Tyrant: Force of Kings

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I want to take my best – my own men – and leave the column.’ He took a breath. ‘For a few … days.’

  Satyrus also took a deep breath, held it, counted to ten, and let it go. ‘Whatever for?’ he asked.

  ‘Horses,’ Scopasis said with a shrug. ‘Antigonus’s men have them. We need them. To be honest, lord, if we do not mount my people, some of them will walk back to the ships.’ He shrugged again. ‘We do not like to walk.’

  Satyrus winced. But he knew that Scopasis wasn’t making this up.

  ‘What’s your plan?’ he asked.

  Scopasis laughed.

  Satyrus woke to hear the patter of rain on the roof of his tent. Most of Nikephorus’s pikemen would have no shelter but the Aeolian coast of Asia was not a damp climate, and he didn’t expect the rain to last. He turned over on his bed of fleeces and went back to sleep.

  He awoke again to waves of rain – the slashes of water hit his pavilion roof like blows from a stick.

  Charmides came in, his light wool chlamys wet through. ‘Zeus Hospites. Lord, Lysimachos says we must march.’

  Satyrus rubbed his eyes. It was raining so hard that when a gust hit the roof of the pavilion, a fine haze of water appeared inside the tent. ‘I’m surprised the pegs didn’t pull,’ he said.

  Charmides smiled. ‘There’s a dozen slaves standing in the rain holding your lines,’ he said.

  Satyrus sighed. ‘Better the slave of a bad master,’ he quoted. ‘Need a dry chlamys?’

  Charmides shook his head. ‘No point.’

  ‘Like that, is it?’ Satyrus asked.

  An hour later, he was soaked to the skin, head down under a straw hat, riding like a farmer with his seat well back on his horse’s rump and his feet dangling. The water wasn’t cold, but it was wet. Shoots and falls of water decorated the steep hills on either side of the pass they were marching though, and the rocks were shining in the watery sun, and the sky was a pile of dark clouds, stacked one on another as thunderheads came in off the sea and raced inland.

  That night, Phoibos shook his head. ‘It is not dry in there, lord,’ he said. He gestured at the pavilion, the lines taut as hawsers between fighting ships, the roof stretched tight. Sheets of rain flowed off it in waves of water. Inside, Phoibos had a smaller tent – almost certainly his own – set up. The inner tent protected Satyrus’s bedding.

  ‘I have some deer meat and a cup of wine, lord.’ He bowed his head.

  ‘Splendid,’ Satyrus said. ‘You are a miracle worker. Invite Charmides and Anaxagoras.’

  They marvelled at the inner tent, drank their wine, ate skewers of meat, and complained about the weather. Satyrus sent a slave for Nikephorus and Stratokles, and he brought Herakles, all of them soaking wet and muddy to the hip, and Phoibos had them wiped clean in the outer tent.

  The inner tent was packed with his friends, all praising Phoibos. The man glowed with the unaccustomed praise.

  ‘We may be merrily dry in here,’ Satyrus said, ‘but the phalangites are soaked and cold.’

  Nikephorus grunted. ‘I was soaked and cold myself until you sent a pais.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s unnatural. Never seen rain like this.’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘We have to march anyway. For all we know, three valleys over, there’s no rain.’

  Anaxagoras nodded as if this was the wisest thing he’d ever heard. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I had never considered this.’

  ‘How many fires are going?’ Satyrus asked young Herakles. Charmides leaned forward to speak, and Satyrus shushed him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Herakles said. He was just recovering from the misery of being wet through and colder than he could remember being.

  ‘Five? Fifty?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Herakles repeated.

  ‘Go and find out,’ Satyrus said. ‘If the men have no fires, they’ll be too cold to sleep and too wet to move in the morning, and we’ll have desertion. By tomorrow, men will start to die. They are your men.’

  Herakles shook his head. ‘So what? If they die, we’ll hire more.’

  Satyrus’s eyes seemed to sparkle in the lamplight. ‘Out you go, young Herakles. That’s an order.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Herakles said. But he got to his feet. Stratokles rose to follow him. Satyrus restrained him.

  ‘Let him learn to be a king,’ he said. ‘Or at least to be a phylarch.’

