But Satyrus insisted, as host, in sacrificing the bull.
Even the Sakje were silent.
No man — no worshipper, no priest, no pious aristocrat — sacrifices a bull lightly. Not just the money — but the cut. A bull does not die as easily as a lamb or a dove. A priest might slash the bull’s throat with a sharp knife, but a soldier was expected to do it the old way.
Satyrus believed in the old way. He stepped up to the altar and handed the rope to Anaxagoras, who pulled it tight, stretching the animal’s neck across the altar. The old way.
Satyrus looked off into the heavens, into the last light in the sky, and it seemed to him that he saw an eagle there, or perhaps a raven, on the auspicious right side of the sky — spiralling away — and just for a moment, he wished that he was there in the sky, high above the needs of men and women.
He sent his thoughts up to Olympus, to Herakles, and drew — rotated his hips, and brought the blade down.
It was not his fighting sword, it was the heaviest sword he could borrow. And Tyche was with him: his blade went between the vertebrae of the neck as if the God himself had his hand on the hilt.
The bull slumped — the last morsel of flesh tore with the weight of the body — and the head rolled free, falling at Anaxagoras’s feet.
The roar of the soldiers was like an avalanche of sound.
Seleucus — dignified, gracious Seleucus — slapped his back as if they were wine-bibbers. ‘Spectacular!’ he shouted over the crowd.
Satyrus wiped his blade clean and bowed to the priest, who gave him the look of a man with a hard act to follow.
But the priest did a competent job, making his way through lambs and goats, and the pool of blood under the altar grew deeper and deeper — libations were poured, and smoke rolled into the heavens from the long bones wrapped in fat and laid on the fires on the altar. A pair of acolytes cut the meat and passed it to Phoibos — a dignified Phoibos in a shining red chiton — who cut it into slices with an expertise and speed that made his flaying look like magic.
Satyrus, his act of piety complete, felt like a hero, and he poured a special libation and then stood with his friends, passing a cup of watered wine, watching the priests — a sacrifice to Athena, a sacrifice to Hera, a sacrifice to Aphrodite …
Seleucus came up by Satyrus. ‘Thank you, King of Tanais. This was well thought out — a proper way for men to show their respect for the gods on the eve of battle. A proper show that we are Hellenes, here in the land of the barbarians.’
Satyrus was looking at a crowd of Darius’s tribal Saka gathered around Melitta, and smiled. But he appreciated that Seleucus was trying to be genial, to overcome his habitual reserve — and besides, the two had shared Ptolemy’s court.
‘Great king, your praise is sweet in my ears,’ Satyrus said.
‘I don’t call myself “Great King”,’ Seleucus said.
But you will, Satyrus thought.
‘Is there news from the fleets?’ he asked.
Seleucus nodded. ‘Our fleets are already dispersing. Demetrios’s fleet is in Athens and Corinth. There were two actions — Plistias declined both times. I understand that your friend Abraham, the Jew — how well I remember him from Alexandria, always the handsomest of the young men — distinguished himself in the Dardanelles. But each time he was offered battle, Plistias rowed backwards and tried to draw our fleet into disarray.’ Seleucus shrugged.
Antiochus, his son, grinned. ‘Lord Leon insisted that the fleet row and row. He would never allow them to raise their sails, not even on the reach from Alexandria to Cyprus. And Leon made sure the rowers were paid every month at the full noon. Strong, well-paid rowers — that’s all anyone needs to know about naval tactics.’
Satyrus nodded. ‘Leon was one of my father’s men, and they are all gathered here. I was hoping he’d make his way over the mountains.’
Antiochus shook his head. ‘Lord Leon and Abraham the Jew and your Aekes — what a polyglot crew your people are! He’s a Spartan helot, isn’t he?’
‘I think that he is now a Bosporon navarch,’ Satyrus said.
Antiochus didn’t take offence. ‘Oh, of course. At any rate, they took some city on the Propontus less than a week ago — Plistias’s last garrison. So now the grain fleets can sail, and our allies have both sides of the Propontus. They must be twelve hundred stades from here.’
Lysimachos came up and offered Satyrus wine in a gold cup — unwatered wine. Satyrus had a sip. ‘Thanks for doing this, Satyrus. The troops like a display of piety. Makes the prospect of battle easier to swallow. Eh?’ He smiled and drank.
The priest was sacrificing the last ram — a black one, for the god many called ‘Pluton’, god of good fortune. But every Hellene present knew that the priest was invoking Hades, god of the underworld.
He poured a heavy phiale of wine onto the altar, and with the stinging copper scent of blood, the rich aroma of cooking fat, and the spiced and steaming wine over the spitting, burned bones, the air was full of the smells of the gods.
‘Pluton, lord of good fortune — husband of Persephone, who brings the spring in all its abundance, Demeter’s lovely daughter; brother of Zeus, all powerful under the earth, lend us your daughter Tyche and withhold your hand from us. And let the shades of our friends drink deep of these libations of wine and blood, and remember when they were men, and walked the earth beneath the kiss of the sun.’
The sun was just setting — a red fireball on the distant horizon of the ridges to the west.
Coenus was there. He was born of one of the oldest families in Greece, who claimed descent from Zeus, or so the poets told, and he was unmoved by Macedonian kings.
Seleucus extended his arm. Coenus had been an intimate of Ptolemy’s at Alexandria, and the two men knew each other well. They clasped hands, and Coenus embraced Diodorus, who had made his career with the King of Babylon.
‘If he raises the shades of all of our friends,’ Coenus said, and there were tears in his eyes.
Seleucus nodded. ‘All the men that Alexander took to Granicus, Issus, Arabela, the Jaxartes River and the Hydaspes, Persepolis, Babylon, India. There must be five armies there.’
Lysimachos habitually wore an air of irony, as if there was nothing he took seriously, neither life nor death, danger, scorn, even defeat. But as the sun sank below the horizon, he shook his head. ‘Why did the priest say that? Those shades — they would outnumber every man here, in both armies.’
Coenus nodded. ‘Perhaps the night before a battle is the time to remember the fallen — as we may well join them tomorrow. When you are cold and rotten in the ground, brothers, would you not want to think that other men will pour wine over your memory from time to time, and think of all your deeds, and praise you?’
They were a great circle of men and women around the altars, then — the sun was going down, and he cast a last blaze of bronze colour over everything.
Unbidden, a man — a Macedonian — spoke up. ‘I remember Granicus,’ he said. ‘I remember trying to climb the river bank, and Memnon and all his fucking hoplites at the top, killing us. My brother fell there.’
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of voices came out of the dark. ‘Aye!’ they shouted, and they said aloud the names of the men they’d known who fell there.
Diodorus held up his wine cup. ‘I remember Chaeronea, brothers. I stood with Athens against Macedon, and I saw my father’s corpse, and two of my boyhood friends died there.’
And again, the chorus — smaller, this time. Again the shouts of names.
Coenus took the cup. ‘I remember Issus. I was with the allied cavalry. Kleisthenes fell there, where we broke the Persian nobles.’