‘Got one,’ Crax said. ‘They killed the staff.’
Out on the exedra, the daughters had begun to wail. Charmides went that way, and Satyrus dragged himself along, supported by Crax.
‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Satyrus said.
Crax laughed. ‘Tell that to my hips on a cold morning,’ he said.
The two daughters were eight and twelve, and their parents and most of their slaves were dead. The casual side-product of war.
‘They died for me,’ Satyrus said wearily.
Jubal nodded. ‘They’ll be related to someone round here.’ He went over to the girls and put his arms around them, and they threw themselves on his neck.
Satyrus found himself standing on someone’s blanket roll. It was vaguely familiar, and he assumed it was Jubal’s. Despite the pain of his wound, or because of it, he subsided to the planks of the porch and began to roll it up.
Crax was seeing to his men.
There was an alabaster vase – fine workmanship – on the blanket roll, and Satyrus picked it up, opened the stopper, took a whiff. Memory flooded him.
‘Sophokles,’ he said. Ten years had passed but he knew that smell, and that jar. He rifled the rest of the wallet – glass ampoules, worth a fortune, with powders. A folding tablet and a beautiful gold stylus. A scroll of recipes.
Two poems by Sappho.
A note, written on a scrap of papyrus, with an address in Alexandria.
Ben Zion’s address.
Satyrus let the breath go from between his teeth, and hoped that Achilles and his friends were enough.
It was hours before Apollodorus and Anaxagoras returned, riding wearily on jaded horses. They were picked up stades away by Crax’s men, so they already knew of the events of the day by the time they rode up to the farm.
By then, a dozen local men and two women had taken charge of the farm and the girls. Satyrus had time to wonder what would become of them – whether they’d end well-dowered or as slaves on their own land.
He slept there one more time, and Crax’s men helped bury the dead, and then they all rode out for Zeugma.
The first sight of Seleucus’s army told the whole story. The elephants could be seen from stades away, plodding up the Euphrates. They were huge, and the rumour was that Seleucus had traded all of the Indian satrapies to an Indian king for five hundred elephants. If he had, he’d brought less than half. Satyrus counted more than a hundred before pain and boredom took over, but there weren’t more than two hundred.
Still, it was the biggest concentration of elephants Satyrus had seen since Eumeles. And it would give the alliance the same odds as the Antigonids, at least.
Satyrus rode down into the walled city of Zeugma in time to meet the King of Babylon himself as he offered libations to the river god at the bridge. Seleucus was leaving the Euphrates and turning west, towards the sea and Phrygia, and he was bidding farewell, as the King of Babylon, to one of the country’s deities. Satyrus watched him and felt dirty.
When he was done, Seleucus came forward, surrounded by courtiers. He was a middle aged man losing the hair on his head, and he had the square-jawed Macedonian look, but he had never been a heavy drinker, and age had brought him dignity as well as thinning hair. Satyrus had last seen him riding in Ptolemy’s staff at Gaza covered in dust. Satyrus bowed.
Seleucus returned his bow. ‘I am stunned to see you here, Satyrus,’ he said. ‘But delighted, of course. Diodorus says you have the rally point and a chart of the campaign.’
Satyrus took his proffered hand and clasped it. ‘I see that you have not stinted,’ he said. ‘Thank the gods!’
Seleucus gave him a wry smile. ‘I brought my best … and my worst. The cream of my troops, and the bastards I can’t trust at home. Ptolemy?’
‘Sent his fleet to Rhodes.’ Satyrus shrugged.
‘Cassander?’ Seleucus asked.
‘Emptied Europe for Lysimachos, who now has Prepalaus to contend with. I doubt there’s a man fit to wear armour left in Europe.’ Satyrus was getting tired.
‘A stool for the King of the Bosporus,’ Seleucus Nicator called. ‘Diodorus said you’d been wounded. You look well enough.’
‘I am – a few days and I’ll be fit. May I accompany you west?’ Satyrus subsided onto the stool with relief.
‘My pleasure. And your Exiles will be delighted to have you – the famous Satyrus of Tanais? Worth a thousand men.’
Satyrus smiled up at Seleucus. ‘You didn’t used to be such a flatterer.’
‘I wasn’t King of Babylon, then,’ Seleucus said, seriously.
Six days, and the advance guard was across the Taurus Mountains and making camp at Cybistra, in Lycaonia. The elephants were still in the high passes of the mountains, and the rearguard hadn’t left Zeugma.
