Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (28 page)

Brasidas' force was now beset on two sides,
front and back, and many of its rearmost ranks turned to face the
returning Athenian horse, setting their spears.

Many of them turned–but not all–for in the
darkness, confusion reigned. Demosthenes aimed his charge at those
who seemed the least prepared, and the column of heavy horse
thundered with little resistance through the ranks of the
center-left, Chalkideans by the appearance of their arms,
scattering most of those who were not cut down by slashing Athenian
steel. But this time, instead of leading the column straight
through, he caused it to linger within the mass of enemy spearmen,
deadly though they could be to man or mount, to inflict as much
havoc as their long blades could wreak in the short time that
remained before the two armies collided.

When that time did come, Demosthenes
withdrew, along with his comrades, behind the enemy's shattered
right wing to watch and wait. The two armies met, filling the
brightening sky with a sound like the clap of a Titan.
The 
othismos
, the pushing match, was joined. Bellowing
war cries faded into groans of exertion and, for the unlucky, into
screams of pain as the two masses of men packed themselves flesh
upon flesh, bronze upon bronze with life-saving shields
interlocked, dug their feet into the snow-covered plain of Thrace
and pushed with all the strength in their hearts and limbs. Such
contests could and often did last for hours. This one did not.
Having been cut in two and deployed in a makeshift fashion to begin
with, Brasidas' force was almost immediately enveloped on both
wings. First the Chalkideans on the left, and next the center,
began to break and run south. Some men, the last to have crossed
the bridge just before the attack, even shed their armor and cast
themselves into the Strymon to be carried by the freezing current
to what they hoped would be safety downstream.

Heart soaring, Demosthenes rejoined the
battle. He could not know how many men's blood he spilled that day
with long, sweeping strokes of his sword from the back of Balios.
No fewer than ten, certainly, but he did not keep count. He had
kept his feet the whole time in Thalassia's dangling saddle-loops,
and they likely saved him more than once from being thrown. They
lengthened his sword stroke, too, and increased the force behind
each blow. Well before the battle had ended, that portion of his
mind which remained rational had concluded that all of Athens'
cavalry must be so equipped, regardless of its natural resistance
to change.

By the time pink fingers stretched across
the sky, the battle east of the Strymon had turned to a rout.
Demosthenes worked his way toward the river's bank, cutting down a
group of fleeing Argileans on the way. At first opportunity, he
looked across the river in search of some sign of how the fighting
had gone in the western hills, where Alkibiades had waited
overnight in a wooded depression with a thousand light infantry.
Half of those under his command were Thracian swordsmen who had
come down from Rhodope for nothing more than glory and the
opportunity to strip the arms of those they killed; Demosthenes
caught sight of a band of those men now, unmistakable with the
fox-tail tassels of their soft caps flapping in time with their
steps. They were running hard in pursuit of some enemy infantry who
had slung their shields on their backs and fled north, toward where
plains gave way to marshland. Perhaps the routed enemy did not know
that they soon would find themselves trudging through knee-deep
water and suctioning mud, or perhaps they did, and wrongly hoped
the fox-tailed Thracians, who knew the land well, would be
discouraged from following.

***

By full sunrise, the Athenian victory on
both banks was complete. Five or six hundred of Brasidas's light
troops were on the run through the northern marshes ahead of their
tireless Thracian pursuers, but nearer and more pressingly, a band
of about two hundred enemy hoplites had managed to withdraw to the
bridge and hold it against sustained infantry assault from the
eastern bank. Demosthenes had not ordered such an assault. No one
had–it had simply developed in the frenzy of battle, as was often
the case–but when he arrived on the scene and saw the Athenian
corpses piling up, he called its halt.

As the Athenians withdrew, he saw who led
the band of holdouts on the bridge. He had met him once before,
briefly, having stood almost face to face with him during the
failed Spartan naval assault on the beaches of Pylos, where the
Equal had been the first trierarch to run his ship aground. The
honor it had won him had helped make him a general.

