Force of Kings

20

It cost them two days to get around Demetrios and his army; two days of climbing higher and higher on the ridges north of Sardis; two days of hiding among the rocks and the scrubby wild olives. Two days of short rations for man and horse.

On the third day it rained. The water poured down as if the gods were upending buckets on them, but they seized the moment to move — visibility was less than two horse lengths. The rocks were slippery, and Satyrus and Apollodorus, who took turns in the lead, both had falls, and Apollodorus had to put one of his horses down.

Late afternoon, and even Apollodorus was unsure as to their direction. They had angled away from the ridge, looking to make up time, and now, as they rode through the deluge, heads down, Satyrus was worried that they had in fact ridden off in the wrong direction. Descents can be more difficult than ascents.

The sun was setting, somewhere beyond the endless clouds, and a wind was picking up, lashing the water against them. Their cloaks were long since soaked through. The light was tricky, and Satyrus was afraid that they were riding due south — right into Antigonus — and worried again that they were losing time.

The ground was levelling off.

Satyrus pushed his tired horse to a trot and drew level with Apollodorus.

‘I want to go downhill to the road,’ he shouted. ‘I want to be sure where we are — I want to make some time.’

Rain poured through Apollodorus’s straw farmer’s hat and down his face, soaking his beard, and making him look old. Old and worried.

‘Do it,’ the man shouted back.

Satyrus felt his way down the ridge, pushing his horse when she hesitated. He didn’t love the mare but she was the best of his string and he had to hope that she could find her footing in the tricky light and pouring water.

They went down and down and down … and Satyrus began to worry again. He couldn’t imagine that they had climbed this far — couldn’t imagine that he’d have to ride back up all this rock to find his friends.

It occurred to him that, hurry or no, the wisest course was to go back up the ridge, find his friends, and make some sort of miserable camp until the rain cleared. One glance in sunlit daylight would show them where they were.

Down and down. Now Satyrus was sure he was lost — he could see a watercourse at the base of the valley, and the darkness was coming down like the water — too damned late to climb the ridge.

And then he saw the road.

There couldn’t be a road at the base of every valley. It had to be the Sardis road — the Royal Road.

He sat on his horse’s back for a moment, and then slipped down to give the animal a rest and let her drink from the gushing rainwater in the conduit by the road. He had a handful of grain and he put it in his straw hat and she ate it, ravenously, and his hat went with the grain. He had a lump of honey-sugar, almost as big as his fist, in his bag — a sticky, sodden mass, but he ate half and gave the other half to the horse, and she flicked her ears forward as if acknowledging that this, at least, was worth her time.

For the first time, he loved her.

‘Good girl,’ he said, and patted her neck.

Now he had to climb the ridge again.

He was so busy with the horse that he missed the men.

They came along, heads down in the pouring rain — more than a hundred cavalrymen, sodden men in sodden cloaks on sodden horses.

Satyrus was in the middle of the road. He managed to leap onto his horse’s back — he had that much time — and then they were all around him.

‘Get off the road, you stupid fuck!’ shouted a phylarch.

He hid his head and walked the mare clear of the mass of men, so that she was fetlock deep in the conduit of rainwater. He sat there and watched as Demetrios’s Aegema, his elite cavalry, marched past in the very last light. Five hundred cavalrymen, and in the midst of them, Demetrios himself and two men Satyrus knew at sight — Neron, his spy, and Apollonaris, his physician.

Satyrus pulled his sodden cloak over his head and sat as still as he could.

Neron looked at him.

Demetrios looked at him. He was laughing — in a torrent of rain, he laughed like Dionysus. He was confident and happy.

That alone shook Satyrus as much as anything. And Demetrios and Neron were talking, but Satyrus couldn’t hear them over the rain.

Neron turned his head, looked back at Satyrus, and shouted.

Satyrus held his breath.

A pair of soldiers rode forward to Neron.

Satyrus backed his horse, step by step, along the conduit that ran by the road — now the water was deeper, and icy cold. Poor beast.

Satyrus prayed to Herakles, and his prayers were answered in the form of a small path — probably the route that the road’s maintainers used to get at the conduit walls.

