Force of Kings

Part III

‘And he escaped?’ Demetrios asked. His tone was mild, and the hypaspist phylarch was obviously terrified.

The phylarch mumbled some sort of an answer.

‘Say that again?’ Demetrios said. A slave handed him pomegranate juice; Neron, his spymaster, stood close by him. He was wearing helmet and bronze thorax, that both had recent dents — Demetrios had fought, hand to hand, at the height of the pike push, and he’d been roaring in the front rank when they broke Cassander’s Macedonians with their own.

‘He might be dead?’ the phylarch attempted, although most men would have taken his voice for a whisper.

Demetrios sprang off his stool, unclipped his cheek-plates, and tossed his helmet to a slave. ‘I’m sorry, did you say dead?’

One of his strategoi was trying to get his attention. Demetrios swung his slightly mad gaze clear of the terrified hypaspist and inclined his head to Philip, son of Alexander. ‘Well fought, sir.’

The strategos flushed at the praise. ‘Thank you, lord. We have prisoners — thousands. Prepalaus’s whole army must be collapsing.’

Demetrios’s face lit with satisfaction. ‘This is it!’ he said, and thumped the other man on the back. ‘By Herakles, Philip, if Prepalaus collapses we’ve won. We push our sarissas into Asia and save Pater. By the gods — I never thought this moment would happen.’ He turned back to the phylarch. ‘Lad, you’re leaving something out. Speak. I’m in a benevolent frame of mind.’

The man stammered, mumbled. Paused.

‘We found the guard captain,’ he said, quite clearly. ‘Dead.’

Demetrios felt his guts clench. ‘And?’ he asked. It seemed to him that the gods had traded his Satyrus for this victory. What a foolish way for a hero to die. Poor Satyrus. The man deserved better, even if he chose the wrong side — perhaps because he chose the wrong side. Demetrios wanted him — as a contestant.

‘And Lord Satyrus?’ he asked patiently. As the master of Greece, he suddenly had time to be patient.

The man began to babble, and Neron smacked him.

Later, when Neron came back bearing a cup of wine, the spymaster shook his head wearily.

‘I honestly can’t tell what’s the truth and what’s fiction,’ he said. He sat on Demetrios’s ivory stool without asking permission. Neron was one of the few — very few — who had such rights.

‘Tell me all,’ Demetrios said.

‘It sounds as if Satyrus’s escape was itself a trap — an ambush to kill him.’ Neron shrugged. ‘I have one niggling thought — one cavil, if you like. That phylarch is holding something back, something he’s too scared to impart. I’m going to guess that the body he found was not Satyrus’s.’

Demetrios sat up on his kline. ‘You … by Herakles! That would be wonderful!’

Neron shook his hands, rubbed his eyes with his palms, shook his head as if trying to shake off fatigue. ‘I’m pleased for you, lord. You like him. But he’s a cunning opponent and if he has got clear, it is a master stroke.’

‘Nonsense,’ Demetrios said. ‘What can he do? We’ve the fleet, we’ve the army, Cassander’s at my mercy and I can push my pikes in Asia — tomorrow, if I want.’

‘If he’s dead …’ Neron took a deep breath. ‘If he’s dead, his sister will fight you for the Propontus.’

Demetrios was dismissive. ‘Let her. We’ll summon the Ephesian squadrons — sixty hulls there — and move our troops straight across to Asia, and bypass the Propontus. She can watch there all summer — the war will be passing her by.’

Neron nodded. ‘Your pater is hard pressed,’ he said. ‘We have to move fast. But you know all that.’

Demetrios drank off his juice. ‘I fought well today.’

Neron raised an eyebrow. ‘Time to stop that, lord. We’re this close to victory — this close.’ He held his fingers the width of a slim coin apart. ‘You take a wound — we’re done.’

Demetrios shrugged. ‘I’m going to be a god,’ he said. ‘I don’t get wounded.’

Neron sighed. ‘If you say so. My last news? I have a messenger who says that Satyrus has fifteen ships at Aegina. Right now. Fishing boat saw them in port.’

Demetrios frowned.

‘If Satyrus is alive, and free, he’ll be aboard by now.’ Neron shrugged again.

