But when the fires were lit and roaring, when I had wine served out from the carts, when the woodpiles were as tall as houses – well, my popularity increased. The wine wasn’t very good, but in a cold rain on a windswept night, it was delicious. I’d been suckered on the wine, too.
Our tents weren’t much – just a wedge of linen, no front or back. They kept the water off your face, and we put four men in each – and no tents for slaves or shield-bearers. They were just wet. The footsloggers weren’t much better, and the younger pages – I’d been left with all the babies – were soaked to the skin and didn’t have the experience to stay warm or dry.
I was up all night.
The next day was the third day of hard rain, and we marched anyway – lighter and faster yet. More wheels had been built during the night – Gordias kept his wheelwrights at it, I guess. Anyway, now we had spare wheels in one cart, and the wheelwrights, instead of marching with their units, stayed with the carts, so that as soon as a tyre came loose or an axle cracked, we pulled that cart out of the line, surrounded it with Thracian auxiliaries and repaired it from spares while the rest of the column marched on.
We made excellent time that day – gravel roads, better carts, and we were already better at marching. Polystratus found a camp, and we were almost in the highlands. The rain let up for a few hours, and the tents went up on dryish ground – I put half the army out to cut pine boughs and gather last year’s ferns and any other bedding they could find, and I strung the pages across the hillsides as guards.
I had halted well before dark, having learned my lesson the night before. Besides, I was tired myself.
Gordias was so useful I began to suspect that my pater had sent him to watch me. Polystratus, too – he reminded me of things every minute, like a wife. But I was getting it done – I could see beef being butchered in the army’s central area, and the cooks collecting the beef in their kettles, and already I could see local farmers coming into the camp with produce to sell, which we’d missed the night before by making camp too late. It was all running well, and as I watched, the first fire leaped into being in the cooking area of camp, and there were lines of men carrying wood and bedding down the hillsides . . .
Down the valley ahead of us, more fires leaped into being, and they weren’t ours.
I had to assume that was Alexander and the pages and Thessalians. But at the same time, I’d be a fool not to act as if those fires were enemies’.
The headman of the Thracians was called Alcus. That means something like ‘Butthead’ in Thracian. But Alcus and Polystratus got along well enough. I sent Polystratus for him, and after a delay that seemed eternal, he rode up and I showed him the fires to the north and west.
He nodded, tugged his beard, looked at Polystratus.
‘You want us to go and look,’ he said finally.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think you are the best suited for it, you know this country. Besides . . .’
Gordias put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t explain,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell them what to do.’
Sigh. So much to learn!
‘Go any way you think best, but tell me who set those fires,’ I ordered.
Alcus pursed his lips, blew out a little puff and pulled his elaborately patterned cloak tighter around his shoulders. ‘Boys won’t be happy,’ he said.
I was freezing cold, I hadn’t slept in two days and I was scared spitless that I’d run into a Thracian army.
‘Fuck that,’ I snapped. ‘Get your arse down the valley and get me a report.’
The Thracian officer looked at me for a few heartbeats, spat carefully – not a gesture of contempt, more like contemplation – and said, ‘Yes, lord,’ in a way that might have been taken for an insult.
When he was gone, Gordias laughed. ‘Not bad, lord,’ he said. ‘A little temper goes a long way, as long as you control it and it doesn’t control you.’
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Pater had hired this man as a military tutor. I never again ran across a mercenary so interested in teaching a kid.
An hour passed in a few heartbeats. In that time, I had to decide whether or not to keep the firewood and bedding collection going, or to call all the work parties in. If it turned out to be the prince up the valley, I’d look like a fool, and as the rain had started again, my men would have a miserable night. On the other hand, if five thousand Thracians were sneaking along the hillsides towards me, I’d lose my whole command when they swept us away in one attack – I had fewer than fifty men on guard in camp, and nothing else except the pages, and most of them were unblooded teenagers.
Command is glorious. I thought some hard thoughts about my prince, I can tell you.
I decided to keep my work parties at it. I sent Gordias to keep them going as fast as he could. In fact, he withdrew a third of the men and put them under arms.
I took the pages, spread them across the hillsides in a skirmish line facing north, and started probing.
It was a standard hunting formation, and I told every boy that I didn’t want them to fight, just to report if they saw Thracians, and then we were moving. It was last light, the sun was far off in the heavy clouds, and if we’d been in the bottom of the valley it would already have been night. It was horrible weather, too – sheets of rain. Our cloaks were soaked and sat on our shoulders like blankets of ice.
But the pages were trained hard, and now it paid off. We crossed a ravine in pretty good order – I remember being proud of them – and then the lightning started, and by the light of it – the Thunderer was throwing his bolts about pretty freely – we moved across the swollen watercourse at the bottom of the ravine and up the other side.
I found a trail running right along the top of the ridge. Not unexpected – if you spend enough time in the wild you get a sense for where animals and men like to walk. Trails are hard to find in the rain, but this one had some old stones along the north side, as if there had once been a wall.
Half a dozen pages huddled in behind me. The trail was so much easier than the hillside – it was natural enough.
There was a long peal of thunder, a brilliant double strike of Zeus’s heavy spear, and I was in the midst of fifty Thracians. They were all in a muddle, gathered around something on the trail.
A bearded man in a zigzag-decorated cloak had his helmet off. He looked at me in another lightning flash.
Athena inspired me.
I know a few words of Thracian.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I bellowed over the rain. It’s something you say to slaves quite a bit.
That puzzled them.
‘What the fuck are you doing here!’ I bellowed again. And then I turned my horse and rode away, waiting for the feel of a javelin between my shoulder blades. I got my horse around, got back to the lip of the ravine, and my half-dozen pages were right on my heels – I prayed to Hermes that the Thracians hadn’t seen what a beardless lot they were. We slid down the ravine and our horses got us up the other side – it was full dark now, and in dark and rain your horse is pretty much your only hope to get anywhere.
Below me on the hillside, I heard the unmistakable sound of iron ringing on iron.
The closest page was Cleomenes, no longer quite a child. I grabbed him by the hair, got his ear close to my head – the thunder was deafening, or so I remember it – and ordered him to get back to camp and tell Gordias to stand to.
‘You know where camp is?’ I yelled.