Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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I looked into those remarkable blue eyes. ‘You mean, I can choose between sending you away, and having the best sex of my life?’ I sighed. ‘I don’t know. I need time to think,’ I said, while reaching my warm hands under her gown.

‘Humour,’ she said, through my kisses, ‘is your outstanding virtue.’

‘I thought it was my large penis,’ I said.

She laughed into my mouth. We were warm.

We spent the winter training north of Pella. This was new. As I’ve said, Philip always sent the army home for the winter. Alexander did not. He kept the entire force in the field – funded by the League of Corinth, at a drachma per soldier per day.

We climbed mountains in the snow.

We practised seizing ridges and passes. In the snow.

We charged lines of straw dummies with our lances. On horseback. In the snow.

We practised setting camp and setting fires, digging in, collecting forage – in the snow.

And we drilled.

Ares, it was endless.

Look, I’m good at drill. I love drill. I love the sort of ritual-team-dance aspect to drill – the stamp of a thousand perfectly timed feet sends a thrill down my spine. But that winter was absurd. We drilled and drilled and drilled, and I’m not sure that there’s any army in history that spent as much time practising the Spartan Counter-March as we did. Every day, five or six times a day – with wheeling, sprinting, breaking and reforming, marching to the left, right and rear by files, half-files and double files. On and on.

Every damn day.

The troopers cursed him. The aristocrats were good officers at first, but after two months – remember, we’d been at it all summer, too – people just wanted a cup of wine and a fuck.

I had to send Thaïs away, because men were starting to hate me for having her. Which was sad, because she loved it, and she kept people amused – she’d show up in the phalanx in armour and already know the drill, she’d ride a horse shooting a bow, she’d go off with the scouts until they caught her – she could easily pass for a man, but something often gave her away, too.

She had found a hobby. I didn’t know what it was and I knew I wasn’t allowed to ask, but she suddenly wrote a great many letters – on and on, really. Sometimes a dozen a day. And she bought a pair of Thracian slaves – and sent one home. Into the mountains. I didn’t understand that at all.

She smiled at me and dared me to ask.

At any rate, after a month I didn’t have to pay attention any more, because I had to send her to my estates. After that, the rest of the winter was a blur of marching and climbing and freezing cold – you climb a mountain in two feet of snow wearing open-toed boots. Go ahead. The pezhetaeroi were in sandals. I had a horse, most of the time – a sort of living leg-warmer.

I knew what we were doing. We were going to blow the Thracians right out of their northern kingdom and carve a road to the Danube – to buy Antipater a defensible border while we were away conquering Asia. It was a good plan, in a general, strategic way. But it was an obvious plan, and every man, woman and child on both sides of the nebulous border between Macedon and the wild Thracians knew we were coming as soon as the passes were free of snow.

Alexander did have one shaved knucklebone, though. He sent our fleet – twenty triremes and some supply ships – from Amphilopolis, around through the Dardanelles and into the Euxine Sea. In part it was exploration – the Macedonian fleet had never attempted to enter the Euxine. In part it was sheer daring – we knew nothing of the mouth of the Danube, although we found some Amphilopolans who had traded there. But it was a brilliant outflanking move. If it worked. The ships would leave well before the army marched. If the army marched.

One night, I lay in some straw between Cleitus and the king. We were passing a gourd full of wine. Outside, the wind howled. Alectus had just informed the king that we’d lost a little over a hundred men to exposure and the arrows of the Lord of Contagion that month.

I was keeping the Military Journal, by then – in effect, I coordinated everyone’s military reporting, and that had become my major job. Antipater did it for Philip, and he taught me – but I added to the job. I went around to all the regiments and appointed a record-keeping officer – sometimes with the help of the commander, and sometimes in spite of him. Perdiccas called my officers the ‘king’s spies’. The thing was, the king needed to know the truth. Bluster didn’t cut it when you needed a return of effective soldiers, or when we needed to know how many horses and how many riders were available for a particular mission, or which horses needed new tack before the army could march.

And at the same time, the king was paying – with League funds – for a gradual re-armouring of the whole Macedonian army. And that cost money, but it also required endless lists, inventories, record-keeping, tracking inventory . . .

It was all glory and arete, let me tell you.

At any rate, that’s why I was lying wrapped in my cloak in a pile of straw in a freezing-cold barn in northern Macedon, snuggled between the commander of the king’s bodyguard and the king himself, listening to Alectus tell us his figures on sick and injured, with every word sending plumes of mist rising from his mouth. It was cold.