Brasidas.

He stood unhelmed, flowing dark Spartiate
locks clinging to his high forehead and angular, bloodied
cheekbones. His right hand rested defiantly on the hilt of his
sheathed sword, and on his left arm hung a battered lambda-blazoned
hoplon.

That Brasidas was not among the dead would
disappoint Thalassia—wherever she was. (Why did he sense she was
somewhere near, watching the battle with her overkeen eyes?) Let
her call his survival a failure if she would. By any reasonable
human measure, a great victory had been won this day.

And the day was not yet over. There was
still time yet for Brasidas to join the ranks of the dead.

The bridge was packed from bank to bank,
rail to rail with soldiers. They spilled onto the land, too,
forming walls of shields facing east and west. Half the Spartans
and allies were bloody and battered while the rest were fresh, as
though they had been caught between the two battles on the east
bank and west, participating in neither. All of the holdouts were
hoplites, and the gentle, chaotic motion of their tall, closely
packed spears made the bridge seem almost a living thing.

At the head of the pack, on the side facing
Amphipolis, Brasidas stood. Around him and comprising the front two
ranks were perhaps thirty more survivors of his army's core of
freed Helots. At the Spartans' feet stood a tangled heap of corpses
of Athenians and Amphipolitans, a makeshift palisade of flesh bound
to interfere with any further attempt to dislodge them.

Of course, the standoff had an obvious
solution, and it did not escape Demosthenes. After the end of the
battle's first phase, Straton had brought his troop of
gastraphetes-wielders down from the walls of Amphipolis; but
consulting with the huntsman now, Demosthenes learned that the
belly-bows could not be put to further use until a stock of used
bolts could be harvested from the frosty earth and from the bowels
of enemies already slain.

There was nothing to lose by talking, then,
and something to gain, if not the holdouts' surrender: time for
ammunition to be collected.

"You men!" Demosthenes called down over the
bridge from his lines a safe distance away. "Spartans and their
allies! You have nothing to be ashamed of this day! There is no
dishonor in suffering an honest defeat, and so I offer you the
chance to leave this place with your honor intact. Surrender only
your arms and your general, and you may keep your lives and your
freedom!"

Brasidas, long hair matted with blood and
cheek bearing a deep gash, did not give his men time to consider
deserting him. He shouted back, "That is ever the way with you
Athenians, is it? Willing to fight so long as the going is easy,
but when the real work begins you start throwing about something
even cheaper than your arrows:
 words!
 Come finish
us if you've got the balls, 
hippopornoi!
"

The term was new to
Demosthenes. 
Horse-whores.
 Perhaps Brasidas had
invented it, or perhaps it was a part of the vocabulary of the
Spartans, who so despised horsemen—ranking them second only to
archers in cowardice—that the unit Sparta called its 'cavalry'
marched and fought on foot.

Whatever the insult meant, Demosthenes
brushed it off along with the fat snowflakes which had settled on
his cloak, and replied, "I think my offer is a magnanimous one.
Refuse it and find yourselves spitted like sheep by arrows that
treat bronze like the silks your wives wear now while they seduce
your slaves. The archers are on their way, and you make good
targets packed shoulder-to-shoulder on that bridge. Those of you
who would use reason and think for yourselves, be not afraid of one
man, this general who has led you to defeat! Be afraid of the
skewer that bears your name, for we have plenty to go around!"

By the time Demosthenes finished, he was
forced to shout over a war-chant, some words of blood and honor by
Tyrtaios or other martial poet of Lakonia. Brasidas was the first
to raise his voice, but soon was joined by the whole of the
thirty-strong Spartan contingent. These uplifted Helots, it seemed,
were as willing as any Equal to die at the word of their highborn
commander.

After one verse, Brasidas withdrew his voice
from the soaring elegy, drew his sword and clashed its blade
against the edge of his battered shield, once, twice, three times.
On the first clash, the chanting ceased. On the second, the Spartan
contingent around him locked shields and set their spears, those
who had them, while the rest of the seething mass on the bridge
turned its backs to the hundreds of watchers arrayed on the
Strymon's western bank.

