Funeral Games (33 page)

The dust was thick, and the Saka were close - she could see them shouting to each other just to the east. She waved her bow over her head at them and they shouted. Then they were gone in the dust.

She had a good idea where the enormous red and yellow tent stood, so she rode on instinct, trusting Bion to move carefully in a forest of tents and stakes and ropes. She didn’t ride fast, but she took the straightest line she could find.

She terrified a great many camp followers, emerging from the curtain of dust. She looked like a Massagetae. Under her mask of dust and her head scarf, she smiled wickedly, gave a shriek of joy and terrified them a little more. It would only move them faster. That might save their lives.

Twice, Bion stumbled, catching a leg on a tent stake or a rope, but both times they recovered without a fall. ‘Good boy,’ she said in Sakje, patting his flanks. She was speaking Sakje and thinking in Sakje, and the Greek of the terrified women around her was almost incomprehensible to her. She felt Bion’s weight change and she got up his neck for a jump - he was up and over, and she never knew what they’d just jumped. Then the gelding turned under her and she almost lost her seat, and they were cantering again.

She caught a flash of colour to her left, and then another, and beneath Bion’s hooves she was looking at fruits. They were in the agora of the camp, and close to Banugul’s tent.

Now, where is Philokles?
she asked herself.

 

Satyrus rode easily, leaning well back as they slid down the face of the bluff and then shifting his weight forward as they got the hard ground of the valley under them. He let his horse have his head, and they were off at a gallop. Satyrus trusted his seat, so he used the gallop as a smooth platform to get his chlamys off his waist where he’d tied it and to wrap it around his head.

He had just got the length of wool around his face when he burst into a crowd of Bactrians. He knew them from their long burnooses and their trousers, and then he was through them, moving so fast that they had little chance to catch him. His heart raced and for the first time the foolishness of what he was attempting rose with his gorge to choke him.

I could die doing this,
he thought. It was very different from being hunted by assassins - this was a risk he had incurred at his own will, and it felt stupid.
It’s not even my battle!
some part of his mind shouted at him.
Too late now!
another part answered, and he came out of the protective wall of salt dust as if shot from a bow.

Instantly, he felt naked. There was a breeze here, and it had ripped the veil of salt asunder and left him riding alone with a thousand Bactrians in full view to the west, less than half a stade away. His bare legs proclaimed him a Greek and probably an enemy, and a dozen of them turned their horses and came for him with a series of shrill whoops.

Ahead he saw the body of men he was aiming for - Macedonian cavalry in white leather
spolades
and bronze helmets. The man at their head had a silver helmet, but at this range it was obvious that he was
not
Eumenes. He was ten horse-lengths away, and he was shouting orders in a voice as young and shrill as Satyrus’s own. His cloak was purple.

Satyrus got up on his knees, pressed his heels into his gelding’s flank and raced for the narrowing gap between the Macedonian cavalry and the Bactrians. Behind him, a dozen Bactrians were down on their horse’s necks, calling to one another in hot pursuit, but he was a lighter rider on a better mount. It occurred to him that he ought to shoot at them, but he didn’t have the nerve to spare. He was too busy being one with his horse.

The young officer whirled around, and Satyrus passed him at javelin-toss. The pin on his purple cloak would have ransomed a small town.

In a flash he was through the gap, riding along a file of Macedonian troopers. Every head turned and some men pointed, and the Bactrians on the right started to turn, and more Bactrians, so close that they could almost touch him, turned their horses as he went by, and then he was past, out on the salt pan beyond, and the breeze was gone and he was back in the towering clouds of dust.

He galloped long enough to wind his mount, and then he curved carefully off to his right, slowing gradually and listening as hard as he could. He could hear fighting to the right, and his horse, though tired, was fidgeting hard. He couldn’t imagine why she was so restive, but he curbed her hard while he got his wits about him.

He was lost on the battlefield, somewhere in the battle haze.

 

Melitta remembered the red and yellow tent as being at the south end of the agora, and she rode in that direction. The agora was already empty, except for rubbish and a dead child of six or seven with his throat cut.

That gave Melitta a shock. She looked at the little body too long, and then pushed on. Across the last food stalls, she could see the roof of the red and yellow tent. In front of it were a dozen horses. Men were shouting. And there was a rising sound of a panicked mob coming from the north. The Medes must be in the camp.

