No man in Stratokles’ band had any love for Macedon.
Too late to stop and dress his line. Too late for order, too late for second thoughts, though his head was crowded with them.
The enemy made mistakes, too. Like pausing in their advance to rest with their sarauters planted in the deep earth of farm fields. The Ionian mercenaries appeared out of the wall of dust with a shriek. Just to Stratokles’ front, a lone elephant bolted at the shriek — turned, riderless, and ran straight into the Macedonians behind him. The animal’s flanks were gored red — blood flew off her when she turned.
Just to the left were two dead elephants — mere mounds of meat. But the pair of them were like terrain, covering his flank, if only for a few heartbeats.
Many of the Antigonids got their spears out of the ground and down. A spearhead struck Stratokles squarely in the shield; he stumbled, twisted, and would have lost his footing except that three or four more spear points hit his aspis and held him up. He raised his aspis until the spears scraped by over his head, and plunged in under their shafts, into the rage of Ares. He was screaming eleu eleu eleu eleu at the top of his lungs, and the world — Aristotle’s entire universe — was only as wide as the eye-slits in his Attic helmet.
His spear point skipped off a rimless aspis, rose with the working of his hips, and rammed into a man’s undefended throat.
And he roared.
Diodorus was already wounded. Something had gone into the gap at the base of his breastplate and scored his thigh — it hurt, and worse, the blood was pouring down his leg and over his white horse.
He had most of his men together. He’d lost Crax and the heavy squadron in the first fight, and Ares alone knew where they were — if they weren’t all dead. But his three line squadrons were well formed, watering their horses in the farmyard by rotation, and his prodromoi were prowling the edge of the dust cloud beyond the farm while he sat and bled and watched Demetrios win the battle.
The bastard.
Diodorus turned to Andronicus — technically his hyperetes, the cavalry version of a hypaspist, but the old Gaul was hardly a subordinate in any meaningful way.
‘He moved all his left-flank cavalry to the right, to face us,’ Diodorus said with professional admiration.
‘He didn’t need them,’ Andronicus the Gaul answered. ‘The Persians were men. The rest of them were like children.’ He spat, drank from his canteen. ‘Retire?’ he asked, after watching Demetrios reforming, his best squadrons virtually untouched.
Diodorus looked over his shoulder, where Satyrus’s friend Apollodorus garrisoned the farmhouse and walled farmyard and barns, and just beyond, where Nikephorus — a mercenary, but a long-time retainer of both Satyrus and Melitta — had advanced cautiously, keeping one flank of his double taxeis anchored on the farmhouse. The man was clearly trying to cover a gap — he’d already wheeled a quarter to the right, and then he’d extended his right, halving the depth of his phalanx — a desperate move, really.
Diodorus took his helmet off and tossed it to his field slave, Justus. He accepted water, poured some on his head. Emboldened, he raised the edge of his corselet, terrified that he would see a curl of intestine. His hands shook.
He had a scar like a woman’s birthing scar, where the spear point had crossed, riding on the inside of the bronze instead of punching through his body.
‘Gracious Athena,’ he said, immediately feeling better. Far from a mortal wound — a contemptible wound. Hurt like fire. No matter. ‘If we bugger off, the whole flank goes,’ he said. He was a far more confident man than he had been moments before.
Andronicus shrugged. ‘Battle’s lost,’ he said with professional acuity.
Diodorus tucked a knee carefully under his backside and stood on his horse’s back. The animal was patient — they’d done this a hundred times.
To the west, Demetrios was preparing his second strike: the hammer blow to finish Seleucus.
To the east, Prepalaus had given the order for the phalanx to advance. He probably had no idea of the disaster on his western flank. Or he knew about it, and by advancing, made Demetrios’s job more difficult, and hid the disaster from his own men.
To the south, suddenly, out of the dust came a thick column of elephants, fifty animals, at least, every one with a heavy war harness and a crew of four or five — pikes and bows, javelins. They were forming line from column even as he watched. Squadrons of cavalry were forming at either end of the massive beasts.
Diodorus pointed his spear at the nearest.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s us.’ He laughed, and Andronicus laughed too. The Olbians — younger and prettier — wore the same blue cloaks over beautiful armour, a fortune in horseflesh.
‘Back when we were young and beautiful,’ Andronicus said.
Diodorus couldn’t tell whether that was Gallic sarcasm or genuine regret.
Diodorus nodded, flexed his hand on his spear shaft, and looked out under his hand, trying to read the signs. Out in the dust, past Nikephorus, he heard the war cry of Athens — eleu eleu eleu eleu. He smiled.
‘This is our fight, my friend.’ Diodorus had made his decision.
Andronicus burnished his trumpet on a scrap of cloth. ‘Or rather, these are our friends, so we fight,’ he said.
Diodorus took one last look. Demetrios’s squadrons were starting forward — eight wedges, with solid blocks of lesser cavalry on either flank.
‘It will happen here,’ Diodorus said. ‘If the farm is lost, the day is over.’
Andronicus laughed. ‘The day is already over. You are like a pankrationist who refuses to accept the choke hold until he falls, unconscious or dead.’
Diodorus sat carefully back down in his seat and took his helmet from Justus. ‘Perhaps. Sound attention.’
Now Demetrios’s cavalry were rolling forward at a fast trot. Diodorus cantered to meet his squadron leaders.
‘That flank cavalry — Lydians. Horses already blown. Let them come to the edge of the farm fields — let the archers in the farmyard gall them. Then charge. We’ve practised it a thousand times — straight to a gallop from the stand. Got it?’
Then they were gone, back to their commands, and he was alone.
Once he sent them in, there would be no way out.
He thought of Kineas.
Satyrus led the Olbians forward, watching Demetrios, whose line of elite cavalry stretched away to the north and south, overlapping both ends of Seleucus’s reserve line. He had big blocks of Lydian or Phrygian cavalry at either end of his line of wedges — already cocked slightly in, like the horns of a great equine beast, planning to envelop the reserve.
Satyrus smiled an acknowledgement that Demetrios was responding brilliantly to Seleucus’s reserve ploy.
Diodorus was going to send the Exiles into the Lydians at the north end of Demetrios’s new line.
Satyrus aimed his rhomboid at the tip of the northernmost Antigonid wedge.
He wished he had more men, but he didn’t.
He lowered his lance, grabbed it with both hands, and rested his lower back against the pads of the Sakje saddle. ‘Trot!’ he called.
His Olbians — half Sakje, half Greek, horsemen from birth — went forward. They were not untried — most of them had served as bodyguard at Tanais River, nine years before. The men in the centre of the rhomboid would be readying bows, lances upright in lance buckets and straps, bows out of their gorytoi. Even a few arrows lobbed high in the moments before contact could wreck an enemy formation — plunging fire into the rumps of enemy horses. Kineas, his father, and Eumenes, and Urvara and Srayanka his mother had perfected it, out on the Sea of Grass before he was born.
The leather lace that held his cheek-plates together was loose and cut into his neck under his chin at every rise of the trot, but this charger had the finest, lightest trot he’d ever known.