Funeral Games t-3

by Christian Cameron

  His escort hadn’t pursued them past the gully.

  Diodorus handed the blond’s reins to Hama. ‘I couldn’t resist. Listen, boy. We swore no oaths – you offered us no safe conduct. Your herald didn’t have a staff. And you did not win the battle. Now – speak your piece. Then – maybe – I’ll let you go back to your father.’

  Demetrios didn’t lack courage. He looked around him, as if assessing the situation. ‘You’re the boy who shot past us yesterday!’ he said to Satyrus. He grinned, suddenly, and looked like the statue of a young Apollo. ‘My father offers you wages. And demands the return of any booty you have taken. And the handing over of certain people. I am not to discuss this in public.’ He looked around him.

  Satyrus admired his coolness, because the golden boy was smiling as if he’d just been given a gift.

  ‘Dad says I’m a hothead. I’ll never live this down. You will let me go? He really will kill you. Look at the force he’s putting together!’ Demetrios pointed at the mass of cavalry already gathering on the ridge beyond the gully.

  ‘What people?’ Diodorus asked.

  ‘Eumenes’ widow and her bastard son,’ Demetrios said. ‘We will not mistreat her.’

  Diodorus looked south along the valley. From the top of the ridge that had held their pickets all night, he could see that Sappho’s wagons had made fifteen stades and were still rolling.

  ‘The answer is no,’ Diodorus said after a moment. ‘No, we won’t take service with your father and, no, we won’t return any booty and, no, you cannot have Banugul. Although I wish you fucking had her already,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘As to being fucking Greeks, and mercenaries-’

  ‘I was overwrought,’ Demetrios said cheerfully. ‘I have a temper.’

  ‘Your father arranged with the Argyraspids to have my employer murdered, did he not?’ Diodorus was watching as more Macedonian cavalry crested the far ridge.

  ‘The mutinous troops killed Eumenes,’ Demetrios said. ‘What you say is a very serious accusation.’

  ‘Go and tell your father that if he wants us, he can try and catch us,’ Diodorus said. ‘Now get off your horse.’

  ‘This is my best horse,’ Demetrios said.

  ‘It is about to become my best horse,’ Diodorus said. ‘Think of it as the cost of a little lesson in war. You still have a great deal to learn. Next time you offer someone a truce, keep it.’

  Demetrios dismounted. He turned to Satyrus. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Satyrus, son of Kineas,’ he said.

  Demetrios gave him a good-natured smile, and tossed him his silver helmet. ‘You might as well have this to go with the horse. That way, I’ll know you next time!’ He grinned, turned away and started to jog across the grass to the north.

  ‘There goes fifty talents of gold,’ Hama said bitterly. ‘We got a horse!’

  Diodorus led them back south, towards the vanishing column of dust. ‘Antigonus One-Eye would follow us to the ends of the earth to rescue his son,’ he said. ‘I hope it won’t be worth his while to pursue us otherwise.’

  ‘They really murdered Eumenes?’ Crax asked.

  ‘Someone did. I saw them grab him yesterday – Argyraspids and some cavalry officers.’ Diodorus shook his head. ‘He deserved better.’

  ‘Where in Hades do we go now?’ asked Eumenes the Olbian, who rode up from the head of his troop. ‘Hello, young Satyrus.’ He reached out for the silver helmet that Satyrus was still holding. ‘That’s quite a piece of kit.’

  Satyrus hugged him.

  Eumenes eyed the helmet. ‘Well, I’d be careful where I wore it,’ he said, laughing. ‘Young Apollo over there will probably want it back.’

  ‘He said something of the sort,’ Satyrus admitted.

  Diodorus looked around. ‘Has this outfit lost any semblance of discipline? You people have troops to command, I believe?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Crax asked. ‘Tanais is gone, and Eumenes the Cardian is dead. We’re out of employers!’

  Diodorus gave them a tight smile. ‘Aegypt,’ he said. ‘Down the hills to the Euphrates, up the Euphrates until we can cut across the desert to the Jordan, and down the Jordan to Alexandria.’

  Crax shook his head. ‘That’s five thousand stades!’ he said. ‘By Hermes, Strategos, we don’t have remounts, we don’t have food, and we’re surrounded by enemies. We don’t have a bronze obol amongst us!’

  ‘Twenty days should see us to Ptolemy’s outposts,’ Diodorus said. ‘We’ll buy remounts – or take them. Look, I have the first one under my hand.’

  ‘We couldn’t buy a donkey,’ Crax said.

