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

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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Except Athens.

It had never occurred to him that he might be outplayed at his own game, but on the morning after Philip returned to Pella wounded and defeated, he discovered that Athens and Persia, his two mightiest opponents, had united; that they had added Thebes to the mix, with the best-trained infantry in Greece; and that his own allies were deserting in droves.

Later, Parmenio said that if the Athenians had put their fleet to sea and started plucking our colonies with Persian troops while the Thebans covered the passes into Greece, we’d have been wrecked by summer’s end.

But all too often – here’s the moral of my tale, lad, and no mistake – men carry the seeds of their own ruin in their own greatness. Demosthenes’ hatred of Macedon was rooted in a conservative, backward-looking idealism. He thought he was a democrat, but the men he idolised were the Athenians of Marathon. And although he was personally a very poor soldier, he – like many men – idolised what he was not – the hoplite. Demosthenes did not want to war Macedon down in an inglorious and efficient campaign of commerce-raiding and colony-snatching. That’s what Phokion or Philip or Parmenion, the great generals, would have done.

Demosthenes wanted us humbled the old way, man to man on the battlefield, our hoplites and theirs spear to spear, and may the better men teach the lesser what democracy really was.

Demosthenes was more than a hundred years out of date. But his foolish idealism saved Macedon.

At any rate, that early summer we knew that Athens had made a deal with Artaxerxes, and we were, in effect, surrounded. We waited – rebuilding forces as quickly as we could – for Athens and Thebes to invade. Sparta sat it out – but Sparta was a nonentity by then, more a fearsome name than a real power.

And around midsummer, after Olympias danced naked for Dionysus, after Philip discovered that his new bride Meda was pregnant, he gathered the main army – including all the royal companions, all the pezhetaeroi, all the mercenaries on whom he could lay hands and cash – and marched away like lightning, bound for the Chersonese.

He left Alexander, just seventeen years old, as regent. Antipater stood by him, with a regiment of cavalry and a regiment of Macedonian foot, a full taxeis – enough force to use on any rival baron or upstart noble who made trouble.

To our immense delight, as soon as the sound of Philip’s hobnailed sandals faded away into the south, the Thracians struck again – this time the Maedi, from up by Paeonia. Antipater concurred that a counter-attack was required, and the pages packed their war cloaks and gathered their horses.

We were going to war, and our prince would have his first command. Summer, in the mountains.

FOUR

The Maedi weren’t the wildest of the Thracians. They wore chitons, some of them, with their fox-skin hats – or badger or squirrel. The Maedi weren’t squeamish about what they killed – or wore.

But they did like Macedonian girls, and they’d come over the mountains in groups of fifty or five hundred – or five. Grab a girl – or pillage a twenty-mile swathe. They were seldom organised, and sometimes we’d find dead men where they had squabbled among themselves. Herodotus said that the Thracians would have conquered the world, if only they’d stopped fighting among themselves. Old Herodotus knew a thing or two.

Ever since the incident with the hetaera, Alexander had kept his distance from me – but promoted me, too, making me the right file leader of the pages.

By this time we had almost two hundred pages – perhaps we had more, but the pages weren’t the huge outfit they became later, under Alexander. A few of us were the scions of the great noble houses, but it’s important to note here that quite a few of my fellow pages were the sons of Philip’s ‘new men’. Philip trusted the new men – after all, they had no power and no place at court except what he gave them, and that meant that, as they would fall if he fell, they could be trusted. The rich men and great magnates of central Macedon were all potential rivals for the king, and their riches and power wouldn’t be changed if the king fell. It’s an old story – Persian kings and Athenian oligarchs often practise the same policy.

But that led to a double standard within the pages, too. We were all supposed to be equals under the prince, and we received stipends and much of our equipment was provided from the armouries so that we would all match and there would be no jealousy. But in truth, Alexander treated the noblemen’s sons very differently from the sons of new men. Alexander believed in breeding. That was the fault of all that Homer, I suspect, and Aristotle didn’t help, the aristocratic old fart.

