Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (27 page)

"O sweet Koure, embr—," Arrhidaeus next
intoned.  

His prayer to the Maiden went unfinished,
for the sword borne by a supple, unlikely hand plunged swiftly
down, piercing his breast from front to back, straight through the
heart, and making of his royal blood an offering to that dark,
venerable goddess.

The quiet roar of two thousand soldiers
lying in wait filled the broad space just inside Amphipolis's
southwestern gate. Armor clattered, men's shields grated against
those of their neighbors, and the butt-spikes of spears narrowly
missed skewering feet, prompting muttered curses. Soldiers could be
kept largely silent with threat of the lash, but horses could not,
and there were two hundred of those drawn up with their riders
behind Demosthenes this night, whinnying and snorting with little
regard for stealth. But fortunately, an army lying in ambush needed
only to be quieter than the army whose arrival it awaited, which
was of necessity on the march and louder by far.

For unknown but likely self-evident reasons,
the closed gate behind which they waited was called the Horseman's
Gate. Tonight it would live up to the name. When two pegs in
Amphipolis's stone walls were yanked free, releasing massive
counterweights and throwing open the gate's heavy double doors of
iron-girt firs, the frost-hardened Thracian soil would shudder with
the passage of a column of Athenian citizen cavalry five wide and
forty deep.

Demosthenes sat at the head of this waiting
column, not astride Maia, who was not bred for war, but on a
charger named Balios who perpetually tossed his black head back and
forth in anticipation of the charge. The beast's neck and sides
were armored with hanging sheets of stiff leather onto which were
sewn thin plates of iron, and Balios' head was protected by a
faceplate of contoured bronze. The horse's harness was equipped
with reins, but they would see infrequent use, for war-horses were
trained to respond to a rider's legs, leaving arms free for the
business of dealing death.

A season ago, when Demosthenes had charged
the Boeotian cavalry at Megara, then as now atop Balios, reins and
a felt saddle had been the extent of his riding gear, but Thalassia
had changed that. On the beast's back was now a seat of stiff,
padded leather and from its either side hung loops into which the
rider placed his feet. They gave better leverage and control,
Thalassia claimed, and from having trained with them Demosthenes
knew she was right–when he could remember to keep his feet in them.
A number of the other riders today would use the new equipment, but
most had scoffed. Doubtless even more would laugh when and if they
heard Thalassia's suggestion of giving their mounts iron shoes.

Under his right arm Demosthenes cradled his
lance, like a hoplite's spear but thinner and lighter and with a
conical iron tip less likely than a flat blade to become lodged in
its victim. Yet the lance inevitably would be lost or broken
anyway, and that was when he would draw the long, slashing
cavalryman's sword of virgin Athenian steel hanging in its hide
scabbard beneath the armor of Balios's left flank. While most of
the citizen cavalry wore the same bronze breastplates they wore
when fighting on foot as hoplites, Demosthenes wore a corselet of
overlapping iron scales, like the armor of his mount, which left
his arms bare and stopped just above the thigh. His legs below the
knee were wrapped tightly with strips of plain leather; few
Athenian cavalrymen wore boots into war, for boots to them were
signifiers of their membership in
the 
hippeis 
class, too ornate and expensive to
risk seeing slashed open or soiled with gore. His helmet was a
shell of bronze which left the ears uncovered and flanked his bare
face with scrolling, downturned cheek pieces, and from its crest
flowed a mane of white horsehair, the sign of his rank.

So arrayed, Demosthenes waited atop eager
Balios for word on the progress of the enemy army. Brasidas had
marched his force through the night over rugged terrain from the
pro-Spartan city of Stagiros on the belief that the key bridge over
the Strymon would be turned over to him by traitors in Amphipolis.
In this, one might say he was half-right:
roughly 
half 
of his army would be allowed across
the river before the trap was sprung.

Where Brasidas expected the sun to rise on
an Amphipolis besieged, daybreak would find instead a battle
already well under way.

