It was exhilarating to go so fast across the moon-swept landscape, with such comrades. The sense of purpose was remarkable and heady. The hippeis were exactly as silent as required – loud when they felt secure, silent as a necropolis when they began to close on the enemy camp – and the toxotai were infected by their absolute conviction that they would win. At the second halt for a horse change, Idomeneus grinned at her. ‘Someday I’d like to train archers this well,’ he said.
‘They’ve been together twenty years,’ Bion replied, and then realized she had blundered. ‘At least, that’s what the big barbarian I’m with said.’
Idomeneus nodded. ‘Still,’ he whispered.
‘You kids done chatting?’ Crax asked. He was already mounted and he extended a hand to the Cretan. ‘I hope we’re not keeping you up too late. The party is just about to start.’
No one bothered to tell Bion the plan until they halted a final time, just after the moon had set. Carlus was pointing at the ground.
‘What do I do?’ she asked.
Carlus’s grin was ghastly in the moonlight. ‘Dig a hole and climb in. We’ll draw them to you at first light. When you hear the trumpet, start shooting.’ He shrugged. ‘Not my plan.’
She rolled off the broad back of Carlus’s elephantine horse and gathered her small pack. She did not, of course, have a pick or a shovel. All around her she could see other archers with the same difficulty.
They scraped shallow pits with their hands and some, who had helmets, used them, while Idomeneus walked up and down, cursing and demanding that they dig faster. By the time the very first rays of dawn turned the eastern sky pink, she was lying in the cool sand with her cloak over her and a few hastily gathered blades of swamp grass over her cloak. It wasn’t much. To her right she could see another Cretan, Argon, with his rump sticking up because he was a lazy sod and couldn’t be bothered to dig hard.
Why am I here? Melitta asked herself in the privacy of her hole. She’d been warm enough while working, but now the sand was soaking the warmth out of her and she didn’t have her cloak around her and she was cold and none of this made any sense. The cavalry had ridden away.
She must have fallen asleep, despite everything, because suddenly there was movement around her and the sky was very bright indeed. She raised her head and saw dust, felt the hoof beats of horses, many horses at a gallop.
‘Wait for it!’ Idomeneus called. He was standing in the shadow of a big rock. ‘String your bows!’
A hundred capes wriggled and the sand seemed to roll like the sea as the toxotai strung their bows lying flat. Even the desert generated too much moisture to leave a bow strung overnight.
To Bion, it seemed as if the galloping horses were right on top of them, and still Idomeneus didn’t call and the trumpet didn’t sound. Louder and louder – impossibly loud. And terrifying.
‘Stand up!’ the Cretan called.
Eumenes was right in front of her, two horse-lengths away, and even as she stood, his horse passed between her and Argon, his head turned to watch the rear and his cloak streaming behind him.
She put a heavy arrow on her bow as she noted that there were dozens – no, hundreds – of horses, but only a few of them had riders.
They stole a horse herd, she thought. It made her smile – such a Sakje thing.
The riderless horses raised quite a dust cloud. She wrapped her linen wimple over her mouth and tilted her straw hat down to block the sun. Now she could see almost a stade, and there were two big bodies of cavalry.
The enemy. This was different from anything she’d ever done – different from fighting pirates. She found that she was grinning like a fool. She looked around – she could hit at this range, but she wasn’t sure she was allowed to shoot.
Just half a stade away were hundreds of enemy cavalry. And they were coming fast.
A heavy Cretan arrow leaped into the air – Argon, damn him – and it swept high before stooping like a hawk and falling just short of the lead company.
‘You fucking idiot! Do you want to eat horseshit tonight, you useless turd?’ Idomeneus was not yelling – but he was right there. ‘Wait for the trumpet!’ More quietly, ‘Ares, what a fuck-face.’
The enemy were so close that they must see the archers – but they continued to canter along, making the earth rumble. Melitta was shaking the way she had before telling Aunt Sappho that she’d lain with Xeno – where was Xeno, anyway? And whose plan was this?
The trumpet rang.
