Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

  The boy’s face was dead white despite his swarthy looks, but he managed a twitch of the lips.

  Satyrus reined around, and there was Scopasis, already mounted, with a dozen of his archers behind him.

  ‘That man is a dead man,’ Scopasis said. He pointed at the Sakje arrow in the stallion’s haunch.

  ‘He’s the best horse I’ve ever ridden,’ Satyrus said with all the pent-up emotion of the fight.

  Scopasis said. ‘You are just like your sister.’

  Satyrus managed a laugh. He was going to live.

  As always, the aftermath was far worse than the fight. Almost a third of their force was wounded – the Lydians had been trapped by Stratokles, who was rueful.

  ‘I should have let them go,’ he said, while the trumpeter poured wine on his shoulder wound and he winced. ‘ARES!’ he bellowed, and then subsided. ‘Oh, Tartarus. That hurts like a fucker. I should know better – I was behind them, and I should have let them go.’

  Scopasis nodded. ‘Trapped men fight to the death,’ he said. ‘Better to let them flee and then kill them.’

  ‘How are the Bithynians?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘Regular furies when aroused. As soon as poor Darius was killed, they were wild to avenge him.’ Stratokles arched his back and stifled a scream of pain. All that came out was a grunt. ‘Fuck that’s deep. Lucius, tell me how bad it is.’

  ‘Better than you deserve,’ Lucius said. ‘Deep. But all in fat and muscle – spear point, not a cutting edge. More wine here. And some honey.’

  Satyrus didn’t have a wound, but his foot felt as if it had been trodden by an elephant, not a horse, and he couldn’t walk. ‘Darius is dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Tragic, really,’ Stratokles said. ‘Ow!’ he grunted.

  Herakles was not dead, but his leg was broken in two places, and he had a spear thrust that penetrated the top of the thigh and emerged from the base, and while it had not severed the artery, he had lost blood and slipped into unconsciousness every time he awoke. Charmides had wounds on both arms. Anaxagoras was untouched.

  So was Scopasis. He took command. With Darius Thrakes dead, the Bithynians could be mixed in with the Sakje without any deference at all.

  The Getae nobleman, Calicles, had a nasty cut across his face. ‘I need a better helmet,’ he said ruefully. ‘Never been in that close a fight before. Not really what we do. That’s for Greeks.’ He looked around. ‘My boys feel that the Sakje might not be so bad,’ he said with a half smile. ‘And isn’t it convenient that Darius the Thracian is dead? Can I just put in my two obols? I’m totally harmless and not minded to desert, yes?’

  Satyrus didn’t want to drink wine, lest he pass out, but water tasted like blood in his mouth. ‘It’s a nasty business,’ he said. ‘War, I mean.’

  Calicles nodded. ‘I’m a hostage,’ he said. ‘That’s why I was sent.’

  Stratokles was trying his wound, moving his left arm up and down. He looked at the Thracian. ‘Save it,’ he said. ‘You won’t come to any harm from us.’ He looked purely evil, just then, with his cut nose and scarred face, but Satyrus could see that it was only age, fatigue, and self-disgust.

  Satyrus glanced at Stratokles. ‘Where did Darius die?’

  ‘Our first fight – up the ridge a piece. Took a javelin in the ribs. I didn’t even see him go down. Bastards desecrated his corpse. When we found him, the Bithynians went wild.’ Stratokles met his eye without hesitation.

  Scopasis grunted. ‘Useless fuck,’ he said.

  What an epitaph, Satyrus thought.

  They’d taken heavy casualties, but they’d never again have a chance like they had right then to capitalise on their victory. It was the Sakje way: follow victory, abandon defeat. Satyrus kept his bodyguard and all the wounded, and Scopasis took the surviving Sakje, Getae and Bithynians over the crest of the ridge at dark and into the enemy camp.

  Satyrus watched it from the ridge top – not the least sorry not to be participating. He followed the line of Scopasis’s raid by the sparks that flew from the fires as the Sakje killed men sleeping by them, and from the tents that burned.

  In truth, the damage done was minimal. The next morning, when the raiders had returned and lay like the dead, sleeping by their horses, there wasn’t a sign of the raid in the enemy camp besides a few dozen charred tents and a single corpse – a sentry killed in the dark and still unfound by his mates, but already visited by a pair of vultures.

