'Take your brother's armour,' he said. 'And take Hermogenes as your shield-bearer. You will stand with the men tomorrow. No more playing with the boys.'
And just like that, I was a hoplite.
5
We marched east, across Attica, and the Thebans retired before us, confused by this turn of events. I sweated in my brother's armour, and Pater adjusted it at an Attic forge, borrowing tools to change the waist of my brother's bell corslet and the pinch of his greaves. His helmet fitted me very well.
Pater wept while he worked.
By the third day, we thought that the Thebans would melt away, and then we had word that there was yet another army coming – from Euboea. The Euboeans hated Athens. Truth to tell, Athens is arrogant and most cities hate her.
Then Miltiades' father showed why he was a strategos to be reckoned with. He woke us four hours before dawn, and we left our fires burning and the slaves and boys to watch them, and we marched east and then north. Men who travelled said we were somewhere near Tanagra. I only knew that the weight of my dead brother's arms, his panoply, was the same as the weight of a five-year-old girl, and I was carrying it over a mountain.
Miltiades the Elder had a good plan – to march around the Thebans and catch them napping, and force them to fight, cut off from the Euboeans. But the Thebans were no fools. They had spies and scouts, and their slaves probably traded food with our slaves. They knew we were coming, and they marched in the dark, too, determined to ambush us on the flanks of Mount Parnes. And as with most battles, neither plan bore the least resemblance to the mess that followed.
Plataeans were the left of the army, and this meant that we were the rearguard – the last men to march. Crossing the flank of Mount Parnes on goat tracks, we marched in double file – two wide. It took hours to go a few stades, and where I trudged, we seemed to stop more than we walked.
By the luck of tribe and farm, I walked next to Simon. No one had mentioned that he had run from the Spartans. I didn't even know that he had run – only two or three men had broken, and while I was pretty sure he was one, he wore a plain old helmet with no crest and he had no blazon on the leather face of his shield – like most of our men. Now he walked beside me, and we did not talk.
He was much taller and broader than me. Indeed, I was thirteen, and too young to stand the storm of bronze, but I think that Pater felt that we needed to make up the holes in our phalanx. Who knows what he thought? He never discussed such stuff with me. At any rate, Simon was a head taller and much heavier with muscle. And in the dark, on the flanks of Parnes, I learned what he really was.
His spear-butt flashed in the moon and I ducked. And then he used his hip and almost pushed me off the trail – and off the mountain.
Calchas, dead Calchas, saved my life. Rough-housing with a bigger, stronger man had taught me many tricks. I swayed, armour and all, and got my feet planted. Simon kept right on walking, and the man in the file behind me cursed.
That was the first of three times he tried to trip me, and once I think he meant to put his spear-butt through my eye. But I was wary, and after the third time, someone in the file – we were all neighbours, and Myron's Dionysius was right ahead of me – someone said something to our phylarch, old Epictetus, and he trotted back and asked Simon what he was doing.
Simon flashed me a smile. 'I'm just clumsy,' he said. 'And this boy can't really carry the weight of his panoply.'
Epictetus peered at me. I had my helmet up on my head and I was sweating like a deer bleeding out. I tried to grin.
'Too heavy for you?' he asked.
'No,' I said. 'Simon's a bastard.'
Epictetus shot him a glare. 'Yep,' he said. Most of our file laughed. 'Watch yourself, Simon. I'm watching you.'
That's when I think Simon decided to kill us. Right there on the mountain. Up until then, I think he just hated us quietly. But I called him a bastard, and old Epictetus agreed, and everyone laughed, and the fates spun. We were the last. Miltiades and his tribe were the first. And the Thebans were waiting in ambush. It should have been a disaster. There's no better position for a phalanx than catching your opponent strung out over a goat track.
But the Thebans moved late, and they were late straggling into their ambush site. Hoplites don't usually ambush each other. Maybe they felt unmanly. Who knows what a Theban thinks? At any rate, they fucked it all up.
The result was that their men blundered into Miltiades in the dark. Instead of an ambush, we had a mob fight in the first light.
The first I knew was that the files started to move faster, and then they stopped, and then we could hear it – fighting. One battle made me an expert. But this didn't sound like the fight with the Spartans. This sounded like Chaos come to earth, and it was.
Neither side ever got a phalanx formed. That's what everyone remembers about the Battle of Parnes. Our files and theirs poured into each other in the scrubby, broken ground on the northern shoulder of the mountain, and the push of men behind kept adding fighters. It was so dark that, with your face inside your helmet, you couldn't be sure of the man on your right or left unless you tapped their shield with your own. Twice, Epictetus stopped us without orders and formed our files up close. He was doing what he knew how to do – forming the block that would keep us safe. But both times the path soon narrowed to nothing again and we had to file off.
An hour after we first heard the fighting – exhausted with the fear of waiting and the fatigue of marching – we rounded a bend and saw the fight. The sun was a red ball on the horizon to the east, and we caught glimpses of the sea to the north as the trail climbed and dipped, and then the fight was right there, a spear's throw away.
I could see Pater's double plume. He was standing still, shield against his knees, arms crossed.
The valley was full of men locked in combat, and it was a swirl of death. Because the armies had never formed, no man had a front or a back, and there was no safety and no shield wall.
The Athenians were begging us to come on, COME ON! And still Pater looked out over the valley. I, for one, was in no hurry to plunge into that maelstrom.
And then Pater made his decision. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the movement of his back. He made his decision and we were moving – not down into the battle, but across the hillside to the north. Pater began to run, and the files ran after him.
It might seem a simple thing, to lead a thousand men around a battle that is only two stades or so wide. One man can run the stade in the time another man sings a song, but a thousand men take a hundred times longer, or so it seems when the fate of your city rests on the outcome. And we were scared, honey. We'd been promised a stratagem and an easy fight, and this was chaos and death.
Pater ran north and the files followed him. Just over the brow of the low hill where you first see the polis at Tanagra in the distance, he turned west, halted and ordered the files to form. That was easy. He'd picked a piece of flat ground, and each file ran up, directed by their phylarch and Pater's spear, and they halted to the left of the file before them, so that in the time it took the sun to rise a finger's breadth, the phalanx was formed, minus the cowards and the men who couldn't make the run.
I made it.
Simon didn't. I wonder what he might have done had he made it to the front, but the run left him behind. About sixty men stayed in the rear. This always happens. So the phylarchs say a few words to the men who make it to the fight, and then they close the files.
Suddenly I was in the fourth rank. My hand was cold and clammy on Deer Killer. I had a heavy javelin to go with her, and that's all I had. I had no sword. On the other hand, I had armour like the best men.