Funeral Games (71 page)

‘Remember this moment,’ Philokles said to the assembly. ‘This is the moment that you began to be soldiers.’ He looked around with approval, and still they were silent. ‘So - you are all goat-eaters. How then should I punish them? Even their advocate did not trouble to claim them guiltless.’

Namastis stepped forward from among the Aegyptians. ‘Will you punish both alike?’ he asked.

Philokles put his hands on his hips. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Don’t anger me, priest.’

Namastis shook his head. ‘Old ways die hard,’ he said. ‘If you seek to punish both alike,’ he said, ‘let them carry pots with the peasants until it is your pleasure to return them to the ranks.’

A sound like a sigh escaped from the men gathered in the dark.

‘Whoa!’ said the guilty Hellene, a marine from the
Hyacinth
.

‘Silence!’ Philokles said. ‘Any dissenting opinion?’

Another murmur, like wind passing through a field of barley - but no man stepped forward.

Philokles nodded sharply. ‘Theron, pick the two best shield-bearers and swear them in to the phalanx. These men may carry their kit. If either of you desert, you will earn the punishment of death. Serve, and you may be restored.’ Philokles raised his voice. ‘Do you agree, men of Alexandria?’

They roared - a shout that filled the night.

 

The eighth day found them at Peleusiakos, where mountains of wheat and cisterns of fresh water awaited them with barges of firewood and tens of thousands of bales of fresh fodder for the cavalry. Twelve thousand public slaves laboured at fresh earthworks in the brutal sun, raising platforms of logs and sand and fill brought from the Sinai and even from the river. The ramparts rose four times the height of a man and the platforms carried Ares engines that could throw a spear three stades or a rock the same. To the north lay the sea, and to the south the deadly marshes, which offered no hope to an army. Even with the breeze from the sea, the stink of the swamp mud overwhelmed the smell of horse and camel and the filth of men.

Satyrus marched with the rest of his phalanx into a prebuilt camp and handed his kit to a slave to be cleaned. They had
tents
. Of course, the interior of the linen tent was airless, white hot and brilliantly lit, so that no man could sleep there in the daylight - but the extent of Ptolemy’s preplanning was staggering. Satyrus put his shield against his section of the wall and put his spear in a rack set for that purpose.

Later, after a dinner cooked by public slaves with enough mutton to quieten the loudest grumbles, Satyrus stood on the parapet with his uncles and their officers, Andronicus the hyperetes of the hippeis of exiles, Crax and Eumenes, all looking out over the Sinai and the road to Gaza.

‘We’re not doomed at all,’ Philokles said. ‘I’ve underestimated our Farm Boy.’

Diodorus laughed. ‘Just as you were meant to. Mind you, if the Macedonians had managed to get their mutiny together, we’d never have got here. But look at it! Every man in the army is going to look around at the walls and the camp, the tents, the spiked pits - and the stores! And every man is going to say the same thing.’

‘Ptolemy can hold this with slaves,’ Philokles said. ‘With mice.’

‘Something like that,’ Diodorus said. He had wine in a canteen, and he handed it around.

Satyrus was cowed in the face of so many veterans, but he mustered his courage. ‘So,’ he said, ‘when will we fight?’

Diodorus laughed and slapped Satyrus on the shoulder. ‘That’s the great thing, lad. We’ll
never
have to fight. Demetrios is a child, but he’s not a fool. He’ll take one look at this and cut a deal. Then he’ll turn around and march home.’

‘So no one wins,’ Satyrus said. ‘And Amastris remains with the traitor.’

Diodorus shook his head, but Eumenes, who was younger and perhaps understood Satyrus better, cut in. ‘That’s not true, Satyrus. First,
we win
. All we sought to do was defend Aegypt. We win. That’s an important concept for a soldier to understand. Second,’ he shrugged, ‘I know it’s not the stuff of Homer, but even now, I suspect that Amastris’s uncles and father and every other lord on the Euxine and quite a variety of other busybodies will be speaking for her. And when the golden boy looks at these walls and puts his tail between his legs, well . . .’ Eumenes looked at the other officers, and all three of the older men smiled.

‘Well - what?’ Satyrus asked, torn between annoyance at being treated like a boy and the knowledge that, to these men, he was one. ‘What, Eumenes?’

