Tyrant: Force of Kings (42 page)

Sophokles rutted away – in this, he was no assassin, but merely a typical man – and she chanted her spell to his rhythm. And she built the force of it in her head until it was a black dove, and she sent it winging away across the sea.

Isokles had a house in Heraklea and a pair of slaves, and his six men terrorised the neighbourhood. It was a good life. Isokles had messengers from Phiale, and from Cassander, and he revelled in his role as a dangerous man, courted by important people. He had wealth and position. He had been received by Amastris herself. He paid bribes to a dozen of her court functionaries, and he bribed her slaves, and if Stratokles had still been in her employ, he would by now have caught the intruder and punished him. But Amastris had made a different choice, and her captain of the guard was one of the men Isokles paid so well.

Isokles drank wine, forced sex on his slaves, and waited for spring, like a hideous spider waiting in a nearly invisible web.

Diodorus lay on a couch in the heat of Babylon. Sappho, his wife, lay on a separate couch. It was that hot.

‘Will Seleucus go?’ Sappho asked.

It was the question on the lips of every informed man and woman in the city. Lysimachos had requested that Seleucus come north and west with his army. It was an open secret that Lysimachos had almost been destroyed in the autumn, that Cassander was a wreck, that Ptolemy had retired to Aegypt in disgust.

It was said that Antigonus had two hundred elephants and eighty thousand men.

Diodorus was sixty years old. It lay lightly on him – his chest was still as well muscled as his breastplate, and his arms were like the arms of a statue of Ares. But his hair was entirely white. He sat up, and a slave fanned him harder, mistaking his motion for a demand for a cool breeze.

Diodorus looked at the woman he loved and shook his head. ‘Want to go back to winters?’ he asked. ‘I can’t go back to Alexandria. And I think I’m getting too old for this. Time to retire.’

‘Tanais?’ she asked.

‘We own about a third of it, you and I,’ he said.

‘So?’ she asked.

‘So Seleucus has summoned me for the second hour after the sun is at its peak to speak to him about Satyrus of Tanais,’ Diodorus said. ‘He has no love for Lysimachos.’

‘I could go home,’ Sappho said.

‘Home?’ Diodorus asked.

‘Olbia, where my life changed. Or Tanais.’ She smiled, and rose from her couch. ‘Babylon is too hot,’ she said. ‘And the bugs are oppressive, and the locals are too subservient. The only people to talk to here are the Jews and the Medes.’ She laughed. ‘Listen to me. I was a
slave
for six years, and now I talk like a Macedonian.’

Diodorus bent and kissed her. ‘May I make a confession?’ he said.

‘You made love to my new washerwoman? In that case, you can wash your own fighting clothes.’ She hit him with her fan.

‘The one with the squint, or the one with the strange skin disease? No. I wish to confess that I want to take the Exiles north and fight. If Seleucus goes, this will be the end. One way or another. The last cast of the dice.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s my curse.’

‘Damn that Kineas. He had to tell you that he left you all his battles.’ Sappho had heard the story a hundred times.

‘If he was alive, he would be there.’ Diodorus waved a slave towards him.

‘If he was alive …’ Sappho said, and smiled. ‘I hear Satyrus made a brilliant campaign.’

‘He changed the war,’ Diodorus said with satisfaction.

‘He is like his father,’ Sappho said.

Diodorus shrugged. ‘Yes and no. Kineas was a mercenary with the heart of a king. Satyrus is a king with the heart of a mercenary.’

Sappho shook her head. ‘No. I know him better than you. He is a man of worth. Like my brothers. Like you, my dear.’

Diodorus raised an eyebrow. ‘That is my yearly compliment – I had better treasure it. I hope he is a man of worth, my dear, because he has become the linchpin of this year’s campaign. I’d best be going.’

‘Give Seleucus and his paramour my deepest obeisance,’ Sappho said.

‘With or without the sarcasm?’ Diodorus asked, but the question was apparently rhetorical, as he didn’t wait for an answer.

Sappho called for her body servant, and asked for a stylus and a tablet.

Leon sat back on his kline and read Sappho’s letter for the third time. By his side, Nihmu lay with her head on the armrest, her eyes out to sea.

‘You will go again,’ she said.

‘You could come with me,’ he said.

‘To Tanais?’ she asked. ‘To the Sea of Grass?’ Her breath caught.