Alexander dismissed him with a cup of hot wine and rolled over. ‘As soon as the passes are clear,’ he said dreamily.

‘Why don’t we go now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, as soon as I can put together a logistics head of food and fodder.’

Alexander laughed. ‘Because that trick will only work once, and I want to save it for a tougher opponent.’

Sometimes, he was scary.

But later, when Alectus was obviously still awake, I turned towards him.

‘What did you learn at Delphi?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘I learned that I will live a few years yet, and the king is going to be a god.’ He laughed again.

The passes cleared. Before they cleared, I had all the grain in north-west Macedon gathered in fifty new-built stone granaries that cost a fortune to build and required men to keep roaring fires going all day and all night to keep the ground soft and let the mortar harden without freezing.

All in a day’s work.

We marched from Amphilopolis, headed north, and we moved fast. We had preset camps with supplies waiting at every halt. We flew.

At Neopolis we joined up with our baggage train, and I was reunited with Thaïs, who was fresh and pink-cheeked and looked like a maiden. Most of the army’s wives and sweethearts – and prostitutes and sex toys – came to Neopolis and marched with us. We crossed the Nestus and marched all the way to Philipopolis. The Thracians were conspicuous by their absence.

Thaïs shared my tent and my cloak. Her field household was now reduced to three – her steward, Anonius, from Italy, a Thracian, Strako and a Libyan woman, Bella, a big, attractive black woman who drew the stares of half the army wherever she went. However, she seemed capable of taking care of herself.

The Thracian came and went, foraging and visiting. I warned Thaïs that he would desert, and she laughed.

‘Give me a little credit,’ she said. ‘I have a chain on him.’

The worm of jealousy gnawed at me. It must have showed.

She laughed in my face. ‘I don’t fuck slaves,’ she said, and walked out of my tent.

I hope I don’t make her sound like a harridan. She was not. But we had a spat every day – that’s how we were. She wanted to know every aspect of my business, and I wanted her to respect my privacy, and I didn’t see any need for her to know the inner workings of the Military Journal or the Hetaeroi.

Plenty of things to fight about. Making up was good, too.

Strako kept with us. That impressed me. After two weeks in enemy country, I rolled over, pinned her with a leg and said, ‘OK, I have to know. Why’s he loyal?’

She wasn’t angry – I never knew, with her. She laughed. ‘Well – since you’re keeping me so verywarm . . .’ She kissed my nose. ‘I have his wife, child and brother at home. At your home. If he runs, they all die.’

Um. So soft. So beautiful. So funny, so warm.

So hard.

She also received as many letters as the king. I know that to be true, because I sometimes functioned as the Military Secretary, in those days. I certainly saw most of the king’s correspondence, and I saw all the messengers that came in from Pella – one a day, and sometimes two. She had at least two a day. Some were slaves, some were free, and once, her messenger was a Priest of Apollo.

Two more days, and we were at the Shipka Pass. And the wild Thracians were there – in huge numbers. They had thousands of warriors and more armed slaves, and they had a wagon lager of four wheeled carts lining the top of the pass, where it was about two stades wide.

The Prodromoi brought us word.

We rode forward and looked.

‘Impregnable,’ Hephaestion said. From his years of military experience.

But he was right. It was impregnable. Several of Philip’s campaigns had ended right here.

We made camp.

Just as the light was failing – it was late spring, and the days were getting long – Strako came into my tent. I hadn’t seen him in a day. He frowned at me and motioned at Thaïs.

Thaïs was under some cloaks, trying to get warm. She got up, and Strako began to talk while she put on boots.

‘He says the wagons aren’t for defence,’ Thaïs said.

‘How do you know about the wagons?’ I asked.

‘Strako was just up there. In their camp. Listen, love. Tell the king they plan to roll the wagons on you when you attack. And then charge you. They are hoping you’ll bring up artillery to shell the wagons. It is a ruse within a ruse.’ Thaïs listened to the man.

‘You speak Thracian?’ I asked.

‘It was a long winter,’ Thaïs insisted.

I heard the report to the end. And looked at my lover.

‘I can’t expect to be taken to Asia for my good looks,’ she said. ‘I have friends in every city, and the Pythia made me more friends. But there are other tricks – that anyone in politics knows. That anyone who has read Thucydides knows.’

