Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great (10 page)

You know what happened next. At the sounding of a trumpet, the enemy retreat suddenly seemed to halt. What had really happened, of course, was that the Macedonians didn’t run away at all, but had only countermarched behind a new line formed by their best men. Having fooled many of the Greeks with this sham, they grasped their pikes underhand and lowered the tips. The Macedonian pike is long enough for men four and five shields deep in their phalanx to reach the enemy. Many of the Athenians were propelled by pure momentum into this swarm of spear points. Hemmed in by their comrades around them, hundreds were struck full in the face, noses or jawbones split. This was when I learned that the entrance of a metal point into the unprotected face of a man makes a peculiar noise—a certain combination of a
crunch
and a
thud
. I had much opportunity to hear it as the survivors tried to come about, colliding with the oncoming ranks, until we were all a helpless jumble of exhausted, blind men and boys, so terrified that we defecated ourselves with fear, or cried for our mothers.

It was at this point that the enemy broke their silence. They let loose an inimitable cry—made in that strange dialect of theirs—that rose over the ongoing din of shields and armor, freezing the blood of every Greek on the field. The Macedonians then started forward again, walking right over the Greek casualties, finishing off the fallen with downward thrusts of the iron points on the butts of their pikes. I remember seeing a face I recognized among the wounded: he was the teacher who taught me my letters, decades before. I had not seen him since, and never did again, but only in that instant. He lay uncomplaining at the feet of the Macedonians, the contents of his testicles spilled on his groin flaps, his gray head anointed with the dust of sacrifice.

There was at that point still some distance between the enemy and what remained of the Athenian line. To the eternal credit of my fellow citizens, most of them stood firm as the enemy approached. Others, foreseeing only their imminent death, and finding themselves hemmed in on all sides by the phalanx, gave themselves over to panic. Just a few of these cowards, flailing to free themselves, was enough to disrupt huge swaths of our formation. And all the while the Macedonians were coming on, those damnable cocksure smiles on their faces—smiles like those right there!

Machon leveled a finger at the Macedonian observers in the courtroom, who were indeed grinning as they listened to one of the storied moments in their nation’s history. Their smiles withered as five hundred pairs of resentful eyes bore down on them.

You may be thinking that I paint too dark a picture of the events that day. To those who were not there, it should be pointed out that the battle seemed far from over to us. There was still the opportunity for the Greeks to turn the tables on the enemy: to settle in, dig the butts of our spears into the earth, and impale the dogs as they charged.

We were confident we could do this, and prepared for it, for we all understood exactly what was at stake. We had already learned, after all, that there was no defensive strategy against the likes of Philip—no resort to Long Walls and hope for bad weather. Can you remember when our grandfathers told us of the war with Sparta, when those half-hick stiffs would come every year at the same time, shake their fists at our Long Walls, burn a few haystacks, and go home? Remember how formidable those Lacedaemonians sounded to us, as children? Yet we all knew we were in for much worse if Philip’s hordes poured into Attica. To Philip, walled cities were just unshucked oysters, and the war never stopped for harvest, weather or any other reason under heaven. His troops were neither part-time nor rented soldiers, but professionals who made a craft of intimidation, rape, and massacre.

There was nothing for us to do, then, but to put shoulder to shield and push hard against the line. We would accept the hours of exhaustion in our old panoplies, the heat, the terror of suffocation and the panicky spray of our neighbor’s urine. We would push, and push some more, until the Macedonians broke for their mountains at last, and we would bury our spears in the backs of many as we could.

But it was not to be. The battle was not over in hours, but minutes, as the Macedonian cavalry somehow broke into our rear. Through one of the great gaps in our line, Philip’s so-called ‘Companions’ had rode and commenced to slash at our back rank. The Greek army, it seems, had come that day without any cavalry at all, and so our flanks had no defense.

With that, the entire right wing of the Greeks crumpled. Hoplites dropped their spears, tore off their armor, and ran for their lives. The horsemen made them pay for their indiscipline: the deserters were chased down and butchered from the back by the Macedonian aristocrats. These were, incidentally, quite gaily turned out in their purple cloaks trimmed with gold. And how they seemed to enjoy the work of slaughtering fathers and grandfathers who came to fight for their children’s freedom! As fate would have it, this was not the last time I would watch the Macedonians go about this, their favorite business.

Trapped in the center of the disintegrating phalanx, I was being propelled this way and that by waves of flailing, terrified men. Those who have been there know the danger: in the crush of armored bodies, it was difficult just to get a breath. Keeping upright was also a challenge, lest I suffer the fate of those trampled under the feet of their comrades. It was at that moment, when I was thus engaged, that I first glimpsed Prince Alexander.

I’m not sure why I knew it was him, as I was too far away to see his face. I might have guessed his identity because he was riding at the head of a retinue, or because his cloak had a reversed color scheme, gold trimmed with purple, or from the fact that he alone wore the Gorgon’s head device on his breastplate. Or it might have been for the same reason that the sheep dog always stands out from the rest of the flock—the princely way he rode a horse, cantering here and there, directing his forces, pounding his fist for emphasis, gesturing his displeasure over some unfulfilled command.

