Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER NINETEEN





Jason had witnessed the Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople. He had seen the ghastly bloodbaths of the Thirty Years’ War. He was no stranger to the brutal madness of battle waged with weapons driven by human muscle at face-to-face range amid the stench of sweat and blood and shit. But none of that had really prepared him for the crashing impact of a running phalanx.

In all the other low-tech clashes he had experienced, there had always been a last second instinctive flinching, an avoidance of an actual full-tilt collision. But hoplites were trained to smash straight in, rocking the opposing phalanx back and hopefully opening up tears in its shield-line, after which the battle would cease to be a battle and become a slaughter. The result of such a collision was one for which Jason doubted his generalized expertise in low-technology combat would have prepared him: a thunderclap of din and violence as the two phalanxes came together, the pressure of the rear ranks forcing the front rank ever forward into a nightmarish thunderclap of shields bashed against shields, of thousands of splintering spears.

But not this time. The front rank of the Persian army was simply pulverized as the thrusting spears went through wicker shields and quilted cloth and occasional armor of loosely hanging metal scales to punch into bodies. The phalanx ground on, trampling the shield palisade and seeking out the even less well-protected archers.

Jason drove his spear into the midriff of a Persian, looking into the man’s terrified eyes and smelling his shit as the spearhead ripped through flesh, muscle, and guts before coming up against the spine. Yanking the spear out of the squalling Persian, he came to a realization that was simultaneously dawning on the Greeks all up and down the line: their spears weren’t breaking. This time they weren’t up against another phalanx. There were no hardwood shields and bronze breastplates for the spears to break against. A rectangular Persian wicker shield, made by threading sticks through a wet framework of leather, might as well not have been there when a hoplite thrust his iron-headed ash spear through it. So the spear could be used again . . . and again . . . and again.

The front ranks pushed on. Now the unbroken spears were being used overhand, for stabbing. Jason felt his sandaled feet almost slip in blood and entrails, and heard a scream as he stepped on a wounded Persian. He reversed the spear and slammed the butt-spike down into the terrified face, through the eye-socket into the brain, and jerked it out jellied and bloodied. He couldn’t let himself think about it. But the next time he stepped on a screaming man he moved on, and heard the scream abruptly cease behind him. One of the men in the rear ranks must have brought his spear’s butt-spike down.

In the midst of the crushing press of armored men, forging ahead through a welter of gore and a din of endless screams, Jason could see nothing of what was happening elsewhere on the field. He could only advance, thrusting again and again, through the abattoir that was the battlefield of Marathon. But he knew that the Greek flanks, eight ranks deep and facing second-rate troops, were advancing more rapidly than they were here in the center, where a formation only four deep faced a massive concentration of Persians and Saka. Soon the enemy flanks would give way entirely and flee in howling panic, seeking the safety of their ships. The Greek flanks would follow . . . but only for a hundred yards or so.

This, Jason knew, would be the crucial moment. And it would disprove what a small but persistent school of revisionists had been claiming ever since around the turn of the twenty-first century: that the Athenians had fought Marathon as a disorganized mob. None of those revisionist historians, Mondrago had remarked archly, had ever commanded infantry in combat. If they had, they might have spared themselves the embarrassment of making such a silly assertion, for they would have known that no disorganized mob could possibly do what the Greek flanks were about to do. First of all, they would halt their pursuit of a routed enemy on a trumpet-signal, leaving the light troops, or thetes, to harry the Persians along. And then they would pivot their formations ninety degrees, facing inward toward the center from left and right.

Even as Jason was thinking about it, he realized that their own advance in the center had halted, as the massive Persian numbers began to tell. He even had a split second to wonder at the courage of the Persian and Saka elite troops they faced here, for they were pushing back against the terrifying, spear-jabbing front line of the phalanx, forcing it back by the sheer weight of their mass of human flesh. The tide began to turn against the Athenian center.

Time lost its meaning. The sun was rising in the sky, and in the midst of heat and exhaustion and thirst the men of the Leontis and Antiochis tribes fought on, giving ground stubbornly, their thin line bending back but not breaking. From behind, their tribes’ thetes, including Mondrago, kept up a supporting rain of javelins and sling-stones. They could do so over the heads of the hoplites because the withdrawal was now slightly uphill.

Jason’s spear had finally broken, and the stump of it had been knocked out of his hand before he could reverse it and use the butt-spike. He frantically drew his short sword as the crush of enemy troops, sensing victory, pressed the Greek center further back. Now the Athenians were backing up into the wooded terrain in front of and to the right of their camp. That terrain had been their friend over the past days, screening their right flank from the Persian cavalry; now it turned traitor, causing the phalanx to begin to lose its cohesion. Now it was individual fighting, more a brawl than a battle, and the awkward hoplon, intended as an interlocking component of the phalanx rather than an individual defense, was almost more hindrance than help.

