Tyrant: Force of Kings (59 page)

Artaxerxes grinned.

Pointed past Satyrus, who turned to see another Antigonid squadron forming against him. Another wedge. They formed so fast, Satyrus suspected they must be Companions before he saw the gold helmet and the purple plume and the white horse.

Demetrios himself.

Satyrus pointed to Eumeles.

Eumeles nodded. ‘What we came for,’ he said.

Satyrus slammed his sword back into the sheath under his arm. Some superstition – some piety – told him not to fight Demetrios with his guest gift. He took the long-handled Sakje axe from his saddle bow. Hefted it.

‘Demetrios is mine,’ he said. He took a deep breath against the weight of his breastplate and his fears, and his nostrils took in the smell of a wet cat.

Demetrios was annoyed that his best cavalry couldn’t seem to penetrate the line of elephants, but they merely blunted his attack without breaking it. Almost none of his men were killed – their horses simply refused to go forward.

It was the greatest frustration he had ever known – that victory was visible – the backs of the enemy phalanxes were just past the elephants. He could
see
them. The farm was open to him – as soon as he defeated either the elephants …

… or the cavalry covering their flank. He could
see
his father’s phalanx – the foot companions – pressing forward to the east of the farmyard.

This
was the moment.

He raised his spear. ‘Blow rally,’ he ordered. Pointed to the right, into the flank of the blue cloaks by the farm. By the time he shredded them, the elephants would be bypassed. Forgotten.

Enemy cavalry began to emerge from the collapsing mêlée just to the south.

He laughed, for he was the King of the Earth, and threw his sword glittering into the sun, and caught it by the hilt, and his Companions cheered him.

There was Satyrus of Tanais, a stade away, at the head of his knights, and nothing –
nothing –
could have given Demetrios the Golden more pleasure in that moment than to ride to victory over his chosen adversary.

His men, as aware of victory as he was himself, raised the paean.

The sky above the dust was blue and in the distance, far out over the plain to the west, mountains rose in purple and lavender, the most distant golden in the noonday sun. Up there, in the realm of the ether, all was peace. An eagle, best of omens, turned a lazy circle to his right. Or perhaps it was a raven.

Satyrus spat water and raised his axe.

‘Forward,’ he said. He twisted in his saddle, his last plans made. To Eumenes, he said, ‘When I go for Demetrios, stay tight. Don’t follow me.’

Eumenes looked surprised. Behind him, voices started the Song of Athena, that the hippeis of Olbia had sung since Kineas led them.

Come, Athena, now if ever!

Let us now thy Glory see!

Now, O Maid and Queen, we pray thee,

Give thy servants victory!

Satyrus was fifty horse lengths from Demetrios when he put his heels sharply into Panic’s sides, and she shot forward like a bolt from a bow. Demetrios was covered in armour.

His horse was not.

Satyrus’s actions were hurried, but he had all the time in the world, because this is what Srayanka made them practise from the time they could ride. And because he held the battle in the palm of his hand. His left hand. His bow hand.

He didn’t need to kill Demetrios. But he had to stop him. Absolutely had to stop him. At any cost.

His axe was on his wrist, the haft back along his right arm just off axis from the shaft he had ready there, and his bow came into his hand as if he was practising with the girls and boys on the Sea of Grass, and an arrow fitted itself on the bowstring, the horn nock seating home and the string back and back – his draw thumb against the corner of his mouth …

Demetrios’s look of shock as his horse went down, Satyrus’s shaft buried to the fletching in its neck. His bow in its gorytos because Mother would yell, his axe up and the flick of his wrist that sent the second man in the wedge to Hades, and Panic lived up to her name and rode through the lesser horses like they were blades of grass.

Satyrus knocked another man from his charger, and had time to think
I unhorsed Demetrios
before a blow caught him unprepared. He saw it come … knew he would never parry it in time … raised the haft of his axe …

Stratokles wrestled his opponent, punched the man with his shield rim, with his fist – that hurt – and when he crumpled, tried to take his spear, but he could no longer get his right hand to close. The spear fell away from him, and Stratokles watched it dumbly.

As far as he could see in the dust, men were killing other men.

