Force of Kings

23

Seleucus assumed that he was the commander, and neither Lysimachos nor Prepalaus gainsaid him, so when he summoned the strategoi at dawn, they came, still full of the good fellowship of the night before.

Seleucus was back to his reserved, cautious and dignified self. He nodded as Satyrus came up, and handed around cups of water. ‘If you expect a complex battle plan,’ he said, ‘you are in the wrong tent.’

While they chuckled, he led them out onto the open space in front of his pavilion, and then up the hill to its highest point, where they could see the broad, flat extent of the plain from the low ridges to the east, all the way to the river on the west — a patchwork of small fields wearing the colours of summer in the first light of day.

Lysimachos nodded agreement without a word being said.

Prepalaus frowned. ‘We are facing the subtlest and most able mind of the age,’ he said.

‘We have more cavalry and more elephants, and with this many men from this many lands, the best we can hope for is that we all go forward together and we don’t fight among ourselves,’ Seleucus said. ‘I wish to put all the infantry in the centre — Prepalaus and all of the mercenary foot — Prepalaus on the right, by the single olive tree. That is where your rightmost file will form — clear of the village, and facing the open ground.’

Prepalaus nodded, a man reserving judgement.

‘My sense is that our phalanx is smaller. We will only fill the plain to the walled farm … no, there, to the left.’ He was pointing with a baton, and Satyrus shook his head.

‘That’s ten stades,’ he said.

Seleucus nodded.

Antiochus smiled. ‘Twelve stades and some odd paces, Satyrus. I paced it off myself. Enough for a phalanx formed sixteen deep and three thousand four hundred files wide at the normal order.’

Satyrus thought of his largest battle — at Gaza-and the only one where he had commanded an army, at the Tanais River. At Tanais, both sides would have vanished into fifty thousand men, and that was just one phalanx.

‘He will overreach us on one flank or both,’ Seleucus said. ‘Outguessing Antigonus is a waste of time. So let us assume both. We will divide our cavalry evenly on both flanks. Lysimachos, I wish you to take the right-flank cavalry. I wish all of the Saka and Sakje there. My own cavalry will form on the left, under my son. Diodorus will hold the extreme left of the line, with his leftmost files on the river.’

Seleucus turned to Satyrus. ‘I regret that I have, in effect, broken your contingent among all the commands — your cavalry is with Lysimachos, your infantry with Prepalaus, and the Exiles are with my son.’

Satyrus nodded. He was irked — he was not an inexperienced commander, and he’d just been deprived of a command.

Every eye was on him.

He thought, None of them are satisfied. Lysimachos wants more cavalry. Prepalaus wants command of the whole centre. And if I voice my complaints, I do not help the alliance. And why am I here?

And next to these men, I am the least experienced.

He nodded. ‘I will hold myself in reserve, then,’ he said. ‘Where will you be?’

‘I will keep a thousand cavalry and fifty elephants in reserve,’ Seleucus said.

‘Fifty elephants!’ Prepalaus exclaimed. ‘But we could have them in the front line.’

Seleucus nodded. ‘Perhaps. But they are mine, and I believe that a battle of this size can only be won with a massive stroke — a knockout blow. This will not be a dustless victory, gentlemen. My plan — if it can be called a plan — is to abide. To take the best punch that Antigonus and Demetrios can throw, and to have one more punch to throw back. I will echelon the phalanx — Prepalaus and his Macedonians on the far right, and every taxeis eight files back, like a set of steps.’

They nodded. That was the formation that they had all known since Philip’s time.

‘The right-hand cavalry forward, the left-hand cavalry back behind the leftmost phalanx — your Nikephoros’s men, I think. They can hold the left end of the line.’

‘We let them approach us?’ Lysimachos asked.

Seleucus shook his head. ‘No, that’s bad for morale. No, when we are formed, we will go forward. But the left flank cavalry — I want you to hold back. Wait my signal.’

Satyrus leaned in. ‘Where do you plan to throw your knockout punch?’ he asked.

Seleucus shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘If the battle goes as I plan — and I don’t expect it — I will throw them at the junction between their right-flank cavalry and their left-end phalanx.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But that is pure hubris. I will throw them where I must.’

A slave — or perhaps a freeman, but certainly Seleucus’s secretary — walked around the group, handing out wax tablets bound in wood.

‘This is the order in which I wish you to form,’ he said, ‘with the name of every contingent. All of the psiloi and all of the peltastoi into the centre. I doubt that their order matters very much — they won’t last long.’

‘Don’t let the useless fuckers disorder my phalanx,’ Prepalaus said.

Lysimachos was not quite so contemptuous of his Thracians. ‘Form with gaps,’ he said. ‘Files double back so that the peltasts can come through. It’s foolishness to ask them to go out and discomfort the enemy phalanx and not take some precaution for their exit from the centre.’

Prepalaus shrugged, obviously uncaring.

Satyrus leaned forward again. ‘I wish to support the King of Thrace in this,’ he said. ‘If there are gaps then even cavalry can be committed to the skirmish battle in the centre. And when the peltastoi retire, they can be collected and added to the reserve.’

Prepalaus snorted, but Antiochus agreed, and Seleucus was swayed. ‘It is true,’ he allowed, ‘that it seems wasteful to leave the peltastoi to die, but there’s no room for them on the flanks. Very well. If every taxeis has four files pulled in the centre of its line, that’s a two-horse gap every stade.’

Prepalaus shook his head. ‘Those gaps will collapse shut every time we lose, and those men are lost out of the line,’ he said.

Seleucus crossed gazes with the older Macedonian. Finally Prepalaus shrugged. ‘On your head be it,’ he said. ‘But listen, King of Babylon, you are going head to head with Antigonus One-Eye at even odds. I would rather we were trying something — a feigned retreat, a night march, a fight in the rain. Anything. None of us have ever beaten him. Eh? And your plan is to accept whatever he does and then attack.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s how you win a sword fight,’ he said. ‘Or pankration.’

‘Oh,’ Prepalaus smiled grimly. ‘And you are an expert?’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Antiochus laughed. ‘You sure you’re not a Macedonian?’ he asked.

They poured libations, first to Zeus Soter, and then to Athena, and then to Alexander.

‘Gentlemen,’ Seleucus said, ‘I wish that Tyche may stand by one shoulder of every man while Athena guards the other with Nike at her side, and the Eagle of Zeus over all.’

Even Prepalaus smiled.

‘Go with the gods. Let’s get formed. If we form well, that’s more than half the battle.’

Lysimachos saluted and went to his staff, standing apart, and started issuing orders. Prepalaus had his son with him — he sent the younger man running to the Macedonian camp.

Antiochus clapped Satyrus on the back. ‘Don’t let the old bastard get to you,’ he said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I thought that it would be Lysimachos refusing to play the tune. I worried that someone would play traitor. I didn’t expect Cassander’s general to be an old fool.’

Seleucus shook his head. ‘He’s no fool, King of the North. And I expect he’ll be steady enough when the bronze is in the air. And all his griping tells me that he’s planning to fight. If he stood silently, accepting my orders …’ He said no more, but he didn’t have to.

They all dreaded treason, even now.

Antigonus had slept poorly, and he swore in answer to his son’s greeting.

‘The so-called allies are forming,’ he said.

Antigonus stood still, a slave helping him drink pomegranate juice while two more slaves armed him. He had a heavy horseman’s thorax of solid bronze.

‘I don’t want this thing,’ he said. ‘I’m going on foot with the phalanx. If those bastards don’t see me there, they won’t stand their ground.’

Demetrios motioned to the slaves. ‘Wear scale, then, or leather.’

‘Are you a complete fool?’ Antigonus asked one of the slaves pettishly, and struck the boy so that he fell. He didn’t whimper.

‘I feel like shit,’ Antigonus said. ‘Something in my guts. Have any dreams?’

Demetrios shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘I did — I dreamed about a lot of good lads from Pella who’ve died following me around.’ The old man shrugged, his shoulders free of the heavy armour. ‘Something light — that’s the way,’ he said to the same slave he’d just hit.

They had a thorax of white leather and heavy linen, carefully quilted.

‘That’s what I want,’ said the old man. ‘And greaves.’

‘You aren’t going in the front rank?’ Demetrios asked.

‘I’m the fucking king,’ Antigonus said. ‘What kind of king hides from a fight he started himself? Eh? I taught you better than that. When kings hide from their own fights then the world will have gone to Hades.’

Demetrios hugged his father, quite spontaneously. ‘Let’s win this thing, and rule the world,’ he said.

Antigonus grinned. ‘You are a good boy,’ he said gruffly, his voice thick. ‘By the gods …’ He slapped Demetrios’s back.

Together, they walked to the door of the pavilion. The arming slaves were just getting a pair of sarissas so that the king could have his choice of weapons. The saurauter of the nearest was on the carpet as the slave took it down from the loops on the side of the tent, and it was on the old man’s blind side. The saurauter caught his ankle, and he fell flat in the door of his tent, the wind knocked out of him, his left wrist pressed right back against his body. He shrieked with pain, and every head turned for a stade to see their king lying on his face.

Demetrios hurried to his side, and got him quickly to his feet, and men cheered, but many of them turned aside to mutter to their mates.

