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The fear felt like an icy fist gripped around the young soldier's heart.

The Sarissa was heavy in his hands.

He could barely keep the long shaft from drooping down to hit the men in the ranks ahead of him.

His helmet kept slipping down over his eyes.

It had belonged to his uncle and didn't fit him well, but his father insisted it would keep him safe.

The teenager didn't say the obvious thing that his uncle had died wearing that helmet when a javelin

punched through his chest, but his father would have rewarded him with a cuff on the side of his

head for his insolence. Still, he supposed it did make him feel safer, though safer was a relative

concept in the midst of this madness.

So too did his father's presence next to him in the phalanx.

He could see him striding forward as if this were a walk down a bucolic road, barely feeling the weight of his weapons and armor.

None of the terror that so nearly paralyzed the young soldier was visible on his face, what little of it the

teenager could see under the brim and around the cheekpieces of his helmet. Beyond the ranks of

the pikemen that surrounded him, the soldier saw nothing, the larger battlefield. He can hear it, though,

muffled individual cries nearby, a larger but more distant wave of mixed voices and clashing metal, and a strange

trumpeting like a horn that occasionally pierced the wall of noise. A great crash and a fresh wave

of screams and shouts rose ahead. The phalanx stopped moving forward. Through the swirling

dust driven into the air by thousands of pounding feet, the young soldier

could just make out the mass of another phalanx ahead pointed directly at them. He briefly

wondered whether there were others, like him, experiencing their first battle in the opposing

...