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

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 62 страниц)

Down again, now with me walking in front of him, holding the reins. There hadn’t been fighting in . . . well, I’d lost track of time, and was worried I’d been unconscious when I was thrown.

So much to worry about!

Down and down. And then . . .

The first Thracian I found was a horn-blower – he had the horn at his lips, the lightning flashed and I put my spear through him. The next flash showed scarlet leaking past his lips – he coughed. And died.

I crouched. I couldn’t hear a thing, and I couldn’t see anything, either. But that man I’d killed – I was queasy with it, but too busy to throw up – he’d been ready to blow a horn call. An attack?

They must be close around me.

So I froze, moved carefully to a big tree, stood with my hand over Poseidon’s mouth.

A long time passed. As the lightning played around us, I began to see them. I counted five men around me. But there had to be more – there may have been a thousand in the lightning-lit forest, with huge old trees that could hide an elephant.

Time in a crisis passes in its own way. You think of the most incongruous things. I remember thinking of kissing my farm girl at the Gardens of Midas. Her lips had a certain firmness that defined good kissing to me then – and now, for that matter. And I remember thinking that Philotas owed me a fair amount of money from knucklebones and would be delighted if I died here.

I also thought how many things I’d done wrong, including . . . well, everything. I was alone on the hillside with a bunch of Thracians and not in my camp with my army, for example.

I can’t even guess how long we were all there, and then the lightning storm began to pass over the ridge and the sound and intensity seemed to go with it. I think – it seems to me, without hubris – that we were in the very presence of the gods, because the air around me seemed charged with portent, and the noise and light were mind-numbing. When they went away, it was merely dark and cold – and I hadn’t really been cold for all the time the lightning played.

And suddenly it was dark.

I curled up against Poseidon. He was warm. Actually, he was cold, but he kept me warm.

I remained as still as I could.

Time passed.

Then I heard them. Two men were talking. They were very close indeed – maybe two or three big trees away, except that in the darkness, such things can be deceptive.

I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t understand even a single word.

Mutter mutter mutter.

Mutter.

Mutter mutter.

Growl. Mutter.

And then that stopped, too.

My hand was clamped so hard over Poseidon’s head that my wrist hurt.

I was ashamed of myself, afraid and I needed to piss.

Time marched on, one heavy heartbeat at a time.

I convinced myself that I had to move.

Of all the concerns on my shoulders, it was having to piss that made me move. Let that be a lesson to you. I looked and looked at where I’d heard the voices, and then I had the discipline to turn a circle.

And then the rain came. I’d thought it was raining before, but this was like a wall of water.

A wall of noise, too.

I took Poseidon by the halter and I moved. We stepped on branches and we slipped in mud, but I kept going. And by luck, or the will of the gods, in a few moments I caught a glimpse of my own fires – two stades away across open ground. I was right at the edge of the trees on the hillside.

I mounted before I thought it out, and Poseidon was away – stumbling, because although I didn’t know it until morning, he had a strain from the cold and rain and the fall. He wasn’t fast. And no sooner were we moving than a javelin struck me square in the back.

That’s why rich kids like me wore bronze. But it scared me and knocked the wind out of me. And when I reined in for the sentry line, I was shaking like a leaf.

One of the footsloggers materialised under Poseidon’s chest, his spear at my throat. But before he could challenge me, he knew me.

‘Lord!’ he said. ‘We thought you were lost!’

I rode into camp. Half the men were standing to in wet clumps with their sarissas in their hands. The rest were huddled around fires – enormous fires. The tents had mostly blown down.

War is so glorious.

My tent was one of those down. Polystratus took Poseidon, made sounds indicating that I was a fool and he was a mother hen, and he took me to histent, which had a front and back wall of woven branches and a stool. He got my cuirass off, towelled me dry and told me that there were Thracians down the valley.

Nichomachus handed me a cup of wine. I drank it.

‘I know!’ I said, trying not to sound whiney. Gordias pushed into the tent.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Get lost?’

