‘Lady!’ he said.
‘Parshtaevalt!’ she called. ‘I need to know what’s happening on the left!’
She borrowed his trumpeter and together they rallied much of the centre and faced them to the left. It took time, and she could hear fighting – heavy fighting – in the haze to the east.
Kairax went himself, and came back when they had three hundred knights, all facing east with the setting sun at their backs.
‘The Greeks are spear to spear and breast to breast,’ Kairax said. ‘No one will give a step. The farmers carry all before them, but they will not try the flank of the phalanx. And who can blame them?’
Melitta took a deep breath. With one order, she would expend her last throw of the dice. Could her three hundred break Nikephoros?
They had failed the day before.
She rode out a pace and turned her horse so that she faced the Sakje knights.
‘We will go right into the back of the phalanx,’ she said. ‘There must be no hesitation. No warning. There will be no second time and no arrow rush. Are you ready?’
Most men nodded, tipping the plumes of their helmets so that they seemed to ripple.
‘Let’s do the thing,’ Parshtaevalt said.
Satyrus felt the pain in his gut spreading to his limbs, and he wondered again if there was poison, or if cowardice was spreading to his groin like the pain. While the Olbian cavalry rallied – slowly, because
they were not his father’s men, for all they claimed the title – he had time to think about his wound, and Coenus’s willingness to take him off the field. To lie in a tent and wait for news.
The battle was won. Nothing here to fight for, except reputation.
What if he was poisoned?
Satyrus sat on the horse of his dead enemy, surrounded by corpses.
If I am poisoned
, he thought,
it is in my blood, and these are my last hours.
His head came up, and he straightened his back. He was a son of Herakles, and Kineas, and he was not going to ride away and die in a tent, of blood poisoning.
When the Olbians were rallied, he put them in a rhomboid – a formation they knew – and they walked their horses west into the setting sun, moving slowly, looking for a new foe.
In a stade, they found one.
Upazan had not routed Ataelus – but he had numbers and he had arrows, and only Ataelus’s rage and ten years of bitter resistance sustained Ataelus’s outnumbered riders. They fought like demons – like dead men. And when their backs were to the river and they couldn’t run, they died.
Satyrus didn’t see Ataelus fall. Upazan put him down with an axe, from behind, while the little Sakje commander put an arrow into Upazan’s tanist in the swirl of the melee.
Satyrus didn’t see Graethe die. The wolf lord went down covered in wounds, and when he fell the men of his household stood over his body and died with him.
Nor did he see Urvara die, almost the last warrior standing as her banner was swamped by enemies determined to ride down the flank and win back the battle. She, too, died on the blade of Upazan’s axe, her arms too tired to parry it one last time.
But their warriors didn’t break. Some of their horses were up to their hocks in the river, but they fought on, desperate, often out of arrows, sword to sword, axe to axe.
Satyrus heard the shouts of Greeks before he ordered the charge, and he knew that Abraham was leading whatever he could from the camp by the river into Upazan’s flank. It had to matter.
Satyrus had put himself at the point of the rhomboid. He smiled,
despite the pain in his gut. He heard the fighting, and he knew the shouts were Sauromatae, and he didn’t need scouts to find the next fight.
He raised his sword. ‘Ready!’
The Olbians shouted his father’s name and charged, and then they were into Upazan’s men.
Satyrus struck and struck again, neither weak nor godlike, but merely the warrior he’d been trained to be, and his father’s sword flashed like fire in the red sunlight and his helmet took a blow here and there, but he fought on, looking for Upazan’s golden helmet. That was his goal now.
He had too few men. He could feel it. Just a few hundred more and the Sauromatae would have broken from his impact, but the Olbians were too slow and too few, and although his wedge went deeper and deeper into the horde of Sauromatae, they were not breaking.
He could hear Abraham and Panther now. They were less than a stade away, all but surrounded, and their charge, too, had lost its impetus, so that they were being pressed back to their camp.
Satyrus could see it, as if he was above the battle – could read the sounds, the shouts, the screams. Ataelus’s flank had held long enough. Upazan might win here, but he could no longer win the day.
Tired men swung heavily at tired men. The Olbians were better armoured and fresher.
It wasn’t quite enough. But for a while, it was better than nothing, and the Olbians were lifted above themselves, possibly just because they were the men of Olbia, who had once been Kineas’s men. They pushed forward, even when they should have been stopped.
Satyrus cut a man down – the man had a wolf-tail banner, and Satyrus could only hope it was Upazan’s. His sword arm was bloody to the elbow. His shoulder was weak, the muscles burned with the effort of a thousand overhead cuts, and he could barely manage his captured horse.
But he could feel Herakles at his shoulder.
I am going to die well
, he thought.
He blocked a blow, catching a heavy axe blade far back in its cut, and his blade slipped down the haft so that the head caught him a weak blow in the left shoulder. Most of it fell on the yoke of his corslet, but the axe blade still sliced his skin. He got his bridle hand up
and on the shaft of the axe, and his sword went up and over the haft, only to have his wrist grabbed by the axe-man.
Upazan.
Their eyes came together as they caught each other’s attempted death blows – arm to arm, hand to hand.
Upazan rose on his horse’s back, trying to use his immense strength to bear Satyrus down.
At a great distance, Satyrus heard Greek singing and wondered what it meant. Then his full attention was on Upazan. He met him, strength for strength, and their horses moved under them, and then Satyrus’s arms began to break Upazan’s hold. Upazan redoubled his effort, and he gave a great shout as he threw his weight on Satyrus.
Satyrus held him and bore him back.
