Both armies formed at roughly the same speed, although senior officers on both sides could get a useful idea of the quality of their immediate opponents by the speed and manner of their forming. Antigonus sent a messenger to Philip to ask if he was ready, and both father and son watched a particularly inept phalanx form near the walled farm on the end of the enemy line.
‘I can’t wait to tear into them!’ Demetrios said. Individual men straggled into ill-formed lines, some actually dragging their pikes behind them. They looked already beaten.
‘As soon as Philip is ready,’ Antigonus said. His elephants and the enemy elephants were only two stades apart now, and they and the clouds of skirmishers — also a line ten stades long — were raising dust. In an hour, the two sides would be invisible to each other, unless they started forward.
But of course, they all knew that.
‘Go with the gods,’ Antigonus said to his son. He paused. ‘I think this will be the largest battle the world has ever seen.’
‘How wonderful,’ Demetrios said, delighted.
They embraced again, and Demetrios rode away.
By the farm, Apollodorus and Nikephorus and a dozen taxiarchs harangued their men as they wandered aimlessly through the fields and ambled into a deeply flawed line.
‘Look like militia!’ Nikephorus said for the fiftieth time, catching yet another file whose idea of slouching was to march more slowly.
Apollodorus thought that the men dragging their spears behind them were over-acting, but the charade seemed to put the whole phalanx in tearing high spirits, whatever effect it had on the enemy. There are few things a soldier likes better than the feeling that he is putting some cleverness over on the enemy — and the effort distracted the men from the chaos to come.
In fact, Apollodorus had planted a line of ash stakes to mark the real front, and another to mark the deeply bowed front that amateurs would make. He’d spent the morning on them, and he was quite pleased with the effect. His marines looked particularly vulnerable at the edge of the farmyard — a loose string of men, too far apart for support, and with the rear files already edging back over the crest of the low ridge behind them.
There was no missing that the enemy cavalry was coming, and coming hard. They had eight great wedges pointed at Diodorus and Antiochus, and Apollodorus had his doubts about the quality of the Seleucid satrapal levies. Since they were the leftmost part of the army — the last to advance, and only when the whole echeloned line had formed — he sent servants back to camp to have the marine women and slaves bring up javelins and bows. And he sent another runner forward into the dust cloud to order his marine archers out of the psiloi line.
Nikephorus narrowed his eyes. ‘We don’t have the authority,’ he said. But he watched the enemy cavalry squadrons and nodded. ‘But … I agree.’
Satyrus rode up from the reserve, almost a stade behind the phalanx, where his charger and his riding horse were equally offended by the big squadron of elephants. Indeed, the Olbians, serving as his bodyguard, had trouble all morning, and Eumenes had coaxed one of the Indian mahouts into bringing a single elephant out of the formation so that he could lead his horses around the beast — one at a time, blindfolded, and then with full sight, the riders standing at their heads and murmuring to them. It was a Sakje trick — the Scythians had long experience of elephants — and the horses had calmed considerably by the time Eumenes was done and thanking the mahout.
He saw Stratokles first, and rode over to the Athenian. Herakles was pale under his helmet, but he was smiling, and laughing at something Lucius had just said in his ear. Stratokles had his helmet under his arm.
‘I hate waiting,’ he said. ‘And I hate not being in control.’ He frowned.
Satyrus shrugged. ‘At least you have a thousand men to command,’ he said. ‘I’m a well-dressed trooper under Eumenes, a man who was leading cavalry when my father was alive.’
‘Trade you,’ Stratokles said.
To the left of Stratokles, Nikephorus and Apollodorus shared a canteen.
‘Ares!’ Satyrus said. ‘When are you going to form line?’ As the paymaster, he was outraged to see his troops straggling over a stade of ground. Some of Apollodorus’s marines were snoring away on the porch of the enclosed farmyard.
Both men smiled. ‘Got ya,’ Apollodorus said. He explained, and Satyrus rode away happier — except for his sight of the wedges of Demetrios’s cavalry gathered like storm clouds on the horizon on a harvest day.
He rode all the way to the left, to where Diodorus sat under a tree with a slave holding his horse.
‘We are in for a storm,’ Diodorus said. He pointed across the plain at the wedges. ‘When you go back to Seleucus, tell him that Antiochus and I can’t hold all that for very long.’
‘Apollodorus has filled the farmyard with archers,’ Satyrus said, pointing to the farm that was the linchpin between the infantry and the left-flank cavalry.
Diodorus nodded. ‘That,’ he said, ‘may save a lot of us. Listen, Satyrus,’ he said, wiping the sweat off his brow, ‘Sappho has the baggage train. She’s already moving.’
‘What?’ Satyrus said.
Diodorus nodded. ‘I don’t trust Antiochus’s satrapal troops — I trust Darius, but the rest are sheep. And some of the mercenaries … anyway, it is a precaution that I’ve taken for years. Send all your followers and Phoibos and your people to her — she’s to wait back at Akroinus.’
‘That’s a parasang!’ Satyrus exclaimed. ‘Thirty stades!’ He looked around. Crax had Diodorus’s reserve — a hundred troopers in heavy armour, with scale armour on their big Nisean horses like Persian nobles or Sarmatians. Indeed, Satyrus could see both in the ranks. He was standing with his horse, and he winked.
Andronicus was lying in the shade of the tree. Satyrus hadn’t seen him. But he raised his head. ‘If this army breaks up, we want our girls out of reach of the bastards,’ the Gaul said.
‘Tell Nikephorus to be ready to form an orb,’ Diodorus said. Satyrus embraced him, and Crax, and Andronicus, and a dozen other men, and then saluted the hipparch.
‘Your father would be proud of you,’ Diodorus said. ‘You’re a king.’
Satyrus smiled at the compliment. ‘I feel useless,’ he said.
Then he rode down the line to Nikephoros, and told him to be ready to form an orb.
Melitta didn’t question the placement of her Sakje — they were on the left of the right-flank cavalry, and so they were pressed close between the Macedonian phalanx and the Getae nobles to their right. Her people would have been better off in the open plains to the far right, but Lysimachos hadn’t trusted them — or her — and had sent his Companions there, instead.
The enemy had sent crack troops into their own left — Melitta watched files of pikemen come up and countermarch to reform their line, a complex manoeuvre carried out with contemptuous efficiency. She munched an apple quietly, gave the core to her horse, and nodded to herself.
Her knights were in full armour — a wedge of gold at her back. They were standing dismounted, and behind them stood another block of horses with a handful of warriors holding their heads. No Sakje noble went into battle without a remount ready to hand. Her skirmishers were to their rear. They could accomplish nothing in a head-on fight. So she kept them where they would live. And as her men — and women — had the best armour of all the cavalry on the right, it was possible that their placement was the best, after all. But she longed for open ground and room to manoeuvre.
And she felt, rather than saw, something wrong with the enemy dispositions. There was too much movement — that was the best she could describe it. She wished she had her brother to talk to — he had a much more intellectual approach to war than she did. Or Coenus.
Scopasis stood behind her, talking to his horse, with Thyrsis on his right. She considered speaking to them about what she saw, but they were too busy preparing themselves to fight — to kill. To rival each other.