Force of Kings

19

When he awoke, Satyrus’s first thought was I am not dead.

It was an altogether pleasant thought. And before an hour had passed, Anaxagoras had unrolled the bandage on his leg and shown him the flesh — the lines of red were gone, no longer lines of death reaching for his groin and heart.

He was weak, but he was a veteran of many wounds and he knew the drill — he began to eat anything he could lay hands on.

They let him rest for three days.

His friends were out all the time — riding. Mostly, Satyrus saw the farmer, Belial. He sensed that there were daughters hiding up in the rafters, and that the whole house was afraid of them. But he ate, and watched.

The third day of rest, he was alert enough to figure out that his friends were patrolling. Jubal came back with a twisted leg — a bad fall from his horse.

‘Men trying to kill you, eh?’ he said, and grinned.

Satyrus shook his head. Even here — three thousand stades from Tanais. ‘Who are they?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know. Big bunch — a dozen or more. We hit their camp, only caught three of them.’ He shrugged. ‘Rest were off east. Setting an ambush?’

Satyrus hadn’t seen Charmides in days. ‘And Charmides?’

‘Apollodorus sent him east for Seleucus. He’s supposed to be at Zeugma. Apollodorus is afraid he’s already passed us.’ Jubal rubbed his beard.

The horses were stirring outside.

‘Uh-oh,’ Jubal said. He got a bow from his case and went to the window. As soon as he looked out, he popped back. ‘Party of men.’

Satyrus was flat on his back, too weak to pull a woman’s bow.

Above him, a small girl, no more than seven or eight, waved a hand.

‘We hide,’ he said.

Sophokles was still hobbling from the arrow he’d taken in the fight five days earlier — the luck of the gods that the arrow had been a whistler, or he’d be dead instead of bruised. He dismounted with a curse, having covered all the ground from the mountains to the Euphrates and missed his quarry.

He wanted a good night’s sleep and a chance to regroup. Seleucus was less than a day away to the east and Sophokles didn’t fancy the odds of tracking his quarry amidst the biggest army in Asia.

He dismounted with a curse, and was immediately on his guard. The farmer’s body language gave him away. He was hiding something.

Of course, that could be food or horses or a beautiful daughter. All of which Sophokles would be happy to take. ‘We mean no harm,’ he said, raising his hand.

The farmer nodded. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked. He had two slaves with him — big men, but not trained to arms.

‘Feed us, give us all your horses, and stay out of our way,’ Sophokles said. ‘And we’ll be gone tomorrow.’

The farmer’s eyes were everywhere. ‘You could go in the barn, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Are you a fool?’ Sophokles was in pain, and tired of peasants. ‘I don’t ask you to suppose anything. I’ll have the house.’ He tossed his reins to one of his men. ‘Clear the house. Don’t touch his family. Slaves are fair game.’

There were stools on the lower exedra, and Sophokles lowered himself on one. ‘A cup of wine might improve my mood,’ he said to the farmer.

The man’s wife brought it herself. She’d mixed herbs in it. Sophokles had a moment to picture himself poisoned by a farmer’s-wife in Phrygia, and the thought made him smile. He drank it off.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Honey?’ he asked.

She nodded, her eyes huge.

Telon, his lieutenant — an intelligent man, for an oaf — jogged up from around the stone house. ‘There’s horses in the barn,’ he said. ‘War horses.’

Sophokles reached out to grab the farmer’s wife, but she was faster than he expected — her fist held an iron poker, and it clipped his shoulder and his head, and he was down.

Telon killed her — cut her nearly in half with a big kopis.

Sophokles felt distinctly queasy — something in his gut, and the blow to his head. He threw up and felt better. Telon was pushing at the barred door of the barn and shouting for help, and his men were trying to get in one of the windows.

Sophokles got to his blanket-roll, and it took all his will to untie the leather thongs that held it shut.

The bitch poisoned me.

His brain was processing very slowly. He got the knots open — the blanket unrolled of its own accord. He got a hand into the leather wallet at the heart of the bundle — found the flask. Got it to his lips.

No time to measure. Only his vomit reaction had kept him alive this long. He took a sip, swallowed it …

Vomited, and vomited again. His men were calling out.

By all the gods, that had been close. One of his eyes was gummed shut from blood.

They’d killed the farmer and one of his slaves.