I drank more wine. ‘I got caught on the hillside with the Thracians,’ I said. ‘Did Cleomenes get to you?’

Gordias shook his head. ‘Which one is he? One of the pages? No – I had no word. And not all the troopers here are mine – I had some trouble giving orders.’

That’s the moment I remember best of the whole evening. I’d sort of collapsed on arriving in camp – acted like a cold, wet kid rescued by his servant. Polystratus was towelling my hair when I discovered that my message hadn’t got to camp.

‘Gordias, there’s Thracians within a stade of camp. An ambush on the road north, more coming across the ridge. Where are the pages?’

Gordias shook his head. ‘There’s twenty of the youngest here in camp. I thought the rest were with you?’

‘Ares’ prick,’ I swore. It was my father’s favourite oath. ‘Put my cuirass back on. Polystratus, get us both horses.’

Polystratus didn’t squawk. I put my sodden wool chiton back on – noticing that the dye had run and stained my hips. Gordias got my cuirass closed on me again – say what you will, the bronze is a good windbreak. Mounted on Medea, with Polystratus by me, I went back out into the remnants of the storm. Dawn wasn’t far away, and there was a bit of light, and if you’ve done this sort of thing, you know that the difference between a bit of light and no light is all the difference in the world. I got us up the ridge, found my game trail and there were a dozen of my pages, shivering like young beeches in a high wind – but all clutching a spear close to them, behind trees.

‘Good lads,’ I said – an old man of seventeen to young men of fourteen. ‘Back to camp now.’

‘They are right there,’ Philip Long-nose said. ‘Right across the ravine!’ He pointed, and an arrow flew.

‘Been there all night,’ said another boy.

Polystratus whistled.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Get back now – hot wine in camp.’

The pages started to slip backwards. This was the sort of thing we practised in hunting – observe the quarry and then slip away.

But one of the youngsters made a mistake, or maybe the Thracians were coming anyway. And suddenly they were scrambling across the ravine – fifty or a hundred, how could we know?

I had no idea how many pages I had under my hand.

‘Run!’ I ordered. ‘Camp!’

They ran.

Like a fool, I waited, shepherding them down the trail, and Medea got a spear in the side as a result. She tossed me and ran a few steps and died.

I’d been thrown twice in a night and I wasn’t too happy. But I rolled to my feet in time to have Polystratus grab my arms, and we were off down the trail with a tumble of arrows and javelins behind us.

They chased us right up to camp. We had no walls or ditches, and there was a dark tide of Thracians flowing across the barley fields. Their lead elements were a spear-cast behind Polystratus’s horse’s rump.

And as soon as the Thracians in the valley saw the Thracians on the ridge moving, they came, too.

First light – a general rush.

The pages routed, running past the raw infantry.

It should have been a bloody shambles, but for men like Gordias. The infantry let the pages through and then started to form the hollow square. It was patchy, but the Thracians were in dribs and drabs, not a solid rush – I know that now. At the time it looked like a wall of them, but in fact, there were never more than fifteen men coming at us at a time.

Polystratus got through the phalanx and dropped me in the army’s central square. Myndas, of all people – my least favourite slave – appeared with my third-string charger and a cup of wine and a towel. I dried my face, drank the wine and used his back to get mounted – I had hurt my hips falling.

The pages had no trumpeter and no hyperetes – both were with Alexander. Since the infantry seemed well in hand, I rode around gathering pages – three or four at a time – and leading them into the centre of the square. They were exhausted and most were terrified. But they were royal pages, and that meant they knew their duty. I got about a hundred of them together, formed them in a deep rhomboid and led them to the unthreatened corner of the square. Halted while the file leaders opened the corner for us.

‘We’re about to ride down the barbarians who kept us up all night!’ I called. ‘Stay together and stay on me, or I’ll beat you bloody!’

My first battlefield speech.

Met by silence.

