Funeral Games

24

The pursuit of Stratokles didn’t last out the night. Midnight had come and gone before they found the means he had used to leave the city – a boat waiting off the palace – and his head start was sufficient to guarantee his success.

‘He’ll run to Demetrios,’ Philokles told Satyrus.

The young man was dry-eyed – tired, wrung out and incapable of further emotion. Subsequent days did little to raise his spirits. They marched from the city into the desert, and the next five days were hard – stretches of bright desert punctuated by Delta towns and river crossings, so that a man could be parched with heat and an hour later nearly drowned. The mosquitoes were the worst that Satyrus had ever known, descending on the army in clouds that were visible from a stade away.

‘What do they eat when there aren’t any Jews?’ Abraham asked.

‘Mules,’ Dionysius answered. ‘The taste is much the same.’

Satyrus marched along in silence, sometimes lost in dark fantasies of the torments Amastris must now be suffering, and again, tormenting himself with his own inability to rescue her. Few things are more calculated to indicate to a young man just how small his roll is than marching in the endless dust cloud and bugs of an army column that fills the road from morning until night – one tiny cog in the great bronze machine of war.

At night they camped on flat ground by branches of the Nile and drank muddy water that left silt in their canteens. Every morning, Satyrus made himself roll out of his cloaks and go around the circle of fires, helping one mess group start their fire, finding an axe for another and reminding a third how to cook in clay without cracking the pots.

All in all, the cooking was getting better, if only because the Phalanx of Aegypt was beginning to acquire followers. Every village seemed to have girls and very young men who wanted to go anywhere, if only to leave the eternal drudgery of the land. On the river, a girl was accounted a woman when she was twelve, and old when she was a grandmother of twenty-five or so. Most of them were dead when they were thirty. Satyrus had heard these things, but now he marched through it, and every morning there were more peasants at his campfires, cooking the food – and eating it. And the files of shield-bearers began to fill in, so that the phalanx looked more like the Foot Companions.

On the third day, Philokles walked up and down the ranks, ordering men to carry their own kit. ‘Let them carry the cook pots!’ Philokles roared. ‘Carry your own weapons! You spent the summer earning the privilege – don’t sell it for a little rest!’

The fourth morning and already Amastris was like a distant dream. Satyrus had fallen asleep with Abraham, and he awoke to find his friend shivering. Satyrus was shivering too, but he knew what to do – he was up in a flash, and threw his chlamys over the other man, and then ran along the Thermoutiakos, a stream of the Nile, and then around the camp until he was warm.

Well upstream, he came across a pair of marines he knew and Diokles, leading a goat.

‘Where’d that come from?’ Satyrus asked.

‘We found it, didn’t we?’ one of the marines answered. ‘Wandering, like.’

Diokles wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Didn’t actually belong to anyone,’ he said.

Satyrus rubbed at the beginning of a beard that was forming on his jaw. ‘You know what Philokles says about theft.’

‘Wasn’t theft,’ Diokles insisted.

‘Wandering about, like,’ the marine said.

The other marine was silent.

‘I know where you can find your sister,’ Diokles offered suddenly.

If he intended to distract his officer, he certainly succeeded. ‘You do?’ Satyrus asked.

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Diokles said, waving at the marines. Then he turned back the way he had come. ‘She’s in the archer camp. All the sailors and marines know it – you won’t send her back?’

‘Hades, no!’ Satyrus said.

They walked half a stade, to where a dozen young men were shooting bows at baled forage for the cavalry. ‘She got us the goat,’ Diokles admitted.

‘Really?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’ Diokles answered. ‘You’ll find her. I’ll see you in camp.’

Satyrus jogged over to the men shooting at the bales. It wasn’t that hard to pick out his sister, if you knew where to look. He came up and swatted her on the backside, the way soldiers in armour often did to each other.

Melitta whirled. ‘You bastard!’ she growled.

He laughed. They embraced.

‘You’re insane!’ Satyrus said.

‘No more than you, brother,’ she said. ‘Any word about Amastris?’

Satyrus sat on his haunches in the sand – a new talent for a world with no chairs. ‘No word at all. Stratokles took her and sailed away.’

‘He won’t bother her,’ Melitta said. ‘She’s too clever.’ After a moment, she said ‘much too clever’ in a way that suggested that all that cleverness wasn’t entirely admirable.