  ‘Remember how One-Eye was asking for our loot back?’ Diodorus asked, smirking at Eumenes.

  Crax grinned. ‘That was a good one. What loot?’

  ‘The loot I got,’ Eumenes said. ‘While you folks were gallivanting around the battlefield, I lifted One-Eye’s treasury.’ He shrugged at Crax’s disbelieving look. ‘All Tyche, brother. I got lost in the salt haze, and I tripped over these packhorses.’

  They all laughed, and Satyrus, now one of them, laughed too.

  When they rejoined the column, they found Banugul sitting on a white Nisaean with her son on a black mare. She looked like a queen, her pale-skinned beauty scarcely aged. She wore a considerable amount of carefully applied cosmetics, more than Satyrus had ever seen on a free woman, and she had a cloth-of-gold scarf tied over her hair. Her purple-blue eyes sparkled under the shawl, and she was obviously angry.

  Herakles looked deeply unhappy.

  Diodorus rode up in a swirl of dust and embraced his Sappho. ‘Beautiful job,’ he said.

  She gave him a lopsided grin. ‘Men,’ she said. ‘Birth a baby and they’ve nothing to say. But get a column moving-’

  ‘I wish to go to One-Eye,’ Banugul said.

  Diodorus gawked at her. ‘What? He tried to kill you yesterday.’

  She shook her head. ‘I am not going to Aegypt with a column of mercenaries,’ she said. Her tone softened. ‘There are many men here with no reason to love me, or Alexander’s son, either, Diodorus. I will never forget that Philokles saved me, nor that Kineas’s daughter saved my son. But I am the satrap of Hyrkania, and Antigonus One-Eye is now my lord. I will go and make obeisance to him.’

  Sappho laughed.

  Banugul glared at her.

  Diodorus rubbed his chin. ‘He asked for you and the boy, right enough,’ the strategos said. ‘He might just kill you.’

  Banugul smiled. It was an easy smile, a light smile, and it undid fifteen years of ageing and rendered her Aphrodite-like. ‘He will not kill me. He needs my father, and my brothers, and my son will give him legitimacy.’

  ‘I want to be a king,’ Herakles said suddenly. ‘Not a pawn.’

  ‘Your father started as a pawn,’ Banugul said. And then, in a kinder way, she said, ‘Your turn will come.’

  ‘I want to stay with Satyrus and Melitta,’ he said.

  Satyrus rode over to the boy and clasped his hand, as men do. ‘We will be friends,’ he said.

  Diodorus looked at Sappho, and then at Eumenes. The young Olbian gave a slight nod. So did Sappho.

  ‘You’d be doing us a favour, and no mistake, lady,’ Diodorus acknowledged. ‘If you were to – to go to him, One-Eye might just let us go.’ He looked at the northern horizon. ‘But we’ve got Hades’ own jump on the bastard. I think we can outrun him.’

  Banugul smiled her Aphrodite smile again. ‘So many brave men. But not today.’

  Diodorus exchanged one more look with his wife. ‘Fine. I’ll send a herald.’

  Banugul nodded. ‘By leaving you, I return the favour that Philokles – and Kineas – did me.’

  Sappho turned her head away. Satyrus could tell that his aunt didn’t like the beautiful queen.

  Melitta came up the column, already covered in dust from riding around, visiting. Apparently unaware of her condition, she rode into the command group. ‘Herakles is leaving?’ she asked.

>   ‘Yes,’ Sappho answered. ‘Say your goodbyes. His mother feels she’ll do better with our enemies. The men who just murdered her husband.’

  Banugul’s head shot around, and her glare had the power of a thousand courtly confrontations, and Sappho met it full on.

  ‘Better for all of us, really,’ Diodorus was heard to mutter. ‘Hama? Take a file from first troop, and Andronicus as your herald.’

  Melitta embraced a startled Herakles, who then hugged her back with sudden fervour. She kissed him, which got a grunt of disapproval from his mother. Sappho exchanged her frown for a smile – anything that displeased the blonde Persian woman pleased her.

  ‘I won’t forget you!’ Herakles called, as he rode away. Satyrus waved to him, and then pressed his heels to his mount, galloped up by the other boy, and handed him a javelin – one of his own, a nice heavy one.

  ‘Now you’re armed,’ he said. Then he made himself say something personal. ‘Remember what Philokles said yesterday. Don’t try to be your father. Just be yourself.’

  Herakles gripped his hand so hard it hurt, and Satyrus was shocked to see tears in the boy’s eyes.

  They clasped hands again, and Herakles rode away.