On the third clash, they charged.

The tide of men surged east, toward
Alkibiades and the men he led, freshly emerging from the hills.
Alkibiades' force consisted almost entirely of javelin-armed
Imbrian light infantry, whose crescent-shaped shields of
hide-covered wicker had no chance of withstanding a crushing metal
tide such as that which they faced. Had the Thracians stayed with
the main body instead of breaking ranks to chase their enemy into
the marsh, it might have been different. Then, at least, Alkibiades
might have made up in numbers what his force lacked in quality. As
it was, the scant one hundred Athenian hoplites under Alkibiades'
command stood only two ranks deep between hastily formed wings of
light infantry.

To their credit, they all stood their
ground, the Athenians at the center setting their spears and
locking shields to receive the charge. Alkibiades himself was among
them, in front, easily picked out by his shield rimmed with gold
and inlaid in fragile ivory with a figure of winged Eros wielding a
thunderbolt.

To prevent Demosthenes' men on the east bank
intervening, Brasidas had left a rear-guard, and a fearsome one at
that: about half of the total surviving Spartan contingent kept
their hard eyes and lambda-blazoned shields facing the rising sun
while their fellows streamed away. Those left behind were the most
grievously wounded of the bunch, men whose faces were masks of
gore, whose breastplates bore round holes from which blood issued;
men who could hardly stand without the aid of their spears. But
their wounds made them hardly less formidable, for as the bridge
emptied they had slowly fallen back to its mouth where they formed
up seven across and two ranks deep to form a spear-studded wall of
flesh and bronze that filled the space between the bridge's rails.
They were doomed, these men, and they knew it, but they knew also
that their sacrifice was not in vain. Though fourteen men could not
hope to defeat an Athenian army, given the strength of their
position they could hardly fail to delay it long enough that by the
time any relief crossed over, the fighting on the west bank would
be over.

Before joining the westward tide, Brasidas
clapped several of the doomed men on their armored shoulders and
spoke words inaudible over the war cries of the three hundred or
more men getting underway behind him. He could hardly have told
them much more than, "Die well."

The order for a frontal assault on the
bridge hovered on Demosthenes' lips, but it never landed. No, there
was simply too much to lose. Any force that managed to cross that
bridge would do so over a heap of its own dead.

The lone alternative was a trail leading
north through the marshes, which led to a ford. Cavalry could reach
the ford and cross it in eight minutes, give or take, and then to
reach the battlefield would take them the same again, by which time
the fight was all but certain to be over.

Still, something had to be done.

Digging his heels into Balios' flanks
Demosthenes drove forward into the Strymon's chill, swift
waters.  When the charger sensed no end in sight to the rising
water, Demosthenes laid a hand alongside the beast's twisting neck
to calm him as the current lapped his sweating haunches. By the
time they reached the river's midpoint, Balios' back was fully
submerged and the cupped iron plates of Demosthenes' armor clinked
and flapped as foaming water swirled under and around them. The
horse was scarcely visible but for his snout, but still he obeyed
the labored, submarine kicks from his determined rider until at
last, fighting the current that labored to shove him into the sea,
Balios emerged from the broad Strymon trailing water in streams
like some steed of Nereus bursting from a white-capped wave. The
horse's forehooves planted at last on solid earth, he resumed his
gallop and must have shared his rider's sense of triumph as
together they set their sights on the backs of fleeing Spartans.
The deep crossing had been new to Balios, but this, the riding down
of a fleeing enemy, was an endeavor he understood.

Behind, encouraged by their hipparch's
success, others of the citizen cavalry were attempting the ford,
some with better luck than others. Of the eight who set out and at
whom Demosthenes gave an occasional backward glance, five made it,
the other three being washed downstream where men and beasts were
sure eventually to find some way to shore, with or without the aid
of the comrades who scrambled to offer aid.