More shouts behind him.

‘Up,’ he said to the horse, and put his heels into her sides, and gamely, she rose and made the jump — trusting him — and then she was on the barrow trail, and he didn’t hurry. There was now a thin screen of acacia between him and the road itself, on the other side of the ditch. He rode a few steps, dismounted, and put his cloak over her head.

‘There was a man — right there by the road,’ Neron insisted.

Demetrios nodded. ‘No doubt as miserable as we are, my friend. May he find warmth and shelter.’ He slapped his spymaster on the back. ‘Probably one of your own prodromoi.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Neron said. ‘I’d kill for a report — any report — on where Seleucus is.’

‘Let’s not look too far ahead,’ Demetrios said. ‘Or put another way — fuck Seleucus. We’ve slipped Lysimachos, and now we join up with Pater and the world is ours.’

Neron rode on, but he looked behind him every hundred heartbeats until the rain stopped.

The two cold, wet men were careful. They searched the edge of the conduit and the trees. Then they searched in the conduit, but by luck they were up the hill twenty horse lengths, stabbing their spears down into the water.

Demetrios — and Neron — were well served. They weren’t giving up.

Satyrus waited for the rain to get fiercer, and when it did, he walked his horse north along the conduit. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t look back.

In half an hour, the rain eased off, and by the end of an hour, he’d made ten stades and was on the road, and the rain had stopped.

He considered going back, and decided that the risk would be insane. He had one horse, no camping gear, and no weapons but the knife under his arm.

The sky cleared as he walked on the road, and the moon came up, and it was cold. He mounted up and rode, mostly to keep himself warm, jumping off every couple of stades and running alongside.

His mare was flagging. He searched his sodden leather bag and found a sausage. She ate it. A morsel of wet, stale bread. She ate it.

A linen napkin rolled around his fire-making kit. In the bronze tin, he remembered, he’d put pressed dried grapes from the farm where he’d hidden. The mass of grapes was dry, and the size of his fist. He broke off a piece and gave the rest to his horse.

It was full night. His good campaign chlamys was wet through, but it was still warm, or better than nothing, and the horse was warm. It was the horse that worried him. He needed her alive. In fact, he’d come to like her.

They walked. He didn’t remount. He needed her for an emergency, and short of that, he’d just keep going.

Morning. A beautiful morning, with the sun rising above the ridge to the east like the figures of the poet — long, gentle rays of red-pink reaching across one ridge to lick at the next. Rosy fingers lasciviously teasing earth.

Satyrus was mostly asleep, plodding along. Trying to think of a name for his mare. It seemed like an important thing to name her before she lay down and died. And she was exhausted. And he had no more tricks to play, no more sugar, no more warmth.

But somewhere on the hillsides above him, there was a man with a fire. He could smell it. It gave him hope. He pushed forward, one step in front of the other, up a steep climb. He remembered this stretch of road, and knew just where he was — entering the Mysian Gates.

Near the top he saw the smoke, and then saw the fire, and then saw the men — he laughed.

They’d been watching him all the way up the pass, cooking breakfast.

He kept walking. They were Sakje — he was pretty sure he knew the tall, dark-haired man by the fire as Thyrsis, the Achilles of the Assagetae.

‘Thyrsis!’ he yelled.

Every head came up. Two men he hadn’t seen emerged from cover and let their arrows off their strings.

Thyrsis put his cup on the ground and ran down the road to him, wrapped him in an embrace.

‘What are you doing here, oh king?’ Thyrsis said.

‘Scouting,’ Satyrus said. ‘Would you be so kind as to feed this excellent horse?’

A young Sakje woman took his mare, and he sat on a rock by the road.

The next thing he knew, he was waking to a bright day with his wounded thigh burning and stiff but he felt so much better that he chuckled.

‘Soup,’ Thyrsis said.

The Sakje maiden gave him a cup, and Satyrus drank it all off, and three more like it, and ate some stale bread.

‘How far to the army?’ he asked.

Thyrsis laughed. ‘Six hundred stades,’ he said. ‘We’re just a feint.’