‘Superstitious ninnies,’ Antigonus growled. ‘My wrist hurts like-’ He glared at a man who was staring at him. ‘What’s the matter with you? Never seen a man as ugly as me?’

The man stammered and retreated into his friends, and Demetrios laughed.

‘No one can say you aren’t yourself, this morning,’ he said.

Antigonus walked towards the open-sided pavilion where he issued his orders. ‘I’m not myself,’ he said. ‘If Seleucus offered me a three-years truce, I’d take it. I never thought they’d pull together an army that big.’

Demetrios shook his head. ‘It is no bigger than ours. And you are the greatest general of the age.’

Antigonus made a face. ‘My arse,’ he said. ‘The greatest general of the age likes to have a healthy advantage in men and elephants.’ He shook his head. ‘But I have a few tricks, it’s true.’

All the Macedonian officers rose to their feet as Antigonus entered. They saluted. Antigonus nodded curtly.

‘Let’s keep this simple,’ he said. ‘Form as you are camped — just as you are camped. Form the phalanx twenty deep — we’ll still be the same length of line as their line, and that much more solid.’

‘We could overlap their ends …’ said Philip cautiously.

‘When you are the fucking lord of Asia, you can order your phalanx any way you like, Philip,’ Antigonus said.

‘Someone’s touchy this morning,’ Philip said, and the old man smiled.

‘I am,’ he agreed. ‘So don’t make me cross. Lakshaphur, take all the elephants and string them across the centre as we discussed last night. Five horse lengths between every beast should do it. The beasts will crush their barbarians and their psiloi in the centre and then — I hope — scare the crap out of their phalanx. Some of their men can’t be worth a fart … after all, we have all the old veterans.’

Philip raised an eyebrow.

‘Demetrios, you will have the right-flank cavalry. Philip, you will have the left.’ Both men nodded. ‘At my signal, the elephants go forward. Drum beats and bugles, eh?’

Lakshaphur, one of the last of the Indians who had taken service with Alexander twenty-five years before, gave a curt nod.

‘And then,’ Antigonus said with finality, ‘Philip will take all but the levies from the left and ride behind the phalanx to the right. All the cavalry — one big attack into their left. Shatter their cavalry and pour into the weakest part of their phalanx before they can recover.’

‘It leaves our left naked,’ Philip said.

Antigonus smiled. ‘Are you the only one with the balls to argue with me?’ he asked.

‘Balls?’ Philip shrugged. ‘Wives do it all the time,’ he said, and everyone laughed.

Antigonus nodded. ‘I know the danger. So I’m putting the foot companions and the remaining Argyraspids there. And besides,’ he said. ‘We know we’re going right. They won’t expect it — who attacks the enemy’s shielded flank? And they won’t know. I’ll wager a talent of silver to a single turtle that Seleucus has his useless son or Lysimachos there, with orders to hang back.’ He laughed. ‘If they hang back an hour, we have them. Demetrios will blow through their cavalry, turn their flank, and the thing is done.’

‘I will,’ Demetrios said. He was proud — delighted — to be given the position of honour and maximum responsibility. He was playing Alexander while his father played Philip. The difference was, his father loved him. ‘I will cut through them like a hot pin cuts wax.’

Antigonus beamed with pride. ‘See that you do, boy,’ he said. ‘It’s all on you.’

Demetrios was busy for two hours, arranging the right-flank cavalry to his own satisfaction, riding back and forth along the line, watching as the rightmost files of his father’s elite phalanx formed, adjusting and adjusting again. He decided in the end for brute force over surprise. He arranged his best squadrons in wedges all along his front, with the best armoured men at the points of the wedges; eight deep triangles of his finest heavy cavalry, and the rest — the Lydian levies, reliable men but not well drilled, and the Mysians and the Phrygians — in compact rectangles, six deep, angled off to the right to cover his flank, and a long screen of barbarians — the Thracians of Asia minor — as a screen. The Lydians and Phrygians left wide gaps between squadrons — where Philip would insert his lancers.

The enemy was forming, too. Immediately opposite, he saw the blue cloaks form. They were good troops, and they formed so quickly that their grey-beard commander ordered them to dismount, and they stood with their reins in their hands.

Demetrios wished to order the same, but he wasn’t sure it was a practical idea. Any delay in mounting would disorder the whole front.

He watched under his hand as the day grew hotter and the sun climbed. He was facing Antiochus, he was sure — the enemy commander had a grey Nisean, not a Macedonian horse at all. And he was young. Demetrios was glad — glad because he had no doubts of his ability to take Antiochus. But he looked for Satyrus, especially among the blue cloaks — they were his men, but he and his silver helmet were nowhere to be seen.

Demetrios was unconcerned. He would find Satyrus, and overcome him — man to man. At the culmination of the day. That was the way of these things, and this was his day.

He rode to his father’s side when he was sure of his arrangements.

‘Don’t you have some cavalry to command?’ his father said, by way of greeting.

‘All ready,’ Demetrios said. He and his father embraced. ‘I have Antiochus,’ he added.

‘Aye, and Philip has Lysimachos.’ Antigonus was leaning on his spear. ‘I’m eighty years old, and I’m too fucking old to carry a spear all day, so let’s get this over with.’ But he grinned. ‘I think — I think we’ve got them,’ he said carefully, avoiding a claim of outright hubris.

Both armies formed at roughly the same speed, although senior officers on both sides could get a useful idea of the quality of their immediate opponents by the speed and manner of their forming. Antigonus sent a messenger to Philip to ask if he was ready, and both father and son watched a particularly inept phalanx form near the walled farm on the end of the enemy line.

‘I can’t wait to tear into them!’ Demetrios said. Individual men straggled into ill-formed lines, some actually dragging their pikes behind them. They looked already beaten.

‘As soon as Philip is ready,’ Antigonus said. His elephants and the enemy elephants were only two stades apart now, and they and the clouds of skirmishers — also a line ten stades long — were raising dust. In an hour, the two sides would be invisible to each other, unless they started forward.

But of course, they all knew that.

‘Go with the gods,’ Antigonus said to his son. He paused. ‘I think this will be the largest battle the world has ever seen.’

‘How wonderful,’ Demetrios said, delighted.

They embraced again, and Demetrios rode away.

By the farm, Apollodorus and Nikephorus and a dozen taxiarchs harangued their men as they wandered aimlessly through the fields and ambled into a deeply flawed line.

‘Look like militia!’ Nikephorus said for the fiftieth time, catching yet another file whose idea of slouching was to march more slowly.

Apollodorus thought that the men dragging their spears behind them were over-acting, but the charade seemed to put the whole phalanx in tearing high spirits, whatever effect it had on the enemy. There are few things a soldier likes better than the feeling that he is putting some cleverness over on the enemy — and the effort distracted the men from the chaos to come.

In fact, Apollodorus had planted a line of ash stakes to mark the real front, and another to mark the deeply bowed front that amateurs would make. He’d spent the morning on them, and he was quite pleased with the effect. His marines looked particularly vulnerable at the edge of the farmyard — a loose string of men, too far apart for support, and with the rear files already edging back over the crest of the low ridge behind them.

There was no missing that the enemy cavalry was coming, and coming hard. They had eight great wedges pointed at Diodorus and Antiochus, and Apollodorus had his doubts about the quality of the Seleucid satrapal levies. Since they were the leftmost part of the army — the last to advance, and only when the whole echeloned line had formed — he sent servants back to camp to have the marine women and slaves bring up javelins and bows. And he sent another runner forward into the dust cloud to order his marine archers out of the psiloi line.

Nikephorus narrowed his eyes. ‘We don’t have the authority,’ he said. But he watched the enemy cavalry squadrons and nodded. ‘But … I agree.’

Satyrus rode up from the reserve, almost a stade behind the phalanx, where his charger and his riding horse were equally offended by the big squadron of elephants. Indeed, the Olbians, serving as his bodyguard, had trouble all morning, and Eumenes had coaxed one of the Indian mahouts into bringing a single elephant out of the formation so that he could lead his horses around the beast — one at a time, blindfolded, and then with full sight, the riders standing at their heads and murmuring to them. It was a Sakje trick — the Scythians had long experience of elephants — and the horses had calmed considerably by the time Eumenes was done and thanking the mahout.

He saw Stratokles first, and rode over to the Athenian. Herakles was pale under his helmet, but he was smiling, and laughing at something Lucius had just said in his ear. Stratokles had his helmet under his arm.

‘I hate waiting,’ he said. ‘And I hate not being in control.’ He frowned.

Satyrus shrugged. ‘At least you have a thousand men to command,’ he said. ‘I’m a well-dressed trooper under Eumenes, a man who was leading cavalry when my father was alive.’

‘Trade you,’ Stratokles said.

To the left of Stratokles, Nikephorus and Apollodorus shared a canteen.

‘Ares!’ Satyrus said. ‘When are you going to form line?’ As the paymaster, he was outraged to see his troops straggling over a stade of ground. Some of Apollodorus’s marines were snoring away on the porch of the enclosed farmyard.

Both men smiled. ‘Got ya,’ Apollodorus said. He explained, and Satyrus rode away happier — except for his sight of the wedges of Demetrios’s cavalry gathered like storm clouds on the horizon on a harvest day.