‘I’m afraid for her.’ Satyrus frowned. ‘I know how stupid this sounds, but – I want to rescue her.’

‘That’s not stupid, brother – if it was me, I’d fucking well expect you to come and save me.’ She laughed in her throat, a deeper sound than she’d ever made at home.

‘Nice swearing,’ Satyrus said.

‘I get lots of practice,’ Melitta said.

‘I have to go back and make sure the breakfast gets cooked,’ Satyrus said, and saw Xenophon coming up, his whole demeanour sheepish. ‘Now I know where you sleep,’ he said with more venom than he meant.

Xenophon wouldn’t meet his eye, and Satyrus was sorry to find that he didn’t care much.

‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Xenophon said. He and Melitta exchanged a significant look.

‘No,’ Satyrus said. ‘You have your armour on and I’m going to run. See you soon. What do you call yourself?’

‘Bion, like my horse.’ She flashed him her best smile and he returned it. Then he waved, nodded to Xeno so as not to seem rude and ran off for his camp.

An hour later, his belly full of under-roast goat, he was marching again.

They marched through Natho and Boubastis, picking up more followers and meeting carefully assembled grain barges that supplied the army and kept the looting of the peasants down to manageable limits. At Boubastis, Philokles caught an Aegyptian and a Hellene stealing cattle from an outlying farm and he brought both men into camp at spear point.

‘What will you do with them?’ Diodorus asked. He and Eumenes rode in while the sun was still bright enough for work. A barge was unloading bales of wood for fires – there wasn’t enough wood in the desert to build a raft for an ant, as the Aegyptians said.

Satyrus listened attentively, because the camp was buzzing with rumour about what the Spartan had planned.

‘I intend to hold an assembly of the taxeis tonight. What else should I do?’ Philokles asked.

Diodorus laughed. ‘Most of your men aren’t Greek, Philokles.’

Philokles shrugged. ‘So you say. When it comes to a desire for justice, and a desire to have each man have his say – who is not a Greek? You want me to kill these men out of hand, as an example?’

‘I do,’ Diodorus nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

Philokles shook his head. ‘You’d need a different commander for this group, then, Strategos.’

Dinner was good, because the barges were less than a stade away and there was plenty of food and plenty of fuel. Just five days into the march, the Phalanx of Aegypt was harder and more capable than they had been in the near riot of leaving the city. They could cook, and sleep, and eat, and pack, and march, without much fuss. But the assembly was a new adventure, and a dangerous one, because there was death in it.

The Hellenes knew what was expected, and so all the men gathered in a great circle in the crisp night air. Above them, the whole curtain of the heavens seemed to be on display, the stars burning with distant fire. Every man was there, even those who had the mosquito fever or the runs that seemed to come with too much Nile water – at least for Greeks.

‘Soldiers!’ Philokles’ voice was as loud as any priest’s. ‘These men have disobeyed my orders and the orders of the army. In Sparta, in Athens, in Macedon, these men would forfeit their lives. But only,’ his voice grew over the murmur of the men, ‘only if the assembly of their regiment approved it. Who will step forward and speak for the army, prosecuting these men for their crime?’

Philokles’ eyes pressed on Satyrus. Into the silence he stepped. ‘I will prosecute,’ Satyrus said.

Philokles looked around. ‘Who will speak for these men?’

The two culprits grinned around at their comrades, and were surprised to find many serious faces looking back at them. Finally Abraham stepped into the silence. ‘I will defend,’ he said.

Satyrus looked at him, surprised that his friend would oppose him, but then he shrugged, understanding that Abraham no more wanted to defend them than he wanted to speak against them. This was duty.

The evidence was brief and damning, offered as it was by the phalanx commander.

Satyrus asked a number of questions to make their guilt clear, and then shrugged. He had read every case ever pleaded in Athens – he could quote Isocrates, for instance – but this didn’t seem the place for such flights of rhetoric. ‘If we rob the peasants,’ he asked the silent men of the phalanx, ‘why should they help us? And what are we but enemies, no different from those who come to conquer?’

His words went home – he could see them, like an arrow launched from a distance that, after a delay, strikes the target. He bowed his head to Philokles and stood aside.

