‘Sure, boss,’ the Thracian said. He grinned again, and Satyrus had no idea whether the man understood, or what he intended.
Satyrus vaulted into his high-backed Sakje saddle on his magnificent Persian charger.
Gap-tooth Alexander saluted smartly.
Satyrus took his long-handled Sakje axe from where it hung at his saddle bow and saluted. ‘Just be here and ready when I come back,’ he said, and trotted forward to where Eumenes had his Olbians formed in a rhomboid, half a stade on and half a stade distant from the elephants – the closest the cavalry could go, even after a morning to get used to the big beasts.
‘Ready?’ Satyrus asked Eumenes.
As a reply, Eumenes pointed to the front, where Demetrios was already coming forward, elephants or no elephants. He had completely turned the Seleucid flank, and his second charge was already into Diodorus and the Exiles, who were making a counter-charge at the edge of the farm fields, protecting the flank of the infantry.
Satyrus could see that if he waited for the elephants, Diodorus would be swept away. Seleucus was probably willing to sacrifice a mercenary, for a prize this big.
Satyrus was not.
It was hot.
This had become the defining point of Stratokles’ existence; the heat, the weight of his panoply, the sweat that rolled down his back and between his pectoral muscles, down his groin, down his thighs. His bronze thorax sat well on his hips, but he had lost weight and gained muscle in the last year, and the armour, so carefully fitted in a shop below the Hephaestion in Athens, now needed padding where the shoulders latched and down along his belly – padding that was made of lamb’s wool, hot and itchy and now sodden with sweat.
He had a Phrygian cap under his helmet, and it fitted well enough but it was wool, and it, too, was full of the water of his body. His helmet weighed twice what it had when he donned it, an hour before when the peltasts ran by; he cursed the brave display of horsehair on top, adding a pound to the weight.
He had greaves on his legs, shining bronze with silver buckles, and on each leg was a standing figure of Athena worked in silver, holding Nike aloft. Lined in leather, padded in wool felt.
On his shoulder was a bronze-faced aspis, half a man’s height in diameter, with a bronze porpax and bronze fittings over willow wood. It weighed more with every hour.
Over his shoulder was a sword of Chalcedonian steel, gifted him by Satyrus, and in his hand – wet with perspiration – was the shaft of a pike, three times a man’s height in length. Not a proper Macedonian sarissa. Stratokles’ mercenaries preferred a shorter pike – lighter, easier to wield close in.
He knew that he looked magnificent. But he hadn’t shifted by so much as a foot, and he was soaked in sweat, pounded by the sun that seemed to rise ever higher just to slay
him
, uncooled by the fitful breeze.
And Stratokles was not a new boy. He was an old veteran. This would mark his third time in the front rank, and he knew that the men in the middle of the formation were hotter and had no chance of the breeze.
‘That can’t be good,’ Lucius said.
Stratokles turned his head – the effort of it – and saw a riderless elephant wandering back and forth to their right. The beast stopped to trumpet, and headed off into the dust to the north.
Herakles drank from his canteen. Then he looked around. ‘I suppose that if I have to piss, I have to do it right here,’ he said.
‘And then every man in your file walks through it,’ Lucius added. Men laughed. All the mercenaries liked Lucius.
‘It’ll help cool their feet,’ Herakles said, and began to take care of it. The man behind him guffawed – quite naturally. Other men in the file caught the joke and they laughed, too.
‘Your piss is cool?’ a wag shouted.
‘I drink nothing but iced wine,’ Herakles returned.
‘Fuck walking through it, I’ll drink it,’ shouted a man who’d lost his youth in the Lamian War.
Stratokles found that he was grinning. These were men, like the men with whom he’d grown to manhood. Many of them were Athenians or Ionians – a smattering of Spartans and Spartan rejects, some Corinthians. Greeks. Men who knew what a gymnasium was for; men who could read
and
fight.
A boy – naked but for a red cloak – came running down the line. ‘Lord Stratokles!’ he shouted.
Stratokles held up his shield – Athena in gold on red. The boy ran to him.
‘We are going forward, lord. The whole line. You are to
echelon
,’ the boy put especial care into the word, ‘echelon on the taxeis to your right.’