Bion loosed without thought, then watched as another arrow was dragged from the quiver and nocked, red fletch upward – bow up, full draw, four fingers over the mass of horsemen, loose, third arrow…
The lead company burst under the volleys of arrows. The first arrows hit them in a tight clump, most of them falling from high and hitting the unprotected hindquarters of the horses, so that the animals screamed and fell, or rolled, or stood and fought the air, bellowing their agony with noises that made Melitta’s Sakje stomach roll over with discomfort that killing mere men never caused her. The effect on the company to her front was total – where there had been a hundred cavalrymen, there was a dust cloud and the screams of the dying. Nothing came out of the cloud but a single riderless horse and even as she watched, the third volley of arrows vanished into the rising sand to a thin chorus of new screams.
The second and third enemy companies didn’t hesitate. They swept wide, going for the flanks of the archers, having changed from pursuers to desperate men within three flights of arrows. The men on Bion’s side of the engagement had long beards and Persian dress, they rode good horses and moved fast. Their captain wore rippling golden scale mail and had a henna-dyed beard. Bion shot him from the saddle – a pretty shot even at close range – before he could react to the new threat coming at his own flank: serried troops of the Exiles coming over the low sand and mud ridges to the north and south.
Leaderless, his men were still focused on the archers flaying their front when the Exiles ripped into their flanks, heralded by a point-blank volley of heavy javelins that could knock a horse flat.
Even so, determined men – bearded easterners who had grown up fighting Sakje on the frontier and knew a disaster when they saw one – didn’t hesitate. One group went straight for Melitta. She nodded, even as she fitted another arrow to the string – fingers suddenly clumsy, a spasm of fear even while part of her mind was above the whole battle, thinking things through Their leader knew he’d be safer going through the ambush than turning tail. A good leader.
They were going to make it to her position and she couldn’t stop them and nobody else could either.
She loosed – hit or miss, she didn’t know, because she threw herself flat and rolled in a ball as the Medes went over her, their sabres reaching for her. That was her moment of fear – blind and waiting to be pinned to the ground like a pig in the agora, but then they were past and Argon was making a shrill whistling noise. She looked around – dust, no more – and ran to the Cretan, who lay in his too-shallow pit with blood under his elbows and his back arched in pain.
His throat was cut – just barely cut, the extreme reach of a Mede’s sword – and he gave up as she watched, his body ceasing to struggle, his rump sinking into the hole he had dug for himself. His head turned and he saw her. His mouth moved – no sound. She never knew what he tried to say because a blow to her side suddenly knocked her flat.
Her left arm and side rang with pain but she wasn’t dead. Her hair was full of sand. She spat – got a foot under her.
The Mede had a sword like a Sakje akinakes, long and narrow, and he got a hand on the javelin he’d thrown at her while she rose to her feet.
He hesitated when he saw her trousered legs, and she got her sword out from under her arm before he could finish her off. She didn’t hesitate – she put a hand up against the heavy javelin, missed her grab and stepped in anyway, swung the sword with the whole weight of her body behind it. He got his akinakes up to parry but her blow shee
red down the blade and cut into his fingers and hand from brutal momentum.
He froze in pain.
She swung hard, cutting so deep into his neck that her sword stuck, and he flopped in the bloody sand, still alive, arms reaching for her. He got a hand on her leg and she kicked, slammed her fist into his face – blood from the neck wound splashing over both of them – got the sword free from his muscle and bone and cut again and again and again and again until the sword flew from her fingers from exhaustion to land a horse-length away in the sand.
She knelt by the body, empty of anything. Later she got up and fetched her weapons, drank some water and walked off down the line to where the other survivors gathered around Idomeneus.
‘Argon’s dead,’ she said.
Carlus rode by her. ‘I can’t find her!’ he roared, and a dozen hippeis rode back the way she had come into the battle haze. The archers watched wearily, uncaring as to what the fuss was. Melitta didn’t care much herself, so she walked boldly across the sand to Diodorus.
‘I’m right here,’ she said.
Diodorus looked down at her and his dust-caked face creased in a smile. ‘You look like your father sometimes,’ he said. He pointed at Andronicus and gave him some visual cue that caused the Gaul to blow a complex trumpet call, and all the Exiles began to rally. Several Exiles waved at her, and Eumenes pointed her out to Crax and Carlus, who shook their heads.