He took a breath and then another.

Looked up. Heard the hoof beats — saw the dust cloud.

Shook his head in weary disbelief.

‘Mount up!’ he croaked, and stumbled towards his horse, abandoning his blanket roll.

Telon, at least, had the wits to listen. He abandoned the barred door and leaped for his horse. Seeing the two of them mounted, the rest ran for their horses. The last man was shot dead trying to get a leg over, but the rest of them were away.

Satyrus found the act of climbing down from the hiding hole in the rafters to be as much adventure as he could handle, but worth it, because the big ginger-haired man holding the ladder proved to be Crax. Behind him was Charmides, and half a dozen troopers Satyrus had known since childhood.

‘Did you get them?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Got one,’ Crax said. ‘They killed the staff.’

Out on the exedra, the daughters had begun to wail. Charmides went that way, and Satyrus dragged himself along, supported by Crax.

‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Satyrus said.

Crax laughed. ‘Tell that to my hips on a cold morning,’ he said.

The two daughters were eight and twelve, and their parents and most of their slaves were dead. The casual side-product of war.

‘They died for me,’ Satyrus said wearily.

Jubal nodded. ‘They’ll be related to someone round here.’ He went over to the girls and put his arms around them, and they threw themselves on his neck.

Satyrus found himself standing on someone’s blanket roll. It was vaguely familiar, and he assumed it was Jubal’s. Despite the pain of his wound, or because of it, he subsided to the planks of the porch and began to roll it up.

Crax was seeing to his men.

There was an alabaster vase — fine workmanship — on the blanket roll, and Satyrus picked it up, opened the stopper, took a whiff. Memory flooded him.

‘Sophokles,’ he said. Ten years had passed but he knew that smell, and that jar. He rifled the rest of the wallet — glass ampoules, worth a fortune, with powders. A folding tablet and a beautiful gold stylus. A scroll of recipes.

Two poems by Sappho.

A note, written on a scrap of papyrus, with an address in Alexandria.

Ben Zion’s address.

Satyrus let the breath go from between his teeth, and hoped that Achilles and his friends were enough.

It was hours before Apollodorus and Anaxagoras returned, riding wearily on jaded horses. They were picked up stades away by Crax’s men, so they already knew of the events of the day by the time they rode up to the farm.

By then, a dozen local men and two women had taken charge of the farm and the girls. Satyrus had time to wonder what would become of them — whether they’d end well-dowered or as slaves on their own land.

He slept there one more time, and Crax’s men helped bury the dead, and then they all rode out for Zeugma.

The first sight of Seleucus’s army told the whole story. The elephants could be seen from stades away, plodding up the Euphrates. They were huge, and the rumour was that Seleucus had traded all of the Indian satrapies to an Indian king for five hundred elephants. If he had, he’d brought less than half. Satyrus counted more than a hundred before pain and boredom took over, but there weren’t more than two hundred.

Still, it was the biggest concentration of elephants Satyrus had seen since Eumeles. And it would give the alliance the same odds as the Antigonids, at least.

Satyrus rode down into the walled city of Zeugma in time to meet the King of Babylon himself as he offered libations to the river god at the bridge. Seleucus was leaving the Euphrates and turning west, towards the sea and Phrygia, and he was bidding farewell, as the King of Babylon, to one of the country’s deities. Satyrus watched him and felt dirty.

When he was done, Seleucus came forward, surrounded by courtiers. He was a middle aged man losing the hair on his head, and he had the square-jawed Macedonian look, but he had never been a heavy drinker, and age had brought him dignity as well as thinning hair. Satyrus had last seen him riding in Ptolemy’s staff at Gaza covered in dust. Satyrus bowed.

Seleucus returned his bow. ‘I am stunned to see you here, Satyrus,’ he said. ‘But delighted, of course. Diodorus says you have the rally point and a chart of the campaign.’

Satyrus took his proffered hand and clasped it. ‘I see that you have not stinted,’ he said. ‘Thank the gods!’

Seleucus gave him a wry smile. ‘I brought my best … and my worst. The cream of my troops, and the bastards I can’t trust at home. Ptolemy?’

‘Sent his fleet to Rhodes.’ Satyrus shrugged.

‘Cassander?’ Seleucus asked.

‘Emptied Europe for Lysimachos, who now has Prepalaus to contend with. I doubt there’s a man fit to wear armour left in Europe.’ Satyrus was getting tired.