‘What can he do?’ Demetrios asked. ‘Fight my Isthmian fleet at one to four odds?’

‘Raid shipping?’ Neron said, his voice impatient. ‘Break up our troop movements? Save Prepalaus’s army by covering his flank?’

‘Not with fifteen hulls. Perhaps with fifty. If he’s alive he’ll do something. Good for him. Prepalaus was too easy. Unworthy.’

Neron’s voice became hard, critical. ‘Don’t go that way, lord. If Prepalaus had been any tougher, we’d be desperate now.’

Demetrios smiled. ‘Lighten up. But yes, point taken. Here, have some wine.’

Neron sighed. ‘I will.’ He raised his cup. ‘If Satyrus lives, may he sail home.’

Demetrios shook his head. ‘Avert! If he lives, may I find him at the end of my sword.’

‘I got him,’ Sophokles said. He was offered wine by a slave, and he took it.

Cassander let go a long sigh. He was still a handsome man, but age was beginning to tell — age, and fifteen years and more of constant campaigning, betrayal, revenge. ‘The only good news of the week,’ he said.

The doctor nodded. ‘I heard. And whatever reports you received, it’s worse than they told you.’

Cassander raised a weary eyebrow and toyed with his sandals.

‘I was there — off the flank of Demetrios’s cavalry when the rout began. I couldn’t help it — there’s only so many ways out of Achaea. Your cavalry deserted, he broke your infantry, and now most of them have gone over — Demetrios must have doubled his numbers.’

Cassander’s eyes were bloodshot. He snarled. ‘You’re right. No one told me it was that bad.’

The doctor pretended to finish his wine. In fact, he hadn’t tasted it — he’d poured the whole cup into a chamber pot while Cassander was looking at his sandals. But he appeared to appreciate it. ‘Prepalaus has ceased to exist as a fighting force. Demetrios will either come after you or go to the aid of his father. Either way, he’s won here. What will you do?’

He ducked as the heavy gold cup that Cassander had been using flew by his head.

The doctor smiled, picked up his heavy satchel, and withdrew.

‘Everyone blames the messenger,’ he said.

Phiale emerged from the antechamber tent. ‘That’s that evil bastard done with,’ she said with savage satisfaction.

‘Done with?’ Cassander asked.

‘I poisoned his wine,’ Phiale said. ‘He killed Satyrus, and I killed him. It seems … balanced.’

‘I’m not done with him!’ Cassander said. ‘I need … an act of the gods. I need Demetrios to die. Or Antigonus.’ He took a deep breath, and he was an old man — a pale, shaken old man. ‘I need some luck.’

‘Touch me for luck,’ Phiale said, curling an arm around his head. ‘And I’ll see if I can take care of Demetrios.’

‘He was in armour! Serving against Cassander! With bloody Demetrios as his butt-boy!’ Ptolemy raged. ‘My spymaster says that they spent days and nights together at Corinth!’

Leon sighed. His own spies said the same. Said that Satyrus of Tanais had taken a wound in Demetrios’s service, and was recuperating in the palace tent.

‘What am I to think?’ Ptolemy raged. ‘Cassander is falling apart and Satyrus is helping it happen! Zeus Soter, Leon!’ The lord of Aegypt was also in armour — sitting on the edge of a hard bench in his sleeping tent. Outside, the long, Syrian twilight was giving way to true night, and the sound of insects competed with the steady, rhythmic chomping of thousands of horses eating the good grass of the Bekaa Valley.

The Nubian merchant had come cross-country from Tyre, where his own ships waited with Ptolemy’s fleet, guarding its flank from the increasingly confident and aggressive squadrons of Antigonus and Demetrios, up the coast at Ephesus.

‘As far as we can tell; Cassander tried to have him killed,’ Leon said. He ran his fingers though his beard. ‘If he knows that then he may, indeed, have elected to serve Demetrios.’ He shook his head. ‘But I doubt it.’

Ptolemy sounded bone weary. His cautious invasion of Palestine and lower Syria was a war of careful manoeuvre and local siege, with Antigonus’s local forces responding with vigour. Just three months before, they had seemed on the verge of collapse, but now — now Antigonus seemed to have found his youth.

‘How could he be so stupid?’ Ptolemy asked.

‘Satyrus?’ Leon asked.