  Ten more of Satyrus’s men had died in the night, some making a great deal of noise. They had almost fifty prisoners. When Scopasis’s raiders were ready to move, Satyrus rode over to the Lydians.

  ‘Cut them loose,’ he said, and Draco and Charmides began cutting the thongs that held their wrists.

  It would be an hour or more before they had anything like circulation in their hands.

  ‘I’m taking your horses,’ Satyrus said. ‘I recommend you go home.’ He left them there, at the edge of the meadow where their fellow men had died.

  His foot still hurt. His back hurt. He hadn’t been in the saddle this long since he was nineteen.

  But Antigonus had lost the southern ridge, and that meant that he could not outflank their position on the lake. Satyrus left Scopasis and the best of the Bithynians and Sakje, and took the rest of the men back to camp, their dead thrown over the captured horses.

  Lysimachos was unimpressed. ‘You wanted to go play horse,’ he said, looking at the line of dead men. ‘My Getae will not love you after this.’

  Satyrus twitched. ‘Is it nothing to you that we burned part of the enemy camp? That we, not Antigonus, hold the southern valleys?’

  Lysimachos nodded. ‘It is not nothing. But while you were gone, the old bastard moved his siege engines forward a stade and he’s pounding my first-line forts. Only my best pikemen will even go up there.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘Plenty of war for everyone, then,’ he said heavily. To the east, storm clouds were gathering. He limped off to find Jubal.

  Jubal was building a third line of forts – earthen mounds reinforced by timber, with embrasure-mounted engines. They weren’t very well made, but they were there.

  Jubal clasped hands. ‘Lord,’ he said. He nodded. ‘Lysimachos, he’s going to lose the first line, eh? Let him. I can build them faster than he loses them.’

  ‘Ares,’ Satyrus said. ‘What a way to fight a war.’ But he had seen this kind of war at Rhodes, and it held no surprises for him – unlike the meadow full of bees.

  That night, Lysimachos’s best pikemen set fire to the timbers of the first line and retired in good order. An hour later, the engines of the second line dropped mythemnoi-sized baskets of gravel on the former first line and the Apobatai charged forward into the survivors of some of Antigonus’s peltasts, shaken from the bombardment and broken by the charcoal-blackened mercenaries.

  The Apobatai retired again with the dawn, leaving a smoking ruin. The first line had cost Antigonus more than three hundred men, and all it had cost Lysimachos was a few bushels of rocks.

  The rains came back the next night, and Antigonus assaulted the second line under cover of rain so fierce a man couldn’t raise his face to it without pain. The fields between the armies turned to mud, ankle deep or worse. Jubal’s entrenchments had drainage, and the fields in front of them didn’t; the Antigonids gave themselves away squelching through the mud, and the Lysimachids were ready for them. But after a desperate fight shot with lightning, the old Macedonian veterans pushed the younger men out of the second line forts.

  But Jubal already had a fourth line prepared, racing against the rains, and the engines of the third line poured his carefully hoarded stones onto the Antigonids, who discovered that the second line forts were designed to offer no cover from the third line. Antigonus tried again two nights after the rains returned, and they were stopped cold – and bled – in the lightning-so
aked ditches. They were still there in daylight, and Satyrus fought in the mud with Charmides and Anaxagoras on either side of him. He threw javelins, yelled encouragement, and for heart-breaking minutes faced desperate men coming up mud-soaked ladders from the ditch. At the end, they offered surrender to the enemy men trapped at the top of the forts, and they accepted gratefully, dropping their shields and sinking to their knees in the mud.

  It was probably those prisoners, when they were returned two days later, who told their mates that there was a son of Alexander, alive, in the enemy camp. The wound in his thigh was inflamed, but the Lord of the Silver Bow had not sent red contagion to kill the young man, and the doctors were confident he would recover.

  Satyrus rode with a dozen men as escort under Nikephorus, and Lysimachos with twice as many. Antigonus was waiting in the mud at the edge of the lake, and the rain fell like the contempt of the gods.

