‘See why scouting is such a pain in the arse?’ Crax asked.
Satyrus shook his head. ‘Crax, you know that I’ve been conducting campaigns as a strategos for eight years, eh?’
Crax slapped him on the back. ‘And see, you still have so much to learn.’
‘Crax, my mother taught you to scout.’ Satyrus was tired of the patronising lectures.
Crax laughed. ‘Ataelus taught me to scout, young king. And if you know so much, why do you sit and argue with an old tribesman while the sun to anyone in the valley below silhouettes you? Eh?’ He laughed. ‘Your mother would know better.’
Satyrus shook his head and resigned himself to being a perpetual adolescent to these men.
Tyateira, and Satyrus, riding as a vedette with Apollodorus, met a messenger and took him. He had a scroll from Demetrios to Antigonus.
Satyrus read it, handed it to the messenger, and said, ‘On your way.’
The young man, a Lydian, terrified with Apollodorus’s knife at his throat, relaxed. ‘Thank you, lord.’
Satyrus bowed. ‘How far to Lord Demetrios?’
The messenger remounted, took his satchel and his scroll tube, and saluted. ‘Forty stades, lord. Stratonika. And marching this way as fast as his pikemen will go.’
‘And Lysimachos is pressing him?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Hard. But we’re holding.’ The messenger saluted, gathered his reins, and rode off, and Apollodorus shook his head.
‘I’m going to guess that bastard is off to tell One-Eye something you actually want the bastard to know.’ He shrugged. ‘Otherwise, we just had the best piece of intelligence we could have had, dropped on us by the gods, and you’re letting him ride away.’
‘He’s marching to meet his pater, and he’s sent the fleet back to Athens rather than face ours. And he’s telling his pater that our troops are at Gordia.’ Satyrus took a deep breath. Suddenly his hands were shaking. ‘Athena – we may yet pull this off. Let’s find the others.’
That night, all of them gathered around a fire no bigger than a man’s head. When Satyrus went off to piss, he couldn’t see even a flicker of light. They crouched, cloaks spread to catch the heat and hide the flame, and Crax fed it patiently from scraps of wood.
Satyrus explained the situation to every man.
‘The whole war may turn on one of us getting back to Seleucus,’ he said. ‘I need every man to know. Antigonus and Demetrios are about to join forces – perhaps tomorrow – on the plains north of Sardis. Then they can either go north against Lysimachos or east against Seleucus. They think Seleucus is way up north by Gordia.’ Satyrus tried to choose his words carefully, trying to imagine a cavalry trooper reporting this to the King of Babylon. ‘If Seleucus marches like lightning, he can pass west of Antigonus and join Lysimachos.’
Drawing in the stony dirt and using bread pills to mark the positions, he built a little map complete with ridges marked by rocks.
‘Understand – if we get this wrong, Seleucus will face Antigonus in the plains, alone.’ Satyrus looked around. They looked like they understood.
‘So … we all ride for it in the morning?’ Crax asked.
‘You ride for it. I’m taking Anaxagoras, Jubal, Charmides and Apollodorus and riding west for Lysimachos. We’re so close we can’t afford it if he rests for a day or hesitates … or heads for the coast to link up with the fleet.’ Satyrus shook his head. ‘A day – a few hours – and we could lose.’
Crax nodded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re all grown up.’
In the morning, they all shook hands – every man with every other – and the two parties split.
Before the gulls had descended to eat the beans they left on the ground, they were five stades apart.
It cost them two days to get around Demetrios and his army; two days of climbing higher and higher on the ridges north of Sardis; two days of hiding among the rocks and the scrubby wild olives. Two days of short rations for man and horse.
On the third day it rained. The water poured down as if the gods were upending buckets on them, but they seized the moment to move – visibility was less than two horse lengths. The rocks were slippery, and Satyrus and Apollodorus, who took turns in the lead, both had falls, and Apollodorus had to put one of his horses down.
Late afternoon, and even Apollodorus was unsure as to their direction. They had angled away from the ridge, looking to make up time, and now, as they rode through the deluge, heads down, Satyrus was worried that they had in fact ridden off in the wrong direction. Descents can be more difficult than ascents.
The sun was setting, somewhere beyond the endless clouds, and a wind was picking up, lashing the water against them. Their cloaks were long since soaked through. The light was tricky, and Satyrus was afraid that they were riding due south – right into Antigonus – and worried again that they were losing time.