Sparse, tiny flakes of snow began to swirl
gently in the pre-dawn darkness, vanishing as they touched the cold
ground or the skin of a horse. After a seeming eternity, the
Thracian youth serving as runner at last appeared at the top of the
city wall, rappelled down on a waiting rope and raced over to
Demosthenes to deliver a message in heavily accented Greek.

"Five minutes and they'll be in range!"

Were secrecy not a requirement, Demosthenes
would have used those five minutes to wheel his horse to face his
men and exhort them to battle, telling them, rightly, that a
victory today would deliver a crushing blow not just to one Spartan
army but to Sparta herself. He might remind them that Brasidas's
host had just completed a forced nighttime march and was not
expecting a fight straightaway, whereas the Athenians and their
allies were well rested and looking forward to battle. But this was
an ambush, and so he said nothing, but just stared straight ahead
at the starlit Horseman's Gate and counted down in silence.

When but a few seconds remained, he
whispered a quick prayer to a goddess whose existence he doubted
and raised his left hand skyward. The hand then descended to point
at the trumpeter standing not far off, who in response raised his
horn and blew a low, clear note which soared into the night sky and
settled there for a moment, alone, before falling into a sea of
blood-curdling war cries. The pegs were pulled, the sandbags
descended, the Horseman's Gate flew wide, and two hundred Athenian
chargers bearing two hundred riders wrapped in bronze and leather
thundered out five-by-five onto the plain south of Amphipolis in
search of an enemy to kill.

They galloped into a land of shades, of deep
blues and flitting black shadows, of swirling snowflakes and glints
of silver moonlight on the distant enemy's spear blades and
helmets. As expected, Brasidas had marched his heavy troops, his
hoplites, over the bridge first. Once there, they began forming up
into a phalanx six deep facing the city on the possibility of just
such a sally as that which Amphipolis's defenders were
mounting.

The enemy hoplites furthest east, those who
had crossed over first and assumed the place of honor on the army's
right wing, were Demosthenes' targets of choice. The blazons on
their round shields were not visible yet through the inky darkness,
but there was little doubt of what the light would show. According
to informers on the route of Brasidas's march, the core of
Brasdidas's three thousand spearmen and lighter troops was a band
of seven hundred Helots offered their freedom in exchange for
service on the battlefield. Maybe they were not true Spartan
Equals, but here on this plain, to the men obliged to face down
their gleaming spear blades, they were Spartans all the same.

An enemy trumpeter sounded a note of alarm,
and Brasidas's troops raised a shout of their own that drowned out
the cries of the far fewer horsemen charging them. The defending
hoplites locked their round shields, dug spear-butts into the cold
earth and lowered the points to receive the charge.

Were this how the battle were to unfold,
with cavalry charging formed-up hoplites on open ground, the
horsemen would have been doomed, for when faced with ranks of
bristling spears, horses would ever turn aside at the last moment,
even throwing their riders in their refusal to consign themselves
to certain death. But that would not happen. Death remained a
possibility today, as on any day of battle, but Demosthenes had no
intention of throwing away the life of Balios or those of the two
hundred citizens, among the wealthiest in Athens, following in
formation behind him.

The thing which was to avert doom this day
passed noiselessly overhead in the night sky, insubstantial black
wisps which became real only when they hammered the enemy line,
sending men's shades screaming into the kingdom of the eldest god.
The one hundred wielders of the gastraphetes had released their
first volley before even the Horseman's Gate had swung open, and
now they fired a second over the heads of the charging Athenian
cavalry. To give the bowmen time for at least a third round and
perhaps a fourth, Demosthenes led his column not straight at
Brasidas's line but in an undulating arc which had the secondary
effect of making the enemy wonder where the blow eventually would
land. An arrow slashed harmlessly to the earth just inside
Demosthenes' vision, showing that Brasidas, despite his people's
hatred of arrows, had not turned down a contribution of archers
from some ally or another. But the hail of missiles was sparse
compared even to the sprinkling snow, and it accomplished about as
much.

The same could not be said of the mighty
black bolts which plunged two-by-two into Brasidas's line. The
shooters atop the walls of Amphipolis, all archers skilled with
normal bows before their half-season of training with the new
weapon, concentrated their fire on the enemy right, where the play
of winter moonlight at last illuminated a solid wall of
lambdas.

