Funeral Games (70 page)

‘I will protect you,’ he said thickly - the wrong words, he knew, and said the wrong way. He didn’t care.

She flipped her himation back over her head, but her eyes remained on his. He hadn’t noticed how dispassionate they were before. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You will.’

Her smile was visible only at the corners of her eyes, but it was for him. It was a long time since he had seen eyes do that - for him. It made him wince.

Then she stepped back. His guards surrounded her.

‘We will be pleased to occupy any tent you see fit to give us,’ Stratokles said.

‘No, toad. She is mine. I’ll see to it that you are paid a talent or two for your betrayals, but she is mine. Perhaps I’ll add to your reward for bringing her. Really, she makes the conquest of this strip of sand almost worthwhile.’ Demetrios laughed, and all the companions laughed with him. ‘Aphrodite, goddess of love, you didn’t imagine that she found you anything but horrible? The man who abducted her? Have you ever looked in a mirror? While I, the golden one, chosen of the gods, will save her from your venomous clutches.’ Demetrios laughed. ‘She’s moist for me now, toad.’

That last made all the companions roar with laughter.

Stratokles had the strength to smile. He stood straight.
I am the hero of this piece,
he thought.
Not you, boy. Me. The toad.
‘This is not how your father deals with men, lord,’ Stratokles said above the laughter. ‘Schoolboy insults insult only schoolboys.’

Demetrios turned suddenly, his eyes narrow. ‘You dare to tell me what my father would or wouldn’t do? You call me a boy?’ His companions fell silent.

‘Your father offered me the satrapy of Phrygia. I have done my best to honour my part of the bargain and I still have agents in place. Now,’ slowly, carefully, as if the words were dragged from him, ‘now you call me names and take from me my ward and offer me a few talents of silver?’ Stratokles shrugged. ‘Kill me, lord. For if you don’t, I will tell your father that you are a fool.’

‘My father—’ Demetrios began. Then he stopped, as if listening to someone speak. Demetrios stood like a statue, staring off above his friend Paesander’s head, and then he turned back.

‘You are right to upbraid me, sir.’ The alteration in Demetrios was so total that Stratokles, still in the grip of his own acting, felt that he had to step back before the power of the gods. Demetrios bowed to the Athenian. ‘It was ill of me to call you names - although you must confess that you will never model for Ganymede.’

Some of the companions laughed, but the laugh was nervous, because Demetrios’s voice sounded
odd
.

Stratokles inclined his head in a token of agreement. ‘I have never bragged about my looks. Nor have I ever sought to model myself on Ganymede,’ he said, pointing the barb at the handsomest of Demetrios’s companions, a beautiful boy who stood next to Paesander. ‘Although I gather that some do.’

Demetrios laughed. ‘There’s more to you than that ugly face,’ he acknowledged. ‘We are on the edge of battle - the battle that will give us Aegypt. Then we shall reward all of our faithful soldiers. It was wrong of us to speak in terms of a few paltry pieces of silver. Please accept our apologies.’ Demetrios bowed, and Stratokles had to fight the urge to forgive him out of hand.

That is power
, he thought.

‘And the girl?’ he asked.

Demetrios smiled. ‘Let it be as she wishes.’

Stratokles led her away, with Demetrios’s friend Paesander as a messenger. The daimon hectored him that he had fallen prey to a pretty girl.

T
he pursuit of Stratokles didn’t last out the night. Midnight had come and gone before they found the means he had used to leave the city - a boat waiting off the palace - and his head start was sufficient to guarantee his success.

‘He’ll run to Demetrios,’ Philokles told Satyrus.

The young man was dry-eyed - tired, wrung out and incapable of further emotion. Subsequent days did little to raise his spirits. They marched from the city into the desert, and the next five days were hard - stretches of bright desert punctuated by Delta towns and river crossings, so that a man could be parched with heat and an hour later nearly drowned. The mosquitoes were the worst that Satyrus had ever known, descending on the army in clouds that were visible from a stade away.

‘What do they eat when there aren’t any Jews?’ Abraham asked.

‘Mules,’ Dionysius answered. ‘The taste is much the same.’