Abraham stood forth. ‘I am not a Greek,’ he said. ‘But in this I think that the Greeks are right – that a man should be judged according to the will of his comrades. Because his comrades are best fitted to judge the crime.’ Abraham turned so that he was addressing the Aegyptians, who filled one half of the circle. ‘I ask all of you – who has not eaten stolen meat in the last week? Who has not lifted a bottle of honey beer? Let that man vote that these miscreants be killed. For myself, I am no hypocrite. My friend has told us why we hurt our own cause when we steal, and I hear him. I will not eat another stolen goat. But until the taste of that stolen food is gone from my lips, I will not condemn another to death.’

Philokles was suppressing a smile when he stepped past the two advocates. ‘Well said by both.’ He looked around. Fifteen hundred men stood in near perfect silence.

‘Remember this moment,’ Philokles said to the assembly. ‘This is the moment that you began to be soldiers.’ He looked around with approval, and still they were silent. ‘So – you are all goat-eaters. How then should I punish them? Even their advocate did not trouble to claim them guiltless.’

Namastis stepped forward from among the Aegyptians. ‘Will you punish both alike?’ he asked.

Philokles put his hands on his hips. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Don’t anger me, priest.’

Namastis shook his head. ‘Old ways die hard,’ he said. ‘If you seek to punish both alike,’ he said, ‘let them carry pots with the peasants until it is your pleasure to return them to the ranks.’

A sound like a sigh escaped from the men gathered in the dark.

‘Whoa!’ said the guilty Hellene, a marine from the Hyacinth.

‘Silence!’ Philokles said. ‘Any dissenting opinion?’

Another murmur, like wind passing through a field of barley – but no man stepped forward.

Philokles nodded sharply. ‘Theron, pick the two best shield-bearers and swear them in to the phalanx. These men may carry their kit. If either of you desert, you will earn the punishment of death. Serve, and you may be restored.’ Philokles raised his voice. ‘Do you agree, men of Alexandria?’

They roared – a shout that filled the night.

The eighth day found them at Peleusiakos, where mountains of wheat and cisterns of fresh water awaited them with barges of firewood and tens of thousands of bales of fresh fodder for the cavalry. Twelve thousand public slaves laboured at fresh earthworks in the brutal sun, raising platforms of logs and sand and fill brought from the Sinai and even from the river. The ramparts rose four times the height of a man and the platforms carried Ares engines that could throw a spear three stades or a rock the same. To the north lay the sea, and to the south the deadly marshes, which offered no hope to an army. Even with the breeze from the sea, the stink of the swamp mud overwhelmed the smell of horse and camel and the filth of men.

Satyrus marched with the rest of his phalanx into a prebuilt camp and handed his kit to a slave to be cleaned. They had tents. Of course, the interior of the linen tent was airless, white hot and brilliantly lit, so that no man could sleep there in the daylight – but the extent of Ptolemy’s preplanning was staggering. Satyrus put his shield against his section of the wall and put his spear in a rack set for that purpose.

Later, after a dinner cooked by public slaves with enough mutton to quieten the loudest grumbles, Satyrus stood on the parapet with his uncles and their officers, Andronicus the hyperetes of the hippeis of exiles, Crax and Eumenes, all looking out over the Sinai and the road to Gaza.

‘We’re not doomed at all,’ Philokles said. ‘I’ve underestimated our Farm Boy.’

Diodorus laughed. ‘Just as you were meant to. Mind you, if the Macedonians had managed to get their mutiny together, we’d never have got here. But look at it! Every man in the army is going to look around at the walls and the camp, the tents, the spiked pits – and the stores! And every man is going to say the same thing.’

‘Ptolemy can hold this with slaves,’ Philokles said. ‘With mice.’

‘Something like that,’ Diodorus said. He had wine in a canteen, and he handed it around.

Satyrus was cowed in the face of so many veterans, but he mustered his courage. ‘So,’ he said, ‘when will we fight?’

Diodorus laughed and slapped Satyrus on the shoulder. ‘That’s the great thing, lad. We’ll never have to fight. Demetrios is a child, but he’s not a fool. He’ll take one look at this and cut a deal. Then he’ll turn around and march home.’

‘So no one wins,’ Satyrus said. ‘And Amastris remains with the traitor.’