Carlus rode over. ‘You scared me, missy!’
Melitta spurned the hand he offered her to mount. ‘Bodies to loot,’ she said. ‘And I suspect there are horses for everyone, Big Guy. And if you call me missy again in public, I’ll gut you.’
Carlus grinned as if he’d just won a contest, but his voice sounded gruff. ‘You and what army, archer?’ He spat. And worked to hide his grin.
Melitta walked off into the sand, and she made herself pull rings from fingers. There was some good armour and a lot of decent swords – not that she needed either. After the first minutes, she couldn’t bear the sounds the wounded horses made, and the sight of the men – in particular, the sight of men she liked ignoring other men dying in agony at their feet while they stripped their bodies – sickened her. So she pulled a handsome saddle blanket from the corpse of a horse and a rider fallen together, and she took the bridle and bit from henna-beard, who she’d dropped herself, and then she walked all the way to the horse herd, well clear of the carnage, and cut out a pretty mare, tall and dark with four white feet. She put the tack on, dealt with the mare’s unease with the smells and the whole situation, and got herself mounted, kit bundle, bow and all. And she had a few gold darics to wow the boys in camp.
Idomeneus found her waiting with her horse. ‘You won’t leave me for these centaurs, will you?’ he asked. ‘I shouldn’t have put you at the end of the line in your first fight – but you shoot faster than most of the others. Was it bad, kid?’
She wanted to say something witty, the way Satyrus did – always brave, always ready with a quip. Finally, she said, ‘I didn’t throw up.’
Idomeneus nodded. His lips were as pinched as she felt hers must be. ‘You saw Argon go down?’
She shook her head. ‘Medes got him in the charge. We all hit the sand – he didn’t get flat enough.’
Idomeneus nodded again. ‘Help me get him on a horse then,’ the Cretan said. ‘He’s been with me five years – least I can do is put him in the ground.’
They recovered all their dead, and Crax and Eumenes gathered armour and built a trophy and left it sticking out of the sand, a taunt at the whole army of Demetrios, whose tents were just visible ten stades away on the horizon. When they rode off, with plunder and prisoners and two hundred new horses, the trophy glittered behind them under the new sun until they crested the big ridge south of the walls, and then they were home.
25
Demetrios didn’t make a treaty. After two weeks of staring at the impregnable works of Peleusiakos, losing cavalry fights and watching his plans for conquest unravel, Demetrios decamped in the night, leaving his fires burning, and retreated across the Sinai along eight hundred stades of coast road.
The morning after he vanished, Ptolemy’s army was awakened by trumpets. From the door of his tent, Satyrus could see the cavalry in the next camp rolling their blankets and putting their bronze kettles in old linen bags.
‘They’re moving!’ Satyrus shouted at Abraham, who was still in the blankets with Basis, an Aegyptian girl he’d adopted.
Philokles came up, already in armour and carrying his shield and spear. ‘Shield-bearers, get packed. March in one hour! Satyrus, see to it that every man has food in his belly and more in his pack.’
Satyrus saluted, but he caught his tutor’s arm. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
Philokles nodded in satisfaction. ‘One-Eye’s golden child has made a mistake, lad. And now we’re going to chase him.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Satyrus said. ‘You said no battle.’
‘I was wrong,’ Philokles said. ‘If we catch him short of his depot at Gaza, he’ll have to fight. I never thought Ptolemy had the balls.’ The Spartan made a face. ‘No – that’s wrong. Like Demetrios, I forgot that Ptolemy had the balls.’
Satyrus stood in the sand west of Gaza on the coast, looking at the thousand pinpoints of fire that marked the army of Demetrios.
‘His army is huge!’ Dionysius said.
Abraham stood with Xeno and Dionysius and a circle of their friends and file-mates. They had now been in the field long enough that there were friendships starting across the Hellene-Aegyptian divide – enough friendships and strong enough that Namastis would share wine with Diokles and Dionysius.