‘A stool for the King of the Bosporus,’ Seleucus Nicator called. ‘Diodorus said you’d been wounded. You look well enough.’

‘I am — a few days and I’ll be fit. May I accompany you west?’ Satyrus subsided onto the stool with relief.

‘My pleasure. And your Exiles will be delighted to have you — the famous Satyrus of Tanais? Worth a thousand men.’

Satyrus smiled up at Seleucus. ‘You didn’t used to be such a flatterer.’

‘I wasn’t King of Babylon, then,’ Seleucus said, seriously.

Six days, and the advance guard was across the Taurus Mountains and making camp at Cybistra, in Lycaonia. The elephants were still in the high passes of the mountains, and the rearguard hadn’t left Zeugma.

Diodorus sat by a fire with Crax and Andronicus on either side of him. Sappho passed the wine. She rode astride with the men, and refused to be with the baggage. She’d made more campaigns than many of the veterans. Satyrus felt like embracing her every time he saw her.

She and Diodorus moved him the most — perhaps because they were the eldest. Diodorus was old. Satyrus had never expected it; the man had remained adamantine, proof against time, throughout Satyrus’s childhood, and now he was a stick figure, all sinews and scorched skin with deep furrows in his face and his cheekbones so sharp they could cut. And Sappho’s beauty was blasted — she was an old woman, and no one would mistake her for a great beauty.

So it had taken him two days to discover that looks deceived, and that the people who had raised him were essentially unchanged. No one had told them how old they were. Diodorus was not in his dotage — when his voice lashed a trooper, the man wilted. Sappho had much the same effect on Diodorus — and Crax, and Andronicus, and soon enough Satyrus himself, who discovered that she felt he was cosseting his wound when he might have been exercising.

‘What a Spartan you would have made,’ he grunted, when she forced him to bend his left leg to her satisfaction.

‘I am a woman of Thebes — a far, far better place than Sparta, with better men. Ask them at Leukra.’ She nodded, another argument won, and directed her slave to help him bend the leg again.

So … two days, and he had returned to being their child. It was not so bad.

Especially when he was treated as an adult child.

‘What do you think One-Eye will do?’ Diodorus asked. He sat back on his cloak, and Sappho joined him, burrowing into his arms like a much younger woman.

Satyrus shifted, winced, and looked at Apollodorus. ‘He’ll try to defeat us in detail. About now he’ll be getting his first reports that Seleucus is really on his way. So he can come east to us, or go north to Lysimachos.’ He paused. ‘It’s not that simple, though,’ he added.

Diodorus grunted. ‘It never is,’ he said.

‘There will or won’t be a fleet action in the Dardanelles. That could change everything. Or Demetrios might march inland and join his father — and that would change everything.’ He paused. ‘Or … Hades, I don’t know. Demetrios might go off to crush Cassander and leave his pater …’

‘Never happen,’ Diodorus said. ‘That’s their edge on us. That they have each other. Demetrios won’t abandon his pater. Will he win in the Dardanelles?’

Satyrus took a cup of wine from Charmides. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, as if repeating a lesson for Diodorus. How often had he gone from Philokles, having just had Plato beaten into him, to repeat the lesson for Diodorus, as he sat in his armour?

‘Ahh,’ Diodorus said. ‘Why?’ His tone said he liked the answer.

‘If we win, then our troops move freely on the coast of Asia. But Alexander and Lysimachos have both shown that even if our ships lose, the army can move across the Troad into Phrygia without hindrance. We have Bithynia. That one change is everything. Lysimachos doesn’t need a fleet to move an army down on Antigonus, and his supplies will be safe.’ Satyrus sat back, feeling fifteen.

Diodorus nodded. ‘Well, you’ve commanded more armies than I have, son. But it seems to me that the navies will still have two effects. First, morale: if we win, it will have an effect on the troops. And second, if our ships win, then Antigonus can’t go far from his logistics, for fear that Lysimachos will land behind him. You know that we’re in contact with Ptolemy’s fleet?’

Satyrus hadn’t heard.

‘There’s twenty triremes shadowing us on the coast.’ Diodorus nodded. ‘Pray to Poseidon, son. A victory at sea would save us a world of trouble. But otherwise, your analysis is correct. He’s got to go for one or the other of us, as soon as he can. I reckon he’ll go for Lysimachos — he’s beaten him like a drum, and he’s never beaten us.’

