Banugul smiled her Aphrodite smile again. ‘So many brave men. But not today.’
Diodorus exchanged one more look with his wife. ‘Fine. I’ll send a herald.’
Banugul nodded. ‘By leaving you, I return the favour that Philokles – and Kineas – did me.’
Sappho turned her head away. Satyrus could tell that his aunt didn’t like the beautiful queen.
Melitta came up the column, already covered in dust from riding around, visiting. Apparently unaware of her condition, she rode into the command group. ‘Herakles is leaving?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Sappho answered. ‘Say your goodbyes. His mother feels she’ll do better with our enemies. The men who just murdered her husband.’
Banugul’s head shot around, and her glare had the power of a thousand courtly confrontations, and Sappho met it full on.
‘Better for all of us, really,’ Diodorus was heard to mutter. ‘Hama? Take a file from first troop, and Andronicus as your herald.’
Melitta embraced a startled Herakles, who then hugged her back with sudden fervour. She kissed him, which got a grunt of disapproval from his mother. Sappho exchanged her frown for a smile – anything that displeased the blonde Persian woman pleased her.
‘I won’t forget you!’ Herakles called, as he rode away. Satyrus waved to him, and then pressed his heels to his mount, galloped up by the other boy, and handed him a javelin – one of his own, a nice heavy one.
‘Now you’re armed,’ he said. Then he made himself say something personal. ‘Remember what Philokles said yesterday. Don’t try to be your father. Just be yourself.’
Herakles gripped his hand so hard it hurt, and Satyrus was shocked to see tears in the boy’s eyes.
They clasped hands again, and Herakles rode away.
When Satyrus rode back to his uncle, the strategos was frowning at the dust raised by Banugul’s party. ‘I should have sent more of an escort.’
‘You should have sent her alone,’ Sappho said.
‘You are not helping,’ Diodorus said through clenched teeth.
Satyrus rode away from them, back along the column to his sister, who cried for a little, very quietly.
‘I really liked him,’ she said.
Satyrus didn’t have much of an idea what to say, so he gave her a quick and clumsy hug from horseback and they rode on without speaking. Silence was the order of the day, and a lot of glances back past the dust of the column.
‘They’re all worried about the escort,’ Satyrus said. He’d just worked it out. ‘If Antigonus murdered Eumenes the Cardian, he could do anything, including murdering Banugul.’
His sister sobbed.
‘What did I say?’ he asked the gods.
‘Just the fucking obvious! You are so useless.’ Melitta’s voice trembled.
Crax went out with the prodromoi to find a campsite and still there was no sign of Hama or the escort. Crax returned long after Melitta’s tears had dried, and she and her brother were reconciled, and still there was no news. They made camp – a cold and hasty camp, which consisted mostly of picketing horses and unrolling blankets and cloaks. The mountains rose all around them, and it was cold, and in the last light of the late summer evening, it began to rain. Melitta pressed hard against her brother’s back.
‘I really liked him,’ she said. ‘Herakles, I mean.’
‘I know who you mean,’ Satyrus said.
‘Of course you did,’ Theron said kindly, from the other side of the sleeping pile. ‘He was a nice enough boy, for the son of a god.’
‘Go to sleep,’ Philokles ordered.
They all slept fitfully, the intermittent rain and the cold making real sleep impossible. Melitta shivered and Satyrus’s hips were hurting from sleeping on the ground. He pulled his Thracian cloak over his face to keep the rain off of it and managed to slip away.
He smelled the lion skin first, and then he saw the club.
‘You have done well,’ said a voice deep enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck.
Satyrus snapped awake with the scent of wet cat fur in his nostrils. He lay awake a long time, listening to his heart race and to Theron’s snores, until the reality of the dream slipped into the next one, and he relaxed, and slept.
They were all stiffer, and older, in the morning, and the horses were tired. But just after first light, when the sentries were calling men to wake, a young trooper rode in, weary but obviously full of news, and went to the cluster of tents that stood in the centre of the camp. By the time Satyrus was sharing a bowl of yogurt and honey with his sister, the news was spreading from fire to fire, and the sound of laughter could suddenly be heard, and fatigue began to fall away.
Philokles came over, having been to Diodorus’s tent. ‘Melitta? One-Eye welcomed Banugul as a queen, with open arms, and his escort hailed Herakles as the son of Alexander.’ He smiled at her.
She nodded. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, slipping away a little.
‘That’s good to hear,’ Satyrus said, just to say something.
Philokles and Theron both nodded.
‘One-Eye sent Diodorus a safe-conduct,’ Philokles added.
‘Zeus Soter!’ Theron said. ‘So we’re going to live?’
‘Eventually he’s going to discover that we have his pay chest,’ Philokles said.
Not much later, the whole escort came in, with another dozen troopers who had been accounted dead. They were stripped of their armour, but they were mounted, and glad to be released. Most of them had been taken prisoner while wandering lost in the dust cloud.
Diodorus, finished with other business, strode up. ‘You don’t have to live like soldiers. You know that you can all stay with us,’ he said. ‘We have an empty tent,’ he added, pointing at the tent where Banugul had stayed. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but for some reason it made all the men around the fire roar with laughter.
Satyrus looked at his tutor. Philokles nodded. ‘I think it is time my charges learned to live like soldiers,’ he said.
Diodorus smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, looking at the horizon, ‘they’ll have all the way to Aegypt to learn it.’
They all laughed together, glad to be alive, and their laughter rose to heaven like a sacrifice, and just for a moment, Satyrus could smell lion skin.
PART IV
GRINDING
15
313 BC
‘I have no intention of fighting One-Eye if I can help it,’ Cassander said. He was dressed in a magnificent purple chlamys over a chiton that would have looked rich on a king. ‘Fighting One-Eye is foolish. He eliminated Eumenes, and now he’s on top – but he’s vulnerable. I want One-Eye to fight Ptolemy while I take Ptolemy’s soldiers away from him.’
Cassander was visiting Athens, in state. He came with an extensive entourage that taxed the best efforts of Demetrios of Phaleron and all his political allies to support him. As Menander joked, it was as if the man ate gold.
They were gathered in Demetrios’s house – a palace in all but name. Cassander was surrounded by Macedonians, but there were other Greeks in his train, and important allies, like Eumeles of Pantecapaeum.
Demetrios of Phaleron had brought his own allies – the men he trusted to run Athens, and then men whose gold helped keep Cassander fed.