Even more than most fighters, a Spartan
trusted none but a countryman to stand at his right and share his
shield, but today the massive arrows of the gastraphetes refused to
treat the shield of a Lakedaemonian differently than any other.
Great holes were punched in the crimson lambdas and in the leather
curiasses behind them. The spears of dying men scythed groundward,
forcing the living to break ranks to avoid the loss of life or
limb. In the darkness it was impossible to know how many fell, but
four volleys of two hundred arrows each meant that by the time the
clash of arms began, nearly a thousand merciless iron-tipped bolts
had already ripped into a segment of the enemy line where stood
just a few hundred men.

It was just after that fourth volley struck
that Demosthenes drove the Athenian cavalry into the very same
spot. It had been a great risk to rely on an unproven weapon to
buckle a wall of shields held by the most fearsome fighters in all
of Greece, if not the world, but the risk had paid off. Thanks to
the belly-bows, instead of plunging headlong into certain death,
the citizen cavalry of Athens ploughed the field of Lakedaemonians,
whose ash spear shafts parted as stalks of wheat before the hippeis
going to work with their lances. They jabbed down into necks and
collarbones while their hoplite victims struggled to bring shields
and unwieldy spears into position in time to give something back.
Some threw down their spears and drew short swords, which made up
for their lack of reach with swiftness of stroke, and from behind
shields riven with fist-sized holes they stabbed upward at horses'
necks and riders' thighs.

Their efforts were in vain. So weakened by
missiles was the Spartan line that the Athenian charge lost almost
no momentum in colliding with it. Each rider raced through the
widening gap in the broken Spartan ranks and remained within the
phalanx only long enough to thrust lances into one picked target
each, skewering men like goats for roasting. By the time the
Athenian cavalrymen had swords in hand to replace lost lances, they
had ridden through the body of enemy troops entirely and burst out
through the rear.

Demosthenes led the column far enough that
all the ranks behind him could pass clean through the body of enemy
troops without slowing. Then he brought Balios around and doubled
back in time to see, over the helmets of the Spartan ranks, a
thousand more shadowy defenders of Amphipolis pouring out from the
Horseman's Gate to form up opposite Brasidas's army, which now
suffered a wide gap in its right. No sooner had the defenders drawn
up than they advanced at a run against a reeling and confused
enemy.

Strewn with the corpses on the ground in his
path, Demosthenes made out the dark, still hulks of three horses.
The loss of their citizen riders was plenty of cause for mourning,
but in the cold calculus of war it was as nothing, for no fewer
than two hundred enemy now lay dead or dying. The Spartan
contingent of Brasidas's army, its heart, had been effectively cut
out. Brasidas himself, perhaps, was dead, for his helmet crest,
assuming he wore one, was nowhere visible. Absent, too, were any
long Spartan locks beneath the toppled pilos-style helmets of the
Spartan corpses, lending credence to the reports that they were
Helots.

Now, with the Spartan contingent broken,
would be a proper time to pause and offer terms to the allies who
had marched with Sparta, but Brasidas's army should be not just
stopped here, but smashed–or so spoke a certain star-born
prophetess whose current whereabouts were unknown. Instead of
losing Amphipolis without a fight, Athens would keep the rich gold
deposits of Mount Pangaion and vast forests of shipworthy Thracian
timber. Best of all, a half-dozen other subject cities of the
Athenian Empire would not be prompted out of fear to throw open
their gates to Brasidas.

Thalassia had given him reason enough not to
halt the battle and offer terms, but he had another reason. The
battle delirium had taken root in him, much as he tried to stave it
off. Madness was not useful in battle except to those barbarians
who fought with no cohesion or order but relied instead on the
feats of frenzied individuals bent on winning personal glory, but
who were likelier by far to win themselves a grave. But today a
civilized Athenian yielded himself, at least a little, to
possession by the war god and ordered no pause. Instead he raised
his long sword high and kicked his horse to a gallop. Seeing the
bright white horsehair plume of their hipparch's helmet streaming
through the dark in the direction of the enemy rear, the rest of
the citizen cavalry followed.