‘Cassander. The useless fucker. He tried to kill me, remember? And now Satyrus. What for?’ Ptolemy shook his head. ‘If we had his fleet, we’d still be in the game.’

‘Is it that bad?’ Leon asked. ‘I’ve been at sea.’

Ptolemy shrugged. ‘To be honest, no. It’s not that bad. It’s never been as bad as when Perdiccas had Alexander’s own army at the Nile forts and I had nothing but a handful of mercenaries to stop them. Nor as bad as when Golden Boy came at us at Gaza. We’re in Syria. Lots of room to retreat.’

‘And this looks like a good army,’ Leon offered.

‘All the quality money can buy,’ Ptolemy said with a touch of his old humour. ‘But if Cassander folds — and the bastard will fold — then they’ll all come after me.’

‘Lysimachos?’ Leon asked.

‘Won’t hold long enough for Seleucus to reach him — because there’s nothing to stop Demetrios from taking his soldiers to Asia. Faster than Lysimachos can move.’ Ptolemy shook his head again. ‘It’s not cast in bronze. But I’m not going to save them. I can’t beat Antigonus — and you and I both know it. If I had Eumenes … if I had any number of the boys from the old days. But I don’t, and I don’t think I could trust this army to face old One-Eye.’

Leon sighed. ‘I should get back. If you are right, we will have to cover your retreat.’

Ptolemy laughed. ‘Yes, if we’re really lucky, we’ll have to fight them after all.’ His sarcasm was evident. ‘I’m too old for this shit.’

Leon nodded. ‘Think of One-Eye. He must be eighty.’

Ptolemy nodded. ‘I think of it all the time. I think if he were to die, we’d be saved.’

The last winds of the storm were still blowing hard enough that a phalangite would have a hard time holding his sarissa upright. Most of the army’s tents were blown flat, and the slaves had stopped trying to get them back up.

Lysimachos was on the beach, stripped, trying with every other soldier in his army to rescue men from the sea. The corpses were so thick in the sea wrack that the waves seemed to be made of dead men.

Half his army, gone in an afternoon squall on the Euxine. Five thousand veterans, gone to the bottom. The beaches from Heraklea to Sinope were littered with corpses, and more were sinking beneath the waves or floating, bloated and stinking and black, like soft logs in the wake of the squall. His fleet wrecked.

Lysimachos continued to search the corpse-wrack, looking for men who were alive. And after hours — the hideous work seemed eternal — he found Amastris and her women beside his men. His wife — he hardly thought of her these days — was swimming about, grabbing men by the hair and pulling them to shore.

Until then, she had never been more than a tool for his desires — the desire to conquest, the desire to have a child by her, to hold her city as a port into Asia.

But watching her dare the undertow to pull a Macedonian peasant out of the clutches of Poseidon, despite the complete disaster that had just overtaken him, he smiled.

Kalias, his principal strategos, was shaking his head.

‘We’re done,’ he said. ‘First Cassander and now this.’

Lysimachos watched his wife for another minute. She was beautiful — and brave. Worthy, in fact.

‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘I’m not done yet.’ He stripped his chiton over his head. ‘See those women out in the water? Are they better than we?’ He ran through the corpses and dived headlong, racing for a man he’d seen to move a hand.

All along the beach, weary, waterlogged soldiers rose to their feet, stripped their gear, and went into the surf.

Lysimachos made it to his man. He couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead, but he did what he’d seen Amastris do — he got a hand into the man’s hair, put his buttocks under the man’s back, and swam for shore.

He was further off the beach than he’d thought. He raised his head and saw that he was a surprising distance offshore, and despite his swimming, he seemed to be getting further and further away. He swam harder. He started to panic and he fought it with the long experience of the veteran warrior who knows panic like a man knows his lover’s body.

At some point it occurred to Lysimachos to let go of the body. But he was sure there was spirit still in it — and in some way, some inexpressible sending of the gods, Lysimachos had decided that if he could save this one man, if the man lived, then his army would live, his cause would live, and he would save his honour. And if he could not save this one man, it seemed fair that he die here, choking water, Poseidon’s victim.