Satyrus rubbed his thigh and chewed his bread. ‘I need three horses and a partner. I need you to push south; find Anaxagoras, Apollodorus and Jubal. They’re up that ridge somewhere. We thought Demetrios had Lysimachos right behind him.’

Thyrsis laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘We are the best. There’s two hundred of us, and Eumenes and his Olbians. We’ve had him running for sixty stades.’

‘Lysimachos?’ Satyrus asked.

‘With the queen — up by Helikore, the Bithynian capital.’ He smiled at Satyrus’s discomfiture. ‘Your sister and the King of Thrace get along very well. They are waiting at the Royal Road junction for news.’

Satyrus groaned. ‘I have the news,’ he said. ‘I just have to get there.’

Satyrus took the time to visit his mare, who was sound asleep, lying flat, the sleep of an exhausted animal. Then he mounted a Sakje pony, and with Thyrsis himself at his side, galloped for Helikore, two hundred stades to the north.

Sunset, and Thracian cavalry pickets — Getae, who had no love for Thyrsis, but a certain wary respect. Satyrus rode into the largest army camp he’d ever seen. He lost count of the tents, the huts, the wagons … there were easily twenty thousand men, and he suspected that the mass of them was still smaller than Antigonus’s fires in the valley below Sardis.

Calicles, the Thracian nobleman, recognised Satyrus right away, and took him to Lysimachos while he dined.

Melitta saw Satyrus and nodded to him as if his arrival was the most natural thing in the world. He kissed her on both cheeks.

Lysimachos embraced him. ‘You have news?’ he asked.

‘I’ve seen Demetrios retreating, and his father — and I come from Seleucus.’ He raised his hand to forestall a babble of questions. Bowed to Prepalaus — Cassander’s general. ‘Strategos, we met near Corinth,’ he said.

The older Macedonian nodded without warmth. ‘I seem to remember that I was at the point of your spear,’ he said.

Satyrus bowed again. ‘Your master had recently ordered me killed,’ he said, ‘and yet I regret serving with Demetrios, even out of spite.’

The old Macedonian pursed his lips. But rather than say what was on his mind, he shrugged. ‘Tell us where Antigonus is,’ he asked.

‘Antigonus is at Sardis. That was four days ago — I doubt he’s moved. He’s there to effect a junction with Demetrios, who must have joined him by now.’

Lysimachos looked serious.

‘When I left Seleucus, he was in Cappadocia. Antigonus believes he is at the Gordian Gates, and he is not.’ Satyrus seized a parchment provided by his sister and started rendering a chart, just as he’d learned among Ptolemy’s pages in Alexandria. ‘Here’s Gordia. Here’s Dorylaeum. Here we are in Bithynia. Here’s Seleucus — over here, at Koloneia in Cappadocia. See it?’

Prepalaus saw it first.

‘We need to go east to Dorylaeum.’ The Macedonian scratched his head. ‘But Antigonus can be there before us.’

‘Antigonus and his son will, almost certainly, thrust up the coast at where he thinks you are — in the passes north of Sardis. Going for Ephesus … or Sardis. Yes?’ Satyrus had it all in his head — the grand strategy. He could see it as if he were Zeus’s eagle lording it in the heavens, watching men crawl like ants along the valleys of Asia.

Lysimachos nodded at Melitta. ‘That’s what we wanted to do all along — sweep east and pick up Seleucus on his line of march.’ He nodded at Cassander’s general. ‘Some were more cautious.’ Hungrily, Lysimachos leaned forward. ‘How many men does Seleucus have?’

‘Twelve thousand Persian cavalry, that again in satrapal levies, and two hundred elephants. And his household troops.’ Satyrus shrugged. ‘Some infantry, but not as good as ours.’

Prepalaus stood up. ‘I’m not the cautious old fool that Lysimachos would have me — I just never thought Seleucus would actually come.’ He gave them a wry look. ‘Don’t look so superior, King of Thrace. If you and I have anything in common, it is that we’ve both been beaten badly by young Demetrios.’

Lysimachos winced.

Melitta shook her head. ‘We can bicker while we march.’