  Herakles made a thorough job. He came back an hour later. ‘Our men have fifty-four fires,’ he said. ‘More are being lit now. The wood is coming up the pass from the farms below us.’

  Satyrus clapped him on the back.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, and gave him a cup of wine.

  In the morning, the rain was less, but it was still raining, and there were head colds and sneezes throughout the camp. Lysimachos’s men had had a worse night, being further from the wood, and they were slow to start. Satyrus’s men stood in the rain waiting. Many of them had straw hats and straw cloaks, and Nikephorus’s men marched armed and armoured, only their sarissas in the carts. Most of Lysimachos’s men marched in their chitons, and they were cold.

  ‘If they have their arms, they have something to sell if they desert,’ Lysimachos said. ‘Besides, with so many Thracians, I know I won’t be surprised.’ He had thousands of the barbarians, and they moved like waves, covering the distant ridges and the rocky valley floor. Even in the rain, they glittered with armour and gold.

  Satyrus saw no reason to argue. ‘When we crest that ridge,’ he said pointing north and east, ‘we’ll see the sea. Then we need to press for Sardis.’

  Lysimachos nodded. ‘We need to take some time to forage,’ he said.

  Satyrus grunted. ‘You mean, to buy food from farmers? Or just take what you want?’

  ‘This is Antigonus’s satrapy,’ Lysimachos said. ‘We’ll take whatever we want.’

  ‘Not that they were ever offered a choice. Why not pay? We’ll get better intelligence and leave a friendly populace behind.’ Satyrus tipped his hat and watched the water run off it.

  Lysimachos looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘No one has that kind of money,’ he said. ‘If we had to buy our supplies, there’d be no war.’

  Satyrus just looked at him. Melitta was sounding smarter and smarter.

  The eighth day, and Stratokles took Lucius and went ahead to Sardis with a picked troop as an escort. The rain hadn’t ended, and Lysimachos’s men were deserting. Nikephorus had lost a dozen.

  ‘We need a siege train,’ Satyrus mentioned to Jubal. The Nubian grinned. He hadn’t played any role in the campaign so far – just ridden quietly with the escort. He was a natural horseman.

  ‘I’ll be happy to be at building it,’ he said. ‘But I’ll need a few things: wood, iron, bronze. Some skilled artisans.’

  ‘Sardis,’ Satyrus said.

  Jubal smiled. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Either we’ll stop to lay siege, and you’ll have to build us some artillery, or they’ll open the gates, and you can get what you need.’ Satyrus looked at Lysimachos, aware that he was ordering Jubal to take what he needed.

  Jubal made a face. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Lord.’

  But Sardis opened its gates for a cash payment to the commander of the garrison, and Lysimachos kept his men outside. Jubal bought a pair of slave smiths and some metal and a talent in silver’s worth of cut and planed wooden beams. He bought wagons and linen tarps coated in linseed oil.

  Satyrus bought pots – fire pots, the type his triremes used to keep a fire going all day at sea. He bought every scrap of canvas in the city: every party pavilion, every sail from the fishing boats. A convoy came over the mountains from the seaport with more. He spent a summer’s tithes from the Propontus on tentage.

  It didn’t stop the rain, but it earned him the thanks of the army.

  Th
e third morning at Sardis – the eleventh since they had marched from Ephesus – they marched again, just as One-Eye’s scouts came over the high pass. Satyrus sent a runner back to Apollodorus ordering him to abandon Ephesus. It wouldn’t matter to them – in twelve hours, Antigonus would cut the road.

  Satyrus cantered over to Lysimachos, who was watching Antigonus’s scouts descending the road behind them. Nikephorus came, and Stratokles, and two of Lysimachos’s Thracian chiefs and Nikeas, his escort commander and right-hand man, and Lucius.

  ‘Two thousand stades from here to Heraklea,’ Lysimachos said.

  ‘Most of it through the mountains,’ Satyrus said. ‘You have a route?’

  Lysimachos nodded. ‘I planned to go the Royal Road from here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect Antigonus to be on our heels.’

