My mate blocks me.
“You went with Tollo.”
He means it’s his turn to risk his neck for no good reason.
Stephanos bars everyone. “No one’s going!”
But Agathocles is already in the saddle. His rank is full captain; Stephanos is only a color sergeant. The other riders bring their prize captive. Lucas takes up his arms and kit; he mounts; Agathocles again orders Stephanos to remember his station.
I catch Lucas’s bridle. Into his saddle-pouch I press my woolen overcloak and a sack of kishar and lentils. He takes my hand.
“Whatever happens to me, brother,” he says, “tell the truth.”
41
It takes six days, pushing our animals and prisoners, to relink with the main column. This is at Gabae, the trading camp on the frontier between Sogdiana and the Wild Lands. We catch up with the siege train; the fighting elements have already pushed north. The Wolf’s tribesmen, a scout tells us, are massing above the border. “Looks like an all-in skull-buster.”
No one has seen Lucas or Costas or Agathocles. The capture of Spitamenes’ son is news to them. They have heard nothing and know nothing.
We drop our prisoners and press north along the military highway, or what has become the military highway. Mule trains of hundreds bring up rations and heavy gear. How far ahead is Coenus? No one knows. Where is Spitamenes? The rear-boggers give us the blank stare.
Our animals are too fagged to keep pace. They need a day. We carve a camp alongside the trudging supply column, in an icecrusted wash in the middle of nothing. Gales howl. We chop sod for a windbreak. Plunging my pike into the turf, I pull up a skull. Flag digs up a hip joint. The site is a barrow. An ancient burial mound.
Soldiers are superstitious. “I ain’t bonzing here,” says Dice.
We bed down with the muleteers. Breakfast is wine and millet scratch, both frozen. We share it with a squad of Paeonian lancers-Alexander’s elite scouts-who have ridden three days without rest from Nautaca.
“Where’s the king?”
“Coming fast, mates. And bringing every bat and bumper!”
The lancers wolf their gruel, then spur north, putting the supply column behind them.
By postnoon Alexander’s merc cavalry are passing. Rumor says his Royal Squadron of Companions-and he himself-have already pushed past Gabae by the eastern caravan trace. They’re ahead of us.
We slog on. The supply train has plenty of dry fodder, but their sergeants won’t let us have it. Every bale is tagged for a line unit. We have nothing for our ponies. The steppe sprawls gray and frozen; grass is frost-stiff straw. Our horses’ turds gush like soup.
Still no one has word of Lucas.
My mind searches for reasons. “You’re thinking again,” says Flag.
In this multitude, he reasons, what’s the chance of getting news of one man? Besides, it’s almost certain Lucas got through. “They’re heroes, him and that captain. It was their report that set off this whole show.”
I want to believe it. It makes sense; the timing of it rings right. Lucas is probably in camp with forward elements right now. He’s with Coenus and Alexander, soaking up the glory.
We press on. A thaw hits. The steppe becomes a bog. Laden mules sink halfway to their hocks; wagons are mired by scores. The lane of the column’s passage looks like a field plowed by oxen. It’s so miserable, death itself sounds like a vacation. Better than another night’s kip in this slop.
It rains all day, the tenth and eleventh. Our horses are skeletons. We look like ghosts. Then on the twelfth, the temperature plummets. The heavens dump sleet, then snow. We come over a rise. Ahead: an assembly area. Quartermasters route us off the highway behind a range of hills.
We have caught up with the front. Tents and field kitchens. Mack infantry in thousands, all arming for battle. No half-pikes. Full-length sarissas. Stephanos sends me to find someone from Coenus’s brigade to report to. It’s impossible. The site spreads for miles. We’re among elements of Alexander’s elite merc cav. Their horses make ours look like dogs. Before I can spot a familiar face or a standard I recognize, a colonel’s aide calls us to mount and ride. The fight isn’t tomorrow, it’s now.
Still no one has seen Lucas.
42
I have never seen men so eager for battle. Twenty-seven months of frustration have driven our Macks more than a little mad. They want to crack skulls. They burn to make widows.
Our companies form up under Bullock in a vale alongside a line of catapults being fixed to their limbers. Unit strength is supposed to be 256. Count tops out at 91. Nobody cares. Wherever a man finds himself, let him pick a crew and slot in.
Stephanos canters the line, forming us into wedges. We’ll be backing up the merc cav. “I don’t suppose,” Flag says, “anyone has anything like actual orders.”
Stephanos indicates the mercs. “Just do what they do.”
The hired cav are Phrygians and Cappadocians. You can tell by their pointy caps. We don’t even speak the same language. Dice reins alongside Boxer and Little Red. “Welcome to gang-fuck!” He’s laughing.
The mercs pull out in column of wedges. They seem to know what they’re doing. They’re all lancers, with earflap cawls and pennants snapping on the ends of their twelve-footers. We’re trotting down a swale between tall barrows. It’s like passing between burial mounds. The battlefield, or what will become the battlefield, is just over the left-hand rise. We turn a corner and there it is.
Snow is dumping in sheaves now. Clear of the vale, the cold hits like a wall of ice. Where is the foe? The weather is deteriorating so fast we can’t see more than one wedge in front of us. With the wind and snow, we can’t hear a thing.
Where is Alexander?
Where’s Spitamenes?
In every other scrape I’ve been in, the dominant element has been confusion, succeeded by doubt and terror. Here it’s only confusion. I feel no fear at all. I keep scanning round for Lucas. Let him be all right and I’ll croak without a second thought.
Our wedges follow the mercs. The column swings right. The barrows are at our right shoulder now; we’re at the canter, paralleling them. To our left and down a long gale-scoured slope stretches a vast bowl filling up with snow. We pass company after company of light infantry advancing into this. They make no haste. They’re jabbering to each other, careless as fishwives in the market. Curtains of snow descend; you can see the troops but can’t hear them. The footing beneath my pony’s hooves is hard as stone and slick as marble.
Historians will demonstrate later that Spitamenes had no choice but to come, on this site at this hour, into the open. Alexander’s forts have compassed the Wolf, leaving him no safe patch to set down upon. The foe’s supplies have been cut off. Doubtless his hot-blood tribesmen provoke him in council. The Massagetae won’t stay the winter without some adventure after plunder. He’ll lose them and the Daans and Sacae if he doesn’t act with audacity. They’ll scatter and never rally round him as a leader again.
The Wolf has no choice but to attack. He knows Alexander wants him to. He knows our king has contrived events to give him no other option. And he knows that as soon as he does attack, Alexander will race north from his ready camp at Nautaca with every man and horse he’s got.
So be it.
A straight-up brawl at last.
Our merc cav come left in column. We follow. The mercenaries transit directly behind the light infantry, forming a second front rearward of the foot troops; then their leaders come about in that evolution called the Laconian countermarch, like racehorses round a turning pole or a team of oxen plowing a field. Dice hails me as we skipper through the blowing snow. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Just follow these bastards!” I’m as lost as he is.
Our mounted force draws up on the rim of the snow bowl, behind the broad front of infantry. We’re in the middle now, in column with our long axis flank-on to the fight; the merc cav rein on our right wing in the same formation. We can hear but not yet see the clash taking place half a mile downslope.