With a thousand cavalry and two thousand infantry, the Bosporon contribution was so small as to be almost negligible, but Prepalaus and Lysimachos needed a foil, or a balance, and they listened to Melitta.

‘Are we agreed?’ Melitta asked.

Lysimachos nodded.

Prepalaus rubbed his grey chin and nodded. ‘This is where we cast the die,’ he said. ‘If Antigonus is ahead of us in the mountain passes, we have to retreat. And that will leave Seleucus alone.’

A slave handed Satyrus wine, and he collapsed onto his sister’s couch. She kissed him, and he almost fell asleep on the spot.

‘Let’s do it,’ Prepalaus said.

When Satyrus awoke the next morning, he found himself in a camp all but empty of soldiers. Tents and huts had become mere piles of straw; horse lines were nothing but small mounds of dung. Slaves toiled to fill in latrines.

The sun was in the middle of the sky. He’d slept half a day away. He was in his own camp bed in his own pavilion, and Phoibos had a breakfast of sweet bread and pomegranate for him, washed down with grape juice and sparkling water from a spring.

Satyrus felt old. His muscles were stiff. But food helped, and a slave came in after breakfast and massaged him with a thoroughness verging on violence, and then he slept again.

Phoibos served him dinner — lamb on skewers and Chian wine. Scopasis joined him, left behind by Melitta to run his escort and collect the Sakje scouts and Greek cavalry of the feint. Thyrsis was already gone away back down the road towards Sardis.

It was odd to sit in the fading sunlight and look out over a dwindling camp. There were men left behind — sick or lame, tending spare mounts, or simply in charge of the last baggage, some regretful deserters and some hopeful recruits, late for the fair.

Satyrus went to sleep for the third time in a day, considering what the remnants of an army looked like, and awoke to the stiffest legs he’d ever had. But he couldn’t hide in his tent like Achilles for ever, so he allowed Phoibos to dress him in a Tyrian red chiton and matching chlamys with gold embroidery. His best sword was either on his pack horse with Charmides and Jubal, or lost, so he took another, lighter and longer.

Mounting was no pleasure — riding was worse. Satyrus trotted a riding horse around the camp for half an hour, easing his muscles to their task, and then he mounted his warhorse; a horse he’d scarcely ridden since acquiring him on this very spot, more or less.

Phoibos and his slaves had the tent down and all the gear packed on a dozen donkeys and a wagon. Their little baggage train was already moving but Phoibos had two stools, a table, and a cup of wine waiting in the open where the pavilion had been — and one last donkey waiting to receive them.

Satyrus sat on the stools and the masseur rubbed some of the pain out of his calves and thighs, especially where he had taken the wound. The flesh had closed.

Satyrus drank the wine. ‘You are the very best of servants, Phoibos.’

‘I endeavour to give satisfaction,’ Phoibos said. ‘If I might be so bold, lord, I gather that we are at war with my former master, Demetrios?’ he asked.

Satyrus nodded. He drank the wine off. ‘Yes.’

Phoibos nodded. ‘I think it would be best if I avoided falling into his hands. He wouldn’t be forgiving.’

Satyrus smiled. ‘I’ll do my best to keep that from happening.’

‘May all the gods bless you, my lord.’ Phoibos held Satyrus’s horse while he mounted.

Satyrus had the whole day’s ride to contemplate how in two days he’d gone from starving fugitive to King of the Bosporus.

Philokles would laugh, he thought.

Satyrus had no problem catching the army. They made a little more than one hundred stades that day, but their vanguard managed to go almost twice that, coming up to Trikomia on the Hermos River, almost close enough to Dorylaeum to touch the walls.

An hour after Satyrus came into camp, Melitta was sharing his dinner in his pavilion, and Thyrsis, Eumenes of Olbia and Scopasis came in for a cup of wine — the Olbians and the Sakje had retired out of the Sardis Road and Mysia.

‘Demetrios is north of Sardis with thirty thousand men,’ Eumenes said. ‘His probes up the passes were pretty cautious yesterday. We took a couple of prisoners but they didn’t know anything. We let them go.’