At any rate, as we packed our war gear and looked to our weapons – for the first time, as a unit that would serve together – Alexander made his preferences plain. I got one troop, and Parmenio’s son Philotas got the other. Better young men, or those who’d already had some commands, like Philip the Red, were passed over.

I took Philip as one of my file leaders and Black Cleitus as the other. They were both older than I, and might have been jealous or sticky, but I had money and a fair amount of goodwill from the hunting camp and I used both. Philip’s father was a senior officer in the foot companions and I bought him a fancy Attic helmet from an Athenian vendor in the agora – first-rate work, it made him look like a hero. In fact, it was a better helmet than his father had.

Cleitus needed everything. One of Alexander’s failings was that the closer you were to him, the lesshe seemed to think about helping you – as if the very power of his proximity would cure financial woes. New friends, favourites and foreigners often got presents, while Cleitus had to look to me or Philotas (who also liked him) to get a new sword and a pair of riding spears better than the royal armouries provided.

And this was really all boyish nonsense. Our armoury provided excellent equipment. But if you know boys, you know that to carry a spear marked with the starburst of the armoury was an admission of poverty. It might be a superb spear – but boys are boys.

Worth noting, too, that boys also left the pages. It was a hard life – the younger pages did the work that slaves did – up all night in front of the prince’s door or the king’s – washing pots, feeding horses, carrying water. We were beaten when we failed – I was only beaten three times in my whole service, but it hurt my pride every time. And we never had enough sleep or enough food. Some boys couldn’t take it, and they left.

Some found other ways to leave. The handsomest of all the boys in my age group was Pausanias of Epirus, and he was as pretty as a girl. When he was sixteen, Philip took him as a lover, and when Philip marched away into the Chersonese, he took Pausanias as a royal companion – the youngest. To be fair, Pausanias was an excellent spearman – but it was his fair looks and his flute-playing ways that got him into the royal companions. He was the first to be promoted out of the pages and into Philip’s service, but hardly the last – after all, the purpose of the Basilikoi Paides was to train future soldiers and administrators.

Alexander was going to command the expedition, but Antipater was doing a great deal of the work, and I was lucky enough to be invited to attend him. I remember it as terrifying – he wasn’t the old monster he later became, but a handsome middle-aged man who’d seen a lot of war and who was Parmenio’s chief rival at court. I received orders to report to his quarters in the palace, and I went, newly shaved, scrubbed like a helmet, with more pimples than scars, as the Macedonians say, except that in my case, I actually had a few scars.

‘Well,’ Antipater said, looking down his long nose at me. His son Cassander was no friend of mine, and he had to know it. And had been passed over for command, serving as a mere file-closer. I was worried about this interview, and my hands shook.

I was in armour – I saluted.

Antipater returned the salute. ‘Well,’ he said again.

He looked at me for a long time. ‘Cage your eyes, damn you,’ he said. ‘If I want to be stared at by a child, I’ll tell you.’

I looked at the floor.

‘How much grain does a donkey eat in a day?’ he asked.

‘Eight pounds a day. More in the mountains.’ These were things I knew.

‘How much grain can you count on getting in the Thracian hills?’ he asked.

‘None, lord,’ I answered.

He scratched his beard. ‘How much for a warhorse?’

‘Twice as much, and as much again on a day he fights,’ I said.

He made a motion with his mouth – when I got to know him better, I knew it was disapproval. ‘Kill chargers with overfeeding,’ he said. ‘Don’t they teach you babies better than that?’

I looked at the floor.

‘How much grain does a man eat a day?’ he asked.

I’d run the pages’ mess for two years. I gave him amounts for boys, men, women . . .

‘You’ll do. You have a head on your shoulders and no mistake. What’s the most important thing about a campsite? Look at me, boy.’

I looked at him again. His face was grim.

‘Water,’ I said. ‘Water, high ground that drains in rain, defensibility, access to firewood, access to forage for horses, in that order.’