I watched him until I lost sight of him behind an obstacle—an obstacle that I belatedly realized was the Sacred Band, which was surrounded. The Thebans had formed themselves into a defensive square, with their spears presented at every side. Against them the enemy pikemen were forming up in columns thirty-two shields deep. When they were ready, the Macedonians charged at a run into the Thebans, with the soldiers in their back ranks pushing the ones in front. This kind of attack generated powerful momentum—the kind that drove leveled pikes straight through the armor of stationary men. The Macedonians did this over and over, giving each fresh regiment a crack at the Thebans; the defenders, who had locked shields, were able to hold their own for a while, but they lacked the force of forward movement, and their lances were too short to strike back. Inevitably, with their armor holed or split, the Thebans began to fall. As each died, his comrade protected his body with his shield, or with his own body, as the case may be. The square gave way as the Macedonians kept up the attack; we Greeks watched with tears in our eyes as this glorious Band, its history unblemished by defeat, was ground into the dust.

At last, when there was only one stubborn pair left on what had become their funeral mound, Prince Alexander rode forward on his fabled mount, Bucephalus. Taking aim with his thrusting spear, and in a remarkable bit of horsemanship, he drove right into the morass of dead flesh and speared one of the Thebans straight through his breastplate. With the other resigned to do nothing more than watch, Alexander extracted the spearhead from the body of his companion, backed off a bit, then simply rode the last Theban down. The Macedonians roared as Bucephalus leapt free of the mound, and Alexander unfurled his tawny tresses and raised his blooded spear in triumph.

This was not the end of the day’s slaughter. In defiance of custom, Philip’s troops massacred retreating Athenians for the rest of the afternoon, chasing them into the hills, into cornfields and granaries, up roofs and down into caves. Yes, the King made a gallant gesture of burning the bodies that were left on the battlefield and delivering the collected ashes to us here. But the bodies of hundreds of others—those who fled—were never recovered or given the proper rites. They were left to rot where they fell. We Athenians, for our part, did not ask awkward questions of the victors, but merely thanked the gods for what we were given.

Like many of you, I was at Chaeronea to save my country. But at the risk of encouraging Aeschines’s bizarre speculations, I grant I did have an ulterior motive. It had always been my ambition to write a history. You may recall that Thucydides and Xenophon were soldiers, and commenced their histories because they foresaw that future generations might learn from an account of the conflicts of their time. I believed—and still do believe—that the same is true of our wars. Where Thucydides had his Pericles, Cleon, and Alcibiades, in our time we have Demosthenes, Philip, and, yes, Aeschines! So while my opponent attempts to make my ambition in this regard appear something dubious, he only shows his own contempt for the craft of history. How many of the men here would take up the pen too, if they had the means and the opportunity…? To your shame, Aeschines, see how many hands are raised!

“The defendant may not pose questions to the jury,” the judge objected.

“Your honor, would that rule apply to questions one might characterize as rhetorical?”

“You may ask rhetorical questions only if you clearly indicate that you don’t want your questions to be answered.”

“Eminence, am I to understand that if I ask a rhetorical question, and the jury elects to answer, I am to be held responsible for transgression of a rule that I myself have not committed?”

The jurymen broke into heated discussion. Polycleitus, glowing red with anger, called for order. It took several moments for the room to quiet again.

“The defendant will not ask questions, and the jury will not answer. Is that clear enough to you all?”

“Perfectly. I also request additional time due to the interruption…”

“So granted! Go on, please.”

To resume, I went to Boeotia as a soldier, but also with the eye of a chronicler, as I judged this to be a unique moment in the affairs of men. Fortunately for my project, I was not killed during the battle, but taken prisoner. Along with several thousand other Athenians and allies, I was placed in a stockade not far from the Macedonian camp. The pen was just an offhand thing, a corral built of thin sticks and brush, with ditch water to drink. Philip fed his prisoners with rotten onions collected from the haversacks of the dead—yet
 
so famished were the Athenians that they fought over these meager rations. It is a fortunate thing for the defeated men of Asia that Alexander did not inherit his father’s cheapness.

Having foreseen the advantage of taking notes in the field, I had brought with me several lead tablets and a stylus, which I stored in the cave of my shield. It was at that point, when I had been in detention for two days without food, when the stench of the open pit toilets rose to new heights, and rumors flew that we would all be sent to short, miserable careers as slaves in the mines at Mt. Pangaeus, that I believed I was sufficiently immersed in my subject to begin composing.

I had not gotten far along, recording my impressions of the battle, when a peculiar voice addressed me, asking “Ye scribe, what dost thou?”

Perceiving that the question came from the Macedonian side of the fence, and in the archaic dialect of those backward northerners, I ignored it. A pair of booted feet came into my line of sight as I peered down at my tablet, and the voice resumed,

“Be ye poet or proseur, o son of Theseus, I will own thine answer!”

Bowing to the inevitable, I looked up, and was confronted with none other than Prince Alexander himself.

VI.

Anyone listening to Aeschines’s description of this teenager would be severely misled. He spoke of fine long hair, which was accurate enough, but neglected the stringy, oily quality of it, which gave the impression of being perpetually wet. I still hear tales of Alexander’s ‘blond’ or ‘fair’ hair when it was clearly brown and nothing more. It fell in unrestrained sweeps down around his face—a face that was not without a certain dignity, but coarse, big-boned, and full of pimples. His eyes were not blue or blue-on-one-side but again, plain brown. At that distance I assure you I smelled nothing of the natural perfume that was supposed to permeate his body. His most remarkable features were a set of full, almost feminine lips, and a pair of wide-set eyes that focused on their object with a remarkable intensity.