He rode all the way to the left, to where Diodorus sat under a tree with a slave holding his horse.

‘We are in for a storm,’ Diodorus said. He pointed across the plain at the wedges. ‘When you go back to Seleucus, tell him that Antiochus and I can’t hold all that for very long.’

‘Apollodorus has filled the farmyard with archers,’ Satyrus said, pointing to the farm that was the linchpin between the infantry and the left-flank cavalry.

Diodorus nodded. ‘That,’ he said, ‘may save a lot of us. Listen, Satyrus,’ he said, wiping the sweat off his brow, ‘Sappho has the baggage train. She’s already moving.’

‘What?’ Satyrus said.

Diodorus nodded. ‘I don’t trust Antiochus’s satrapal troops — I trust Darius, but the rest are sheep. And some of the mercenaries … anyway, it is a precaution that I’ve taken for years. Send all your followers and Phoibos and your people to her — she’s to wait back at Akroinus.’

‘That’s a parasang!’ Satyrus exclaimed. ‘Thirty stades!’ He looked around. Crax had Diodorus’s reserve — a hundred troopers in heavy armour, with scale armour on their big Nisean horses like Persian nobles or Sarmatians. Indeed, Satyrus could see both in the ranks. He was standing with his horse, and he winked.

Andronicus was lying in the shade of the tree. Satyrus hadn’t seen him. But he raised his head. ‘If this army breaks up, we want our girls out of reach of the bastards,’ the Gaul said.

‘Tell Nikephorus to be ready to form an orb,’ Diodorus said. Satyrus embraced him, and Crax, and Andronicus, and a dozen other men, and then saluted the hipparch.

‘Your father would be proud of you,’ Diodorus said. ‘You’re a king.’

Satyrus smiled at the compliment. ‘I feel useless,’ he said.

Then he rode down the line to Nikephoros, and told him to be ready to form an orb.

Melitta didn’t question the placement of her Sakje — they were on the left of the right-flank cavalry, and so they were pressed close between the Macedonian phalanx and the Getae nobles to their right. Her people would have been better off in the open plains to the far right, but Lysimachos hadn’t trusted them — or her — and had sent his Companions there, instead.

The enemy had sent crack troops into their own left — Melitta watched files of pikemen come up and countermarch to reform their line, a complex manoeuvre carried out with contemptuous efficiency. She munched an apple quietly, gave the core to her horse, and nodded to herself.

Her knights were in full armour — a wedge of gold at her back. They were standing dismounted, and behind them stood another block of horses with a handful of warriors holding their heads. No Sakje noble went into battle without a remount ready to hand. Her skirmishers were to their rear. They could accomplish nothing in a head-on fight. So she kept them where they would live. And as her men — and women — had the best armour of all the cavalry on the right, it was possible that their placement was the best, after all. But she longed for open ground and room to manoeuvre.

And she felt, rather than saw, something wrong with the enemy dispositions. There was too much movement — that was the best she could describe it. She wished she had her brother to talk to — he had a much more intellectual approach to war than she did. Or Coenus.

Scopasis stood behind her, talking to his horse, with Thyrsis on his right. She considered speaking to them about what she saw, but they were too busy preparing themselves to fight — to kill. To rival each other.

Stupid boys. She loved them both.

And like the answer to a prayer, Anaxagoras rode out of the dust. He didn’t embrace her — he knew when she was Queen of the Assagetae. Instead, he saluted.

‘Satyrus says I may ride with you,’ he said.

She smiled so widely she felt as if her lips hurt. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But if you love me, you’ll run an errand first.’

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘Anything,’ he said, with a remarkable lack of male bluster.

‘Find Lysimachos and ask him why the enemy is moving so much, and then tell him I think we should attack. Then, when he ignores you, go and tell Satyrus. Then come back to me.’

He was off at a gallop.

She saw him reach Lysimachos, with his command group in the centre of the cavalry. And then, on her left, the enemy elephants trumpeted, and rolled forward.

Anaxagoras was a patient man, but Lysimachos showed no sign of allowing him to approach. He gave no sign, his whole being focused on watching the centre. The Macedonian officers around him looked at Anaxagoras with veiled disdain — he was a Greek on a Sakje horse, and he was already dust covered.

He waited what he thought was a courteous amount of time, given the circumstances, and then he rode past the line of aides, right up to the King of Thrace. A hand reached out to take his bridle but Anaxagoras was prepared for that, and he made it to his target.

‘Melitta of Tanais wishes you to look at the cavalry opposite us. She says that they are moving, and she wishes to attack.’ He spoke too fast, he thought, but the man turned and heard him out.

Then he surprised Anaxagoras, who had him pegged as an arrogant windbag of a Macedonian, and looked for a long time at the cavalry formed opposite them.

‘Eros’s tiny prick,’ Lysimachos swore. ‘They’re either retreating, or changing flanks. Ride to Seleucus and tell him I want to attack, and if he approves, to sound his trumpets.’

Anaxagoras changed horses and rode for the centre, six stades away. The elephants in the centre were less than a stade apart. Lysimachos sent three of his Macedonians with the same message — the dust clouds were starting to obscure everything, and he wanted to be sure the message got through. As if by agreement, the four men spread out over the plain, going for where they imagined the command group might be.

Anaxagoras was wrong, and by some distance — too close to the front line, which was starting forward by the time he realised his error, and he could hear the sound of elephants shrieking. A gust of breeze, and a gap in the dust … and he saw one of the other messengers and what had to be Seleucus, and he turned his horse that way.

Seleucus wasn’t on the hillock where Anaxagoras assumed he’d be — he was well to the left, where he could see Demetrios’s cavalry. Anaxagoras galloped up and dismounted to spare his horse.

Seleucus looked at him. ‘Ah, the lyricist,’ he said. ‘You are the very scion of Apollo.’

‘Today, I’m here for Hermes,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Lord King, Lysimachos sends-’

Seleucus was looking past him, to his right. ‘I have heard,’ he said curtly.

‘Melitta also wanted you to know. She wished to attack.’ A bit of a stretch, really — Anaxagoras was surprised at his own presumption.

‘She is a veteran cavalry commander?’ Seleucus asked. It did not appear to be a rhetorical question.

Satyrus nodded. ‘Of fifty fights on the plains, and several battles of Hellenes.’

Seleucus was watching Demetrios’s cavalry.

‘In a whole day of battle, a commander usually makes only two or three decisions,’ he said. He watched Demetrios for a while, and the sounds of elephant versus elephant drifted across the ground to them — the shrieks, the trumpeting, the screams of men caught between the beasts. The best of the psiloi on both sides would be pressing forward into the dust. The worst would already be running.

Satyrus nodded. ‘I know,’ he said.

‘Is Antigonus reading me, and luring my rash Lysimachos into a trap? Or has he decided to retire his inferior cavalry flank? Or are they unreliable? Or is Lysimachos mistaken, and they are simply late in forming line?’ He sighed. ‘Ares, it is hot. Already. Imagine what it’s like in the phalanx. I don’t even have my helmet on.’ He took a drink of water — Anaxagoras hoped it was water — spat, and looked back at Demetrios.

‘Satyrus, tell the reserve that these trumpets are not for them. Do it!’ he said.

Satyrus, the highest-ranking messenger on the field, rode away. His riding horse was still terrified of the elephants, and he had the hardest time communicating with the Indian prince who led them. It took him several minutes to inform all of the reserve himself. By the time he did, his riding horse was done. But he made it back to Seleucus in time to hear the trumpets sound, all together, with a peal like the music of the gods.

Lysimachos couldn’t imagine what was taking the King of Babylon so long — especially as it became increasingly obvious that cavalry units were peeling away from the mass opposite him. The enemy cavalry left behind spread out into dispersed bands and started forward, ready to skirmish with javelins and bows.

He was trembling with a mixture of anxiety and excitement when the distant trumpets sounded, and three more of his young men immediately mounted their horses and rode for their assigned locations, to order his cavalry forward into the dust.

He waited until he could see the messenger reach Melitta — the best-looking of his cavalry commanders by a long shot, and he hoped she knew her business — and then he took his helmet, pulled it on, and lashed the cheek-plates together. A slave handed him a heavy lance, and he took it. Raised it above his head, and rode to the front of his companions.

‘Forward!’ he shouted.

Philip rode up next to Demetrios as the rest of his Greek cavalry trotted past, headed for the far right.

‘I think Lysimachos is on to me,’ he said. ‘I see dust, and there were trumpets.’

‘Don’t be an old woman,’ Demetrios said. ‘This is our time.’ He took a pair of heavy spears from a slave and rode the front of his own personal wedge of Companions. ‘Now for victory!’ he said, and led them forward.

Satyrus had a near-perfect view of the first charge by Demetrios. The new breeze had cleared the dust from the western end of the field, and he could see Diodorus mount his troopers as Demetrios started forward.

Some of the satrapal levies broke immediately. In heartbeats, thousands of cavalrymen were racing to the rear.

And Demetrios hadn’t reached his enemies yet.

The Seleucid counter-charge was too little and too late — even the crack companions were unsettled by the defection of half of the satrapal cavalry, and the reliable Persians raced west, seeking to flank and harass, instead of charging straight forward to a certain doom.