  Satyrus watched the first formed troops come over the ridge. ‘I don’t think that the Royal Road is a good option, anyway. Until Plistias recovers, my ships on Lesbos will cover the seaward flank. I’d like to stay in touch with them. I suggest we go north through the mountains to Cyzucus on the Propontus – or to where the road goes east, at least. My ships hold the whole of the straits. From there we can move east by stages with our flanks secure.’

  Lysimachos rubbed his beard. ‘That means marching through Bithynia. Hostile, very hostile.’

  Satyrus waved at Mithridates, rescued from Demetrios at Ephesus. ‘Handy that we have a spare King of Bithynia, then, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Lysimachos looked at him. Even Stratokles looked at him with respect.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘But first – if I may be so bold – we had better brush One-Eye’s advance guard back, or they’ll be crawling all over us.’

  The fight at the fords of the Hermos River was not memorable in any way, except that Anaxagoras told them that the Ionian Greeks had fought the Lydians and Persians here. ‘It is in Herodotus,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Right here at the bridge – two hundred years ago, give or take a few. The Greeks held, and the Persian satrap was wounded, and the Greeks slipped away.’

  ‘And then they won at Marathon,’ Charmides said.

  ‘Hah!’ Satyrus put in. ‘Not the Ionians. They were tools for the warring powers.’

  ‘Still are,’ Stratokles added. ‘Too rich.’

  ‘Too soft,’ added Lucius.

  Charmides narrowed his eyes. ‘Now see here …’ he said.

  Anaxagoras raised his hands. ‘It’s history!’ he said. ‘Not a calculated insult. Besides, didn’t you tell me once your father was a Spartan?’

  Satyrus turned his head. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘How did a Spartan come to Lesbos?’

  Out across the plain, the enemy scouts came forward warily, and behind them came two big squadrons of cavalry and a taxeis of pikemen, marching hard.

  Charmides grew red and said nothing.

  ‘Here they come,’ Anaxagoras said, and pulled his helmet down. They were manning a barricade of stakes hidden by a line of woven matts with greenery on them – it was hard to arrange an ambush at a frequented ford with no cover for ten stades in any direction.

  The scouts came to the river bank opposite but they didn’t like what they saw. Ten minutes later, the enemy cavalry pushed into the river, but they didn’t cross, and the taxeis halted on the far bank.

  Their baggage came up, and they began to make camp.

  Satyrus watched them with real respect. ‘Antigonus is good,’ he said.

  Lysimachos, already pulling his best barbarians out of their ambush positions, nodded. ‘He’s the best of us who are left. Why?’

  ‘He’s laid a counter-trap, that’s why. We’re supposed to make a lunge at this advance guard, so far from his army, no support. But look – cavalry on both ridges.’

  Lysimachos nodded. ‘I’ve been duped by him a dozen times, and yet, I swear we could take the taxeis before the cavalry could save them.’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘If that’s the war we were waging. I thought we were retreating?’

  Lysimachos laughed. ‘We are, we are.’

  Philip, with One-Eye’s advance guard, made camp across the water, ready to sell his life dearly.

  Satyrus broke contact and rode away behind a screen of Thracians.

  And that night, Scopasis appeared in camp. Satyrus had some warning of his coming – the rumble of horse’s hooves. His sentries grasped their weapons and stared into the darkness.

  He had more than a thousand horses, all told. All his Sakje were mounted, and their horse herd covered the space of the whole of the rest of the camp.

  ‘I hate rain,’ Scopasis said. He grinned. ‘But it is good for stealing horses.’

  ‘How’d you get so many?’ asked Charmides.

  ‘Patience,’ Scopasis said.

  ‘Will you teach me?’ Charmides asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Scopasis said.

  The irony – the hand of Tyche, to some – was that Satyrus suddenly had superb cavalry scouts – the best, in fact, in two thousand stades – just as both armies entered the mountains. The plain of Sardis gave way to the rising passes of the Tennon Mountains. The Sakje were penned in with the army, crossing high, wooded passes that narrowed to the width of the tracks that followed them.

  But Scopasis seemed determined to scout, so Satyrus sent him far to the north and south, marking alternative passes over the great folds of earth that separated the deep green valleys of Lydia and Mysia.

  Behind them, Antigonus pushed his cavalry and light infantry to keep the pressure on.