Satyrus passed on a second cup of wine. ‘I’m still tired,’ he said. ‘Did you find my friends?’

Eumenes smiled. ‘They found us. Your marine — he’s some sort of hero from epic poetry — he wanted to mount a fresh horse and come with me. But the boy … Charmides? Went to sleep on his horse, and had a fall. I left them with my prodromoi.’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘When I was lost in the rain, I couldn’t imagine it would end this well.’

Before the first rays of the sun shone down the valley of the Hermos, Satyrus was up, and he’d built a small altar on a rock above the cavalry camp. He sacrificed a lamb to Hermes for protecting his friends, and another to Apollo for the healing of his wound. Then he rode down into the camp, spoke with Nikephoros and Lykaeaus who was temporarily leading all the marines. Then he mounted his bay riding horse, had a slave lead his charger, and headed east with his twenty horse marines — as the other Bosporons now called them — under Draco, who laughed at him and reminded him that they’d crossed this country together when Satyrus was a boy.

Lysimachos was with the vanguard — he had a thousand Thracian cavalry, and they were enthusiastic burners, so that the limits of their exploration could be read on every horizon. It was a brutal form of war but Satyrus, sitting with Lysimachos, had to admit that it did keep the commander informed of his men’s progress.

‘This is all enemy country,’ Lysimachos said.

Satyrus doubted that the peasantry of the hills were really allies — or friends — to any man. And the first village they rode through showed the Thracians’ savagery — dead men, dead women, and dead animals. All the roofs burned.

Melitta came up in the late afternoon with Scopasis and all her people. Her knights were stripped of their armour — it was off with their wagons, somewhere in the baggage behind them — and their adolescent men and women were armed only with a bow and a knife.

Melitta saluted Lysimachos with her whip. ‘Give your Getae a day off,’ she said. She said it so pleasantly that only Satyrus caught the violence with which she said Getae. ‘We’ll pass through them at sunset.’

Lysimachos shrugged. ‘I don’t think they need to be called in. We’re making good progress.’

Melitta slapped her leather-clad leg impatiently. ‘My people can make twice the time, and we don’t stop to rape the animals.’ Her true feelings were coming through, and the scars on her face burned red. ‘And if we’re as close to Antigonus as Prepalaus thinks, we need to keep the smoke off the horizon, eh?’

Satyrus had seldom loved his sister as much as that moment — Lysimachos accepted her suggestions with a smile. It was a condescending smile — that of a man in his prime to a mere woman — a woman play-acting a cavalry commander.

Melitta shrugged off the implied insult, accepted the part of his agreement she needed, and cantered away with her knights at her horse’s heels.

Lysimachos shook his head. ‘She actually fights, I hear,’ he said.

Satyrus looked at him and smiled, albeit for a completely different reason. ‘She actually wins,’ he said. ‘You know what the Assagetae call her?’

‘Long legs? Lovely eyes?’ Lysimachos chuckled.

‘Smells Like Death.’ Satyrus smiled at the King of Thrace. ‘Our mother was called Cruel Hands. And not for nothing. Ask your Getae.’ Then he bowed, waved to his horse marines, and cantered off in his sister’s wake. He had to ride quickly — Draco was threatening to spit on the King of Thrace.

They rode through Dorylaeum, and no one tried to hold it or the passes beyond against them. The Sakje crossed the Hermos ford at a gallop, caught an Antigonid patrol off guard and captured the lot — five troopers and a phylarch. The men had nothing worthwhile to report, but their shock at the appearance of the Sakje told its own story, and their phylarch was not so ignorant.

He claimed that there was a division of Antigonus’s army behind them — half a day’s march south, at Kotiaeio.

Satyrus heard the name and dismounted. He took his working scroll out of his saddlebag and made a mark.

‘Crax talked about Kotiaeio,’ Satyrus said. ‘Ares, that was ten days ago. Ask the phylarch where Seleucus is.’

The man shook his head in silence.

Satyrus pointed his finger at Scopasis and waved at the prisoners.

Draco dismounted and moved the little ‘x’ of Kotiaeio further west. ‘I’ve been there,’ he said.