Satyrus rolled his hips. ‘I just hope we don’t fight for ten days,’ he said. ‘I can barely ride.’

Sappho laughed. ‘But you will,’ she said.

‘It’ll take ten days to get the rearguard up to here,’ Diodorus said. ‘Our army is spread across six hundred stades of crappy roads. But ten days … that’s about it. Ten days will see us near enough that we’ll be fighting.’

Five days, and two days of rain. Satyrus could ride well again, and he exercised hard, sparring with Anaxagoras, and Crax, whose Keltoi sword was three palms longer than any Greek sword and who used it in an alien way, snipping with long sweeps and cutting straight into attacks.

Five days brought them to the shores of the Karalis Lake, more than a hundred stades from the sea and covered in gulls. The rain filled the water courses and, uncomfortable as it was, it allowed the vanguard to move faster — suddenly, water for horses was abundant.

Seleucus knew the business of war, too. Every night, when they halted, there was an agora of merchants from the nearest towns — even if those towns were fifty stades distant — with wagons full of produce, sheep, goats, fodder for horses. All they required was cash, and Diodorus’s war-chest seemed to be bottomless.

‘No point in being a rich mercenary if you can’t keep your horses fed,’ he said.

On the evening of the fifth day, Crax came in from a long scout north and west — he’d taken six men and gone as far and fast as a string of ponies would take them. Seleucus and a dozen of his officers came up the column from Iconium to hear the report.

Crax was drinking cider. He was covered in dust, he appeared to be a wraith; and the men who had ridden with him simply fell from their saddles and lay like the dead.

Crax was uncowed by having Seleucus present, although he bobbed his head to the King of Babylon — rather, Satyrus felt, like one Maeoti farmer greeting another on the road.

‘Well?’ Seleucus said.

‘Antigonus is supposed to be at Sardis, trying to link up with his son, who’s coming south from the Troad with eighteen thousand men. I didn’t see any of them, lords, but there’s a detachment of Antigonus’s cavalry up the road a piece, north of the mines at the road junction. Locals call it Kotia. I took a man there — he hasn’t been paid since the festival of Ares in the autumn — and he talked. Said that they expect us at Gordia, and they have troops ready to march that way and hold us in the passes.’

Seleucus nodded. ‘It is so helpful that One-Eye thinks I’m a fool. Still, if they expect us at Gordia …’

‘Send some of your satrapal levies marching that way,’ Diodorus said.

‘Sardis …’ Seleucus began. ‘That’s six hundred stades. Where’s Lysimachos?’

Crax shook his head. ‘I don’t know, lord, and my prisoner doesn’t know either.’

Diodorus swore, and so did Seleucus.

Satyrus finished the wine in his cup. ‘Give me a dozen men with six remounts a man, and I’ll find him,’ he said. ‘I know these hills — I campaigned around Sardis last year.’

Diodorus nodded. ‘I’d rather send-’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘No — no assassin is going to follow me across Phrygia.’

‘I was considering what would happen if one of One-Eye’s cavalry patrols got you,’ Seleucus said. ‘But I need information more than I need you, Satyrus. If you’ll do it … go with Athena and Hermes.’

Satyrus took his friends, as well as Andronicus the Gaul and a dozen troopers — all with strings of horses. And Crax. The Bastarnae man was unstoppable, and he was awake at first light with his own horses.

They were off before dawn, and they rode until dusk, slept with their reins on their arms, and were off in the dark again, sweeping around the north end of the lakes, then across country to Akmonia, through tribal territories where people lived high on the hillsides in villages that seemed to hang from the sky. They weren’t troubled.

They picked up the Sardis road at Thyrai and went due east, into the rising sun. They left the road when their vedettes saw soldiers and rode along the ridges above the Kogamas River.

‘Welcome to Lydia,’ Satyrus said. He felt wonderful — his thigh hurt, but in the usual ways of an injury. Three days in the saddle, and he was like a god. And free of the plodding columns.

The Valley of the Kogamas was full of men. When they made camp, the light of their fires stretched away east as far as they could see.

‘That’s Antigonus,’ Crax said. ‘I didn’t get this far, but here he is. He’s east of Sardis — where’s his son? Where’s Lysimachos?’

