"Bova, Ben - Orion 04 - Orion and the Conquerer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

I looked in the direction he was staring. A troop of men in identical polished armor and helmets of gleaming bronze was forming up in well-ordered ranks under the flinty eyes of a trio of officers. Their breastplates were molded to look like a well-muscled torso; their helmets were plumed with horsehair dyed red. They seemed to sparkle in the sun.
"Argives," said Nikkos. "Fresh meat from the Peloponnesos."
"More mercenaries?" I asked.
He nodded and spat into the dusty ground. "Look at 'em. All prettied up in their fine bright armor. I bet they've never done anything more than parade around and tell tall tales. They must think they can get the Perinthians to swoon at the sight of 'em."
I had to laugh, especially when I looked down at my own battered armor, dented and scratched and caked with dust. But then I had to wonder: armor like that cost a great deal of money. Where did I get it? What other battles had I fought, to dent and scratch it so? Where was I from?
Philip and his generals seemed to understand full well that soldiers with little do to begin to rot from the inside. We were drilled every day, trained in the close-order formations of the phalanx until handling our sixteen-foot-long sarissas seemed as natural as using a soup spoon. The mercenaries loafed and laughed at us while we of the Macedonian phalanxes marched and wheeled and turned and charged at the bawling commands of our unit leaders.
It was dull, sweaty work; endless repetition. But I had seen how Philip's machine had ground up my mercenary phalanx like a meat chopper with ten thousand arms and one brain. I went through the drills without complaint and ignored the jeers of the mercenaries.
Most of the tribesmen served not as hoplites in a phalanx but as peltasts, archers or slingers or javelin throwers, light infantry that could skirmish against the heavier-armed phalanxes and dash away before the hoplites could close with them. The mercenaries were all hoplites, of course, heavy infantry.
"The country's full of mercenary troops," Nikkos told me. "Any poor boy who wants to make something of himself joins a mercenary troop and goes off soldiering. Every city in the land grows soldiers nowadays. Except Athens, of course."
"What do they grow in Athens?" I asked.
"Lawyers." And he spat again.
Some of the other men near us laughed. I let it pass.
The men fell to arguing over which city produced the best soldiers. Some felt that the Spartans were the bravest, but most agreed that Thebes had an even better reputation.
"Especially their Sacred Band," said one of the men.
"The Sacred Band aren't mercenaries," Nikkos pointed out. "They fight only for Thebes."
"And damned well, too."
"They're all lovers. Each man in the Sacred Band is part of a pair."
"The philosophers say that makes the best kind of soldier, a man who's fighting alongside his lover. They'll never let each other down."
"Fuck the philosophers. The Sacred Band's the best damned bunch of soldiers in the world."
"Better than us?"
"Better."
"We have a better general!"
"But they're not mercenaries. As long as we don't make war against Thebes we don't have to worry about them."
"There are plenty of Theban mercenaries, though. Even the Great King, over in Asia, hires mercenaries from Thebes."
"The Great King?" I asked.
Nikkos gave me a peculiar look. "Of Persia," he said. "Don't you know anything?"
I could only shake my head.
Nikkos did not trust the newly-arrived Argives. He kept calling them "pretty boys" who would be next to worthless in a real battle. For their part, the Argives swaggered through the camp as if they were each personally descended from Achilles, and laughed at our constant drilling.
"Why doesn't the king send them against the wall?" Nikkos grumbled. "Then we'd see what they're really made of."
But Philip apparently had no intention of attacking the city wall. The army sat outside and did little more than drillЧand fire a few missiles into the city each day. The Perinthians sat tight and cheered each time a ship sailed into their wall-protected harbor.
Our phalanx was camped next to the strutting Argives, and there was plenty of bad blood between us. It was natural, I suppose; if we were not allowed to fight the real enemy we fought each other. There were rows and fistfights almost every night. The officers on both sides sternly punished the men involved; Nikkos himself took ten lashes one morning while we were all made to stand at attention and watch. One of Philip's generals, Parmenio, threatened to stop our wine supply if we did not behave.
"We'll see how belligerent you are on water," he growled at us. I had heard that Parmenio was a wine lover, and he looked it: heavy and red-faced, with broken blood vessels splotching his cheeks and bulbous nose.
The Argives were punished by their own officers, of course, but it seemed to us that their punishments were much lighter than our own.
I tried to stay out of the squabbling. Without quite remembering the details I recalled how another army had been almost destroyed because of a quarrel between its leaders. Was that at Troy?
Then came the night that changed everything.
"Where is Troy?" I asked Nikkos that evening, as we reclined on our blankets in front of the dinner fire.
He furrowed his brow at me. "Who knows? Maybe it's only a story."
"No," said one of the other men. "It's on the other side of the Hellespont."
"It's still there? I thought it was burned to the ground."
"That's where it was."
"How do you know? If it ever existed it was so long agoЧ"
"In the time of heroes."
"Heroes?" I asked.
"Like Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon."
Odysseus. That name rang a bell in my mind. Was it he who gave me the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh?
"What do you horse thieves know about Agamemnon?" shouted one of the Argives, barely a stone's throw from our fire.
"He was one of the leaders of the Achaians at Troy," I answered.
"He was an Argive," said the mercenary, stepping into the light from our fire. "King of Mycenae. Not some shit-footed farmer from the hills like you bunch."
I got to my feet. The Argive was big, and wearing his muscled cuirass plus a short stabbing sword at his hip, but I was taller by half a head and wider across the shoulders.
"I am of the house of Odysseus," I said, half-dreaming. "I remember that."