The daimon took him, and he moved, spun, and cut as if guided by an invisible hand, or as if he was a dancer in a carefully practised routine. He stopped sensing time as a linear thing and moved through his opponents, seeing them as fractional images of the action – a descending back-cut through a man’s nose guard, a wrist-roll thrust with an off-axis left foot advance that penetrated through a man’s leather cuirass and his belly, a ripping blow from a heavy spearhead that chopped a piece from his shield rim – the spearman’s second attack, using the spear like a long-handled axe, and his response – deflection, avoidance, inside the spear’s reach, the man’s terrified eyes as Satyrus cut him down …
He saw the blow. The stop-start universe of instant to instant life and death showed him the little man’s spear as it came in from his unprotected right side – he was trying to withdraw his sword from his last victim, and the fine edge was stuck in bone – the realisation in less than half a heartbeat that he could never block the blow – the enemy spear – another spear driving into it, and Satyrus was alive, his sword ripped from his last victim, and over his shoulder Demetrios was glowing with triumph as he pulled his own spear out of the little man.
‘Saved your life,’ he said with real satisfaction.
Satyrus didn’t pause, as there were three men trying to kill him.
The beautiful sword stuck in the ribs of another victim, a few heartbeats later, and Satyrus was all but driven from his feet by a powerful blow to his shield – a man tripping and falling to his shield side, but the man was ideally positioned to topple him, and Satyrus went to one knee – spear thrusts clattered on his shield and one rang on his helmet, and his searching sword-hand found nothing in the gravel and rubble of the breach.
Achilles stabbed over his head, fast as the sting of a wasp – one, two, three – and the rapidity and force of his blows was godlike – the third blow sank the width of a man’s hand through an enemy shield, and the man screamed as his shield arm was ripped open by the needle point on the spear.
Baulked of a weapon, even a broken spear shaft, Satyrus rose, grabbed the injured man’s shield with his free hand, and spun the rim, breaking the man’s already injured arm and dislocating his shoulder. Stepping through him, Satyrus slammed the edge of his shield into the next man in the breach, catching his shield and driving it back into the man’s unprotected mouth, spraying teeth, and Satyrus took his spear as the man screamed and sank to his knees.
Now Satyrus was the point of a wedge, with Demetrios at one shoulder and Achilles at the other, and the defenders of the breach were hesitant, because the best men had been at the front and now the survivors were brittle.
The pause gave Satyrus time to realise that he’d been wounded twice, that his imperfectly-healed ribs were burning as if on fire and that the fight for the breach was almost won. One of his adversaries, bolder than the others, lunged overarm at his outstretched left leg where it projected from under his shield. He dropped the head of his spear and swept the weapon sideways as he passed his right foot forward – collected his opponent’s spear on his shaft, rotated his own and thrust with his sarauter, taking his opponent off line and in the throat, killing him instantly. And he heard Demetrios grunt in admiration. He hefted his spear, pivoted, and threw it at a man who was looking elsewhere, and who paid with his life for his inattention, and then Satyrus let his aspis fall off his arm, collected a big rock – formerly part of the wall – and threw it into the enemy rank – just a little above the upper rim of a front-ranker’s shield. The man raised his shield and was knocked flat as the weight of the rock took him.
Demetrios was there, and ten other men – into the gap, widening it like workmen with chisels working marble, and in the time it took Satyrus to stoop and recover his shield, the defenders were pushed back out of the breach.
‘Take my sword,’ Achilles said.
Satyrus turned his head, saw the offered hilt, and took it. He spat. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘But I think this is done.’ Nonetheless, he picked up his shield and took his time fitting it correctly on his arm.
Hypaspists pushed past them, desperate to get to their king, who was now three horse lengths ahead, and Satyrus was carried forward by the rush. Someone’s spear point opened the back of his calf like a line of fire on his skin – careless bastard.
Satyrus moved to his right, and again to his right, pushed forward by the relentless pressure of the hypaspists but controlling his approach. The enemy were falling back and back, trying to rally, trying not to run.
Satyrus saw the flashes of new crests and well-made helmets over the beaten defenders – reinforcements.
‘Form up, there!’ he bellowed, but his accent was Greek, not Macedonian, and the eager men around him ignored him. The hypaspists pressed forward in a mob, their spears upright or pinned against them by the press.