Diodorus shook his head, but Eumenes, who was younger and perhaps understood Satyrus better, cut in. ‘That’s not true, Satyrus. First, we win. All we sought to do was defend Aegypt. We win. That’s an important concept for a soldier to understand. Second,’ he shrugged, ‘I know it’s not the stuff of Homer, but even now, I suspect that Amastris’s uncles and father and every other lord on the Euxine and quite a variety of other busybodies will be speaking for her. And when the golden boy looks at these walls and puts his tail between his legs, well…’ Eumenes looked at the other officers, and all three of the older men smiled.

‘Well – what?’ Satyrus asked, torn between annoyance at being treated like a boy and the knowledge that, to these men, he was one. ‘What, Eumenes?’

‘He’ll probably make a treaty just to get his men fed,’ Philokles said. ‘Amastris will go on the table to buy some of that grain.’

Satyrus spat in disgust.

Diodorus flexed his shoulders under his cuirass. ‘I want to get this bronze off my back. Satyrus, I share your disgust. You look very like your father when you’re annoyed.’

Philokles put an arm around his shoulders. ‘He is growing to be like his father.’

‘So’s his sister,’ Diodorus said, and they all laughed, even Satyrus.

It was almost a week before they saw the scouts of the enemy, and another week before Demetrios brought up his infantry.

The cavalry went out of the works and skirmished. The hippeis of Tanais rode forth and brought back prisoners – Sakje and Medes – and Seleucus, Ptolemy’s new second in command, won a cavalry battle somewhere to the south and east on the Nabataean road. The pikemen of the phalanxes played no part in any of this. Most of them sat in camp. But the Phalanx of Aegypt drilled all day, every day. They marched up and down the roads, and they charged across broken ground and open ground and they dug on the walls when ordered, because Philokles refused to give them a rest.

They worked harder than anyone but the slaves.

Melitta watched them march by, sitting on the great earthwork wall with her legs hanging over the edge to catch the breeze – legs which drew no notice at all in a camp so full of available peasant girls that no one gave her a second look. That thought made her smile. Beneath her feet, Xeno and Satyrus and all the young men she knew – there was Dionysius, his hair plastered to his head under a filthy linen skull cap, making a sarcastic comment to his file partner, she could see it on his face – the lot of them marched by. They were singing the Paean to Apollo to keep in step and they sang it well enough to move her.

‘Bion? Bion!’

Officer. She pulled her legs under her and swung off the parapet to drop to the hard-packed gravel of the sentry walk. ‘Phylarch!’ she called in her low voice.

Idomeneus was a Cretan, like most expert archers. He wore quilted armour and carried a massive bow and Melitta suspected that the spade-bearded mercenary knew she was a girl and didn’t care. She saluted him as she’d been taught.

‘Listen up, lad. I’m to take my best hundred archers – we’ll ride double with some of the horse-boys and try a little ambush. There’s likely to be some plunder. What do you say?’

‘I’ll get my kit,’ Melitta said.

‘Whoa, horsey. Sunset, at the camp of the Exiles.’ He grinned. ‘Professionals. They won’t leave us to die, I think.’

Melitta hoped her face didn’t register her reaction. ‘Exiles’ is what Ptolemy’s army called Diodorus’s hippeis from Tanais. Those were her people – they’d know her.

Too late to back out. ‘I’ll be there,’ she said.

She accepted the derision of her peers with grace when she appeared on parade in Persian trousers she’d bought from a slave. Like most of them, she had a big straw hat the size of an aspis and under it she wrapped her head in linen against the sun. There wasn’t much of Melitta, daughter of Kineas, to be seen.

The hundred picked toxotai didn’t so much march as stroll across the camp. Good archers were specialists – like craftsmen – and they didn’t have the kind of discipline that the men in the phalanxes needed. In fact, they derided the phalangites as often as they could.

Cavalry were a different matter. Cavalrymen often had a social distinction, and they considered all infantrymen to be beneath their notice. Melitta, as the child of the Sakje, shared their disdain, and it was odd to receive the cutting edge of it from men she knew.

‘Pluton, they smell!’ Crax laughed. He trotted his horse along the length of the toxotai, his charger actually brushing Melitta. He stopped and leaned over by Idomeneus. ‘This is the best you could do? They look like dwarves, Ido!’

Crax actually pointed at Melitta. ‘That one can’t be more than twelve.’