I had heard of Thucydides, but I hadn’t read him. I made a mental note to rectify this.

‘We can trust this report?’ I asked.

‘Or I’m a complete fool,’ she said.

I took it to the king.

Cleitus woke me in the dark. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’re going to attack. Get up.’

I was up like a shot. I knew Alexander – I knew we were going to attack.

I went for Polystratus and found Bella curled in his cloak. He was mightily embarrassed to be awakened.

‘It’s not what you think, lord,’ he said. ‘We were cold.’

I nodded. What do you say?

We armed each other in the light of a single lamp. It was cold.

Alexander was waiting for us by a huge fire near his pavilion.

‘We’ve drilled all winter at opening gaps in the ranks,’ he said. ‘We’ll win this one on simple discipline. It will be a good lesson for the pezhetaeroi. Tell them to open ranks to let the wagons through – if they are too packed together, tell them to lie flat with their shields over them and let the wagons run over them.’ He shrugged. ‘Once they drop the wagons on us, it’s just an infantry fight.’

He turned to Philip Longsword. ‘Straight up the right-side ridge until you are well above the pass – then down into their flank.’ He turned to Cleitus. ‘Take the mercenary archers and march to the left of the hypaspitoi – get into the rocks – those white rocks there – and start shooting. You’ll have them at open shields. Then it’ll all be over but the marching.’

It wasn’t a complex plan. It was, in fact, an obvious plan.

The thing is, most armies couldn’t have done it. It required that the hypaspitoi climb a mountain in full armour, with spears, and then traverse a long ridge and then come down in the enemy rear, while archers climbed the same ridge, took cover and lofted arrows two hundred paces into the Thracians. While the rest of us went right up the path into the carts and didn’t just die.

But we knew each other. Alexander dismounted a hundred Hetaeroi, and I led them as the right anchor of the phalanx, which was going straight up the throat of the pass. When we assembled in the first light of dawn, the hypaspitoi were already gone, the last files of archers were just leaving camp and the Thracians were awake, alert and lining their rampart of wagons.

Alexander walked down the line of the front rank. We were only a thousand paces from the top of the pass.

He stopped and shook my hand. Then embraced me.

He went along the front rank and he hugged, embraced, shook hands – a hundred times or more.

While the Thracians jeered, and the hypaspitoi climbed.

And then, when he was satisfied that the army loved him, he waved and ran off to the right. He was going with the hypaspitoi. In person, this time. Not like on Mount Ossa.

I buckled my chinstrap and led my friends up the pass.

The thing about plans is that they are rarely like the eventuality. The idea that we could drop files and half-files to the rear – as a phalanx always did when faced with, say, a small stand of trees in the middle of a plain – was excellent. But the fact was that when the Thracians started rolling the carts on us, they came at us like a ball flung by a child – all angles, no predictable path.

I’d say we were at three hundred paces when they released the carts.

As I said, my Hetaeroi were on the right of the line. We were crammed into the last ‘open’ ground in the pass, and our end files were virtually crushed against the low cliff that gradually sloped in from our right, narrowing the pass and packing us tighter and tighter.

At five hundred paces, I had six files – almost half my strength – doubled in behind the left files to make space, and there was no place for us to climb above the pass, or I’d have gone.

My point is, we weren’t eight deep, we were sixteen deep, and all along the front, phylarchs and taxitoi doubled files to cut their frontage and keep room to manoeuvre.

And then the carts came.

There was no way we could drop files back, because the carts had no predictable path. They bounced, slammed into each other, stopped, exploded against rocks – or hurtled at us like fists from Olympus.

It was a brilliant stratagem.

I’d say we had five carts on our frontage. The fact that the pass was ‘v’-shaped – an inverted ‘v’ like a lambda – with the point at the top of the pass, the narrowest part, and the floor of the pass vaguely rounded out by a small watercourse, meant that all the carts tended to run towards the centre.

Of the five rolled at us, two collided and stopped on the slope above us, and two deviated off towards the pezhetaeroi and vanished.

And one came right at us.

‘Lie down!’ I roared. It seemed like an insane thing to do, with a ton of cart roaring and bouncing down at us, but Aristotle and Alexander agreed that the wheels should pass over us so fast we’d be uninjured. I got down and put my aspis, sloped slightly, over my head and upper back.

