Coenus nodded. ‘As do I. Do me a favour?’
Satyrus turned to the older man. ‘Anything.’
‘The night before battle, your father did a thing: he gathered his friends and made sacrifice to the gods. And we sang – sometimes the
Iliad
. And then we drank together. Do it tonight. Most of us are here.’
There were tears in the old man’s eyes.
‘Most of us still alive, I mean. And the shades of the rest … they’ll be here, too.’
Satyrus looked over the fields below him on the ridge. Almost at his feet, a stone-walled farm with a big yard was like a small fortress at the edge of the plain, and the dusty Asian fields rolled away, littered in shining scarlet poppies as far as the eye could see to the haze raised by the opposing army. In the distance, the small hamlet of Ipsos rested on dry stream bed. Irrigation made the farther fields a lurid green, while the higher fields of poorer farmers were a greyer, sparser colour. All would be tramped flat on the morrow, rich and poor together.
Satyrus thought on that a moment.
‘There will be more shades yet, this time tomorrow,’ he said.
It was a perfect summer evening, and the camps stretched away from the ridges on the east flank to the river on the west, and no man present had ever seen such a confrontation – not at Gaza, and not when Alexander still walked the earth.
Satyrus informed Phoibos, and he made the symposium happen as if he arranged wine for two hundred guests every day – perhaps he did.
There were Sakje. It was not possible to invite just a few Sakje – they had no notion of invitation. A party was for drinking. The first man on a pony arrived at Satyrus’s pavilion an hour before sunset, while Phoibos and his slaves were still stacking the wood for four concentric bonfires. Other slaves brought sheep, goats, a pair of cows and a bull.
Phoibos, now an accepted part of Satyrus’s military household, found Draco – a trusted retainer, in his eyes, if a heavy drinker and a dangerous fornicator – already at the slaves. Phoibos caught the killer’s eye. ‘Sir, I need an errand that only a gentleman can run for me.’
Draco tore himself away from the contemplation of a willing accomplice in lechery. ‘Whatever you need, laddy.’ The word ‘gentleman’ had gone to his head. Phoibos knew his way around soldiers.
‘I need a priest … a decent priest, a Greek with a civil tongue. Otherwise Lord Satyrus will do the sacrifices himself, which is not seemly.’
Draco clucked. ‘The things you worry about, Phoibos. But … you do this stuff, and I don’t. Antiochus has a priest of Zeus. An Athenian. I met him yesterday.’
‘Would you be so kind? ‘ Phoibos asked, already holding out the Macedonian’s dusted and re-pressed cloak.
Draco nodded and set off across the camp. He took a horse, and because he had to go to the horse lines, he put on a sword. And when he thought of who he would be addressing, he stopped and changed his chiton as well.
Well before dark, Phoibos presented Satyrus with another quandary. Having invited his friends – his father’s friends – and the Sakje, now some of the other officers wished to invite themselves. The sight of a line of wine jars the width of a phalanx, and a set of bonfires like the funeral pyre of Petrocolus, and a herd of sacrificial meat big enough to feed the army …
‘Lord Antiochus wishes to attend,’ Phoibos said. ‘The King of Babylon. The King of Thrace. The strategos of Macedon.’
Satyrus looked grim. ‘Not the party I intended.’
Melitta shook her head. ‘Of course it is. If Mater and Pater were here, wouldn’t they do just this? What can better hearten the army than to see the chiefs together in piety and amity?’
Satyrus smiled. ‘Very well. We host the world.’
‘Very good,’ Phoibos replied. ‘I have already taken the liberty of telling them so.’
It wasn’t yet full dark, and the Sakje were clamouring for the fires to be lit. There were quite a few eastern Saka with the satrapal levies, and now there were two hundred of them alone flooding the area set off for the symposium. Most of them had enough sense to bring wine, and pallets to lie on.
A tall, handsome man with a big nose and beautiful dark skin like fine wood bowed low to Satyrus. ‘You don’t know me,’ he said. He had the voice of a Greek actor playing a Persian.
‘Darius,’ Satyrus said.
They embraced, and Darius embraced Melitta. ‘Where’s Leon?’ he asked.
‘Out on the sea, covering our flank,’ Satyrus said.