A pair of Sakje took them under guard, headed north to Lysimachos.

Satyrus pointed at his new estimate of where Kotiaeio was located.

‘Let’s say Antigonus has discovered that we’re not north of Sardis … day before yesterday. So he marches north and east through the Mokedene. He had a garrison in the east — at the Gordian Gates — and now he’s racing to them? Or to find us? It really doesn’t matter. He’s beaten us to the crossroads at Kotiaeio, and we won’t fight through there. And we want to join up with Seleucus — who’s down here — and we want to meet Antigonus on the plains — the high plains. Where we can use our cavalry.’

Melitta sat on her horse watching him. ‘I’d like to contribute to your monologue but this is all empty space to me.’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t be, sister. We walked down this valley pretending to be slaves. We went south and east from here, right along the Sangarius River. Remember?’

Melitta smiled. ‘You were an odd boy. I was scared out of my wits. All my energy went to carrying that damn basket.’

‘And a very fetching slave you made,’ Draco put in.

‘You had no eyes for me, Macedonian. My slave girl, now …’ They both chuckled.

‘Aye, she was a tender morsel. Very much to a soldier’s taste.’ Draco licked his lips lewdly.

Satyrus made a face. ‘You were scared? You acted as if this was a game we were playing.’

She shrugged. ‘You think perhaps I should have run around screaming?’ She shrugged. ‘In other words, you’ve decided where the army should go.’

Satyrus scratched his beard. ‘We should consult with Lysimachos and Prepalaus.’

Their eyes met. The smile they shared might have lasted a generation.

‘Thyrsis,’ Melitta called. ‘Guides back at the ford, and guides every five stades. A pair, with remounts, and as soon as the vanguard comes up, they report and ride to us.’

Thyrsis looked bored. ‘This is children’s work. I want to fight.’

Melitta stared him down.

He shrugged. ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said, and some of the Sakje laughed — some at him, some at them both.

‘I need Anaxagoras back,’ Melitta said. ‘The boys are growing restless. They need to see that I have a stallion of my own.’

Satyrus sighed and took his horse marines forward. They were fine cavalrymen now. In fact, they could, most of them, manage a bow on horseback. But two days with the Sakje and they were tired and sore. And they didn’t have enough remounts to keep up the pace.

Satyrus gave them the horses from the captured Antigonid patrol, and several Sakje leaders added to the string of remounts. Two men who couldn’t make the pace were left as guides. The rest of them pressed forward, heading east and south, Draco leading. His years of service — with Eumenes of Kardia, with Alexander, with Heraklea — left him with a good knowledge of the area, and he brought them unerringly to the ford of the Sangarius, well west of Gordia … and unguarded.

They camped across the ford, and every man slept with his weapons to hand, his horse ready bridled — they had pickets over a stade from camp. They woke in the darkness before dawn and rode south and west now. Melitta sent Scopasis and half her tribesmen back along the river, prowling due west, looking for contact with the enemy.

Satyrus rode up every ridge. The ground was flat — increasingly agricultural. They were on the high plains of central Anatolia, and when they camped again, Scopasis rolled out of his blankets as if stung by a scorpion, and came to Melitta, wonder on his face. In his hand was a pair of arrowheads — carefully cast bronze points, tiny trilobate heads such as only the Sakje used.

‘Our people have been this way before,’ Scopasis said.

‘Oh, yes,’ Melitta said. She sang them one of her mother’s songs, of the Great Ride against the King of Phrygia.

Draco sat with his back against Satyrus’s, polishing the blade of his dirk. ‘She’s quite something, that sister of yours,’ he said.

They were off with the sun again. Satyrus sent one of his horse marines back along the chain of guides — a chain that now stretched almost six hundred stades. They’d started to get guides back but Satyrus wanted a progress report.

Mid-afternoon, and Satyrus climbed a low ridge — shallow and long, ten stades across. There were wild grapes all along the crest, hard riding, and he had to dismount; he heard his troopers curse him.

But at the western edge of the ridge there was a mound, and below it was a bluff, and the ground fell away to the south and east. To his right, he could see Melitta and her scouts as puffs of dust on the path across the lower ridge.

