Funeral Games

PART V
POLISHING
19
312 BC

T he Athenian trireme had seen action, and his expensive Phoenician consort was missing, but he was rowing strongly as he passed the foundations to the new lighthouse and his owner might have been forgiven for feeling a twinge of pride. He’d watched for that ship for two weeks, and there he was, one more piece falling into place.

Stratokles leaned on the stone wall that edged his rented garden, fondling the scar tissue at the end of his shortened nose as he watched the familiar Athenian shape fold his oars to meet the harbour boat. He nodded, well pleased – the ship had been at sea long enough to temper the oarsmen, and now they responded like professionals. Then, calling to his slaves, he dressed in a plain chlamys, called for Lucius and his guards, and headed for the waterfront.

I need some luck. The problem with spying – with almost all forms of subterfuge – is that it was hard to trust anyone, and harder to find the person who could be trusted and still be clever enough to carry out orders. His guard captain, Lucius, was a capable fighter – but not a thinker. Or not the kind of thinker who could compete with Leon and Diodorus.

I need news. He needed to know that the Olbian boy was dead. He’d seen this sort of thing before – where a minor issue in a plan began to develop a life of its own. Satyrus had become such an issue. Stratokles shook his head, because the children were such a side issue.

I need Iphicrates. Stratokles had spent long days negotiating with Macedonians – hard men who despised Ptolemy only a little more than they despised Cassander or Antigonus One-Eye. They despised Stratokles utterly, and they didn’t always hide their contempt. Iphicrates can deal with them. I shouldn’t even have met them. Even as he walked, Stratokles made a gesture with his hand – a sort of peasant gesture to avert evil, but in his lexicon it meant that he was conscious of having made a mistake.

I hate Macedonians. Iphicrates might be sullen and secretive, but he was a brilliant fighter and a man who the Macedonians would accept as a negotiator – fools and thugs every one. And he needed Iphicrates to fight back against Leon and his minions.

That black bastard has everything, Stratokles thought. Good subordinates, time, money – fuck him. I’m smarter, and I’ll pull this thing off with my bare hands if I have to.

Stratokles had endured a month of humiliations as his household servants were hounded and beaten, his slaves stolen, his house vandalized. A punitive raid by Leon’s mercenaries had all but destroyed one of the criminal associations he had hired, and now only a handful of desperate men would take his coin.

Don’t go soft, short-nose, he told himself.

The endless friction of the job was getting to him, and he stopped on the wharf to take a deep breath and look around him. He was close – very close – to suborning Ptolemy’s senior officers. No time for self-pity now. His plan – and the future of Athens – needed him to keep a steady hand on the tiller. And it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Despite growing frictions between Cassander and Ptolemy, he had lulled the court with his tales of a summer campaign against Cassander by One-Eye and managed to convince the lord of Aegypt to ship a full taxeis of his veterans away to Macedonia, and he had demanded, and gained, a declaration of independence for the city-states of old Greece, a political statement that would muddy the waters at home and help Athens in fifty different ways. Demetrios of Phaleron would smile in delight, the oligarchic bastard.

Athens, I will yet free you! he thought. Then he grinned. Out loud, he said, ‘Athens, I will free you. If I have to sacrifice every one of these bastards to do it.’ That made him feel better.

It was time to repay Cassander for two years of slights and indignities – time to play his hand for himself and Athens. Cassander was losing his touch, and he wasn’t going to be the winning side. Stratokles needed Athens to be on the winning side – powerful on the winning side – to get what he needed and make Athens free.

So he had begun – carefully – to exchange letters with Antigonus One-Eye, ensuring himself a soft and feathered nest when he jumped – when Athens jumped. He would take a satrapy – preferably Phrygia. Phrygia would make a useful springboard for Athens, a capable ally, a market for goods. And he had an eye on the perfect wife for the Satrap of Phrygia. A fine child, the only heir of the Euxine’s second or third most powerful city. Amastris of Heraklea. All he needed was one last brilliant thrust and a little astute kidnapping – in most ways, an easier mission than playing all three corners between Cassander, One-Eye and Ptolemy.

The mutiny of the Macedonians – that would paralyze Ptolemy whether the doctor was successful or not. Always have a second line of plans, Stratokles thought while fingering his beard. And a third line if you can manage it.

Then he’d board that ship and leave, before Ptolemy discovered how thoroughly he had been bought and sold. The Athenian grinned and thought again of his employee, the doctor. If Cassander was paying the doctor, Stratokles thought that he might do well to avoid the man, even if he had been the doctor’s patron. Because soon enough, Cassander would realize that Stratokles had changed horses, and then the doctor would come after him.

And then it came to him – the master stroke that would sweep the board. He actually stopped walking in the middle of the Posideion and stood still as the wonder of the idea filled him.

Short-nose, you’re the smartest bastard in all the circle of the world.

Stratokles beat his own ship to the piers and spent an uncomfortable ten minutes waiting around for the trireme to come alongside. He couldn’t afford to draw the attention of the guards at this point – he didn’t mind if people associated his ship with the death of the Olbian boy, but he didn’t want the link too plain. He felt the frustration of a man on the edge of a great success, who has to depend on the whims of Fate.

But the guards on the piers were busy checking bills of lading, or collecting bribes from merchants. None spared him a glance.