Stratokles released his cheekpieces and tilted his helmet back. He twirled his pike in his hands – a muscle memory from youth, a display of talent he still had – and placed the long spear horizontal to the ground at his head height – as if bracing the front line. With his back to the enemy, he called out, ‘Ready to march!’
Men looked right and left, measured the distance, sometimes tapped their shields together. A few of the front rankers had the old aspis – Stratokles did, and Herakles, Lucius, and a pair of Athenian exiles who called themselves Plato and Gorgias. The rest had the smaller, lighter Macedonian aspis.
Which, of course, had been invented by an Athenian.
‘Forward!’ Stratokles called, backstepping in front of his taxeis. He’d never been a taxiarch before – never would have been, in Athens – but he knew the drills and the dances as well as most of the useless political appointees that had led the boys at Chaeronea and all through the Lamian War.
In fact, he was terrified. But like most men of a certain age, he’d been terrified so many times that terror was an old adversary, one he could best in single combat with more ease than he bested lack of sleep, heat, or insect bites.
Step by step, forward. His aulos player picked up his steps and played them – a good lad, that one. He looked at the phalanx to their right – still moving, a little ahead, with a gap widening at the critical juncture where the two came together. But to try and fix that now would disorder his men.
Later might be too late.
Politics was easier, and at the moment, assassination looked
far
more efficient.
The shaft to his back was the first warning he had that there was an enemy in the dust, and then, suddenly, there were Phrygian highlanders – as surprised to have hoplites come at them as Stratokles was to be struck – again – by a javelin in the back. Luckily, his bronze was the best money could buy and all he had to show for the man’s best throws were two deep divots in the surface of his back-plate.
It took Stratokles a long, long heartbeat to understand that he was in combat.
Not Lucius. He rammed his spear over the Athenian’s shoulder, catching the crescent-shaped shield of the peltast and knocking the man flat.
Herakles put his pike point into the man – reversing and shortening his pike in two practised motions, ramming the spear point home, stepping forward over the corpse.
Stratokles saw it all – running slowly, like a dream – and had time to think,
He’s no boy. He’s twenty-seven and this should have been his life. And now I want him to live and get away, not die here trying to be Alexander.
But he’s more like Alexander every day.
The Phrygians melted before them, as fast as they had appeared. There was a shower of javelins – blows like punches on the face of his shield – and his golden Athena was no longer unmarred.
The taxeis had quickened its step – any veteran knew that the way to get rid of peltasts was to plough over them. Not only had they closed the gap with the right taxeis, now they were overtaking it – the front ranks were almost even.
It occurred to Stratokles then that not only were there elephants out there in the dust, but that his taxeis and Nikephorus’s were going to be matched against the very finest soldiers in the world … that is, whatever old One-Eye chose to put on the
right
of his line.
Stratokles risked a look to his left … and there was nothing there at all.
‘Athena,’ he said aloud.
Too late to wonder where in Hades Nikephorus was.
His men were trotting – well closed up, but moving a top speed. He was proud of them – worried – terrified – but he suspected that hitting at this speed would be an advantage, unless they went into elephants, and even then – he had a thought, under the sweat and grime – elephants might flinch from the wall of spear points if it moved this fast.
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Lucius panted.
‘Good to know,’ Stratokles grunted.
Now his front rank was losing cohesion.
The taxeis next to him had started to trot, as well.
‘Spears! Down!’ Stratokles called, and all along the front, the pikes came down to chest level, throat level, and now they were running, and instead of the paean, the Athenians had started the war cry:
eleu eleu eleu eleu
in the back of the throat, rising to a scream.
The hint of a breeze, like a cat making one lick at a sticky spot on her fur – one lick of breeze, and there they were, the front taxeis of the enemy, the rightmost of the line. No, the rightmost but one. There was another, well separated in the dust. And they had the star of Macedon on their shields, and the Ionian war cry rose to a shriek.
No man in Stratokles’ band had any love for Macedon.
Too late to stop and dress his line. Too late for order, too late for second thoughts, though his head was crowded with them.
