Philokles took the cup from his hand and drained it. ‘This will be my eleventh fight in a phalanx on a big field.’ He looked around at the younger men, and they looked at him, the very image of the warrior. ‘I’m as scared as any of you – more, because I know what I face tomorrow. But listen – no philosophy here, lads, just the straight bronze, as we say in Sparta. Keep your spot in the line and get through their pikes as fast as you can, and we’ll be fine. We’re really quite good. Tomorrow, you’ll see how good we are.’
‘Will we win, Philokles?’ Dionysius asked.
Philokles scratched his head like a farmer. ‘Lad, I don’t know. We ought to lose. Ptolemy is taking a mighty risk. There are still men in this army – Macedonians – who want us to lose. So the Greeks and the Aegyptians have to fight extra hard. See? Now go to bed.’
And they did.
PART VII
THE CONTEST
26
312 BC
S tratokles had plenty of time to be disgusted with himself.
T he worst of it was that he had been wrong. He, the great political philosopher, had backed the wrong horse as surely as Demosthenes had with Alexander. It wasn’t that Demetrios the Golden was incompetent. He was ruthless and he had strokes of brilliance, and his will was strong. It was simply that he was too young and too inflexible to command an army. His own brilliance and beauty clouded his judgment. He assumed himself to be a child of the gods and behaved accordingly. And even when events proved him wrong, he couldn’t be seen to change his mind.
Stratokles watched as the golden boy’s strategy unravelled, and he shook his head quietly. He didn’t need spies to tell him how badly their cavalry was losing the foraging war – he saw the wounded, the empty saddles, the disgust of the Saka and Mede nobles.
On the other hand, his networks – his carefully paid webs of informers and messengers – hung together, and he had at least two reports a day on the treason of Ptolemy’s Macedonians. The Foot Companions – the elite of Ptolemy’s army – would change sides as soon as the fighting started. The deal was done. When they changed sides, every Macedonian on the field would know who the winner was – and the golden boy would owe his throne to a wily Athenian and his web of informers.
‘If he was a wrestler,’ Stratokles commented to his one-time kidnap victim, ‘Demetrios would be at the edge of the sand, with one foot on the line, down two falls to one.’
‘Hmm,’ Amastris said. ‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘I thought more highly of the boy and his father than either deserves,’ Stratokles answered. Having begun on a path of scrupulous honesty, he didn’t deviate. ‘It might be said that I erred.’
Amastris nodded. ‘Except?’
Stratokles spread his palms. ‘Ah, despoina, there are some things even you are not yet ready to hear. You have other loyalties. Let us say that I have the means to save the golden boy from his folly.’
‘And thus render him deeper in your debt than would have been the case if he had been as competent as you imagined him to be.’ Amastris settled on to her cushions and smiled at him. She had no problems looking at his face.
‘You are a superb student,’ he said, and she glowed at his praise.
Stratokles had always devised plans in layers, so that when one layer failed, he had a reserve – sometimes two or three. He looked at his new student of statecraft, and he thought lovingly of his new reserve.
In Demetrios’s camp palace – a set of tents as big as Xerxes’ captured tents in Athens – he had a young hostage. A glowering, handsome boy who claimed to have had Alexander himself for a father. Herakles.
In Macedon, Herakles was a rumour. Now that Stratokles had laid eyes on him, it was hard not to plot. Difficult to keep himself from imagining what he could accomplish for Athens – for the world – if he had Alexander’s heir and this brilliant girl.
He looked at her again and knew that she was not for him. But neither was the satrapy of Phrygia. Suddenly it seemed like a limited ambition – a wasted life. He didn’t need to be lord of a rich province. Instead, he could stand behind the throne of the earth, the trusted advisor, the hands – gentle hands – on the reins of state. Athens would be the richest city in the world, and he would have a statue in bronze on the Acropolis.
‘You have seen the man that calls himself Herakles?’ Stratokles said to his student.
She allowed herself a smile. ‘Yes.’
‘He is the son of Alexander. He may well prove to be the most important player on this board.’ Stratokles stroked his beard.
‘He’s younger than my Satyrus, and has no experience of anything but being a hostage.’ Amastris waved for a cup of wine.
‘His experience is not the issue,’ Stratokles said. ‘His blood is the issue.’
‘Ahh!’ she replied.
‘A child of yours by him – Alexander’s grandson – could guarantee the future of Heraklea for ever,’ Stratokles said carefully.
She didn’t blush. Instead, she smiled demurely and shook her head. ‘Or make my city a target for every adventurer with an army,’ she said. ‘And my child. And me.’
‘Ahh!’ Stratokles responded, and they both laughed.
Nonetheless, he sent for his Lucius, and gave him some exacting instructions.
So – while Stratokles had plenty of time to be disgusted with himself, he was not. He was too busy plotting.
27
S atyrus rose with the first of the light, feeling as if he hadn’t slept at all, bitten by insects and with his left hip sore from sleeping on the ground. His guts churned, and every time he looked out over the sand towards Gaza, they flipped again.
He went out beyond the horse lines and did his business, but it didn’t help. Before the sun was another handspan higher in the sky, his guts churned again and he felt as if he had the same trots they’d all had camping on the Nile. When he stood still, he shook.
After a while, he ran. It wasn’t a decision – he just dropped his chitoniskos on his pack and ran off, naked except for his sandals. He ran a stade, and then another, along the ‘streets’ where men lay in rows, some awake, facing the dawn, and others snoring in bliss or simply in exhaustion. He ran until he passed the sentries to the west, where the road led towards Aegypt. And then he turned and ran back. Without disturbing Basis or Abraham, he used pumice to polish the scales of his cuirass, and then he buffed the silver on his helmet until it shone like the moon.
Like thousands of other men, he went down to the beach and swam in the cool dawn. Far down the beach towards Gaza, he could see thousands of other men performing the same ritual.
He went back to his pack and took out his best red chitoniskos, and then he put on his armour – all of it, even the greaves, which he had only worn for parades. Then he walked around the Phalanx of Aegypt, feeling hollow, and made sure all the men ate a good meal.
Melitta was up with the dawn, having lain with Xeno and regretted it somehow – not the act itself, but the surrender. The triteness of sex before battle. Xeno was going to face battle with a thousand friends, and he was scared. She understood. She was scared herself.
She and her people were facing the elephants.
Archers, javelin men, all of the peltastai – they were out on the sand, digging pits and putting stakes in the bottom. Ptolemy’s greatest fear was the power of Demetrios’s elephants – fifty of the monsters, where Ptolemy didn’t have a single one. So the light troops went out in the new dawn, each attended by a handful of slaves, and they dug. This time they had tools. Ptolemy prepared for things like this.
She dug and dug. She thought of Argon and his too-shallow hole, and she dug more.
She was soaked in sweat by the time yet more slaves came with food, and she got out of her hole and ate, slurping cool water from a clay cup and then eating mutton soup so fast that barley streamed down her chiton. She regretted every minute that she’d stayed awake the night before, but she found, as the sun rose and the colour of the world changed, that she didn’t have to be worried about being pregnant.