His mare was flagging. He searched his sodden leather bag and found a sausage. She ate it. A morsel of wet, stale bread. She ate it.
A linen napkin rolled around his fire-making kit. In the bronze tin, he remembered, he’d put pressed dried grapes from the farm where he’d hidden. The mass of grapes was dry, and the size of his fist. He broke off a piece and gave the rest to his horse.
It was full night. His good campaign chlamys was wet through, but it was still warm, or better than nothing, and the horse was warm. It was the horse that worried him. He needed her alive. In fact, he’d come to like her.
They walked. He didn’t remount. He needed her for an emergency, and short of that, he’d just keep going.
Morning. A beautiful morning, with the sun rising above the ridge to the east like the figures of the poet — long, gentle rays of red-pink reaching across one ridge to lick at the next. Rosy fingers lasciviously teasing earth.
Satyrus was mostly asleep, plodding along. Trying to think of a name for his mare. It seemed like an important thing to name her before she lay down and died. And she was exhausted. And he had no more tricks to play, no more sugar, no more warmth.
But somewhere on the hillsides above him, there was a man with a fire. He could smell it. It gave him hope. He pushed forward, one step in front of the other, up a steep climb. He remembered this stretch of road, and knew just where he was — entering the Mysian Gates.
Near the top he saw the smoke, and then saw the fire, and then saw the men — he laughed.
They’d been watching him all the way up the pass, cooking breakfast.
He kept walking. They were Sakje — he was pretty sure he knew the tall, dark-haired man by the fire as Thyrsis, the Achilles of the Assagetae.
‘Thyrsis!’ he yelled.
Every head came up. Two men he hadn’t seen emerged from cover and let their arrows off their strings.
Thyrsis put his cup on the ground and ran down the road to him, wrapped him in an embrace.
‘What are you doing here, oh king?’ Thyrsis said.
‘Scouting,’ Satyrus said. ‘Would you be so kind as to feed this excellent horse?’
A young Sakje woman took his mare, and he sat on a rock by the road.
The next thing he knew, he was waking to a bright day with his wounded thigh burning and stiff but he felt so much better that he chuckled.
‘Soup,’ Thyrsis said.
The Sakje maiden gave him a cup, and Satyrus drank it all off, and three more like it, and ate some stale bread.
‘How far to the army?’ he asked.
Thyrsis laughed. ‘Six hundred stades,’ he said. ‘We’re just a feint.’
Satyrus rubbed his thigh and chewed his bread. ‘I need three horses and a partner. I need you to push south; find Anaxagoras, Apollodorus and Jubal. They’re up that ridge somewhere. We thought Demetrios had Lysimachos right behind him.’
Thyrsis laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘We are the best. There’s two hundred of us, and Eumenes and his Olbians. We’ve had him running for sixty stades.’
‘Lysimachos?’ Satyrus asked.
‘With the queen — up by Helikore, the Bithynian capital.’ He smiled at Satyrus’s discomfiture. ‘Your sister and the King of Thrace get along very well. They are waiting at the Royal Road junction for news.’
Satyrus groaned. ‘I have the news,’ he said. ‘I just have to get there.’
Satyrus took the time to visit his mare, who was sound asleep, lying flat, the sleep of an exhausted animal. Then he mounted a Sakje pony, and with Thyrsis himself at his side, galloped for Helikore, two hundred stades to the north.
Sunset, and Thracian cavalry pickets — Getae, who had no love for Thyrsis, but a certain wary respect. Satyrus rode into the largest army camp he’d ever seen. He lost count of the tents, the huts, the wagons … there were easily twenty thousand men, and he suspected that the mass of them was still smaller than Antigonus’s fires in the valley below Sardis.
Calicles, the Thracian nobleman, recognised Satyrus right away, and took him to Lysimachos while he dined.
Melitta saw Satyrus and nodded to him as if his arrival was the most natural thing in the world. He kissed her on both cheeks.
Lysimachos embraced him. ‘You have news?’ he asked.
‘I’ve seen Demetrios retreating, and his father — and I come from Seleucus.’ He raised his hand to forestall a babble of questions. Bowed to Prepalaus — Cassander’s general. ‘Strategos, we met near Corinth,’ he said.
The older Macedonian nodded without warmth. ‘I seem to remember that I was at the point of your spear,’ he said.
Satyrus bowed again. ‘Your master had recently ordered me killed,’ he said, ‘and yet I regret serving with Demetrios, even out of spite.’
The old Macedonian pursed his lips. But rather than say what was on his mind, he shrugged. ‘Tell us where Antigonus is,’ he asked.
‘Antigonus is at Sardis. That was four days ago — I doubt he’s moved. He’s there to effect a junction with Demetrios, who must have joined him by now.’
Lysimachos looked serious.
‘When I left Seleucus, he was in Cappadocia. Antigonus believes he is at the Gordian Gates, and he is not.’ Satyrus seized a parchment provided by his sister and started rendering a chart, just as he’d learned among Ptolemy’s pages in Alexandria. ‘Here’s Gordia. Here’s Dorylaeum. Here we are in Bithynia. Here’s Seleucus — over here, at Koloneia in Cappadocia. See it?’
Prepalaus saw it first.
‘We need to go east to Dorylaeum.’ The Macedonian scratched his head. ‘But Antigonus can be there before us.’
‘Antigonus and his son will, almost certainly, thrust up the coast at where he thinks you are — in the passes north of Sardis. Going for Ephesus … or Sardis. Yes?’ Satyrus had it all in his head — the grand strategy. He could see it as if he were Zeus’s eagle lording it in the heavens, watching men crawl like ants along the valleys of Asia.
Lysimachos nodded at Melitta. ‘That’s what we wanted to do all along — sweep east and pick up Seleucus on his line of march.’ He nodded at Cassander’s general. ‘Some were more cautious.’ Hungrily, Lysimachos leaned forward. ‘How many men does Seleucus have?’
‘Twelve thousand Persian cavalry, that again in satrapal levies, and two hundred elephants. And his household troops.’ Satyrus shrugged. ‘Some infantry, but not as good as ours.’
Prepalaus stood up. ‘I’m not the cautious old fool that Lysimachos would have me — I just never thought Seleucus would actually come.’ He gave them a wry look. ‘Don’t look so superior, King of Thrace. If you and I have anything in common, it is that we’ve both been beaten badly by young Demetrios.’
Lysimachos winced.
Melitta shook her head. ‘We can bicker while we march.’
With a thousand cavalry and two thousand infantry, the Bosporon contribution was so small as to be almost negligible, but Prepalaus and Lysimachos needed a foil, or a balance, and they listened to Melitta.
‘Are we agreed?’ Melitta asked.
Lysimachos nodded.
Prepalaus rubbed his grey chin and nodded. ‘This is where we cast the die,’ he said. ‘If Antigonus is ahead of us in the mountain passes, we have to retreat. And that will leave Seleucus alone.’
A slave handed Satyrus wine, and he collapsed onto his sister’s couch. She kissed him, and he almost fell asleep on the spot.
‘Let’s do it,’ Prepalaus said.
When Satyrus awoke the next morning, he found himself in a camp all but empty of soldiers. Tents and huts had become mere piles of straw; horse lines were nothing but small mounds of dung. Slaves toiled to fill in latrines.
The sun was in the middle of the sky. He’d slept half a day away. He was in his own camp bed in his own pavilion, and Phoibos had a breakfast of sweet bread and pomegranate for him, washed down with grape juice and sparkling water from a spring.
Satyrus felt old. His muscles were stiff. But food helped, and a slave came in after breakfast and massaged him with a thoroughness verging on violence, and then he slept again.