‘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 alclass="underline" 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.
The peltasts had other ideas. Not for them the desperate mêlée. As soon as the farmyard was clear — Apollodorus’s surviving marines cheering like heroes, hunting the last Antigonids out of the barns — the peltasts ran to the walls and threw everything they had — every carefully hoarded javelin, every spear, and then rocks from the walls — down into the right front corner of the Antigonid phalanx.
Satyrus found himself virtually alone, breast to breast with fresher men, fighting for his life. He had no idea, but two horse lengths away Antigonus One-Eye, terror of Asia, the greatest strategist of his era, was dead, with a pair of javelins in his breast and his helmet crushed by a rock thrown by a Thracian peltast. And with his death, the phalanx seemed to die. Again, the knowledge of his loss seemed to be transmitted instantly to every hoplite of his army.
The Foot Companions broke.
By the olive tree behind the farm, Diodorus sat on his exhausted charger, the big gelding’s legs straddling the corpse of Andronicus the Gaul, killed by ten men. Half a dozen wary Lydians faced Diodorus. He’d already killed two. He had a spear in his hand, and since this was the end, he had no need to surrender — to live to see a day of defeat.
Victory, or death without knowledge of defeat. Wasn’t that what men asked of the gods?
Goodbye, Sappho, who made my life a joy.
Kineas, I’m coming, and taking at least one more of these bastards with me.
He backed his horse a step, and shortened his reins, and saw a wave of peltasts come over the farmyard wall behind the Lydians. They were so wild, he thought they must be panicked, routed men.
The Lydians turned their heads, almost as one man.
One took a rock in the side, and fell. Diodorus’s spear licked out and took another.
Diodorus could see men he knew — the archon of Olbia, the boy Eumenes — not a boy any more, but one of the old ones. He had an axe, and he was waving it, and suddenly the Lydians were gone.
Diodorus’s horse died gracefully — he gave Diodorus time to slide from his back, and subsided to the ground, faithful to the very last. Diodorus was left standing in the shade of the olive tree, a spear in his hand.
When Eumenes came to embrace him, he had fifty troopers gathered around him, and they managed to form something like a line on the spot Andronicus the Gaul had died because, like Diodorus, they weren’t dead. And that meant that they had to keep to their standards.
Eumenes hugged him. ‘We … won!’ he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
Diodorus let out a long, deep sigh. ‘I guess I’m alive, then,’ he said. He thought of Niceas and Graccus, of Philokles, of Crax and Andronicus and Kineas and all of them.
One of his youngest troopers — a new boy out from Athens, named Niceas, too — was drinking. ‘Can I offer you some, sir?’ he asked Diodorus.
Well-mannered boy. ‘What’s in that canteen, lad?’
The boy smiled. ‘Wine, sir.’
Diodorus took the canteen and poured half of its contents into the blood-soaked ground. ‘Nike!’ he said.
24
Miriam arrived at Tanais after the fall of the last of Plistias’s garrisons opened the Propontus to allied ship traffic, and she rode the first ship north into the Euxine. Her brother’s ship.
She landed at Tanais, and Theron took her to the citadel, where she felt like a stranger. He took her to the agora, where she felt like a stranger, and to the synagogue, where Alexandrian Jews she’d known from infancy made her feel … like a stranger.
If I stay here, she thought, this will be my life. Always an outsider.
She stood in the agora, on the third uncomfortable day.
‘Recognise him?’ Abraham asked her, pointing at the gilded bronze statue on its marble pedestal.
She shrugged. ‘I can read,’ she said. ‘I met Philokles, but I don’t remember him being plated in gold.’
Abraham laughed. ‘And this is Satyrus’s father, Kineas. And this woman must by the famous Srayanka.’
Miriam nodded, her heart thudding in her chest and her breath short. What she felt was like rage. ‘No statues for our parents, of course,’ she said.
‘Miriam!’ Abraham said.
‘You know, brother, you wear armour when it suits you, command a fighting ship, when it suits you. Play feed the flute girl … I’ve heard. Stop affecting to be shocked by your sister. There are things in the world I don’t love right now.’
‘You want to go?’ Abraham asked.
‘No, brother, you want to go. You want to go and stand in the phalanx and save him. You burn, even now.’ She crossed her arms over her breasts.
Behind her, Achilles and Ajax looked at each other and took a few steps away.
Abraham held his temper. ‘It is too late,’ he said. ‘If Leon is right, they fought a few days after we carried the city.’ He shrugged. ‘I knew when I took command that I might miss the fight. It is Leon I feel for.’
‘Why must you be so relentlessly good?’ Miriam asked.
She whirled to see her three hardened killers dissolve in mirth.
Theron dined with them — insisted that Achilles and Ajax and Odysseus recline, and they were served by the chief steward.
Theron’s physique was unaffected by the years … apparently. He looked magnificent by lamplight, and he led them in some poetry, poured wine for all of them, and did his best to make Miriam happy.
The next morning, he appeared at the door to her room. At his back was a lovely woman — perhaps thirty.
‘I am Kallista,’ she said, entering Miriam’s room. ‘Theron seems to think you need cheering up.’
Miriam shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
Kallista smiled. She was beautiful and had the gracious good manners of great ladies. Great Hellene ladies. ‘You are the woman Satyrus wants. If you want him, that’s all you need worry about.’
Miriam looked at this lady, and hated her, at least in part for her perfectly plucked eyebrows, conical breasts and neat hair. ‘I am a Jew,’ she said with tragic finality.
Kallista nodded for a moment. ‘You never met me in Alexandria?’ she said.
Miriam shook her head.