As Satyrus watched, only Diodorus’s Exiles and Antiochus’s Companions stood in the way of the charge. There were not quite enough of them to face all of the wedges.

In the last seconds before impact, Andronicus sounded his silver trumpet and the blue cloaks responded like dancers in the Pyricche, ranks flowing right and left — their horses were perfectly fresh, their discipline firm. They formed three deep, wide anti-wedges as fast as a school of fish changes direction in the sea — their points aimed at the gaps between the Antigonid wedges.

Antiochus and his wedge of Companions crashed headlong into the fourth Antigonid wedge, and the crash, the frightened neighs of riderless horses, and the screams of men rolled across the plain — the war cry of Ares. To their left, Darius and his household cavalry tried to meet the fifth wedge of Demetrios’s men — Darius died there, trying to cut his way to Demetrios himself, the first of the men Kineas had trained to die that day, with his relatives around him — and the fifth wedge was blunted and blown facing them.

But the rest of the wedges — and the Lydians and the cavalry from the eastern flank — were virtually unopposed, and they swept forward mercilessly, cutting into the stragglers of the Persians and the satrapal troops. The Persians had to fall back, and fall back again, and the victorious Antigonids rolled on, killing the laggards and pressing the fleeing troops as hard as their tired horses would permit.

And just like that — in one blow — the day was won and lost.

But Diodorus — the cunning old fox — was not lost. His counter-wedges blew through the gaps between the enemy wedges, threading them so that the deep formations collapsed each other and ended the charge as deep columns — facing nothing. The Antigonids pressed straight on, seeking for the fleeing Persians, or turned into the centre of the fight, where their young king was.

Diodorus reformed his columns, turned, and came trotting back to the farm. Satyrus was relieved to see him still with his men, and then the breeze died, and the dust came again.

The skirmishers were coming back through the gaps that some of the taxeis of pikemen had left. They looked like ants scurrying out of a series of holes — like water leaking through a dyke.

No one seemed to care about them, so Satyrus changed horses, left his helmet and his charger with the Olbians, and rode forward with Charmides and his horse marines.

If the peltastoi were surprised to be greeted by new orders, they weren’t disobedient. Just tired and elephant-shocked.

‘Over to the left. Form on the hillock. See it?’ Satyrus said, over and over. By his tenth or twelfth group of tired men, the first group was already on the hillock — some of them sitting, some lying down, but their position was obvious. Men started heading there before he even reached them, and he swung wide, up the low ridge into what had been their camp the night before, to get a view west to where Melitta and the Sakje glittered in the sun.

The enemy cavalry — those that remained — were heavily outnumbered, but they were resilient and had no intention of fighting a head-on cavalry charge and losing. Rather, they dispersed along the front like professionals then tried to skirmish, closing to throw javelins into Lysimachos’s Companion cavalry and the Greek mercenaries.

But when they did the same to Melitta’s knights on the left end of the right-wing fight, they discovered that every Sakje had a bow.

In two volleys, the Lydian cavalry opposite them was shredded — decimated, or worse, and the survivors broke — destroyed without being able to reply.

Melitta swept forward, widening her wedge to cover more ground. The enemy phalanxes were echeloned away from her — a long, angled line of dust and glittering pikes. The far end, twelve stades away, was level with her new position after her charge — the nearest end was still two stades distant, disciplined and professional and already forming a neat and virtually impregnable orb.

She looked to her left, where the Antigonid elephants and the slightly fewer Seleucid elephants were tangled together with all the psiloi. The Seleucid line was getting the worst of it. But the Antigonid light infantry and their elephants were more than a stade in front of their own pikes — more like two.

All this in a glance, dust or no dust.

‘Thyrsis!’ she shouted.

Her Achilles came up from his place.

‘Back to the boys and girls — all the skirmishers. Left — right there — into their skirmishers and plough a furrow, as deep as you can. Don’t fight the elephants — fight the men.’

Thyrsis saluted. His eyes sparkled. ‘I will!’ he shouted, and rode away to where her adolescents waited in the rear. There were more than five hundred of her light cavalry — fresh, eager, and too young to know that they couldn’t face elephants.

Then she wheeled her knights the other way, to the right, and pushed forward, using her knights and their bows to clear the Lydians away, like a farmer’s-wife shooing flies with a broom.

Satyrus saw the Sakje outriders pouring into the gap on the Antigonid western flank, and rode his second horse of the day to exhaustion to tell the King of Babylon.

He nodded. His whole attention was on Demetrios and his cavalry. Antiochus was wrecked — the young man himself was missing, and no messages were emerging from that flank. Demetrios’s golden helmet and his trumpeter’s golden trumpet were already two stades behind the Seleucid line, threatening to roll up the allies like a carpet. And Demetrios didn’t hesitate to savour his victory. His men were rallying like professionals … at least, the professionals were. The Lydians and Mysians and Phrygians were already three or four stades away, on blown horses, pursuing the broken satrapal levies.

But his elite cavalry, and Philip’s, had turned to face east.

Seleucus watched for another minute. He turned, looking over the whole battlefield.

‘Lysimachos is victorious?’ he asked.

Satyrus nodded. ‘Sweeping the enemy cavalry away.’

Seleucus grunted. ‘I hope he remembers to fall on the rear of their phalanx,’ he said. ‘Battles are not won by cavalry.’

He watched the battle for as long as a man might dicker for a sausage in the agora. Then he nodded sharply.

He smiled at Satyrus. ‘Well, here we go. I will send all the elephant reserve into Demetrios. If you will take the right with your Companions, I will take the left with mine.’

Satyrus bowed in the saddle. ‘I’m honoured.’

Seleucus shrugged. ‘It’s where they are posted. Go, now.’

The reserve changed front to the left with surprising fluidity. The elephants were fast — well watered, well led, and rested, they wheeled ponderously, but Satyrus was surprised by their speed. He brought his cavalry over the hillock where the rallied peltastoi waited.

‘Hold here,’ he told them. He identified a Greek officer — at least, the man spoke good Greek, although he was dressed like a Thracian. Satyrus reined in and changed to his beautiful warhorse while he explained.

‘Organise them as best you can. What’s your name?’ he asked.

The man grinned. ‘Alexander,’ he said. He had a lot of teeth missing, and he seemed to be the size of an elephant, and Satyrus wasn’t sure if the giant was mocking him or not.

‘Fine. You’re the strategos of the peltastoi. Form a line right here — four deep or whatever suits you. See the farmyard?’ he said.

Alexander grinned. ‘I grew up on a farm, boss,’ he said. ‘I know what a farm looks like.’

‘When I say, you will go down there and help the men in the farmyard fight the enemy infantry,’ Satyrus said.

‘Sure, boss,’ the Thracian said. He grinned again, and Satyrus had no idea whether the man understood, or what he intended.

Satyrus vaulted into his high-backed Sakje saddle on his magnificent Persian charger.

Gap-tooth Alexander saluted smartly.

Satyrus took his long-handled Sakje axe from where it hung at his saddle bow and saluted. ‘Just be here and ready when I come back,’ he said, and trotted forward to where Eumenes had his Olbians formed in a rhomboid, half a stade on and half a stade distant from the elephants — the closest the cavalry could go, even after a morning to get used to the big beasts.

‘Ready?’ Satyrus asked Eumenes.

As a reply, Eumenes pointed to the front, where Demetrios was already coming forward, elephants or no elephants. He had completely turned the Seleucid flank, and his second charge was already into Diodorus and the Exiles, who were making a counter-charge at the edge of the farm fields, protecting the flank of the infantry.

Satyrus could see that if he waited for the elephants, Diodorus would be swept away. Seleucus was probably willing to sacrifice a mercenary, for a prize this big.

Satyrus was not.

It was hot.

This had become the defining point of Stratokles’ existence; the heat, the weight of his panoply, the sweat that rolled down his back and between his pectoral muscles, down his groin, down his thighs. His bronze thorax sat well on his hips, but he had lost weight and gained muscle in the last year, and the armour, so carefully fitted in a shop below the Hephaestion in Athens, now needed padding where the shoulders latched and down along his belly — padding that was made of lamb’s wool, hot and itchy and now sodden with sweat.

He had a Phrygian cap under his helmet, and it fitted well enough but it was wool, and it, too, was full of the water of his body. His helmet weighed twice what it had when he donned it, an hour before when the peltasts ran by; he cursed the brave display of horsehair on top, adding a pound to the weight.

He had greaves on his legs, shining bronze with silver buckles, and on each leg was a standing figure of Athena worked in silver, holding Nike aloft. Lined in leather, padded in wool felt.

On his shoulder was a bronze-faced aspis, half a man’s height in diameter, with a bronze porpax and bronze fittings over willow wood. It weighed more with every hour.

Over his shoulder was a sword of Chalcedonian steel, gifted him by Satyrus, and in his hand — wet with perspiration — was the shaft of a pike, three times a man’s height in length. Not a proper Macedonian sarissa. Stratokles’ mercenaries preferred a shorter pike — lighter, easier to wield close in.

He knew that he looked magnificent. But he hadn’t shifted by so much as a foot, and he was soaked in sweat, pounded by the sun that seemed to rise ever higher just to slay him, uncooled by the fitful breeze.

