Satyrus grinned. ‘I don’t intend to die,’ he said. ‘I intend to get to the top of that ridge and kill everything I find there.’
Delios wasn’t sure if his king was joking. ‘Lord?’
Satyrus nodded to all of them. ‘Herakles is with us,’ he said.
Behind him, he heard young Herakles say to Lucius, ‘What does that mean? Is he talking about me?’
‘Shush,’ said the Latin.
It took for ever for the men to fill their canteens. Arrows fell on them, and javelins, and rocks with increasing frequency as the enemy filled in on the ridge above them — more men on the ridge behind them. Satyrus took a heavy rock on his shield and had to skip to avoid it crushing his ankles.
Somewhere, they had friends, too. Probably the archers out with their morning scouts — there were enemy tribesmen dying up there on the ridge, and arrows going both ways.
‘I don’t get it,’ Lucius said. ‘Who’re those bastards?’
‘No idea. Don’t look a gift archer in the mouth,’ Satyrus said. Louder, he said, ‘Dump everything but your canteen and your fighting gear. If you have a long spear, ditch it. If you can get a javelin or two — take them.’
The ranks shuffled as men stripped their food bags. Veterans took a bite of bread, or dropped a ripe fruit down the front of their chitons. Some men dumped everything — some kept everything.
Men were edging forward, eager to start, to get it over with. To get out from under the rain of death. Two men were already down — one with his skull crushed, another with a broken ankle and then a crushed skull.
‘Wait for it,’ Satyrus yelled. Above them, the Mysians were screaming war cries.
Young Herakles shuffled and spat, trying to get the taste of death out of his mouth. Lucius looked bored. Satyrus watched the hills above them, wishing that he could suddenly hear the trumpets of the main column.
It seemed an odd and somewhat pointless place to die. But the smell of wet cat was powerful in his nostrils, and his hands shook with the power of his eudaimonia. He felt the strength of ten men flowing through his hands.
‘If this is your last hour,’ Satyrus called in his storm-at-sea voice, ‘use it to show the gods that you are a hero, not a man.’
The Apobatai, poised on the edge of desperation and defeat, heard him, and their roar of defiance was the sound of a wounded lion, crouched in the thicket, still dangerous.
‘At them!’ Satyrus roared, and they were away — a mad scramble, rock to rock, and the javelins flew thick and fast, and rocks — almost impossible to climb with an aspis straight-armed over your head. Satyrus got a leg up on a big rock, and something hit him in the exposed hip, and then he was up — no idea how — and instead of slipping down and climbing the next rock, he simply jumped — landed on the peak of the next giant rock, his foot already slipping, and he did it again, running from rock-peak to rock-peak while javelins hit his shield.
He wasn’t the only man to run along the top of the rocks instead of picking his way.
He was just the fastest.
He went up the side of the ridge, and three bounds brought him to his first opponent — his balance was already slipping, and the man was below him, and Satyrus put a spear point unerringly into the top of the man’s head as he turned to run, right through the top of his skull, and Satyrus leaped again. Now he was on a patch of grass the size of a helmsman’s station, and two men stood there, one with a bow and one with an axe. The bowman shot the axe man in the back and died to Satyrus’s spear, his eyes still full of the remorse of his panic-driven error. And then the Mysian tribesmen were breaking, running, and the Apobatai hunted them through the rocks to the top of the ridge, until their flight was stiffened by Agrianian javelin men from northern Macedon — professional light infantry, some of them veterans from Alexander’s earliest campaigns. There were fifty of them there, and some slingers.
They were professionals, but they didn’t have armour, shields, or desperation. Satyrus’s men suffered from the slingers — ten men went down in as many casts — but then, out of nowhere, a dozen of his scout-archers appeared higher on the hill and let fly into the back of the Agrianians, and the ridge was taken. The Mysian tribesmen were butchered, thirty of them were taken prisoner, and the Agrianians fought a dogged rearguard action of their own, their javelins outranged by the Sakje bows of the scouts. But they knew cover and they knew how to move, and they slipped away with fewer than a dozen casualties.
Satyrus made the top of the ridge and slumped against a stone. His sword was red with blood and light rust, and when he raised the blade to point out the enemy slingers and call an order, the blood ran untrammelled down the blade and over his hand. He had one more fight — not his choice — when a wounded Mysian chose to die rather than surrender and attempted to take Satyrus with him. Satyrus had to kill him twice, a blow to the head that should have put him down and another that all but severed his head before the man fell at his feet.
And then he slumped against a rock again, the pain in his hip so intense he could barely stand, the sword stuck to his hand with dried blood.
Herakles found him first, gave him water, and then poured water over his sword hand until the dried blood ran away and he could open his hand.
‘It’s dry here,’ Satyrus mumbled. At his feet, he could see Nikephorus coming hard with three hundred pikemen.
‘Can you walk, lord?’ Herakles asked him.
Satyrus laughed. ‘You, too, are a king, lad. You and I don’t call each other “lord”.
Herakles looked around. ‘Is this … all there is? Satyrus? Is this all there is to … to war?’ He looked at his feet — crusted with the mud of Ares — blood, excrement and dirt. ‘I was so scared.’
Lucius came up and put his arm around the young man, and Satyrus drank wine from his canteen and rubbed his hip. The thorax had held, but now that he had time to look, he could see that the rock — he thought it had been a rock — had crushed the flange at the hip right into his skin.
‘Help me get this off,’ he gasped. The blood was soaking his buttocks and his groin, running down his legs.
He dropped his shield and they unlatched the thorax and folded it off him. He wished for his scale shirt, but it was thousands of stades to the north.
The wound itself was nothing; the rock had crushed the armour, and the corner of the broken bronze had cut his hip deeply and repeatedly with every stride he took — a series of fifty semicircular cuts, every one of which had drawn blood.
‘That’s going to make a spectacular scar,’ Lucius said. ‘Can you walk?’
Satyrus shook his head. ‘I’ll be fine. Dump the thorax — we can’t fix it here.’
Young Herakles shook his head. ‘And let them put your breastplate in a trophy?’ he said. ‘Never!’ He took a rock and bashed at the place where the hip was bent in and the metal was torn asunder. In three blows he’d knocked it back into shape, the jagged edges now thrust out and away from Satyrus’s hip.
‘Well done, young man!’ Lucius said. They got it over Satyrus’s head, and latched it, and Satyrus felt only the pain of the wound and some additional pressure where the weight sat on his hips. He pushed his blood-soaked chlamys up onto his hips, and managed to wink at Herakles. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Although I don’t really care if they build a trophy,’ he added.
‘That was incredible,’ Herakles said, as they started to descend the mountain. ‘I feel like a god.’
Satyrus nodded. The wine had gone to his head, and all he wanted was sleep. The rain had stopped. The sun was starting to burn through the haze. Nikephorus was running to meet them, relief in his eyes.
‘I had no idea!’ he shouted, fifty paces away.
When Satyrus reached him, he slapped the mercenary on the back. ‘Neither did I. Antigonus is one wily bastard.’
They collected the rearguard, picked up their dead and retreated over the top of the pass.