Of Merchants & Heros (42 page)

Expectation hung in the air, and everywhere was the sense that the final decision was at hand. The camp sounded with the scrape of whetstones on javelins and swords; and when the men were not busy with their kit and weapons, they swam in the lake’s chill crystal waters, or sat gossiping and gaming outside their tents.

One afternoon, during these days of waiting, I was out walking in the heights above the settlement when I saw a figure standing alone, gazing out along the passes.

As I drew near I saw it was Titus. He had cropped his hair short for the season’s campaigning, losing his curls and leaving a short light-brown fuzz. It made him look like a young trooper. We had joked about it.

He glanced round as I approached, to see who it was, then raised his hand in greeting.

‘Still they do not come,’ he said, turning back to look out along the valley. ‘How much longer? We have come all this way to defend them; they promise troops; and now, when we need them, they are not here. They talk and talk about freedom, but when the time comes, they think someone else will do the fighting.’

I drew my breath and looked out across the high pastures and the empty road. In the distance, over the still water of the lake, a lone eagle soared, turning in a great arc. The air was sharp and clean, like mountain water. I said, ‘Are we strong enough to defeat Philip, if they do not come?’

He frowned. Out across the lake, the hovering eagle suddenly plunged, then rose with beating wings from the water. In its talons a fish was struggling. I tried to see an omen in it.

Titus nodded and smiled, guessing my thought. ‘It is not a matter of numbers only; it is like a battle between two creatures of different elements, each the master of its own.’

I asked him what he meant.

‘So far we have fought only garrison troops. We have not faced the Macedonian massed phalanx, row upon row of dense-packed men, each bearing against the enemy a pike fourteen cubits long. It is said they are invincible.’

‘How then do we defeat this phalanx?’

He turned, and I saw the light in his blue eyes. ‘The phalanx has one great weakness. In time of war, a general cannot always pick the place of battle; and yet the phalanx fights at its best only on level ground, where there are no ditches and ridges and trees to obstruct it. If the Macedonians could always pick their place, they would be unbeatable. But they cannot. Their strength lies in their formation, and if once their lines are broken they are exposed. They cannot turn, they cannot retreat; they must go forward or stay where they are.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘we must not let Philip choose his ground.’

He nodded. ‘But Philip knows that too. He will do everything in his power to ensure we fight at a place of his choosing.’

He shrugged, and took one more look at the empty valley. ‘Too much depends on chance. Let the allies come; then at least our forces will be even . . . Tell me, have you decided yet which company you will command?’

I said I had. He had sent a tribune to me the day before, offering me whichever company I chose. It was a great honour, and a sign of his trust, and I guessed he must have heard something of what had happened between me and Lucius.

‘I did not even have to think about it,’ I said. ‘The veterans who fought with me at Korinth arrived yesterday. I will fight with them.’

He nodded. ‘Then you have chosen well. They were in Africa, with Scipio at Zama. They are good men.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘They saved my life.’

Two days later the contingent of Athenian hoplites arrived, and with them Menexenos, dusty from the road, with his owl- emblazoned shield slung on his back, and his broad soldier’s sun-hat on his head.

He too was leading his own company. I recognized some of them from my time in Athens: there was young dark-haired Lysandros, who had fought with me in the burning barn outside the gates of Athens; there was Ismenios, marching beside his lover Theodoros; and there was strong, broad-shouldered Pandion the pankratiast.

It was the first time I had seen Menexenos leading men. He made no pretence at being anything other than what he was. I have seen those who think the way to lead is to assume a vulgarity they do not possess, hoping to be liked. So they spit and swagger and slap, and all the time the men know they are being talked down to, and despise them for it. It would never have occurred to Menexenos to treat them that way. He looked for excellence in everything, and finding it in his men, helped them to find it in themselves. And all this he achieved by the simplest gestures and words, because it lay at the core of his being.