‘Ahh. He will be sad to have missed this.’ Darius looked out at the Saka and the Sakje. ‘I apologise – many of them are mine, Persae and Saka. So I have brought some wine and some extra hands to serve.’ In fact, every man behind him had an amphora of wine – a veritable fortune.
‘I am not a poor man,’ he said with a smile. ‘Seleucus has given me high rank.’
‘You will be in the morning if we drink all that,’ Melitta said.
‘And this handsome man?’ Darius asked.
‘My friend, Anaxagoras,’ Satyrus said.
Melitta laughed. ‘My husband, whenever he troubles to ask me.’
Satyrus had the pleasure of watching Anaxagoras blush in consternation.
Old friends crowded around to offer their congratulations, but Melitta gave her shout of war and they stilled. ‘He has to ask me,’ she said. ‘I’m Greek enough in my heart that I cannot ask him.’
Anaxagoras grinned, bowed … and vanished.
Satyrus wondered if he was angry. Anaxagoras was not easy to hurt – perhaps he had not liked this public denouement.
Hard to know.
Old friends pressed close once more, and Satyrus forgot in a whirl of reminiscence.
Sophokles needed to get clear of the compound and ride for it. He knew everything – everything useful that he could get.
He’d spent the day wooing Seleucus’s physician, a man who had never been to Athens and needed all the help he could get. Sophokles gave him good advice, shared two of his best drugs, free of charge, and discussed bandages and poisons. In exchange, he asked nothing except to sit one tent wall from the command tent and listen.
He didn’t like how confident the Seleucids were. But he had the fault lines of their alliance firmly in his head, and now he could tell Neron which of the satraps could be bribed; he’d heard it from Antiochus himself.
He bowed to all, and hurried out of the palace complex of tents – hurried too fast, so that the sentries in the outer cordon stopped him. It was the sort of mistake he hated to make. He vowed never to make it again.
Draco dismounted at the officer’s picket line, near the King of Babylon’s tents. His horse hated the smell of elephants, and he drove her picket pin in to the ring. Then he walked up to the sentries, dusting his hands to get the sand off.
There was a handsome enough man just passing out of the palace of tents, walking too fast. The soldiers didn’t like it – Draco applauded their professionalism – they stopped and asked his business.
Draco thought that perhaps he knew that voice. He froze.
When the man finally passed the cordon, Draco followed him into the streets behind the palace of tents, where the companion cavalry and infantry were camped.
Indecision was not in Draco. He watched the man walk, and he was sure.
He followed him down the main street of infantrymen, and then along a side street, past the petty-wine shops, the men who sold olive oil and new pans to soldiers.
He followed the man right to the door of his tent, and there, without breaking stride, he plunged his sword into his back.
Then he rolled the man over. His eyes were glazing.
‘Know who I am?’ Draco said. ‘I hope so. Here – eat this, you fuck.’ He buried his sword in the man’s mouth, so the point came out the back of his neck. Draco put a little more pressure on the point and snapped the vertebrae, sawed messily a little and beheaded him. He sighed when he remembered that he was wearing his best cloak. But he wrapped the head in the cloak.
Pushed the corpse to bleed out in the door of the tent.
Picked up the head and went looking for a priest of Zeus.
Anaxagoras returned to the party like a thunderbolt. He was mounted, and he had – of all people – Scopasis and Thyrsis at his side, and they rode through the party like an enemy charge, scattering the guests, but not a one was injured. It was a pretty feat of riding, and it was made better by the agility with which Anaxagoras snatched the Queen of the Assagetae from the conversation she was sharing with Sappho and the Lady Thais, Antiochus’s concubine, as well as Lucius and Stratokles. One moment she was talking to them, and the next she was across his horse, riding away.
His arms were strong, and his grip on her was like a band of bronze.
‘Marry me?’ he asked.
The sound of her laughter trickled past the sound of his horse’s hooves, back through the party.
It made a fine way to launch the festivities, especially when they came back, dismounted and more orderly, and announced their betrothal. Phoibos glared at Draco, who entered looking rumpled, drunken, and soiled, but had indeed brought the priest, who hastened to do his master’s bidding.
But Satyrus insisted, as host, in sacrificing the bull.
Even the Sakje were silent.
No man – no worshipper, no priest, no pious aristocrat – sacrifices a bull lightly. Not just the money – but the cut. A bull does not die as easily as a lamb or a dove. A priest might slash the bull’s throat with a sharp knife, but a soldier was expected to do it the old way.