Leon shook his head. ‘We’ll rally the fleets at Rhodes,’ he said. ‘I expect that the fight, when it happens, will be in Asia – probably far from the sea. Plistias is at Miletus. Demetrios holds the mouth of the Propontus.’ Leon shrugged heavily. ‘All my ships, all Ptolemy’s and what Rhodes has left – all together, two hundred hulls. Demetrios and Plistias built all winter – no idea what they’ll have. But I’ll be surprised if they have
fewer
than two hundred hulls.’ Leon shook his head. ‘Everyone has their eyes on the armies and the elephants. A fleet of two hundred hulls has as many men as an army of fifty thousand.’

Nihmu sighed. ‘Yes, dear.’

Leon passed a hand down her back. ‘This is the end. Or at least, all of us will try to make it the end.’ He looked at the letter. ‘Diodorus and Crax and Sappho are coming up from Babylon with Seleucus.’

Nihmu looked out over the sea. ‘All of Kineas’s people, one last time.’

Leon looked at her, and she was crying.

‘Did he know what was to come?’ she asked. ‘I never saw this.’

Leon smiled. ‘Why cry? We will see all of our friends.’

Nihmu managed a small smile. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And then we will die.’

Leon smiled. His wife had been a prophetess, and she was wont to say such things. Sometimes they had meaning, and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes the meaning was subtle. So he smiled, kissed her, and got to his feet. ‘The children of men are born to die,’ he said.

Nihmu nodded. ‘I should practise my archery,’ she allowed.

Antigonus sat on a leopard skin thrown over a stool, and watched two oarsmen wrestling for a prize.

Demetrios sat beside him, and the boy’s presence made him … whole. Happy. Even if the young fool wanted to be a god. That was a young man’s fantasy. Antigonus One-Eye had eighty-two years’ worth of pain, wounds, and age. He no longer wanted to live for ever, but he was damned if he was going down easily.

‘I have the best army I’ve had since the king died,’ Antigonus said.

‘You mean Alexander,’ Demetrios said. ‘You and I are kings, now.’

‘I mean the king. He was king. We … are fighting in the ruins of his temple.’ Antigonus watched the sun setting over the sea. ‘Bring me your whole army – everything. Leave fucking Cassander holding his limp dick and come over to Asia. Let’s do it – one throw for everything. I’m tired, and I’ve been
this
close ten times, and I want to
win
.’

A slow smile spread over Demetrios’s face. ‘You and me … together? One army? Nothing will defeat us.’

Antigonus nodded. ‘Nothing ever has,’ he said. ‘Mind you, buy every fucking hoplite in Greece before you come. Buy
everyone
. Bloat yourself. Buy them even if it is just to deny them to fucking Cassander. Buy all the Thessalians you can find.’

‘You have cash?’ Demetrios asked.

‘You own Athens, son. Don’t expect cash from me.’ Antigonus grunted. ‘I met your Satyrus,’ he noted.

‘You liked him!’ Demetrios said.

‘He’s worth fifty of Lysimachos. Not a bad little strategos – fell for an old chestnut in the mountains, then put one over on me.’ Antigonus chuckled. ‘Wish you could buy him. Since you can’t, I’ve paid to have him poisoned.’

‘Poisoned! Pater, he’s a hero!’ Demetrios shook his head. ‘That’s womanish.’

‘My child, I’m eighty-two years old. I can be as womanish as I want.’ The old man smiled, though. ‘You know why we’ll win?’

‘Because I’m going to be a god?’ Demetrios asked.

‘No. Not by a long chalk.’ Antigonus drank some wine. That part of life remained good. He still liked good wine. And strong bread with a crust. And the sight of a field he’d won.

‘Because we have Athens and Tyre and all the money?’ Demetrios said.

‘I won’t pretend that won’t help,’ Antigonus said, and chuckled. ‘But no. It’s because Cassander is a useless fuck, and Ptolemy wants it to end, and Lysimachos can’t find his arse with both hands in the dark, and Seleucus is an arrogant pup … and they all hate each other. You and me, son, we trust each other, and when the bronze meets the iron, that’s what will count.’

Demetrios put his arms around his father and kissed him. ‘I’ll be there when you call,’ he said.

Antigonus drank off his wine and tossed the cup into the sea. ‘Then sod ’em all,’ he said. ‘We’ll be kings of the world.’

The caravan came to Heraklea with fifty camels and a hundred horses, laden with spices and silk and fine cottons, wool shawls from the lands east of Hyrkania, swords forged by legendary giants, and twenty loads of lapis lazuli quarried in the high, high passes of Sogdia and Bactria.

