The officer was wearing a sword. He drew it, leaned down, and cut Polycrates’ throat. ‘Arse-cunt,’ he said. He giggled. ‘Now you, so-called king, you can just come along with-’
Satyrus lunged. He got a hand on someone’s elbow and he put his feet under him — struggled, and someone hit him, and he was stumbling, but free of one confining arm … free of the other, and training took over.
He got a man’s arm and broke it, the bone going with a dull crack like a green limb breaking on an olive tree. The man screamed, and Satyrus kicked him into two more men who stumbled back. Satyrus ducked — instinct alone — as a club tagged his shoulder instead of his head. Pain, but no permanent damage. He rolled to his right, ignoring another blow to his thigh, and kicked out as he changed stance — flexed the man’s knee right back so that his leg curved the wrong way, spun on his grounded foot — no time for close engagements or grappling — punched out: left, right, landed half of each blow by sheer speed.
Now he’d been free of them long enough to form a plan — which was to get back on a horse and ride. Men who didn’t live with horses didn’t know how quickly a Sakje-trained man could mount. He got a hand behind an adversary’s head, swung his hips and threw the man head first into the ground.
The officer, who Satyrus had christened ‘Arse-Cunt’, screamed at his men. ‘All together!’ he shouted.
His shout gave them pause, and while they paused, Satyrus put his palm into another man’s chin, breaking his jaw, and the crowd was getting thinner.
I can do this, he thought.
He put the crown of his forehead into another man’s nose, felt the satisfying crunch, took a hard blow across the shoulders, and stepped through his downed opponent, stepping hard on his crotch. He’d put quite a few of them down.
He got his back to his horse but the untrained animal shied away where a Sakje horse would have pressed in against his back — or even put a hoof into an attacker.
He stumbled, turned to mount, and a staff caught him in the side. He had no choice but to abandon his attempt to mount, and he rolled under the horse. No blow he’d taken yet was enough to stop him — he was a trained pankration fighter, after all — but the aggregate of the beating he was taking had begun to hang on him like a bull on his shoulders. He got to his feet but he was slow, and there was Arse-Cunt, who cut at him with the sword — quite competently. That limited his options. Satyrus stepped left, and by sheer bad luck his horse went the same way, snorting and backing, and he went down under its hooves — was up, but slowly, having been kicked, but now he had the horse between him and the sword.
Arse-Cunt killed the horse with one solid cut, his blade neatly severing the artery at the base of the horse’s neck — Satyrus saw the rising cut and the man’s hip-roll and knew that he was a trained fighter. The horse blood was everywhere.
The other horse bolted, and Satyrus’s options narrowed sharply.
He was panting, and the nearest opponent took it as a sign that he was done, and came in, club raised. Satyrus stepped into the blow, caught the man’s elbow, and rammed his thumb into the man’s left eye, killing him instantly.
There were only five of them still on their feet, but the horses were gone, and the five remaining were no doubt the best of the lot, and they moved to surround him. Satyrus made himself grin, because grinning opponents are scary, and he decided to go for Arse-Cunt, because if he could get the sword, he was reasonably sure he could kill the rest of them. He took a breath-
A club swished so close to his ear that he felt the breeze and the tug at his hair as he leapt forward — right foot, left foot, balance, set — hip feint, and he had his hand on Arse-Cunt’s wrist — turned him on his hips and stripped the sword out of his hands, but Arse-Cunt punched him in the gut instead of standing slack-jawed in surprise, and another unlucky blow from one of the other men caught the sword and spun it away.
And then the fight was lost. He had time to think of Herakles — to hope that he had honoured the god in his last fight — and to wonder, even as he went down, how Demetrios could ever have ordered this. But the third blow to his head took him down into the dark. It was odd: he didn’t go right away, but lingered, as if outside his body, while Arse-Cunt killed his own wounded.
I would like to have killed that man, he thought, and then he was gone.
4
Stratokles had meant to ride all the way to Hyrkania, but events conspired to ease his passage, and he arrived at the settlement at Namastae on a fishing boat that carried him, Lucius, and their horses — six of them — crammed so tight that Stratokles slept with his head on his horse’s rump.
But the wind was fair and the sea calm, and he was riding up the hill to the citadel just eleven days after fleeing Heraklea. His purse was almost empty. It would have been as flat as salt-bread if he and Lucius hadn’t had the good luck to be attacked by bandits who were richer and better mounted than they. Their horses and their darics had solved most of their travel problems.
‘You haven’t said much about what we’re doing here,’ Lucius said, as they rode up the hill to the stone citadel on the height.
‘Kineas of Olbia stormed this,’ Stratokles said. ‘Perhaps he was a god, at that. How in the name of all the gods did he storm this?’
Lucius looked up the steep slope, and shrugged. ‘Crap defenders, superb attackers — the usual story. Like most, I expect he won the fight back when he was training his legion, not here while they were fighting.’
Stratokles smiled. ‘You are not just a pretty face,’ he said.
Lucius shook his head. ‘If we could drop all this back-stabbing and fight a war, you and I might prosper,’ he said.
Stratokles nodded. ‘My thoughts exactly. The question is, which side? And the answer — let’s start our own.’
Banugul was no longer young. Unlike many beautiful women, she didn’t trouble to hide her age. She did not redden her lips or apply too much kohl or other cosmetics to smooth out the tiny wrinkles or hide the years.
In fact, despite — or even because of — the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and lips, the skin at the top of her chin, the infinitely slight sign of a jowl under her jaw, she was still Banugul, from the top of her fine light head to the base of her slim, arched feet; feet that wore slight golden sandals because the wearer was not afraid to emphasise rather than hide. Under her Greek matron’s chiton, her body was hard and muscled, her breasts swelled in proportion to her hips and shoulders, and when she moved, all the temple dancers in Heraklea could not have competed with her.
‘Stratokles,’ she said, rising from her carved chair to take his hand.
‘My lady,’ he said formally.
‘And who is your beautiful friend?’ she asked.
Stratokles bowed. ‘This is Lucius, a Latin from far-off Italia. He has served me for some years — indeed, he was with me when we rescued your son.’
Banugul smiled, and her smile decorated the room. Even from the side, Stratokles caught its force, but Lucius, who was the intended recipient, all but staggered.
She stepped down off her dais and caught his hands. ‘I understand that Stratokles — and you, sir — no doubt took my son for your own ends. And yet as a mother I know that your actions saved his life. Demetrios would have executed him — or Cassander would have, or Ptolemy.’ She turned the smile on Stratokles, like the beam of a lamp turned on a moth, and Stratokles found himself grinning like a fool.
‘I’ve come to talk about your son,’ Stratokles said.
‘The answer is “no”.’ She smiled a very different smile. ‘You want him for some scheme. I am done with schemes, Stratokles. Once, in this very room, Kineas of Olbia told me to be satisfied with what I had. And now have again. And you know? I have built a life here, my dear. I have killed most of my enemies and I rule a goodly piece of the coast, and the satrap and I are old friends, and Antigonus and Seleucus both court me.’