We walked our horses out of the square and wheeled north. Gordias was on to me in a heartbeat – he began to wheel the ‘back’ faces of the square – the faces with no opponents – out on to the plain, unfolding the square like a ‘W’.

The Thracians hadn’t come for a field fight, and as soon as they saw us approaching them it was over, and they started to fade into the trees – first a few, and then the whole of their front.

Over on the west side of the valley was a squadron of horse – or, rather, some tribal lords on ponies. I aimed at them. They’d have a hard time riding into the trees, and I was going to get a fight. I was mad.

The Thracians didn’t want that kind of fight, and they turned their horses and rode for it, a few of them shooting over their horses’ rumps with bows, and one of my boys took an arrow and died right there – young Eumedes, a pretty good kid.

We were half a stade away. Too damned far. They turned like a flock of birds and ran.

I put my heels into my charger’s side. I had a fresh horse, a bigger, faster horse, and I was mad. I hadn’t even named my new chargers – that’s how much of my time oats and cartwheels took.

The Thracians were mostly gone into the trees. Nearer to hand, the chief and his retinue were beginning to scatter along the valley.

I got up on my charger’s neck and let him run. I ignored the followers and stayed on the chief. He turned, made a rude gesture at me and turned his horse into the sopping woods.

I didn’t give a shit, and followed him, closing the distance between us at every stride. I’d picked a good remount – this horse could moveand had some brains, as well, and we were hurtling though the trees, never more than a heartbeat from being thrown or scraped off on a tree – just try galloping through open woods.

But my mount was eating the distance. The chief looked back at me – he was a bigger man, much older. He looked back, measured the distance, looked back again, and we both knew it was too late for him to turn his horse and fight. So he drew his sword and prepared to fight as I came up on him – jigging like a hare, trying to get me off his bridle-hand side.

I wasn’t having it. And my mount was smart – as I said. He turned on his front feet, right across the pony’s rump, and in a flash we were up with them and I got an arm round his neck and ripped him off the horse – just as the instructor taught. I never even let go of my spear.

He went down hard, rolled. Before he was on his feet, my spear was at his throat. His leg was broken, anyway.

He wasn’t the warlord. But he was the warlord’s sister’s son. And I got him back to camp, having collected my pages from their pursuit. We had a dozen prisoners, and Eumedes was our only loss.

I didn’t try and move. Our infantry had seen the Thracians off, and they were a lot better for it. I got a cheer as I rode in with the Thracian, covered in gold – he had a lot of gold on. I ordered all the prisoners stripped of their jewellery and all of it – and everything off the men killed by the infantry – put in a pile in the middle of camp. I had my herald announce that all the loot would be divided among the whole army, share and share alike.

And the sun rose. The low clouds burned off, and it was early summer at the edge of the hills instead of late autumn, and the men were warm. No one grumbled when I sent forage parties into the hills for more fuel.

Gordias slapped my back. ‘Well done,’ he said.

‘You mean I fucked almost everything away, but it came out well enough?’ I asked. I wasfeeling pretty cocky. But I knew I’d done almost everything wrong.

Gordias nodded. ‘That’s justwhat I mean, son.’ He shaded his eyes, watching the distant Thracians. ‘We have a word for it. We call it war.’

That night, I decided to press my luck. Gordian and Perdias, my other mercenary officer, were completely against it.

Even Polystratus was hesitant.

I decided to attack the Thracians in the dark. There was some moon. And we’d had forage parties out all day – there’d been steady low-level fighting, our woodcutters against theirs, all day. We’d had the best of it – mostly because our farm boys had chased their farm boys off in the early morning, and that sort of thing makes all the difference. And while they had a few tattooed killers, it seemed to me an awful lot of my opponents were as raw as my own troops.

No, I’m lying. That’s what Perdias said, and later in the day Gordias agreed. I didn’t have a clue – but once they’d said it, I took it as true.