‘He’ll probably make a treaty just to get his men fed,’ Philokles said. ‘Amastris will go on the table to buy some of that grain.’

Satyrus spat in disgust.

Diodorus flexed his shoulders under his cuirass. ‘I want to get this bronze off my back. Satyrus, I share your disgust. You look very like your father when you’re annoyed.’

Philokles put an arm around his shoulders. ‘He is growing to be like his father.’

‘So’s his sister,’ Diodorus said, and they all laughed, even Satyrus.

 

It was almost a week before they saw the scouts of the enemy, and another week before Demetrios brought up his infantry.

The cavalry went out of the works and skirmished. The hippeis of Tanais rode forth and brought back prisoners - Sakje and Medes - and Seleucus, Ptolemy’s new second in command, won a cavalry battle somewhere to the south and east on the Nabataean road. The pikemen of the phalanxes played no part in any of this. Most of them sat in camp. But the Phalanx of Aegypt drilled all day, every day. They marched up and down the roads, and they charged across broken ground and open ground and they dug on the walls when ordered, because Philokles refused to give them a rest.

They worked harder than anyone but the slaves.

Melitta watched them march by, sitting on the great earthwork wall with her legs hanging over the edge to catch the breeze - legs which drew no notice at all in a camp so full of available peasant girls that no one gave her a second look. That thought made her smile. Beneath her feet, Xeno and Satyrus and all the young men she knew - there was Dionysius, his hair plastered to his head under a filthy linen skull cap, making a sarcastic comment to his file partner, she could see it on his face - the lot of them marched by. They were singing the Paean to Apollo to keep in step and they sang it well enough to move her.

‘Bion? Bion!’

Officer. She pulled her legs under her and swung off the parapet to drop to the hard-packed gravel of the sentry walk. ‘Phylarch!’ she called in her low voice.

Idomeneus was a Cretan, like most expert archers. He wore quilted armour and carried a massive bow and Melitta suspected that the spade-bearded mercenary knew she was a girl and didn’t care. She saluted him as she’d been taught.

‘Listen up, lad. I’m to take my best hundred archers - we’ll ride double with some of the horse-boys and try a little ambush. There’s likely to be some plunder. What do you say?’

‘I’ll get my kit,’ Melitta said.

‘Whoa, horsey. Sunset, at the camp of the Exiles.’ He grinned. ‘Professionals. They won’t leave us to die, I think.’

Melitta hoped her face didn’t register her reaction. ‘Exiles’ is what Ptolemy’s army called Diodorus’s hippeis from Tanais. Those were her people - they’d know her.

Too late to back out. ‘I’ll be there,’ she said.

 

She accepted the derision of her peers with grace when she appeared on parade in Persian trousers she’d bought from a slave. Like most of them, she had a big straw hat the size of an aspis and under it she wrapped her head in linen against the sun. There wasn’t much of Melitta, daughter of Kineas, to be seen.

The hundred picked toxotai didn’t so much march as stroll across the camp. Good archers were specialists - like craftsmen - and they didn’t have the kind of discipline that the men in the phalanxes needed. In fact, they derided the phalangites as often as they could.

Cavalry were a different matter. Cavalrymen often had a social distinction, and they considered all infantrymen to be beneath their notice. Melitta, as the child of the Sakje, shared their disdain, and it was odd to receive the cutting edge of it from men she knew.

‘Pluton, they smell!’ Crax laughed. He trotted his horse along the length of the toxotai, his charger actually brushing Melitta. He stopped and leaned over by Idomeneus. ‘This is the best you could do? They look like dwarves, Ido!’

Crax actually pointed at Melitta
.
‘That one can’t be more than twelve.’

Her captain didn’t get angry. Instead, he pointed at ‘Bion’. ‘Fall out,’ he said. ‘String your bow.’

Crax laughed. ‘Well, at least he’s strong enough to get it bent. Say - that’s a Sakje bow, lad.’

Melitta had the string on with the practice of years. Without waiting for an order, she put an arrow on her string, chose a target - a javelin target across the Exiles’ parade square, a good half a stade away - and loosed. The arrow rose, drifted a little on the evening breeze and struck the target squarely, so that the wooden shield moved and the
thunk
echoed.