It was a simple contest: Lysimachos against the sea. Lysimachos was strong, and his will was as great as his body. He was not a great swimmer. But he would not surrender to the waves, or let go the man whose hair he had.

He fought a long fight.

The land slipped further and further away — first a stade, and then another.

He kept swimming. Fighting.

He got a throat full of seawater, his nose closed, his larynx burning from the salt, and he fought panic off one more time, pushed himself up in the water. Changed grip on the body on his back — almost certainly a corpse by now.

A swirl in the water by his head.

He closed his eyes. He opened them to find a mermaid.

‘You’re going the wrong way,’ Amastris said. She was as calm and fit as a goddess, and as beautiful. ‘Here, give him to me.’ She took the man’s hair and had the energy to swim up under his head, stick her fingers in his mouth, and pull him up to her shoulder.

‘Still alive,’ she said cheerily.

Side by side, they swam for the beach.

Antigonus read the dispatches from his son with unconcealed delight, his one eye roving over the careful scribal writing like a lookout watching for ships on a threatened coast.

‘He doesn’t even know that Lysimachos is wrecked!’ Antigonus laughed. ‘By all the gods. By all the gods, gentlemen! Ptolemy is alone! Cassander’s defeated, Lysimachos wrecked by a storm, Seleucus too far away, Satyrus dead!’ He laughed again. ‘And I was at the point of despair.’

‘Ptolemy still has a mighty army,’ suggested his spymaster, Kreon — a Siciliote.

‘We will buy him. Offer him a generous truce, crush the rest of them, and take him next spring. Ares, I haven’t felt this young in years. Get me a girl.’

Kreon laughed. ‘Don’t hurt yourself, lord,’ he chuckled.

‘Damn it, Kreon — I’m old, not dead.’ Antigonus laughed aloud. ‘By the gods. We’ve won. I never thought I’d say those words.’

Kreon flinched. ‘Not done yet. They still have life in them. Lysimachos still has troops — about half his army, and all of Heraklea’s resources. I understand he’s marching.’ He looked at his master. ‘Seleucus is mighty.’

‘That pup? What can he do?’ Antigonus said. ‘His army is a quarter of mine and he has no fleet.’

‘Join hands with Lysimachos or Ptolemy?’ Kreon said.

‘It would take a miracle,’ Antigonus said, and chuckled.

Miriam was doing exercises when she heard her brother’s angry roar. She finished her dance steps — her brother had a temper and it was best not to feed it — and then pulled a chiton over her head and emerged from her room into the central garden.

They were not slaves. Far from it — they had returned to comfortable captivity, but with the threat of slavery or death hanging over them every day. They were held in a spacious private home right against the walls of the city, and there were fifty soldiers watching the forty Rhodian prisoners in the houses around them.

Abraham, when she found him, was weeping.

Miriam came and sat by him on the bench.

‘Our father is dead,’ Abraham said, and ripped hair out of his beard.

Miriam felt the tears well up in her eyes — painful tears. She had never made peace with the old man. And now she never would. But to say she didn’t love him would have been a lie. She began to sob, but it was as if someone else was doing the crying, because her mind ran on, calm and clear, even as she heard her own rather shocking exclamation.

Abraham took both of her hands.

‘And Satyrus may be dead,’ he said. ‘Demetrios has won a great victory in Greece, and Cassander is destroyed. Demetrios and Antigonus have … won.’ He took a long time, and she found that she cared nothing — nothing — for the defeat of her side.

‘Satyrus is not dead,’ she said through her sobs. She would know, she thought. Even though she had determined to tell him that she would not go with him to Tanais — even though Ephesus had clarified for her that she was a Jew and not a Hellene. She would be neither his mistress nor his wife.

She had decided. But she would feel it in her body if he died.

If Abraham heard her, he ignored her.

‘Demetrios had him killed,’ Abraham said, and his voice cracked.

Miriam raised her head. ‘Satyrus is alive,’ she said.

Abraham looked shocked. And in a moment — in her eyes, in her posture — he understood.

Abraham understood, and he searched for rage — rage at his sister’s betrayal of her … widowhood?

There was nothing there but his own sorrow for his father. ‘You love Satyrus?’ he asked.

Miriam hung her head. ‘I will not wed him.’

Abraham understood in those words, and he put his arms around her. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear.’