Satyrus marched along in silence, sometimes lost in dark fantasies of the torments Amastris must now be suffering, and again, tormenting himself with his own inability to rescue her. Few things are more calculated to indicate to a young man just how small his roll is than marching in the endless dust cloud and bugs of an army column that fills the road from morning until night - one tiny cog in the great bronze machine of war.

At night they camped on flat ground by branches of the Nile and drank muddy water that left silt in their canteens. Every morning, Satyrus made himself roll out of his cloaks and go around the circle of fires, helping one mess group start their fire, finding an axe for another and reminding a third how to cook in clay without cracking the pots.

All in all, the cooking was getting better, if only because the Phalanx of Aegypt was beginning to acquire followers. Every village seemed to have girls and very young men who wanted to go
anywhere
, if only to leave the eternal drudgery of the land. On the river, a girl was accounted a woman when she was twelve, and
old
when she was a grandmother of twenty-five or so. Most of them were dead when they were thirty. Satyrus had heard these things, but now he marched through it, and every morning there were more peasants at his campfires, cooking the food - and eating it. And the files of shield-bearers began to fill in, so that the phalanx looked more like the Foot Companions.

On the third day, Philokles walked up and down the ranks, ordering men to carry their own kit. ‘Let them carry the cook pots!’ Philokles roared. ‘Carry your own weapons! You spent the summer earning the privilege - don’t sell it for a little rest!’

The fourth morning and already Amastris was like a distant dream. Satyrus had fallen asleep with Abraham, and he awoke to find his friend shivering. Satyrus was shivering too, but he knew what to do - he was up in a flash, and threw his chlamys over the other man, and then ran along the Thermoutiakos, a stream of the Nile, and then around the camp until he was warm.

Well upstream, he came across a pair of marines he knew and Diokles, leading a goat.

‘Where’d that come from?’ Satyrus asked.

‘We found it, didn’t we?’ one of the marines answered. ‘Wandering, like.’

Diokles wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Didn’t actually belong to anyone,’ he said.

Satyrus rubbed at the beginning of a beard that was forming on his jaw. ‘You know what Philokles says about theft.’

‘Wasn’t theft,’ Diokles insisted.

‘Wandering about, like,’ the marine said.

The other marine was silent.

‘I know where you can find your sister,’ Diokles offered suddenly.

If he intended to distract his officer, he certainly succeeded. ‘You do?’ Satyrus asked.

‘I’ll catch up with you,’ Diokles said, waving at the marines. Then he turned back the way he had come. ‘She’s in the archer camp. All the sailors and marines know it - you won’t send her back?’

‘Hades, no!’ Satyrus said.

They walked half a stade, to where a dozen young men were shooting bows at baled forage for the cavalry. ‘She got us the goat,’ Diokles admitted.

‘Really?’ Satyrus asked.

‘Do you really want to know?’ Diokles answered. ‘You’ll find her. I’ll see you in camp.’

Satyrus jogged over to the men shooting at the bales. It wasn’t that hard to pick out his sister, if you knew where to look. He came up and swatted her on the backside, the way soldiers in armour often did to each other.

Melitta whirled. ‘You bastard!’ she growled.

He laughed. They embraced.

‘You’re insane!’ Satyrus said.

‘No more than you, brother,’ she said. ‘Any word about Amastris?’

Satyrus sat on his haunches in the sand - a new talent for a world with no chairs. ‘No word at all. Stratokles took her and sailed away.’

‘He won’t bother her,’ Melitta said. ‘She’s too clever.’ After a moment, she said ‘much too clever’ in a way that suggested that all that cleverness wasn’t entirely admirable.

‘I’m afraid for her.’ Satyrus frowned. ‘I know how stupid this sounds, but - I want to rescue her.’

‘That’s not stupid, brother - if it was me, I’d fucking well expect you to come and save me.’ She laughed in her throat, a deeper sound than she’d ever made at home.

‘Nice swearing,’ Satyrus said.

‘I get lots of practice,’ Melitta said.

‘I have to go back and make sure the breakfast gets cooked,’ Satyrus said, and saw Xenophon coming up, his whole demeanour sheepish. ‘Now I know where you sleep,’ he said with more venom than he meant.

Xenophon wouldn’t meet his eye, and Satyrus was sorry to find that he didn’t care much.

‘I’ll walk back with you,’ Xenophon said. He and Melitta exchanged a significant look.