Antipater nodded. ‘You remember your lessons,’ he said. ‘I’m not coming on this expedition. So I’m sending Laodon with you, but you – you, young Ptolemy – are going to run the supplies. I’ll send you two of my own slaves, who’ve done this sort of thing before. They’re Greeks – they can do mathematics and they understand how to feed an army. Let me offer you this piece of advice, boy – war runs on scouting and food, not heroism and not fancy armour. Philotas is going to run the scouting and you are going to run the food.’

I nodded, but my annoyance crossed my face. Of course it did – I was seventeen.

‘You think you are a better scout and it’s the more dashing occupation?’ Antipater asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Then you’re more of a fool than I took you for, and perhaps fit for neither. Yes, it is dashing, but a well-fed army will win a fight even when surprised, whereas brilliant scouting can’t get an unwilling army to cross a stream. Listen, boy. There’s trouble at court – you know it?’ He leaned towards me, and I leaned back. Antipater was scary.

And I never, never talked about court matters with adults – not even my father. I looked at him with my carefully calculated look of bovine placidity. ‘Huh?’ I said.

‘My son says you are dull.’

I shrugged. Looked at the ground.

‘Very well,’ he dismissed me.

I was still shaking when Philotas and Cleitus found me. They put a cup of wine into me, and thus emboldened, I collected my two new slaves – Antipater actually gave them to me. Myndas was the older and handsomer, and Nichomachus was younger and thin, too tall, with a dreadful wispy beard and pimples worse than mine.

‘Zeus, they look like shit,’ Philotas said. ‘Hey – who are you two and why is Antipater giving you away?’

They both looked at the ground, shrugged and shuffled, like slaves. Nonetheless, it was obvious to me that Myndas had been a free man once. And that Nichomachus never had.

‘I gather both of you can do mathematics?’ I said.

More shuffling.

But Myndas produced an abacus, and proceeded to rattle off some remarkable maths problems, muttering under his breath. Philotas, who liked cruel games, shot problems at him faster and faster – absurd problems, obscene problems.

‘If every soldier fucks his shield-bearer twice a day,’ Philotas said in his nasty, sing-song voice, ‘and if he needs a spoonful of olive oil to get it done each time, and if there’s two thousand footsloggers in the army, how much olive oil does the army need every day?’

Myndas didn’t raise his eyes. ‘How big a spoon, master?’ he asked.

‘Whatever you use yourself,’ Philotas answered, and Cleitus guffawed.

Adolescent humour. With boys, it is the humour of the stronger vented on the weaker, and nothing is weaker than a slave.

But they were my slaves, and I’d never owned a man besides my shield-bearer, so I shook my head.

‘Very funny. Myndas, don’t mind him – he can’t help himself. Some day he’ll get laid and stop talking about it.’ I grinned at Philotas to take out the sting, and got punched – hard – in the shoulder.

But he laid off Myndas. It’s important that your slaves see you as someone who can protect them, and since I was to command a troop, I needed Philotas to see that I had limits and would protect my own.

All fun and games, in the pages.

I needed horses, and so did Cleitus. My pater’s factor was in town with orders to give me anything I wanted – my pater was a distant man, but he did his best to equip me. So I spent his money on two more chargers to support Poseidon, and I gave my two old chargers to Cleitus. I put my two slaves on mules. I went out to Polystratus’s farm and offered him silver to march with me. He was a Thracian himself.

He looked at his wife, his new daughter and his farm – a few acres of weeds and some oats. A hard existence.

‘Double that,’ he said. ‘I need some money.’

‘That’s the pay of a royal companion!’ I said.

Polystratus shrugged. ‘I don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘My wife needs me, and my daughter. I could be starting on a son.’ He looked at her and she smiled, blushed, looked at the ground.

Of course I paid him. I gave him a mina of silver down, and then followed him around while he packed his kit, gave his wife a third of the money and then marched up the hill to the headman. I stood as witness while he used his advance of pay to triple his landownership and to pay the headman’s own sons to till the new land for him while he was absent.

