Stupid boys. She loved them both.
And like the answer to a prayer, Anaxagoras rode out of the dust. He didn’t embrace her — he knew when she was Queen of the Assagetae. Instead, he saluted.
‘Satyrus says I may ride with you,’ he said.
She smiled so widely she felt as if her lips hurt. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But if you love me, you’ll run an errand first.’
Anaxagoras nodded. ‘Anything,’ he said, with a remarkable lack of male bluster.
‘Find Lysimachos and ask him why the enemy is moving so much, and then tell him I think we should attack. Then, when he ignores you, go and tell Satyrus. Then come back to me.’
He was off at a gallop.
She saw him reach Lysimachos, with his command group in the centre of the cavalry. And then, on her left, the enemy elephants trumpeted, and rolled forward.
Anaxagoras was a patient man, but Lysimachos showed no sign of allowing him to approach. He gave no sign, his whole being focused on watching the centre. The Macedonian officers around him looked at Anaxagoras with veiled disdain — he was a Greek on a Sakje horse, and he was already dust covered.
He waited what he thought was a courteous amount of time, given the circumstances, and then he rode past the line of aides, right up to the King of Thrace. A hand reached out to take his bridle but Anaxagoras was prepared for that, and he made it to his target.
‘Melitta of Tanais wishes you to look at the cavalry opposite us. She says that they are moving, and she wishes to attack.’ He spoke too fast, he thought, but the man turned and heard him out.
Then he surprised Anaxagoras, who had him pegged as an arrogant windbag of a Macedonian, and looked for a long time at the cavalry formed opposite them.
‘Eros’s tiny prick,’ Lysimachos swore. ‘They’re either retreating, or changing flanks. Ride to Seleucus and tell him I want to attack, and if he approves, to sound his trumpets.’
Anaxagoras changed horses and rode for the centre, six stades away. The elephants in the centre were less than a stade apart. Lysimachos sent three of his Macedonians with the same message — the dust clouds were starting to obscure everything, and he wanted to be sure the message got through. As if by agreement, the four men spread out over the plain, going for where they imagined the command group might be.
Anaxagoras was wrong, and by some distance — too close to the front line, which was starting forward by the time he realised his error, and he could hear the sound of elephants shrieking. A gust of breeze, and a gap in the dust … and he saw one of the other messengers and what had to be Seleucus, and he turned his horse that way.
Seleucus wasn’t on the hillock where Anaxagoras assumed he’d be — he was well to the left, where he could see Demetrios’s cavalry. Anaxagoras galloped up and dismounted to spare his horse.
Seleucus looked at him. ‘Ah, the lyricist,’ he said. ‘You are the very scion of Apollo.’
‘Today, I’m here for Hermes,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Lord King, Lysimachos sends-’
Seleucus was looking past him, to his right. ‘I have heard,’ he said curtly.
‘Melitta also wanted you to know. She wished to attack.’ A bit of a stretch, really — Anaxagoras was surprised at his own presumption.
‘She is a veteran cavalry commander?’ Seleucus asked. It did not appear to be a rhetorical question.
Satyrus nodded. ‘Of fifty fights on the plains, and several battles of Hellenes.’
Seleucus was watching Demetrios’s cavalry.
‘In a whole day of battle, a commander usually makes only two or three decisions,’ he said. He watched Demetrios for a while, and the sounds of elephant versus elephant drifted across the ground to them — the shrieks, the trumpeting, the screams of men caught between the beasts. The best of the psiloi on both sides would be pressing forward into the dust. The worst would already be running.
Satyrus nodded. ‘I know,’ he said.
‘Is Antigonus reading me, and luring my rash Lysimachos into a trap? Or has he decided to retire his inferior cavalry flank? Or are they unreliable? Or is Lysimachos mistaken, and they are simply late in forming line?’ He sighed. ‘Ares, it is hot. Already. Imagine what it’s like in the phalanx. I don’t even have my helmet on.’ He took a drink of water — Anaxagoras hoped it was water — spat, and looked back at Demetrios.
‘Satyrus, tell the reserve that these trumpets are not for them. Do it!’ he said.
Satyrus, the highest-ranking messenger on the field, rode away. His riding horse was still terrified of the elephants, and he had the hardest time communicating with the Indian prince who led them. It took him several minutes to inform all of the reserve himself. By the time he did, his riding horse was done. But he made it back to Seleucus in time to hear the trumpets sound, all together, with a peal like the music of the gods.
Lysimachos couldn’t imagine what was taking the King of Babylon so long — especially as it became increasingly obvious that cavalry units were peeling away from the mass opposite him. The enemy cavalry left behind spread out into dispersed bands and started forward, ready to skirmish with javelins and bows.
He was trembling with a mixture of anxiety and excitement when the distant trumpets sounded, and three more of his young men immediately mounted their horses and rode for their assigned locations, to order his cavalry forward into the dust.
He waited until he could see the messenger reach Melitta — the best-looking of his cavalry commanders by a long shot, and he hoped she knew her business — and then he took his helmet, pulled it on, and lashed the cheek-plates together. A slave handed him a heavy lance, and he took it. Raised it above his head, and rode to the front of his companions.
‘Forward!’ he shouted.
Philip rode up next to Demetrios as the rest of his Greek cavalry trotted past, headed for the far right.
‘I think Lysimachos is on to me,’ he said. ‘I see dust, and there were trumpets.’
‘Don’t be an old woman,’ Demetrios said. ‘This is our time.’ He took a pair of heavy spears from a slave and rode the front of his own personal wedge of Companions. ‘Now for victory!’ he said, and led them forward.
Satyrus had a near-perfect view of the first charge by Demetrios. The new breeze had cleared the dust from the western end of the field, and he could see Diodorus mount his troopers as Demetrios started forward.
Some of the satrapal levies broke immediately. In heartbeats, thousands of cavalrymen were racing to the rear.
And Demetrios hadn’t reached his enemies yet.
The Seleucid counter-charge was too little and too late — even the crack companions were unsettled by the defection of half of the satrapal cavalry, and the reliable Persians raced west, seeking to flank and harass, instead of charging straight forward to a certain doom.
As Satyrus watched, only Diodorus’s Exiles and Antiochus’s Companions stood in the way of the charge. There were not quite enough of them to face all of the wedges.
In the last seconds before impact, Andronicus sounded his silver trumpet and the blue cloaks responded like dancers in the Pyricche, ranks flowing right and left — their horses were perfectly fresh, their discipline firm. They formed three deep, wide anti-wedges as fast as a school of fish changes direction in the sea — their points aimed at the gaps between the Antigonid wedges.
Antiochus and his wedge of Companions crashed headlong into the fourth Antigonid wedge, and the crash, the frightened neighs of riderless horses, and the screams of men rolled across the plain — the war cry of Ares. To their left, Darius and his household cavalry tried to meet the fifth wedge of Demetrios’s men — Darius died there, trying to cut his way to Demetrios himself, the first of the men Kineas had trained to die that day, with his relatives around him — and the fifth wedge was blunted and blown facing them.