Stratokles inclined his head in a token of agreement. ‘I have never bragged about my looks. Nor have I ever sought to model myself on Ganymede,’ he said, pointing the barb at the handsomest of Demetrios’s companions, a beautiful boy who stood next to Paesander. ‘Although I gather that some do.’
Demetrios laughed. ‘There’s more to you than that ugly face,’ he acknowledged. ‘We are on the edge of battle – the battle that will give us Aegypt. Then we shall reward all of our faithful soldiers. It was wrong of us to speak in terms of a few paltry pieces of silver. Please accept our apologies.’ Demetrios bowed, and Stratokles had to fight the urge to forgive him out of hand.
That is power, he thought.
‘And the girl?’ he asked.
Demetrios smiled. ‘Let it be as she wishes.’
Stratokles led her away, with Demetrios’s friend Paesander as a messenger. The daimon hectored him that he had fallen prey to a pretty girl.
24
The pursuit of Stratokles didn’t last out the night. Midnight had come and gone before they found the means he had used to leave the city – a boat waiting off the palace – and his head start was sufficient to guarantee his success.
‘He’ll run to Demetrios,’ Philokles told Satyrus.
The young man was dry-eyed – tired, wrung out and incapable of further emotion. Subsequent days did little to raise his spirits. They marched from the city into the desert, and the next five days were hard – stretches of bright desert punctuated by Delta towns and river crossings, so that a man could be parched with heat and an hour later nearly drowned. The mosquitoes were the worst that Satyrus had ever known, descending on the army in clouds that were visible from a stade away.
‘What do they eat when there aren’t any Jews?’ Abraham asked.
‘Mules,’ Dionysius answered. ‘The taste is much the same.’
Satyrus marched along in silence, sometimes lost in dark fantasies of the torments Amastris must now be suffering, and again, tormenting himself with his own inability to rescue her. Few things are more calculated to indicate to a young man just how small his roll is than marching in the endless dust cloud and bugs of an army column that fills the road from morning until night – one tiny cog in the great bronze machine of war.
At night they camped on flat ground by branches of the Nile and drank muddy water that left silt in their canteens. Every morning, Satyrus made himself roll out of his cloaks and go around the circle of fires, helping one mess group start their fire, finding an axe for another and reminding a third how to cook in clay without cracking the pots.
All in all, the cooking was getting better, if only because the Phalanx of Aegypt was beginning to acquire followers. Every village seemed to have girls and very young men who wanted to go anywhere, if only to leave the eternal drudgery of the land. On the river, a girl was accounted a woman when she was twelve, and old when she was a grandmother of twenty-five or so. Most of them were dead when they were thirty. Satyrus had heard these things, but now he marched through it, and every morning there were more peasants at his campfires, cooking the food – and eating it. And the files of shield-bearers began to fill in, so that the phalanx looked more like the Foot Companions.
On the third day, Philokles walked up and down the ranks, ordering men to carry their own kit. ‘Let them carry the cook pots!’ Philokles roared. ‘Carry your own weapons! You spent the summer earning the privilege – don’t sell it for a little rest!’
The fourth morning and already Amastris was like a distant dream. Satyrus had fallen asleep with Abraham, and he awoke to find his friend shivering. Satyrus was shivering too, but he knew what to do – he was up in a flash, and threw his chlamys over the other man, and then ran along the Thermoutiakos, a stream of the Nile, and then around the camp until he was warm.
Well upstream, he came across a pair of marines he knew and Diokles, leading a goat.
‘Where’d that come from?’ Satyrus asked.
‘We found it, didn’t we?’ one of the marines answered. ‘Wandering, like.’
Diokles wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Didn’t actually belong to anyone,’ he said.
Satyrus rubbed at the beginning of a beard that was forming on his jaw. ‘You know what Philokles says about theft.’
‘Wasn’t theft,’ Diokles insisted.
‘Wandering about, like,’ the marine said.
The other marine was silent.
‘I know where you can find your sister,’ Diokles offered suddenly.
If he intended to distract his officer, he certainly succeeded. ‘You do?’ Satyrus asked.
‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Diokles said, waving at the marines. Then he turned back the way he had come. ‘She’s in the archer camp. All the sailors and marines know it – you won’t send her back?’
‘Hades, no!’ Satyrus said.
They walked half a stade, to where a dozen young men were shooting bows at baled forage for the cavalry. ‘She got us the goat,’ Diokles admitted.
‘Really?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Diokles answered. ‘You’ll find her. I’ll see you in camp.’
Satyrus jogged over to the men shooting at the bales. It wasn’t that hard to pick out his sister, if you knew where to look. He came up and swatted her on the backside, the way soldiers in armour often did to each other.
Melitta whirled. ‘You bastard!’ she growled.
He laughed. They embraced.
‘You’re insane!’ Satyrus said.
‘No more than you, brother,’ she said. ‘Any word about Amastris?’
Satyrus sat on his haunches in the sand – a new talent for a world with no chairs. ‘No word at all. Stratokles took her and sailed away.’
‘He won’t bother her,’ Melitta said. ‘She’s too clever.’ After a moment, she said ‘much too clever’ in a way that suggested that all that cleverness wasn’t entirely admirable.
‘I’m afraid for her.’ Satyrus frowned. ‘I know how stupid this sounds, but – I want to rescue her.’
‘That’s not stupid, brother – if it was me, I’d fucking well expect you to come and save me.’ She laughed in her throat, a deeper sound than she’d ever made at home.
‘Nice swearing,’ Satyrus said.
‘I get lots of practice,’ Melitta said.
‘I have to go back and make sure the breakfast gets cooked,’ Satyrus said, and saw Xenophon coming up, his whole demeanour sheepish. ‘Now I know where you sleep,’ he said with more venom than he meant.
Xenophon wouldn’t meet his eye, and Satyrus was sorry to find that he didn’t care much.
‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Xenophon said. He and Melitta exchanged a significant look.
‘No,’ Satyrus said. ‘You have your armour on and I’m going to run. See you soon. What do you call yourself?’
‘Bion, like my horse.’ She flashed him her best smile and he returned it. Then he waved, nodded to Xeno so as not to seem rude and ran off for his camp.
An hour later, his belly full of under-roast goat, he was marching again.
They marched through Natho and Boubastis, picking up more followers and meeting carefully assembled grain barges that supplied the army and kept the looting of the peasants down to manageable limits. At Boubastis, Philokles caught an Aegyptian and a Hellene stealing cattle from an outlying farm and he brought both men into camp at spear point.
‘What will you do with them?’ Diodorus asked. He and Eumenes rode in while the sun was still bright enough for work. A barge was unloading bales of wood for fires – there wasn’t enough wood in the desert to build a raft for