He raised his shield on nothing but instinct, got his numb right hand onto the porpax to add strength. Took a wound in his thigh and kept his feet.

‘Down!’ shouted Lucius, and Stratokles let himself fall.

He turtled under his shield, so he didn’t see Plato and Gorgias cut into the men he’d been facing – killing two. Didn’t see Lucius behead a man with a single back-cut of his kopis.

Then Lucius offered him a hand. ‘I had no idea you were such a hero,’ he said.

Stratokles couldn’t tell whether it was said with irony, so he just smiled. He lacked the energy to say … anything.

Even drinking from his canteen was almost too much.

There was shouting to the left.

And cheers to the right.

‘We aren’t fighting anyone,’ Stratokles ventured.

Lucius stopped, listened. ‘Ares, he’s right.’

‘Where’s Herakles?’ Stratokles asked.

‘Down. Dead or wounded – I don’t know.’ Lucius shrugged. ‘I followed you.’

He had something of his taxeis – it was hard to tell, but most of the men around him had been front or second rankers. The cheers from his right could be anyone’s, but if they were Antigonid cheers, then the whole line was shattered, fuck it all. If they were Seleucid cheers, on the other hand …

After all, they had beaten their opponents – hadn’t they?

The sheer ignorance of his position made him want to laugh. Stratokles the Informer – the master spy – lost on a battlefield where he didn’t know friend from foe.

‘What’s funny?’ Lucius asked.

‘Me,’ Stratokles said. ‘We’re wheeling left! Rally, you bastards! Athena! Athena!’

Apollodorus led his third charge out from the farmyard into the flank of the enemy phalanx. He had become aware that the only thing that was holding Nikephorus’s men together was his own hornet-sting attacks.

Every man in the farmyard was fighting for his life – Andronicus had thrown his own elite taxeis and every man he could rally at the walls.

Apollodorus knew he was holding the linchpin of the alliance. He knew that the Exiles were dying in the fields to the south and west to keep him alive, and he did his best to support them with arrows and javelins. But they were dying.

‘Nikephorus is dead!’ came a panicked shout from the right.

Apollodorus wished there was someone to tell him what to do. But he was not a man to waste time.

He ran along the wall itself, jumped down into the flank file of the wreck of Nikephorus’s pikemen and grabbed a sarissa from a frightened man.

‘Nikephorus will live for ever! And so will we! Forward!’ he shouted, and the echo of the stone wall, or the voice of Athena at his shoulder, seemed to amplify his voice to the voice of a god.

Perhaps they never went forward. But for as long as a running man’s heart beat fifty times, they held.

And then they heard the shouts: ‘Athena, Athena.’

Soldiers have ways beyond the rational of understanding the carnage and the chaos and the fear, of navigating where no man could sail with his mind intact, of holding firm when the merely rational demands flight. Like sailors, soldiers are superstitious because they know in their hearts that the world of the mêlée is beyond the comprehension of the rational.

Nikephorus’s men – horrified by the elephant and demoralised by the death of their commander – had held. And as soon as they heard ‘Athena’ they
knew
that they had not lost.

They had won.

It was not a rational decision, because where they stood they were pinched between Antigonus’s finest infantry and the first signs of Demetrios’s cavalry, a few scattered riders trickling past the Exiles or past Satyrus’s Olbians, enough to have sent them reeling in panic just two minutes before.

Now, they raised their shoulders, set their hips, put their faces to the enemy, and pushed.

The second time forward, and Melitta led her knights halfway round the enemy formation, shooting as they rode – flowed her knights from a long, shooting file to a three-deep line facing the westernmost corner of the enemy square – and the arrows began to fall in sheets.

On the opposite face, the youngest tribesmen went too close and were gaffed like fish, but they shot and shot, from so close that a heavy war arrow might punch through an aspis and into an old man’s arm, or skip off his rim to break his nose. And old men’s shields begin to slump – who can keep a shield nose high for an hour?

The Macedonians charged again.

This time, Melitta’s knights didn’t flee far … and then they turned their horses. Melitta hauled her mare around on her haunches, perilously close to toppling, and was away. The Macedonians had spread in their charge and she was in among them, killing with her axe, and then they had closed their ranks again, leaving a carpet of dead and a smaller square.

They were superb.