As I stood considering this, I found myself recalling the day he had won at the games; and the pot-bellied stone-cutter afterwards, who set so much store by doing as he pleased, and claimed that all were equal. There were no such men here. Nor would this small band of proud hoplites, who stood straight-backed and bright-eyed as the Roman troops looked curiously on, have tolerated a man like that among them. They had come to face death, and they knew, with the wise instinct that lies within each man’s soul, that there is a truth in such hard reality that causes a man to see things in true proportion.

That night we lay beneath the open window of my room in the old settlement, talking quietly of what was to come. The room smelt of mountain heather, and cedarwood, and sex. Now that the heat of Eros had passed, I felt a stillness, and the melancholy that always touches my soul at such times.

As I lay in the darkness, listening to his steady breathing beside me, feeling his warmth against the night-time chill, it seemed that I saw the pattern of our love written in the very stars themselves, and in every thing that was. It filled my heart, and I wanted to say that we should turn away from the battle ahead, and go to a place where time and danger would not touch us.

But, I knew, there was no such refuge, for it would be a refuge from life itself. So I said nothing; turning on my side I drew him close, and pulled up the blanket around us against the night chill.

On the afternoon of the next day, Phaineas arrived at last with his Aitolians.

Menexenos and I had gone out walking along the shore of the lake. Seeing the army approach, we climbed up the goat-track rising up the hillside, the better to see.

Phaineas and his generals led; then came mounted warriors on prancing Thessalian horses, decked out in gaudy finery; and, behind them, a meandering raggletaggle line of infantry.

In the days that followed others came too: men from the cities of Epeiros and Thessaly which Philip had ravaged; a troop of Kretans; contingents from the Hellespont, and from Pergamon and Rhodes.

And then, after too long waiting, we finally struck north, to meet Philip and his army.

We advanced to Pherai, which lay on the main route south from Macedonia. Here we made camp, and next day at daybreak Menexenos and I rode out northwards with two Aitolian scouts who knew that country, looking for signs of Philip.

We rode for most of the day, halting often, scanning from the high ground, questioning the peasants we came across on the land.

But when we asked they shook their heads and looked grave.

They had not seen the Macedonians, they said.

Then, towards evening, we paused beside a pine wood, to relieve ourselves and rest the horses. We were on the edge of the rising ground, following a track in the foothills of Mount Chalkedonion. I crossed to the far side of the wood, where a bare rocky promontory jutted out, and, shading my eyes with my hand, scanned the plain below one last time before turning home.

The plain was empty, and deep in shadow now, as the sun dropped below the distant heights of Pelion. Far off, to the north and east, a bank of cloud was gathering, lit from behind so that it glowed red and purple. A breeze had picked up. It stirred the pine branches, and I thought to myself that soon there would be rain.

Just as I was about to turn back, I heard the sound of scree on rock. It was no more than a few light tumbling stones, but I paused and looked up, thinking to see a goat or coney.

The slope was empty. But then, on the high hillside track above, half hidden by pine and ash and thickets of arbutus, a troop of Macedonians appeared on horseback.

I hurried back to the others. Menexenos had seen them too. He was crouching down with the scouts, peering warily up from behind the tree cover.

‘Have they seen us?’ I whispered.

‘I don’t think so. Not yet. But they will, when we move.’

Silently we made our way back to the horses. The Macedonians were little more than a javelin’s throw away. We could hear them talking among themselves in their broad, flat accents. It was hard to tell exactly how many they were; perhaps ten, perhaps fifteen. The track they were following was obscured by trees. I asked one of the scouts where it led. He shrugged. It was not a route he knew. He supposed it ran somewhere up over the ridge.

We crouched down and waited, expecting at any moment that one of the Macedonians would spot our tethered horses and sound the alarm. But no one shouted out, and when they passed momentarily behind an obscuring screen of pine we edged out into the open ground, and eased the horses back along the mountain track.

Moments later the cry went up behind us.

‘Go!’ I cried.

We flicked the horses to a canter – we could move no faster on the uneven stony path. A javelin clattered somewhere on the rocks behind us. But I could tell from the sound that it had fallen far short.

After that, the Macedonians, realizing we were beyond their range, saved their weapons. I heard them crying out challenges and frustrated insults; and when the track levelled I turned back to look.

