Force of Kings

16

Satyrus rallied them all the way back to the summit end of the meadow, and hoped that the enemy hipparch would have the sense to just ride away. His foot hurt as if every bee in the meadow had stung him, and he had a dent in his helmet so deep that it looked as if it had been hit with an axe. The side of his head was mushy with blood.

‘Send all the Sakje along the edges of the meadow into the rocks. Greeks in the centre, with the Getae and the Bithynians, formed close. A wedge.’ Satyrus pointed, his voice already hoarse.

Scopasis got it, organised the flank detachments, and the Sakje slipped from their ponies and began to push forward in the rocky ground. The enemy’s light infantry were there, but their javelins were no match for bows and armour, and they lost the rocky edge.

Satyrus placed himself at the point of the wedge. Some jobs came with being in command.

He had the most shocking fear. He felt lethargic, and he was afraid. This little skirmish was of no real moment to the campaign. And he might die here. Men said his father had taken a wound in one fight and that had left him too weak to last a second fight, and that’s how he died.

He kept the fear from his voice and straightened his shoulders. Charmides and Anaxagoras were the next men in the wedge. Both of them were grinning like fools.

Satyrus thought of a thousand things he wanted to say. Many of them were about Miriam.

The Sakje edged along the meadow. He could see them rising to shoot — flushing the enemy psiloi from their cover — often simply running at them in short rushes, cutting down the slowest. The enemy psiloi were heavily outnumbered and finally they abandoned the fight, the remaining two dozen breaking and running for the safety of their cavalry.

Satyrus took two shuddering breaths. He reached out for his god … for the smell of wet cat, the eudaimonia that lifted him into combat and made him one with his god.

There was nothing there, and he shuddered as if cold. His fingers were sticky on the haft of the Macedonian officer’s sword. He had blood under his nails and in the fissures of his hands.

He wanted to go back and tell Miriam that he’d rather go to Alexandria with her than be King of the Bosporus.

The enemy hipparch — too inexperienced or perhaps simply too stubborn to know that he was beaten, was organising another charge. His horses were blown, but he seemed to have some fresh men. Now they filled the field flank to flank — three deep or more.

The Sakje were emptying their quivers into the Antigonids, and the Lydians, despite their armour, were suffering.

Satyrus found that his hands were trembling. It made him angry.

Was he afraid? Or was he about to charge an enemy that outnumbered him heavily because this was the moment?

He could no longer tell.

‘Remember who you are,’ he said aloud, and men around heard him, and took it as his pre-battle speech, and hands closed on spear hafts.

‘If we just wait,’ Anaxagoras said, as another flight of Sakje arrows fell on the Lydians.

‘Walk!’ Satyrus ordered. The wedge started forward, the men at his flanks pressing in. He looked back. As far as he could see, the formation was tight.

A little less than a stade.

The Lydians started forward. They were being galled by the Sakje, and the open ground invited them.

Anaxagoras was, of course, correct.

Satyrus swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘Trot!’ he ordered. His horse was perfect for the point of the wedge — he was a line breaker. He had heart, and he responded instantly between Satyrus’s legs, a fast trot that threatened to leave Anaxagoras and Charmides behind. Somehow the magnificent horse put heart into the man.

Satyrus had never led a wedge before, except on a drill field. But he knew the feeling of being alone, mounted on a massive monster that rode behind him and made the earth shake. He looked back, almost lost his seat as the stallion leaped something on the ground — a corpse from the first clash.

Half a stade.

The biggest error in a cavalry charge was to gallop too early. His mother had taught him from youth, and his sister, and Coenus and Diodorus and Crax and all the Exiles … oh, to have them at his side now.

The Lydians launched into their charge, and now the fatigue of their horses showed in the whites of their eyes and their hesitation. Right in front of Satyrus, a man spurred his charger to a gallop, went a few plunges, and was back at a trot.

Half a stade. Close enough to see the whites of the horses’ eyes, the sweat on their flanks, the desperation in men’s faces.