And Stratokles was not a new boy. He was an old veteran. This would mark his third time in the front rank, and he knew that the men in the middle of the formation were hotter and had no chance of the breeze.

‘That can’t be good,’ Lucius said.

Stratokles turned his head — the effort of it — and saw a riderless elephant wandering back and forth to their right. The beast stopped to trumpet, and headed off into the dust to the north.

Herakles drank from his canteen. Then he looked around. ‘I suppose that if I have to piss, I have to do it right here,’ he said.

‘And then every man in your file walks through it,’ Lucius added. Men laughed. All the mercenaries liked Lucius.

‘It’ll help cool their feet,’ Herakles said, and began to take care of it. The man behind him guffawed — quite naturally. Other men in the file caught the joke and they laughed, too.

‘Your piss is cool?’ a wag shouted.

‘I drink nothing but iced wine,’ Herakles returned.

‘Fuck walking through it, I’ll drink it,’ shouted a man who’d lost his youth in the Lamian War.

Stratokles found that he was grinning. These were men, like the men with whom he’d grown to manhood. Many of them were Athenians or Ionians — a smattering of Spartans and Spartan rejects, some Corinthians. Greeks. Men who knew what a gymnasium was for; men who could read and fight.

A boy — naked but for a red cloak — came running down the line. ‘Lord Stratokles!’ he shouted.

Stratokles held up his shield — Athena in gold on red. The boy ran to him.

‘We are going forward, lord. The whole line. You are to echelon,’ the boy put especial care into the word, ‘echelon on the taxeis to your right.’

Stratokles released his cheekpieces and tilted his helmet back. He twirled his pike in his hands — a muscle memory from youth, a display of talent he still had — and placed the long spear horizontal to the ground at his head height — as if bracing the front line. With his back to the enemy, he called out, ‘Ready to march!’

Men looked right and left, measured the distance, sometimes tapped their shields together. A few of the front rankers had the old aspis — Stratokles did, and Herakles, Lucius, and a pair of Athenian exiles who called themselves Plato and Gorgias. The rest had the smaller, lighter Macedonian aspis.

Which, of course, had been invented by an Athenian.

‘Forward!’ Stratokles called, backstepping in front of his taxeis. He’d never been a taxiarch before — never would have been, in Athens — but he knew the drills and the dances as well as most of the useless political appointees that had led the boys at Chaeronea and all through the Lamian War.

In fact, he was terrified. But like most men of a certain age, he’d been terrified so many times that terror was an old adversary, one he could best in single combat with more ease than he bested lack of sleep, heat, or insect bites.

Step by step, forward. His aulos player picked up his steps and played them — a good lad, that one. He looked at the phalanx to their right — still moving, a little ahead, with a gap widening at the critical juncture where the two came together. But to try and fix that now would disorder his men.

Later might be too late.

Politics was easier, and at the moment, assassination looked far more efficient.

The shaft to his back was the first warning he had that there was an enemy in the dust, and then, suddenly, there were Phrygian highlanders — as surprised to have hoplites come at them as Stratokles was to be struck — again — by a javelin in the back. Luckily, his bronze was the best money could buy and all he had to show for the man’s best throws were two deep divots in the surface of his back-plate.

It took Stratokles a long, long heartbeat to understand that he was in combat.

Not Lucius. He rammed his spear over the Athenian’s shoulder, catching the crescent-shaped shield of the peltast and knocking the man flat.

Herakles put his pike point into the man — reversing and shortening his pike in two practised motions, ramming the spear point home, stepping forward over the corpse.

Stratokles saw it all — running slowly, like a dream — and had time to think, He’s no boy. He’s twenty-seven and this should have been his life. And now I want him to live and get away, not die here trying to be Alexander.

But he’s more like Alexander every day.

The Phrygians melted before them, as fast as they had appeared. There was a shower of javelins — blows like punches on the face of his shield — and his golden Athena was no longer unmarred.

The taxeis had quickened its step — any veteran knew that the way to get rid of peltasts was to plough over them. Not only had they closed the gap with the right taxeis, now they were overtaking it — the front ranks were almost even.

It occurred to Stratokles then that not only were there elephants out there in the dust, but that his taxeis and Nikephorus’s were going to be matched against the very finest soldiers in the world … that is, whatever old One-Eye chose to put on the right of his line.

Stratokles risked a look to his left … and there was nothing there at all.

‘Athena,’ he said aloud. Too late to wonder where in Hades Nikephorus was.

His men were trotting — well closed up, but moving a top speed. He was proud of them — worried — terrified — but he suspected that hitting at this speed would be an advantage, unless they went into elephants, and even then — he had a thought, under the sweat and grime — elephants might flinch from the wall of spear points if it moved this fast.

‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Lucius panted.

‘Good to know,’ Stratokles grunted.

Now his front rank was losing cohesion.

The taxeis next to him had started to trot, as well.

‘Spears! Down!’ Stratokles called, and all along the front, the pikes came down to chest level, throat level, and now they were running, and instead of the paean, the Athenians had started the war cry: eleu eleu eleu eleu in the back of the throat, rising to a scream.

The hint of a breeze, like a cat making one lick at a sticky spot on her fur — one lick of breeze, and there they were, the front taxeis of the enemy, the rightmost of the line. No, the rightmost but one. There was another, well separated in the dust. And they had the star of Macedon on their shields, and the Ionian war cry rose to a shriek.

No man in Stratokles’ band had any love for Macedon.

Too late to stop and dress his line. Too late for order, too late for second thoughts, though his head was crowded with them.

The enemy made mistakes, too. Like pausing in their advance to rest with their sarauters planted in the deep earth of farm fields. The Ionian mercenaries appeared out of the wall of dust with a shriek. Just to Stratokles’ front, a lone elephant bolted at the shriek — turned, riderless, and ran straight into the Macedonians behind him. The animal’s flanks were gored red — blood flew off her when she turned.

Just to the left were two dead elephants — mere mounds of meat. But the pair of them were like terrain, covering his flank, if only for a few heartbeats.

Many of the Antigonids got their spears out of the ground and down. A spearhead struck Stratokles squarely in the shield; he stumbled, twisted, and would have lost his footing except that three or four more spear points hit his aspis and held him up. He raised his aspis until the spears scraped by over his head, and plunged in under their shafts, into the rage of Ares. He was screaming eleu eleu eleu eleu at the top of his lungs, and the world — Aristotle’s entire universe — was only as wide as the eye-slits in his Attic helmet.

His spear point skipped off a rimless aspis, rose with the working of his hips, and rammed into a man’s undefended throat.

And he roared.

Diodorus was already wounded. Something had gone into the gap at the base of his breastplate and scored his thigh — it hurt, and worse, the blood was pouring down his leg and over his white horse.

He had most of his men together. He’d lost Crax and the heavy squadron in the first fight, and Ares alone knew where they were — if they weren’t all dead. But his three line squadrons were well formed, watering their horses in the farmyard by rotation, and his prodromoi were prowling the edge of the dust cloud beyond the farm while he sat and bled and watched Demetrios win the battle.

The bastard.

Diodorus turned to Andronicus — technically his hyperetes, the cavalry version of a hypaspist, but the old Gaul was hardly a subordinate in any meaningful way.

‘He moved all his left-flank cavalry to the right, to face us,’ Diodorus said with professional admiration.

‘He didn’t need them,’ Andronicus the Gaul answered. ‘The Persians were men. The rest of them were like children.’ He spat, drank from his canteen. ‘Retire?’ he asked, after watching Demetrios reforming, his best squadrons virtually untouched.

Diodorus looked over his shoulder, where Satyrus’s friend Apollodorus garrisoned the farmhouse and walled farmyard and barns, and just beyond, where Nikephorus — a mercenary, but a long-time retainer of both Satyrus and Melitta — had advanced cautiously, keeping one flank of his double taxeis anchored on the farmhouse. The man was clearly trying to cover a gap — he’d already wheeled a quarter to the right, and then he’d extended his right, halving the depth of his phalanx — a desperate move, really.

Diodorus took his helmet off and tossed it to his field slave, Justus. He accepted water, poured some on his head. Emboldened, he raised the edge of his corselet, terrified that he would see a curl of intestine. His hands shook.

He had a scar like a woman’s birthing scar, where the spear point had crossed, riding on the inside of the bronze instead of punching through his body.

‘Gracious Athena,’ he said, immediately feeling better. Far from a mortal wound — a contemptible wound. Hurt like fire. No matter. ‘If we bugger off, the whole flank goes,’ he said. He was a far more confident man than he had been moments before.

Andronicus shrugged. ‘Battle’s lost,’ he said with professional acuity.

Diodorus tucked a knee carefully under his backside and stood on his horse’s back. The animal was patient — they’d done this a hundred times.

To the west, Demetrios was preparing his second strike: the hammer blow to finish Seleucus.

To the east, Prepalaus had given the order for the phalanx to advance. He probably had no idea of the disaster on his western flank. Or he knew about it, and by advancing, made Demetrios’s job more difficult, and hid the disaster from his own men.

To the south, suddenly, out of the dust came a thick column of elephants, fifty animals, at least, every one with a heavy war harness and a crew of four or five — pikes and bows, javelins. They were forming line from column even as he watched. Squadrons of cavalry were forming at either end of the massive beasts.