The enemy made mistakes, too. Like pausing in their advance to rest with their sarauters planted in the deep earth of farm fields. The Ionian mercenaries appeared out of the wall of dust with a shriek. Just to Stratokles’ front, a lone elephant bolted at the shriek – turned, riderless, and ran straight into the Macedonians behind him. The animal’s flanks were gored red – blood flew off her when she turned.
Just to the left were two
dead
elephants – mere mounds of meat. But the pair of them were like terrain, covering his flank, if only for a few heartbeats.
Many of the Antigonids got their spears out of the ground and down. A spearhead struck Stratokles squarely in the shield; he stumbled, twisted, and would have lost his footing except that three or four more spear points hit his aspis and held him up. He raised his aspis until the spears scraped by over his head, and plunged in under their shafts, into the rage of Ares. He was screaming
eleu eleu eleu eleu
at the top of his lungs, and the world – Aristotle’s entire universe – was only as wide as the eye-slits in his Attic helmet.
His spear point skipped off a rimless aspis, rose with the working of his hips, and rammed into a man’s undefended throat.
And he roared.
Diodorus was already wounded. Something had gone into the gap at the base of his breastplate and scored his thigh – it hurt, and worse, the blood was pouring down his leg and over his white horse.
He had most of his men together. He’d lost Crax and the heavy squadron in the first fight, and Ares alone knew where they were – if they weren’t all dead. But his three line squadrons were well formed, watering their horses in the farmyard by rotation, and his prodromoi were prowling the edge of the dust cloud beyond the farm while he sat and bled and watched Demetrios win the battle.
The bastard.
Diodorus turned to Andronicus – technically his hyperetes, the cavalry version of a hypaspist, but the old Gaul was hardly a subordinate in any meaningful way.
‘He moved all his left-flank cavalry to the right, to face us,’ Diodorus said with professional admiration.
‘He didn’t need them,’ Andronicus the Gaul answered. ‘The Persians were men. The rest of them were like children.’ He spat, drank from his canteen. ‘Retire?’ he asked, after watching Demetrios reforming, his best squadrons virtually untouched.
Diodorus looked over his shoulder, where Satyrus’s friend Apollodorus garrisoned the farmhouse and walled farmyard and barns, and just beyond, where Nikephorus – a mercenary, but a long-time retainer of both Satyrus and Melitta – had advanced cautiously, keeping one flank of his double taxeis anchored on the farmhouse. The man was clearly trying to cover a gap – he’d already wheeled a quarter to the right, and then he’d extended his right, halving the depth of his phalanx – a desperate move, really.
Diodorus took his helmet off and tossed it to his field slave, Justus. He accepted water, poured some on his head. Emboldened, he raised the edge of his corselet, terrified that he would see a curl of intestine. His hands shook.
He had a scar like a woman’s birthing scar, where the spear point had crossed, riding on the inside of the bronze instead of punching through his body.
‘Gracious Athena,’ he said, immediately feeling better. Far from a mortal wound – a contemptible wound. Hurt like fire. No matter. ‘If we bugger off, the whole flank goes,’ he said. He was a far more confident man than he had been moments before.
Andronicus shrugged. ‘Battle’s lost,’ he said with professional acuity.
Diodorus tucked a knee carefully under his backside and stood on his horse’s back. The animal was patient – they’d done this a hundred times.
To the west, Demetrios was preparing his second strike: the hammer blow to finish Seleucus.
To the east, Prepalaus had given the order for the phalanx to advance. He probably had no idea of the disaster on his western flank. Or he knew about it, and by advancing, made Demetrios’s job more difficult, and hid the disaster from his own men.
To the south, suddenly, out of the dust came a thick column of elephants, fifty animals, at least, every one with a heavy war harness and a crew of four or five – pikes and bows, javelins. They were forming line from column even as he watched. Squadrons of cavalry were forming at either end of the massive beasts.
Diodorus pointed his spear at the nearest.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s us.’ He laughed, and Andronicus laughed too. The Olbians – younger and prettier – wore the same blue cloaks over beautiful armour, a fortune in horseflesh.
‘Back when we were young and beautiful,’ Andronicus said.