Andronicus grunted.

Anaxagoras dropped to the ground and unrolled his blankets.

Satyrus laughed. ‘You know, Anaxagoras, I’ve done my sister a great service the last two weeks.’

Anaxagoras was already in his blankets. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘You can ride,’ Satyrus said. ‘Like a Sakje. Now she’ll marry you.’

‘I’m not sure that equine riding is the skill she’ll marry me for,’ Anaxagoras said. He smiled, turned over, and was asleep.

Another day of careful riding — walking, often, and it was the slowest day they’d made yet — and they were clear of Antigonus. His cavalry was on the roads, but the high ground on the north flank of the valley was empty of everyone but refugees.

They had news — all of it conflicting. Demetrios had won a great victory at Kallipolis — had lost his fleet — had abandoned his fleet and marched inland — defeated Lysimachos — been defeated — everyone was dead.

‘See why scouting is such a pain in the arse?’ Crax asked.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘Crax, you know that I’ve been conducting campaigns as a strategos for eight years, eh?’

Crax slapped him on the back. ‘And see, you still have so much to learn.’

‘Crax, my mother taught you to scout.’ Satyrus was tired of the patronising lectures.

Crax laughed. ‘Ataelus taught me to scout, young king. And if you know so much, why do you sit and argue with an old tribesman while the sun to anyone in the valley below silhouettes you? Eh?’ He laughed. ‘Your mother would know better.’

Satyrus shook his head and resigned himself to being a perpetual adolescent to these men.

Tyateira, and Satyrus, riding as a vedette with Apollodorus, met a messenger and took him. He had a scroll from Demetrios to Antigonus.

Satyrus read it, handed it to the messenger, and said, ‘On your way.’

The young man, a Lydian, terrified with Apollodorus’s knife at his throat, relaxed. ‘Thank you, lord.’

Satyrus bowed. ‘How far to Lord Demetrios?’

The messenger remounted, took his satchel and his scroll tube, and saluted. ‘Forty stades, lord. Stratonika. And marching this way as fast as his pikemen will go.’

‘And Lysimachos is pressing him?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Hard. But we’re holding.’ The messenger saluted, gathered his reins, and rode off, and Apollodorus shook his head.

‘I’m going to guess that bastard is off to tell One-Eye something you actually want the bastard to know.’ He shrugged. ‘Otherwise, we just had the best piece of intelligence we could have had, dropped on us by the gods, and you’re letting him ride away.’

‘He’s marching to meet his pater, and he’s sent the fleet back to Athens rather than face ours. And he’s telling his pater that our troops are at Gordia.’ Satyrus took a deep breath. Suddenly his hands were shaking. ‘Athena — we may yet pull this off. Let’s find the others.’

That night, all of them gathered around a fire no bigger than a man’s head. When Satyrus went off to piss, he couldn’t see even a flicker of light. They crouched, cloaks spread to catch the heat and hide the flame, and Crax fed it patiently from scraps of wood.

Satyrus explained the situation to every man.

‘The whole war may turn on one of us getting back to Seleucus,’ he said. ‘I need every man to know. Antigonus and Demetrios are about to join forces — perhaps tomorrow — on the plains north of Sardis. Then they can either go north against Lysimachos or east against Seleucus. They think Seleucus is way up north by Gordia.’ Satyrus tried to choose his words carefully, trying to imagine a cavalry trooper reporting this to the King of Babylon. ‘If Seleucus marches like lightning, he can pass west of Antigonus and join Lysimachos.’

Drawing in the stony dirt and using bread pills to mark the positions, he built a little map complete with ridges marked by rocks.

‘Understand — if we get this wrong, Seleucus will face Antigonus in the plains, alone.’ Satyrus looked around. They looked like they understood.

‘So … we all ride for it in the morning?’ Crax asked.

‘You ride for it. I’m taking Anaxagoras, Jubal, Charmides and Apollodorus and riding west for Lysimachos. We’re so close we can’t afford it if he rests for a day or hesitates … or heads for the coast to link up with the fleet.’ Satyrus shook his head. ‘A day — a few hours — and we could lose.’

Crax nodded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re all grown up.’

In the morning, they all shook hands — every man with every other — and the two parties split.

Before the gulls had descended to eat the beans they left on the ground, they were five stades apart.