But the rest of the wedges — and the Lydians and the cavalry from the eastern flank — were virtually unopposed, and they swept forward mercilessly, cutting into the stragglers of the Persians and the satrapal troops. The Persians had to fall back, and fall back again, and the victorious Antigonids rolled on, killing the laggards and pressing the fleeing troops as hard as their tired horses would permit.
And just like that — in one blow — the day was won and lost.
But Diodorus — the cunning old fox — was not lost. His counter-wedges blew through the gaps between the enemy wedges, threading them so that the deep formations collapsed each other and ended the charge as deep columns — facing nothing. The Antigonids pressed straight on, seeking for the fleeing Persians, or turned into the centre of the fight, where their young king was.
Diodorus reformed his columns, turned, and came trotting back to the farm. Satyrus was relieved to see him still with his men, and then the breeze died, and the dust came again.
The skirmishers were coming back through the gaps that some of the taxeis of pikemen had left. They looked like ants scurrying out of a series of holes — like water leaking through a dyke.
No one seemed to care about them, so Satyrus changed horses, left his helmet and his charger with the Olbians, and rode forward with Charmides and his horse marines.
If the peltastoi were surprised to be greeted by new orders, they weren’t disobedient. Just tired and elephant-shocked.
‘Over to the left. Form on the hillock. See it?’ Satyrus said, over and over. By his tenth or twelfth group of tired men, the first group was already on the hillock — some of them sitting, some lying down, but their position was obvious. Men started heading there before he even reached them, and he swung wide, up the low ridge into what had been their camp the night before, to get a view west to where Melitta and the Sakje glittered in the sun.
The enemy cavalry — those that remained — were heavily outnumbered, but they were resilient and had no intention of fighting a head-on cavalry charge and losing. Rather, they dispersed along the front like professionals then tried to skirmish, closing to throw javelins into Lysimachos’s Companion cavalry and the Greek mercenaries.
But when they did the same to Melitta’s knights on the left end of the right-wing fight, they discovered that every Sakje had a bow.
In two volleys, the Lydian cavalry opposite them was shredded — decimated, or worse, and the survivors broke — destroyed without being able to reply.
Melitta swept forward, widening her wedge to cover more ground. The enemy phalanxes were echeloned away from her — a long, angled line of dust and glittering pikes. The far end, twelve stades away, was level with her new position after her charge — the nearest end was still two stades distant, disciplined and professional and already forming a neat and virtually impregnable orb.
She looked to her left, where the Antigonid elephants and the slightly fewer Seleucid elephants were tangled together with all the psiloi. The Seleucid line was getting the worst of it. But the Antigonid light infantry and their elephants were more than a stade in front of their own pikes — more like two.
All this in a glance, dust or no dust.
‘Thyrsis!’ she shouted.
Her Achilles came up from his place.
‘Back to the boys and girls — all the skirmishers. Left — right there — into their skirmishers and plough a furrow, as deep as you can. Don’t fight the elephants — fight the men.’
Thyrsis saluted. His eyes sparkled. ‘I will!’ he shouted, and rode away to where her adolescents waited in the rear. There were more than five hundred of her light cavalry — fresh, eager, and too young to know that they couldn’t face elephants.
Then she wheeled her knights the other way, to the right, and pushed forward, using her knights and their bows to clear the Lydians away, like a farmer’s-wife shooing flies with a broom.
Satyrus saw the Sakje outriders pouring into the gap on the Antigonid western flank, and rode his second horse of the day to exhaustion to tell the King of Babylon.
He nodded. His whole attention was on Demetrios and his cavalry. Antiochus was wrecked — the young man himself was missing, and no messages were emerging from that flank. Demetrios’s golden helmet and his trumpeter’s golden trumpet were already two stades behind the Seleucid line, threatening to roll up the allies like a carpet. And Demetrios didn’t hesitate to savour his victory. His men were rallying like professionals … at least, the professionals were. The Lydians and Mysians and Phrygians were already three or four stades away, on blown horses, pursuing the broken satrapal levies.
But his elite cavalry, and Philip’s, had turned to face east.
Seleucus watched for another minute. He turned, looking over the whole battlefield.
‘Lysimachos is victorious?’ he asked.
Satyrus nodded. ‘Sweeping the enemy cavalry away.’
Seleucus grunted. ‘I hope he remembers to fall on the rear of their phalanx,’ he said. ‘Battles are not won by cavalry.’
He watched the battle for as long as a man might dicker for a sausage in the agora. Then he nodded sharply.
He smiled at Satyrus. ‘Well, here we go. I will send all the elephant reserve into Demetrios. If you will take the right with your Companions, I will take the left with mine.’
Satyrus bowed in the saddle. ‘I’m honoured.’
Seleucus shrugged. ‘It’s where they are posted. Go, now.’
The reserve changed front to the left with surprising fluidity. The elephants were fast — well watered, well led, and rested, they wheeled ponderously, but Satyrus was surprised by their speed. He brought his cavalry over the hillock where the rallied peltastoi waited.
‘Hold here,’ he told them. He identified a Greek officer — at least, the man spoke good Greek, although he was dressed like a Thracian. Satyrus reined in and changed to his beautiful warhorse while he explained.
‘Organise them as best you can. What’s your name?’ he asked.
The man grinned. ‘Alexander,’ he said. He had a lot of teeth missing, and he seemed to be the size of an elephant, and Satyrus wasn’t sure if the giant was mocking him or not.
‘Fine. You’re the strategos of the peltastoi. Form a line right here — four deep or whatever suits you. See the farmyard?’ he said.
Alexander grinned. ‘I grew up on a farm, boss,’ he said. ‘I know what a farm looks like.’
‘When I say, you will go down there and help the men in the farmyard fight the enemy infantry,’ Satyrus said.
‘Sure, boss,’ the Thracian said. He grinned again, and Satyrus had no idea whether the man understood, or what he intended.
Satyrus vaulted into his high-backed Sakje saddle on his magnificent Persian charger.
Gap-tooth Alexander saluted smartly.
Satyrus took his long-handled Sakje axe from where it hung at his saddle bow and saluted. ‘Just be here and ready when I come back,’ he said, and trotted forward to where Eumenes had his Olbians formed in a rhomboid, half a stade on and half a stade distant from the elephants — the closest the cavalry could go, even after a morning to get used to the big beasts.
‘Ready?’ Satyrus asked Eumenes.
As a reply, Eumenes pointed to the front, where Demetrios was already coming forward, elephants or no elephants. He had completely turned the Seleucid flank, and his second charge was already into Diodorus and the Exiles, who were making a counter-charge at the edge of the farm fields, protecting the flank of the infantry.
Satyrus could see that if he waited for the elephants, Diodorus would be swept away. Seleucus was probably willing to sacrifice a mercenary, for a prize this big.
Satyrus was not.
It was hot.
This had become the defining point of Stratokles’ existence; the heat, the weight of his panoply, the sweat that rolled down his back and between his pectoral muscles, down his groin, down his thighs. His bronze thorax sat well on his hips, but he had lost weight and gained muscle in the last year, and the armour, so carefully fitted in a shop below the Hephaestion in Athens, now needed padding where the shoulders latched and down along his belly — padding that was made of lamb’s wool, hot and itchy and now sodden with sweat.