Christian Cameron - Funeral Games

None of the other archers were doing any better.

‘We’re fucked,’ she muttered, drawing and loosing again.

Their arrows had cleared the last of the enemy psiloi, so that the monsters strode down the field in a long line with no infantry covering them, but that seemed to be a very minor flaw as the line plodded across the sand towards her pit.

If they go through us, they go into the face of the phalanx, she thought. And we lose.

Next to her, a pair of Greek archers called to each other as they lofted arrows high. ‘Their skin must be thinner somewhere,’ called Laertes, the oldest man among the toxotai.

The beasts were now so close that the archers could try to aim for softer parts – also close enough for flight to seem like an option. She drew to her eyebrow and loosed – to see her bronze-headed barb bounce off the lead elephant’s head.

For the first time she realized that there were men on the backs of the behemoths. Without thinking, she shot one – the range was just a few horse-lengths – and for the first time in fifteen shafts she saw a target go down, the man clutching his armpit as he fell from the beast’s back.

She thought of the elephants in Eumenes the Cardian’s army, and how their mahout said that they were only deadly as long as there were men on their backs.

The lead cow elephant turned her head, as if curious as to what had happened.

Melitta shot two arrows as fast as she’d ever shot in her life. The first missed – right over the top of the cow, who was so close that Melitta was shooting up to aim at all. The second hit the other spearman on the elephant’s back, sticking in his shield but not, apparently, doing any harm.

She looked around her and realized that the toxotai were running. She was the last archer shooting. She turned and ran herself.

Satyrus pulled his helmet down and tied the chinstrap one-handed even as they marched forward. Flute players sounded the step, and Satyrus glanced right and left, his heart filled by the sight. As far as his eye could see, their ranks were moving. The centre was slow, and the mass of the phalanx bowed, but he could see now that the line of his own phalanx – all the army of Aegypt together – was longer than the enemy line.

Off to the right, the cavalry was moving. Off to the left, just a stade away, Satyrus could see Diodorus sitting alone on his charger at the head of the Exiles. He seemed to be eating a sausage.

Right in front of him, the elephants had broken the line of peltastai and toxotai. His gut clenched, his chest muscles trembled and he had to make himself stand taller. Elephants.

Melitta ran twenty paces and stopped – in part, because Idomeneus was standing there, putting an arrow to his bow, and in part because she had to see what happened when the monsters hit the pits.

‘Stop running!’ Idomeneus yelled. ‘There’s nowhere to go!’ He shot.

Forty paces away, the lead cow shuddered as her front feet slid out from under her. In seconds she had slipped most of the way into the hole – head first, and her head cap of bronze pushed the stake flat and it did her no harm. She bellowed, gathered her hindquarters and scrabbled out of the pit, shaking her head.

Too shallow. Melitta shot. Her arrow struck in a great fore-foot.

But something was wrong with the beast, because she stopped. She rolled her head, looking right and left, as arrows pricked her. Her snake-like trunk touched the prone form of the man who’d come off her head when she’d stepped into the pit – he didn’t move. Melitta almost had pity as the great beast tried to move her driver.

Her driver. Her driver.

‘Shoot the drivers!’ Melitta shouted. Her voice broke – it was the most feminine shout on the field – but it carried, and she didn’t care. ‘Shoot the drivers!’

Idomeneus took up the shout. ‘Drivers!’ he said, pulling his great bow to his ear and punching a finger-thick shaft into the mahout of the next beast in line. The man threw up his hands and fell back, and the beast, riderless, stopped.

‘Be ready!’ Philokles roared beside him.

Satyrus felt his arse clench, felt his guts turn and turn again. Three times now, his fear had fallen away, and every time it came back.

Elephants.

He looked at the front rank, and it was bending because the Foot Companions weren’t keeping up. ‘Dress up, phylarchs!’ he shouted. Really Philokles’ job, but he had his attention on the trumpets and the battle in the front. ‘Theron!’ Theron was a hundred paces distant – a hopeless distance on a battlefield. ‘Theron! Step up!’ he called, and other voices repeated it – the front rank flexed, and there was Theron, waving his spear and pushing forward. The file-followers struggled to close up from behind. A pikeman fell and the whole body of men rippled and someone cried out in pain. ‘Close up!’ Philokles bellowed.

Satyrus tore his eyes off the recovery of the middle ranks – he was drifting left because he’d turned his head. ‘Watch your spacing!’ Namastis growled. A deserved rebuke.

And then, through the limited vision of his close-faced helmet, he saw that the elephants had stopped. ‘Look!’ he said to Namastis. ‘Look!’

The monsters were in the line of pits. Almost half managed to walk right through without touching the obstacles, but they didn’t exploit their success – they had a curious morale of their own, and when the archers began to clear the crews off the backs of the animals in the pits, the whole elephant advance broke down.

Idomeneus was the first man to run forward and Melitta loved him for it. Stripped of their psiloi, the elephants were vulnerable once they stopped. The archers ran in among them in their open formation and began massacring the crews. It wasn’t even a fight – the men on the backs of the huge beasts had no reply to make to the hundreds of shafts aimed at them, and a few even tried to surrender.

No prisoners were taken. The archers slaughtered the crews in a paroxysm of fear and rage, and then the beasts began to turn away, the masses of sharp shafts and the point-blank shots beginning to scare them, and suddenly they were running – away.

‘Halt!’ sang the trumpets.

‘Halt!’ echoed the officers.

The phalanx ground to a halt. All along the line, officers raced up and down ordering the line to dress. The front was disordered everywhere, and the Foot Companions were almost a full phalanx-depth to the rear.

‘If they hit us now, we’re wrecked,’ Philokles said to Satyrus. ‘Gods!’ He ran off along the front of the phalanx, ordering men to dress the line.

The White Shields took up the cry first, and in a heartbeat, all discipline was forgotten. ‘The elephants run!’ men shouted, and the front ranks, the men who would have had to face the brutes first, all but danced.

Philokles roared for silence. Ptolemy appeared from the right and rode down the front rank. ‘Look at that, boys!’ he called. ‘Every man of you owes our light troops a cup of the best! By Herakles!’ Ptolemy halted in the centre of the White Shields. He seemed to be addressing the whole line. ‘Ours to win, boys! Right here! Right now! Remember who you are!’

The White Shields roared, and so did the Phalanx of Aegypt, but Satyrus thought that the other cheers were muted. He hoped it was just his fears.

Philokles reached past Namastis. ‘Don’t point,’ he said. ‘It’s not all good.’

Over to the left, the cavalry fight wasn’t going well for anyone – but suddenly, in a flaw in the battle haze, the whole line of the phalanx could see forty more elephants waiting.

‘Ares,’ Satyrus cursed. His heart sank. Again. So he made himself turn his head. ‘Drink water,’ he yelled.

Philokles was nodding. ‘We have to break the phalanx in front of us before Demetrios throws those elephants into us,’ he said. ‘That just became the battle.’ He drank and spat. ‘When I fall, you take command. ’