Neiron started to say something. Satyrus glared at him. ‘This is my call, gentlemen. Archers out, Melitta, all the way back to the “bow”. Save your last shafts for — well, if we get broken.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give me that whistle,’ he said, and she handed it over.
‘Don’t get killed, stupid brother,’ she said. She kissed him. They grinned at each other.
The archers slipped away unseen, heading for the rear. Satyrus climbed the wall, took cover behind one of the filled baskets, which topped his head — just. It had been hit repeatedly, and the soft earth and gravel fill was a pincushion of bolts.
Now he could see the enemy forming. Stones slammed into the earthwork, but it held. A trickle of sand ran down the basket and onto his back. Another bolt thudded home.
Satyrus ran down the slope to his troops. ‘Officers!’ he roared.
He waited until they were all there. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘When the whistle sounds, you charge. Got it?’
Neiron looked up at the wall. ‘How will you know?’
‘I’ll be on the wall,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me there. We have to stop this one. No second place, gentlemen. No speeches. Get to the top and hold. Ready?’
They growled, and he sent them back to the phalanx. He turned and ran up the inner face of the third wall, Helios on his heels.
‘I didn’t tell you to come,’ he said.
‘You don’t tell me to get you juice every morning, either,’ Helios replied.
Bolts fell, and a shower of rocks, small rocks being launched in baskets. One pinged off his silver helmet, hard enough for him to smell blood. But he peered out.
The enemy was already in the middle ground — running silently. Men were falling — they were going too fast for safety. They were fast.
Satyrus blew the whistle. He had left it late. Just below him, his men had to get to their feet — had to get their shields on their arms. Had to start up the slope of rubble.
But the Antigonids were slowed — again — by Jubal’s cunning rubble wall and its apparently shallow slope, and they bunched up on the ramps-
— Apollodorus roared for the oarsmen to dress their line as they came up the wall-
— Abraham laid his spear sideways across a line of his fellow citizens-
— A Macedonian officer, resplendent in gold and silver, raised his shield at the top of the wall. ‘Come on!’ he roared, and men poured onto the wall top-
Satyrus stood straight — no missiles now — and set his shield on his shoulder.
The oarsmen came over the wall top formed like veterans, and their spears slammed into the forming Macedonians. The Macedonians were higher: they’d won the race to the wall.
But they were too far apart, still trying to form.
And that’s all Satyrus had time to see. He’d intended to fight the man in silver and gold, but just as the left files of the oarsmen closed around him, a crowd of Antigonid phalangites howled into his position. He took a shower of blows on his shield and he was pressed back against the men coming up behind him — and Helios went down next to him.
The whole fight seemed to crystallise, then, and time seemed to slow down. He sidestepped — right over Helios as the boy gave a great shudder — and put his spear through a man’s eye-slit, whipped the head back and rifled it forward at the next man’s helmet, the point scoring on the crown just under his horsehair crest and punching through the bronze to spill his brains inside his helmet, and he slumped down across his file-mate.
A blow caught Satyrus in the neck. It hurt, but he kept his feet. Now his oarsmen were on either side. The enemy’s rush was stemmed.
‘Push!’ Satyrus called, and the oarsmen leaned on their spears, put their shoulders into their shields and heaved. Now the tiny differences told — the leather socks inside their sandals allowed men a secure stance on gravel — scarves on necks stopped sweat, cloth pads in helmets allowed the men to see a little better.
But the Macedonians were better fed, and they had not lived in constant fear for six long months.
At the top of the wall, the fight balanced out. Men coming up behind couldn’t join the push — the fighting lines were higher than their supporting ranks in most places. But they could press in tighter, and the press became so close that men began to die in the crush, stabbed under their shields, jaws broken when someone rammed their own shield up into their mouth in the melee, or men were simply crushed off their feet.
The citizen hoplites with the old-fashioned aspis were at an advantage, now — bigger shields kept men alive in the closest press. The marines, too: Apollodorus, howling like a lion loose in a pen of sheep, killed two men. He demanded that the marines push, and they responded. Draco killed a man an arm’s length from Satyrus, and blood sprayed from his severed neck — the Antigonids around him flinched, and Draco was into them like a wolf into a flock of sheep, slaying to right and left, his spear ripping their shades from their mouths and sending them shrieking to Hades.
Draco died there, roaring into the ranks of the Antigonids alone, exposed, outpacing the rest of the marines, but he created a hole — a flaw like a tear in the fabric of the enemy formation right at the top of the wall, and it collapsed in. Satyrus knocked a man unconscious with the butt of his broken spear — no idea when it had broken — and stepped into the gap. Apollodorus downed his man and Abraham, armed only with a sword, roared at his citizen hoplites and jabbed so fast that Satyrus couldn’t follow his actions — brilliant — and his men shoved forward. And there, in those heartbeats, the attack was broken.
Satyrus looked down and realised that the man he had just smashed to the ground was the man in the gold and silver armour. He grabbed the man’s ankles and pulled. Other hands reached to help him.
He let go of the wounded officer, raised his head and saw the enemy rushing to their machines as the broken attack began to filter back. The enemy weren’t smashed — officers and phylarchs were reforming down in the rubble — but Satyrus suspected that they were done for the day.
‘Off the wall!’ he called.
Two marines were lifting Draco. Satyrus had seen him fall — known who he had to be.
Other men had Helios, and other wounded and dead men. Satyrus saw blue and white plumes — the anchor.
Neiron: his white Athenian armour covered in blood.
‘Back!’ Satyrus roared. ‘Off the wall!’
Slowly, stubbornly, the citizen hoplites and the ephebes and the oarsmen came down the back of the wall, and behind them, the enemy machines opened up.
‘All the way back!’ Satyrus called. He made himself look away — Neiron was looking at him. ‘All the way back!’ he yelled, and ran down the line. The ephebes were slow — too damned proud. He ran up to their leaders and demanded they run.
‘We have no need to run, polemarch!’ a phylarch called.
A stone from the enemy engines crushed him, showering his age-mates with blood and bone.
‘Run, damn you!’ Satyrus called.
He went up the face of the new wall — the last wall, the ‘bow’, and looked back.
The third wall was lost under a deluge of stone and shot. Some shots were going over — enough to kill more men in a few heartbeats than the whole desperate fight at the top of the wall had killed in minutes.
I had to, he told himself. Helios? Neiron? Draco? Idomeneus?
I had to. If I didn’t hold it as long as I could, Demetrios would smell a rat.
If he’s already smelled it, I have just lost those men for nothing.
The new wall had the revetments that they had spent the night building on the forward wall — heavy pylons like squat columns full of rubble and dirt, and the archers were already occupying them.
‘Well done,’ Melitta said. She had a graze across one cheek, but otherwise looked calm and clean. ‘Looked real enough to me.’