Tyrant: Force of Kings (54 page)

Water was sent out to the revellers. And Satyrus walked from group to group as they dispersed, with his sister and his friends, clasping hands and wishing men good fortune. He found Draco regaling a crowd of Macedonians with some tale.

‘Bed,’ Satyrus said. Draco was so drunk that his face was flushed bright red – so flushed that it was visible by the flicker of firelight.

‘Killed that fucking doctor!’ Draco said, throwing his arms around Satyrus.

Satyrus’s thoughts were far away – he had no idea what the drunk veteran was saying. ‘Who?’ he asked.

Draco had a cloak rolled under his arm, and he laughed. ‘Wait a mo,’ he said, and howled with laughter. He unrolled the cloak with a practised flick, and the Macedonians cursed when they saw what was wrapped in the folds – but they laughed.

Melitta didn’t flinch. She picked the head up by the hair. ‘Sophokles,’ she said with satisfaction.

Satyrus spat to avoid retching. ‘Where’d you find him?’

Draco guffawed. ‘Wandering about the camp like the
fucking
spy he was.’

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I hate to think how many other spies Antigonus has with us,’ he said. ‘Stratokles, have you seen this?’

The Athenian looked at the head for a long time. Then he took it from Melitta. ‘I knew him,’ he said, with unusual candour. ‘Sometimes we were comrades. May I take this for burial?’

Draco nodded. ‘Sure. Listen, I could take you to his body. I left it in his tent.’ He laughed.

Anaxagoras watched the two of them go off into the darkness together. ‘What does peace hold for them?’ he asked.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I take your meaning,’ he said, ‘but there must be something. Draco is more like the ruin of a man than a man.’

‘I do not speak this way because I love war,’ Anaxagoras said, ‘although I confess that it does have sharp joys, like love. But merely because of what I observe. Draco lives
here
, the way a farmer lives on his farm. And he killed that assassin. Without him …’

Satyrus nodded. And sighed, and clasped his sister’s hand. They walked to the fire, and poured libations – one for their father, and another for their mother, and a last for Philokles. He could feel them, right there in the darkness.

An hour later, Draco and Stratokles came to the fires. They had burned well down, but the piles of embers were as high as a man’s thighs, and Draco went off into the dark and returned with Phoibos and a file of slaves, and they piled one fire high with fresh logs – old cedar, from a fence up the valley. And then the Macedonian picked up the corpse of the Athenian doctor and hoisted it onto the fire, burning his leg in the process. And Stratokles put the head with the corpse, and poured wine and oil on the fire. Stratokles went to put oil on the Macedonian’s burns, but the man stumbled away into the dark.

Lucius found Stratokles sitting alone, wrapped in his chlamys, watching the fire burn down.

‘He was no friend of yours,’ Lucius said.

Stratokles nodded.

‘By the gods – he wasn’t working for you?’ Lucius demanded. ‘We are … I thought you’d chosen a side.’ He spoke with sudden suspicion.

‘I have,’ Stratokles said. He sounded tired. ‘I’ve chosen a side, and tomorrow, I will stand in the front rank of my own phalanx and do my best to see Antigonus defeated. But Sophokles and I…’ He looked away. ‘We started together. We ended differently. But I wonder, sitting here, if tomorrow my body will go in a pit – a life of scheming, and a few moments of brutality.’ He shook his head and reached out for Lucius’s canteen, which was handed to him, full of heavy, sweet wine. ‘We started together. I don’t think it’s too late for us to end together.’ He drank.

Lucius took the canteen back and took a drink. ‘Stratokles, you’ve been a good boss. And I’ve made money … piles of money. But win or lose, tomorrow is the end. I’ve had enough for a couple of years … to go back and buy my exile off.’ He shrugged, sat back. ‘So let’s stop being so fucking maudlin and enjoy tomorrow.’

‘One more time?’ Stratokles said. ‘You’ll keep me alive?’

‘Have I ever let you down?’ Lucius asked. ‘You’re alive, aren’t you, you thankless Greek?’

They laughed.

23

Seleucus assumed that he was the commander, and neither Lysimachos nor Prepalaus gainsaid him, so when he summoned the strategoi at dawn, they came, still full of the good fellowship of the night before.

Seleucus was back to his reserved, cautious and dignified self. He nodded as Satyrus came up, and handed around cups of water. ‘If you expect a complex battle plan,’ he said, ‘you are in the wrong tent.’