  Satyrus had heard of the old man all his life, but never met him. Now he saw Antigonus, and his respect – bordering on awe – went up threefold. Antigonus was as straight as a sarissa, wearing armour that would make a younger man tired. His white-haired arms were corded in muscle, and the bronze of his cuirass probably covered more of the same.

  Satyrus saluted him – the pankrationist’s salute.

  Antigonus One-Eye nodded. ‘You’ll be the King of the Bosporus,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Satyrus said.

  Antigonus ignored Lysimachos as if he wasn’t even there.

  ‘I reckon you won this round, boy,’ the old man said. ‘I’d like a day to recover my dead – if I can find them in the mud – and two days free to retreat. In exchange, I won’t come back this year.’

  Lysimachos spat. ‘The year’s over, old man. These are winter rains.’

  Antigonus’s gaze never left Satyrus. ‘I hear the wind sighing,’ he said. ‘Three days’ truce.’ He shrugged. ‘Or I put it to the boys that we’re in trouble, and I put my whole army into your lines and see what I can do.’

  Lysimachos grinned. ‘Even if you won, you’d be done. Seleucus or Ptolemy would eat you alive.’

  Antigonus’s face was stone. ‘Tell the foolish wind that it would make no difference to him. He’d be dead.’ Antigonus was an old man, but his voice held … power.

  Lysimachos narrowed his eyes. ‘Bring it,’ he said.

  Satyrus shook his head. Lysimachos’s Thracians had been deserting for days, headed home across the Propontus. And the pikemen weren’t much better. Even Stratokles’ men – even Nikephorus’s men – had desertions. The weather was appalling. The mud was an awful place to die.

  Satyrus rode over to Lysimachos. ‘I know you hate him,’ he said quietly, ‘but if we win a pitched battle, the best we’ll get is retreat. He’s offering to retreat. Let him go with honour.’

  Lysimachos took a deep breath. He seemed on the edge of a speech. But the hint of a smile crossed his lips, and he nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  In two days, Antigonus was gone into Mysia.

  But the rains continued, and with winter, the pestilence came.

  Part V

  ‘You have to hand it to him,’ Sophokles said to the empty air. ‘He has more lives than a cat, and he has changed the war.’

  ‘Isokles will kill him for me. You have failed,’ Phiale said. She was on a swing, well over his head – one of the divertissements of Lycurgus’s new Temple of Aphrodite. Sophokles was practising his knife pass, over and over, and apparently talking to the wall – or to the statue of Aphrodite as a war-goddess.

  ‘Isokles may be a dab hand at terrifying prostitutes, but he’s not exactly a man-killer,’ Sophokles said.

  ‘He’s quite mad. Perhaps god-possessed. Who knows?’ Phiale’s voice was dreamy.

  ‘Well, if so, perhaps he has a chance, because Satyrus and Melitta are, between them, quite the most god-helped pair I’ve encountered. I look forward to killing them’ – Sophokles flicked his dagger from right to left hand before making his lunge – ‘because it appeals to my highly developed sense of hubris.’

  Phiale leaped from her swing and landed like the dancer she was. ‘Satyrus has a lover,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not really surprising,’ Sophokles put in.

  ‘Shush, you are ingracious. His lover is, if you can imagine, some barbarian girl of Alexandria. I want you to take her for me.’ She smiled over her shoulder at him and did a back flip, which stripped her, as her chiton fell away at the top of her leap.

  Sophokles collected her garment, dabbed at his face with it, and handed it to her. ‘You have a superb body, despoina. I will not kill some barbarian slave in Alexandria for you. It is beneath me.’

  Phiale kicked off her sandals. ‘I could say that a barbarian in Alexandria might be your speed. If I was in a cruel mood.’

  Sophokles stopped moving, tossed his dagger into the base of the statue of Aphrodite, and watched her. She was naked, standing on the balls of her feet, her very pose an inflammation.

  ‘Am I being seduced?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Seduction is subtle.’ Phiale stepped inside his guard and ran a thumb up his thigh, brushed his penis with her fingers, and slipped away from him with the same sort of motions he used in combat. ‘This is more direct,’ she said.

  She turned, her eyes never leaving him, and lay down on the side altar.