At last light I put a minimum of men on watch and sent the rest to bed. Myndas had my tent back up and all my kit dry – there’s a hard campaign all in itself – and he’d built a big fire, built a drying frame – quite a job of work for a Greek mathematician. But he was still trying to overcome my anger, and he had a long way to go.

We stood at the fire – the two infantry officers and the commander of the Thessalians, a wild bastard named Drako, who wore his hair long like a Thracian, with twisted gold wire in it, and the Thracian auxiliary commander, Alcus. He and Drako were like opposites – Drako was slim, long and pretended to a false effeminacy, as some very tough men do; Alcus was short, squat, covered in thick ropes of muscle and heavy blue tattoos.

‘We’re going at them, across the ridge-top trail at moonrise,’ I said.

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 hisexpedition. 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.

The Thracians came up to the base of the berm.

We stood at the top.

A chief roared something – I think he called, ‘Who are we!’

And they roared.

Three times, and then they came in silence, rushing up the dyke faster than I could imagine.

Gordias, on the other hand, kept his head.

‘Ready?’ he called. ‘Throw!’ he roared, and five hundred javelins swept like birds of prey on the huddled mass of unshielded, unarmed men.

And that’s as far as they got. So many men fell in the shower of spears that they turned to run, and Alexander was on them with the older pages and the professional cavalry – Alcus was there, and Drako, and all the younger pages from camp.

We were all around them, then, and with numbers, too. And weapons and armour.

Maybe a hundred of them lived. I doubt it, though. We offered no quarter, and Alexander meant to make an example in his first battle. The cavalry went in again and again, and they had nowhere to run – even our shield-bearers and camp slaves were out, with slings and rocks, lining the forest edge, so that if an armed man burst free of the melee, they shot him down.

Hephaestion said that Alexander killed the chieftain, and that’s possible, but when he went down, the rest as good as fell on their swords. All the fight went out of them, and we took fifty prisoners.

And then there was nothing but the vultures and the corpses and the stink of men’s excrement, and we went back to camp. We didn’t form and march back – nothing so organised. That level of efficiency came later. Instead, men simply couldn’t stand looking at the dead any longer – or men snatched up a gold ring or a torc and left, or wandered blank-eyed for a while and found themselves by a fire.

Gordias got some slaves organised and started collecting the rest of the loot. I found Philip the Red and got him to help me organise collection of the wounded – we had a few. We killed their wounded. I found that I was turning my head away.

It was horrible. But you know about that – I can see it in your eyes. And the animals – the dogs, the carrion birds.

Luckily it was daylight.

By noon, we had most of the army in camp. It was a young army, and most of the men simply sat, slack-jawed. Older men guzzled wine.

Alexander paced, like a caged lion.

‘We need to be at them,’ he said.

Laodon put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Sire, there is no “them” to be at. You have destroyed them.’

Alexander shrugged off his arm. ‘Do not be familiar, sir. And their villages are open – right now. Not for long – other tribes will protect them.’

Laodon shook his head. ‘Your army is exhausted.’

Gordias backed him up. ‘My men have been up all night, and fought two days in a row.’

Alexander flinched – a visible shudder. I knew him well, and knew that he was fighting off a temper tantrum.

Instead, he managed a smile. ‘Well, then,’ he said. He caught my eye. ‘Not bad for the baggage guard, eh?’ he said.

I grinned.

He grinned back.

‘I expected to find you besieged,’ Alexander said.

Laodon shrugged. ‘We were sent to fail,’ he said.

I stood in shock. ‘Antipater betrayed us?’

Alexander looked out at his battlefield and then back at me. ‘It makes no snese – but they were waiting for us. Laodon said they were, and they were. So we left you to fort up and went off to try and ambush their ambush.’

‘You might have said,’ I shot back. In Macedon, we’re not slaves.

Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘I might have. But it was a hunch, and I might have been wrong. Or Laodon might have been the traitor.’ He shrugged, even as Laodon flinched. Smiled at me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you got the baggage.’

I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Thank the gods.