Suddenly the impulse to help Philokles rescue Banugul seemed foolish. How would she ever find him? How could she take on a dozen men? And she had no time - the wail of mass despair was right behind her.

‘Were the fuck is she?’ came a shout from the complex of tents clustered around the red and yellow. She knew that voice. That was the doctor - the false doctor, Sophokles.

‘She ran!’ another man said.

‘Get her brat!’

‘He’s got a sword!’

Melitta was on the point of fleeing down the long avenue that ran back towards the gully when she heard Sophokles’ voice, and the power of her brother’s oath washed over her. She got her bow up, drew her akinakes and rode right up to the side wall of the great pavilion, Bion picking his way among the spiderweb of supporting stays. When she got there, she reached out and slit the walls of the tent from top to bottom so that they folded away on their supports, and then she was in the tent. She let the knife dangle from its wrist strap, nocked an arrow and watched a man chasing a boy a little younger than her brother - a bronze-haired boy with a sword. He turned and slashed at his attacker.

‘Just kill him,’ Sophokles shouted.

Melitta’s first arrow hit Sophokles in the side just below his pointing arm. He never saw the shot and he went down in a heap and then her second arrow was in the man chasing the boy.

‘Come with me!’ she shouted at the boy. She dropped her bow into the gorytos at her waist and extended her left hand.

Her brother would have known what to do, but this boy just looked at her. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Sophokles was up again, holding his side. Her light bow hadn’t put an arrow through his thorax. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said. He was two horse-lengths away.

‘Up!’ Melitta said to the boy. ‘Now!’

‘Do I have to do everything myself?’ Sophokles said, stepping over the body of the other man. Two more men came into the tent at his shoulders. He scooped a spear off the floor.

He was distracted for a vital second when a third man pushed into the huge tent from the largest side corridor with a struggling woman in his arms. ‘I have her!’

‘Just kill her!’ Sophokles called. ‘Ares! Are you fools?’

Finally, after a hesitation that seemed to Melitta to last for aeons, the boy reached up and took her hand, his eyes fixed on the struggles of the woman. Bion moved under her, and she gave a heave and he was up, grabbing her waist and almost pulling her off Bion’s back. Bion backed a step and another. She grabbed at her bow, her own dangling knife cutting the top of her thigh.

Sophokles cocked back his spear. ‘That boy is not for you,’ he said. ‘Hand him over - I’ll pay you gold. Gold! Understand?’ He pointed at a gold armband he wore. ‘Gold, you stupid barbarian.’ Aside, he said, ‘Fucking barbarians.’

‘One-Eye said to
capture
the woman and her son,’ a Macedonian accent said - one of the men behind the Athenian assassin. He was armoured like an officer, with fine gold bands on an iron cuirass. ‘Do
not
kill her.’

Sophokles looked around like a man who has suffered one indignity too many. ‘Fuck you, Macedonian,’ he said. He whirled and plunged his spear into the neck of the officer, downing him instantly.

Melitta got her bow in her hand. She caught a flash of movement from the far doorway, and there was Philokles with a sword in his hand. He kicked a man in the back of the knee and the man went down with a curse.

Of course, Philokles had no idea who she was. He glanced at her and grabbed the woman on the ground. ‘My son!’ she shouted.

‘I’m rescuing you, you stupid bitch,’ Philokles said. At the word
rescue
, every head in the tent turned, and the action seemed to Melitta to speed up. Sophokles and Philokles recognized each other.

‘Enter the drunk,’ the assassin said.

‘He’s trying to kill them because he works for Olympias,’ Philokles called out. ‘Not for One-Eye. Kill him!’

‘Hermes, you are a pest,’ the false doctor said. He cocked back the spear he held and threw it.

Philokles managed in one athletic twist to let go of the woman, bump her with his hip hard enough to knock her flat and deflect the spear.

‘Damn you!’ Sophokles cursed. ‘You have the luck of Tyche herself !’ he said.

Melitta shot him in the back of the knee. It was the least armoured part of him that she thought she could hit, and the man had turned his back on her. Then, with the surge of elation that came with a really good shot, she backed her gelding out of the slit in the tent, wheeled her horse and rode.

 

Satyrus took too much time - a subjective eternity - to realize that his horse was thrashing like a mad thing because he was almost surrounded by elephants. They were in two long columns, each of twenty or more beasts, and he was
between
them, however he had managed that. There were men around him, on foot - skirmishers or 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.

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.