His hands were no longer shaking. There was only the man on a bay horse opposite him, and the point of his spear coming at his eyes, and his own spear.
He let the horse have his head. ‘Charge!’ he roared. The fear was there but mostly he had conquered it.
The stallion was all heart. He bounded forward, and Satyrus raised his spear two-handed, letting him run …
He caught his opponent’s spearhead with his own, swept it up two-handed and buried his spear point in the man’s body, scales flying from the point of impact like rain from a tent hit with a stick, ripped it clear of the man’s corpse and got the spear haft across his body to block the sword-cut of the next man, and his mare danced under him. The rear ranker tried to overbear his horse and Charmides killed him, and the point of the wedge was through the enemy line, and the stallion was still flying along the ground at a gallop. Satyrus gave him a knee and he turned to the left, skimming the ground like a flying thing.
An arrow flashed past his head.
Satyrus put himself low on the horse’s neck and pounded along the meadow in a wide curve, and he had fifty horsemen behind him — Charmides and Herakles’ men all mixed, and they made the turn and came down on the rear of the Lydian line, and the Lydians broke. Then there was desperate fighting — man to man, horse to horse, and a press as tight as Satyrus had ever experienced on foot.
He saw Herakles fall. The young man took a spear wound that pinned him to his horse, and the horse fell, and he fell with it. Satyrus’s mount seemed to follow his thoughts, and he leaped over the prone prince and Satyrus unhorsed one of his attackers and the other turned away.
The dust was so thick that Satyrus couldn’t see. He almost couldn’t breathe but the pressure of the fight was less.
The little trumpeter was still with him — he had a spear and a sword, now. Satyrus flashed him a smile. ‘Don’t be a hero,’ he said.
The boy’s face was dead white despite his swarthy looks, but he managed a twitch of the lips.
Satyrus reined around, and there was Scopasis, already mounted, with a dozen of his archers behind him.
‘That man is a dead man,’ Scopasis said. He pointed at the Sakje arrow in the stallion’s haunch.
‘He’s the best horse I’ve ever ridden,’ Satyrus said with all the pent-up emotion of the fight.
Scopasis said. ‘You are just like your sister.’
Satyrus managed a laugh. He was going to live.
As always, the aftermath was far worse than the fight. Almost a third of their force was wounded — the Lydians had been trapped by Stratokles, who was rueful.
‘I should have let them go,’ he said, while the trumpeter poured wine on his shoulder wound and he winced. ‘ARES!’ he bellowed, and then subsided. ‘Oh, Tartarus. That hurts like a fucker. I should know better — I was behind them, and I should have let them go.’
Scopasis nodded. ‘Trapped men fight to the death,’ he said. ‘Better to let them flee and then kill them.’
‘How are the Bithynians?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Regular furies when aroused. As soon as poor Darius was killed, they were wild to avenge him.’ Stratokles arched his back and stifled a scream of pain. All that came out was a grunt. ‘Fuck that’s deep. Lucius, tell me how bad it is.’
‘Better than you deserve,’ Lucius said. ‘Deep. But all in fat and muscle — spear point, not a cutting edge. More wine here. And some honey.’
Satyrus didn’t have a wound, but his foot felt as if it had been trodden by an elephant, not a horse, and he couldn’t walk. ‘Darius is dead?’ he asked.
‘Tragic, really,’ Stratokles said. ‘Ow!’ he grunted.
Herakles was not dead, but his leg was broken in two places, and he had a spear thrust that penetrated the top of the thigh and emerged from the base, and while it had not severed the artery, he had lost blood and slipped into unconsciousness every time he awoke. Charmides had wounds on both arms. Anaxagoras was untouched.
So was Scopasis. He took command. With Darius Thrakes dead, the Bithynians could be mixed in with the Sakje without any deference at all.
The Getae nobleman, Calicles, had a nasty cut across his face. ‘I need a better helmet,’ he said ruefully. ‘Never been in that close a fight before. Not really what we do. That’s for Greeks.’ He looked around. ‘My boys feel that the Sakje might not be so bad,’ he said with a half smile. ‘And isn’t it convenient that Darius the Thracian is dead? Can I just put in my two obols? I’m totally harmless and not minded to desert, yes?’
Satyrus didn’t want to drink wine, lest he pass out, but water tasted like blood in his mouth. ‘It’s a nasty business,’ he said. ‘War, I mean.’
Calicles nodded. ‘I’m a hostage,’ he said. ‘That’s why I was sent.’
Stratokles was trying his wound, moving his left arm up and down. He looked at the Thracian. ‘Save it,’ he said. ‘You won’t come to any harm from us.’ He looked purely evil, just then, with his cut nose and scarred face, but Satyrus could see that it was only age, fatigue, and self-disgust.
Satyrus glanced at Stratokles. ‘Where did Darius die?’
‘Our first fight — up the ridge a piece. Took a javelin in the ribs. I didn’t even see him go down. Bastards desecrated his corpse. When we found him, the Bithynians went wild.’ Stratokles met his eye without hesitation.
Scopasis grunted. ‘Useless fuck,’ he said.
What an epitaph, Satyrus thought.
They’d taken heavy casualties, but they’d never again have a chance like they had right then to capitalise on their victory. It was the Sakje way: follow victory, abandon defeat. Satyrus kept his bodyguard and all the wounded, and Scopasis took the surviving Sakje, Getae and Bithynians over the crest of the ridge at dark and into the enemy camp.
Satyrus watched it from the ridge top — not the least sorry not to be participating. He followed the line of Scopasis’s raid by the sparks that flew from the fires as the Sakje killed men sleeping by them, and from the tents that burned.
In truth, the damage done was minimal. The next morning, when the raiders had returned and lay like the dead, sleeping by their horses, there wasn’t a sign of the raid in the enemy camp besides a few dozen charred tents and a single corpse — a sentry killed in the dark and still unfound by his mates, but already visited by a pair of vultures.
Ten more of Satyrus’s men had died in the night, some making a great deal of noise. They had almost fifty prisoners. When Scopasis’s raiders were ready to move, Satyrus rode over to the Lydians.
‘Cut them loose,’ he said, and Draco and Charmides began cutting the thongs that held their wrists.
It would be an hour or more before they had anything like circulation in their hands.
‘I’m taking your horses,’ Satyrus said. ‘I recommend you go home.’ He left them there, at the edge of the meadow where their fellow men had died.
His foot still hurt. His back hurt. He hadn’t been in the saddle this long since he was nineteen.
But Antigonus had lost the southern ridge, and that meant that he could not outflank their position on the lake. Satyrus left Scopasis and the best of the Bithynians and Sakje, and took the rest of the men back to camp, their dead thrown over the captured horses.
Lysimachos was unimpressed. ‘You wanted to go play horse,’ he said, looking at the line of dead men. ‘My Getae will not love you after this.’
Satyrus twitched. ‘Is it nothing to you that we burned part of the enemy camp? That we, not Antigonus, hold the southern valleys?’
Lysimachos nodded. ‘It is not nothing. But while you were gone, the old bastard moved his siege engines forward a stade and he’s pounding my first-line forts. Only my best pikemen will even go up there.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Plenty of war for everyone, then,’ he said heavily. To the east, storm clouds were gathering. He limped off to find Jubal.