‘Is it that bad?’ Leon asked. ‘I’ve been at sea.’
Ptolemy shrugged. ‘To be honest, no. It’s not that bad. It’s never been as bad as when Perdiccas had Alexander’s own army at the Nile forts and I had nothing but a handful of mercenaries to stop them. Nor as bad as when Golden Boy came at us at Gaza. We’re in Syria. Lots of room to retreat.’
‘And this looks like a good army,’ Leon offered.
‘All the quality money can buy,’ Ptolemy said with a touch of his old humour. ‘But if Cassander folds — and the bastard will fold — then they’ll all come after me.’
‘Lysimachos?’ Leon asked.
‘Won’t hold long enough for Seleucus to reach him — because there’s nothing to stop Demetrios from taking his soldiers to Asia. Faster than Lysimachos can move.’ Ptolemy shook his head again. ‘It’s not cast in bronze. But I’m not going to save them. I can’t beat Antigonus — and you and I both know it. If I had Eumenes … if I had any number of the boys from the old days. But I don’t, and I don’t think I could trust this army to face old One-Eye.’
Leon sighed. ‘I should get back. If you are right, we will have to cover your retreat.’
Ptolemy laughed. ‘Yes, if we’re really lucky, we’ll have to fight them after all.’ His sarcasm was evident. ‘I’m too old for this shit.’
Leon nodded. ‘Think of One-Eye. He must be eighty.’
Ptolemy nodded. ‘I think of it all the time. I think if he were to die, we’d be saved.’
The last winds of the storm were still blowing hard enough that a phalangite would have a hard time holding his sarissa upright. Most of the army’s tents were blown flat, and the slaves had stopped trying to get them back up.
Lysimachos was on the beach, stripped, trying with every other soldier in his army to rescue men from the sea. The corpses were so thick in the sea wrack that the waves seemed to be made of dead men.
Half his army, gone in an afternoon squall on the Euxine. Five thousand veterans, gone to the bottom. The beaches from Heraklea to Sinope were littered with corpses, and more were sinking beneath the waves or floating, bloated and stinking and black, like soft logs in the wake of the squall. His fleet wrecked.
Lysimachos continued to search the corpse-wrack, looking for men who were alive. And after hours — the hideous work seemed eternal — he found Amastris and her women beside his men. His wife — he hardly thought of her these days — was swimming about, grabbing men by the hair and pulling them to shore.
Until then, she had never been more than a tool for his desires — the desire to conquest, the desire to have a child by her, to hold her city as a port into Asia.
But watching her dare the undertow to pull a Macedonian peasant out of the clutches of Poseidon, despite the complete disaster that had just overtaken him, he smiled.
Kalias, his principal strategos, was shaking his head.
‘We’re done,’ he said. ‘First Cassander and now this.’
Lysimachos watched his wife for another minute. She was beautiful — and brave. Worthy, in fact.
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘I’m not done yet.’ He stripped his chiton over his head. ‘See those women out in the water? Are they better than we?’ He ran through the corpses and dived headlong, racing for a man he’d seen to move a hand.
All along the beach, weary, waterlogged soldiers rose to their feet, stripped their gear, and went into the surf.
Lysimachos made it to his man. He couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead, but he did what he’d seen Amastris do — he got a hand into the man’s hair, put his buttocks under the man’s back, and swam for shore.
He was further off the beach than he’d thought. He raised his head and saw that he was a surprising distance offshore, and despite his swimming, he seemed to be getting further and further away. He swam harder. He started to panic and he fought it with the long experience of the veteran warrior who knows panic like a man knows his lover’s body.
At some point it occurred to Lysimachos to let go of the body. But he was sure there was spirit still in it — and in some way, some inexpressible sending of the gods, Lysimachos had decided that if he could save this one man, if the man lived, then his army would live, his cause would live, and he would save his honour. And if he could not save this one man, it seemed fair that he die here, choking water, Poseidon’s victim.
It was a simple contest: Lysimachos against the sea. Lysimachos was strong, and his will was as great as his body. He was not a great swimmer. But he would not surrender to the waves, or let go the man whose hair he had.
He fought a long fight.
The land slipped further and further away — first a stade, and then another.
He kept swimming. Fighting.
He got a throat full of seawater, his nose closed, his larynx burning from the salt, and he fought panic off one more time, pushed himself up in the water. Changed grip on the body on his back — almost certainly a corpse by now.
A swirl in the water by his head.
He closed his eyes. He opened them to find a mermaid.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ Amastris said. She was as calm and fit as a goddess, and as beautiful. ‘Here, give him to me.’ She took the man’s hair and had the energy to swim up under his head, stick her fingers in his mouth, and pull him up to her shoulder.
‘Still alive,’ she said cheerily.
Side by side, they swam for the beach.
Antigonus read the dispatches from his son with unconcealed delight, his one eye roving over the careful scribal writing like a lookout watching for ships on a threatened coast.
‘He doesn’t even know that Lysimachos is wrecked!’ Antigonus laughed. ‘By all the gods. By all the gods, gentlemen! Ptolemy is alone! Cassander’s defeated, Lysimachos wrecked by a storm, Seleucus too far away, Satyrus dead!’ He laughed again. ‘And I was at the point of despair.’
‘Ptolemy still has a mighty army,’ suggested his spymaster, Kreon — a Siciliote.
‘We will buy him. Offer him a generous truce, crush the rest of them, and take him next spring. Ares, I haven’t felt this young in years. Get me a girl.’
Kreon laughed. ‘Don’t hurt yourself, lord,’ he chuckled.
‘Damn it, Kreon — I’m old, not dead.’ Antigonus laughed aloud. ‘By the gods. We’ve won. I never thought I’d say those words.’
Kreon flinched. ‘Not done yet. They still have life in them. Lysimachos still has troops — about half his army, and all of Heraklea’s resources. I understand he’s marching.’ He looked at his master. ‘Seleucus is mighty.’
‘That pup? What can he do?’ Antigonus said. ‘His army is a quarter of mine and he has no fleet.’
‘Join hands with Lysimachos or Ptolemy?’ Kreon said.
‘It would take a miracle,’ Antigonus said, and chuckled.
Miriam was doing exercises when she heard her brother’s angry roar. She finished her dance steps — her brother had a temper and it was best not to feed it — and then pulled a chiton over her head and emerged from her room into the central garden.
They were not slaves. Far from it — they had returned to comfortable captivity, but with the threat of slavery or death hanging over them every day. They were held in a spacious private home right against the walls of the city, and there were fifty soldiers watching the forty Rhodian prisoners in the houses around them.
Abraham, when she found him, was weeping.
Miriam came and sat by him on the bench.
‘Our father is dead,’ Abraham said, and ripped hair out of his beard.
Miriam felt the tears well up in her eyes — painful tears. She had never made peace with the old man. And now she never would. But to say she didn’t love him would have been a lie. She began to sob, but it was as if someone else was doing the crying, because her mind ran on, calm and clear, even as she heard her own rather shocking exclamation.
Abraham took both of her hands.