It was almost a week before they saw the scouts of the enemy, and another week before Demetrios brought up his infantry.
The cavalry went out of the works and skirmished. The hippeis of Tanais rode forth and brought back prisoners – Sakje and Medes – and Seleucus, Ptolemy’s new second in command, won a cavalry battle somewhere to the south and east on the Nabataean road. The pikemen of the phalanxes played no part in any of this. Most of them sat in camp. But the Phalanx of Aegypt drilled all day, every day. They marched up and down the roads, and they charged across broken ground and open ground and they dug on the walls when ordered, because Philokles refused to give them a rest.
They worked harder than anyone but the slaves.
Melitta watched them march by, sitting on the great earthwork wall with her legs hanging over the edge to catch the breeze – legs which drew no notice at all in a camp so full of available peasant girls that no one gave her a second look. That thought made her smile. Beneath her feet, Xeno and Satyrus and all the young men she knew – there was Dionysius, his hair plastered to his head under a filthy linen skull cap, making a sarcastic comment to his file partner, she could see it on his face – the lot of them marched by. They were singing the Paean to Apollo to keep in step and they sang it well enough to move her.
‘Bion? Bion!’
Officer. She pulled her legs under her and swung off the parapet to drop to the hard-packed gravel of the sentry walk. ‘Phylarch!’ she called in her low voice.
Idomeneus was a Cretan, like most expert archers. He wore quilted armour and carried a massive bow and Melitta suspected that the spade-bearded mercenary knew she was a girl and didn’t care. She saluted him as she’d been taught.
‘Listen up, lad. I’m to take my best hundred archers – we’ll ride double with some of the horse-boys and try a little ambush. There’s likely to be some plunder. What do you say?’
‘I’ll get my kit,’ Melitta said.
‘Whoa, horsey. Sunset, at the camp of the Exiles.’ He grinned. ‘Professionals. They won’t leave us to die, I think.’
Melitta hoped her face didn’t register her reaction. ‘Exiles’ is what Ptolemy’s army called Diodorus’s hippeis from Tanais. Those were her people – they’d know her.
Too late to back out. ‘I’ll be there,’ she said.
She accepted the derision of her peers with grace when she appeared on parade in Persian trousers she’d bought from a slave. Like most of them, she had a big straw hat the size of an aspis and under it she wrapped her head in linen against the sun. There wasn’t much of Melitta, daughter of Kineas, to be seen.
The hundred picked toxotai didn’t so much march as stroll across the camp. Good archers were specialists – like craftsmen – and they didn’t have the kind of discipline that the men in the phalanxes needed. In fact, they derided the phalangites as often as they could.
Cavalry were a different matter. Cavalrymen often had a social distinction, and they considered all infantrymen to be beneath their notice. Melitta, as the child of the Sakje, shared their disdain, and it was odd to receive the cutting edge of it from men she knew.
‘Pluton, they smell!’ Crax laughed. He trotted his horse along the length of the toxotai, his charger actually brushing Melitta. He stopped and leaned over by Idomeneus. ‘This is the best you could do? They look like dwarves, Ido!’
Crax actually pointed at Melitta. ‘That one can’t be more than twelve.’
Her captain didn’t get angry. Instead, he pointed at ‘Bion’. ‘Fall out,’ he said. ‘String your bow.’
Crax laughed. ‘Well, at least he’s strong enough to get it bent. Say – that’s a Sakje bow, lad.’
Melitta had the string on with the practice of years. Without waiting for an order, she put an arrow on her string, chose a target – a javelin target across the Exiles’ parade square, a good half a stade away – and loosed. The arrow rose, drifted a little on the evening breeze and struck the target squarely, so that the wooden shield moved and the thunk echoed.
‘Hmm,’ Diodorus said. ‘That lad looks familiar to me, Crax.’ Diodorus had a dun-coloured cloak over a plain leather cuirass and two spears in his fist.
Crax reached down and slapped Idomeneus. ‘I take it all back, Cretan. They’re all Apollo’s own children. At least they won’t burden the horses!’
After a quick inspection, ten of them were sent to fill all the water bottles, a task Melitta always drew because she was clearly one of the youngest. Then they paraded with the hippeis, and every archer was assigned to a rider.
Bion was assigned to a Macedonian deserter she didn’t know well – although she did know him – but just as she prepared to climb on to his mount, Carlus trotted his gigantic charger along the line.
‘Captain says I take the boy,’ Carlus said.
The Macedonian shrugged. ‘He’s the lightest, that’s for sure. Not sorry to ride without him, though. They’ve all got lice.’ He turned his horse and moved back along the file.
Carlus lifted Bion with one hand. ‘Hands around my waist, lad,’ he said.
Carlus smelled of male sweat and horse – not a bad smell at all, but ‘Your uncle says that if you want to go with the army, you should be with us,’ Carlus said. His voice was level. ‘We can keep you alive.’
‘I can keep alive. I have comrades who I value,’ she said. And she knew that life in the camp of the Exiles would not be real like life with the toxotai. She was gaining a reputation as an archer and as someone to be taken seriously, at knucklebones or even boxing. With the hippeis, she’d be known for what she was. Kind glances and helpful hands and some laughter behind her back.
Carlus shrugged. ‘Everyone needs to make their own way,’ he allowed.
The moon was bright, and the desert empty, and they rode fast – the kind of speed that Medes and Sakje practised, and few Greeks could manage. Every man had two horses, or even three, and they changed every hour.
It was exhilarating to go so fast across the moon-swept landscape, with such comrades. The sense of purpose was remarkable and heady. The hippeis were exactly as silent as required – loud when they felt secure, silent as a necropolis when they began to close on the enemy camp – and the toxotai were infected by their absolute conviction that they would win. At the second halt for a horse change, Idomeneus grinned at her. ‘Someday I’d like to train archers this well,’ he said.
‘They’ve been together twenty years,’ Bion replied, and then realized she had blundered. ‘At least, that’s what the big barbarian I’m with said.’
Idomeneus nodded. ‘Still,’ he whispered.
‘You kids done chatting?’ Crax asked. He was already mounted and he extended a hand to the Cretan. ‘I hope we’re not keeping you up too late. The party is just about to start.’
No one bothered to tell Bion the plan until they halted a final time, just after the moon had set. Carlus was pointing at the ground.
‘What do I do?’ she asked.
Carlus’s grin was ghastly in the moonlight. ‘Dig a hole and climb in. We’ll draw them to you at first light. When you hear the trumpet, start shooting.’ He shrugged. ‘Not my plan.’
She rolled off the broad back of Carlus’s elephantine horse and gathered her small pack. She did not, of course, have a pick or a shovel. All around her she could see other archers with the same difficulty.
They scraped shallow pits with their hands and some, who had helmets, used them, while Idomeneus walked up and down, cursing and demanding that they dig faster. By the time the very first rays of dawn turned the eastern sky pink, she was lying in the cool sand with her cloak over her and a few hastily gathered blades of swamp grass over her cloak. It wasn’t much. To her right she could see another Cretan, Argon, with his rump sticking up because he was a lazy sod and couldn’t be bothered to dig hard.
Why am I here? Melitta asked herself in the privacy of her hole. She’d been warm enough while working, but now the sand was soaking the warmth out of her and she didn’t have her cloak around her and she was cold and none of this made any sense. The cavalry had ridden away.
She must have fallen asleep, despite everything, because suddenly there was movement around her and the sky was very bright indeed. She raised her head and saw dust, felt the hoof beats of horses, many horses at a gallop.