Diodorus pointed his spear at the nearest.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s us.’ He laughed, and Andronicus laughed too. The Olbians — younger and prettier — wore the same blue cloaks over beautiful armour, a fortune in horseflesh.

‘Back when we were young and beautiful,’ Andronicus said.

Diodorus couldn’t tell whether that was Gallic sarcasm or genuine regret.

Diodorus nodded, flexed his hand on his spear shaft, and looked out under his hand, trying to read the signs. Out in the dust, past Nikephorus, he heard the war cry of Athens — eleu eleu eleu eleu. He smiled.

‘This is our fight, my friend.’ Diodorus had made his decision.

Andronicus burnished his trumpet on a scrap of cloth. ‘Or rather, these are our friends, so we fight,’ he said.

Diodorus took one last look. Demetrios’s squadrons were starting forward — eight wedges, with solid blocks of lesser cavalry on either flank.

‘It will happen here,’ Diodorus said. ‘If the farm is lost, the day is over.’

Andronicus laughed. ‘The day is already over. You are like a pankrationist who refuses to accept the choke hold until he falls, unconscious or dead.’

Diodorus sat carefully back down in his seat and took his helmet from Justus. ‘Perhaps. Sound attention.’

Now Demetrios’s cavalry were rolling forward at a fast trot. Diodorus cantered to meet his squadron leaders.

‘That flank cavalry — Lydians. Horses already blown. Let them come to the edge of the farm fields — let the archers in the farmyard gall them. Then charge. We’ve practised it a thousand times — straight to a gallop from the stand. Got it?’

Then they were gone, back to their commands, and he was alone.

Once he sent them in, there would be no way out.

He thought of Kineas.

Satyrus led the Olbians forward, watching Demetrios, whose line of elite cavalry stretched away to the north and south, overlapping both ends of Seleucus’s reserve line. He had big blocks of Lydian or Phrygian cavalry at either end of his line of wedges — already cocked slightly in, like the horns of a great equine beast, planning to envelop the reserve.

Satyrus smiled an acknowledgement that Demetrios was responding brilliantly to Seleucus’s reserve ploy.

Diodorus was going to send the Exiles into the Lydians at the north end of Demetrios’s new line.

Satyrus aimed his rhomboid at the tip of the northernmost Antigonid wedge.

He wished he had more men, but he didn’t.

He lowered his lance, grabbed it with both hands, and rested his lower back against the pads of the Sakje saddle. ‘Trot!’ he called.

His Olbians — half Sakje, half Greek, horsemen from birth — went forward. They were not untried — most of them had served as bodyguard at Tanais River, nine years before. The men in the centre of the rhomboid would be readying bows, lances upright in lance buckets and straps, bows out of their gorytoi. Even a few arrows lobbed high in the moments before contact could wreck an enemy formation — plunging fire into the rumps of enemy horses. Kineas, his father, and Eumenes, and Urvara and Srayanka his mother had perfected it, out on the Sea of Grass before he was born.

The leather lace that held his cheek-plates together was loose and cut into his neck under his chin at every rise of the trot, but this charger had the finest, lightest trot he’d ever known.

‘All closed up!’ Eumenes called. Satyrus managed a glance over his shoulder — the rhomboid was like a single living thing.

A stade.

He could see the man who would be his first opponent — the point of the Antigonid wedge. An aristocrat, a man born for war.

Through the narrow opening of his helmet, what Satyrus saw was a man who did not ride well, on a horse far smaller than his.

Individual shafts began to hiss past him as the best archers let fly. Hard to miss, even at this range and from a moving horse, against a target that filled the horizon.

The Antigonids had no bows.

More arrows, now — half a stade, and there was nothing to life but the rhythm of the trot, the ripping cloth sound of the arrows in flight, the man he would fight.

Fifty horse lengths.

Twenty horse lengths.

‘Now!’ he shouted to Artaxerxes, his trumpeter.

The calls rang out, and the tip of the wedge gave their horses their heads, and in one stride his charger was at a gallop — whistle arrows screamed over them in a volley, making untrained horses shy. There were tumbling horses all along the Antigonid front, their wedge tearing itself apart as rear rankers tried to ride over the dead, or worse, wounded and thrashing mounts — Satyrus’s lance crashed through his chosen opponent, the point of the enemy wedge — crushed his breastplate and then burst through like an awl punching heavy leather, carrying the man right off his horse …

Satyrus dropped the lance — the head would never come back out of the wound — and drew his sword as his horse rose on her haunches and punched with her feet — two rapid blows and an enemy stallion dropped, dead, rider trapped under the hooves, and Satyrus was up on his horse’s neck, chopping with his sword — heavy blows, falling on men’s helmets and armoured backs, but they were shattered and his men had knocked them flat. Their horses were tired, smaller, had come further across the plain, and the arrows from the sky were a surprise, the whistling arrows spooked their horses, and they were dead men.

Panic, his charger, carried him effortlessly, despite his armour, seeming to skim the ground. It was like elation, like the daimon of combat magnified by the daimon of speed.

But I’d rather be on the deck of a ship, he thought, inconsequentially. He wondered where Abraham was — where Miriam was. He had a firm picture in his mind of the meadow below Tanais, where he’d ridden as a boy — where he’d killed a Sauromatae girl.

He was clear of the tail of the Antigonid wedge. Instead of going straight through, he could see that his rhomboid had collapsed the wedge and then gone at an angle. He looked back — the tired enemy horses were unable to flee, caught against the bigger mounts, going down into the dust.

Even as the victor, it was horrifying.

To his left, Demetrios’s men were throwing spears at the elephants, clearing their crews. It was hardly one-sided — only the bravest of the Antigonids dared face the beasts, and many horses baulked or fled — but the elephant crews had a hard time inflicting casualties on the riders, too.

Satyrus couldn’t see Seleucus at the other end of the line.

Closer, on his right, Diodorus charged the Lydians, and the fight flowed right to the walled enclosure around the house — men pressed in close, horses breast to breast, the fire of the Exiles against the depth of the Lydians. The Marine archers in the farmyard poured their shafts into the Lydians’ unprotected horses from the flank.

And then something gave. The Lydians shifted — even through the dust, Satyrus saw the movement. He’d been about to order Artaxerxes to rally his knights to the right, to support the Exiles, but the Lydians bulged, and men began to look over their shoulders — terrified men.

Crax had ridden into the rear of the Lydians, out of the olive grove below the farm where he’d lain concealed, a Sakje trick. They were a hundred men against two thousand, but their flashing scale armour and their appearance in the enemy’s rear turned the fight, and suddenly the Lydians were urging their tired horses back — back.

Like Diodorus, less than a stade away, Satyrus had come to the conclusion that the farm was now the key to the battle. Diodorus and Apollodorus held the farm.

Satyrus waved his sword and pointed south, towards the flank of the next wedge. ‘Sound rally — rally left.’

Nikephorus had extended his right as far as he could without surrendering any hope of his men holding when struck. Despite his efforts, there was a gap a taxeis wide between his rightmost file and Stratokles’ left — and the Athenian had charged off down the field with his flank in the air — vanished into the dust.

Elephants came out of the dust — mostly riderless, some with crews. The gap had this advantage — elephants and peltasts funnelled harmlessly down it, an alley between the spear points.

Two elephants came together, just a few spear lengths west of his position — both with crews intact- and the two animals reared up, trumpeted, and their sounds were more terrifying than their savagery. Quick as lightning, both beasts seemed to be sweating blood — tusks ripped, and shattered — the pikemen in the opposing howdahs thrust at each other and at the opposing animal, and the archer in the Seleucid howdah shot furiously from a long, cane bow, his heavy arrows taking the Antigonid crew, one at a time, until the Antigonid beast stopped fighting — despite the blood, despite the continuing efforts of his adversary — to place a gentle foot on the dead meat of her master, fallen from his perch between his ears. Then he turned away with a sound like a mother mourning a dead child, and fled.

Nikephorus’s men roared their approval.

And then Antigonus came out of the dust.

They came slowly, carefully — spears down, marching at the slowest pace. Nikephorus saw Antigonus immediately, near the very right file — a proper man.

His own taxeis was only half depth on the right so he had to go forward or risk being broken. Nikephorus stepped out of his line. ‘Spears down!’ he roared.

And as the points glittered, he lowered his. ‘Nike!’ he roared.

Three thousand voices answered him. ‘Nike!’

‘Forward!’ he bellowed.

And then the elephant, wounded and furious, stumbled into a run between the two closing phalanxes. Men flinched away on both sides and in a few heartbeats, both sides were like tangled skeins of wool yarn, files every which way, all order lost as the pain-maddened elephant crashed back and forth, taking long, deep wounds from brave men’s spears, but snapping them, trunk flashing, bronze-capped tusks dripping blood and ordure and he slayed men and no more men could touch him. It was every soldier’s nightmare — a mad elephant trapped in a phalanx. Men died like wheat or oats scythed down at harvest time.

Nikephorus stood fast, put his spear into the elephant’s side — mad beasts have no allies — and drew his sword.

‘Close up!’ he cried. ‘Get in your files!’

His men began to give ground.

‘Apobatai!’ he shrieked ‘Hold the line!’

