‘Surely that is war,’ Anaxagoras said.
‘Will you be so philosophical if it is you?’ Satyrus asked, somewhat pettishly.
The Corinthian pursed his lips, then fumbled for his helmet. The enemy was coming.
The first clash was hard fought. The enemy may have been tired and their horses unwatered, but they had weight of horse, numbers, and a certain determination, and the mêlée was desperate. Satyrus led the counter-charge from the centre — he put himself in front of Charmides’ little troop of bodyguards, took a spear from the phylarch, snapped his cheek-plates down and pointed with the spear.
The two forces met with a crash like an avalanche in a winter valley, and the meadow packed them so tight that men were brought to a stand or knocked flat. Satyrus was at an advantage, mounted on his magnificent new Nisean, and he knocked aside a Lydian noble in scale armour on a much smaller horse. His spear glanced from the man’s aventail, the man’s lance missed over his shoulder, and then he was reining frantically, his hands in the Nisean’s mane, trying to keep him upright as he trampled the smaller horse.
He’d lost his spear, so drew his sword — the good sword Demetrios had given him. The Lydians were well-armoured men, and the sword’s point was quickly dulled against the bronze breastplates most of them wore.
Then he was in the midst of the enemy. Both sides had threaded each other, so that their files were intermixed, and his back-plate rang with blows; he was face to face with a Macedonian officer, and Satyrus got his bridle hand on the other man’s elbow, put his pommel in the man’s face, and took his spear from his unresisting hands as the man fell. It was a good spear, short and needle sharp, and Satyrus used it against the unarmoured rumps of the Lydian horses around him, twisting and stabbing like a viper.
And then he heard Charmides shouting to his right — he had both hands on the spear haft, and he shifted his weight and the stallion backed a few steps, as nimble as a dog, and Satyrus loved him. He shifted his weight and he backed again.
A terrific blow on his head and he was on the ground, on his feet, but a horse stepped on his foot and he was down in the dust.
The stallion stood over him.
He must have lost consciousness for some time — heartbeats or more — suddenly Charmides was right over him, and Satyrus got his feet under him and got to his feet, although his head was spinning and his foot hurt so badly he couldn’t put his full weight on it. But the Macedonian’s spear was right there and he got a hand on it, used it to hold his weight and then, as he had been taught as a boy, he put it against the stallion’s back and stepped up onto the spear with his good foot, gritted his teeth against the pain in his other foot and got his leg over. He barely clung on, hung there a moment like a sack of wool, but he was up, and despite the pain reached behind and retrieved the spear.
Scopasis had come into the flank of the enemy. He could see where they were falling back, and how they had been disoriented by Scopasis’s charge.
He looked around. His trumpeter had blood running down his neck — an ear, cut clean off. And his trumpet was cut in two. He had used it as a club.
‘Rally!’ he began to call. It hurt his head.
16
Satyrus rallied them all the way back to the summit end of the meadow, and hoped that the enemy hipparch would have the sense to just ride away. His foot hurt as if every bee in the meadow had stung him, and he had a dent in his helmet so deep that it looked as if it had been hit with an axe. The side of his head was mushy with blood.
‘Send all the Sakje along the edges of the meadow into the rocks. Greeks in the centre, with the Getae and the Bithynians, formed close. A wedge.’ Satyrus pointed, his voice already hoarse.
Scopasis got it, organised the flank detachments, and the Sakje slipped from their ponies and began to push forward in the rocky ground. The enemy’s light infantry were there, but their javelins were no match for bows and armour, and they lost the rocky edge.
Satyrus placed himself at the point of the wedge. Some jobs came with being in command.
He had the most shocking fear. He felt lethargic, and he was afraid. This little skirmish was of no real moment to the campaign. And he might die here. Men said his father had taken a wound in one fight and that had left him too weak to last a second fight, and that’s how he died.
He kept the fear from his voice and straightened his shoulders. Charmides and Anaxagoras were the next men in the wedge. Both of them were grinning like fools.
Satyrus thought of a thousand things he wanted to say. Many of them were about Miriam.
The Sakje edged along the meadow. He could see them rising to shoot — flushing the enemy psiloi from their cover — often simply running at them in short rushes, cutting down the slowest. The enemy psiloi were heavily outnumbered and finally they abandoned the fight, the remaining two dozen breaking and running for the safety of their cavalry.
Satyrus took two shuddering breaths. He reached out for his god … for the smell of wet cat, the eudaimonia that lifted him into combat and made him one with his god.
There was nothing there, and he shuddered as if cold. His fingers were sticky on the haft of the Macedonian officer’s sword. He had blood under his nails and in the fissures of his hands.
He wanted to go back and tell Miriam that he’d rather go to Alexandria with her than be King of the Bosporus.
The enemy hipparch — too inexperienced or perhaps simply too stubborn to know that he was beaten, was organising another charge. His horses were blown, but he seemed to have some fresh men. Now they filled the field flank to flank — three deep or more.
The Sakje were emptying their quivers into the Antigonids, and the Lydians, despite their armour, were suffering.
Satyrus found that his hands were trembling. It made him angry.
Was he afraid? Or was he about to charge an enemy that outnumbered him heavily because this was the moment?
He could no longer tell.
‘Remember who you are,’ he said aloud, and men around heard him, and took it as his pre-battle speech, and hands closed on spear hafts.
‘If we just wait,’ Anaxagoras said, as another flight of Sakje arrows fell on the Lydians.
‘Walk!’ Satyrus ordered. The wedge started forward, the men at his flanks pressing in. He looked back. As far as he could see, the formation was tight.
A little less than a stade.
The Lydians started forward. They were being galled by the Sakje, and the open ground invited them.
Anaxagoras was, of course, correct.
Satyrus swallowed the lump in his throat. ‘Trot!’ he ordered. His horse was perfect for the point of the wedge — he was a line breaker. He had heart, and he responded instantly between Satyrus’s legs, a fast trot that threatened to leave Anaxagoras and Charmides behind. Somehow the magnificent horse put heart into the man.
Satyrus had never led a wedge before, except on a drill field. But he knew the feeling of being alone, mounted on a massive monster that rode behind him and made the earth shake. He looked back, almost lost his seat as the stallion leaped something on the ground — a corpse from the first clash.
Half a stade.
The biggest error in a cavalry charge was to gallop too early. His mother had taught him from youth, and his sister, and Coenus and Diodorus and Crax and all the Exiles … oh, to have them at his side now.
The Lydians launched into their charge, and now the fatigue of their horses showed in the whites of their eyes and their hesitation. Right in front of Satyrus, a man spurred his charger to a gallop, went a few plunges, and was back at a trot.
Half a stade. Close enough to see the whites of the horses’ eyes, the sweat on their flanks, the desperation in men’s faces.
Twenty horse lengths, and Satyrus knew which man he would engage — flicked his head around to see his wedge still well closed up, even the Bithynians keeping their places in line.