Melitta intended to kill them all.

But it was Thyrsis and the young warriors who did the deed.

A boy – an eager boy – shot a phylarch above the knee, gave a whoop, and put his pony into the gap. An over-eager file closer thrust his spear into the boy’s horse; the horse twisted and fell, dumping the boy into the face of the square, falling on six men and twenty pike heads …

Quick as a trout takes the lure in a mountain stream, a pair of girls struck into the opening, shooting as they rode – one died, cut in half by a kopis, but the other girl’s horse crashed into the effectively disarmed men of the sixth and seventh ranks and died there, her rider cutting at men’s sandalled feet with her knife. Another boy raced through the widened gap, threw his weight forward, and died, punched from the horse’s back by a pike driven with the precision of a twenty-year veteran …

Thyrsis rode into the gap, killed a phylarch with his axe, and as his horse sank onto its haunches the Sakje Achilles urged him with his voice and the horse rose, powered by back legs the size of fence posts, and leaped – and Thyrsis was loose in the centre of the Argyraspid square.

And then, faster than even Melitta could understand, her people closed in, the dust cloud raged, and then …

There were only Sakje.

Satyrus came to with Eumenes under one arm and his Persian trumpeter under the other, and he was lying on the hillock above the farmyard, and the sound of battle – the lungs of Ares – made it all but impossible to hear what Eumenes was saying.

His head rang, and there was pain … everywhere.

‘Your helmet – you owe the bronzesmith!’ Eumenes said. He held a wet cloth against Satyrus’s head. ‘I don’t
think
your skull is broken.’

Memory returned slowly. ‘I dropped Demetrios!’ he said.

Eumenes nodded. ‘We tried to hold his body. His men fought like lions.’ The archon of Olbia smiled. ‘So did we. We got your corpse and they got his. It seemed a good trade when we found you alive.’

Satyrus sat up and wished he hadn’t. It was as if he had a girdle of spikes on his head. ‘Herakles!’ he said aloud.

Eumenes put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Win or lose, we’re done. My horses wouldn’t go forward again, and our remounts are six stades away, behind the elephants.’

‘Get me to my feet,’ Satyrus said.

A huge, hairy hand appeared in his peripheral vision, grabbed his arm and pulled.

‘I waited,’ Alexander said. ‘You look like shit. Now what do we do?’

Satyrus forced a smile. ‘Herakles,’ he prayed.

The farmyard was a charnel house. And the Exiles were giving way to yet more Lydians – or perhaps Phrygians or Mysians. Not giving way so much as dying.

But on the other side of the farmyard Antigonus’s phalanx was in trouble.

Satyrus made himself turn his head. ‘Charmides, dismount the escort.’ He took a drink of wine – unwatered wine – from Eumenes. ‘You are my favourite,’ he said to the archon.

‘Are you insane?’ Eumenes asked with admiration. Behind him, Coenus shook his head.

‘Alexander, form your peltasts as tight as you can. We go
through
the farmyard into the enemy phalanx.’ He met the giant’s eyes, and the man nodded.

‘We can do that,’ he said reasonably.

Charmides formed the surviving marines across the front of the crowd of peltasts. The Olbian hippeis left their horses and fell in. All in all, they had quite a few men, tipped with a thin front rank of men in full armour – head to toe armour, in fact.

Satyrus drew his sword, took a deep breath, and swallowed bile. He had to fight the reflex to retch. There was no time.

He took another swallow from his trumpeter – water – and Herakles cleared his head, so he could see it all: he saw Crax die under the tree behind the farmhouse, the last man in a knot of brave men, and a ring of enemies at his feet. He saw Diodorus, still mounted, still fighting, and Carlus, the German, with an axe, covering his back. He saw Apollodorus in the front of Nikephorus’s phalangites. And he saw Antigonus – a tired old man, pointing to the near collapse of the Exiles and shouting.

‘Now or never, lad,’ Coenus said.

‘Follow me,’ Satyrus shouted, and ran down the hillock into the farmyard.

They crashed through the enemy hoplites trying to storm the farmyard from the flank – scattered or killed them – then the horse marines and the Olbians plunged into the open flank of the Antigonid foot companions, heavily armoured men with axes and swords.