A man on guard laughed bitterly.
‘Or we’ll all die,’ he said, and his words carried clearly across the night.
Satyrus moved as quietly as if he were hunting ibex in the south, or deer on the Tanais. Twice, his bare feet touched gravel and he had to move yet more carefully – and then we was in the shadow of the new portico. In crawling under the edge of the scaffold, he managed to get sand under his bandage.
Nonetheless, he was able to come up to the pillars without being discovered, and he reached out just as she turned.
‘Don’t scream,’ he said.
She opened her mouth, put a hand on his chest and then put her mouth up to his. ‘You came!’ she breathed.
Her kiss was everything he remembered, and nothing, no shred of conscious thought, entered his head for many heartbeats. She kissed him for so long that he breathed the air from her lungs, and she took it back from him, and then she leaned back against the pillar as if all the strength was gone from her legs.
‘You are naked,’ she said.
‘I am pretending to be a slave,’ he answered. ‘Besides, my nudity shows my physique, and my physique shows that I am ready to do my duty as a citizen.’ Gods – he was parroting Philokles in the middle of kissing Amastris.
‘It shows more than that,’ she said. She ran a finger down his chest. ‘How did you get here?’ she asked, but her tongue didn’t let him answer, and her hand closed over his manhood, and she laughed into his kiss, a low laugh full of promise. Then, before things got out of her control, she took him by the hand and led him back, away from the gate, screened by the line of scaffolding, until they slipped by a pair of torch-bearers and under the columns of the main wing of the palace.
‘This is where you first kissed me,’ she said. That seemed to demand certain actions, and then they were moving again. Just the sight of her gold-sandalled feet seemed the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, and he followed her in a daze until they emerged from the line of pillars.
‘The gardens,’ she said, as they passed between the gateposts of entwined roses.
An odd, observant part of his mind noted that she knew the gardens very well, as she led him past the maze to an arbour adorned with a statue of a nymph – possibly Thetis of the glistening breasts.
‘I never thought that you would actually come,’ she said into his ear, and then licked it.
Satyrus picked her up and carried her to the bench.
‘Put me down!’ she said, but her voice was soft.
Satyrus pulled the golden pin that held the shoulder of her dress and began to kiss down her neck, over her shoulder, and without pause up the curve of her breast, even as he sat carefully on the bench. Training was good for many things.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Satyrus – no. Oh, I never thought that you would come.’
‘No?’ he asked, raising his head.
Her eyes sparkled in the near dark, reflecting distant torchlight like a thousand stars. ‘No,’ she breathed. ‘Not that sort of no. Or perhaps – I don’t know. Oh, my dear.’
He straightened.
She drew him down for a kiss, and wriggled off his lap on to the bench. ‘Where’s my pin?’ she asked.
He produced it, and she carefully thrust it through her gown without repinning her shoulder, and then she turned back to him. ‘I don’t want to lose anything,’ she said, her eyes as big and deep as night itself. Then she unpinned the other shoulder and put the pin in the same place, and turned to him with a smile that took his breath away. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Gold pins do not grow on trees.’
The sun streaked the horizon as he rowed back, his mind buzzing, his shoulders curiously tired.
‘Make it possible for Ptolemy to give us to each other,’ Amastris had said. That phrase filled his head, and he rowed across the harbour at a speed that might have won a race.
The beach was silent, except for the snores of the oarsmen and their companions. A pair of women bathed in the sea as he rowed up, and one of them rose out of the water. ‘Aphrodite,’ she called. ‘Coming out of the sea just for you!’
Satyrus laughed. ‘I have nothing left to give that lovely goddess,’ he said, and both the girls laughed. ‘Nor have we,’ they called.
His good humour lasted until he climbed into his room, where Philokles sat by his empty bed.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ the Spartan asked. And without listening to an explanation, Philokles said, ‘We were attacked last night.’ He shrugged. ‘I thought you were taken. Dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Satyrus said.
‘Dorcus is dead. Nihmu has a knife wound in her shoulder. Three men – in through the women’s quarters.’ The Spartan shook his head. ‘Gods – so you were gone all night – and Melitta too, unless her note is forged. She says she has eloped with the god of war, so Stratokles failed by the will of the gods.’
Satyrus ducked out of his room and down the hall, scattering servants. He went into Sappho’s wing, past the guard. ‘Auntie?’ he called.
Sappho emerged in a Persian robe, slapped him and then embraced him. ‘You were with a girl!’ she said. ‘Is this what we taught you? You smell of sex. You little fool!’ she said, but she hugged him all the tighter.
Satyrus wondered why he ever thought that he could get away with anything.
‘That’s quite the expensive scent,’ Kallista said from behind Sappho. ‘Were you with Phiale, by any chance? Why didn’t we think of that?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry!’ he said.
‘Now, if we could recover your sister, I could stop worrying,’ Sappho said.
Melitta lay under the stars, her two men’s cloaks crossed over her and her legs entwined with Xeno’s. His new boy lay on the other side, full of soup, asleep.
The boy was a sadder case than Melitta had guessed – mother dead, father dead – killed by their own owner. Melitta thought about the boy’s story, trying to piece together a six-year-old’s account of his life. Something rang – something was trying to fit with the rest of her head, like a piece in a mosaic.
Xeno was too adoring, and in some ways his adoration was more difficult than anything, but she had shot ten bullseyes out of ten at fifty paces by torchlight, and even the archer-captain of the toxotai was impressed with her – him. She had a place among the archers who were training to face Demetrios’s elephants. Xeno’s adoration seemed a small price to pay.
Melitta wondered what her brother was doing. In her rush to get free of the smothering confines of Leon’s house, she hadn’t thought about what it would be like to be separated from him, despite his many failings. He was, after all, her twin. Where had he gone?
Xeno was already snoring. She smiled at him – the bulk of him so familiar and so unfamiliar – and smiled at the thought that none of the other soldiers considered that there was anything remarkable in their sharing blankets and cloaks. She wondered how long she could keep up her role as a man.
As long as she could.
22
T he army of Aegypt was supposed to begin to march with the dawn. Their departure was marked with riots and protests in addition to all the usual difficulties, and the sun crossed the height of the sky before the cavalry had marched. The baggage train of wagons, carts, donkeys and porters filled the road before the first squadron departed, and there were more and more non-combatants with every unit. The feeling in the column was ugly, and the feeling in the streets of the city was worse.
The Foot Companions were rumoured to have mutinied in their barracks, but they did march – sixteen files deep, with shield-bearers sandwiched between the files of soldiers, so that the men walked unencumbered while their slaves carried their armour, their weapons and their food. Unlike the cavalry, many of whom had worn their best for the departure, partly to make a show and partly to overawe the populace, the Foot Companions disdained to do the same. They walked off in dusty red chitons, grumbling. There were gaps in their ranks, and rumour said
