She was just picking her way south again when she was challenged.
‘Who are you?’ called a voice with more fear than authority.
She could see riders, and carts. ‘Melitta of Tanais,’ she called. ‘With Herakles.’
Women gathered around her.
‘What the fuck?’ Crax croaked. The dust was not subsiding. They’d been an hour in one place, just a stade from where they’d shredded the enemy phalanx. For no reason that they understood, they were waiting near their starting position in the battle line of the early morning. Diodorus had ordered the halt and told men to dismount and other men to get out and scout, and then he’d left Crax in charge and ridden off with Hama. Stragglers wandered in, both their own and other mercenary cavalrymen who’d been in Diodorus’s command, or Philip’s, when the day began.
Dismounted men prowled the ground around them stripping the enemy dead of loot – and water. Other parties searched the salt flats for their dead, and buried them. A young trooper from Olbia went down with heat sickness and suddenly the phylarchs were everywhere, demanding that men empty their canteens.
Andronicus spoke up to Crax. ‘The horses won’t last much longer,’ he said.
Satyrus wondered what his eyes looked like. All the men around him had the eyes of mourners – red-rimmed, red-creased, with red blood in the corners. The salt was vicious. He wiped his eyes on his arm again and felt the burn on his eyelids and his hands and winced.
‘Did we win?’ he asked the man next to him.
‘We won, son. That doesn’t mean the whole army won,’ the man cackled. ‘Got any water?’
‘No,’ Satyrus admitted.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘Cleitus,’ he said, extending an arm.
‘Satyrus,’ he answered, clasping the man’s hand. He felt like a grown man.
The other man offered his water and Satyrus took a swig, and then another before he could stop himself. He handed it back. There was wine in the man’s water – it tasted divine, as if Dionysus had blessed it himself.
‘We’ve found most of our dead, and buried them,’ he said. ‘We didn’t need to ask for a truce to do it, either. In my book, that’s a victory.’
‘We plundered their dead, too,’ another man said.
‘Here comes the strategos,’ Crax called. ‘Stand by your mount!’
Diodorus came up in a new cloud of salt. ‘Call in the scouts, hyperetai. Satyrus, on me. Everyone not actually doing anything, get the fuck off your mount now.’ He turned to Crax. ‘Report!’
‘Most of second troop is in, but not Eumenes,’ Crax said. ‘He vanished in the first melee. Otherwise, we’ve buried our dead.’
Diodorus shook his head. ‘He’s been with us since we started,’ he said. ‘Well, almost.’ He looked around. ‘Not finding his body is hard.’
Crax nodded. ‘Since the first winter in Olbia,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’ll turn up. Anyway, otherwise second is down seventeen. We’re down nine, and first is down thirteen. Third is nowhere to be found, and I swept all the way back to where we hit the Medes in the first hour.’ The Getae officer looked around. The hyperetai of all three troops were shepherding the dismounted men into a column, every man leading his horse. Beyond them, the phalanx was seething as if it was still in combat, and the settling salt dust revealed an angry agitation.
Crax pointed at the activity. ‘This looks bad,’ he said. ‘How bad is it? Did we lose?’
‘Rally point,’ Diodorus said tersely. ‘And we walk to save the horses. It’s bad.’
Crax looked back again. Men in the phalanx were shaking their fists and cursing at each other. ‘How bad?’ he asked.
‘The Macedonian fucks just handed Eumenes to One-Eye. Alive,’ Diodorus said bitterly. ‘I was too late to stop them, the treasonous cunts.’
There were shouts from the phalanx behind them, and then more shouts, and an ugly murmur.
‘Just keep moving, boys,’ Diodorus said. ‘March!’
Crax shook his head. ‘How can such men make their peace with the gods?’ he asked.
Diodorus shook his head. ‘Antigonus took our camp,’ he said. ‘The Argyraspids traded Eumenes for their loot from years past. Can you imagine?’ He went on, ‘If they’d stood their ground, we could have had it back at spear point in the morning. That army was beaten. Listen – every man in our phalanx knows that they’ve been robbed.’
Crax swore expressively in Getae.
Diodorus walked silently, and Satyrus kept his head down to avoid being sent away.
The column of troops set off. They were short of men, missing or dead, but they had also collected several dozen cavalry stragglers and Crax formed them into a fourth troop. Many of them protested against walking in the salt dust, and a few mounted their horses and rode away in disgust, refusing to accept discipline that they felt was foolish. The rest obeyed, obviously glad to have someone to follow, another lesson that was not lost on Satyrus, although he was now so tired that he couldn’t remember what he had done or the order in which it had happened or whether he had been brave or cowardly, but only that he was alive.
Word of the betrayal of Eumenes the Cardian by his own officers began to filter down the column, so that men shook their heads or cursed.
The sun was well down in the sky, and Satyrus couldn’t account for all the hours of the day.
Next to Satyrus, his uncle gathered his officers and issued orders as he walked.
‘When we get to the gully, water the horses by troop, fast as you can. Crax, you cover us while we water. Then we retire past the gully in column till we find the girls, and camp. Every man grooms his mount before he sleeps – we’ll fight again tomorrow. And we’ve lost all our remounts. This is what we have.’
‘Lost our remounts!’ Antigonus said. ‘Zeus Soter, strategos. That’s bad.’
‘Worse than you think, brother,’ Diodorus spat. ‘Don’t let anyone stop. Don’t let anyone fall out. Use force if you have to – we can’t spare a man, even the lost sheep back there. Understand?’
The hyperetai and the troop commanders all nodded, saluted and walked back to their places in the column, and a litany of ‘Close up!’ and ‘Move your arse!’ started to roll up and down the small column.
‘Uncle Diodorus?’ Satyrus asked quietly.
The strategos turned his head and raised one salt-crusted eyebrow.
‘Did we win?’ Satyrus asked.
Diodorus shook his head. ‘I don’t think we won enough,’ he said.
The stream at the bottom of the gully flowed clear and bright despite the events of the day, and Satyrus and his new bay drank greedily. Satyrus washed his face and hands in the crisp water and found that the burns around his eyes were far worse than he’d expected, and he poured handfuls of water over his eyes until a Keltoi trooper pulled him firmly from the stream. He collected the reins of his mare and led her up the far bank of the watercourse.
‘That horse looks like she has some life in her,’ Diodorus said. He had a fig in his fist and was eating it. Between bites, he gave orders. ‘Boy, take that nice horse and go and find the baggage. Should be less than a stade, over the ridge. Then double back and tell us where they are.’
Satyrus took two tries to get himself up on the big mare’s back – his arms were too weak to vault. But he got up, and he pleased himself immensely by giving his uncle a salute. Then he pulled his broad felt petasos hat off his back where it had rested uselessly all day while his face burned raw and pulled it down over his eyes.
The water made a difference. He set his mare at the slope and she got up it with style, her haunches pushing powerfully as they climbed. He patted her neck. ‘Good girl,’ he said.
All her tack was mounted in silver, with silver belt ends and Saka-style buckles. The Greeks seldom used buckles, but they looked wonderful. And the leopard skin made him smile.
As soon as he emerged from the gully end he was in the midst of a horde of camp followers, and there were more all along the trade road going south, hundreds of women, some with children, many crying and more walking in a worse silence. They shied off the road as soon as they saw an armed man, except for a few too tired or too victimized to flinch.
A stade past the eastern end of the gully, he saw pickets – a dozen cavalrymen in three posts. He rode towards them, urging his mount into a canter. She responded easily, crossing the low scrub grass like the wind – the very wind that was dispersing the clouds of salt dust, so that for the first time in eight hours, the Plain of Gabiene was again visible.
