When I tried to walk down the hill toward the city I found that my feet would not obey me. I stood rooted to the spot. In the distance, so far and so faint that I could not be entirely sure of it, I heard someone laughing sardonically. Almost crying, so bitter was the laughter. A man’s twisted laughter, I thought, although I could not be altogether sure.
With all the force I could muster I tried to break free of whatever held me immobile and start on the way down the hill toward the city.
Only to wake up on the threadbare grass of the stony battlefield outside Perinthos with the first rays of the sun glinting over the rugged hilltops.
Who am I? The question echoed in my mind. Then another question arose to haunt me: Why am I here?
CHAPTER 3
That morning we marched to Perinthos, where the main body of Philip’s army was camped outside the city’s wall. It was embarrassing to realize that Philip had used only a small part of his army to defeat my mercenary troops. Most of the Macedonian forces were besieging Perinthos, while still another contingent of his troops was marching swiftly toward Byzantion, on the narrow strait of Bosporus that separated Europe from Asia.
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.