Christian Cameron - Funeral Games

T he elephants came on undaunted by the long lines of pikemen – forty elephants against eight thousand men. Satyrus ran back down the front rank to his own men. Sandwiched in the centre of the line, his men had nowhere to go to escape the beasts. He knew what Alexander’s phalanxes had done against elephants.

‘Drop files! Listen, Aegypt! I’m going to count off the front rank by five files. I want those files to make a Spartan march – around to the rear and then halt. Make lanes through the phalanx!’ Some men, like Xeno and Abraham, looked as if they understood, while others, like Dionysius, looked blank. Satyrus began to run down the rank. ‘One, two, three – four, five! All of you – countermarch to the rear! Go!’

The men he touched – most of them he tagged by hitting their shields quite hard with his butt-spike to make sure they knew they were the ones he meant – turned and began to force their way back between the files – and their file-followers followed them, pushing and shoving where they had to, turning their shields side-on to the ranks to make space. It was ugly – it looked as if his whole phalanx had collapsed. Satyrus turned and looked back at the elephants, who were close.

‘Herakles, stand by me,’ Satyrus said aloud. ‘Front rank! File-leaders, look to your spacing! Make it solid!’ He used his spear as a baton, dressing the front rank.

Xeno shook his helmeted head so that his plume bobbed up and down. ‘We have holes in our ranks!’

‘The beasts will go down the lanes!’ Satyrus shouted. ‘Then we attack them!’

He turned back to look at the elephants. Half a stade.

‘Stand fast, Alexandria! When I shout the name of Herakles, every man turn towards the nearest elephant and attack! Kill the riders!’ He spared a glance for the White Shields, who were carrying out the same manoeuvre, making lanes, in a much more professional manner.

The elephants were so large that they filled the horizon, so close that he could see their tiny eyes, so loud that their footsteps caused the earth to tremble. Dust rose behind them like smoke from the forge of Hephaistos. Satyrus found that his hands were shaking on his spear haft.

The elephants sped up, their heavy bodies moving with grace, their massive feet crashing more rapidly against the earth, and Satyrus was frozen for a moment, and then he raced for his place in the front rank, knees soft as wet bread. He made himself stand straight, turned and faced the charge of the monsters. The idea of making lanes in his spear block seemed beyond absurd.

All those years ago, Tavi had said that the beasts wouldn’t fight without a man on their back. Satyrus gripped that idea the way a drowning man grips a floating spar.

‘Spears – down! ’ someone bellowed. At a remove, he realized that he had shouted the order. His body was running on its own.

The taxeis responded like one man, the spears flashing as the ranks lifted their weapons and put them in position – as if the mass of an elephant wouldn’t snap the shafts like kindling.

Just beyond the reach of his spear, he saw the nearest behemoth turn slightly and race into the opening between Abraham’s file and Xeno’s, two pike-lengths away. The beast was already slowing, but it ran into the lane as if the driver had given the order.

Satyrus couldn’t see any of the other beasts, but he could see the vermilion paint on the flank of the beast that had gone by and smell its strange stink. He could all but hear Philokles telling him that sometimes the leader had to show the way.

He shivered with fear, and filled his lungs, and even over the stink of the great monsters he smelled the wet-cat smell of the god at his shoulder. ‘Herakles!’ he trumpeted. He raised his spear and turned, stepping out of the ranks – suicide in an infantry fight, but now he was two files away from the elephant, and fear or no fear, this was something he had to lead.

He raced across the empty ground of the front and turned down the alley of the missing files, coming up on the beast from behind, its ridiculous tail swaying as it walked. The men on its back were terrified – their terror steadied him – both were thrusting pikes down at the Aegyptian phalangites, most of whom thrust back hesitantly.

‘Herakles!’ Satyrus called. He was within reach of the thing’s leg. His spear was plenty long enough. He ran alongside the beast for three paces, pivoted on his left foot and punched up with his spear, right into the mahout’s side. The man turned, too late, and his scream was lost in the thunder of the elephants and the phalanx roared as he fell from his perch.

The beast stopped. It made a sound – a horrible sound, the same sound that Satyrus would have liked to have made when he saw the blood pouring out of Philokles, rage and sorrow and mourning compounded.

Abraham’s spear plucked the Macedonian pikeman from the beast’s back and the man fell into the phalanx, screaming as he died on a dozen spears. The Aegyptian taxeis turned into a mob tearing at the men on the elephants, and in some palaces the beasts rioted, killing a dozen men in a few seconds. One animal threw an Alexandrian Jew so high in the air that his fall injured as many men as the elephant’s rage had. Another animal pinned a man under one huge foot and used her trunk to pull the dead man apart, but everywhere the crews were being butchered at close quarters. The files who had retreated to form the gaps came charging back down the alleys without orders, without any intention but to join their comrades and kill, and even the horrors of the death wreaked by the monsters couldn’t slow the inevitable conclusion as a thousand men fought ten elephants.

The elephant closest to Satyrus gave another hideous cry and then slumped, almost unmoving.

All around him, the sounds of fighting died away. Most of the elephants had broken free of the phalanx, and now, their crews gone, they ran away over the plain, but three of the elephants were trapped in the press of bodies and they simply stood, waiting for their fates.

Abraham caught at Satyrus’s spear arm as he prepared to kill the beast. ‘Stop!’

Satyrus turned his helmeted head. ‘What?’

‘Stop!’ Abraham said. He pulled his helmet off, his long hair falling in a sweat-caked mass. ‘They’re ours! We’ve captured them!’

In seconds his cry was taken up, and as long as Satyrus lived, he would remember that cry, and the thousands of Alexandrian hands reaching out, not to kill, but just to touch the great beasts.

‘The elephants are ours!’

The Exiles went through the crowds at the gate like a scythe through the stalks of wheat on an autumn day when the wheat is dry and the stalks are brittle. Then they passed under the great gate of the camp and into the narrow streets behind the gate.

Melitta followed Diodorus as they entered the town. There was no real defence, just panicked men running from horsemen who seldom stopped to cut them down. Then they were through the town and into the tented camp, and Melitta could see the enemy horsemen and many of the infantry already streaming away from the back of the camp – a complete rout, the enemy already abandoning their own camp, their wives, their treasure.

‘Follow me!’ Diodorus roared. He pointed his charger’s head at the complex of tents in the centre, like a palace built of canvas, with a magnificent central structure of Tyrian purple. ‘Exiles, follow me!’

Melitta had been all but born to the saddle but she still found Diodorus difficult to follow. He rode over obstacles, jumping tent ropes like a centaur, his officer’s cloak streaming away behind him. Melitta rode around obstacles that Diodorus jumped, but she stayed with him, and Crax and Eumenes and both of their troops followed, their faded blue cloaks marking them as friends.