Lampsakos

“Can you smell that?” Smiler asked, making a show of pointing his nose into the wind.

To emphasise his words, he stopped in his tracks, causing the donkey he had been leading to do the same. Spreading his arms, he inhaled deeply.

“Smell what?” Thrax asked, unconsciously clicking his tongue to spur on Phaia, their unit’s trusty asinine beast of burden.

“The sea, of course,” Zenia put in, shaking her head and muttering something Thrax couldn’t quite catch, but what obviously must have been some kind of invective in Persian.

“She’s right, Thracian. It’s the sea!” Smiler continued. “Not that you Thracian horsemen of the plains would be able to recognise the smell of course. But us Greeks, well, to us the sea is second nature, I tell you!”

At this, Thrax merely rolled his eyes in disgust. He decided not to remind his friend that he had in fact grown up on a peninsula never more than a couple of hours’ ride from the sea, while Smiler had spent most of his life somewhere in an Arkadian village, before he had ever set eyes upon an expanse of water larger than a mountain lake. What stung most, however, was the remark about the ‘Thracian horseman’. Immediately after the incident with the Persian scout, Thrax had been posted back with the Arkadians. Meaning of course, that instead of riding with Oros’ men, he had walked here all the way from Bithynia.

“Ah… the sea…” Smiler said, sighing in Zenia’s direction, who instantly pulled a face. “This was where us Greeks were always meant to…”

“Some of the Greeks maybe, lad, but not an Arkadian grunt like you!” Neodamos the purser interrupted, giving Smiler a slap to the back of the head. “And now bloody get a move on, you’re holding everybody up!” he added, marching past the three and shaking his head.

“Some people simply fail to appreciate…” Smiler began, but Thrax simply shook his head and trudged on, ignoring whatever his friend had meant to say.

***

It had taken a month for the army to reach Lampsakos. In that time, the wintery Anatolian plateau had given way to the plain of the Troad, where spring had already begun. Belts were tighter after the strain of making their way through Phrygia as fast as possible and packs were lighter as a substantial amount of the booty taken had been converted into food. Not only had everyone suffered from the strain of more than three months of relentless marching and campaigning, but so had the army as a whole: Of the over five thousand men following Derkylidas east only four thousand five hundred had returned back west.

The Odrysian scouts had parted ways with the Greeks upon entering the satrapy of Farnabah, evidently not wishing to become part of the conflict between Persia and Sparta. On the other hand, the army had been c