His very best men died there, putting their shoulders behind their shields, trying to push at Antigonus’s best men while they defended themselves from thousands of pounds of pain-crazed war-elephant. They dug in their heels and pushed, they cut high and low with their swords when their spears broke, they punched and bit when they lost their swords.

Nikephorus aimed himself for Antigonus, and killed — forward, a step at a time, an eye for the elephant, still wreaking havoc to his right — but in the chaos of the mêlée, where there were no ranks, no files, just the vortex of death that was the elephant and the sight of Antigonus’s gold helmet and red plumes, he pushed himself to the limit, cut, step, shield up, step-

He was six men from Antigonus when the world went black.

‘Go for their rear!’ Melitta shouted to Lysimachos. ‘We’ll do this!’ She pointed her axe at the solid wall of Antigonid pikemen, formed in a tight square, like a hedgehog, with steel and bronze points bristling from every wall and every corner.

Lysimachos either understood or came to his own decision, and his spear rose above the rout of the enemy cavalry, and pointed north then west. His Companions rode with him. So did Calicles and the Thracians.

They thundered past the two thousand pikemen holding the left of the Antigonid infantry line — men who had faced cavalry at Arabela and Issus, for whom lance and javelin and flashing hooves held little fear.

Melitta rode clear of her people, called her chiefs to her, raised her bow in her fist and punched it at the pikemen.

Before she reined in, the arrows had started to fly.

Unable to reply, the pikemen closed up, lapped their shields, and endured.

But the Sakje had no threat to contend with, and they pressed closer, shooting at feet, at shins, at faces — individual young men and woman began to compete at acts of daring. A girl barely in her teens, ash-blonde braids bound to her head, rode along the front face of the phalanx, a hand’s breadth from the reach of the sarissas, shooting down into the ranks. Assagetae cheers followed her. And behind her, a boy, bolder or crazed with battle, rode into the gap an arrow made — a gap that lasted for a few heartbeats — pushed his pony into the gap, and the horse’s hooves and his short sword wreaked havoc until he was killed, ten sarissas in his chest and horse. At one corner of the scrum, another girl lassoed a phylarch and dragged him from the ranks into the dust — he cut the cord, killed her in two sweeps of his sword, but was shot full of arrows like a pincushion. Before his body could fall, Thyrsis leaped from his horse on the man’s back, cut his throat, and ripped his helmet off his head and scalped him in full view of his men, raised the flapping hair and screamed, and all the Sakje screamed.

Desperate, the Argyraspids charged, scattering the Sakje, who ran like flies from the swatter, but the phalangites didn’t catch a single rider. And the Sakje turned and shot as they rode free, and old men died — men who had survived fifty battles.

Melitta halted with her fishtail standard by a well.

‘Change horses,’ she ordered.

Stratokles had been fighting for so long he couldn’t think. His sword arm rose and fell by itself; he ducked, his shield jarred on his shoulder, his mouth was dry as parchment, and still they pressed on.

He no longer knew which direction was front and which was rear.

He’d lost Lucius, lost Herakles, and only the sharp barks of eleu told him that the men behind him were his own.

He wanted to slump to the ground.

His hand was red with other men’s blood, and his own, and his fingers were stuck to the hilt, and he thought his jaw might be broken.

His sword arm rose and fell.

Someone was screaming like a stuck pig.

Satyrus had his knights in hand. He had a moment to snatch a drink of water — to pat his horse’s neck.

‘Well done,’ he said to his trumpeter. The Persian boy was as brave as a lion.

Artaxerxes grinned.

Pointed past Satyrus, who turned to see another Antigonid squadron forming against him. Another wedge. They formed so fast, Satyrus suspected they must be Companions before he saw the gold helmet and the purple plume and the white horse.

Demetrios himself.

Satyrus pointed to Eumeles.

Eumeles nodded. ‘What we came for,’ he said.

Satyrus slammed his sword back into the sheath under his arm. Some superstition — some piety — told him not to fight Demetrios with his guest gift. He took the long-handled Sakje axe from his saddle bow. Hefted it.

‘Demetrios is mine,’ he said. He took a deep breath against the weight of his breastplate and his fears, and his nostrils took in the smell of a wet cat.

Demetrios was annoyed that his best cavalry couldn’t seem to penetrate the line of elephants, but they merely blunted his attack without breaking it. Almost none of his men were killed — their horses simply refused to go forward.

It was the greatest frustration he had ever known — that victory was visible — the backs of the enemy phalanxes were just past the elephants. He could see them. The farm was open to him — as soon as he defeated either the elephants …

… or the cavalry covering their flank. He could see his father’s phalanx — the foot companions — pressing forward to the east of the farmyard.

This was the moment.

He raised his spear. ‘Blow rally,’ he ordered. Pointed to the right, into the flank of the blue cloaks by the farm. By the time he shredded them, the elephants would be bypassed. Forgotten.

Enemy cavalry began to emerge from the collapsing mêlée just to the south.

He laughed, for he was the King of the Earth, and threw his sword glittering into the sun, and caught it by the hilt, and his Companions cheered him.

There was Satyrus of Tanais, a stade away, at the head of his knights, and nothing — nothing — could have given Demetrios the Golden more pleasure in that moment than to ride to victory over his chosen adversary.

His men, as aware of victory as he was himself, raised the paean.

The sky above the dust was blue and in the distance, far out over the plain to the west, mountains rose in purple and lavender, the most distant golden in the noonday sun. Up there, in the realm of the ether, all was peace. An eagle, best of omens, turned a lazy circle to his right. Or perhaps it was a raven.

Satyrus spat water and raised his axe.

‘Forward,’ he said. He twisted in his saddle, his last plans made. To Eumenes, he said, ‘When I go for Demetrios, stay tight. Don’t follow me.’

Eumenes looked surprised. Behind him, voices started the Song of Athena, that the hippeis of Olbia had sung since Kineas led them.

Satyrus was fifty horse lengths from Demetrios when he put his heels sharply into Panic’s sides, and she shot forward like a bolt from a bow. Demetrios was covered in armour.

His horse was not.

Satyrus’s actions were hurried, but he had all the time in the world, because this is what Srayanka made them practise from the time they could ride. And because he held the battle in the palm of his hand. His left hand. His bow hand.

He didn’t need to kill Demetrios. But he had to stop him. Absolutely had to stop him. At any cost.

His axe was on his wrist, the haft back along his right arm just off axis from the shaft he had ready there, and his bow came into his hand as if he was practising with the girls and boys on the Sea of Grass, and an arrow fitted itself on the bowstring, the horn nock seating home and the string back and back — his draw thumb against the corner of his mouth …

Demetrios’s look of shock as his horse went down, Satyrus’s shaft buried to the fletching in its neck. His bow in its gorytos because Mother would yell, his axe up and the flick of his wrist that sent the second man in the wedge to Hades, and Panic lived up to her name and rode through the lesser horses like they were blades of grass.

Satyrus knocked another man from his charger, and had time to think I unhorsed Demetrios before a blow caught him unprepared. He saw it come … knew he would never parry it in time … raised the haft of his axe …

Stratokles wrestled his opponent, punched the man with his shield rim, with his fist — that hurt — and when he crumpled, tried to take his spear, but he could no longer get his right hand to close. The spear fell away from him, and Stratokles watched it dumbly.

As far as he could see in the dust, men were killing other men.

He raised his shield on nothing but instinct, got his numb right hand onto the porpax to add strength. Took a wound in his thigh and kept his feet.

‘Down!’ shouted Lucius, and Stratokles let himself fall.

He turtled under his shield, so he didn’t see Plato and Gorgias cut into the men he’d been facing — killing two. Didn’t see Lucius behead a man with a single back-cut of his kopis.

Then Lucius offered him a hand. ‘I had no idea you were such a hero,’ he said.

Stratokles couldn’t tell whether it was said with irony, so he just smiled. He lacked the energy to say … anything.

Even drinking from his canteen was almost too much.

There was shouting to the left.

And cheers to the right.

‘We aren’t fighting anyone,’ Stratokles ventured.

Lucius stopped, listened. ‘Ares, he’s right.’

‘Where’s Herakles?’ Stratokles asked.

‘Down. Dead or wounded — I don’t know.’ Lucius shrugged. ‘I followed you.’

He had something of his taxeis — it was hard to tell, but most of the men around him had been front or second rankers. The cheers from his right could be anyone’s, but if they were Antigonid cheers, then the whole line was shattered, fuck it all. If they were Seleucid cheers, on the other hand …

After all, they had beaten their opponents — hadn’t they?

The sheer ignorance of his position made him want to laugh. Stratokles the Informer — the master spy — lost on a battlefield where he didn’t know friend from foe.

‘What’s funny?’ Lucius asked.

‘Me,’ Stratokles said. ‘We’re wheeling left! Rally, you bastards! Athena! Athena!’

Apollodorus led his third charge out from the farmyard into the flank of the enemy phalanx. He had become aware that the only thing that was holding Nikephorus’s men together was his own hornet-sting attacks.

Every man in the farmyard was fighting for his life — Andronicus had thrown his own elite taxeis and every man he could rally at the walls.