Diodorus sat by a fire with Crax and Andronicus on either side of him. Sappho passed the wine. She rode astride with the men, and refused to be with the baggage. She’d made more campaigns than many of the veterans. Satyrus felt like embracing her every time he saw her.
She and Diodorus moved him the most – perhaps because they were the eldest. Diodorus was
old
. Satyrus had never expected it; the man had remained adamantine, proof against time, throughout Satyrus’s childhood, and now he was a stick figure, all sinews and scorched skin with deep furrows in his face and his cheekbones so sharp they could cut. And Sappho’s beauty was blasted – she was an old woman, and no one would mistake her for a great beauty.
So it had taken him two days to discover that looks deceived, and that the people who had raised him were essentially unchanged. No one had told them how old they were. Diodorus was not in his dotage – when his voice lashed a trooper, the man wilted. Sappho had much the same effect on Diodorus – and Crax, and Andronicus, and soon enough Satyrus himself, who discovered that she felt he was cosseting his wound when he might have been exercising.
‘What a Spartan you would have made,’ he grunted, when she forced him to bend his left leg to her satisfaction.
‘I am a woman of Thebes – a far, far better place than Sparta, with better men. Ask them at Leukra.’ She nodded, another argument won, and directed her slave to help him bend the leg again.
So … two days, and he had returned to being their child. It was not so bad.
Especially when he was treated as an adult child.
‘What do you think One-Eye will do?’ Diodorus asked. He sat back on his cloak, and Sappho joined him, burrowing into his arms like a much younger woman.
Satyrus shifted, winced, and looked at Apollodorus. ‘He’ll try to defeat us in detail. About now he’ll be getting his first reports that Seleucus is really on his way. So he can come east to us, or go north to Lysimachos.’ He paused. ‘It’s not that simple, though,’ he added.
Diodorus grunted. ‘It never is,’ he said.
‘There will or won’t be a fleet action in the Dardanelles. That could change everything. Or Demetrios might march inland and join his father – and
that
would change everything.’ He paused. ‘Or … Hades, I don’t know. Demetrios might go off to crush Cassander and leave his pater …’
‘Never happen,’ Diodorus said. ‘That’s their edge on us. That they have each other. Demetrios won’t abandon his pater. Will he win in the Dardanelles?’
Satyrus took a cup of wine from Charmides. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, as if repeating a lesson for Diodorus. How often had he gone from Philokles, having just had Plato beaten into him, to repeat the lesson for Diodorus, as he sat in his armour?
‘Ahh,’ Diodorus said. ‘Why?’ His tone said he liked the answer.
‘If we win, then our troops move freely on the coast of Asia. But Alexander and Lysimachos have both shown that even if our ships
lose
, the army can move across the Troad into Phrygia without hindrance. We have Bithynia. That one change is everything. Lysimachos doesn’t need a fleet to move an army down on Antigonus, and his supplies will be safe.’ Satyrus sat back, feeling fifteen.
Diodorus nodded. ‘Well, you’ve commanded more armies than I have, son. But it seems to me that the navies will still have two effects. First, morale: if we win, it
will
have an effect on the troops. And second, if our ships win, then Antigonus
can’t
go far from his logistics, for fear that Lysimachos will land behind him. You know that we’re in contact with Ptolemy’s fleet?’
Satyrus hadn’t heard.
‘There’s twenty triremes shadowing us on the coast.’ Diodorus nodded. ‘Pray to Poseidon, son. A victory at sea would save us a world of trouble. But otherwise, your analysis is correct. He’s got to go for one or the other of us, as soon as he can. I reckon he’ll go for Lysimachos – he’s beaten him like a drum, and he’s never beaten us.’
Satyrus rolled his hips. ‘I just hope we don’t fight for ten days,’ he said. ‘I can barely ride.’
Sappho laughed. ‘But you will,’ she said.
‘It’ll take ten days to get the rearguard up to here,’ Diodorus said. ‘Our army is spread across six hundred stades of crappy roads. But ten days … that’s about it. Ten days will see us near enough that we’ll be fighting.’
Five days, and two days of rain. Satyrus could ride well again, and he exercised hard, sparring with Anaxagoras, and Crax, whose Keltoi sword was three palms longer than any Greek sword and who used it in an alien way, snipping with long sweeps and cutting straight into attacks.