The enemy – the beaten enemy – turned their heads, almost as one, like a flock of birds changing direction in the air. And then they opened their ranks – not well, but well enough – and let the newcomers through. The exchange of ranks took fifty heartbeats, and during that time the new enemy were vulnerable, but the hypaspists weren’t in order to make a cohesive attack, and mostly they gathered around their king and walled him off from the fighting.
And then the enemy attacked. They were mercenaries – most of them political exiles with a burning hate for Demetrios and his pseudo-democratic ways, and they crashed into the disorganised hypaspists and drove them back ten paces, killing as they came, and in the time it takes an Olympian to run the stade, Satyrus was in the front rank.
His opponent had a magnificent crest on one of the new helmets – a small, fitted Attic helmet with engraving on every surface. He had a thick blond beard under the cheek-plates, and he slammed his spear into Satyrus’s aspis with the confidence of the larger man.
Satyrus shuffled back to absorb the impact of the man’s spear, and then stepped forward –
push
with the back, right thigh, lead left, collect balance, and he was under Blond Beard’s spear, pressing shield to shield – Blond Beard trying to stab almost straight down over the locked shields. Satyrus stooped to get the pushing face of his aspis under the other man’s rim, and as the man responded to that threat, sliced the edge of his sword across the other man’s instep – flicked it back into the man’s unprotected ankle under his greaves, and
then
powered forward against him, making him stumble back and fall into his own line …
Now Achilles was next to him, and he put his spear point through a man’s face, and the enemy line paused.
But Demetrios’s hypaspists were not Alexander’s hypaspists, and they were still not in fighting order. A dozen or more – twenty, perhaps – were clustered around Satyrus and Achilles, but the rest had surrounded the king and forced him down the ramp.
‘We’re fucked,’ Achilles said.
Satyrus spat. He’d been wounded again, and the futility of the whole fight was overweighing the daimon.
He backed a step, and Achilles matched him.
He backed three more steps, and he was in the breach. The hypaspist on his left locked up, their aspides touching, and Achilles’ rank partner did the same, and they almost filled the breach.
Satyrus risked a look over his shoulder.
Demetrios was screaming at someone, his voice rough with strain, but his men were forcing him out of the breach. The rest were clearly intent on retreat, except the handful already committed to standing with Satyrus and Achilles.
The enemy mercenaries were hesitating.
‘Back,’ Satyrus ordered. He stepped back, and the man at his back gave ground as well.
‘We had them, gods curse on them!’ said the man on Satyrus’s left.
Now the mercenaries were preparing for a charge.
Satyrus stepped back again, and again, and now his head and shoulders were level with the outside of the breach, and he had the gritty dirt of the ramp under his sandals and between his toes. A bad position from which to fight.
But the mercenaries hesitated again.
‘Back,’ Satyrus said. The danger of falling off the ramp was very real.
Down below, a ballista fired, its bolt crashing into the right side of the breach and ricocheting crazily until it struck the front rank of enemy hoplites. It didn’t kill anyone, but in its tumble it broke a man’s ankle and knocked another unconscious.
‘Give that man a bag of darics,’ Achilles grunted.
Satyrus shared his view – the first ballista shot stopped the enemy at the back edge of the breach, and Satyrus and his little band were able to skid down the ramp unmolested – not even by javelins or arrows.
Satyrus reached the base of the ramp, and men hastened to hand him water, wine; they were chastened by their defeat, and aware that the last men off the ramp had taken greater risks and were the better men.
They weren’t his men – it wasn’t his place to berate them or demand explanations. Besides, he was bleeding in three places and the damned thorax he was wearing had cut into his waist to the extent that he could barely keep his feet. He opened the cheek-plates on his borrowed helmet, ripped it off his head, and drank air, his sides heaving.
His right leg was red to the knee.
Demetrios pushed through his cordon of guards and threw his arms around Satyrus. ‘I feared you were dead. By the gods, I’d have killed the lot of these cowards if you had fallen. Say the word, and I will.’
Satyrus didn’t know what to do with Demetrios’s embrace – he returned the pressure for a moment, and then stepped back. Another man offered a wineskin, and Satyrus took a long drink and handed it to the man who had stood at his left shoulder.
