Salamis by Christian Cameron

are above such petty things. I know you are angry. I am angry too. My brother-in-law – his head cut off, his body maimed by cowards – lies in the sand at Thermopylae, exposed by the Persians like a criminal. I am angry – but for my part, I wouldn’t do that to a dog.’
    Well – something like that. Thank the gods I’d had time to think about it. And I’d already decided I wouldn’t allow such shit before I was exhausted and angry and lost Teucer’s son.
    I still blame myself for that. We didn’t need to fight on the road at all – just run. Not one of my better days. And you’ll note that when I stopped at the tomb to try and save Idomeneus, I wrecked the ambush’s chance of a real victory.
    Well, I can’t regret that.
    But what I’m getting at in this story is that one of the worst parts of leading men in war – and women, too – is that you make mistakes, people die or are maimed, and then you have to go right on leading them. You want to lie down and sleep, or murder some prisoners, or perhaps just take your own life in shame – and I have known all these moments, friends. The black despair after combat – the abyss, some of us called it then.
    But they are all looking at you, waiting for you to give an order, when all you really want to do is cry. Or die.
    More wine, here.
    Where was I?
    Ah – my huddle – Moire and Hipponax and Hector. I told them my plan in some detail. I sent Hector with the fastest runners to go up the trail ten stades and set an ambush. I told Hipponax that he’d be next and that, no matter what happened, he’d be taking the next group of oarsmen another ten stades, to the shoulder of the mountain overlooking Eleutherae and there he’d set another ambush. And that the two of them, each with twenty men, would play leapfrog with the column.
    This is how you retreat – with a sting in the tail. Men pursuing quickly become careless. There is some part of the human animal that believes that running forward is winning and running backwards is losing, and perhaps this is even true, but in a well-conducted retreat you can use this against your enemy. I learned all this from Aristides, and some more of it from Brasidas.
    Oh, how I missed him, too. I felt a fool for leaving him at the ships.
    At any rate, as soon as our plans were made, Hector chose his men and led them off at a run. We loaded the last of the grain on the pack animals.
    I got my own, lighter, aspis off my pack mule, replaced its weight with grain, and placed myself at the very back of the column with my picked men. My little mare was going to have an easy time of it for a few hours.
    I gave the boys a ten-minute head start and then we marched.
    All that time – maybe an hour we were at the shrine, with the sun getting higher in the sky – I worried that the Saka would come straight back at us. If they had, we’d have made a fight, but it would have been ugly.
    Once we were moving, though, we were in better shape. A moving column funnels enemy action to the back. It is hard even for cavalry to surround marching infantry, in bad ground. Out on the steppes or on the sands of some open desert I suppose it would be terrible for the hoplites, but in the woods, we could walk almost as fast as they, when we were on a road and they had to infiltrate through the big old trees and rocks of Cithaeron’s lower slopes.
    Be that as it may, we didn’t see a man or horse for two hours. We passed through our first ambush and they joined our column, then Hipponax led his men away at a run to form the next one. Tired oarsmen being forced to run half the day in their looted panoplies glared at me with death in their eyes, but I was used to making them row all day and I smiled and shouted words of encouragement, as the Spartans do – ‘Well run, Empedocles! You look like a god, Onisandros!’ – and we continued. When the sun was high in the sky we took an hour’s rest, with skope on all the high points, watching for the enemy.