Twenty horse lengths, and Satyrus knew which man he would engage — flicked his head around to see his wedge still well closed up, even the Bithynians keeping their places in line.

His hands were no longer shaking. There was only the man on a bay horse opposite him, and the point of his spear coming at his eyes, and his own spear.

He let the horse have his head. ‘Charge!’ he roared. The fear was there but mostly he had conquered it.

The stallion was all heart. He bounded forward, and Satyrus raised his spear two-handed, letting him run …

He caught his opponent’s spearhead with his own, swept it up two-handed and buried his spear point in the man’s body, scales flying from the point of impact like rain from a tent hit with a stick, ripped it clear of the man’s corpse and got the spear haft across his body to block the sword-cut of the next man, and his mare danced under him. The rear ranker tried to overbear his horse and Charmides killed him, and the point of the wedge was through the enemy line, and the stallion was still flying along the ground at a gallop. Satyrus gave him a knee and he turned to the left, skimming the ground like a flying thing.

An arrow flashed past his head.

Satyrus put himself low on the horse’s neck and pounded along the meadow in a wide curve, and he had fifty horsemen behind him — Charmides and Herakles’ men all mixed, and they made the turn and came down on the rear of the Lydian line, and the Lydians broke. Then there was desperate fighting — man to man, horse to horse, and a press as tight as Satyrus had ever experienced on foot.

He saw Herakles fall. The young man took a spear wound that pinned him to his horse, and the horse fell, and he fell with it. Satyrus’s mount seemed to follow his thoughts, and he leaped over the prone prince and Satyrus unhorsed one of his attackers and the other turned away.

The dust was so thick that Satyrus couldn’t see. He almost couldn’t breathe but the pressure of the fight was less.

The little trumpeter was still with him — he had a spear and a sword, now. Satyrus flashed him a smile. ‘Don’t be a hero,’ he said.

The boy’s face was dead white despite his swarthy looks, but he managed a twitch of the lips.

Satyrus reined around, and there was Scopasis, already mounted, with a dozen of his archers behind him.

‘That man is a dead man,’ Scopasis said. He pointed at the Sakje arrow in the stallion’s haunch.

‘He’s the best horse I’ve ever ridden,’ Satyrus said with all the pent-up emotion of the fight.

Scopasis said. ‘You are just like your sister.’

Satyrus managed a laugh. He was going to live.

As always, the aftermath was far worse than the fight. Almost a third of their force was wounded — the Lydians had been trapped by Stratokles, who was rueful.

‘I should have let them go,’ he said, while the trumpeter poured wine on his shoulder wound and he winced. ‘ARES!’ he bellowed, and then subsided. ‘Oh, Tartarus. That hurts like a fucker. I should know better — I was behind them, and I should have let them go.’

Scopasis nodded. ‘Trapped men fight to the death,’ he said. ‘Better to let them flee and then kill them.’

‘How are the Bithynians?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Regular furies when aroused. As soon as poor Darius was killed, they were wild to avenge him.’ Stratokles arched his back and stifled a scream of pain. All that came out was a grunt. ‘Fuck that’s deep. Lucius, tell me how bad it is.’

‘Better than you deserve,’ Lucius said. ‘Deep. But all in fat and muscle — spear point, not a cutting edge. More wine here. And some honey.’

Satyrus didn’t have a wound, but his foot felt as if it had been trodden by an elephant, not a horse, and he couldn’t walk. ‘Darius is dead?’ he asked.

‘Tragic, really,’ Stratokles said. ‘Ow!’ he grunted.

Herakles was not dead, but his leg was broken in two places, and he had a spear thrust that penetrated the top of the thigh and emerged from the base, and while it had not severed the artery, he had lost blood and slipped into unconsciousness every time he awoke. Charmides had wounds on both arms. Anaxagoras was untouched.

So was Scopasis. He took command. With Darius Thrakes dead, the Bithynians could be mixed in with the Sakje without any deference at all.

