Diodorus couldn’t tell whether that was Gallic sarcasm or genuine regret.
Diodorus nodded, flexed his hand on his spear shaft, and looked out under his hand, trying to read the signs. Out in the dust, past Nikephorus, he heard the war cry of Athens –
eleu eleu eleu eleu
. He smiled.
‘This is our fight, my friend.’ Diodorus had made his decision.
Andronicus burnished his trumpet on a scrap of cloth. ‘Or rather, these are our friends, so we fight,’ he said.
Diodorus took one last look. Demetrios’s squadrons were starting forward – eight wedges, with solid blocks of lesser cavalry on either flank.
‘It will happen here,’ Diodorus said. ‘If the farm is lost, the day is over.’
Andronicus laughed. ‘The day is already over. You are like a pankrationist who refuses to accept the choke hold until he falls, unconscious or dead.’
Diodorus sat carefully back down in his seat and took his helmet from Justus. ‘Perhaps. Sound attention.’
Now Demetrios’s cavalry were rolling forward at a fast trot. Diodorus cantered to meet his squadron leaders.
‘That flank cavalry – Lydians. Horses already blown. Let them come to the edge of the farm fields – let the archers in the farmyard gall them. Then charge. We’ve practised it a thousand times – straight to a gallop from the stand. Got it?’
Then they were gone, back to their commands, and he was alone.
Once he sent them in, there would be no way out.
He thought of Kineas.
Satyrus led the Olbians forward, watching Demetrios, whose line of elite cavalry stretched away to the north and south, overlapping both ends of Seleucus’s reserve line. He had big blocks of Lydian or Phrygian cavalry at either end of his line of wedges – already cocked slightly in, like the horns of a great equine beast, planning to envelop the reserve.
Satyrus smiled an acknowledgement that Demetrios was responding brilliantly to Seleucus’s reserve ploy.
Diodorus was going to send the Exiles into the Lydians at the north end of Demetrios’s new line.
Satyrus aimed his rhomboid at the tip of the northernmost Antigonid wedge.
He wished he had more men, but he didn’t.
He lowered his lance, grabbed it with both hands, and rested his lower back against the pads of the Sakje saddle. ‘Trot!’ he called.
His Olbians – half Sakje, half Greek, horsemen from birth – went forward. They were not untried – most of them had served as bodyguard at Tanais River, nine years before. The men in the centre of the rhomboid would be readying bows, lances upright in lance buckets and straps, bows out of their gorytoi. Even a few arrows lobbed high in the moments before contact could wreck an enemy formation – plunging fire into the rumps of enemy horses. Kineas, his father, and Eumenes, and Urvara and Srayanka his mother had perfected it, out on the Sea of Grass before he was born.
The leather lace that held his cheek-plates together was loose and cut into his neck under his chin at every rise of the trot, but this charger had the finest, lightest trot he’d ever known.
‘All closed up!’ Eumenes called. Satyrus managed a glance over his shoulder – the rhomboid was like a single living thing.
A stade.
He could see the man who would be his first opponent – the point of the Antigonid wedge. An aristocrat, a man born for war.
Through the narrow opening of his helmet, what Satyrus saw was a man who did not ride well, on a horse far smaller than his.
Individual shafts began to
hiss
past him as the best archers let fly. Hard to miss, even at this range and from a moving horse, against a target that filled the horizon.
The Antigonids had no bows.
More arrows, now – half a stade, and there was nothing to life but the rhythm of the trot, the ripping cloth sound of the arrows in flight, the man he would fight.
Fifty horse lengths.
Twenty horse lengths.
‘Now!’ he shouted to Artaxerxes, his trumpeter.
The calls rang out, and the tip of the wedge gave their horses their heads, and in one stride his charger was at a gallop – whistle arrows screamed over them in a volley, making untrained horses shy. There were tumbling horses all along the Antigonid front, their wedge tearing
itself
apart as rear rankers tried to ride over the dead, or worse, wounded and thrashing mounts – Satyrus’s lance crashed
through
his chosen opponent, the point of the enemy wedge – crushed his breastplate and then burst through like an awl punching heavy leather, carrying the man right off his horse …
Satyrus dropped the lance – the head would never come back out of the wound – and drew his sword as his horse rose on her haunches and punched with her feet – two rapid blows and an enemy stallion dropped, dead, rider trapped under the hooves, and Satyrus was up on his horse’s neck, chopping with his sword – heavy blows, falling on men’s helmets and armoured backs, but they were
shattered
and his men had knocked them flat. Their horses were tired, smaller, had come further across the plain, and the arrows from the sky were a surprise, the whistling arrows spooked their horses, and they were dead men.