Finally, the Athenian trireme turned in for the pier. Her oars shot in – a beautiful manoeuvre – and she coasted along, just barely moving, so that her helmsman only had to make a single turn to spend the last of her momentum.

Stratokles didn’t know that voice. He froze. The Athenian trireme embraced the pier like an old friend with scarcely a sound. Iphicrates had never handled the ship with such – elegance. Or without a lot of swearing…

‘Something’s wrong,’ Stratokles said to his guards. He walked quickly to the sternward edge of the pier. ‘Iphicrates?’ he called. ‘Show yourself!’

He waited a moment as marines put a plank over the gunwale. ‘Back to your places!’ he called.

‘Best let me go first,’ Lucius said.

Stratokles shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I need to know what’s going on. If Iphicrates is hurt…’ He shook his head. ‘Fuck this.’ He leaped on to the plank. ‘Who’s in command here?’

Momentum carried him two steps up the stern after the shock of recognition struck him. Those were not his officers standing in the stern. He reached for his sword. And that boy He leaped back on to the docks, rolled without tangling his cloak and came to his feet.

‘Secure that man! Xenophon!’ the boy barked.

Stratokles owed his life to the fact that the men on his ship – his ship! – were as stunned as he. He gathered his guards and ran, and the marines didn’t get another sight of him.

All the way back to his house, Stratokles tried to see how this could have happened and what the ramifications were. The loss of his ship was a serious blow – that ship meant mobility and freedom and a last bolt-hole if things went spectacularly wrong.

Just short of his gate, Stratokles shook his head as if he’d been in a conversation with another man. He put his hand out and stopped his guards.

‘Lucius – wait.’ Stratokles pointed at the house. ‘We don’t know that’s safe.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘No – they can’t have got word here yet – have to move fast. Get all the slaves, all the chests and the cash. Load it on the slaves. Fast as you can. Go!’

Lucius was a man used to obeying, and he leaped into action, barking orders at the other guards, most of them Keltoi or Iberians.

In less than an hour, they stripped Stratokles’ residence of cash and belongings, made a train of his slaves and some hastily hired porters, and vanished to his bolt-hole – that is, to one of his bolt-holes.

Stratokles fought for calm acceptance, but he was angry. ‘What the fuck could have happened?’ he asked Lucius. ‘More important, what do I do now?’

Lucius shrugged. ‘Anything that got old Iphicrates…’ he muttered, and shrugged. ‘We’ve got horses. Let’s head out across the desert. You said yourself that most of your damage was done and that Gabines was on to you.’

Stratokles stood still in the street, breathing hard. But then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No – we won’t cut and run. Not yet. I’m this close to burying Ptolemy for ever. I’ll stand my ground, for now.’

Lucius shook his head. ‘Well, I’m with you, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this done.’

When he was standing in the courtyard of his safe house, a shit-hole taverna he’d purchased in the unfashionable south-east quarter, he breathed easier despite the stink of the tannery next door.

Think it through, he said to himself.

Terrified slaves put bales of his goods down in the courtyard. Stratokles snapped his fingers, and two of his guards stepped forward.

‘Pay them well,’ Stratokles said. The expense was ruinous, but he couldn’t afford the betrayal of a slave at this point.

A young Gaulish woman with a yellow bruise that covered the left side of her face turned and bolted, fearing something in his voice and guessing incorrectly. She ran out of the courtyard, a six-year-old child at her side. Two of his best went off in pursuit.

‘Athena!’ Stratokles protested to the heavens. ‘Zeus Soter! I intended no impiety!’ He stopped imploring the heavens, as it scared the slaves. To Lucius, he said, ‘See to it we have no more runners.’

The rest of the slaves huddled together, as if by closeness they could achieve protection against the swords, like the sheep in the tannery. Lucius’s men herded them into their new quarters and put a bar across their door.

Before the shadows grew longer, the smaller of his guards returned from the chase with a smug look on his face and a head in a sack – a head with blond braids.

‘And the child?’ Stratokles asked.

The man looked around. ‘Never saw a child,’ he said.

Stratokles shook his head. ‘She had a child.’

The man blinked. ‘Never saw a child,’ he said. ‘Maybe Dolgu saw the brat.’

Stratokles stifled his annoyance. ‘Fine. Send Dolgu to me when he returns. In the meantime, go and buy me two new slaves in the market and get this courtyard cleaned. And arrange to send this note to the doctor. The usual way.’ The doctor was comfortably ensconced at the palace, and would only communicate via codes.

He had a new plan – it lacked the endless vistas of beauty of the former plan, but it would serve. Its simplicity was its beauty.

He would continue to foment the mutiny. That was too easy. Cassander wanted the Macedonians in Macedon, and they all wanted to go home. No need for deep planning there. The new wrinkle was that he would use his tools to kill Ptolemy. And then, when Antigonus strolled into the ensuing chaos, Stratokles would use him to free Athens.

‘You want me to take the boys and have a go at Leon’s men?’ Lucius asked. The big Italian was eating an apple.

‘No,’ Stratokles said. ‘No, Leon’s a sideshow. The children are a sideshow. If the doctor can get them, well and good, but I’m done with such stuff. We work the Macedonians, and then we decamp.’

Lucius finished his apple, right down to the seeds. ‘For what it’s worth, I agree. We can’t fight everyone.’

‘That’s just what I think,’ Stratokles said.