He slapped his knees. ‘Well, if the men need a rest, they need a rest. We march at dawn.’

And that was that.

The next day, Alexander took the oldsters and the Thracian auxiliaries and rode north-west, into Thracian territory, and proceeded to burn every village he came to. I moved along the valley floors, building small fortified camps or using the stock dykes the way the Thracians had, but with better sentries and sanitation. We covered fifty stades a day and Alexander covered three times that, and after three weeks he’d burned a swathe across Maetian Thrace as wide as the Chersonese and twice as long. Four weeks to a day after we’d broken their army, we stormed their log-walled city. Alexander put in a garrison of veterans from the infantry corps – two hundred men who got five times the land grants they might have expected. He called it Alexandropolis.

My last camp in Thracian territory had a stockade with three thousand slaves – mostly very saleable young women. The soldiers took their pick, and the rest went up for sale.

Horrible. But they did the same to us.

And then we marched home to Pella, with a fortune in gold and slaves, and Alexander gave an excellent speech, and handed out the whole of the loot to the infantry and the professional cavalry. The pages received nothing.

Antipater greeted us at the main gate, reviewed the army and embraced Alexander. The town cheered us.

It was very difficult to go back to being a page, after that. Three nights later, I was punished for being late to guard duty outside the prince’s door – publicly admonished by one of Philip’s somatophylakes, who didn’t seem to know or care that I had just won a night battle, killed my prince’s enemies, stormed a city and handed in my accounts for the logistics of the army and had them passed. Like an adult.

He hit me across the face with his hand, and ordered me to spend the night standing on my feet.

Which, of course, I did.

A month later Philip was back. Another failed siege in the Chersonese – another Athenian proxy victory, and now the Persian fleet was gathering, or so men said. It had been a summer of manoeuvre and near defeat for Macedon, and the rumour was that Thebes was ready to join Persia and Athens against us. And the western Thracians, unimpressed by Alexander’s near extermination of the Maeti, were threatening to close the passes of the north-east against us. Or perhaps hold them open for Thebes.

Amid all this, Philip came home. He embraced Alexander publicly and praised him to the skies – after all, as Philip was the first to admit, Alexander had won the year’s only victory, and turned a raw phalanx into a veteran one.

Then Philip took the new phalanx and marched it away, and changed Alexandropolis to Philipopolis, and we were left to wonder. And to raise fresh troops.

All winter, Philip marched and counter-marched – he lacked a fleet, and he had to keep the Athenians and their surrogates at arm’s length with his army. He sent letters – brilliant letters, full of advice for his son the regent. Some provoked a smile from the regent – and many a frown.

I read them to the prince, because I was one of the inner circle – my courage undoubted, my place secure, or so I thought. I would read him Philip’s letters while he wrote out his own correspondence – he had secretaries but preferred to write for himself. Philip’s advice, like that of most parents, could be internally contradictory – I recall one letter that admonished the regent for attempting to bribe the magnates of inner Macedon, and then in the next line recommended bribery as the tool to use with Thracians. And every time we managed to raise and equip a new corps of infantry, he’d summon them to his field army, leaving Alexander without the means to march against the renewed threat from the Thracians.

The second time this happened, when we’d stripped the countryside of farm boys to form a fourth taxeis of foot companions only to lose it, Alexander threw his ivory stylus at the wall, and it stuck in the plaster.

‘He wants everything for himself. He will leave nothing for me!’ he shouted.

Certainly Antipater was no longer allowed an army. Even Drako’s Thessalians were called away to the field army.

In the spring, Philip turned without warning and marched on the Thracians – a deeper raid than we had undertaken, and with no traitor to lure them out to easy victory, this time the Thracians stayed in their hill forts and fought for time. Philip captured a few towns and lost some others, and began to move out of the hills in three columns – but the centre column made a mistake, or moved too fast, and was ambushed. Philip got another spear in the thigh – the same thigh – and the line infantry got badly chewed up.