The ground was levelling off.
Satyrus pushed his tired horse to a trot and drew level with Apollodorus.
‘I want to go downhill to the road,’ he shouted. ‘I want to be sure where we are – I want to make some time.’
Rain poured through Apollodorus’s straw farmer’s hat and down his face, soaking his beard, and making him look old. Old and worried.
‘Do it,’ the man shouted back.
Satyrus felt his way down the ridge, pushing his horse when she hesitated. He didn’t love the mare but she was the best of his string and he had to hope that she could find her footing in the tricky light and pouring water.
They went down and down and down … and Satyrus began to worry again. He couldn’t imagine that they had climbed this far – couldn’t imagine that he’d have to ride back
up
all this rock to find his friends.
It occurred to him that, hurry or no, the wisest course was to go back up the ridge, find his friends, and make some sort of miserable camp until the rain cleared. One glance in sunlit daylight would show them where they were.
Down and down. Now Satyrus was sure he was lost – he could see a watercourse at the base of the valley, and the darkness was coming down like the water – too damned late to climb the ridge.
And then he saw the road.
There couldn’t be a road at the base of every valley. It had to be the Sardis road – the Royal Road.
He sat on his horse’s back for a moment, and then slipped down to give the animal a rest and let her drink from the gushing rainwater in the conduit by the road. He had a handful of grain and he put it in his straw hat and she ate it, ravenously, and his hat went with the grain. He had a lump of honey-sugar, almost as big as his fist, in his bag – a sticky, sodden mass, but he ate half and gave the other half to the horse, and she flicked her ears forward as if acknowledging that this, at least, was worth her time.
For the first time, he loved her.
‘Good girl,’ he said, and patted her neck.
Now he had to climb the ridge again.
He was so busy with the horse that he missed the men.
They came along, heads down in the pouring rain – more than a hundred cavalrymen, sodden men in sodden cloaks on sodden horses.
Satyrus was in the middle of the road. He managed to leap onto his horse’s back – he had that much time – and then they were all around him.
‘Get off the road, you stupid fuck!’ shouted a phylarch.
He hid his head and walked the mare clear of the mass of men, so that she was fetlock deep in the conduit of rainwater. He sat there and watched as Demetrios’s Aegema, his elite cavalry, marched past in the very last light. Five hundred cavalrymen, and in the midst of them, Demetrios himself and two men Satyrus knew at sight – Neron, his spy, and Apollonaris, his physician.
Satyrus pulled his sodden cloak over his head and sat as still as he could.
Neron looked at him.
Demetrios looked at him. He was laughing – in a torrent of rain, he laughed like Dionysus. He was confident and happy.
That alone shook Satyrus as much as anything. And Demetrios and Neron were talking, but Satyrus couldn’t hear them over the rain.
Neron turned his head, looked back at Satyrus, and shouted.
Satyrus held his breath.
A pair of soldiers rode forward to Neron.
Satyrus backed his horse, step by step, along the conduit that ran by the road – now the water was deeper, and icy cold. Poor beast.
Satyrus prayed to Herakles, and his prayers were answered in the form of a small path – probably the route that the road’s maintainers used to get at the conduit walls.
More shouts behind him.
‘Up,’ he said to the horse, and put his heels into her sides, and gamely, she rose and made the jump – trusting him – and then she was on the barrow trail, and he didn’t hurry. There was now a thin screen of acacia between him and the road itself, on the other side of the ditch. He rode a few steps, dismounted, and put his cloak over her head.
‘There was a man – right there by the road,’ Neron insisted.
Demetrios nodded. ‘No doubt as miserable as we are, my friend. May he find warmth and shelter.’ He slapped his spymaster on the back. ‘Probably one of your own prodromoi.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Neron said. ‘I’d kill for a report – any report – on where Seleucus is.’
‘Let’s not look too far ahead,’ Demetrios said. ‘Or put another way – fuck Seleucus. We’ve slipped Lysimachos, and now we join up with Pater and the world is ours.’
Neron rode on, but he looked behind him every hundred heartbeats until the rain stopped.
The two cold, wet men were careful. They searched the edge of the conduit and the trees. Then they searched
in
the conduit, but by luck they were up the hill twenty horse lengths, stabbing their spears down into the water.