Apollodorus knew he was holding the linchpin of the alliance. He knew that the Exiles were dying in the fields to the south and west to keep him alive, and he did his best to support them with arrows and javelins. But they were dying.

‘Nikephorus is dead!’ came a panicked shout from the right.

Apollodorus wished there was someone to tell him what to do. But he was not a man to waste time.

He ran along the wall itself, jumped down into the flank file of the wreck of Nikephorus’s pikemen and grabbed a sarissa from a frightened man.

‘Nikephorus will live for ever! And so will we! Forward!’ he shouted, and the echo of the stone wall, or the voice of Athena at his shoulder, seemed to amplify his voice to the voice of a god.

Perhaps they never went forward. But for as long as a running man’s heart beat fifty times, they held.

And then they heard the shouts: ‘Athena, Athena.’

Soldiers have ways beyond the rational of understanding the carnage and the chaos and the fear, of navigating where no man could sail with his mind intact, of holding firm when the merely rational demands flight. Like sailors, soldiers are superstitious because they know in their hearts that the world of the mêlée is beyond the comprehension of the rational.

Nikephorus’s men — horrified by the elephant and demoralised by the death of their commander — had held. And as soon as they heard ‘Athena’ they knew that they had not lost.

They had won.

It was not a rational decision, because where they stood they were pinched between Antigonus’s finest infantry and the first signs of Demetrios’s cavalry, a few scattered riders trickling past the Exiles or past Satyrus’s Olbians, enough to have sent them reeling in panic just two minutes before.

Now, they raised their shoulders, set their hips, put their faces to the enemy, and pushed.

The second time forward, and Melitta led her knights halfway round the enemy formation, shooting as they rode — flowed her knights from a long, shooting file to a three-deep line facing the westernmost corner of the enemy square — and the arrows began to fall in sheets.

On the opposite face, the youngest tribesmen went too close and were gaffed like fish, but they shot and shot, from so close that a heavy war arrow might punch through an aspis and into an old man’s arm, or skip off his rim to break his nose. And old men’s shields begin to slump — who can keep a shield nose high for an hour?

The Macedonians charged again.

This time, Melitta’s knights didn’t flee far … and then they turned their horses. Melitta hauled her mare around on her haunches, perilously close to toppling, and was away. The Macedonians had spread in their charge and she was in among them, killing with her axe, and then they had closed their ranks again, leaving a carpet of dead and a smaller square.

They were superb.

Melitta intended to kill them all.

But it was Thyrsis and the young warriors who did the deed.

A boy — an eager boy — shot a phylarch above the knee, gave a whoop, and put his pony into the gap. An over-eager file closer thrust his spear into the boy’s horse; the horse twisted and fell, dumping the boy into the face of the square, falling on six men and twenty pike heads …

Quick as a trout takes the lure in a mountain stream, a pair of girls struck into the opening, shooting as they rode — one died, cut in half by a kopis, but the other girl’s horse crashed into the effectively disarmed men of the sixth and seventh ranks and died there, her rider cutting at men’s sandalled feet with her knife. Another boy raced through the widened gap, threw his weight forward, and died, punched from the horse’s back by a pike driven with the precision of a twenty-year veteran …

Thyrsis rode into the gap, killed a phylarch with his axe, and as his horse sank onto its haunches the Sakje Achilles urged him with his voice and the horse rose, powered by back legs the size of fence posts, and leaped — and Thyrsis was loose in the centre of the Argyraspid square.

And then, faster than even Melitta could understand, her people closed in, the dust cloud raged, and then …

There were only Sakje.

Satyrus came to with Eumenes under one arm and his Persian trumpeter under the other, and he was lying on the hillock above the farmyard, and the sound of battle — the lungs of Ares — made it all but impossible to hear what Eumenes was saying.

His head rang, and there was pain … everywhere.

‘Your helmet — you owe the bronzesmith!’ Eumenes said. He held a wet cloth against Satyrus’s head. ‘I don’t think your skull is broken.’

Memory returned slowly. ‘I dropped Demetrios!’ he said.

Eumenes nodded. ‘We tried to hold his body. His men fought like lions.’ The archon of Olbia smiled. ‘So did we. We got your corpse and they got his. It seemed a good trade when we found you alive.’

Satyrus sat up and wished he hadn’t. It was as if he had a girdle of spikes on his head. ‘Herakles!’ he said aloud.

Eumenes put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Win or lose, we’re done. My horses wouldn’t go forward again, and our remounts are six stades away, behind the elephants.’

‘Get me to my feet,’ Satyrus said.

A huge, hairy hand appeared in his peripheral vision, grabbed his arm and pulled.

‘I waited,’ Alexander said. ‘You look like shit. Now what do we do?’

Satyrus forced a smile. ‘Herakles,’ he prayed.

The farmyard was a charnel house. And the Exiles were giving way to yet more Lydians — or perhaps Phrygians or Mysians. Not giving way so much as dying.

But on the other side of the farmyard Antigonus’s phalanx was in trouble.

Satyrus made himself turn his head. ‘Charmides, dismount the escort.’ He took a drink of wine — unwatered wine — from Eumenes. ‘You are my favourite,’ he said to the archon.

‘Are you insane?’ Eumenes asked with admiration. Behind him, Coenus shook his head.

‘Alexander, form your peltasts as tight as you can. We go through the farmyard into the enemy phalanx.’ He met the giant’s eyes, and the man nodded.

‘We can do that,’ he said reasonably.

Charmides formed the surviving marines across the front of the crowd of peltasts. The Olbian hippeis left their horses and fell in. All in all, they had quite a few men, tipped with a thin front rank of men in full armour — head to toe armour, in fact.

Satyrus drew his sword, took a deep breath, and swallowed bile. He had to fight the reflex to retch. There was no time.

He took another swallow from his trumpeter — water — and Herakles cleared his head, so he could see it all: he saw Crax die under the tree behind the farmhouse, the last man in a knot of brave men, and a ring of enemies at his feet. He saw Diodorus, still mounted, still fighting, and Carlus, the German, with an axe, covering his back. He saw Apollodorus in the front of Nikephorus’s phalangites. And he saw Antigonus — a tired old man, pointing to the near collapse of the Exiles and shouting.

‘Now or never, lad,’ Coenus said.

‘Follow me,’ Satyrus shouted, and ran down the hillock into the farmyard.

They crashed through the enemy hoplites trying to storm the farmyard from the flank — scattered or killed them — then the horse marines and the Olbians plunged into the open flank of the Antigonid foot companions, heavily armoured men with axes and swords.

The peltasts had other ideas. Not for them the desperate mêlée. As soon as the farmyard was clear — Apollodorus’s surviving marines cheering like heroes, hunting the last Antigonids out of the barns — the peltasts ran to the walls and threw everything they had — every carefully hoarded javelin, every spear, and then rocks from the walls — down into the right front corner of the Antigonid phalanx.

Satyrus found himself virtually alone, breast to breast with fresher men, fighting for his life. He had no idea, but two horse lengths away Antigonus One-Eye, terror of Asia, the greatest strategist of his era, was dead, with a pair of javelins in his breast and his helmet crushed by a rock thrown by a Thracian peltast. And with his death, the phalanx seemed to die. Again, the knowledge of his loss seemed to be transmitted instantly to every hoplite of his army.

The Foot Companions broke.

By the olive tree behind the farm, Diodorus sat on his exhausted charger, the big gelding’s legs straddling the corpse of Andronicus the Gaul, killed by ten men. Half a dozen wary Lydians faced Diodorus. He’d already killed two. He had a spear in his hand, and since this was the end, he had no need to surrender — to live to see a day of defeat.

Victory, or death without knowledge of defeat. Wasn’t that what men asked of the gods?

Goodbye, Sappho, who made my life a joy.

Kineas, I’m coming, and taking at least one more of these bastards with me.

He backed his horse a step, and shortened his reins, and saw a wave of peltasts come over the farmyard wall behind the Lydians. They were so wild, he thought they must be panicked, routed men.

The Lydians turned their heads, almost as one man.

One took a rock in the side, and fell. Diodorus’s spear licked out and took another.

Diodorus could see men he knew — the archon of Olbia, the boy Eumenes — not a boy any more, but one of the old ones. He had an axe, and he was waving it, and suddenly the Lydians were gone.

Diodorus’s horse died gracefully — he gave Diodorus time to slide from his back, and subsided to the ground, faithful to the very last. Diodorus was left standing in the shade of the olive tree, a spear in his hand.

When Eumenes came to embrace him, he had fifty troopers gathered around him, and they managed to form something like a line on the spot Andronicus the Gaul had died because, like Diodorus, they weren’t dead. And that meant that they had to keep to their standards.

Eumenes hugged him. ‘We … won!’ he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it.

Diodorus let out a long, deep sigh. ‘I guess I’m alive, then,’ he said. He thought of Niceas and Graccus, of Philokles, of Crax and Andronicus and Kineas and all of them.

One of his youngest troopers — a new boy out from Athens, named Niceas, too — was drinking. ‘Can I offer you some, sir?’ he asked Diodorus.

Well-mannered boy. ‘What’s in that canteen, lad?’

The boy smiled. ‘Wine, sir.’

Diodorus took the canteen and poured half of its contents into the blood-soaked ground. ‘Nike!’ he said.