While they chuckled, he led them out onto the open space in front of his pavilion, and then up the hill to its highest point, where they could see the broad, flat extent of the plain from the low ridges to the east, all the way to the river on the west – a patchwork of small fields wearing the colours of summer in the first light of day.

Lysimachos nodded agreement without a word being said.

Prepalaus frowned. ‘We are facing the subtlest and most able mind of the age,’ he said.

‘We have more cavalry and more elephants, and with this many men from this many lands, the best we can hope for is that we all go forward together and we don’t fight among ourselves,’ Seleucus said. ‘I wish to put all the infantry in the centre – Prepalaus and all of the mercenary foot – Prepalaus on the right, by the single olive tree. That is where your rightmost file will form – clear of the village, and facing the open ground.’

Prepalaus nodded, a man reserving judgement.

‘My sense is that our phalanx is smaller. We will only fill the plain to the walled farm … no, there, to the left.’ He was pointing with a baton, and Satyrus shook his head.

‘That’s ten
stades
,’ he said.

Seleucus nodded.

Antiochus smiled. ‘Twelve stades and some odd paces, Satyrus. I paced it off myself. Enough for a phalanx formed sixteen deep and three thousand four hundred files wide at the normal order.’

Satyrus thought of his largest battle – at Gaza—and the only one where he had commanded an army, at the Tanais River. At Tanais, both sides would have vanished into fifty thousand men, and that was just one phalanx.

‘He will overreach us on one flank or both,’ Seleucus said. ‘Outguessing Antigonus is a waste of time. So let us assume both. We will divide our cavalry evenly on both flanks. Lysimachos, I wish you to take the right-flank cavalry. I wish all of the Saka and Sakje there. My own cavalry will form on the left, under my son. Diodorus will hold the extreme left of the line, with his leftmost files on the river.’

Seleucus turned to Satyrus. ‘I regret that I have, in effect, broken your contingent among all the commands – your cavalry is with Lysimachos, your infantry with Prepalaus, and the Exiles are with my son.’

Satyrus nodded. He was irked – he was not an inexperienced commander, and he’d just been deprived of a command.

Every eye was on him.

He thought,
None of them are satisfied. Lysimachos wants more cavalry. Prepalaus wants command of the whole centre. And if I voice my complaints, I do not help the alliance. And why am I here?

And next to these men, I
am
the least experienced.

He nodded. ‘I will hold myself in reserve, then,’ he said. ‘Where will you be?’

‘I will keep a thousand cavalry and fifty elephants in reserve,’ Seleucus said.

‘Fifty elephants!’ Prepalaus exclaimed. ‘But we could have them in the front line.’

Seleucus nodded. ‘Perhaps. But they are mine, and I believe that a battle of this size can only be won with a massive stroke – a knockout blow. This will not be a dustless victory, gentlemen. My plan – if it can be called a plan – is to abide. To take the best punch that Antigonus and Demetrios can throw, and to have one more punch to throw back. I will echelon the phalanx – Prepalaus and his Macedonians on the far right, and every taxeis eight files back, like a set of steps.’

They nodded. That was the formation that they had all known since Philip’s time.

‘The right-hand cavalry forward, the left-hand cavalry back behind the leftmost phalanx – your Nikephoros’s men, I think. They can hold the left end of the line.’

‘We let them approach us?’ Lysimachos asked.

Seleucus shook his head. ‘No, that’s bad for morale. No, when we are formed, we will go forward. But the left flank cavalry – I want you to hold back. Wait my signal.’

Satyrus leaned in. ‘Where do you plan to throw your knockout punch?’ he asked.

Seleucus shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘If the battle goes as I plan – and I don’t expect it – I will throw them at the junction between their right-flank cavalry and their left-end phalanx.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘But that is pure hubris. I will throw them where I must.’

A slave – or perhaps a freeman, but certainly Seleucus’s secretary – walked around the group, handing out wax tablets bound in wood.

‘This is the order in which I wish you to form,’ he said, ‘with the name of every contingent. All of the psiloi and all of the peltastoi into the centre. I doubt that their order matters very much – they won’t last long.’

‘Don’t let the useless fuckers disorder my phalanx,’ Prepalaus said.

Lysimachos was not quite so contemptuous of his Thracians. ‘Form with gaps,’ he said. ‘Files double back so that the peltasts can come through. It’s foolishness to ask them to go out and discomfort the enemy phalanx and not take some precaution for their exit from the centre.’

Prepalaus shrugged, obviously uncaring.