Satyrus believed in the old way. He stepped up to the altar and handed the rope to Anaxagoras, who pulled it tight, stretching the animal’s neck across the altar. The old way.
Satyrus looked off into the heavens, into the last light in the sky, and it seemed to him that he saw an eagle there, or perhaps a raven, on the auspicious right side of the sky – spiralling away – and just for a moment, he wished that he was there in the sky, high above the needs of men and women.
He sent his thoughts up to Olympus, to Herakles, and drew – rotated his hips, and brought the blade down.
It was not his fighting sword, it was the heaviest sword he could borrow. And Tyche was with him: his blade went between the vertebrae of the neck as if the God himself had his hand on the hilt.
The bull slumped – the last morsel of flesh tore with the weight of the body – and the head rolled free, falling at Anaxagoras’s feet.
The roar of the soldiers was like an avalanche of sound.
Seleucus – dignified, gracious Seleucus – slapped his back as if they were wine-bibbers. ‘Spectacular!’ he shouted over the crowd.
Satyrus wiped his blade clean and bowed to the priest, who gave him the look of a man with a hard act to follow.
But the priest did a competent job, making his way through lambs and goats, and the pool of blood under the altar grew deeper and deeper – libations were poured, and smoke rolled into the heavens from the long bones wrapped in fat and laid on the fires on the altar. A pair of acolytes cut the meat and passed it to Phoibos – a dignified Phoibos in a shining red chiton – who cut it into slices with an expertise and speed that made his flaying look like magic.
Satyrus, his act of piety complete, felt like a hero, and he poured a special libation and then stood with his friends, passing a cup of watered wine, watching the priests – a sacrifice to Athena, a sacrifice to Hera, a sacrifice to Aphrodite …
Seleucus came up by Satyrus. ‘Thank you, King of Tanais. This was well thought out – a proper way for men to show their respect for the gods on the eve of battle. A proper show that we are Hellenes, here in the land of the barbarians.’
Satyrus was looking at a crowd of Darius’s tribal Saka gathered around Melitta, and smiled. But he appreciated that Seleucus was trying to be genial, to overcome his habitual reserve – and besides, the two had shared Ptolemy’s court.
‘Great king, your praise is sweet in my ears,’ Satyrus said.
‘I don’t call myself “Great King”,’ Seleucus said.
But you will
, Satyrus thought.
‘Is there news from the fleets?’ he asked.
Seleucus nodded. ‘Our fleets are already dispersing. Demetrios’s fleet is in Athens and Corinth. There were two actions – Plistias declined both times. I understand that your friend Abraham, the Jew – how well I remember him from Alexandria, always the handsomest of the young men – distinguished himself in the Dardanelles. But each time he was offered battle, Plistias rowed backwards and tried to draw our fleet into disarray.’ Seleucus shrugged.
Antiochus, his son, grinned. ‘Lord Leon insisted that the fleet row and row. He would never allow them to raise their sails, not even on the reach from Alexandria to Cyprus. And Leon made sure the rowers were paid every month at the full noon. Strong, well-paid rowers – that’s all anyone needs to know about naval tactics.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Leon was one of my father’s men, and they are all gathered here. I was hoping he’d make his way over the mountains.’
Antiochus shook his head. ‘Lord Leon and Abraham the Jew and your Aekes – what a polyglot crew your people are! He’s a Spartan helot, isn’t he?’
‘I think that he is now a Bosporon navarch,’ Satyrus said.
Antiochus didn’t take offence. ‘Oh, of course. At any rate, they took some city on the Propontus less than a week ago – Plistias’s last garrison. So now the grain fleets can sail, and our allies have both sides of the Propontus. They must be twelve hundred stades from here.’
Lysimachos came up and offered Satyrus wine in a gold cup – unwatered wine. Satyrus had a sip. ‘Thanks for doing this, Satyrus. The troops like a display of piety. Makes the prospect of battle easier to swallow. Eh?’ He smiled and drank.
The priest was sacrificing the last ram – a black one, for the god many called ‘Pluton’, god of good fortune. But every Hellene present knew that the priest was invoking Hades, god of the underworld.
He poured a heavy phiale of wine onto the altar, and with the stinging copper scent of blood, the rich aroma of cooking fat, and the spiced and steaming wine over the spitting, burned bones, the air was full of the smells of the gods.