Jason saw a huge Saka—instantly recognizable as such by the distinctive pointed hat they wore—break free of the press and turn toward him, swinging his battle-axe in a powerful downward cut. Jason managed to raise his heavy shield in time to block it, but the hard-driven axe, striking off-center, knocked the hoplon aside. With a roar, the Saka recovered and brought his axe around for a second blow before Jason could get the sixteen-pound shield back in line. Jason raised his sword to parry the cut, deflecting the axe’s arc, but it struck his helmet a glancing blow that caused stars to explode in his eyes. He instinctively whipped the sword around and drove it into the Saka’s midriff, a vicious twisting thrust that brought a rope of entrails out with it when he withdrew the blade.

As the Saka sank, groaning, to the ground, Jason looked around him, cursing the helmet’s limited field of vision. To his left, he saw Callicles, using the butt-spiked stump of his broken spear to fend off an akenake-wielding Persian. But exhaustion was finally beginning to tell, and the old hoplite was slowing. With a visible effort, he raised his shield to counter what turned out to be a feint. The Persian rushed in under it and brought his short sword upward, driving into Callicles’ groin. Callicles shrieked. The Persian heaved the akenake out and stabbed again.

Jason lunged, swinging his hoplon around like a weapon. Its edge caught the Persian on the back of the neck, smashing his face into Callicles’ shield, crushing his nose and breaking his teeth. Before the Persian could recover from the stunning impact and pain, Jason raised his sword and chopped down where neck met shoulder. Blood sprayed. The Persian and Callicles collapsed together, their blood mingling. It was all the same color.

At that moment, Jason became aware of a sea-change in the battle. He must, he thought, not have heard the second trumpet call. For now the Persian center, so exultant mere minutes ago, was dissolving in consternation. A deafening cacophony of shouts and clashing weapons and armor to left and right told Jason why. The victorious Greek flanks, having wheeled inward in a way impossible for any but veteran troops well-briefed on a prearranged plan, were crunching into the Persian center, which was now boxed in on three sides. The Leontis and Antiochis men of the Greek center were now advancing again as the screaming Persians and Saka fled for their lives in the only direction left open to them, having had their fill of the horror, the sheer awfulness, of hoplite warfare. But as always in warfare at this technological level, running for one’s life was precisely the wrong thing to do, for fleeing men could not protect themselves. The Athenians of the center went in pursuit, cutting them down in the ever-shrinking killing ground as the flanks pressed in from the sides. Jason was left behind.

He sank to his knees, feeling in his left temple the pressure from a dent the Saka’s axe stroke had made in his helmet. He laid down his sword and shield, pulled the helmet off, threw it away, and took great gulping breaths now that he was free of its stifling confines. He also looked around, relishing the full field of vision. The slope was littered with the dead and dying, a wrack left behind as the roaring tide of battle receded. Otherwise, he was alone.

Now’s my chance to get away, go up this hill to the aircar, get back to Athens and retrieve Chantal’s TRD from Themistocles’ house—assuming that Franco and his merry men haven’t already beaten us to it, he told himself. First, I have to find Alexandre. He forced his brain, still numb from what he had just experienced, to start forming the mental command that would bring up a map of the locality complete with TRD locations. . . .

At that moment, he saw out of the corner of his eye that he wasn’t alone after all. A hoplite, still fully armed and equipped, was coming toward him at a trot, his face hidden by one of the crested Corinthian helmets.

Who is that? he wondered, looking at the inhuman facelessness of the Corinthian helmet. And what’s he in such a hurry for?

“Rejoice!” he called out, one fifth-century b.c. Greek to another.

Instead of replying, the hoplite brought his spear up overhand and stabbed with it. For some infinitesimal fraction of a second, Jason clearly saw the spearpoint coming toward his unprotected face.

Jason’s paralysis broke. He scooped up his shield and, with no time to get his arm through the porpax arm-grip, he awkwardly grabbed the shield by the hand-grip and the left edge and shoved it up and out as he surged to his feet.

The iron point, driven by all the strength of his onrushing assailant, punched through the shield’s thin bronze covering and the hardwood beneath, protruding from the inner surface inches from Jason’s arm. Jason twisted the shield sharply to the side, and the spear-shaft broke. Before the attacker could reverse it and use the butt-spike, Jason shoved the shield forward against him, pushing with his entire weight, bowling the man over. Taking advantage of the momentary respite, he scrambled backwards and retrieved the sword he had laid on the ground. At the same time, he frantically tried, using his left arm alone, to grip his shield properly. Clumsy and burdensome as the sixteen-pound hoplon was, it was all he had.