Her captain didn’t get angry. Instead, he pointed at ‘Bion’. ‘Fall out,’ he said. ‘String your bow.’

Crax laughed. ‘Well, at least he’s strong enough to get it bent. Say – that’s a Sakje bow, lad.’

Melitta had the string on with the practice of years. Without waiting for an order, she put an arrow on her string, chose a target – a javelin target across the Exiles’ parade square, a good half a stade away – and loosed. The arrow rose, drifted a little on the evening breeze and struck the target squarely, so that the wooden shield moved and the thunk echoed.

‘Hmm,’ Diodorus said. ‘That lad looks familiar to me, Crax.’ Diodorus had a dun-coloured cloak over a plain leather cuirass and two spears in his fist.

Crax reached down and slapped Idomeneus. ‘I take it all back, Cretan. They’re all Apollo’s own children. At least they won’t burden the horses!’

After a quick inspection, ten of them were sent to fill all the water bottles, a task Melitta always drew because she was clearly one of the youngest. Then they paraded with the hippeis, and every archer was assigned to a rider.

Bion was assigned to a Macedonian deserter she didn’t know well – although she did know him – but just as she prepared to climb on to his mount, Carlus trotted his gigantic charger along the line.

‘Captain says I take the boy,’ Carlus said.

The Macedonian shrugged. ‘He’s the lightest, that’s for sure. Not sorry to ride without him, though. They’ve all got lice.’ He turned his horse and moved back along the file.

Carlus lifted Bion with one hand. ‘Hands around my waist, lad,’ he said.

Carlus smelled of male sweat and horse – not a bad smell at all, but ‘Your uncle says that if you want to go with the army, you should be with us,’ Carlus said. His voice was level. ‘We can keep you alive.’

‘I can keep alive. I have comrades who I value,’ she said. And she knew that life in the camp of the Exiles would not be real like life with the toxotai. She was gaining a reputation as an archer and as someone to be taken seriously, at knucklebones or even boxing. With the hippeis, she’d be known for what she was. Kind glances and helpful hands and some laughter behind her back.

Carlus shrugged. ‘Everyone needs to make their own way,’ he allowed.

The moon was bright, and the desert empty, and they rode fast – the kind of speed that Medes and Sakje practised, and few Greeks could manage. Every man had two horses, or even three, and they changed every hour.

It was exhilarating to go so fast across the moon-swept landscape, with such comrades. The sense of purpose was remarkable and heady. The hippeis were exactly as silent as required – loud when they felt secure, silent as a necropolis when they began to close on the enemy camp – and the toxotai were infected by their absolute conviction that they would win. At the second halt for a horse change, Idomeneus grinned at her. ‘Someday I’d like to train archers this well,’ he said.

‘They’ve been together twenty years,’ Bion replied, and then realized she had blundered. ‘At least, that’s what the big barbarian I’m with said.’

Idomeneus nodded. ‘Still,’ he whispered.

‘You kids done chatting?’ Crax asked. He was already mounted and he extended a hand to the Cretan. ‘I hope we’re not keeping you up too late. The party is just about to start.’

No one bothered to tell Bion the plan until they halted a final time, just after the moon had set. Carlus was pointing at the ground.

‘What do I do?’ she asked.

Carlus’s grin was ghastly in the moonlight. ‘Dig a hole and climb in. We’ll draw them to you at first light. When you hear the trumpet, start shooting.’ He shrugged. ‘Not my plan.’

She rolled off the broad back of Carlus’s elephantine horse and gathered her small pack. She did not, of course, have a pick or a shovel. All around her she could see other archers with the same difficulty.

They scraped shallow pits with their hands and some, who had helmets, used them, while Idomeneus walked up and down, cursing and demanding that they dig faster. By the time the very first rays of dawn turned the eastern sky pink, she was lying in the cool sand with her cloak over her and a few hastily gathered blades of swamp grass over her cloak. It wasn’t much. To her right she could see another Cretan, Argon, with his rump sticking up because he was a lazy sod and couldn’t be bothered to dig hard.

Why am I here? Melitta asked herself in the privacy of her hole. She’d been warm enough while working, but now the sand was soaking the warmth out of her and she didn’t have her cloak around her and she was cold and none of this made any sense. The cavalry had ridden away.