He lost Upazan’s left hand – their horses were pulling apart – and he snapped a short cut with his sword. It went home, cutting deeply into Upazan’s left arm just as Upazan rammed a dagger with his own left, so that it cut right into Satyrus’s sword arm and he dropped the Aegyptian sword to dangle from its chain around his wrist.
Satyrus’s horse stepped back and a blow hit his side, but Coenus was there. He hit Upazan twice – hard blows to the helmet that rocked the big man in his saddle. And then, as if he’d practised the move all his life, Coenus cut back into another Sauromatae, using the bounce off Upazan’s helmet to speed his back cut, and he lost his sword in the man’s head – it sheered into the helmet and wouldn’t come free.
Satyrus stripped the chain off his right wrist and took the sword in his left. He was backing his horse now – the captured Nisaean responded beautifully, turning on its front legs. Satyrus managed a clumsy parry that saved Coenus from a spear in the side.
It was getting dark. He fought on, determined to save Coenus, who had always been there for him and who had done as much to win this kingdom as any other man.
Coenus took the dead man’s spear from his limp fingers – the press was now so tight around Upazan and Satyrus that the dead could not fall to the ground, and a man’s knees could be broken by the press of horses.
Upazan was recovering. He had his axe in a short grip, one-handed. He landed a weak blow against an Olbian, who fell backwards across the rump of his horse but could not fall to the ground.
He cut at Satyrus, and Satyrus blocked it.
The sound of the melee had changed. The horses were moving and suddenly Upazan was slipping away, but Satyrus, wounded and without the use of his sword arm, followed him, cutting almost blindly at Sauromatae who were as tired and used up as he was.
‘UPAZAN!’
Satyrus stopped and let his sword slump to his left side.
‘UPAZAN!’
Now
the Sauromatae were giving way. Something had happened. And Satyrus knew that voice.
‘UPAZAN!’ shouted Leon the Numidian as he burst through a ring of Sauromatae, the only man in the fight with a big round oxhide shield, his spearhead glinting in the red sun, his beard white.
‘You!’ Upazan growled in recognition. He turned his horse to face his nemesis and lengthened his grip on the axe.
‘Remember Mosva?’ Leon said.
Upazan swung, the whole weight of his axe up.
Leon pushed in close and the tip of his spear rammed into Upazan’s face and out through the helmet. Blood fountained. ‘T hat’s her spear!’ Leon shouted, but Upazan was already dead.
And all around them, the Exiles rode through the Sauromatae like a Sindi farmer’s scythe goes through ripe wheat in the last days of summer.
Satyrus sat on his horse and watched the last moments, as the Sauromatae broke or died.
He watched as Diodorus threw his arms around Coenus, and he watched as Leon’s horse trampled Upazan’s broken body into the hard-packed earth.
It all seemed far away.
After a while, he realized that men were cheering. There was Crax, pointing at him, and there was Abraham of all people, holding his sword in the air like Achilles. And Diodorus, turning his horse and rearing.
And Melitta, and she was crying and smiling at the same time.
He was crying too.
But he was not dead. And neither was she.
He straightened his back.
And slowly, with all the will he could muster, he raised his father’s
sword over his head, so that it caught the light of the setting sun, and then the sound came at him like a final blow – suddenly the cheers were like a song, and the song was for
them
. It was everywhere, on and on.
I
t took days to bury the dead, and days more to feel anything but a vacant mourning – pain and numbness, and then aches and raw grief.
Satyrus had lost half his youth in an afternoon, and Melitta had lost more. Urvara was gone, and Graethe, and Memnon, dead in the phalanx, fighting in the front rank – the oldest of his father’s men, and perhaps the best.
And there were thousands more dead. Many he did not know. Some, like Lithra, he knew too well. He had the misfortune to find her body himself – a body he had held in his arms.
Ataelus proved too hard to kill. The axe blow that knocked him flat left him unconscious, but within a few days, he rose again.
Later, Satyrus would say that the days
after
the Battle of Tanais River changed him more than the whole campaign that led to it.
And before he had stopped mourning, while the grief was still a raw thing that could move most of them to tears, he had to be king. Because even while the flies gathered on the dead, so the requests for his attention, his decisions and his judgment began buzzing around his ears.
Four days after the fight, when some of the older veterans had begun to make it a story, and the wound in his belly was still closing without rot, he put on a chiton and rode out of the camp with Melitta. They left all their well-meaning friends behind and rode north along the river to the foot of the kurgan of Kineas.
‘Still want to be king?’ Melitta asked, and he shook his head.
‘I think the price was too high,’ he said. ‘I feel like – like I used to feel when I spent all my money in the market. On a toy. And then – I wanted to take the toy back.’
Melitta looked up at the kurgan. ‘Still going to do it?’
Satyrus nodded. ‘You with me?’
‘All the way to the top,’ Melitta said.
They climbed the kurgan together as the sun set in the west. Below them, the Sakje and the Greeks moved around, making dinner, and the smoke of their fires rose to the heavens.
Satyrus had to stop three times in climbing the mound, and Melitta swore when her arms failed her. She was still that tired, and she had rested just long enough that every muscle ached.
But they got to the top before the rim of the sun settled in the Bay of Salmon. There was a broad stone at the top, and in the centre was a deep cleft.
Satyrus drew the Aegyptian blade and handed it to Melitta.
She held it high, so that the sun caught the blade and made it a tongue of flame. Then she brought it down into the cleft, so that the blade grated as she thrust it to the hilt in the stone.
They stood together until the sun set, and then they walked back down the kurgan to the camp. And the sword held the light for a long time.
Writing a novel – several novels, I hope – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good’. From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the ‘hero’ and the others as villains.