‘I thought we weren’t going to have a battle,’ Abraham said wryly. He handed some really bad Aegyptian beer around. They were six days out from the stockpiles at Peleusiakos, and there wasn’t much of anything.
‘According to Philokles, Demetrios might have avoided battle if two things hadn’t worked against him.’ Satyrus felt very all-knowing. He was the only man in the phalanx who had information every evening, straight from the command staff, and it did a lot to reinforce his reputation. ‘The first was Seleucus, who stayed on his southern flank and harried him, so that every man he had lost in the sands of Nabataea came back to haunt him. My uncles have fought his cavalry three times and put up a trophy every time.’ He grinned, thinking of what Eumenes had told him about a certain fight in the sand.
‘Horse-boys,’ Dionysius said, but he lacked his usual venom.
Xeno took a swig of the beer, spat and pretended to crouch, as if in terror at the taste. ‘Ares, I’d rather drink water,’ he said. ‘Listen, mock the horse-boys all you want, friends. You’ll be happy enough to have them around if it comes to a fight.’
‘Listen to the old sweat!’ Abraham mocked. But he smiled, and Xeno smiled back.
Satyrus, full of information to impart, tried to be patient while he waited for silence. ‘Listen!’ he said. ‘Philokles says that the worst of it is his own pride, so that even when his father’s advisors told him to take the elephants and the best of his infantry and race for his depot he refused.’
‘He’s close,’ Dionysius said. He drank the beer and made a face. ‘Ares and Aphrodite, this is horse piss! No, listen! I’m serious!’
‘He would know,’ Xeno shot in, and roared with laughter. He didn’t get to score against Dionysius often.
‘Try this, then,’ said a low voice, and Satyrus found a wineskin pressed into his hand. He turned to see his sister’s eyes – Bion, he reminded himself. He gave her a hug.
‘Who’s that?’ Dionysius said. ‘Aphrodite’s insatiable cunny, gentlemen, our Satyrus has himself a boy. A boy in barbarian trousers! Satyrus, how could you? When you had me?’
There was a brief silence, and then Abraham slapped his thighs and roared with laughter, and so did all the men by the fire – even Namastis, who was not usually loud in his demonstrations, had to hold his gut. Xeno, Satyrus and Bion stood silen
t while half a dozen young men squirmed. Dionysius actually went to the ground. ‘Your face!’ Dionysius managed. ‘Your-’
Abraham stumbled over to Satyrus and put his hand on his arm. ‘God – you look fit to kill us. Joke, friend.’ His eyes flicked over Bion and in a stage whisper, he said, ‘We know.’ And then he sputtered a few times and subsided.
Satyrus found that he was smiling. So was Xeno. After a while, Bion smiled too. ‘Fuck the lot of you,’ he said in his low voice.
‘Don’t go leaving angry,’ Dionysius called. ‘Or if you do, leave the wine.’
That got another round of laughter, until voices from behind them ordered them to pipe down.
Half a skin of wine later, Dionysius declaimed his hymn to the breasts of an unknown avatar of Aphrodite. Bion drank wine indifferently, and when Dionysius lay down on his cloak, he found a snake – harmless, Bion assured him several anxious moments later.
Philokles and Theron came to drink the last of the wine. Theron gave Bion a long look but said nothing. Philokles produced his Spartan cup and filled it. ‘Who among you poured a libation?’ he said.
That silenced them.
‘What a thankless bunch of recruits you are. The noisiest men in the camp, and no libation?’ He poured a good half of his cup into the sand. ‘I offer this wine to all the gods – but most of all to Grey-Eyed Athena to keep us safe, and to that god most men never name – gentle Hades, take only the old and leave the young to enjoy their youth.’
‘That’s a chilly health, Strategos,’ Dionysius said.
Philokles shook his head. ‘Men will die tomorrow. Men you know. You may be dead yourselves. Lack of sleep could kill you as dead as an enemy arrow, lads. I doubt that ten of you could get any ill from one skin of wine, but I think it’s time to get in your cloaks and sleep.’
‘Still,’ Theron put in, after taking his sip of wine, ‘I’d rather hear my front rank laughing their arses off the night before a fight, than pissing in their beer.’
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