‘Satyrus of Tanais,’ he said.
‘Kleon Alexander’s son of Amphilopolis,’ the man answered, pressing his hand. ‘An honour, lord. If I live, I’ll tell my sons I stood with you in a breach.’
‘He stood? At the breach, when they carried me down the hill?’ Demetrios said. ‘You are a phylarch. Give your name to my military secretary.’
‘All these men stood,’ Satyrus said, his sense of justice piqued. ‘And if I may – they have orders to protect you at all costs, I suspect. So they did. When you exposed yourself, they assumed the worst.’
‘I saved your life!’ Demetrios said. ‘It was worth it.’ He grinned. ‘I didn’t expect to take the suburbs today.’
Satyrus shrugged. The attack had been dangerous and demanding and had come within a moment of success – the golden king was rationalising defeat, a surprisingly human thing for him to do.
‘As you say, lord,’ he said. ‘And may the gods stand by your shoulder as you stood by mine,’ he added, because it was good manners – and true enough. Satyrus wasn’t too exhausted to recall the unwavering spear point of the small man, calmly waiting his moment to kill him. That close. That man had been a killer – Satyrus had seen it in his eyes. Tyche had cheated him of his moment of glory, and saved Satyrus’s life.
He was having trouble breathing, and the world was shrinking, somehow.
Achilles put his hand on his shoulder. ‘You need to get those wounds looked at,’ he said. ‘You’re making a puddle.’
Satyrus glanced down and saw that Achilles was literally speaking truth.
The sight of so much blood shook him, and he stumbled.
Fell.
He awoke to the thought that it would have been stupid to die fighting for Demetrios, and he was a fool for taking part, and then he was awake, his eyes gummy and his throat sandy, his mouth feeling as if he’d eaten glue – or spent a long night drinking with good companions.
‘You with us?’ a strange voice asked.
Satyrus had trouble focusing his eyes for a moment, and the other man’s face swam and then steadied.
‘Sort of,’ he muttered.
‘How many fingers?’ the doctor asked.
‘Three?’ Satyrus answered.
‘Close enough,’ the doctor answered. ‘Don’t be in a hurry to raise your head. You lost blood – I had to burn your thigh, but I think you’ll be fine if you don’t pick up a contagion.’
Even as the man spoke, the pain in his thigh began to push through a hundred other scrapes and pains.
‘No poppy,’ he said.
‘You’ve already had some,’ the doctor said.
‘No more,’ Satyrus said.
‘Fair enough. You’ve had too much? Fairly common soldier’s complaint.’ He nodded again. ‘I’m Apollonaris of Tyre – I’m Demetrios’s physician.’
The world was coming into focus, and Satyrus would have thought that he was in a palace, or even a temple complex, except for the odd light filling the structure. A tent then. A tent hung in tapestries and decorated with a heavy, hanging gold lamp.
‘How long will I be on my back?’ Satyrus asked. He had a thought of Miriam – a sharp pang of longing.
What am I doing here?
he asked himself.
‘Two days, or perhaps three, unless your wounds infect.’ Apollonaris grinned. ‘In which case, you’ll soon be dead.’
Satyrus cursed. ‘This is how you talk to the golden king?’
Apollonaris laughed. He had a rich laugh. ‘Yes. He likes my banter. Don’t fret, lord, I won’t let you infect. Apollo and I are old friends.’
‘That sounds like hubris,’ Satyrus said.
The doctor smiled, and while Satyrus slipped away into sleep.
Each successive sleep caused him to awake better and more restless, and there was food – mutton soup, and then ever more solid things – delicious, rich foods straight from the golden king’s table, and twice Demetrios came in person.
After his third long sleep, he awoke to find Achilles at his bedside, and he grinned at the man.
‘Next time tell me when I’m bleeding – a little sooner.’ Satyrus took a deep breath, waited for the pain from his thigh. It was there, but definitely better. No fever.
Achilles smiled. ‘The rest of the boys have come in,’ he said. ‘And young Jason. Still a lot of people looking for you. Jason had a go at offing Phiale and didn’t pull it off – trying to avenge his master. He’s here for you – claims you said you’d take him on.’
Satyrus sighed. ‘So I did,’ he answered, wondering how many plots he’d be saddled with if he accepted the boy as his freedman.