Funeral Games

22

T he army of Aegypt was supposed to begin to march with the dawn. Their departure was marked with riots and protests in addition to all the usual difficulties, and the sun crossed the height of the sky before the cavalry had marched. The baggage train of wagons, carts, donkeys and porters filled the road before the first squadron departed, and there were more and more non-combatants with every unit. The feeling in the column was ugly, and the feeling in the streets of the city was worse.

The Foot Companions were rumoured to have mutinied in their barracks, but they did march – sixteen files deep, with shield-bearers sandwiched between the files of soldiers, so that the men walked unencumbered while their slaves carried their armour, their weapons and their food. Unlike the cavalry, many of whom had worn their best for the departure, partly to make a show and partly to overawe the populace, the Foot Companions disdained to do the same. They walked off in dusty red chitons, grumbling. There were gaps in their ranks, and rumour said that some men had deserted, or worse.

The other taxeis also marched, each body with two thousand men formed four deep in huge long files, followed by carts and slaves. Only lucky men in these less prestigious formations had a shield-bearer. Again, there were gaps – files where a man or two were missing. Rumours swept the column that there was a plot against Ptolemy – that the Macedonians would rise and murder him – that Aegyptians would murder him – wilder and wilder stuff.

The Phalanx of Aegypt continued to drill on their parade near the sea. At the head of the parade was their equipment. Every man had a bundle to carry, carefully tied, and the phylarchs worked their way down their files, inspecting every man’s campaign gear before passing their files on to the captains who inspected them again. When they were inspected and passed, which took until noon, with the poorer men scurrying to the market and back for last-minute donations, they stacked their gear at the head of the square and did drill until the shadows began to gather, and then Diodorus appeared.

‘The strategos of the rearguard!’ Philokles said.

‘The very same,’ Diodorus replied, saluting. ‘We wouldn’t even make it to a campsite tonight, my friend,’ he said, pointing at the bundles. ‘Can your men camp here? On the parade?’

Philokles shrugged. ‘I expected nothing less,’ he said.

Satyrus stepped up by Diodorus’s leg. ‘All day we’ve heard rumours,’ he said. He was light-headed with lack of sleep. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The mutineers have gathered,’ Diodorus said, but his eyes were on Philokles and not his nephew. ‘As we discussed, eh, brother?’

Philokles gave a strange half-smile. ‘Just as we planned.’ He saluted and then waved at Rafik, his trumpeter, who came at a run. He turned to Satyrus. ‘Lad, get Abraham and tell him to send for the food we discussed. Rafik, sound “Phylarchs to the front”.’ The call rang out, and then Philokles bellowed, ‘On me!’

Satyrus found himself teaching a strange mix of men how to cook over an open fire. Most were city dwellers with no more knowledge of how to cook than they had of how to sleep comfortably on the bare ground. As he discussed the best mix of cheese and barley in the wine and water, the merits of an egg dropped in the mess, and the taste of the result with a hundred new mess cooks, he also gathered that the men were on edge – excited, too. Something was in the wind.

When the sun’s long rays welcomed the evening, he found Philokles standing at his elbow, eating a bowl of barley soup and chewing on a piece of fish. ‘Not bad, Phylarch. Your men eat well.’

Satyrus grinned. ‘Don’t look at me. Diokles brought spices – pepper! Who brings pepper to war?’

‘Me,’ Diokles said. ‘Bread and olive oil, Strategos?’

Philokles pressed close to his student. ‘Diodorus has sent Eumenes into the southern quarter with guides that Namastis provided,’ he said. ‘In an hour we’ll know one way or another.’ He kept his voice low. ‘Your sister – gods only know how – sent a note with a slave boy to Leon. The slave boy told us where Stratokles is – he and all the Macedonians who are bent on mutiny have gathered together. They probably mean to attack the palace.’ He looked around, ate a mouthful of soup and then, seeing the confusion on Satyrus’s face, raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s Stratokles, lad!’

Satyrus nodded, fatigue forgotten. ‘May I come?’ he asked.

‘If the quarry is all in one place – if our information is right – we’ll strike tonight. I mean to use some of our men – Aegyptians and Hellenes together.’

Diokles grinned. ‘Blood ’em a little? That’s the spirit.’

‘So that’s why we stayed behind!’ Satyrus said.

‘Hmm. More of an effect than a cause, lad. Good soup. Pick three men and join me at the head of the square in an hour – swords and shields only.’

‘Yes, sir!’

