Crax was seeing to his men.
There was an alabaster vase — fine workmanship — on the blanket roll, and Satyrus picked it up, opened the stopper, took a whiff. Memory flooded him.
‘Sophokles,’ he said. Ten years had passed but he knew that smell, and that jar. He rifled the rest of the wallet — glass ampoules, worth a fortune, with powders. A folding tablet and a beautiful gold stylus. A scroll of recipes.
Two poems by Sappho.
A note, written on a scrap of papyrus, with an address in Alexandria.
Ben Zion’s address.
Satyrus let the breath go from between his teeth, and hoped that Achilles and his friends were enough.
It was hours before Apollodorus and Anaxagoras returned, riding wearily on jaded horses. They were picked up stades away by Crax’s men, so they already knew of the events of the day by the time they rode up to the farm.
By then, a dozen local men and two women had taken charge of the farm and the girls. Satyrus had time to wonder what would become of them — whether they’d end well-dowered or as slaves on their own land.
He slept there one more time, and Crax’s men helped bury the dead, and then they all rode out for Zeugma.
The first sight of Seleucus’s army told the whole story. The elephants could be seen from stades away, plodding up the Euphrates. They were huge, and the rumour was that Seleucus had traded all of the Indian satrapies to an Indian king for five hundred elephants. If he had, he’d brought less than half. Satyrus counted more than a hundred before pain and boredom took over, but there weren’t more than two hundred.
Still, it was the biggest concentration of elephants Satyrus had seen since Eumeles. And it would give the alliance the same odds as the Antigonids, at least.
Satyrus rode down into the walled city of Zeugma in time to meet the King of Babylon himself as he offered libations to the river god at the bridge. Seleucus was leaving the Euphrates and turning west, towards the sea and Phrygia, and he was bidding farewell, as the King of Babylon, to one of the country’s deities. Satyrus watched him and felt dirty.
When he was done, Seleucus came forward, surrounded by courtiers. He was a middle aged man losing the hair on his head, and he had the square-jawed Macedonian look, but he had never been a heavy drinker, and age had brought him dignity as well as thinning hair. Satyrus had last seen him riding in Ptolemy’s staff at Gaza covered in dust. Satyrus bowed.
Seleucus returned his bow. ‘I am stunned to see you here, Satyrus,’ he said. ‘But delighted, of course. Diodorus says you have the rally point and a chart of the campaign.’
Satyrus took his proffered hand and clasped it. ‘I see that you have not stinted,’ he said. ‘Thank the gods!’
Seleucus gave him a wry smile. ‘I brought my best … and my worst. The cream of my troops, and the bastards I can’t trust at home. Ptolemy?’
‘Sent his fleet to Rhodes.’ Satyrus shrugged.
‘Cassander?’ Seleucus asked.
‘Emptied Europe for Lysimachos, who now has Prepalaus to contend with. I doubt there’s a man fit to wear armour left in Europe.’ Satyrus was getting tired.
‘A stool for the King of the Bosporus,’ Seleucus Nicator called. ‘Diodorus said you’d been wounded. You look well enough.’
‘I am — a few days and I’ll be fit. May I accompany you west?’ Satyrus subsided onto the stool with relief.
‘My pleasure. And your Exiles will be delighted to have you — the famous Satyrus of Tanais? Worth a thousand men.’
Satyrus smiled up at Seleucus. ‘You didn’t used to be such a flatterer.’
‘I wasn’t King of Babylon, then,’ Seleucus said, seriously.
Six days, and the advance guard was across the Taurus Mountains and making camp at Cybistra, in Lycaonia. The elephants were still in the high passes of the mountains, and the rearguard hadn’t left Zeugma.
Diodorus sat by a fire with Crax and Andronicus on either side of him. Sappho passed the wine. She rode astride with the men, and refused to be with the baggage. She’d made more campaigns than many of the veterans. Satyrus felt like embracing her every time he saw her.
She and Diodorus moved him the most — perhaps because they were the eldest. Diodorus was old. Satyrus had never expected it; the man had remained adamantine, proof against time, throughout Satyrus’s childhood, and now he was a stick figure, all sinews and scorched skin with deep furrows in his face and his cheekbones so sharp they could cut. And Sappho’s beauty was blasted — she was an old woman, and no one would mistake her for a great beauty.
So it had taken him two days to discover that looks deceived, and that the people who had raised him were essentially unchanged. No one had told them how old they were. Diodorus was not in his dotage — when his voice lashed a trooper, the man wilted. Sappho had much the same effect on Diodorus — and Crax, and Andronicus, and soon enough Satyrus himself, who discovered that she felt he was cosseting his wound when he might have been exercising.
‘What a Spartan you would have made,’ he grunted, when she forced him to bend his left leg to her satisfaction.
‘I am a woman of Thebes — a far, far better place than Sparta, with better men. Ask them at Leukra.’ She nodded, another argument won, and directed her slave to help him bend the leg again.
So … two days, and he had returned to being their child. It was not so bad.
Especially when he was treated as an adult child.
‘What do you think One-Eye will do?’ Diodorus asked. He sat back on his cloak, and Sappho joined him, burrowing into his arms like a much younger woman.
Satyrus shifted, winced, and looked at Apollodorus. ‘He’ll try to defeat us in detail. About now he’ll be getting his first reports that Seleucus is really on his way. So he can come east to us, or go north to Lysimachos.’ He paused. ‘It’s not that simple, though,’ he added.
Diodorus grunted. ‘It never is,’ he said.
‘There will or won’t be a fleet action in the Dardanelles. That could change everything. Or Demetrios might march inland and join his father — and that would change everything.’ He paused. ‘Or … Hades, I don’t know. Demetrios might go off to crush Cassander and leave his pater …’
‘Never happen,’ Diodorus said. ‘That’s their edge on us. That they have each other. Demetrios won’t abandon his pater. Will he win in the Dardanelles?’
Satyrus took a cup of wine from Charmides. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, as if repeating a lesson for Diodorus. How often had he gone from Philokles, having just had Plato beaten into him, to repeat the lesson for Diodorus, as he sat in his armour?
‘Ahh,’ Diodorus said. ‘Why?’ His tone said he liked the answer.
‘If we win, then our troops move freely on the coast of Asia. But Alexander and Lysimachos have both shown that even if our ships lose, the army can move across the Troad into Phrygia without hindrance. We have Bithynia. That one change is everything. Lysimachos doesn’t need a fleet to move an army down on Antigonus, and his supplies will be safe.’ Satyrus sat back, feeling fifteen.
Diodorus nodded. ‘Well, you’ve commanded more armies than I have, son. But it seems to me that the navies will still have two effects. First, morale: if we win, it will have an effect on the troops. And second, if our ships win, then Antigonus can’t go far from his logistics, for fear that Lysimachos will land behind him. You know that we’re in contact with Ptolemy’s fleet?’
Satyrus hadn’t heard.
‘There’s twenty triremes shadowing us on the coast.’ Diodorus nodded. ‘Pray to Poseidon, son. A victory at sea would save us a world of trouble. But otherwise, your analysis is correct. He’s got to go for one or the other of us, as soon as he can. I reckon he’ll go for Lysimachos — he’s beaten him like a drum, and he’s never beaten us.’