Ben Bova – Orion and the Conqueror

The city was no great affair. I could not see much of it, huddled behind its wall and locked gates, but it seemed small and cramped to me. The main wall was rough and uneven; crenelated towers stood by each of its two gates and only a few buildings inside were tall enough to rise above the wall’s top. It sat at the edge of the water, where the rocky plain that descended from the distant hills met the Propontis, the sea that lay between the narrows of the Hellespont and the Bosporus.

Yet there was something familiar about the city, something that tugged at my memory. When I tried to recall what it was, though, I struck a blank wall much more obdurate than the city wall of Perinthos.

Philip’s camp lay sprawled on the threadbare plain, almost within an arrow’s shot of the city wall. I sensed an edginess in the air. The camp reeked with a restless, disgruntled mood, the kind of irritation that arises when soldiers have been sitting too long in one place with neither the comforts of their home base nor the prospect of getting home any time in the near future.

The siege was going badly. Perinthos was a seaport, so it could stay behind its locked gates and defy the Macedonians while ships brought in fresh supplies and, occasionally, reinforcements from Athenian allies such as Byzantion. Philip, supreme on land, had no navy. It must have been sheer madness for the Perinthians to try to relieve the siege with the handful of mercenaries that Athens had sent. Philip had made short work of them, but now that the battle was over, the siege went on and the city remained defiant.

The horses kicking up clouds of dust in their corrals seemed to be more active than the soldiers. Men loafed about as we marched into the camp. I saw that they had been here long enough to have built log huts for themselves with well-trampled paths between them. Mules brayed as slaves led them past us, their backs piled high with fodder and stacks of firewood.

The only soldiers who seemed busy were the engineers swearing and sweating over a massive catapult, yelling at a quartet of bare-chested slaves straining to load a heavy iron bolt onto it while another squad of half-naked slaves sat waiting to start the mules pulling the thick ropes that would cock the catapult’s arm. I saw that someone had scratched onto the dark iron bolt the words, From Philip.

I heard the thump of another catapult being fired and, turning, saw its missile tumbling high into the morning sun. It cleared the wall and disappeared behind it. Then came a thunderous crunching boom as it hit. Voices wailed, a woman’s high-pitched shriek cut through the air as a cloud of dust rose above the wall like a dark blot against the sky. From Philip.

Troy. Vaguely I remembered another siege of another city, long ago: Troy. Had I been there, or had I merely heard tales about it? My right hand pressed against my thigh and I felt the dagger that I kept strapped beneath the skirt of my chiton. What had it to do with my faint recollection of Troy?

Nikkos directed our phalanx to a relatively clear area of the camp, as far from the smell and dust of the corrals as possible. I saw that Philip’s army was much larger than the Macedonians could field by themselves. He had added troops from all the tribes allied to his kingdom, such as Nikkos’ Thracians, and still hired mercenaries, as well.

“See those gilded lilies there?” Nikkos prodded my ribs with his elbow as we were unloading our equipment from the mule train that had followed us into camp.

I looked in the direction he was staring. A troop of men in identical polished armor and helmets of gleaming bronze was forming up in well-ordered ranks under the flinty eyes of a trio of officers. Their breastplates were molded to look like a well-muscled torso; their helmets were plumed with horsehair dyed red. They seemed to sparkle in the sun.

“Argives,” said Nikkos. “Fresh meat from the Peloponnesos.”

“More mercenaries?” I asked.

He nodded and spat into the dusty ground. “Look at ’em. All prettied up in their fine bright armor. I bet they’ve never done anything more than parade around and tell tall tales. They must think they can get the Perinthians to swoon at the sight of ’em.”

I had to laugh, especially when I looked down at my own battered armor, dented and scratched and caked with dust. But then I had to wonder: armor like that cost a great deal of money. Where did I get it? What other battles had I fought, to dent and scratch it so? Where was I from?

Philip and his generals seemed to understand full well that soldiers with little do to begin to rot from the inside. We were drilled every day, trained in the close-order formations of the phalanx until handling our sixteen-foot-long sarissas seemed as natural as using a soup spoon. The mercenaries loafed and laughed at us while we of the Macedonian phalanxes marched and wheeled and turned and charged at the bawling commands of our unit leaders.

It was dull, sweaty work; endless repetition. But I had seen how Philip’s machine had ground up my mercenary phalanx like a meat chopper with ten thousand arms and one brain. I went through the drills without complaint and ignored the jeers of the mercenaries.

Most of the tribesmen served not as hoplites in a phalanx but as peltasts, archers or slingers or javelin throwers, light infantry that could skirmish against the heavier-armed phalanxes and dash away before the hoplites could close with them. The mercenaries were all hoplites, of course, heavy infantry.

“The country’s full of mercenary troops,” Nikkos told me. “Any poor boy who wants to make something of himself joins a mercenary troop and goes off soldiering. Every city in the land grows soldiers nowadays. Except Athens, of course.”

“What do they grow in Athens?” I asked.

“Lawyers.” And he spat again.

Some of the other men near us laughed. I let it pass.

The men fell to arguing over which city produced the best soldiers. Some felt that the Spartans were the bravest, but most agreed that Thebes had an even better reputation.

“Especially their Sacred Band,” said one of the men.

“The Sacred Band aren’t mercenaries,” Nikkos pointed out. “They fight only for Thebes.”

“And damned well, too.”

“They’re all lovers. Each man in the Sacred Band is part of a pair.”

“The philosophers say that makes the best kind of soldier, a man who’s fighting alongside his lover. They’ll never let each other down.”

“Fuck the philosophers. The Sacred Band’s the best damned bunch of soldiers in the world.”

“Better than us?”

“Better.”

“We have a better general!”

“But they’re not mercenaries. As long as we don’t make war against Thebes we don’t have to worry about them.”

“There are plenty of Theban mercenaries, though. Even the Great King, over in Asia, hires mercenaries from Thebes.”

“The Great King?” I asked.

Nikkos gave me a peculiar look. “Of Persia,” he said. “Don’t you know anything?”

I could only shake my head.

Nikkos did not trust the newly-arrived Argives. He kept calling them “pretty boys” who would be next to worthless in a real battle. For their part, the Argives swaggered through the camp as if they were each personally descended from Achilles, and laughed at our constant drilling.

“Why doesn’t the king send them against the wall?” Nikkos grumbled. “Then we’d see what they’re really made of.”

But Philip apparently had no intention of attacking the city wall. The army sat outside and did little more than drill—and fire a few missiles into the city each day. The Perinthians sat tight and cheered each time a ship sailed into their wall-protected harbor.

Our phalanx was camped next to the strutting Argives, and there was plenty of bad blood between us. It was natural, I suppose; if we were not allowed to fight the real enemy we fought each other. There were rows and fistfights almost every night. The officers on both sides sternly punished the men involved; Nikkos himself took ten lashes one morning while we were all made to stand at attention and watch. One of Philip’s generals, Parmenio, threatened to stop our wine supply if we did not behave.

“We’ll see how belligerent you are on water,” he growled at us. I had heard that Parmenio was a wine lover, and he looked it: heavy and red-faced, with broken blood vessels splotching his cheeks and bulbous nose.

The Argives were punished by their own officers, of course, but it seemed to us that their punishments were much lighter than our own.

I tried to stay out of the squabbling. Without quite remembering the details I recalled how another army had been almost destroyed because of a quarrel between its leaders. Was that at Troy?

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