  She had two killers to suit her needs, and she could bind them both with simple tools – her body, hard silver. But in the Temple of Aphrodite she was a priestess, and with a partner she could work the most powerful and dangerous magics.

  Sophokles rutted away – in this, he was no assassin, but merely a typical man – and she chanted her spell to his rhythm. And she built the force of it in her head until it was a black dove, and she sent it winging away across the sea.

  Isokles had a house in Heraklea and a pair of slaves, and his six men terrorised the neighbourhood. It was a good life. Isokles had messengers from Phiale, and from Cassander, and he revelled in his role as a dangerous man, courted by important people. He had wealth and position. He had been received by Amastris herself. He paid bribes to a dozen of her court functionaries, and he bribed her slaves, and if Stratokles had still been in her employ, he would by now have caught the intruder and punished him. But Amastris had made a different choice, and her captain of the guard was one of the men Isokles paid so well.

  Isokles drank wine, forced sex on his slaves, and waited for spring, like a hideous spider waiting in a nearly invisible web.

  Diodorus lay on a couch in the heat of Babylon. Sappho, his wife, lay on a separate couch. It was that hot.

  ‘Will Seleucus go?’ Sappho asked.

  It was the question on the lips of every informed man and woman in the city. Lysimachos had requested that Seleucus come north and west with his army. It was an open secret that Lysimachos had almost been destroyed in the autumn, that Cassander was a wreck, that Ptolemy had retired to Aegypt in disgust.

  It was said that Antigonus had two hundred elephants and eighty thousand men.

  Diodorus was sixty years old. It lay lightly on him – his chest was still as well muscled as his breastplate, and his arms were like the arms of a statue of Ares. But his hair was entirely white. He sat up, and a slave fanned him harder, mistaking his motion for a demand for a cool breeze.

  Diodorus looked at the woman he loved and shook his head. ‘Want to go back to winters?’ he asked. ‘I can’t go back to Alexandria. And I think I’m getting too old for this. Time to retire.’

  ‘Tanais?’ she asked.

  ‘We own about a third of it, you and I,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘So Seleucus has summoned me for the second hour after the sun is at its peak to speak to him about Satyrus of Tanais,’ Diodorus said. ‘He has no love for Lysimachos.’

  ‘I coul
d go home,’ Sappho said.

  ‘Home?’ Diodorus asked.

  ‘Olbia, where my life changed. Or Tanais.’ She smiled, and rose from her couch. ‘Babylon is too hot,’ she said. ‘And the bugs are oppressive, and the locals are too subservient. The only people to talk to here are the Jews and the Medes.’ She laughed. ‘Listen to me. I was a slave for six years, and now I talk like a Macedonian.’

  Diodorus bent and kissed her. ‘May I make a confession?’ he said.

  ‘You made love to my new washerwoman? In that case, you can wash your own fighting clothes.’ She hit him with her fan.

  ‘The one with the squint, or the one with the strange skin disease? No. I wish to confess that I want to take the Exiles north and fight. If Seleucus goes, this will be the end. One way or another. The last cast of the dice.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my curse.’

  ‘Damn that Kineas. He had to tell you that he left you all his battles.’ Sappho had heard the story a hundred times.

  ‘If he was alive, he would be there.’ Diodorus waved a slave towards him.

  ‘If he was alive …’ Sappho said, and smiled. ‘I hear Satyrus made a brilliant campaign.’

  ‘He changed the war,’ Diodorus said with satisfaction.

  ‘He is like his father,’ Sappho said.

  Diodorus shrugged. ‘Yes and no. Kineas was a mercenary with the heart of a king. Satyrus is a king with the heart of a mercenary.’

  Sappho shook her head. ‘No. I know him better than you. He is a man of worth. Like my brothers. Like you, my dear.’

  Diodorus raised an eyebrow. ‘That is my yearly compliment – I had better treasure it. I hope he is a man of worth, my dear, because he has become the linchpin of this year’s campaign. I’d best be going.’

  ‘Give Seleucus and his paramour my deepest obeisance,’ Sappho said.

  ‘With or without the sarcasm?’ Diodorus asked, but the question was apparently rhetorical, as he didn’t wait for an answer.