Satyrus leaned forward again. ‘I wish to support the King of Thrace in this,’ he said. ‘If there are gaps then even cavalry can be committed to the skirmish battle in the centre. And when the peltastoi retire, they can be collected and added to the reserve.’

Prepalaus snorted, but Antiochus agreed, and Seleucus was swayed. ‘It is true,’ he allowed, ‘that it seems wasteful to leave the peltastoi to die, but there’s no room for them on the flanks. Very well. If every taxeis has four files pulled in the centre of its line, that’s a two-horse gap every stade.’

Prepalaus shook his head. ‘Those gaps will collapse shut every time we lose, and those men are lost out of the line,’ he said.

Seleucus crossed gazes with the older Macedonian. Finally Prepalaus shrugged. ‘On your head be it,’ he said. ‘But listen, King of Babylon, you are going head to head with Antigonus One-Eye at even odds. I would rather we were trying
something
– a feigned retreat, a night march, a fight in the rain. Anything. None of us have ever beaten him. Eh? And your plan is to accept whatever he does and
then
attack.’

Satyrus nodded. ‘That’s how you win a sword fight,’ he said. ‘Or pankration.’

‘Oh,’ Prepalaus smiled grimly. ‘And you are an expert?’

Satyrus nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Antiochus laughed. ‘You sure you’re not a Macedonian?’ he asked.

They poured libations, first to Zeus Soter, and then to Athena, and then to Alexander.

‘Gentlemen,’ Seleucus said, ‘I wish that Tyche may stand by one shoulder of every man while Athena guards the other with Nike at her side, and the Eagle of Zeus over all.’

Even Prepalaus smiled.

‘Go with the gods. Let’s get formed. If we form well, that’s more than half the battle.’

Lysimachos saluted and went to his staff, standing apart, and started issuing orders. Prepalaus had his son with him – he sent the younger man running to the Macedonian camp.

Antiochus clapped Satyrus on the back. ‘Don’t let the old bastard get to you,’ he said.

Satyrus shook his head. ‘I thought that it would be Lysimachos refusing to play the tune. I worried that someone would play traitor. I didn’t expect Cassander’s general to be an old fool.’

Seleucus shook his head. ‘He’s no fool, King of the North. And I expect he’ll be steady enough when the bronze is in the air. And all his griping tells me that he’s planning to fight. If he stood silently, accepting my orders …’ He said no more, but he didn’t have to.

They all dreaded treason, even now.

Antigonus had slept poorly, and he swore in answer to his son’s greeting.

‘The so-called allies are forming,’ he said.

Antigonus stood still, a slave helping him drink pomegranate juice while two more slaves armed him. He had a heavy horseman’s thorax of solid bronze.

‘I don’t want this thing,’ he said. ‘I’m going on foot with the phalanx. If those bastards don’t see me there, they won’t stand their ground.’

Demetrios motioned to the slaves. ‘Wear scale, then, or leather.’

‘Are you a complete fool?’ Antigonus asked one of the slaves pettishly, and struck the boy so that he fell. He didn’t whimper.

‘I feel like shit,’ Antigonus said. ‘Something in my guts. Have any dreams?’

Demetrios shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘I did – I dreamed about a lot of good lads from Pella who’ve died following me around.’ The old man shrugged, his shoulders free of the heavy armour. ‘Something light – that’s the way,’ he said to the same slave he’d just hit.

They had a thorax of white leather and heavy linen, carefully quilted.

‘That’s what I want,’ said the old man. ‘And greaves.’

‘You aren’t going in the front rank?’ Demetrios asked.

‘I’m the fucking king,’ Antigonus said. ‘What kind of king hides from a fight he started himself ? Eh? I taught you better than that. When kings hide from their own fights then the world will have gone to Hades.’

Demetrios hugged his father, quite spontaneously. ‘Let’s win this thing, and rule the world,’ he said.

Antigonus grinned. ‘You are a good boy,’ he said gruffly, his voice thick. ‘By the gods …’ He slapped Demetrios’s back.

Together, they walked to the door of the pavilion. The arming slaves were just getting a pair of sarissas so that the king could have his choice of weapons. The saurauter of the nearest was on the carpet as the slave took it down from the loops on the side of the tent, and it was on the old man’s blind side. The saurauter caught his ankle, and he fell flat in the door of his tent, the wind knocked out of him, his left wrist pressed right back against his body. He shrieked with pain, and every head turned for a stade to see their king lying on his face.