The caravan was commanded by a woman, and her tribesmen called her ‘The Widow.’ She was rumoured to be beautiful, and her voice was gentle, but the tough, dark Sogdian mercenaries told the boys in the souk how she had killed a bandit in the high passes with her steel, and how she had killed another – one of their own, who thought she might warm his bed – with a thumb into his brain through his eye.

Covered in dust, robed to the throat and wearing a Persian burnoose, she was slim, but that was all that could be said of her. And rich – she was certainly about to be rich. The lapis alone was the largest cargo of the fine stone to arrive in thirty years.

She spoke Greek with rapid, accurate fluency. The traders of the souk loved and hated her at once, and her vicious guards, who caught a thief by the camels, gutted him, and staked him by their lines as a warning to others.

She was still covered in dust when she finished bargaining with a jewel merchant for a handful of uncut rubies – the only sale she was interested in making – and it brought her a bag of gold darics and the eyes of every thief in Heraklea. Only her eyes showed, which the jeweller thought was an unfair advantage in making a deal, but they were beautiful eyes, large and liquid and a remarkable, lapis-dark blue, and besides, for all her bargaining, he’d just made a year’s wage. He felt beneficent when she asked her question.

Leon the Nubian? Of course he still had a factor here. Directions were provided.

The widow shouted orders, and men did things, and the souk made room for fifty camels and their attendants. She had an astounding number of Sogdian mercenaries, and some Hyrkanians. Their horses alone were enough to excite envy.

She walked, accompanied by two Hyrkanians, through the alleys behind the agora to the warehouse she’d been told to visit. Really, an old Greek home sandwiched between two warehouses.

Leon’s factor was a young man with a black beard and dancing eyes – hard to see that he had been a slave since birth, or perhaps all that joy was the result in ending free. He bowed; informants had already brought him word of her arrival, but he was stunned to have the agora’s new star descend on his doorstep.

Before her heart had beat a hundred times, she was reclining on a couch with a cup of wine in her hand. A slave helped her roll the burnoose off her shoulders and head, and under the folds of her dusty Persian coat, she wore a man’s chitoniskos. Her Persian boots were replaced by gold sandals from her bag.

Leon’s man, Hector, raised his cup. ‘To Hermes, god of travellers, who brings you to my door. And to whom should I pledge this cup, lady of the beautiful eyes?’

She had a playful smile, for a matron of mature years. ‘Your master and I have been more rivals than friends,’ she said. ‘Nonetheless, I believe we are allies now, and I have brought a cargo to help finance an army.’

Hector shook his head. ‘You have the better of me, my lady. If my master had a rival such as you, I would surely know.’

‘Bah,’ she said, and the lapis eyes flickered. ‘I am an old woman and the world has forgotten me. My name is forgotten. But when I was young, men called me Banugul.’

Hector knew her then: the woman that his master called the ‘Viper of Hyrkania’.

But as she was proposing to
give
him the contents of the richest caravan in thirty years, he was hard put to see how she might be plotting against him.

By the end of the day, she and her men had largely taken over his house. It worried him but she allowed – insisted, in fact – that he write letters to Tanais and to Alexandria. He sent a third copy to Rhodes. And then he was busy, as he found himself in control of the lapis market. It was a delightful way for a merchant to live.

Miriam sat on a couch, her legs stretched out before her, and opened the scroll. She did a great deal of her brother’s business – it kept her from thinking. And thinking made her feel ill.

But the letter from Heraklea was for Leon, not for Abraham. She hesitated, but the name
Satyrus of Tanais
leapt off the page at her, and she couldn’t help herself. At some point in the long missive, she pivoted her legs from couch to floor, rose and walked out of the garden – lovingly restored – across the tile floor of the former andron, now part of the larger reception hall, and up the short steps to her brother’s warehouse.

Abraham, dressed in the long robes of a Jew, stood with Daedelus of Halicarnassus. They were old comrades, of course, but her brother’s eyes positively glittered.

Miriam was suddenly conscious that she was not dressed to receive. But she was in the warehouse, where women were not welcome, and she couldn’t bring herself to leave and change.

Abraham grinned at her like a fool. ‘Leon’s on his way!’ he said. ‘Ptolemy has sent part of his fleet – I’m to have a command!’ He caught himself, tried to restore the imperturbable demeanour of a man of worth. Failed, and grinned again. Then tried to put his grin away, all too aware how Miriam was going to feel when he rowed off to fight alongside Leon … and Satyrus.