Jubal smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘Either we’ll stop to lay siege, and you’ll have to build us some artillery, or they’ll open the gates, and you can get what you need.’ Satyrus looked at Lysimachos, aware that he was ordering Jubal to take what he needed.
Jubal made a face. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Lord.’
But Sardis opened its gates for a cash payment to the commander of the garrison, and Lysimachos kept his men outside. Jubal bought a pair of slave smiths and some metal and a talent in silver’s worth of cut and planed wooden beams. He bought wagons and linen tarps coated in linseed oil.
Satyrus bought pots — fire pots, the type his triremes used to keep a fire going all day at sea. He bought every scrap of canvas in the city: every party pavilion, every sail from the fishing boats. A convoy came over the mountains from the seaport with more. He spent a summer’s tithes from the Propontus on tentage.
It didn’t stop the rain, but it earned him the thanks of the army.
The third morning at Sardis — the eleventh since they had marched from Ephesus — they marched again, just as One-Eye’s scouts came over the high pass. Satyrus sent a runner back to Apollodorus ordering him to abandon Ephesus. It wouldn’t matter to them — in twelve hours, Antigonus would cut the road.
Satyrus cantered over to Lysimachos, who was watching Antigonus’s scouts descending the road behind them. Nikephorus came, and Stratokles, and two of Lysimachos’s Thracian chiefs and Nikeas, his escort commander and right-hand man, and Lucius.
‘Two thousand stades from here to Heraklea,’ Lysimachos said.
‘Most of it through the mountains,’ Satyrus said. ‘You have a route?’
Lysimachos nodded. ‘I planned to go the Royal Road from here,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect Antigonus to be on our heels.’
Satyrus watched the first formed troops come over the ridge. ‘I don’t think that the Royal Road is a good option, anyway. Until Plistias recovers, my ships on Lesbos will cover the seaward flank. I’d like to stay in touch with them. I suggest we go north through the mountains to Cyzucus on the Propontus — or to where the road goes east, at least. My ships hold the whole of the straits. From there we can move east by stages with our flanks secure.’
Lysimachos rubbed his beard. ‘That means marching through Bithynia. Hostile, very hostile.’
Satyrus waved at Mithridates, rescued from Demetrios at Ephesus. ‘Handy that we have a spare King of Bithynia, then, isn’t it?’ he said.
Lysimachos looked at him. Even Stratokles looked at him with respect.
Satyrus nodded. ‘But first — if I may be so bold — we had better brush One-Eye’s advance guard back, or they’ll be crawling all over us.’
The fight at the fords of the Hermos River was not memorable in any way, except that Anaxagoras told them that the Ionian Greeks had fought the Lydians and Persians here. ‘It is in Herodotus,’ Anaxagoras said. ‘Right here at the bridge — two hundred years ago, give or take a few. The Greeks held, and the Persian satrap was wounded, and the Greeks slipped away.’
‘And then they won at Marathon,’ Charmides said.
‘Hah!’ Satyrus put in. ‘Not the Ionians. They were tools for the warring powers.’
‘Still are,’ Stratokles added. ‘Too rich.’
‘Too soft,’ added Lucius.
Charmides narrowed his eyes. ‘Now see here …’ he said.
Anaxagoras raised his hands. ‘It’s history!’ he said. ‘Not a calculated insult. Besides, didn’t you tell me once your father was a Spartan?’
Satyrus turned his head. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘How did a Spartan come to Lesbos?’
Out across the plain, the enemy scouts came forward warily, and behind them came two big squadrons of cavalry and a taxeis of pikemen, marching hard.
Charmides grew red and said nothing.
‘Here they come,’ Anaxagoras said, and pulled his helmet down. They were manning a barricade of stakes hidden by a line of woven matts with greenery on them — it was hard to arrange an ambush at a frequented ford with no cover for ten stades in any direction.
The scouts came to the river bank opposite but they didn’t like what they saw. Ten minutes later, the enemy cavalry pushed into the river, but they didn’t cross, and the taxeis halted on the far bank.
Their baggage came up, and they began to make camp.
Satyrus watched them with real respect. ‘Antigonus is good,’ he said.
Lysimachos, already pulling his best barbarians out of their ambush positions, nodded. ‘He’s the best of us who are left. Why?’
‘He’s laid a counter-trap, that’s why. We’re supposed to make a lunge at this advance guard, so far from his army, no support. But look — cavalry on both ridges.’
Lysimachos nodded. ‘I’ve been duped by him a dozen times, and yet, I swear we could take the taxeis before the cavalry could save them.’
Satyrus shrugged. ‘If that’s the war we were waging. I thought we were retreating?’
Lysimachos laughed. ‘We are, we are.’
Philip, with One-Eye’s advance guard, made camp across the water, ready to sell his life dearly.
Satyrus broke contact and rode away behind a screen of Thracians.
And that night, Scopasis appeared in camp. Satyrus had some warning of his coming — the rumble of horse’s hooves. His sentries grasped their weapons and stared into the darkness.
He had more than a thousand horses, all told. All his Sakje were mounted, and their horse herd covered the space of the whole of the rest of the camp.
‘I hate rain,’ Scopasis said. He grinned. ‘But it is good for stealing horses.’
‘How’d you get so many?’ asked Charmides.
‘Patience,’ Scopasis said.
‘Will you teach me?’ Charmides asked.
‘Yes,’ Scopasis said.
The irony — the hand of Tyche, to some — was that Satyrus suddenly had superb cavalry scouts — the best, in fact, in two thousand stades — just as both armies entered the mountains. The plain of Sardis gave way to the rising passes of the Tennon Mountains. The Sakje were penned in with the army, crossing high, wooded passes that narrowed to the width of the tracks that followed them.
But Scopasis seemed determined to scout, so Satyrus sent him far to the north and south, marking alternative passes over the great folds of earth that separated the deep green valleys of Lydia and Mysia.
Behind them, Antigonus pushed his cavalry and light infantry to keep the pressure on.
And in the skies above them, the clouds rolled in from the sea, on and on, so that it seemed to Satyrus, riding up his third steep climb of the day, that he had been wet through for ever. Now he made a practice of riding among Nikephorus’s Apobatai, calling out names and asking men for a dry chiton to get a laugh. Sometimes he would dismount, hand his horse to a slave, and march on foot with his own rations in a leather bag — not because the act had any value in itself, but only because the infantry needed to know that he was there.
Five days out of Sardis — when the rain seemed eternal, and the farmers by the road were showing signs of despair at the weather, which was flooding their fields — Satyrus was marching with the Apobatai. He found that the men sharing the trail with him were Lucius, Stratokles and Herakles.
Herakles gave him a look — half reproach, and half a request for praise. ‘They told me I had to do this,’ he said with a shrug.
He was carrying an oiled linen tarp, a bronze cook pot and the same big leather wallet as Satyrus — although his was covered in ornate bronze work. He was actually carrying the whole marching kit of a hoplite or a phalangite. Behind him stumbled an adolescent boy with his shield and helmet.
Satyrus laughed. ‘You’re carrying more than I am, lad,’ he said.
Herakles smiled.
Satyrus realised that it was the first time he’d seen the boy smile.
He spoiled the effect by panting and then crowing, ‘It’s easy!’ The combination was risible. Satyrus hid his smile, slapped the boy’s back, and marched on into the rain.
Two stades up the pass, Stratokles fell in beside him. ‘He worships you,’ he said.