Gordias shook his head. ‘Son, you did well enough today—’
‘I’m not your son. We have them on the ropes—’
Alcus spat. ‘Thracians attack at night, not Greeks.’
I wasn’t sure which side he was supporting, but I chose to interpret it my way. ‘Exactly. They won’t even have sentries.’
Gordias sighed. ‘Listen – my lord. We’ve done well. But we don’t know where the prince is. This is his expedition. If we fail, we’ll be crushed. And – listen to me, my lord – if we succeed, Alexander may not be too thrilled. You know what I’m speaking of.’
I considered that for a few heartbeats. ‘Point made. We attack at moonrise.’
I heard an enormous amount of bitching when we woke the troops – the camp was too small for me to be isolated from their discontent. The only trooper more unwilling than a beaten man is a victorious man – he’s proved his mettle and got some loot, and he’d like to go home and get laid.
They went on and on – they were still bitching about my sexual habits, my incompetence and my errors of judgement when I roared for silence and marched the lead of the column off into the trees.
My plan was fairly simple. I sent the Thracians and the Thessalians down the valley – they were to start an hour after us, and make noise and trouble only after we struck. All the infantry were with me. The pages were staying in camp as a rallying point, and because they were so tired that most of them didn’t even wake up for the rallying call. Thirteen-year-olds – when they collapse, they’re like puppies, and it takes a day or two to get their strength back.
We crossed the ridge more slowly than I could believe – we seemed to be held up by every downed tree, and we lost the trail over and over, despite the moonlight. Finally I pushed up to the front of the column and led it myself – and immediately lost the trail. People say ‘as slow as honey in winter’, but really they should say ‘as slow as an army moving at night’.
After a couple of hours, the moon began to go down, the light changed and I discovered that I had perhaps two hundred men with me and the rest were gone – far behind, on another trail, or hopelessly lost.
But we were there. I could see the Thracian fires.
And I didn’t really understand how few of my men were with me because, of course, it was night. Really, until you’ve tried to fight at night, it seems quite reasonable.
I had Polystratus right at my heels – Gordias at my right shoulder.
I remembered my Iliad, so I whispered that every man was to pin back the right shoulder of his chiton. I waited for what seemed like half the night for this order to be passed and obeyed, and then we were moving forward again, bare arms gleaming faintly in the last moonlight.
We found that the Thracians weren’t fools – they had camped in a web of dykes, where in better times hundreds of cattle and sheep could be penned. Some of the ground between the dykes was flooded.
Really, I had a dozen opportunities to realise that I was being an idiot and call the whole thing off.
I led them along the face of the first dyke wall – over the berm, and down into the evil surprise of smelly waste water on the far side. Disgusting. And up, now smelling like a latrine – over the next dyke, and again I saw their fires. I was off by a stade, already turned around in the berms.
But now the system of dykes worked in my favour – we were inside the outer walls, and we moved west along the north side of a long earth wall, and there was no way a sentry could see us, unless he was right atop us.
I was right at the front, moving as fast as I could.
So, of course, I began to outpace all my troops, until Polystratus and Gordias and I were alone.
We stopped at the end of a long wall – almost a stade long. We didn’t need scouts to know that we were there – we could hear drunken Thracians calling one to another.
I poked my head over the berm.
There was the sentry, an arm’s length away. He roared, I stabbed at him, missed, his counter-thrust tangled in my cloak and I got my left arm around his spear, shoved it into his armpit, lifted it and slammed my fist into his face six or seven times, and he was down. Gordias killed him.
But every Thracian awake in that corner saw me, and there was a growl from the camp.
Gordias roared for the men to cross the dyke and charge.
I watched my beautiful plan fall to rubble. But since there wasn’t any alternative, I drew my sword and ran headlong into the Thracians at the foot of the dyke.
It was dark. I think I wounded or killed two or even three men before they began to realise what was happening.
There were Macedonians coming over the dykes. Just not all that many.
I still don’t know how many were still with me at that point. A hundred? Two hundred?
They made quite a bit of noise, though.
Gordias crashed into the knot of men where I was fighting, and Polystratus – who had had the sense to bring a shield – stood at my shoulder, and most of the men we were facing were awake enough, but they had eating knives and dirks – all their gear was somewhere else. (Try to find your gear in the dark when you are drunk.)
And of course they were drunk. They were Thracians.
This is a story about Alexander, not about me – but I love to tell this story, and it touches on Alexander in the end. That fight in the dark was perfectly balanced – a hundred fully armed Macedonian infantrymen against two thousand sleepy, drunk, unarmed Thracians.
Just when they should have swamped us, Drako swept over the wall behind us with fifty horsemen, looking like fiends from the Thracian hell, and they broke and ran off. Alcus bit into another group and then both my cavalry leaders – neither one of whom made any attempt to find or communicate with me – swept off into the dark. They got the pony herd and some stolen beef and headed back to camp.
By now, the sun was coming up, somewhere far to the east, and there was a line of grey on the far ridge and eye-baffling half-light. And more and more of my missing infantrymen were coming in – most of them from the wrong direction. By sunrise I had half a thousand men and full possession of their camp.
They formed in the middle of the valley – a dejected band of beaten men, most of them without spears. They knew they had to take the camp back, and their leaders were haranguing them.
My cavalry had begun to harass them with javelins.
I lined the dyke closest to them – every minute brought me more light and two or three more men, as they scrambled up the earth walls behind me. Most of my lost infantrymen had gone too far north in the dark.
The Thracians were game. They put their best-armed men in front, formed as tight as they could and swept forward to the base of the dyke, where they stood, roaring, getting their courage up. They still outnumbered my men four to one, and we didn’t have our sarissas – they were in camp. We had javelins – a good weapon, but not as useful in stopping an angry Thracian as a pike as long as three men are tall.
I walked up and down in front of my men – manic with energy, elated by my success, terrified of the next few minutes. I was at the right end of my line when a helmetless man leaped off his horse and ran lightly up the berm.
‘Well done,’ he said, and threw his arms around me. ‘Hold their charge and we have them.’
He gleamed like a god come to earth. It was, of course, Alexander.
‘We will, my prince!’ I said – torn between relief and annoyance. But relief won. It’s like being angry at your lover – and then seeing her after an absence. Suddenly, at the sight of her, you care nothing for her infidelities – you’re too young to know whereof I speak.