When the Medes came, their weapons glinting in the sun that had burned off the sea mist, the Attolians brought their crossbows to bear, firing down with accuracy too deadly to ignore.

The army was traveling only ten abreast and cheek by jowl on the narrow roadbed. At a shouted command, a block moved forward and reordered itself as it came, shaping into a phalanx of twenty by twenty and moving up the hill at top speed. The Attolians’ fire slowed them not at all.

The Attolians on the hill formed into their own blocks and charged down. That did slow the first of the Medes, but as more phalanxes came up, they pressed forward. I was on the upper hill, screened by takima bushes, but I could see very well. The noise was overwhelming. I didn’t remember noise like this at the battle near Brimedius. The hammering sounds of weapons ran together and were so loud that very soon, instead of hearing it, I felt I could hear nothing at all.

The Attolians couldn’t hold the hillside. Step by step they were forced back. Suddenly, they broke ranks and retreated. The Medes followed, lured out of their phalanxes, their mouths open in inaudible shouting.

They topped the hill, and their expressions changed. Too late they looked for their side men, but their side men were out of reach. On my command, the Eddisians charged from above. Their momentum carried them through the disordered enemy and across the brow of the lower hill. The weakened Mede phalanxes disintegrated, like trees losing leaves in a high wind. The Eddisians continued on down the hill toward the army below, still in its tight marching formation.

All the ten thousand men of the Mede fighting force were trapped behind their own front line. Those in the frontline troops, with the enemy bearing down on them, recoiled. The front line pushed back into its own pikemen, who couldn’t stop the men behind them, who were pushing forward.

I should be humble, but I’m not. I was delighted. Everything was working just as I’d hoped. I stood on the hillside and cheered. The men around me shouted with me. We watched the confusion traveling back up the line of the Mede army like the contractions of an earthworm, while the Eddisians continued to hack at the front line. Then we scrambled and slid down the hill to the road and hurried on toward Oneia.

We could have stayed and replaced the Eddisians in the battle line as they fought to the last, but we would have been putting ourselves in the same position as the Medes: most of our men in back with just a few at the head of the line to fight. With both armies limited by the narrow roadway, the Medes would soon prevail.

Instead we hurried away. Once the road was clear, the Eddisians would turn and follow us at a run. The curves of the road were all that would protect them from the Mede fire until they reached the open ground around Oneia, where we would be waiting to give them cover. We would have the advantage of space to spread out and fight. The Medes would still be in the roadway, and as they issued from it a few at a time, we would take them. Sooner or later the great pressure of men would overwhelm us. That would be the time for each man to kill as many as he could before he died.

I ran, with my father just behind me. I slowed, but he didn’t move up, and I realized he was shielding me. My armor plate would stop an arrow or a bullet at that range, but not a crossbow quarrel. There weren’t any crossbow quarrels, however, or bullets, and all it did was slow me down. I was staggering by the time I heard the shouting ahead of us, and the clanging of metal against metal. My father suddenly passed me and then slowed and looked backward, clearly undecided which enemy to face.

Gasping, I tugged on his shoulder and tried to catch enough breath to reassure him. The men around us slowed, but I waved them forward and staggered on. It wasn’t shouting, it was cheering, I was almost certain. We came around the last curve in the road, and we saw them: rank after rank of men in the blue and gold of Attolia waiting for us, banging their weapons and yelling.

“Attolis,” I gasped to my father. “He sent more men.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

EARLIER in the day, the magus had slowed the Medes on the coast road as they tried to fight their way from the port to Elisa, so that nearly a third of their column was still in the Elisa Valley and not yet on the road down to Oneia when the armies of my loyalist barons came over the hills from the hinterlands. The loyalists had been traveling all night by torchlight and went directly to battle without a rest.

Down in Oneia, the head of the Mede army was crushed with the help of the fresh Attolian troops. The Attolians had arrived only the day before and during the previous night, transferring in small boatloads to the tiny beach below Oneia. If the weather had not been calm, they couldn’t have done it and would have been sitting offshore as we died.

As it happened, the Medes were forced by the pressure of men coming down behind them along the roadway and out into the open to face a coordinated attack where their greater numbers never benefited them. It was madness for their general to commit all his forces on such a road, and I can only think that he fatally underestimated me. Perhaps he, too, had been listening to the Mede ambassador in Attolia.

When the Medes finally organized their retreat, we followed them up toward Elisa. I’d sent men around to reach our ambush site from behind to cover the hillside with their fire, so that the Medes could not treat us as we had treated them.

I learned afterward that in the Elisa Valley the Medes had tried to break away and drive for the capital road, only to find that pass blocked by Hanaktos’s army. Hanaktia is a woman of iron and had taken me at my word when I said that there would be a remedy for all transgressions. She had left the safety of Elisa and ridden herself to her late husband’s soldiers to rally them to fight against the Medes.

I am afraid that the side effect of all this will be a burnishing of our reputation for two-faced deal making. It is unflattering, but the Medes will think twice before making any bargains with future rebels if they believe we are all unreliable allies.

Unable to clear a path of retreat toward the capital, the Medes were forced to fight their way back across the valley and down the road to the port at Tas-Elisa. They were harried at every step and arrived in complete darkness. Thanks to the magus’s work with the townspeople, before the Medes even arrived, the soldiers found themselves locked out of the walled town.

The Mede ships in the harbor had cannons to provide covering fire. Under that and the small-arms fire from the town walls, the few thousand Medes who were left scrambled into shoreboats and were hauled to their ships. My army settled into the tents that had been provided for the Medes, ate their provisions, and enjoyed their wine, while the townspeople sensibly stayed inside their closed walls and refused to let anyone in, including me. Being turned away was a surprise, but I was too relieved by the entire course of the day to care. I rode up to Elisa in the dark, with the sounds of victory slowly fading into the song of nightbirds and insects, and fell into my own kingly bed at dawn.

The bodies were gathered over the next few days, stripped, and then burned. The weapons were collected in a makeshift armory in Tas-Elisa. I meant to restore the truce at Elisa as quickly as possible, so I stored no weapons there. I will pay a whopping fine to the treasury to assuage the outrage of the priests. Though I have escaped any lightning strikes of the gods, I regret bringing war to the place of festivals, and Elisa must have its truce if Sounis is to elect any kings in the future.