And way off to the east, twenty stades away or more, was a line of dust that rose to the heavens like burnt offerings from a hundred altars.

At his side, Draco gave a whoop.

Sophocles had long since given up on catching Satyrus. He had no intention of trying to follow the King of the Bosporus into the Seleucid army. It was the sort of thing that men did in Persian songs, but Sophokles intended to live to old age.

So he rode north, around the King of Babylon. He had to stop for two days when his guts rid themselves of the last of the farmer’s-wife’s poison. His thugs deserted him, and stole all but one of his horses.

But they didn’t kill him, and he thanked the gods for that, and rode north again. It rained so hard he couldn’t see.

All in a day’s work.

It took him four days to find Antigonus’s army, and another whole day to get an idiot cavalry officer to lead him to the old man himself. He gathered from the men who held him — gently but firmly — that Demetrios had joined his father just the day before.

By the time he faced the father and son, his news was nine days old. But it was valuable nonetheless.

Demetrios had heard of him. And Neron. Neron came. And then the serious questioning began.

Sophokles had made his decision before riding in. He was changing sides. He no longer knew — or cared — which side Phiale was on. He needed the protection of a side, and all the signs and portents he could see shouted that Antigonus — with the bigger army and the giant herd of elephants and the brilliant son and the bottomless well of Asian riches — would win.

And Sophokles had had enough of obeying people with bad intelligence.

So, patiently, he told everything he knew.

And he knew a great deal.

Neron asked him questions all day — a full day, with two tattooed barbarians standing by. Sophokles didn’t like torture any more than the next man — and he kept pointing out that he’d have more value as an agent than as a tortured corpse.

Finally — after a day — Neron came over and gave him a bowl of soup. ‘One more time — you were after Satyrus of Tanais?’

Sophokles, who had answered this ten times, shrugged. ‘Yes.’

Neron looked angry, but Sophokles had figured out long since that he, Sophokles, was not the target.

‘And you lost him?’ Neron asked.

‘Twice. Lost him at the edge of the Euphrates — Zeugman — twenty days ago. Then I shadowed Seleucus for a few days, until … well, I had a wound. Then I lost him again. He went north.’

Neron put his face in his hands. ‘Satyrus of Tanais sailed around our fleet to join Seleucus. And then he left Seleucus riding north. That’s what you are telling me. Satyrus is the linchpin between their armies. And he went north.’

Sophokles found the soup more interesting than the theory. He made the sound men make when they don’t care to speak.

Neron left him for a while, and then returned.

‘We want you to go back to Seleucus,’ he said. ‘And spy.’

Sophokles shrugged. ‘Better Seleucus than Lysimachos. None of his easterners will know me, and my Persian is pretty good.’ He finished the soup. ‘And kill Satyrus?’

Demetrios the golden, in his second-best breastplate and with his helmet under his arm, came in. ‘Absolutely not. If I hear that he was assassinated, I’ll see you cut in quarters and burned. Am I making myself clear? I am the man who will kill Satyrus — in single combat. I have dreamed it. He is the worthy opponent of my story, and I will not have him killed.’

Neron raised an eyebrow.

Demetrios sighed. ‘Neron, I know you have our best interests at heart. But we have more than two hundred elephants, fifty thousand hoplites, and the finest cavalry in the world. And Pater, and me. Don’t you see? We want this battle. This is where we get them all together and we smash them like a pot. With just a little luck, we kill Seleucus and his idiot son and Lysimachos and Satyrus. The lot. Cut the heads off the hydra, and we’re done.’

Neron shrugged. ‘I understand the plan. I feel it is … optimistic.’

Demetrios beamed his golden smile. ‘Neron, sometimes I wonder which one of us works for the other. Are you the tool of my imperial ambition? Or am I the tool of yours? This is a command. Please obey.’

Neron turned to Sophokles. ‘There, you heard it from your prince. Observe, spy, and report. Do not kill Satyrus, or anyone else.’

Sophokles nodded. ‘Of course. In the meantime, might I have more soup?’