Panic, his charger, carried him effortlessly, despite his armour, seeming to skim the ground. It was like elation, like the daimon of combat magnified by the daimon of speed.
But I’d rather be on the deck of a ship
, he thought, inconsequentially. He wondered where Abraham was – where Miriam was. He had a firm picture in his mind of the meadow below Tanais, where he’d ridden as a boy – where he’d killed a Sauromatae girl.
He was clear of the tail of the Antigonid wedge. Instead of going straight through, he could see that his rhomboid had collapsed the wedge and then gone at an angle. He looked back – the tired enemy horses were unable to flee, caught against the bigger mounts, going down into the dust.
Even as the victor, it was horrifying.
To his left, Demetrios’s men were throwing spears at the elephants, clearing their crews. It was hardly one-sided – only the bravest of the Antigonids dared face the beasts, and many horses baulked or fled – but the elephant crews had a hard time inflicting casualties on the riders, too.
Satyrus couldn’t see Seleucus at the other end of the line.
Closer, on his right, Diodorus charged the Lydians, and the fight flowed right to the walled enclosure around the house – men pressed in close, horses breast to breast, the fire of the Exiles against the depth of the Lydians. The Marine archers in the farmyard poured their shafts into the Lydians’ unprotected horses from the flank.
And then something gave. The Lydians shifted – even through the dust, Satyrus saw the movement. He’d been about to order Artaxerxes to rally his knights to the right, to support the Exiles, but the Lydians bulged, and men began to look over their shoulders – terrified men.
Crax had ridden into the rear of the Lydians, out of the olive grove below the farm where he’d lain concealed, a Sakje trick. They were a hundred men against two thousand, but their flashing scale armour and their appearance in the enemy’s rear turned the fight, and suddenly the Lydians were urging their tired horses back – back.
Like Diodorus, less than a stade away, Satyrus had come to the conclusion that the farm was now the key to the battle. Diodorus and Apollodorus held the farm.
Satyrus waved his sword and pointed south, towards the flank of the next wedge. ‘Sound rally – rally left.’
Nikephorus had extended his right as far as he could without surrendering any hope of his men holding when struck. Despite his efforts, there was a gap a taxeis wide between his rightmost file and Stratokles’ left – and the Athenian had charged off down the field with his flank in the air – vanished into the dust.
Elephants came out of the dust – mostly riderless, some with crews. The gap had this advantage – elephants and peltasts funnelled harmlessly down it, an alley between the spear points.
Two elephants came together, just a few spear lengths west of his position – both with crews intact– and the two animals reared up, trumpeted, and their sounds were more terrifying than their savagery. Quick as lightning, both beasts seemed to be sweating blood – tusks ripped, and shattered – the pikemen in the opposing howdahs thrust at each other and at the opposing animal, and the archer in the Seleucid howdah shot furiously from a long, cane bow, his heavy arrows taking the Antigonid crew, one at a time, until the Antigonid beast stopped fighting – despite the blood, despite the continuing efforts of his adversary – to place a gentle foot on the dead meat of her master, fallen from his perch between his ears. Then he turned away with a sound like a mother mourning a dead child, and fled.
Nikephorus’s men roared their approval.
And then Antigonus came out of the dust.
They came slowly, carefully – spears down, marching at the slowest pace. Nikephorus saw Antigonus immediately, near the very right file – a proper man.
His own taxeis was only half depth on the right so he had to go forward or risk being broken. Nikephorus stepped out of his line. ‘Spears down!’ he roared.
And as the points glittered, he lowered his. ‘Nike!’ he roared.
Three thousand voices answered him. ‘Nike!’
‘Forward!’ he bellowed.