  When Satyrus rode back to his uncle, the strategos was frowning at the dust raised by Banugul’s party. ‘I should have sent more of an escort.’

  ‘You should have sent her alone,’ Sappho said.

  ‘You are not helping,’ Diodorus said through clenched teeth.

  Satyrus rode away from them, back along the column to his sister, who cried for a little, very quietly.

  ‘I really liked him,’ she said.

  Satyrus didn’t have much of an idea what to say, so he gave her a quick and clumsy hug from horseback and they rode on without speaking. Silence was the order of the day, and a lot of glances back past the dust of the column.

  ‘They’re all worried about the escort,’ Satyrus said. He’d just worked it out. ‘If Antigonus murdered Eumenes the Cardian, he could do anything, including murdering Banugul.’

  His sister sobbed.

  ‘What did I say?’ he asked the gods.

  ‘Just the fucking obvious! You are so useless.’ Melitta’s voice trembled.

  Crax went out with the prodromoi to find a campsite and still there was no sign of Hama or the escort. Crax returned long after Melitta’s tears had dried, and she and her brother were reconciled, and still there was no news. They made camp – a cold and hasty camp, which consisted mostly of picketing horses and unrolling blankets and cloaks. The mountains rose all around them, and it was cold, and in the last light of the late summer evening, it began to rain. Melitta pressed hard against her brother’s back.

  ‘I really liked him,’ she said. ‘Herakles, I mean.’

  ‘I know who you mean,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘Of course you did,’ Theron said kindly, from the other side of the sleeping pile. ‘He was a nice enough boy, for the son of a god.’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Philokles ordered.

  They all slept fitfully, the intermittent rain and the cold making real sleep impossible. Melitta shivered and Satyrus’s hips were hurting from sleeping on the ground. He pulled his Thracian cloak over his face to keep the rain off of it and managed to slip away.

  He smelled the lion skin first, and then he saw the club.

  ‘You have done well,’ said a voice deep enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.

  Satyrus snapped awake with the scent of wet cat fur in his nostrils. He lay awake a long time, listening to his heart race and to Theron’s snores, until the reality of the dream slipped into the next one, and he relaxed, and slept.

  They were all stiffer, and older, in the morning, and the horses were tired. But just after first light, when the sentries were calling men to wake, a young trooper rode in, weary but obviously full of news, and went to the cluster of tents that stood in the centre of the camp. By the time Satyrus was sharing a bowl of yogurt and honey with his sister, the news was spreading from fire to fire, and the sound of laughter could suddenly be heard, and fatigue began to fall away.

  Philokles came over, having been to Diodorus’s tent. ‘Melitta? One-Eye welcomed Banugul as a queen, with open arms, and his escort hailed Herakles as the son of Alexander.’ He smiled at her.

  She nodded. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, slipping away a little.

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Satyrus said, just to say something.

  Philokles and Theron both nodded.

  ‘One-Eye sent Diodorus a safe-conduct,’ Philokles added.

  ‘Zeus Soter!’ Theron said. ‘So we’re going to live?’

  ‘Eventually he’s going to discover that we have his pay chest,’ Philokles said.

  Not much later, the whole escort came in, with another dozen troopers who had been accounted dead. They were stripped of their armour, but they were mounted, and glad to be released. Most of them had been taken prisoner while wandering lost in the dust cloud.

  Diodorus, finished with other business, strode up. ‘You don’t have to live like soldiers. You know that you can all stay with us,’ he said. ‘We have an empty tent,’ he added, pointing at the tent where Banugul had stayed. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but for some reason it made all the men around the fire roar with laughter.

  Satyrus looked at his tutor. Philokles nodded. ‘I think it is time my charges learned to live like soldiers,’ he said.

  Diodorus smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, looking at the horizon, ‘they’ll have all the way to Aegypt to learn it.’

  They all laughed together, glad to be alive, and their laughter rose to heaven like a sacrifice, and just for a moment, Satyrus could smell lion skin.

  PART IV

  GRINDING

  15

  313 BC

  ‘I have no intention of fighting One-Eye if I can help it,’ Cassander said. He was dressed in a magnificent purple chlamys over a chiton that would have looked rich on a king. ‘Fighting One-Eye is foolish. He eliminated Eumenes, and now he’s on top – but he’s vulnerable. I want One-Eye to fight Ptolemy while I take Ptolemy’s soldiers away from him.’

  Cassander was visiting Athens, in state. He came with an extensive entourage that taxed the best efforts of Demetrios of Phaleron and all his political allies to support him. As Menander joked, it was as if the man ate gold.