The Getae nobleman, Calicles, had a nasty cut across his face. ‘I need a better helmet,’ he said ruefully. ‘Never been in that close a fight before. Not really what we do. That’s for Greeks.’ He looked around. ‘My boys feel that the Sakje might not be so bad,’ he said with a half smile. ‘And isn’t it convenient that Darius the Thracian is dead? Can I just put in my two obols? I’m totally harmless and not minded to desert, yes?’

Satyrus didn’t want to drink wine, lest he pass out, but water tasted like blood in his mouth. ‘It’s a nasty business,’ he said. ‘War, I mean.’

Calicles nodded. ‘I’m a hostage,’ he said. ‘That’s why I was sent.’

Stratokles was trying his wound, moving his left arm up and down. He looked at the Thracian. ‘Save it,’ he said. ‘You won’t come to any harm from us.’ He looked purely evil, just then, with his cut nose and scarred face, but Satyrus could see that it was only age, fatigue, and self-disgust.

Satyrus glanced at Stratokles. ‘Where did Darius die?’

‘Our first fight — up the ridge a piece. Took a javelin in the ribs. I didn’t even see him go down. Bastards desecrated his corpse. When we found him, the Bithynians went wild.’ Stratokles met his eye without hesitation.

Scopasis grunted. ‘Useless fuck,’ he said.

What an epitaph, Satyrus thought.

They’d taken heavy casualties, but they’d never again have a chance like they had right then to capitalise on their victory. It was the Sakje way: follow victory, abandon defeat. Satyrus kept his bodyguard and all the wounded, and Scopasis took the surviving Sakje, Getae and Bithynians over the crest of the ridge at dark and into the enemy camp.

Satyrus watched it from the ridge top — not the least sorry not to be participating. He followed the line of Scopasis’s raid by the sparks that flew from the fires as the Sakje killed men sleeping by them, and from the tents that burned.

In truth, the damage done was minimal. The next morning, when the raiders had returned and lay like the dead, sleeping by their horses, there wasn’t a sign of the raid in the enemy camp besides a few dozen charred tents and a single corpse — a sentry killed in the dark and still unfound by his mates, but already visited by a pair of vultures.

Ten more of Satyrus’s men had died in the night, some making a great deal of noise. They had almost fifty prisoners. When Scopasis’s raiders were ready to move, Satyrus rode over to the Lydians.

‘Cut them loose,’ he said, and Draco and Charmides began cutting the thongs that held their wrists.

It would be an hour or more before they had anything like circulation in their hands.

‘I’m taking your horses,’ Satyrus said. ‘I recommend you go home.’ He left them there, at the edge of the meadow where their fellow men had died.

His foot still hurt. His back hurt. He hadn’t been in the saddle this long since he was nineteen.

But Antigonus had lost the southern ridge, and that meant that he could not outflank their position on the lake. Satyrus left Scopasis and the best of the Bithynians and Sakje, and took the rest of the men back to camp, their dead thrown over the captured horses.

Lysimachos was unimpressed. ‘You wanted to go play horse,’ he said, looking at the line of dead men. ‘My Getae will not love you after this.’

Satyrus twitched. ‘Is it nothing to you that we burned part of the enemy camp? That we, not Antigonus, hold the southern valleys?’

Lysimachos nodded. ‘It is not nothing. But while you were gone, the old bastard moved his siege engines forward a stade and he’s pounding my first-line forts. Only my best pikemen will even go up there.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Plenty of war for everyone, then,’ he said heavily. To the east, storm clouds were gathering. He limped off to find Jubal.

Jubal was building a third line of forts — earthen mounds reinforced by timber, with embrasure-mounted engines. They weren’t very well made, but they were there.

Jubal clasped hands. ‘Lord,’ he said. He nodded. ‘Lysimachos, he’s going to lose the first line, eh? Let him. I can build them faster than he loses them.’

‘Ares,’ Satyrus said. ‘What a way to fight a war.’ But he had seen this kind of war at Rhodes, and it held no surprises for him — unlike the meadow full of bees.

