, and Seckla was refusing to be drawn into a fight, and the archers were running around, trying to stay alive and occasionally launching a shaft. I only had six archers, and they were the balance of the fight. The cavalrymen didn’t seem to know that, though. Phokis, one of the former slaves and a fine archer, died from a chance javelin throw, but he was one of the few.
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