  They were gathered in Demetrios’s house – a palace in all but name. Cassander was surrounded by Macedonians, but there were other Greeks in his train, and important allies, like Eumeles of Pantecapaeum.

  Demetrios of Phaleron had brought his own allies – the men he trusted to run Athens, and then men whose gold helped keep Cassander fed.

  Stratokles lay full length on a kline and fingered his beard – more salt than pepper in it now – and exchanged a glance with the only men in the room that he trusted, the scarred mercenary who called himself Iphicrates, and his own lieutenant, the big Italian called Lucius.

  ‘How will you persuade Antigonus to attack Ptolemy?’ Philip son of Amyntas asked. He was just the sort of fool who asked such questions – indeed, Stratokles counted on him to ask such questions. He was not the only officer in the room to wonder – every Macedonian officer wondered the same. And Stratokles wondered if Cassander, the murdering regent, the ally of Athens, the rapist of Greece, was finally losing his touch.

  ‘Never you mind,’ Cassander said. His chuckle was syrupy, almost flirtatious. ‘Antigonus and I go back,’ he said, with a wicked smile. ‘He’s old. And his son is a fool. I can control them.’ Coming from the man who had assassinated Olympias, Alexander’s mother, and her principal rivals, the statement didn’t seem to hold the hubris it might have held from a lesser – or greater – man. Cassander was no fool on the battlefield – but in the world of politics and assassination, he was the master.

  ‘I think that you underestimate Ptolemy,’ Demetrios said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cassander smiled. ‘But I doubt it. A man with a reputation for plain-
dealing, called “Farm Boy” by his troops, is hardly a candidate for survival in this world.’

  Stratokles couldn’t help himself. ‘He’s done pretty well so far,’ he said.

  Cassander turned and looked at him. Always an unsettling experience. Most men flinched from the physical reality of Stratokles’ face, but not Cassander.

  ‘With my ally’s permission, you seem perfect to go to Aegypt on my behalf, my duplicitous darling. As Athens’s ambassador, craving freedom from tyranny.’ Cassander smiled, because the Greek city-states and their prating about freedom made him laugh. ‘But anyone with a brain at Ptolemy’s court will see that you are from me. Tell him I’m desperate. Get him to fill his ships with his Macedonian regulars and send them to me. I’ll strip him of real soldiers and then Antigonus can have him and Aegypt too.’

  Stratokles rubbed his beard. His eyes went to Menander’s, and the playwright nodded slightly.

  ‘A simple enough piece of deception. I can do it,’ Stratokles said. ‘But I’m not sure…’ he added, prepared to make an honest summation of his hesitancy, largely based on how many enemies he had made in the Athenian factions. ‘I’m not known here as “Stratokles the Informer” out of the love of my fellow citizens.’

  Athens, the things I do for you.

  ‘Do it?’ Cassander laughed. ‘My dear viper, you can do it and make the Farm Boy like the taste of the poison, I have no doubt.’ He looked at Demetrios. ‘Can you spare me your snake?’

  ‘But if Antigonus has the revenues of Aegypt, he’ll be invincible!’ said Diognes, Demetrios’s lover – the handsomest man in Greece.

  Demetrios of Phaleron had hard grey eyes – the eyes of Athena, men said. He ignored the beautiful young man on his couch and his eyes flicked from Cassander to Stratokles. ‘I can spare him. But I doubt your wisdom in this, Cassander.’

  Better you than me, Demetrios, Stratokles said to himself. He, too, thought it a fool’s errand. But as usual, Cassander was the one driving the chariot, and Athens was only along for the ride.

  ‘Diognes, my dear, beautiful and rather empty-headed boy, this is why you are an ornament at parties and I’m the regent of Macedon. If Antigonus takes Aegypt, he’ll use more of his precious Macedonians to garrison it. That’s all that matters – don’t you see? Soldiers – real soldiers. They come from Macedon. Our only export, but just now, the most valuable export in the world. No one but a Macedonian can hold a sarissa and fight. No infantry in the world can beat us.’ He smiled at them, uncaring that he’d just offended every Greek in the room. ‘We’ll take Ptolemy’s veterans as our tax. And next year, we’ll use them to break Antigonus One-Eye. Or perhaps Lysimachos. It hardly matters – once I have the phalanxes, I can go where I want.’ The regent raised his heavily lidded eyes from the pretty Athenian and they dropped on Stratokles as if his glance had real weight. ‘You, my viper, are the tool I need to move this particular rock.’