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.”