  And in the skies above them, the clouds rolled in from the sea, on and on, so that it seemed to Satyrus, riding up his third steep climb of the day, that he had been wet through for ever. Now he made a practice of riding among Nikephorus’s Apobatai, calling out names and asking men for a dry chiton to get a laugh. Sometimes he would dismount, hand his horse to a slave, and march on foot with his own rations in a leather bag – not because the act had any value in itself, but only because the infantry needed to know that he was there.

  Five days out of Sardis – when the rain seemed eternal, and the farmers by the road were showing signs of despair at the weather, which was flooding their fields – Satyrus was marching with the Apobatai. He found that the men sharing the trail with him were Lucius, Stratokles and Herakles.

  Herakles gave him a look – half reproach, and half a request for praise. ‘They told me I had to do this,’ he said with a shrug.

  He was carrying an oiled linen tarp, a bronze cook pot and the same big leather wallet as Satyrus – although his was covered in ornate bronze work. He was actually carrying the whole marching kit of a hoplite or a phalangite. Behind him stumbled an adolescent boy with his shield and helmet.

  Satyrus laughed. ‘You’re carrying more than I am, lad,’ he said.

  Herakles smiled.

  Satyrus realised that it was the first time he’d seen the boy smile.

  He spoiled the effect by panting and then crowing, ‘It’s easy!’ The combination was risible. Satyrus hid his smile, slapped the boy’s back, and marched on into the rain.

  Two stades up the pass, Stratokles fell in beside him. ‘He worships you,’ he said.

  Satyrus laughed. ‘He’s an ephebe in a man’s body.’

  Stratokles shook his head. ‘He asks all the time – how does Satyrus do it? What does Satyrus wear?’ Stratokles smiled. ‘Look at his hat – he had to find the same peasant who made your straw hat.’

  Satyrus laughed, but then he nodded his head. ‘Everyone needs someone to follow,’ he said. ‘I had Philokles. The boy could do worse than me.’

  Stratokles looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re an arrogant sot, you know that, lord?’

  Satyrus nodded. ‘If I can’t be a model for ephebes as the war-king of the north, what good am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Right, then,’ said the A
thenian. ‘I’ll just keep him away from Jews, shall I?’

  Satyrus counted twenty steps before he allowed himself to answer.

  ‘Sorry,’ Stratokles said. ‘Meant it as a joke.’

  Lucius, trudging along in the rank behind them, laughed. ‘The men I’ve killed because of your so-called sense of humour.’

  ‘Tell me your story, Lucius,’ Satyrus said, to pass the time.

  The Latin pushed forward, his long legs eating the rocky trail. Now the army was just two abreast, strung out along the passes for twenty stades and more. Satyrus and the Apobatai were the rearguard – except for scouts and archers posted to annoy Antigonus and his vanguard. When Satyrus topped a big ridge, he could see the distant, watery twinkle of iron and bronze. One-Eye.

  Lucius turned and looked down the back trail. They were almost last. Satyrus had the strangest feeling, all of a sudden, that he was alone with Stratokles and Lucius and that this was just the sort of carelessness that his sister had warned him against. They weren’t really alone – he knew Philos and Miltiades in the clump ahead – but he tried not to be too obvious as he eased his sword in the scabbard – felt it stick, and flicked his glance at Lucius.

  The Latin was gazing down the back trail. ‘I think Antigonus got up early this morning,’ he said.

  At the base of the ridge, in the valley they’d just left, a dozen horsemen and a thick column of infantry appeared, trotting strongly right at them.

  Satyrus pulled at his sword again, and it came free of the scabbard fitfully, the blade red with rust.

  Lucius looked at him. ‘Where I’m from, that’s a crime,’ he said.

  Satyrus nodded. ‘If my tutor saw me with a rusty sword,’ he said. Then he looked into the valley. ‘Apobatai!’ he called.

  Heads turned.

  ‘Philos!’ Satyrus called. ‘Run up the track and tell Nikephorus to start forming the rearguard – One-Eye’s making a grab for us. Look on the heights above us!’

  Philos dropped his shield and ran, sprinting up the steep trail with the hoarded energy of the professional soldier.