It was full dark by the time they were in the southern quarter. The moon provided some light, and there were guides – Aegyptians, often men from the phalanx that Satyrus recognized. More than a few of them took his hand and shook it, or pressed it to their lips. He didn’t understand why he had their devotion – but he did. That had a taste more bitter than sweet.

The tannery stank – the smell was so bad that men sneezed and spat.

‘Silence!’ Philokles whispered. ‘Wait until you smell the dead on a battlefield!’ He had Xeno with him, and Xeno was holding a small child by the hand.

Satyrus clasped hands with his friend. ‘Who’s the kid?’

‘I bought a shield-bearer,’ Xeno said. He looked pained. ‘He knew how to find that Athenian. Tyche.’

The boy was trembling. Satyrus knelt down next to the boy. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

The blond boy turned his head away and hid in the folds of Xeno’s chitoniskos.

‘Satyrus, your sister is serving as an archer,’ Xeno said.

‘Sappho will kill her,’ Satyrus said. He shrugged. Every time he looked at the head of the alley, his stomach turned over, and the daimon of combat was starting to sing in his ears, and his hands shook. Satyrus had no idea what his tutor’s plan was. He led his file where he was told, to the back gate of a warehouse, where he saw Hama, an under-officer of Diodorus’s hippeis, waiting with another armoured man.

Hama touched his brow when he recognized Satyrus. ‘Lord,’ he whispered.

‘What are we doing?’ Satyrus asked, because Philokles had vanished into the moonlit dark, Xeno and the child trailing along.

Hama shrugged. ‘When the trumpet sounds, we charge that gate,’ Hama said. He shrugged again. ‘Diodorus says – prisoners.’ Hama showed Satyrus that he had a Persian horseman’s mace. ‘So I brought this.’

The night was full of men. Satyrus thought that Philokles must have brought half the phalanx, with the other half acting as guides – Ares and Aphrodite, as Diodorus liked to say. With the dismounted cavalrymen, there were two thousand soldiers waiting in the dark.

Philokles reappeared with his trumpeter, the Nabataean youth called Rafik. Xeno and the child were gone.

‘What are all these men for?’ Satyrus asked.

‘I’m using a hammer to crack an egg,’ Philokles said. ‘It’s a good strategy to use, if you have the option. Put another way, more is more.’

Satyrus was going to ask another question, but Philokles put out his hand. ‘Steady – we’re going before they see us. Ready?’

Satyrus nodded.

Philokles raised his hand, and Rafik put the trumpet to his lips.

Satyrus ran for the gate with Hama. Behind them, a dozen phalangites with a log jogged along, and Satyrus felt foolish as he stepped clear to allow the ram to hit the gate. It blew open as if Zeus had struck it with a thunderbolt.

The courtyard was full of men – dozens of men, perhaps hundreds, some in armour, all with weapons. They might have been formidable, except that they were under attack from thousands of men coming out of the dark, and they were taken completely by surprise.

That didn’t affect Satyrus, who was the third man through the back gate. The first was Philokles, who had a shield, a huge Greek aspis, and a club, and the second was Hama with his mace. Each felled a man, and then Satyrus was facing a panicked Macedonian who was screaming – not that Satyrus was listening. He punched his shield into the man and knocked him down, then headed for the building.

He fought a second man just heartbeats later – turning the man away from Philokles and then stabbing him in the chest as he tried to fight. Most of the men were trying to surrender, but the phalangites had their blood up and they were breaking heads.

Satyrus hesitated, shouting at men he knew to spare the men surrendering, and Hama stepped in front of him and burst open the main door with his shoulder and got an arrow in his shield, but this didn’t slow Hama by a pace – he put the shield up and pressed forward, virtually blind, his speed a wicked surprise to the man behind the door. Then he stopped, quick as a cat, and cut under his shield, breaking knees and shins.

Satyrus followed Hama through the door. An arrow whispered evilly by his face and then he was facing a rush from a side room – despite his strength, he was shoved back against a wall, and then the man who slipped past him screamed as one of Satyrus’s Aegyptian rear-rankers spitted him on his long knife.

‘Thanks!’ Satyrus said.

The man grinned and shook his head. ‘I’m with you, lord!’ he said. Then Diokles pushed forward past the Aegyptian.

‘Lost you in the press,’ Diokles said.

They entered the side room, some kind of wine shop, and two more men rushed them from behind the trestle tables that marked the land-lord’s portion of the shop. One man had an axe, but he hesitated when Satyrus faked a cut at his head, and then he was dead. The other man fell to his knees.

