The sun was just getting a rim above the edge of the sea, and it was already hot. Satyrus was perspiring inside his armour. He had no interest in a scarf.
‘Best take one,’ the king said.
Satyrus smelled smoke. He stepped out of the ranks and looked around, and there they were — thousands of bundles of green brush, the fires under them just licking at the foliage. Satyrus had taken the pile for another entrenchment.
‘The smoke will cover us all the way in,’ Demetrios said. ‘Wear a scarf.’
Satyrus took one from the slave. He noted that most of the rank and file hypaspists had them on already, making them look like a regiment of hill bandits. Most of them had magnificent Thracian-style helmets with elaborate cheek-plates fitted like faces, some with heavy beards and moustaches in black paint, enamel, or blackened silver — or even bright gold. The scarves vanished as they buckled the cheek-plates down.
Satyrus pulled down his own cheek-plates. He had a simple Attic helmet, a light thing of tinned bronze with an ordinary plume of red and white horsehair — nothing like the elaborate horsehair coifs worn by the veterans around him.
Sealed in his helmet, Satyrus’s vision was limited to a few degrees off the centreline — his peripheral vision was almost completely lost. And the damp scarf was stifling his breath. The cuirass he had chosen was slightly too small, and now it seemed like a torture device, constricting his lungs even as he tried to wrench air through the damned scarf — and the smell of smoke was everywhere.
Why am I doing this? he asked himself. There was no easy answer.
The ramp stretched away, apparently to the edge of the heavens. It was almost a stade long, and rose ten times the height of a man. The first two-thirds were well surfaced in carefully laid turf, but the last third looked like loose dirt.
And then the breeze took the smoke and tossed it forward, and he couldn’t see anything.
Arrows were beginning to come down from the battlements on the suburbs, and bigger, more deadly projectiles came from higher on the Acrocorinth; bolts and stones from engines.
Demetrios stepped out of the ranks. ‘I am your king,’ he said, ‘and my eye is on you. Stand with me and be my brothers, or prove craven and go be less than men.’ His eyes met Satyrus’s, and he raised his spear in salute.
Satyrus returned the salute.
‘Smoke is good,’ coughed the hypaspist commander. ‘Thick.’
‘Let the engines fire again,’ Demetrios said.
Satyrus stood and sweated and shook.
‘Remind me why I said we should do this?’ Achilles muttered.
One of the hypaspists laughed. ‘This is work for men,’ he said. ‘You foreigners should probably sit this out.’
Achilles grunted. ‘Foreigner? Where were you born, Asia man?’
‘Silence in the ranks!’ a phylarch called, and Satyrus smiled to think that he was going into combat as a hoplite, not a king.
‘Ready, there!’ the commander called.
The phylarchs answered, and Satyrus realised that as he was at the head of an eight-man file, he had best answer. ‘Ready,’ he coughed, through the smoke.
‘Ever been in a fight before?’ asked the man next to him.
‘Once or twice,’ Satyrus said.
‘He fought us at Rhodes!’ said the phylarch on his left. He laughed. ‘Watch him, Philip! He’ll do his part.’
Satyrus was oddly pleased at the compliment.
‘Up we go, then,’ said the commander.
Demetrios stepped into the middle of the front rank at the last moment, and raised his shield. The arrows were falling faster — they were walking right into the thick of them.
‘Shields up!’ yelled the commander. ‘Right up — don’t be lazy fucks!’
Satyrus wished for an aspis as he raised the smaller Macedonian bowl over his head. Arrows began to strike the surface, and something bit his shin.
The smoke was debilitating, and Satyrus was not sure, as a sometime commander, that he thought it was worth the cover. The arrows seemed to fall with wicked minds of their own, and the smoke got in his lungs and made him want to puke — he had the burning sensation in his guts that a man gets when he eats too much fat.
Up and up — his feet were still on sod, so they hadn’t gone very far yet, but Satyrus could feel the burn in his thighs, and the arrows were coming faster, and suddenly a ballista bolt swept away the phylarch next to him and the man behind, a ringing, screaming chaos of death, and the whole front bent as men fell, wounded or only struck by pieces of the corpses — the headless phylarch fell back into his file-
‘Halt!’ screamed the commander. ‘Close up!’
The smoke was thinning. The range was almost point-blank, and the enemy engines were firing down with more force and more accuracy, and a second direct hit cleared the rear half of another file in a wave of screams and ringing armour.
‘Are you ready to be a hero?’ Demetrios asked. The two of them were nose to nose. ‘Did I mention that the breach is only eight men wide? We go first, whatever Philip tries to do. He wants to protect me. I want to be first on the wall.’ Under his ornate cheek-plates, Satyrus could see the white rims around his eyes, the slightly mad grin.
‘I’ll be right beside you, lord,’ Satyrus said. Then he allowed himself a smile. ‘Or ahead of you, if you stumble.’
Demetrios smacked his shield face with his spear. ‘I love this moment. May it last for ever in memory.’
‘Forward!’ Philip, the hypaspist commander, sounded panicked. His losses were already more than he’d expected, and Satyrus was, frankly, surprised that they weren’t retreating. With a tenth of his men down and the breach so narrow — it looked like foolishness.
Foolishness that Demetrios was committing because he had to impress the King of the Bosporons?
Sling stones began to hit them — first a punch against his shield, and then a blow like a giant fist to the crest on his helmet. Satyrus adjusted his shield, crouched, and began to go faster. So did the new phylarch to his left.
Suddenly the ground was gone beneath his feet, and he was on loose dirt and sand, grateful for his boots. He went faster, and the sling stones were like a storm of deadly bees — zipping through the air, ringing when they hit armour, thudding when they hit flesh.
This breach is not prepared. Demetrios has made a mistake.
Self-preservation said that if he couldn’t turn tail, he could run at the breach, and Satyrus did. He was suddenly conscious of how narrow the ramp really was, and how far he still had to go. He was out of the smoke, the breach was full of men, and he was … in front. If he slipped to the right or left, he would fall — probably to his death on the rocks at the base of the ramp.
And then all the worry, all the thought, all the strategy fell away, and he was running up a steep slope at men who intended to kill him, and it no longer mattered whether Cassander had tried to kill him or was really his ally, because there was only right here and right now, and a tall man in a yellow horsehair crest who seemed to fill the breach.
Satyrus paused, perhaps ten paces from the wall — shifted his weight, slowed, and threw his dory, twice the height of a man, a long thrusting spear, not a throwing spear.
Yellow Plume took it right through his shield, gave a scream, and went down.
Satyrus drew his sword, stepped on Yellow Plume, still squirming with the spear in his side, and put his shield into the next three men, who all attempted to spear him together. He caught two of the spears and the third hammered into his helmet, caught for a moment on his crest-box and skidded away, snapping his head back painfully against his chin-strap.
He got his feet under him and stepped in, passing his right foot forward to get under the spearheads and stay there. Behind the men in front was another rank, and their spearheads thundered on his shield and one ripped his thigh, a hard overhand thrust that he never saw. Another glanced off his bronze thorax.