The front right wheel hit my aspis and went over it, then right over my butt and missed my right leg. The rear wheel kicked my aspis hard enough to slam it into my head – my helmeted head – and then ran off down the slope and over the file behind me.

I got to my feet.

Aristotle, damn him, was completely correct. Behind me, Nearchus got to his feet, and then Cleomenes and then Pyrrhus.

The cart that hit us stopped in the seventh file, because the shields slowed it so much. Two files had to roll it off young Calchus. But he sprang to his feet.

In the whole army, men were getting to their feet.

Which was good, because the Thracians were charging.

‘Close up!’ I roared.

I wanted my men at the closest order – the synapsis, where the shields overlapped. I might as well mention that all the Hetaeroi in the assault had aspides, albeit the smaller, rimless type Iphakrates invented.

The way to achieve that close order was to move the half-files forward into the gaps between files. But what I wanted to do was to get the full files – my right files, my very best men – to move forward through the left files – remember, the right files were all pushed to the rear by the narrowing of the pass. Right?

I could see Cleitus. He could see me. And this is where the trust part – and knowing each other like brothers – came into it.

I caught his eye and yelled, ‘Files forward! Synapsis!’ Took a breath. ‘Not half-files – the rear files! Now!’

Cleitus had it from the first syllable. He was bellowing at his phylarchs, and my front phylarchs were pushing to the right and left to make room, and the Thracians were one hundred and fifty paces away and coming down the slope at a dead run.

Changing formation in the face of the enemy is the very worst thing you can do. It requires rock-solid confidence and enormous quantities of practice. Great officers and file leaders. And no errors, because at this point, two men tripping over each other could spell doom.

But we were Macedonians.

The Thracians were about thirty paces away when the rear files locked their shields to the front-file phylarchs.

I was on the left, by choice – I wanted to be in contact with the centre. So my full-sized aspis – call me old-fashioned – locked up with Laodon, who was commanding his pezhetaeroi from the right file, which was more the norm.

‘Spears – DOWN!’ I ordered, and Laodon roared the same words, almost at the same moment, and our front ranks put their spears at the ready and the rear ranks pushed forward, locking up so that every man had his shield pushed into the back of the man ahead of him, his spear either point forward, overhand, ready to kill, or, in the rear ranks, erect, the point at the sky, safe until needed. The pezhetaeroi had sarissas, eighteen feet long, but we Hetaeroi had our cavalry spears, just eleven feet long.

No matter.

The Thracians hit us.

Ares, they were brave.

The front men, those who had run the fastest to reach us, were the bravest of the brave, men who sought to make a reputation for ferocity among Thracians. They were coming down a steep slope and they were aboveus, and several men leaped into the air and fellinto our ranks, seeking to break our wall of shields and spears, shatter our formations and make room for their friends to reap us like summer wheat.

A man leaped in front of me.

My spear took him in the air and slammed him to earth, and then it was a blur of bodies and edges and threats and parries. The sun was just rising, and cast a red light over everything, and the noise was everywhere, the full-throated roar of the brazen lungs of Areas, and men died, fell wounded, collapsed to earth all around me.

The pressure of the shield at my back was gone, and I stumbled back – downhill – looking for that reassuring pressure, and it wasn’t there.

My spear broke. I remember that, because it was disorienting suddenly to have no pressure behind me and no spear. I raised my shield to cover my head and took a full step back, reaching with my back foot.

Nearchus was down. I found his shield with my foot.

Got my hand on my sword.

Drew.

The Keltoi long sword doesn’t come free like the xiphos. A xiphos glides into your hand like a friendly snake, all under the comfortable cover of your shield, as fast as thought and just as safe, but the long sword has to be drawn all the way free of a scabbard almost twice as long. You have to roll your shoulders and raise the rim of the aspis. There’s a reason most men don’t carry them.

Lucky, or alert to my difficulties, a tribesman slammed into the face of my shield with his metal shield boss while I drew, and down I went, losing my weapon, cutting my hand on my own blade. I fell back down the slope, and for the second time that day my helmet absorbed a major impact – this time, when my head hit a rock.

But Tyche was with me, and my back came up against Nearchus’s aspis, so that I got my butt under me and then one foot before the Thracian could finish me, and I slammed my aspis into him two-handed, one hand in the porpax and the other holding the rim. He stumbled back.

I looked down, but couldn’t see my Keltoi sword or anything else.

He rifled his spear at me and I knocked it down.

