Melitta sat on her horse watching him. ‘I’d like to contribute to your monologue but this is all empty space to me.’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t be, sister. We walked down this valley pretending to be slaves. We went south and east from here, right along the Sangarius River. Remember?’
Melitta smiled. ‘You were an odd boy. I was scared out of my wits. All my energy went to carrying that damn basket.’
‘And a very fetching slave you made,’ Draco put in.
‘You had no eyes for me, Macedonian. My slave girl, now …’ They both chuckled.
‘Aye, she was a tender morsel. Very much to a soldier’s taste.’ Draco licked his lips lewdly.
Satyrus made a face. ‘You were scared? You acted as if this was a game we were playing.’
She shrugged. ‘You think perhaps I should have run around screaming?’ She shrugged. ‘In other words, you’ve decided where the army should go.’
Satyrus scratched his beard. ‘We should consult with Lysimachos and Prepalaus.’
Their eyes met. The smile they shared might have lasted a generation.
‘Thyrsis,’ Melitta called. ‘Guides back at the ford, and guides every five stades. A pair, with remounts, and as soon as the vanguard comes up, they report and ride to us.’
Thyrsis looked bored. ‘This is children’s work. I want to fight.’
Melitta stared him down.
He shrugged. ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said, and some of the Sakje laughed — some at him, some at them both.
‘I need Anaxagoras back,’ Melitta said. ‘The boys are growing restless. They need to see that I have a stallion of my own.’
Satyrus sighed and took his horse marines forward. They were fine cavalrymen now. In fact, they could, most of them, manage a bow on horseback. But two days with the Sakje and they were tired and sore. And they didn’t have enough remounts to keep up the pace.
Satyrus gave them the horses from the captured Antigonid patrol, and several Sakje leaders added to the string of remounts. Two men who couldn’t make the pace were left as guides. The rest of them pressed forward, heading east and south, Draco leading. His years of service — with Eumenes of Kardia, with Alexander, with Heraklea — left him with a good knowledge of the area, and he brought them unerringly to the ford of the Sangarius, well west of Gordia … and unguarded.
They camped across the ford, and every man slept with his weapons to hand, his horse ready bridled — they had pickets over a stade from camp. They woke in the darkness before dawn and rode south and west now. Melitta sent Scopasis and half her tribesmen back along the river, prowling due west, looking for contact with the enemy.
Satyrus rode up every ridge. The ground was flat — increasingly agricultural. They were on the high plains of central Anatolia, and when they camped again, Scopasis rolled out of his blankets as if stung by a scorpion, and came to Melitta, wonder on his face. In his hand was a pair of arrowheads — carefully cast bronze points, tiny trilobate heads such as only the Sakje used.
‘Our people have been this way before,’ Scopasis said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Melitta said. She sang them one of her mother’s songs, of the Great Ride against the King of Phrygia.
Draco sat with his back against Satyrus’s, polishing the blade of his dirk. ‘She’s quite something, that sister of yours,’ he said.
They were off with the sun again. Satyrus sent one of his horse marines back along the chain of guides — a chain that now stretched almost six hundred stades. They’d started to get guides back but Satyrus wanted a progress report.
Mid-afternoon, and Satyrus climbed a low ridge — shallow and long, ten stades across. There were wild grapes all along the crest, hard riding, and he had to dismount; he heard his troopers curse him.
But at the western edge of the ridge there was a mound, and below it was a bluff, and the ground fell away to the south and east. To his right, he could see Melitta and her scouts as puffs of dust on the path across the lower ridge.
And way off to the east, twenty stades away or more, was a line of dust that rose to the heavens like burnt offerings from a hundred altars.
At his side, Draco gave a whoop.
Sophocles had long since given up on catching Satyrus. He had no intention of trying to follow the King of the Bosporus into the Seleucid army. It was the sort of thing that men did in Persian songs, but Sophokles intended to live to old age.
So he rode north, around the King of Babylon. He had to stop for two days when his guts rid themselves of the last of the farmer’s-wife’s poison. His thugs deserted him, and stole all but one of his horses.
But they didn’t kill him, and he thanked the gods for that, and rode north again. It rained so hard he couldn’t see.
All in a day’s work.
It took him four days to find Antigonus’s army, and another whole day to get an idiot cavalry officer to lead him to the old man himself. He gathered from the men who held him — gently but firmly — that Demetrios had joined his father just the day before.
By the time he faced the father and son, his news was nine days old. But it was valuable nonetheless.
Demetrios had heard of him. And Neron. Neron came. And then the serious questioning began.
Sophokles had made his decision before riding in. He was changing sides. He no longer knew — or cared — which side Phiale was on. He needed the protection of a side, and all the signs and portents he could see shouted that Antigonus — with the bigger army and the giant herd of elephants and the brilliant son and the bottomless well of Asian riches — would win.
And Sophokles had had enough of obeying people with bad intelligence.
So, patiently, he told everything he knew.
And he knew a great deal.
Neron asked him questions all day — a full day, with two tattooed barbarians standing by. Sophokles didn’t like torture any more than the next man — and he kept pointing out that he’d have more value as an agent than as a tortured corpse.
Finally — after a day — Neron came over and gave him a bowl of soup. ‘One more time — you were after Satyrus of Tanais?’
Sophokles, who had answered this ten times, shrugged. ‘Yes.’
Neron looked angry, but Sophokles had figured out long since that he, Sophokles, was not the target.
‘And you lost him?’ Neron asked.
‘Twice. Lost him at the edge of the Euphrates — Zeugman — twenty days ago. Then I shadowed Seleucus for a few days, until … well, I had a wound. Then I lost him again. He went north.’
Neron put his face in his hands. ‘Satyrus of Tanais sailed around our fleet to join Seleucus. And then he left Seleucus riding north. That’s what you are telling me. Satyrus is the linchpin between their armies. And he went north.’
Sophokles found the soup more interesting than the theory. He made the sound men make when they don’t care to speak.
Neron left him for a while, and then returned.
‘We want you to go back to Seleucus,’ he said. ‘And spy.’
Sophokles shrugged. ‘Better Seleucus than Lysimachos. None of his easterners will know me, and my Persian is pretty good.’ He finished the soup. ‘And kill Satyrus?’
Demetrios the golden, in his second-best breastplate and with his helmet under his arm, came in. ‘Absolutely not. If I hear that he was assassinated, I’ll see you cut in quarters and burned. Am I making myself clear? I am the man who will kill Satyrus — in single combat. I have dreamed it. He is the worthy opponent of my story, and I will not have him killed.’
Neron raised an eyebrow.
Demetrios sighed. ‘Neron, I know you have our best interests at heart. But we have more than two hundred elephants, fifty thousand hoplites, and the finest cavalry in the world. And Pater, and me. Don’t you see? We want this battle. This is where we get them all together and we smash them like a pot. With just a little luck, we kill Seleucus and his idiot son and Lysimachos and Satyrus. The lot. Cut the heads off the hydra, and we’re done.’