Polystratus was not a typical Thracian.

We rode back together, and I bought him a pair of horses. It was all Pater’s money – what did I care? I got him a good leather spola and a nice helmet with heavy cheekpieces. He had his own spears and sword, and he spent his own money on a donkey. And by evening, he had a pais – a slave boy to carry his gear and do his work.

I had to laugh. But I did so where Polystratus couldn’t see me.

That evening, I found that Myndas was sitting in the courtyard of the barracks, and Nichomachus was writing his sums on wax and saying them back. Since I was the mess-master of the pages, I knew the numbers they were doing like I knew my name, so I stopped and stood with them. They didn’t make mistakes, but in a few moments I surprised them by knowing how to multiply one hundred and ninety-eight pages by six mythemnoi of grain.

This was the first of many generational differences between Philip’s men and Alexander’s men. They hadn’t had Aristotle. They’d learned enough maths to buy a slave to do the work, but I could work Pythagoras’s solutions to geometry in my head. And so could Cassander and so could Philotas and so could Cleitus, on and on.

Myndas kept his eyes down. ‘You . . . can you use this, lord?’ he asked, rattling his abacus.

‘Yes, if I had a mind to,’ I admitted. ‘But I can do most of the numbers in my head – especially any maths to do with the pages and feeding them.’ I slapped him on the back. ‘Has the prince set the army yet? I’ve been gone all day.’

The two slaves shook their heads.

‘You two been fed?’ I asked.

Both shook their heads.

I waggled a finger at Polystratus. ‘Myndas, this is Polystratus. He was once a slave and now he’s free – serving me. He is the head of my household, which you are now in. Polystratus, these two are scribes, so don’t break them cutting firewood. They haven’t eaten since before noon. See to them, will you?’

Polystratus nodded. ‘Scribes?’ he asked. Shrugged. ‘Buy ’em food, or get the cook to shell out?’ he asked me.

‘Buy it in the market today, and get them on the barracks list tomorrow,’ I said. This was the sort of detail you had to remember with an army or with your own slaves – I’d walked off to find Polystratus and left them with no way to get food. So much to learn. Zeus, I was young!

Three days of these preparations, and I spent the last two looking at carts and donkeys and mules, watching wicker baskets filled with grain, shouting myself hoarse at merchants, bellowing with rage when I found I’d been swindled on some donkeys . . .

The fourth morning, the sun still hidden in the east. Two hundred pages, a thousand foot soldiers, a hundred of Parmenio’s Thessalian cavalry leading the way and fifty tame Thracians in our rearguard – and we were off. My baggage carts and donkeys occupied about two-thirds of the column and moved slower than beeswax in winter, and everyone found occasion to mention as much to me as we crawled out of the capital and up into the hills.

The second day out of Pella, Alexander suddenly took all the older companions – except me – and headed off north and west. Cleitus cantered up to me where I was helping get a cart repaired – a broken wheel, the hub was rotten, and I’d bought the damned thing . . .

‘The prince says it will be winter before your carts get to the Thracians!’ he said.

What could I say? I’d been swindled in every direction. I had the worst donkeys in the market and I had apparently bought every old cart in Pella.

But Alexander rode off with Laodon and all the older pages to win glory, and left me with a thousand foot soldiers and the carts. In command.

I chose a campsite on the river – with water, firewood, forage and an easy defence. And when daybreak came, it was pouring with rain and I stayed in camp. I surveyed every cart, declared half a dozen unfit and sent Polystratus to get more from the local farms. Our estates were within half a day’s ride.

Then I took Myndas aside. ‘You let me buy those carts,’ I said.

He stared at the ground.

So I punched him in the head. ‘How much did they pay you, you fuck?’ I said.

He curled into a ball and waited to be hit again. But it was obvious to me that the military contractors had paid off my slave to give me crap.