They were silhouetted against the twilit sky, a row of mounted horsemen staring furiously down. I smiled to myself, and then allowed myself to laugh. For I could see, now, that the track they were on doubled back up the hillside, leading them away from us.

They could get to us only by returning the long way they had come, and by then we would be gone.

Next day, in the hour before dawn, Titus sent out a troop of men into the hills above Pherai, to take possession of the high ground and see what they could find.

Later one of them returned, bringing news that they had run into a similar advance party of Macedonians, scouting the high pass. Both sides, he said, had stood off, awaiting orders, neither attacking nor retreating.

Titus considered for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Order the men back.’

‘What?’ cried Phaineas, who was with him. ‘We have found them at last. Now you say we should not engage.’

‘No, Phaineas; here is not the place.’ He looked out from the terrace towards the distant wooded slopes of Pelion. The cloud-bank I had seen earlier had moved inland, hiding the high peaks, casting pools of shadow over the plain. ‘What are the Macedonians doing up there in the hills?’ he said, frowning. ‘No, I don’t like it. Philip is up to something, and I don’t know what it is.’

‘He is slipping away from us,’ complained Phaineas. ‘That much I know.’

But Titus seemed not to hear. He cast his eyes over the plain – a peaceful vista of neat well-tended fields, paddocks, smallholdings and fruit orchards – as if the answer lay there, if only he could see it.

Phaineas blinked and shrugged, and said to the rest of us, ‘We could have fought them.’

‘I have not come here to skirmish,’ said Titus. He rubbed the brown stubble on his chin. ‘And nor,’ he said after a moment, ‘has Philip.’

He turned and gestured at the plain.

‘He doesn’t like the terrain. It doesn’t suit him. He is trying to draw us west, into the open spaces of Thessaly, where he can crush us with his phalanxes.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Marcus, send word for the camp prefect. Tomorrow we march south.’

‘South?’ cried Phaineas in disbelief.

‘Yes, south. Either he has retreated, which I do not believe, or he is moving behind us. That is why we cannot find him.’ He looked up at Mount Chalkedonion and said, ‘This high ground is hiding him.

He is somewhere behind it.’

We struck camp, and returned by the way we had come, crossing the tributary streams of the Enipeus, which runs down into the Thessalian lowlands. That night we camped on the south side of Chalkedonion, where the sanctuary of Thetis is, below the little hillside town of Skotoussa.

Menexenos sniffed the air and looked at the sky. The last of the sunset seared the thickening cloud with grey and purple. ‘The rain is coming at last,’ he said.

That night a violent storm came rolling in from the east, first distant grumbling thunder and flickering backlit clouds; then a crashing din like the onset of some Titan army as it moved overhead.

With it came wind, then sudden, torrential rain. The men sheltered under their hide tents, trying to keep dry, and talking of omens.

Sometime in the black night the rain stopped. But with the first light of dawn we saw that the cloud had descended from the hills, shrouding everything in a chill, pallid mist. I went to Titus, and found Phaineas already there.

‘. . . And now how will you find him?’ he was saying. ‘You should have attacked while you could. He will march right past you, and you won’t even know.’

‘He could, but he will not,’ answered Titus.

‘You are so sure? How do you know?’

‘I knew when I met him. He wants this fight. He wants this fight with
me
.’

‘Pah!’ Phaineas switched his hand in front of his face to show his contempt. ‘I don’t trust him.’

‘Nor do I,’ answered Titus. ‘But I think I understand him.’ He looked out into the murk. ‘You know this country. What is up in the hills behind us?’

Phaineas turned and blinked at the mist. ‘Nothing much. Uneven terrain. Sheep and goat pasture. A few terraces of barley near Skotoussa. They call these hills Kynoskephalai.’

‘The Dogs’ Heads,’ repeated Titus, saying the word in Latin.

‘Yes,’ said Phaineas. He frowned under his thick black beard.

Then he said, ‘But why? You don’t think he’s hiding up there, do you?’

‘I don’t know where he is. But I don’t want him holding the high ground above our camp. Marcus, how ready are your men?’