And then the elephant, wounded and furious, stumbled into a run between the two closing phalanxes. Men flinched away on both sides and in a few heartbeats, both sides were like tangled skeins of wool yarn, files every which way, all order lost as the pain-maddened elephant crashed back and forth, taking long, deep wounds from brave men’s spears, but snapping them, trunk flashing, bronze-capped tusks dripping blood and ordure and he slayed men and no more men could touch him. It was every soldier’s nightmare – a mad elephant trapped in a phalanx. Men died like wheat or oats scythed down at harvest time.
Nikephorus stood fast, put his spear into the elephant’s side – mad beasts have no allies – and drew his sword.
‘Close up!’ he cried. ‘Get in your files!’
His men began to give ground.
‘Apobatai!’ he shrieked ‘Hold the line!’
His very best men died there, putting their shoulders behind their shields, trying to push at Antigonus’s best men while they defended themselves from thousands of pounds of pain-crazed war-elephant. They dug in their heels and pushed, they cut high and low with their swords when their spears broke, they punched and bit when they lost their swords.
Nikephorus aimed himself for Antigonus, and killed – forward, a step at a time, an eye for the elephant, still wreaking havoc to his right – but in the chaos of the mêlée, where there were no ranks, no files, just the vortex of death that was the elephant and the sight of Antigonus’s gold helmet and red plumes, he pushed himself to the limit, cut, step, shield up, step—
He was six men from Antigonus when the world went black.
‘Go for their rear!’ Melitta shouted to Lysimachos. ‘We’ll do this!’ She pointed her axe at the solid wall of Antigonid pikemen, formed in a tight square, like a hedgehog, with steel and bronze points bristling from every wall and every corner.
Lysimachos either understood or came to his own decision, and his spear rose above the rout of the enemy cavalry, and pointed north then west. His Companions rode with him. So did Calicles and the Thracians.
They thundered past the two thousand pikemen holding the left of the Antigonid infantry line – men who had faced cavalry at Arabela and Issus, for whom lance and javelin and flashing hooves held little fear.
Melitta rode clear of her people, called her chiefs to her, raised her bow in her fist and punched it at the pikemen.
Before she reined in, the arrows had started to fly.
Unable to reply, the pikemen closed up, lapped their shields, and endured.
But the Sakje had no threat to contend with, and they pressed closer, shooting at feet, at shins, at faces – individual young men and woman began to compete at acts of daring. A girl barely in her teens, ash-blonde braids bound to her head, rode along the front face of the phalanx, a hand’s breadth from the reach of the sarissas, shooting
down
into the ranks. Assagetae cheers followed her. And behind her, a boy, bolder or crazed with battle, rode into the gap an arrow made – a gap that lasted for a few heartbeats – pushed his pony into the gap, and the horse’s hooves and his short sword wreaked havoc until he was killed, ten sarissas in his chest and horse. At one corner of the scrum, another girl lassoed a phylarch and dragged him from the ranks into the dust – he cut the cord, killed her in two sweeps of his sword, but was shot full of arrows like a pincushion. Before his body could fall, Thyrsis leaped from his horse on the man’s back, cut his throat, and ripped his helmet off his head and scalped him in full view of his men, raised the flapping hair and screamed, and all the Sakje screamed.
Desperate, the Argyraspids charged, scattering the Sakje, who ran like flies from the swatter, but the phalangites didn’t catch a single rider. And the Sakje turned and shot as they rode free, and old men died – men who had survived fifty battles.
Melitta halted with her fishtail standard by a well.
‘Change horses,’ she ordered.
Stratokles had been fighting for so long he couldn’t think. His sword arm rose and fell by itself; he ducked, his shield jarred on his shoulder, his mouth was dry as parchment, and still they pressed on.
He no longer knew which direction was front and which was rear.
He’d lost Lucius, lost Herakles, and only the sharp barks of
eleu
told him that the men behind him were his own.
He wanted to slump to the ground.
His hand was red with other men’s blood, and his own, and his fingers were stuck to the hilt, and he thought his jaw might be broken.
His sword arm rose and fell.
Someone was screaming like a stuck pig.
Satyrus had his knights in hand. He had a moment to snatch a drink of water – to pat his horse’s neck.
‘Well done,’ he said to his trumpeter. The Persian boy was as brave as a lion.