That night, Lysimachos’s best pikemen set fire to the timbers of the first line and retired in good order. An hour later, the engines of the second line dropped mythemnoi-sized baskets of gravel on the former first line and the Apobatai charged forward into the survivors of some of Antigonus’s peltasts, shaken from the bombardment and broken by the charcoal-blackened mercenaries.

The Apobatai retired again with the dawn, leaving a smoking ruin. The first line had cost Antigonus more than three hundred men, and all it had cost Lysimachos was a few bushels of rocks.

The rains came back the next night, and Antigonus assaulted the second line under cover of rain so fierce a man couldn’t raise his face to it without pain. The fields between the armies turned to mud, ankle deep or worse. Jubal’s entrenchments had drainage, and the fields in front of them didn’t; the Antigonids gave themselves away squelching through the mud, and the Lysimachids were ready for them. But after a desperate fight shot with lightning, the old Macedonian veterans pushed the younger men out of the second line forts.

But Jubal already had a fourth line prepared, racing against the rains, and the engines of the third line poured his carefully hoarded stones onto the Antigonids, who discovered that the second line forts were designed to offer no cover from the third line. Antigonus tried again two nights after the rains returned, and they were stopped cold — and bled — in the lightning-soaked ditches. They were still there in daylight, and Satyrus fought in the mud with Charmides and Anaxagoras on either side of him. He threw javelins, yelled encouragement, and for heart-breaking minutes faced desperate men coming up mud-soaked ladders from the ditch. At the end, they offered surrender to the enemy men trapped at the top of the forts, and they accepted gratefully, dropping their shields and sinking to their knees in the mud.

It was probably those prisoners, when they were returned two days later, who told their mates that there was a son of Alexander, alive, in the enemy camp. The wound in his thigh was inflamed, but the Lord of the Silver Bow had not sent red contagion to kill the young man, and the doctors were confident he would recover.

Satyrus rode with a dozen men as escort under Nikephorus, and Lysimachos with twice as many. Antigonus was waiting in the mud at the edge of the lake, and the rain fell like the contempt of the gods.

Satyrus had heard of the old man all his life, but never met him. Now he saw Antigonus, and his respect — bordering on awe — went up threefold. Antigonus was as straight as a sarissa, wearing armour that would make a younger man tired. His white-haired arms were corded in muscle, and the bronze of his cuirass probably covered more of the same.

Satyrus saluted him — the pankrationist’s salute.

Antigonus One-Eye nodded. ‘You’ll be the King of the Bosporus,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Satyrus said.

Antigonus ignored Lysimachos as if he wasn’t even there.

‘I reckon you won this round, boy,’ the old man said. ‘I’d like a day to recover my dead — if I can find them in the mud — and two days free to retreat. In exchange, I won’t come back this year.’

Lysimachos spat. ‘The year’s over, old man. These are winter rains.’

Antigonus’s gaze never left Satyrus. ‘I hear the wind sighing,’ he said. ‘Three days’ truce.’ He shrugged. ‘Or I put it to the boys that we’re in trouble, and I put my whole army into your lines and see what I can do.’

Lysimachos grinned. ‘Even if you won, you’d be done. Seleucus or Ptolemy would eat you alive.’

Antigonus’s face was stone. ‘Tell the foolish wind that it would make no difference to him. He’d be dead.’ Antigonus was an old man, but his voice held … power.

Lysimachos narrowed his eyes. ‘Bring it,’ he said.

Satyrus shook his head. Lysimachos’s Thracians had been deserting for days, headed home across the Propontus. And the pikemen weren’t much better. Even Stratokles’ men — even Nikephorus’s men — had desertions. The weather was appalling. The mud was an awful place to die.

Satyrus rode over to Lysimachos. ‘I know you hate him,’ he said quietly, ‘but if we win a pitched battle, the best we’ll get is retreat. He’s offering to retreat. Let him go with honour.’

Lysimachos took a deep breath. He seemed on the edge of a speech. But the hint of a smile crossed his lips, and he nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said.

In two days, Antigonus was gone into Mysia.

But the rains continued, and with winter, the pestilence came.