Jubal was building a third line of forts — earthen mounds reinforced by timber, with embrasure-mounted engines. They weren’t very well made, but they were there.
Jubal clasped hands. ‘Lord,’ he said. He nodded. ‘Lysimachos, he’s going to lose the first line, eh? Let him. I can build them faster than he loses them.’
‘Ares,’ Satyrus said. ‘What a way to fight a war.’ But he had seen this kind of war at Rhodes, and it held no surprises for him — unlike the meadow full of bees.
That night, Lysimachos’s best pikemen set fire to the timbers of the first line and retired in good order. An hour later, the engines of the second line dropped mythemnoi-sized baskets of gravel on the former first line and the Apobatai charged forward into the survivors of some of Antigonus’s peltasts, shaken from the bombardment and broken by the charcoal-blackened mercenaries.
The Apobatai retired again with the dawn, leaving a smoking ruin. The first line had cost Antigonus more than three hundred men, and all it had cost Lysimachos was a few bushels of rocks.
The rains came back the next night, and Antigonus assaulted the second line under cover of rain so fierce a man couldn’t raise his face to it without pain. The fields between the armies turned to mud, ankle deep or worse. Jubal’s entrenchments had drainage, and the fields in front of them didn’t; the Antigonids gave themselves away squelching through the mud, and the Lysimachids were ready for them. But after a desperate fight shot with lightning, the old Macedonian veterans pushed the younger men out of the second line forts.
But Jubal already had a fourth line prepared, racing against the rains, and the engines of the third line poured his carefully hoarded stones onto the Antigonids, who discovered that the second line forts were designed to offer no cover from the third line. Antigonus tried again two nights after the rains returned, and they were stopped cold — and bled — in the lightning-soaked ditches. They were still there in daylight, and Satyrus fought in the mud with Charmides and Anaxagoras on either side of him. He threw javelins, yelled encouragement, and for heart-breaking minutes faced desperate men coming up mud-soaked ladders from the ditch. At the end, they offered surrender to the enemy men trapped at the top of the forts, and they accepted gratefully, dropping their shields and sinking to their knees in the mud.
It was probably those prisoners, when they were returned two days later, who told their mates that there was a son of Alexander, alive, in the enemy camp. The wound in his thigh was inflamed, but the Lord of the Silver Bow had not sent red contagion to kill the young man, and the doctors were confident he would recover.
Satyrus rode with a dozen men as escort under Nikephorus, and Lysimachos with twice as many. Antigonus was waiting in the mud at the edge of the lake, and the rain fell like the contempt of the gods.
Satyrus had heard of the old man all his life, but never met him. Now he saw Antigonus, and his respect — bordering on awe — went up threefold. Antigonus was as straight as a sarissa, wearing armour that would make a younger man tired. His white-haired arms were corded in muscle, and the bronze of his cuirass probably covered more of the same.
Satyrus saluted him — the pankrationist’s salute.
Antigonus One-Eye nodded. ‘You’ll be the King of the Bosporus,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Satyrus said.
Antigonus ignored Lysimachos as if he wasn’t even there.
‘I reckon you won this round, boy,’ the old man said. ‘I’d like a day to recover my dead — if I can find them in the mud — and two days free to retreat. In exchange, I won’t come back this year.’
Lysimachos spat. ‘The year’s over, old man. These are winter rains.’
Antigonus’s gaze never left Satyrus. ‘I hear the wind sighing,’ he said. ‘Three days’ truce.’ He shrugged. ‘Or I put it to the boys that we’re in trouble, and I put my whole army into your lines and see what I can do.’
Lysimachos grinned. ‘Even if you won, you’d be done. Seleucus or Ptolemy would eat you alive.’
Antigonus’s face was stone. ‘Tell the foolish wind that it would make no difference to him. He’d be dead.’ Antigonus was an old man, but his voice held … power.
Lysimachos narrowed his eyes. ‘Bring it,’ he said.
Satyrus shook his head. Lysimachos’s Thracians had been deserting for days, headed home across the Propontus. And the pikemen weren’t much better. Even Stratokles’ men — even Nikephorus’s men — had desertions. The weather was appalling. The mud was an awful place to die.
Satyrus rode over to Lysimachos. ‘I know you hate him,’ he said quietly, ‘but if we win a pitched battle, the best we’ll get is retreat. He’s offering to retreat. Let him go with honour.’
Lysimachos took a deep breath. He seemed on the edge of a speech. But the hint of a smile crossed his lips, and he nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said.
In two days, Antigonus was gone into Mysia.
But the rains continued, and with winter, the pestilence came.
Part V
‘You have to hand it to him,’ Sophokles said to the empty air. ‘He has more lives than a cat, and he has changed the war.’
‘Isokles will kill him for me. You have failed,’ Phiale said. She was on a swing, well over his head — one of the divertissements of Lycurgus’s new Temple of Aphrodite. Sophokles was practising his knife pass, over and over, and apparently talking to the wall — or to the statue of Aphrodite as a war-goddess.
‘Isokles may be a dab hand at terrifying prostitutes, but he’s not exactly a man-killer,’ Sophokles said.
‘He’s quite mad. Perhaps god-possessed. Who knows?’ Phiale’s voice was dreamy.
‘Well, if so, perhaps he has a chance, because Satyrus and Melitta are, between them, quite the most god-helped pair I’ve encountered. I look forward to killing them’ — Sophokles flicked his dagger from right to left hand before making his lunge — ‘because it appeals to my highly developed sense of hubris.’
Phiale leaped from her swing and landed like the dancer she was. ‘Satyrus has a lover,’ she said.
‘That’s not really surprising,’ Sophokles put in.
‘Shush, you are ingracious. His lover is, if you can imagine, some barbarian girl of Alexandria. I want you to take her for me.’ She smiled over her shoulder at him and did a back flip, which stripped her, as her chiton fell away at the top of her leap.
Sophokles collected her garment, dabbed at his face with it, and handed it to her. ‘You have a superb body, despoina. I will not kill some barbarian slave in Alexandria for you. It is beneath me.’
Phiale kicked off her sandals. ‘I could say that a barbarian in Alexandria might be your speed. If I was in a cruel mood.’
Sophokles stopped moving, tossed his dagger into the base of the statue of Aphrodite, and watched her. She was naked, standing on the balls of her feet, her very pose an inflammation.
‘Am I being seduced?’ he asked.
‘No. Seduction is subtle.’ Phiale stepped inside his guard and ran a thumb up his thigh, brushed his penis with her fingers, and slipped away from him with the same sort of motions he used in combat. ‘This is more direct,’ she said.
She turned, her eyes never leaving him, and lay down on the side altar.
She had two killers to suit her needs, and she could bind them both with simple tools — her body, hard silver. But in the Temple of Aphrodite she was a priestess, and with a partner she could work the most powerful and dangerous magics.
Sophokles rutted away — in this, he was no assassin, but merely a typical man — and she chanted her spell to his rhythm. And she built the force of it in her head until it was a black dove, and she sent it winging away across the sea.
Isokles had a house in Heraklea and a pair of slaves, and his six men terrorised the neighbourhood. It was a good life. Isokles had messengers from Phiale, and from Cassander, and he revelled in his role as a dangerous man, courted by important people. He had wealth and position. He had been received by Amastris herself. He paid bribes to a dozen of her court functionaries, and he bribed her slaves, and if Stratokles had still been in her employ, he would by now have caught the intruder and punished him. But Amastris had made a different choice, and her captain of the guard was one of the men Isokles paid so well.