She must have fallen asleep, despite everything, because suddenly there was movement around her and the sky was very bright indeed. She raised her head and saw dust, felt the hoof beats of horses, many horses at a gallop.

‘Wait for it!’ Idomeneus called. He was standing in the shadow of a big rock. ‘String your bows!’

A hundred capes wriggled and the sand seemed to roll like the sea as the toxotai strung their bows lying flat. Even the desert generated too much moisture to leave a bow strung overnight.

To Bion, it seemed as if the galloping horses were right on top of them, and still Idomeneus didn’t call and the trumpet didn’t sound. Louder and louder – impossibly loud. And terrifying.

‘Stand up!’ the Cretan called.

Eumenes was right in front of her, two horse-lengths away, and even as she stood, his horse passed between her and Argon, his head turned to watch the rear and his cloak streaming behind him.

She put a heavy arrow on her bow as she noted that there were dozens – no, hundreds – of horses, but only a few of them had riders.

They stole a horse herd, she thought. It made her smile – such a Sakje thing.

The riderless horses raised quite a dust cloud. She wrapped her linen wimple over her mouth and tilted her straw hat down to block the sun. Now she could see almost a stade, and there were two big bodies of cavalry.

The enemy. This was different from anything she’d ever done – different from fighting pirates. She found that she was grinning like a fool. She looked around – she could hit at this range, but she wasn’t sure she was allowed to shoot.

Just half a stade away were hundreds of enemy cavalry. And they were coming fast.

A heavy Cretan arrow leaped into the air – Argon, damn him – and it swept high before stooping like a hawk and falling just short of the lead company.

‘You fucking idiot! Do you want to eat horseshit tonight, you useless turd?’ Idomeneus was not yelling – but he was right there. ‘Wait for the trumpet!’ More quietly, ‘Ares, what a fuck-face.’

The enemy were so close that they must see the archers – but they continued to canter along, making the earth rumble. Melitta was shaking the way she had before telling Aunt Sappho that she’d lain with Xeno – where was Xeno, anyway? And whose plan was this?

The trumpet rang.

Bion loosed without thought, then watched as another arrow was dragged from the quiver and nocked, red fletch upward – bow up, full draw, four fingers over the mass of horsemen, loose, third arrow…

The lead company burst under the volleys of arrows. The first arrows hit them in a tight clump, most of them falling from high and hitting the unprotected hindquarters of the horses, so that the animals screamed and fell, or rolled, or stood and fought the air, bellowing their agony with noises that made Melitta’s Sakje stomach roll over with discomfort that killing mere men never caused her. The effect on the company to her front was total – where there had been a hundred cavalrymen, there was a dust cloud and the screams of the dying. Nothing came out of the cloud but a single riderless horse and even as she watched, the third volley of arrows vanished into the rising sand to a thin chorus of new screams.

The second and third enemy companies didn’t hesitate. They swept wide, going for the flanks of the archers, having changed from pursuers to desperate men within three flights of arrows. The men on Bion’s side of the engagement had long beards and Persian dress, they rode good horses and moved fast. Their captain wore rippling golden scale mail and had a henna-dyed beard. Bion shot him from the saddle – a pretty shot even at close range – before he could react to the new threat coming at his own flank: serried troops of the Exiles coming over the low sand and mud ridges to the north and south.

Leaderless, his men were still focused on the archers flaying their front when the Exiles ripped into their flanks, heralded by a point-blank volley of heavy javelins that could knock a horse flat.

Even so, determined men – bearded easterners who had grown up fighting Sakje on the frontier and knew a disaster when they saw one – didn’t hesitate. One group went straight for Melitta. She nodded, even as she fitted another arrow to the string – fingers suddenly clumsy, a spasm of fear even while part of her mind was above the whole battle, thinking things through Their leader knew he’d be safer going through the ambush than turning tail. A good leader.

They were going to make it to her position and she couldn’t stop them and nobody else could either.

She loosed – hit or miss, she didn’t know, because she threw herself flat and rolled in a ball as the Medes went over her, their sabres reaching for her. That was her moment of fear – blind and waiting to be pinned to the ground like a pig in the agora, but then they were past and Argon was making a shrill whistling noise. She looked around – dust, no more – and ran to the Cretan, who lay in his too-shallow pit with blood under his elbows and his back arched in pain.