‘No,’ Satyrus said. ‘You have your armour on and I’m going to run. See you soon. What do you call yourself?’

‘Bion, like my horse.’ She flashed him her best smile and he returned it. Then he waved, nodded to Xeno so as not to seem rude and ran off for his camp.

An hour later, his belly full of under-roast goat, he was marching again.

 

They marched through Natho and Boubastis, picking up more followers and meeting carefully assembled grain barges that supplied the army and kept the looting of the peasants down to manageable limits. At Boubastis, Philokles caught an Aegyptian and a Hellene stealing cattle from an outlying farm and he brought both men into camp at spear point.

‘What will you do with them?’ Diodorus asked. He and Eumenes rode in while the sun was still bright enough for work. A barge was unloading bales of wood for fires - there wasn’t enough wood in the desert to build a raft for an ant, as the Aegyptians said.

Satyrus listened attentively, because the camp was buzzing with rumour about what the Spartan had planned.

‘I intend to hold an assembly of the taxeis tonight. What else should I do?’ Philokles asked.

Diodorus laughed. ‘Most of your men aren’t Greek, Philokles.’

Philokles shrugged. ‘So you say. When it comes to a desire for justice, and a desire to have each man have his say - who is not a Greek? You want me to kill these men out of hand, as an example?’

‘I do,’ Diodorus nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’

Philokles shook his head. ‘You’d need a different commander for this group, then, Strategos.’

Dinner was good, because the barges were less than a stade away and there was plenty of food and plenty of fuel. Just five days into the march, the Phalanx of Aegypt was harder and more capable than they had been in the near riot of leaving the city. They could cook, and sleep, and eat, and pack, and march, without much fuss. But the assembly was a new adventure, and a dangerous one, because there was death in it.

The Hellenes knew what was expected, and so all the men gathered in a great circle in the crisp night air. Above them, the whole curtain of the heavens seemed to be on display, the stars burning with distant fire. Every man was there, even those who had the mosquito fever or the runs that seemed to come with too much Nile water - at least for Greeks.

‘Soldiers!’ Philokles’ voice was as loud as any priest’s. ‘These men have disobeyed my orders and the orders of the army. In Sparta, in Athens, in Macedon, these men would forfeit their lives. But only,’ his voice grew over the murmur of the men, ‘only if the assembly of their regiment approved it. Who will step forward and speak for the army, prosecuting these men for their crime?’

Philokles’ eyes pressed on Satyrus. Into the silence he stepped. ‘I will prosecute,’ Satyrus said.

Philokles looked around. ‘Who will speak for these men?’

The two culprits grinned around at their comrades, and were surprised to find many serious faces looking back at them. Finally Abraham stepped into the silence. ‘I will defend,’ he said.

Satyrus looked at him, surprised that his friend would oppose him, but then he shrugged, understanding that Abraham no more wanted to defend them than he wanted to speak against them. This was duty.

The evidence was brief and damning, offered as it was by the phalanx commander.

Satyrus asked a number of questions to make their guilt clear, and then shrugged. He had read every case ever pleaded in Athens - he could quote Isocrates, for instance - but this didn’t seem the place for such flights of rhetoric. ‘If we rob the peasants,’ he asked the silent men of the phalanx, ‘why should they help us? And what are we but enemies, no different from those who come to conquer?’

His words went home - he could see them, like an arrow launched from a distance that, after a delay, strikes the target. He bowed his head to Philokles and stood aside.

Abraham stood forth. ‘I am not a Greek,’ he said. ‘But in this I think that the Greeks are right - that a man should be judged according to the will of his comrades. Because his comrades are best fitted to judge the crime.’ Abraham turned so that he was addressing the Aegyptians, who filled one half of the circle. ‘I ask all of you - who has not eaten stolen meat in the last week? Who has not lifted a bottle of honey beer? Let that man vote that these miscreants be killed. For myself, I am no hypocrite. My friend has told us why we hurt our own cause when we steal, and I hear him. I will not eat another stolen goat. But until the taste of that stolen food is gone from my lips, I will not condemn another to death.’

Philokles was suppressing a smile when he stepped past the two advocates. ‘Well said by both.’ He looked around. Fifteen hundred men stood in near perfect silence.