psiloi or just men who had lost their way as he had – and none of them offered him any threat. He passed a Median peltastes in spotted trousers so close that the weary man’s shoulder brushed his horse.
He got his horse under some semblance of control just as the elephants, obeying shouted commands, began to shamble from their deep files into an open line. His gelding broke into a panicked run, headed past the elephants and there were bellows of rage – elephantine rage, monster noises from legend in the dust that frightened him as thoroughly as they spooked his mount. He had no control of his charger, and the big gelding passed elephant after elephant before bursting through their line, so close to one great beast that Satyrus, had he been less afraid, might have touched the legs of the behemoth as he went by.
To his left, a pair of the animals were fighting, both creatures on their hind legs, tusks locked, blood weeping from their hides, the men on their backs clinging for their lives. As he watched, one serpentine trunk grasped a mahout, coiled around his arms and ripped him screaming from his perch on the head of the enemy elephant. Satyrus watched in horrified fascination as the man’s body was dropped at the elephant’s feet and meticulously trampled.
He galloped past and his fears changed from terror of the elephants to concern that his gelding had started to move heavily, starved of air, his flanks heaving and shuddering. Despite his panic, Satyrus got his mount clear of the last elephants and then pulled him in to let him breathe. Off to his right, he could see the flash of bronze and steel and hear, clear as a play, the desperate rage of another kind of monster – the two phalanxes grinding away at each other.
Satyrus’s mind began to function for the first time since he escaped the Bactrians. He felt deeply ashamed at his own panic, but he knew that he had no hope of finding Eumenes in the dust.
On the other hand, Diodorus and the hippeis were just on the other side of the phalanx. The phalanx had sixteen thousand men – at the normal fighting depth, they were a thousand wide, or three thousand podes at battle order. Five stades.
Philokles had said that Diodorus needed to know about the camp.
He rode around the shoulder of the phalanx, pushing the poor gelding as hard as he dared. The horse was used up – the elephants had caused it more fatigue in five minutes of terror than the rest of the ride put together. But he was safe for the moment. He was riding down the back of the army, and he was surprised at how empty the battlefield was. A few bodies lay on the ground, and a few men cried out for water, but his charger’s hoof beats hid the worst of the sounds, and he detoured around the biggest piles of bodies as best he could in the thick salt dust, which bit at his throat and his eyes. He was so thirsty he thought of plundering a corpse for its canteen.
It took him too much time to realize that he had a canteen. He cursed his own panic and got some water in his mouth, even as his mount stumbled from a canter to a slow trot. He could feel the change in the battle line here – he could no longer see the back of the phalanx, and the sound of the shouting to his left was more triumphant. He turned his weary horse towards the shouting, hoping he had ridden five stades. It was hard to measure time in the battle haze.
Ahead, in the white-grey clouds, there was a trumpet call – a familiar trumpet call. That was Andronicus with the silver trumpet of the hippeis.
Wasn’t it?
At his feet, there were smiling men with crescent-shaped shields. They were loping forward and pointing, and they ignored him. He rode past them. Farther on he saw more peltastai, all moving forward, and he guessed that the enemy’s flank was crumpling. The men he passed were drinking water, or shouting to each other, or plundering bodies. What they weren’t doing was turning into the open flank of the enemy phalanx.
He thought about what Philokles had said about men who had won a fight being hesitant to enter a second fight. And he kept his horse moving, because he suspected that when the big gelding stopped, he wouldn’t move again. They kept moving east, or what seemed in the haze to be east, roughly parallel to Eumenes’ original battle line, as best he could tell in the heat and the haze.
Then there were no more infantrymen. He heard several trumpet calls, one of which might have been familiar. Satyrus couldn’t see anything, and he couldn’t hear anything except the sounds of the fighting behind him. So he turned his horse further to the left, hoping that Diodorus had continued to win on his flank, and thinking that he had heard the trumpet in that direction.
If Diodorus had lost the initial cavalry action, Satyrus reasoned, the peltastai would hardly have pushed so deep into the enemy’s lines.
The sun was enough past noon that he began to become confident in directions – even with the haze, the sun was a hard, round, white disc in the sky, and he could reason out north and south, east and west. The phalanx fight was now west. Diodorus’s trumpet was east and north.
Probably.
The longer Satyrus rode, the less certain he became. By the time his canteen was almost empty, he had again begun to wonder where he was. The solidity of the phalanx was long gone, the haze rose like a live thing, choking him and limiting his sight to a few horse-lengths, and the noise of the phalanx was so far away that he might have been off the battlefield.
The Median peltastes arose out of the dust like a mythological creature, stabbing with a javelin, trying to unhorse Satyrus. Satyrus took the first thrust in the centre of his abdomen where his cuirass was strongest and he lost his seat. His gelding stopped, kicked out weakly at the peltastes and stumbled a few steps forward. Then the horse came to a stop and with the slow inevitability of winter avalanche in the mountains, he fell. Satyrus kicked clear and rolled to his feet, tangled in his cloak. When he got up, his side was wet where his clay canteen had broken, and the peltastes was on him, stabbing twice with his javelin, fast as the strike of an adder. Satyrus stumbled back, stunned, with sweat and salt in his eyes. He got his right hand under his left armpit and drew his sword, and the Mede hesitated.
Satyrus wiped his eyes with his damp cloak. The Mede measured him and looked at the dying horse, stepped back and threw his javelin like a thunderbolt, but he miscast and it tumbled, and the shaft struck Satyrus a heavy blow on the tip of his left shoulder, and a lance of pain shot down his arm. Then the man turned to run and hesitated again.
Satyrus stepped forward, pulling his cloak over his left arm, and cut at the man before he could flee. The Mede jumped back, a look of panic on his face, and they both heard a trumpet, quite close.
Now that his horse wasn’t moving, Satyrus could hear the sounds of fighting just to the north – horses and men. Somewhere nearby, a maddened steed gave a trumpet of rage. Somewhere else in the murk, men were wounded and screamed their pain, In a matter of heartbeats, the sound was all around him, and so were phantoms of battle, movements in the opaque curtain of salt.
The Mede came back at him, a knife held high in his right hand and his small shield of wicker and hide thrusting from the left.
Satyrus had time to think, He has no training whatsoever. It was a thought that gave him a feeling of calm and superiority, and he side-stepped and cut the man’s knife hand at the wrist. He was too weak to cut through the bone, but the man’s weapon went flying and the man fell to his knees, clutching his maimed hand like a mother with a sick child. In two beats of his heart, the Mede was transformed from a monster of violence to a helpless victim.
Satyrus left him. He stepped past, to the body of his horse, but there was nothing for him to take, and the feeling of success, of survival, left him as fast as it had come.
His breastplate weighed on his chest like an iron anvil, and he was soaked in sweat, and his mouth was dry as sand, and his head ached. His left shoulder hurt as it had after a fall from his horse as a child, and he was afraid to look at it to see if there was blood. And he was still lost.
His father had been famous for his ability to navigate a battlefield on sound alone.
Tears stung his eyes.
‘I will not cry,’ he said aloud, and started to walk forward, towards the sounds of combat. He kept his sword in his hand, more for the symbolism than for any use a sword would be to a dismounted man in a cavalry melee.
A riderless horse ran out of the curtain, eyes white with fear, and knocked him flat. He rolled from under the beast’s hooves and there were horses all around him.
‘Rally on me!’ a voice shouted. ‘Sound the rally!’
The trumpet rang out – a trumpet he had heard a thousand times as a child in Tanais, and he pushed to his