His throat was cut – just barely cut, the extreme reach of a Mede’s sword – and he gave up as she watched, his body ceasing to struggle, his rump sinking into the hole he had dug for himself. His head turned and he saw her. His mouth moved – no sound. She never knew what he tried to say because a blow to her side suddenly knocked her flat.

Her left arm and side rang with pain but she wasn’t dead. Her hair was full of sand. She spat – got a foot under her.

The Mede had a sword like a Sakje akinakes, long and narrow, and he got a hand on the javelin he’d thrown at her while she rose to her feet.

He hesitated when he saw her trousered legs, and she got her sword out from under her arm before he could finish her off. She didn’t hesitate – she put a hand up against the heavy javelin, missed her grab and stepped in anyway, swung the sword with the whole weight of her body behind it. He got his akinakes up to parry but her blow sheered down the blade and cut into his fingers and hand from brutal momentum.

He froze in pain.

She swung hard, cutting so deep into his neck that her sword stuck, and he flopped in the bloody sand, still alive, arms reaching for her. He got a hand on her leg and she kicked, slammed her fist into his face – blood from the neck wound splashing over both of them – got the sword free from his muscle and bone and cut again and again and again and again until the sword flew from her fingers from exhaustion to land a horse-length away in the sand.

She knelt by the body, empty of anything. Later she got up and fetched her weapons, drank some water and walked off down the line to where the other survivors gathered around Idomeneus.

‘Argon’s dead,’ she said.

Carlus rode by her. ‘I can’t find her!’ he roared, and a dozen hippeis rode back the way she had come into the battle haze. The archers watched wearily, uncaring as to what the fuss was. Melitta didn’t care much herself, so she walked boldly across the sand to Diodorus.

‘I’m right here,’ she said.

Diodorus looked down at her and his dust-caked face creased in a smile. ‘You look like your father sometimes,’ he said. He pointed at Andronicus and gave him some visual cue that caused the Gaul to blow a complex trumpet call, and all the Exiles began to rally. Several Exiles waved at her, and Eumenes pointed her out to Crax and Carlus, who shook their heads.

Carlus rode over. ‘You scared me, missy!’

Melitta spurned the hand he offered her to mount. ‘Bodies to loot,’ she said. ‘And I suspect there are horses for everyone, Big Guy. And if you call me missy again in public, I’ll gut you.’

Carlus grinned as if he’d just won a contest, but his voice sounded gruff. ‘You and what army, archer?’ He spat. And worked to hide his grin.

Melitta walked off into the sand, and she made herself pull rings from fingers. There was some good armour and a lot of decent swords – not that she needed either. After the first minutes, she couldn’t bear the sounds the wounded horses made, and the sight of the men – in particular, the sight of men she liked ignoring other men dying in agony at their feet while they stripped their bodies – sickened her. So she pulled a handsome saddle blanket from the corpse of a horse and a rider fallen together, and she took the bridle and bit from henna-beard, who she’d dropped herself, and then she walked all the way to the horse herd, well clear of the carnage, and cut out a pretty mare, tall and dark with four white feet. She put the tack on, dealt with the mare’s unease with the smells and the whole situation, and got herself mounted, kit bundle, bow and all. And she had a few gold darics to wow the boys in camp.

Idomeneus found her waiting with her horse. ‘You won’t leave me for these centaurs, will you?’ he asked. ‘I shouldn’t have put you at the end of the line in your first fight – but you shoot faster than most of the others. Was it bad, kid?’

She wanted to say something witty, the way Satyrus did – always brave, always ready with a quip. Finally, she said, ‘I didn’t throw up.’

Idomeneus nodded. His lips were as pinched as she felt hers must be. ‘You saw Argon go down?’

She shook her head. ‘Medes got him in the charge. We all hit the sand – he didn’t get flat enough.’

Idomeneus nodded again. ‘Help me get him on a horse then,’ the Cretan said. ‘He’s been with me five years – least I can do is put him in the ground.’

They recovered all their dead, and Crax and Eumenes gathered armour and built a trophy and left it sticking out of the sand, a taunt at the whole army of Demetrios, whose tents were just visible ten stades away on the horizon. When they rode off, with plunder and prisoners and two hundred new horses, the trophy glittered behind them under the new sun until they crested the big ridge south of the walls, and then they were home.