Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

"Alexander of Macedon?" Ambrose was grinning from ear to ear. "What was his weakness? He conquered the world, so it could not have been an overwhelming one."

"On the contrary, Uncle Ambrose, it could have been— should have been—a fatal one."

My brother frowned as though insulted, then looked at me. I kept my face blank, feeling no need to admit that my ignorance was as great as his. Arthur, in the meantime, was looking from one to the other of us, and I would have sworn he was unaware that neither of us knew what he was talking about. Finally, Ambrose bowed to the inevitable.

"Well, then, I admit you have me. What weakness have you identified in Alexander of Macedon—apart from his cavalry?" He was being facetious, of course, but the boy shook his head.

"No. That was it."

"What are you saying?" Ambrose's expression was ludicrous. "That it was a weakness? His cavalry?"

"No, his Companions."

"His—?" Ambrose threw up his arms in exasperation and looked to me for support. For my part, feeling as bewildered as he was, I schooled my features into calmness and cleared my throat before saying anything else. Arthur looked at me, waiting to hear what I would say.

"Arthur ... The Companions ... there are some who would say ... " I was beginning to feel ridiculous, and I cleared my throat ferociously and began again. "Look, boy, I have no wish to argue with you, but the Companions are generally accepted, by those who know anything about them, as the greatest fighting force of the Ancient World. They were hand-chosen by their king, Philip of Macedon, and they trained with him and rode to battle with him at their own expense, providing all their own horses, armour, weaponry and equipment. Each was an individual champion, a warrior of renown and unimaginable value, and when King Philip died, a victim of assassination, they transferred their entire allegiance to his son, the young Alexander, and conquered the world under his leadership, long before Rome had begun to gain any power of her own. How could they be defined, by you or anyone, as a weakness?"

Arthur grimaced. "Only in error. You are correct, Uncle. I've made the same mistake I made before: inexactitude. But, if I may say it without being impertinent, so have you and Uncle Ambrose. What I said at first was that every great leader seems to carry the seeds of his own defeat with him. It is the idea of the seeds that is important. It was Alexander's Companions who carried the seeds."

"What seeds, Arthur?"

"Their primary weapon of attack, the sarissa."

"The sarissa?" I could feel Ambrose's blank amazement and utter incomprehension mirrored on my own countenance. "Forgive me, lad, but I have no idea what you mean. We have been trying to improve upon Alexander's sarissa, in Camulod, ever since we first began to train our soldiers to ride horses."

"I know you have, and Uncle Ambrose is still working with it. But the design has changed. The weapons that the Camulodian troopers use are not sarissas, and therefore they are not so dangerous. Besides, Uncle Ambrose has also developed the means of counterbalancing their threat, even if it were there."

I looked at Ambrose. "My felicitations on that. What did you do?"

Ambrose shook his head and gestured with his hand to Arthur, attracting his attention. When he had it, he stood up and moved close to the fire, speaking down to the boy. "Tell me, Arthur, where have you learned all this about the sarissa?"

"From the books written by Publius Varrus and Caius Britannicus. The books from the Armoury in Camulod. We brought them with us when we came here."

"I know you did, but I thought I had read all of them, and yet I have no recollection of anything being said, in any of the volumes I have read, about the sarissa being a thing of weakness, or even a seed of weakness, which means I have not read all of them."

"Well, no ... "

"What does that mean?"

The boy shrugged. "That was never said, exactly, in any of the books. It was something that occurred to me while I was reading, and I merely wondered at it, when first I noticed it. I didn't think of it as weakness until much later, about a year ago, when I was thinking about how the Empire collapsed, and the weakness within the system that led to that."

I moved to interrupt him, but Ambrose waved me to silence. "No, Caius, let him finish. This is important, I think. I can see that weakness, Arthur, the Imperial flaw, I mean, but not the Alexandrian one. How—exactly how— did you come to construe the sarissa as a fatal weakness? No one else ever has, to my knowledge. Have you, Cay?"

I merely shook my head. Arthur looked from one to the other of us again, his eyes wide, and then his face split in a wide grin, his lambent, gold-coloured eyes laughing in disbelief.

"You are making fun of me. You know the answer better than I do. That's how you found the solution."

"No, Arthur, I'm not laughing at you, and neither is Caius Merlyn. I cannot see the problem—how then could I have found the solution to it? Tell us, as simply as you can, what you noticed, what made you think of this. We do not know, so you must enlighten us."

"But—"

"No buts! Tell us, simply. Where are these seeds of defeat?"

"In the length of the weapon, and the techniques the Companions used in fighting with it." He stopped again, but neither of us spoke or sought to interrupt him further. "It was a great, long thing, six paces long, heavy and unwieldy. They carried it in their opening charge, the butt end over their shoulders, the metal point angled downwards against the infantry before them. They skewered the front ranks and left the sarissas in the bodies of the men they had killed ... " His voice faltered. "Is that not so?"

"Aye, it is," Ambrose said, quietly. "And a terrifying sight they must have been, charging down upon a line of men on foot. A solid wall of men on heavy horses, fronted by that line of downward angled spears. Little wonder they were invincible."

"But think of it, Uncle! Great, heavy spears, each one six paces long. What would have happened had one man, one clever, brave, far-seeing enemy, ever thought to pick up those abandoned spears, or to make similar spears, and arm his foot soldiers with them, arranging the men on foot into a wall as well? Think of that! A wall of warriors, shoulder to shoulder, using those sarissas reversed, so that their butts rested firm on the ground and their points reared upward and out, towards the charging horsemen?"

The silence that followed that amazing insight stretched for a long, long time as Ambrose and I sat stunned, visualizing what the boy had described—a realization that had escaped the eyes of all the world for seven centuries. Alexander's cavalry had won him the world, but young Arthur Pendragon, had he lived at that time, could have devised the great Macedonian conqueror's downfall.

Faced with disciplined troops, using their own weapon against them, Alexander's cavalry would have been impotent and ruined. Here was an insight that had evaded every celebrated commentator down the ages, and it had been deduced, without assistance, by one small boy, who sat silent now, waiting timidly for his two towering uncles to ridicule his proposition.

I sat staring into the fire for so long that my eyes teared, but eventually Ambrose made his way to the table that held the ewers of beer and mead. There, deep in thought, he filled a cup for himself before turning back to look at the boy, cradling the cup, his drink untasted.

"We use Alexander's techniques in Camulod."

"Aye, Uncle, we do, but not the sarissa. Our spears are shorter—suited to a man on horseback, but not long enough to be used against him in the fashion I described by a man on foot."

"Aye, but you have put the idea into words now, lad, and once that's done, no matter how quietly it may be done, words have a way of spreading. You said I found the solution. If I have, I've done it blindly. What is it?"