Demetrios – and Neron – were well served. They weren’t giving up.
Satyrus waited for the rain to get fiercer, and when it did, he walked his horse north along the conduit. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t look back.
In half an hour, the rain eased off, and by the end of an hour, he’d made ten stades and was on the road, and the rain had stopped.
He considered going back, and decided that the risk would be insane. He had one horse, no camping gear, and no weapons but the knife under his arm.
The sky cleared as he walked on the road, and the moon came up, and it was cold. He mounted up and rode, mostly to keep himself warm, jumping off every couple of stades and running alongside.
His mare was flagging. He searched his sodden leather bag and found a sausage. She ate it. A morsel of wet, stale bread. She ate it.
A linen napkin rolled around his fire-making kit. In the bronze tin, he remembered, he’d put pressed dried grapes from the farm where he’d hidden. The mass of grapes was dry, and the size of his fist. He broke off a piece and gave the rest to his horse.
It was full night. His good campaign chlamys was wet through, but it was still warm, or better than nothing, and the horse was warm. It was the horse that worried him. He needed her alive. In fact, he’d come to like her.
They walked. He didn’t remount. He needed her for an emergency, and short of that, he’d just keep going.
Morning. A beautiful morning, with the sun rising above the ridge to the east like the figures of the poet – long, gentle rays of red-pink reaching across one ridge to lick at the next. Rosy fingers lasciviously teasing earth.
Satyrus was mostly asleep, plodding along. Trying to think of a name for his mare. It seemed like an important thing to name her before she lay down and died. And she was exhausted. And he had no more tricks to play, no more sugar, no more warmth.
But somewhere on the hillsides above him, there was a man with a fire. He could smell it. It gave him hope. He pushed forward, one step in front of the other, up a steep climb. He remembered this stretch of road, and knew just where he was – entering the Mysian Gates.
Near the top he saw the smoke, and then saw the fire, and then saw the men – he laughed.
They’d been watching him all the way up the pass, cooking breakfast.
He kept walking. They were Sakje – he was pretty sure he knew the tall, dark-haired man by the fire as Thyrsis, the Achilles of the Assagetae.
‘Thyrsis!’ he yelled.
Every head came up. Two men he hadn’t seen emerged from cover and let their arrows off their strings.
Thyrsis put his cup on the ground and ran down the road to him, wrapped him in an embrace.
‘What are you doing here, oh king?’ Thyrsis said.
‘Scouting,’ Satyrus said. ‘Would you be so kind as to feed this excellent horse?’
A young Sakje woman took his mare, and he sat on a rock by the road.
The next thing he knew, he was waking to a bright day with his wounded thigh burning and stiff but he felt so much better that he chuckled.
‘Soup,’ Thyrsis said.
The Sakje maiden gave him a cup, and Satyrus drank it all off, and three more like it, and ate some stale bread.
‘How far to the army?’ he asked.
Thyrsis laughed. ‘Six hundred stades,’ he said. ‘We’re just a feint.’
Satyrus rubbed his thigh and chewed his bread. ‘I need three horses and a partner. I need you to push south; find Anaxagoras, Apollodorus and Jubal. They’re up that ridge somewhere. We thought Demetrios had Lysimachos right behind him.’
Thyrsis laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘We are the
best
. There’s two hundred of us, and Eumenes and his Olbians. We’ve had him running for sixty stades.’
‘Lysimachos?’ Satyrus asked.
‘With the queen – up by Helikore, the Bithynian capital.’ He smiled at Satyrus’s discomfiture. ‘Your sister and the King of Thrace get along very well. They are waiting at the Royal Road junction for news.’
Satyrus groaned. ‘I have the news,’ he said. ‘I just have to get there.’
Satyrus took the time to visit his mare, who was sound asleep, lying flat, the sleep of an exhausted animal. Then he mounted a Sakje pony, and with Thyrsis himself at his side, galloped for Helikore, two hundred stades to the north.
Sunset, and Thracian cavalry pickets – Getae, who had no love for Thyrsis, but a certain wary respect. Satyrus rode into the largest army camp he’d ever seen. He lost count of the tents, the huts, the wagons … there were easily twenty thousand men, and he suspected that the mass of them was still smaller than Antigonus’s fires in the valley below Sardis.