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.She shook her head.‘He is my toad,’ she said.‘I trust him, and I do not know you.’Something hot boiled up in Stratokles’ heart.His face flushed, and his nose hurt.‘I will protect you,’ he said thickly - the wrong words, he knew, and said the wrong way.He didn’t care.She flipped her himation back over her head, but her eyes remained on his.He hadn’t noticed how dispassionate they were before.‘Yes,’ she said.‘You will.’Her smile was visible only at the corners of her eyes, but it was for him.It was a long time since he had seen eyes do that - for him.It made him wince.Then she stepped back.His guards surrounded her.‘We will be pleased to occupy any tent you see fit to give us,’ Stratokles said.‘No, toad.She is mine.I’ll see to it that you are paid a talent or two for your betrayals, but she is mine.Perhaps I’ll add to your reward for bringing her.Really, she makes the conquest of this strip of sand almost worthwhile.’ Demetrios laughed, and all the companions laughed with him.‘Aphrodite, goddess of love, you didn’t imagine that she found you anything but horrible? The man who abducted her? Have you ever looked in a mirror? While I, the golden one, chosen of the gods, will save her from your venomous clutches.’ Demetrios laughed.‘She’s moist for me now, toad.’That last made all the companions roar with laughter.Stratokles had the strength to smile.He stood straight.I am the hero of this piece, he thought.Not you, boy.Me.The toad.‘This is not how your father deals with men, lord,’ Stratokles said above the laughter.‘Schoolboy insults insult only schoolboys.’Demetrios turned suddenly, his eyes narrow.‘You dare to tell me what my father would or wouldn’t do? You call me a boy?’ His companions fell silent.‘Your father offered me the satrapy of Phrygia.I have done my best to honour my part of the bargain and I still have agents in place.Now,’ slowly, carefully, as if the words were dragged from him, ‘now you call me names and take from me my ward and offer me a few talents of silver?’ Stratokles shrugged.‘Kill me, lord.For if you don’t, I will tell your father that you are a fool.’‘My father—’ Demetrios began.Then he stopped, as if listening to someone speak.Demetrios stood like a statue, staring off above his friend Paesander’s head, and then he turned back.‘You are right to upbraid me, sir.’ The alteration in Demetrios was so total that Stratokles, still in the grip of his own acting, felt that he had to step back before the power of the gods.Demetrios bowed to the Athenian.‘It was ill of me to call you names - although you must confess that you will never model for Ganymede.’Some of the companions laughed, but the laugh was nervous, because Demetrios’s voice sounded odd.Stratokles inclined his head in a token of agreement.‘I have never bragged about my looks.Nor have I ever sought to model myself on Ganymede,’ he said, pointing the barb at the handsomest of Demetrios’s companions, a beautiful boy who stood next to Paesander.‘Although I gather that some do.’Demetrios laughed.‘There’s more to you than that ugly face,’ he acknowledged.‘We are on the edge of battle - the battle that will give us Aegypt.Then we shall reward all of our faithful soldiers.It was wrong of us to speak in terms of a few paltry pieces of silver.Please accept our apologies.’ Demetrios bowed, and Stratokles had to fight the urge to forgive him out of hand.That is power, he thought.‘And the girl?’ he asked.Demetrios smiled.‘Let it be as she wishes.’Stratokles led her away, with Demetrios’s friend Paesander as a messenger.The daimon hectored him that he had fallen prey to a pretty girl.24The pursuit of Stratokles didn’t last out the night.Midnight had come and gone before they found the means he had used to leave the city - a boat waiting off the palace - and his head start was sufficient to guarantee his success.‘He’ll run to Demetrios,’ Philokles told Satyrus.The young man was dry-eyed - tired, wrung out and incapable of further emotion.Subsequent days did little to raise his spirits.They marched from the city into the desert, and the next five days were hard - stretches of bright desert punctuated by Delta towns and river crossings, so that a man could be parched with heat and an hour later nearly drowned.The mosquitoes were the worst that Satyrus had ever known, descending on the army in clouds that were visible from a stade away.‘What do they eat when there aren’t any Jews?’ Abraham asked.‘Mules,’ Dionysius answered.‘The taste is much the same.’Satyrus marched along in silence, sometimes lost in dark fantasies of the torments Amastris must now be suffering, and again, tormenting himself with his own inability to rescue her
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