Another thrown spear appeared and I knocked that down, too.

I backed again, still looking for a file partner, and now I was starting to panic – no weapon, and nobody behind me. Had the Hetaeroi really been broken? My helmet cut off my peripheral vision and my hearing, so I really didn’t know where the fight was.

I stepped back again. In my head, that meant I’d gone back four steps, and that was not good.But my booted heel was on something springy, and that meant my sword.

I knelt, put my right hand down and grabbed the hilt.

A flurry of blows hit the face of my shield. But a full-sized aspis is like a wall for a kneeling man.

A big red-haired man tried to push his spear over the top of the aspis, thrusting downinto my neck, but I tilted my aspis and pushed to my feet, lifting his spear away and thrusting the long blade under my tabled shield, passing my right foot past my left to ram the thrust home, and he was dead.

I took a shattering blow to the head.

That’s what happens when you push forward too hard, or when men leave you. I never saw the blow, and it hit me hard enough to break my nose inside my helmet and leave me barely conscious, and another blow, from a spear, cut across the top of my bicep and by the will of Athena went in the front of my thorax instead of under my sword arm – so I got a nasty and very graphic cut across my pectoral muscle instead of a death wound under my arm.

Really, it should have been the end of me, and I stumbled.

A shield was pressed into my back. It steadied me – both physically and in spirit. Someone was there. It meant everything.

A shield slapped against the lower-left rim of my aspis. Someone was in the rank with me.

My eyes wouldn’t focus and I took a scraping blow along my helmet, and Cleomenes called, ‘Step back.’

It occurred to me that I’d been hearing that for a long time.

I nodded, rotated on my hips so that my body was inclined away from my opponent and shot my sword forward to cover my step. Cleomenes stepped up on my left, and I felt his shield wrap around my left as he muscled into place and his spear shot forward. And I was in the second rank, with blood running out from under my helmet and into my mouth. There was a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

On the other hand, I was alive.

I knelt and breathed. Spat blood.

Took a drink from my canteen in the third rank. Someone had pushed past me.

I found that I was kneeling by Nearchus. He was breathing, and had a lot of blood on hisface, so I poured wine and water over his face and he spluttered. I ran my hand over his arm – his sword arm looked bad, with a long shallow cut – and he coughed again and gave a short scream just as I found where his arm was broken.

I got my chlamys out from under my aspis and wrapped his arm as tightly as I dared while he was out of it, and then the whole phalanx was moving. I was better – taking care of someone else is the sovereign remedy for pain – and I got my feet under me and pushed forward.

‘Let me through – front rank!’ I called. I’d fallen all the way back to the sixth or seventh rank. I pushed forward, replacing men who hadn’t fought yet and were – understandably – annoyed.

Some of Laodon’s men were in our ranks. I pushed past two pezhetaeroi to get to Cleomenes, who knocked a Thracian off his feet with a pretty move. I put my sword in the man’s throat to save Cleomenes the step, but that man must have been the last Thracian in the ‘zone’, the area where men fight. The rest were drawn up a few paces above us on the slope, throwing spears. When men settle down to throwing spears, the hard fighting is over.

We had held them.

‘Exchange!’ I croaked at Cleomenes. He shouted a war cry at the Thracians, and then peeked back at me, grinned and nodded, and we did the same dance we’d done earlier, in reverse – he pivoted back, I stepped up, and I was in his place.

Laodon was nowhere to be seen, and Pyrrhus was in the rank next to me, where there should have been a pezhetaeroi. In fact, I could see my own men for four or five files. This sort of thing happens in a hard fight, and with no disrespect to the phalangites of the pezhetaeroi, they weren’t trained men like the graduates of the royal pages. And my boys were. And they were eager – for a lot of the ‘new’ Hetaeroi, this was their first battle – certainly the first big fight on foot, where the heroes walked the earth.

Despite my pain and my wounds, I could feel their eagerness.

We were supposed to hold the Thracians here, so that the hypaspitoi could get around their flanks. If I attacked the Thracians, I’d be pushing them back up the slope, and making Alexander’s job harder.

Just then, while I thought about this and while Cleomenes, behind me, pushed against me aggressively and shouted, ‘Forward, take us forward’, and all the Hetaeroi started to take up the cry . . .

The archers got into position, and the shafts began to fall. I couldn’t even see the archers – but they had got past the flank of the Thracians, and their arrows fell on to unshielded backs. The Thracians began to look over their shoulders.