I found a dozen footsloggers who knew which end of a spokeshave was which, and put them to fixing carts. I had the rest – a thousand of them – cut wood for fires. The rain was as heavy and cold as Tartarus, and we needed those fires. Then I had them cut spruce boughs for bedding. The officers backed me. I had the feeling I was in command exactly as long as I continued to give orders that they liked, but I didn’t get hubris from a few successes because I was still so angry about the carts.

Just at nightfall, Polystratus came in with eight light carts drawn by mules. He had another twenty mules – all the stock from one of my pater’s breeding operations. So the next morning, still wet, by the light of roaring fires, I put donkeys in the shafts of every cart. I gave the useless donkeys to the farmer whose fields we’d wrecked by camping there and we were away, moving almost twice as fast as we’d moved the day before.

One of the officers who was supposed to be ‘under’ me was Gordias, a mercenary from Ephesus. I’d never met him until we marched – now he rode with me. We were crossing flat ground, just short of the foothills of Paeonia, and he rode along, making jokes and observations, and I felt pretty competent.

‘You read Xenophon, lord?’ he asked me, out of nowhere.

‘ The March to the Sea? Of course. And On Hunting, and The Cavalry Commander.’ I ran through all the titles I’d read.

‘Ever formed a box with infantry?’ he asked.

I had to laugh. ‘Gordias, when I ordered your phalangites to cut firewood yesterday, it was the first order I’ve ever given to grown men.’

He nodded. ‘You’re doing all right. Do more. Let’s drill a little – can’t hurt, and in bad weather, it’s best to keep the lads too busy and tired to think. Let’s form the box around your baggage and see how we do.’

So we did. And we didn’t do very well.

Not my fault. Nothing to do with me. But I felt their failure in my bones. They were not a regular taxeis, but a bundle of recruits with some veteran mercenaries with recent land-grants mixed in. The veterans hadn’t taken charge yet, but were still living their own way and ignoring the useless yokels they had as file partners, and the useless yokels were still too scared of the fire-eaters to ask them for help.

They’d never formed a hollow square as a group – the recruits had done it some time or other, and the veterans a hundred times, but never together. The first time, the left files folded in too fast and the front files formed the front face and walked off, leaving the rest of the box to form without them.

Halt, reform.

The second time, the rear face of the hollow square was left behind by the rest of us. And the baggage contrived to plug the road, so that reforming took an hour.

Halt, reform, lunch. Rain.

After lunch, we got the hollow square formed – pretty much by having every officer mount up, ride around and push groups of men, and sometimes individuals, into the spot where they had to go. For almost an hour, we marched across northern Macedon in a hollow square, with our baggage protected, and then the whole thing started to shred like a reed roof in a high wind – the left face of the square ran into a marsh and the right face just kept going.

I couldn’t believe how fast we fell apart.

And then I realised that the sun was dipping and I hadn’t chosen a camp.

Zeus! So much to remember. Luckily, Polystratus had taken a dozen Thracians and gone off on his own and found a campsite.

We got our tents up before last light, and fires lit, with four hundred men up on the hillsides gathering wood and another two hundred standing to, ready to cover them. The men were wet and tired and angry, and I heard a lot about myself I didn’t want to hear. Two days of cold rain would make the Myrmidons mutinous.

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.

He pointed the right way.

I let him go.

I rode off down the hillside, trusting to Poseidon to get me to the fighting. He picked his way, and I had to take deep breaths and wait. Patience has never been my strongest virtue. It seemed to take an hour to go half a stade, despite the fact that we were going downthe hillside and that it was almost clear.

After some minutes, I was suddenly flat on my back – cold water running down my breastplate and under my back. I had thought I was wet – now I was in a stream or a rivulet and I was colder and wetter and everything hurt.

We’d gone over a log and Poseidon had missed the fact that there was a ravine on the other side of the log. By the will of Ares, he didn’t break a leg, but it took me another cold, wet, dark eternity to find him and get him on his feet – eyes rolling in the lightning flashes, utterly panicked.