‘Hmm,’ Diodorus said. ‘That lad looks familiar to me, Crax.’ Diodorus had a dun-coloured cloak over a plain leather cuirass and two spears in his fist.

Crax reached down and slapped Idomeneus. ‘I take it all back, Cretan. They’re all Apollo’s own children. At least they won’t burden the horses!’

After a quick inspection, ten of them were sent to fill all the water bottles, a task Melitta always drew because she was clearly one of the youngest. Then they paraded with the hippeis, and every archer was assigned to a rider.

Bion was assigned to a Macedonian deserter she didn’t know well - although she did know him - but just as she prepared to climb on to his mount, Carlus trotted his gigantic charger along the line.

‘Captain says I take the boy,’ Carlus said.

The Macedonian shrugged. ‘He’s the lightest, that’s for sure. Not sorry to ride without him, though. They’ve all got lice.’ He turned his horse and moved back along the file.

Carlus lifted Bion with one hand. ‘Hands around my waist, lad,’ he said.

Carlus smelled of male sweat and horse - not a bad smell at all, but—

‘Your uncle says that if you want to go with the army, you should be with us,’ Carlus said. His voice was level. ‘We can keep you alive.’

‘I can keep alive. I have comrades who I value,’ she said. And she knew that life in the camp of the Exiles would not be
real
like life with the toxotai. She was gaining a reputation as an archer and as someone to be taken seriously, at knucklebones or even boxing. With the hippeis, she’d be known for what she was. Kind glances and helpful hands and some laughter behind her back.

Carlus shrugged. ‘Everyone needs to make their own way,’ he allowed.

 

The moon was bright, and the desert empty, and they rode fast - the kind of speed that Medes and Sakje practised, and few Greeks could manage. Every man had two horses, or even three, and they changed every hour.

It was exhilarating to go so fast across the moon-swept landscape, with such comrades. The sense of purpose was remarkable and heady. The hippeis were exactly as silent as required - loud when they felt secure, silent as a necropolis when they began to close on the enemy camp - and the toxotai were infected by their absolute conviction that they would win. At the second halt for a horse change, Idomeneus grinned at her. ‘Someday I’d like to train archers this well,’ he said.

‘They’ve been together twenty years,’ Bion replied, and then realized she had blundered. ‘At least, that’s what the big barbarian I’m with said.’

Idomeneus nodded. ‘Still,’ he whispered.

‘You kids done chatting?’ Crax asked. He was already mounted and he extended a hand to the Cretan. ‘I hope we’re not keeping you up too late. The party is just about to start.’

No one bothered to tell Bion the plan until they halted a final time, just after the moon had set. Carlus was pointing at the ground.

‘What do I do?’ she asked.

Carlus’s grin was ghastly in the moonlight. ‘Dig a hole and climb in. We’ll draw them to you at first light. When you hear the trumpet, start shooting.’ He shrugged. ‘Not my plan.’

She rolled off the broad back of Carlus’s elephantine horse and gathered her small pack. She did not, of course, have a pick or a shovel. All around her she could see other archers with the same difficulty.

They scraped shallow pits with their hands and some, who had helmets, used them, while Idomeneus walked up and down, cursing and demanding that they dig faster. By the time the very first rays of dawn turned the eastern sky pink, she was lying in the cool sand with her cloak over her and a few hastily gathered blades of swamp grass over her cloak. It wasn’t much. To her right she could see another Cretan, Argon, with his rump sticking up because he was a lazy sod and couldn’t be bothered to dig hard.

Why am I here?
Melitta asked herself in the privacy of her hole. She’d been warm enough while working, but now the sand was soaking the warmth out of her and she didn’t have her cloak around her and she was cold and none of this made any sense. The cavalry had ridden away.

She must have fallen asleep, despite everything, because suddenly there was movement around her and the sky was very bright indeed. She raised her head and saw dust, felt the hoof beats of horses, many horses at a gallop.

‘Wait for it!’ Idomeneus called. He was standing in the shadow of a big rock. ‘String your bows!’

A hundred capes wriggled and the sand seemed to roll like the sea as the toxotai strung their bows lying flat. Even the desert generated too much moisture to leave a bow strung overnight.

To Bion, it seemed as if the galloping horses were right on top of them, and still Idomeneus didn’t call and the trumpet didn’t sound. Louder and louder - impossibly loud. And terrifying.