“We march to glory!” he shouted in his thin tenor voice. “Who will come with me?”
Inevitably some of the village youths would step forward, faces burning with visions of fame and honor—and loot. Just as inevitably the village elders would tug them back into the crowd. Or worse, their mothers would while the rest of the villagers laughed. Still, Alexandros got a handful of newcomers along the way.
As we approached Thessaly, though, the responses became decidedly more hostile. At one of the mountain passes the local sheep herders even tried to ambush us.
All they saw, I’m sure, was a gaggle of beardless lads on horseback, all of them richly adorned. The horses alone would be worth a fortune to a man who spent his life scrabbling out a living on those rocky hillsides.
Our job was to scout the pass, make certain it was safe for the main body of the army to come through. We knew full well that a handful of determined men could hold up an army for days or even weeks, as Leonidas had at Thermopylae long ago. Philip wanted to get to Thebes before the Athenians could bring their army up to unite with the Thebans. To be held up in these mountain passes could be disastrous.
The local hill folk held scant allegiance to Thebes or anyone else except their own villages. To them, the world was bounded by their mountains and valleys. They knew nothing of the impending war. So when they saw a half-dozen young dandies riding through one of their passes, they thought they had received a windfall from the gods.
They chose their spot well, where the rocky mountain walls nearly touched one another and a rider had to nose his horse carefully around the boulders strewn along the trail.
Alexandros was in the lead, as he usually insisted on, with Hephaistion close behind him. Strung out further behind were Ptolemaios, Nearkos and Harpalos. Ptolemaios was singing a bawdy song, enjoying the echo of his own voice against the mountain walls. I brought up the rear, constantly searching the rugged crests of the mountains and looking behind us for any signs of peril.
I heard the danger, rather than saw it. A rumbling, crunching sound. Looking up, I saw a boulder bouncing down the steep mountainside, kicking up more rocks as it fell.
“Look out!” I bellowed, pulling up on Thunderbolt’s reins.
Alexandros heard it too. With a single glance upward he kicked Ox-Head forward, Hephaistion right beside him. The rest of us turned our horses around, away from the rock slide.
The boulders thundered down and crashed to the floor of the pass in a shower of gritty dust and flying pebbles. Our mounts shied and whinnied. Thunderbolt would have taken off altogether; it took all my strength to hold him where he was.
Eerie war cries echoed through the canyon and I saw men racing along the top of the cliffs. A spear came flying toward me. I saw it in slow-motion, flexing as it glided through the air. Men were scrambling down the rocky face of the cliffs on both sides of us.
And Alexandros was on the other side of the boulders that they had rolled down.
I ducked under the spear and let it fall clattering to the bare ground. Ptolemaios, Harpalos, and Nearkos were being swarmed under by more than a dozen half-naked men armed with spears and staves, but they had their swords out and were slashing at their attackers from horseback. I urged Thunderbolt through the melee, bashing a few heads with my own sword as I approached the rock slide.
The boulders formed a barrier that I could not ride past. I could hear shouting and swearing from the other side, and the scream of a man in death-agony. Swiftly I climbed onto Thunderbolt’s back and leaped atop the nearest boulder, then jumped to the next one.
Alexandros and Hephaistion were on their feet, back to back, surrounded by hill tribesmen with murder in their eyes. Two half-grown boys were leading Hephaistion’s horse down the canyon. Ox-Head was nowhere in sight.
With the greatest roar my lungs could give I leaped from the boulder onto the mass of men attacking Alexandros. Spears snapped and bones crunched. I rolled to my feet and slashed the nearest man almost in two. They were all moving with languid dreamy slowness. I ducked a spear and thrust my sword into the man’s belly, dodged sideways as I yanked the sword out and grabbed the next man’s spear with my left hand. I cracked the spearman’s skull apart with an overhand swing of my sword just as another spear pierced my leather corselet and sliced into my ribs.
I hit the spear with a backhand sword thrust and it pulled free of my flesh. I felt no pain, only the exultation of battle fever. Alexandros killed the man who had speared me and suddenly the attackers broke and ran.
“The others!” I yelled and started scrabbling up the boulders that separated us from Ptolemaios, Harpalos, and Nearkos.
They were still on their horses, although Nearkos’ mount was bleeding in half a dozen places. We roared down on the hill men, slashing and killing until they tried to escape our fearful swords, but Harpalos rode down two of them as they ran in blind panic along the canyon trail. Alexandros pulled down another who was scrambling up the rocks and took his head off with a single blow. I saw one climbing madly up the cliff face. I took half an instant to calculate the throw, then flung my sword at him. It struck him squarely between the shoulder blades. He screamed and fell face-first at my feet with a wet thump, the sword sticking out of his back.
Turning, I saw that Hephaistion held the last of the hill men by the hair. He could not have been more than thirteen: dirty, clothed in rags, on his knees, eyes bulging at the bloody sword Hephaistion held in his other hand. His mouth was wide open but no sound came from it. He was petrified with fear, looking at his death inches away.
“Wait,” Alexandros commanded. “These dogs have taken Ox-Head. I want him to lead us to their village.”
The boy did as he was told. We wound through the narrow pass, out onto a wider trail, and then up a rocky hillside where sheep had cropped the grass almost to its roots. Beyond the second row of hills, nested in the cup of a wooded valley, was the boy’s village.
All the way there, Alexandros raged and fumed about Ox-Head. “Steal him from me, will they? I’ll roast them alive, each and every one of them. They’ll curse the day they were born. If they don’t return Ox-Head to me I’ll kill them all with my own hands!”
I saw that his hands were shaking: the aftermath of battle. He had nearly been killed, although he actually suffered nothing more serious than a few nicks and bruises and a bad fright.
We must have made a grim sight, six bloodied warriors, three of us on foot. I had given Alexandros my mount to ride. Nearkos walked beside me, slim and small, silent and dark as a shadow, leading his bleeding horse with one hand, his sword in the other.
The village elders came out to meet us, trembling visibly. A pair of half-naked boys, silent and round-eyed, led Ox-Head and Hephaistion’s mount toward us.
The elders stopped a few paces before us, dithering and jittering, glancing uneasily at us and each other.
Before they worked up the courage to say anything, Alexandros spoke. “Where are your young men?”
The elders looked back and forth among themselves.
“Well?” Alexandros demanded.
One of the elders was completely bald, but had a white beard that ran halfway down his chest. His fellows nudged him forward.
“Our young men, lord, are dead. You have killed them all.”
Alexandros snorted. “Don’t lie to me, grandfather! We allowed ten or more of them to escape. I want to see them. Now! Else I will burn your miserable village to the ground and sell your women and children into slavery.”