Diokles killed him anyway, running the sharp point of his kopis into the man’s neck.

At the back of the shop were stairs up to the exedra, or so Satyrus assumed. The front door of the shop burst open, and there was Diodorus in full armour.

‘It’s me!’ Satyrus shouted.

‘Hold!’ Diodorus bellowed. He came in, and a dozen troopers came in behind him. Satyrus knew most of them.

Now or never. Easy enough to hesitate and let them go first – Diodorus or Eumenes, perhaps, or Diokles or his nameless Aegyptian file-partner. Fuck that. ‘Follow me!’ Satyrus yelled, and went for the stairs. He roared, and his fear fell away. Inside, he laughed with triumph.

There was an archer on the stairs. Satyrus got his shield up and felt the blow as the arrow went into his shield, popping through the bronze face and the papyrus leaves and the poplar wood to prick his arm. He roared again, banished the flood tide of fear and his legs powered him up. He thrust his shield into the archer and his sword under it, over it, everywhere until the blood flew and the man fell – a nameless stranger, not the Athenian doctor who he saw in nightmares but some poor mercenary, toppling off the stairs with his guts spilling free like an anchor chain. Then he turned as a knife glanced off his scale cuirass.

‘I surrender!’ said the man who had just failed to kill him.

Satyrus held his swing. The man backed away, dropping the knife. ‘I surrender!’ he said and ran back through the door.

‘Satyrus!’ Eumenes of Olbia called from the base of the steps. ‘Wait, boy!’

The man who had just surrendered fell backwards against him, pleading. ‘Please!’ he begged. ‘Help!’ he squeaked.

Phalangites and cavalrymen had used ladders to storm the exedra and were killing every man they found.

‘Stop that!’ Satyrus said. ‘Prisoners!’ he roared in his best storm-at-sea voice.

Men glanced at him, and the madness left their eyes.

Diodorus was shaking his head. ‘We have a hundred prisoners,’ he said. ‘Ares and Aphrodite. Macedonians – what in all the shades of Tartarus were they doing here?’

Philokles shook his head. ‘I can guess, brother. But we do not have the men we came for.’

Satyrus pushed the prisoner from the head of the stairs forward. ‘Gone an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Pure ill luck. And his whole fucking household and all his guards.’

‘Lord,’ the terrified mercenary said. ‘Lord, he left to – arrange – that is – to kill Lord Ptolemy!’

‘Zeus Soter!’ Diodorus said.

Theron and Eumenes began shedding their armour without comment, and Satyrus joined them. ‘Running?’ he asked, and both nodded.

‘All the athletes!’ Satyrus shouted, and the cry was taken up, and Dio came, and a dozen other young men. They stripped to their chitoniskoi, threw their sword belts over their shoulders and they were off.

They ran in a pack through the darkened streets – their own men slowed them for many blocks, as the thousands Philokles had employed hampered them, curious for news and at one post insistent that they prove themselves – good men, obeying orders, who cost them precious minutes until a hippeis officer verified them and they were off again.

They ran like sprinters up to the palace gate and found no guard there, just a pair of dead slaves.

‘Where in Hades do we go?’ Eumenes asked.

Satyrus was familiar enough with the palace. He led the whole group across the courtyard to the entry to the megaron – where a pair of cavalry Hetairoi barred the way with bare steel.

‘Stratokles seeks to murder Lord Ptolemy!’ Theron yelled. His words echoed around the rows of columns and the courtyard and the garden. The two cavalrymen faced them, clearly prepared to fight.

‘Hold, hold! I know that voice!’ shouted a Greek from within the megaron, and then Gabines came through the archway with more guards.

Eumenes, as the senior officer, stepped forward. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I am one of Lord Diodorus’s officers. We have just taken a hundred of the mutineers – more, I think.’

‘Praise the gods!’ Gabines said.

‘We are told that Stratokles the Athenian means to kill Lord Ptolemy,’ Eumenes said.

‘We know,’ Gabines answered wearily. ‘You are too late. He has already failed.’

‘Thank the gods,’ Satyrus said, and behind him, his companions gave a loyal cheer.

‘You may not thank the gods,’ Gabines said, looking at Satyrus. ‘Lord Ptolemy left today, in secret, disguised as a trooper. He is safe.’ Gabines shook his head. ‘But Stratokles the traitor has taken the Lady Amastris.’