‘Take us forward!’ roared the whole right end of the battle line. It sounded to me as if the left end was still engaged, but I could see nothing over there.

There was no one to ask, either.

Cleitus told me later that I was grinning like a maniac. That’s not what I remember, but perhaps! At any rate, I stood straight and pointed my sword.

‘Silence!’ I roared.

The cries stopped as if cut off with a knife.

‘Forward!’ I called, and I took a step forward, and we fell up that hill like an avalanche. The Thracians stood, and we crashed into them, shield to shield, packed like sardines in a barrel, and then we were pushing – the rear-rank men pushing with their legs, the front-rankers trying to keep a shoulder firmly inside the aspis, so that the pressure from the rear ranks didn’t flatten them out and crush them – I’d heard of the othismos but I’d never been in it. We pushed, and they tried to stand, but we practised this and they did not, and in seconds we were pressing them back, and then they were stumbling and the pushing was over – we were cutting and thrusting with spear and sword, and they were tripping, falling, collapsing – and running. They didn’t have the cohesion to hold us. Dozens must have died there – men in my rear ranks killed the ones who tripped and fell with their saurouters.

I got an arrow in my aspis – the long iron head came right through the face and scratched my hand. One of our own.

I lowered my aspis slightly, and there was no one there.

I looked left, and the centre of our line was below me on the slope, fifty paces behind. Our left flank was even farther back.

And straight ahead, I saw Alexander leap down from the rocks – now lower and closer – into the rear of the fleeing Thracians, with Alectus and Philip Longsword on either side.

We’d won. Right there. So my new duty was to save as many of our infantry as possible. It looked to me as if the pezhetaeroi on our left were getting the worst of it.

In a flash, I had an idea, even as the hypaspitoi came pouring down from the top of the pass into the rear of the fleeing Thracians.

I pushed back into the middle ranks.

‘Forward! Phalanx forward! Half-files – halt and stand fast!’ I yelled.

That sent the pezhetaeroi and the Hetaeroi forward on the right – but men from the fifth to the eighth rank stood fast. My men were facing no resistance – they didn’t need deep files behind them to help ‘hold’ the enemy.

Then training told – long training in the snow. The half-file leaders – noble and commoner – stood fast, and as the front ranks peeled away, I had about sixty files of four men each left behind with enough space . . .

‘Half-phalanx will form from the right files to the left!’ I called. This was like rolling a carpet – the rightmost files – four files, to be exact – marched forward and wheeled smartly to the left, passing across the front of the new-formed half-phalanx, and every set of four files then wheeled up and joined the column as they passed, until my whole body was marching across the rear of the front files, into the gap opened by our rapid advance, and into the rear of the Thracians facing the centre and right of our army.

I do not claim that this was a brilliant manoeuvre. I merely claim that there was no other army on earth that could have done it.

Once we were clear of our own front files, we formed front – that is, the column formed a new phalanx at right angles to the old phalanx. The Thracians collapsed. It was almost instant, the moment we were formed, as if every Thracian saw the danger at the same moment – and perhaps they did, but an army has a remarkable level of non-verbal communication. They can ‘feel’ all together. It’s like the pressure of your buddy’s shield in your back – when it is gone, you ‘feel’ wrong.

We slaughtered them as they ran by us – packed against the far cliff, pushing with all their might to escape, even shedding their armour to climb the cliffs. More than a thousand of them died – some men say two thousand, a fifth of the fighting strength of their whole nation slaughtered in a few minutes.

Unfortunately, we could not pursue them on horseback. The downslope of the pass on the far side was too steep, had too many switchbacks, and even in panicked flight, Thracians were a redoubtable foe. Men threw spears, or stood at the bend in the road over the pass to cut at our feet. Had the ground been a little flatter, we might have ended the Thracians as a people for ever. As it was, they died and died, so that the streams that ran down both faces of the pass ran red.

I was carried along with the pursuit for a long way – maybe ten stades, all the way down the pass on the far side to a deep stream with steep banks where one of their princes made a stand with several hundred men in good armour. I could see him – he had a silk standard, some sort of windsock such as the Sarmatians use, and his helmet was covered in gold and jewels. They stood atop the bank on the far side of that icy stream, and we lost as many men trying to push them off the bank as we lost in the whole battle. Three times we crossed the stream, and three times we were thrown back.