But the man had gotten to his feet with remarkable speed for one wearing hoplite armor, and was carrying his shield very easily—he must, Jason thought, be very strong, to be able to use the hoplon for personal defense. He swung the remainder of his spear-shaft almost like a mace and struck the rim of Jason’s shield just as Jason was still trying to correct his grip, sending it flying. The spear-shaft also went flying, and the attacker whipped out his sword and rushed in. Jason knew himself for a dead man, for he stood no chance in a sword fight, shieldless and helmetless.

Only . . . at least I can see, without that damned helmet!

It was the only card he had to play. He lunged forward, evading the sword-slash and moving into the attacker’s right-hand blind zone.

Even with these short blades, it was too close for swordplay. But taking advantage of his instant of invisibility, Jason got his right arm under the attacker’s from behind and, holding both their sword-arms locked into temporary uselessness, used his free left hand to grab the man’s helmet by its crest and wrench it off.

At appreciably the same instant, the attacker brought his clumsy shield sharply back, smashing its rim into Jason’s left rib cage. The breastplate prevented it from breaking any ribs, but the impact caused Jason to lose his grip and the man flung him away. He landed supine, and a sandaled foot came painfully down on his right wrist, pinning his sword-arm to the ground.

Jason had time to look up into his assailant’s face. It was one of the unpleasantly similar faces of Franco’s gene-enhanced underlings. Jason recognized him as Landry’s killer. The man raised his sword. . . .

There was an odd and unpleasant sound, which seemed compounded of those usually characterized as whack and crunch. The Transhumanist’s face went abruptly expressionless, and blood began to seep from a small round hole in the exact center of his forehead. His raised sword fell to the ground, and he followed it there with a clang of armor as his legs crumpled.

Jason looked behind him. Mondrago held the sling that had sent its little lead pellet into the Transhumanist’s brain.

“You really do know how to use that thing,” Jason remarked, inadequately.

“You helped by getting his helmet off,” Mondrago grinned, helping Jason to his feet. He glanced at the body. “So I suppose his job was to provide us with an ‘in-period death.’”

For a moment they stood and looked to the northeast over the plain of Marathon, where the battle was roaring along toward the Persian ships. Jason knew what was happening up there. Datis, the Persian commander, had managed to get enough of a new line formed to hold the Greek light troops. But when the re-formed phalanx—moving slowly this time, for there were limits to the endurance even of hoplites—arrived, a final, desperate battle would rage. The Persians would hold the narrow beach long enough for all but seven of their ships to get away. But many of them would be driven into the great marsh behind their camp, and the sixty-four hundred Persian dead that would be counted after the battle didn’t even count the ones drowned there.

Still, the surviving Persians, including the dread cavalry that had embarked before the battle, would be at sea, and the way around Cape Sunium, to Phalerum and undefended Athens, lay open to them. And at the same moment that horrifying realization dawned on the Greeks, they would see a signal, like the sun reflected from a polished shield, flash atop Mount Pentelikon—surely the work of the traitors whom everyone feared lurked amid Athens’ labyrinthine political factions.

So the weary victors would send a runner to assure the city that the victory had been won. And then they would set out for Athens, leaving the Antiochis tribe to guard the captured loot of the Persian camp. (Apparently only Aristides “the Just” was trusted with that particular assignment, and Jason had to admit that he himself wouldn’t necessarily have trusted Themistocles with it.) These men who had just fought a battle would march, in full armor, the twenty-six miles back to Athens, starting at ten in the morning and arriving at Phalerum by late afternoon, barely in time. And the Persian fleet would sail away.

And as a result of all the sickening butchery on this plain Western civilization would live, to one day give humankind—for the first time—an economic system that allowed for at least the possibility of prosperity, a legal system that allowed for at least the possibility of justice, and a governmental system that allowed for at least the possibility of individual liberty . . . including the liberty of free scientific inquiry that would lead to the stars.

Rutherford wanted us to find out if there’s any truth to the tradition that the runner is none other than Pheidippides, and that he drops dead after delivering his message, Jason recalled, or if historians have been right to ridicule it . . . just as they’ve ridiculed the idea of the hoplites running to the attack. He also wanted us to find out the truth about the “shield signal” from Mount Pentelikon, because the mystery of that was never solved.

Too bad, Kyle. We don’t exactly have time for any of that at the moment.

“Come on,” he told Mondrago as he discarded his breastplate and greaves and tried to discard his exhaustion with them. “Let’s go. The aircar is concealed about halfway up here on Mount Agriliki. We’ll take it to Athens and—maybe—make it to Themistocles’ house and get that jar containing Chantal’s TRD before Franco does.”

They ascended the wooded slope behind the Greek camp, the sounds of shouts and screams and clashing weapons diminishing as the battle moved on. Jason concentrated on retracing his steps to the clearing. As a result, he almost missed the flicker of motion among the shadow-dappled underbrush.

“What?” Mondrago exclaimed, and bounded toward the barely-glimpsed movement. A figure broke cover and skittered frantically away.

It was Pan.