Five days brought them to the shores of the Karalis Lake, more than a hundred stades from the sea and covered in gulls. The rain filled the water courses and, uncomfortable as it was, it allowed the vanguard to move faster – suddenly, water for horses was abundant.
Seleucus knew the business of war, too. Every night, when they halted, there was an agora of merchants from the nearest towns – even if those towns were fifty stades distant – with wagons full of produce, sheep, goats, fodder for horses. All they required was cash, and Diodorus’s war-chest seemed to be bottomless.
‘No point in being a rich mercenary if you can’t keep your horses fed,’ he said.
On the evening of the fifth day, Crax came in from a long scout north and west – he’d taken six men and gone as far and fast as a string of ponies would take them. Seleucus and a dozen of his officers came up the column from Iconium to hear the report.
Crax was drinking cider. He was covered in dust, he appeared to be a wraith; and the men who had ridden with him simply fell from their saddles and lay like the dead.
Crax was uncowed by having Seleucus present, although he bobbed his head to the King of Babylon – rather, Satyrus felt, like one Maeoti farmer greeting another on the road.
‘Well?’ Seleucus said.
‘Antigonus is supposed to be at Sardis, trying to link up with his son, who’s coming south from the Troad with eighteen thousand men. I didn’t see any of them, lords, but there’s a detachment of Antigonus’s cavalry up the road a piece, north of the mines at the road junction. Locals call it Kotia. I took a man there – he hasn’t been paid since the festival of Ares in the autumn – and he talked. Said that they expect us at Gordia, and they have troops ready to march that way and hold us in the passes.’
Seleucus nodded. ‘It is
so
helpful that One-Eye thinks I’m a fool. Still, if they expect us at Gordia …’
‘Send some of your satrapal levies marching that way,’ Diodorus said.
‘Sardis …’ Seleucus began. ‘That’s six hundred stades. Where’s Lysimachos?’
Crax shook his head. ‘I don’t know, lord, and my prisoner doesn’t know either.’
Diodorus swore, and so did Seleucus.
Satyrus finished the wine in his cup. ‘Give me a dozen men with six remounts a man, and I’ll find him,’ he said. ‘I know these hills – I campaigned around Sardis last year.’
Diodorus nodded. ‘I’d rather send—’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘No – no assassin is going to follow me across Phrygia.’
‘I was considering what would happen if one of One-Eye’s cavalry patrols got you,’ Seleucus said. ‘But I need information more than I need you, Satyrus. If you’ll do it … go with Athena and Hermes.’
Satyrus took his friends, as well as Andronicus the Gaul and a dozen troopers – all with strings of horses. And Crax. The Bastarnae man was unstoppable, and he was awake at first light with his own horses.
They were off before dawn, and they rode until dusk, slept with their reins on their arms, and were off in the dark again, sweeping around the north end of the lakes, then across country to Akmonia, through tribal territories where people lived high on the hillsides in villages that seemed to hang from the sky. They weren’t troubled.
They picked up the Sardis road at Thyrai and went due east, into the rising sun. They left the road when their vedettes saw soldiers and rode along the ridges above the Kogamas River.
‘Welcome to Lydia,’ Satyrus said. He felt wonderful – his thigh hurt, but in the usual ways of an injury. Three days in the saddle, and he was like a god. And free of the plodding columns.
The Valley of the Kogamas was full of men. When they made camp, the light of their fires stretched away east as far as they could see.
‘That’s Antigonus,’ Crax said. ‘I didn’t get this far, but here he is. He’s east of Sardis – where’s his son? Where’s Lysimachos?’
Andronicus grunted.
Anaxagoras dropped to the ground and unrolled his blankets.
Satyrus laughed. ‘You know, Anaxagoras, I’ve done my sister a great service the last two weeks.’
Anaxagoras was already in his blankets. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘You can ride,’ Satyrus said. ‘Like a Sakje. Now she’ll marry you.’
‘I’m not sure that equine riding is the skill she’ll marry me for,’ Anaxagoras said. He smiled, turned over, and was asleep.
Another day of careful riding – walking, often, and it was the slowest day they’d made yet – and they were clear of Antigonus. His cavalry was on the roads, but the high ground on the north flank of the valley was empty of everyone but refugees.
They had news – all of it conflicting. Demetrios had won a great victory at Kallipolis – had lost his fleet – had abandoned his fleet and marched inland – defeated Lysimachos – been defeated – everyone was dead.