Storm of arrows

PART II

The same sun burned like a line of fire on the late-summer grass of the prairies beyond the low beach in the Bay of Salmon where a dozen galleys were pulled up on their sterns. Small waves lapped against their armoured beaks, and gulls shrieked and whirled where a crowd of Sindi fishermen hauled a net full of silver fish from their boat to the temporary market, where they would be sold for hard cash.

Beyond the warships, the grain fleet of Athens was anchored out in the Bay of Salmon, well clear of the sloping sand and mud. The great ships were not built to beach like warships — with their size, they required the support of a volume of water or their hulls might split, heavy supporting members breaking under the strain. So they anchored out in the deep water, and local boats and hastily built barges emptied their holds and took their cargoes on to the beach, a reversal of the usual process.

Sauromatae horse-herders drove their spare horses straight over the rails of the great ships so that the horses plunged into the sea. The girls then leaped naked into the sea behind them, tangled their fists in sea-wet manes and swam ashore with their charges.

Philokles, equally naked in the late-summer sun, laughed. ‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea, must love you, Athenian,’ he said.

Kineas gave the Spartan half a smile. ‘All the gods love a man who plans carefully,’ he said.

‘Not Aphrodite,’ Philokles said with a wry smile. ‘The goddess born on foam hates a man who plans too much.’ He frowned. ‘You never mention the Foam-born when you make sacrifice.’

Kineas’s eye caught Sappho, cloaked like a matron despite the sun and wearing a large conical straw hat, sitting on a stool further down the beach with Diodorus’s not inconsiderable camp furniture. ‘Speak to me not of Aphrodite,’ he said. ‘I ask only that she withhold her hand from me until I see Srayanka.’

‘Brother, that is exactly the way in which mortals ask the Foam-born for trouble,’ Philokles said. His eyes continued to follow the Sauromatae girls as they rode their horses out of the water. ‘Have you ever wondered why Poseidon is Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea?’

Kineas, his head full of figures and the minutiae of the landing, shook his head. ‘I must confess that I have not.’

Philokles ignored the hint. ‘I used to think that perhaps our ancestors — those Dorians who came to Sparta and took it in the time after Menelaus and fair Helen — that perhaps they brought a lord of chariots, and the locals had a lord of the ocean, and as the two peoples merged, they merged their gods.’

Kineas was drawn to his friend’s lesson despite himself. ‘I can never decide whether you should be teaching in the agora as a philosopher or thrown from a tall rock as a blasphemer,’ he said with mock concern. But he was listening.

‘But just now, watching those girls, I wonder if it is not hidden, like all other lessons, inside the Poet,’ Philokles said. ‘Wherever the long-haired Achaeans travelled, they took chariots — it is in the Iliad.’

‘True enough,’ Kineas said, amazed that he had never given the matter a thought, though as for most Athenian boys, the Iliad had been the centre of his every military fancy since he first heard it performed in his father’s tiled garden.

‘And the Poet must have seen what we are seeing many times before he lost his sight,’ the Spartan added, peering from beneath his hand. ‘Perhaps I was too simple. Perhaps the Lord of Horses and the Lord of the Sea have always gone together.’

‘Perhaps you’ve just noticed that the Sauromatae girls are naked, and extraordinarily handsome,’ Kineas said.

Philokles released a great sigh. ‘Aphrodite is close to you, brother,’ he said. He gave a wry grin that made him look ten years younger. ‘When women stir my loins, they must be stirring indeed.’

Kineas had no time to consider naked women of any sort, however, because as soon as the bulk of his army had landed he had to put it in a state of defence, had to start the parts of it in motion, had to arrange orders to cover various eventualities, because he was not marching the whole of it together but sending pieces of it across the three thousand stades that separated them from the Kaspian Sea to the east.

Eumenes had done his job. Herds of cattle waited on the beach, already penned together with Sindi shepherds and Sindi sheep. Inland, Ataelus’s prodromoi had marked the road with signs used by the Sakje — sticks and bits of fleece, skulls of dead animals, piles of stones. Kineas could read them, and the Sauromatae girls could read them better. Ataelus was gone — long gone, by all accounts — but Eumenes had been waiting for them when the first warships pulled up on the flats, and he and Philokles and Leon were due to head east as soon as the first troops were prepared to travel — the infantry under Lycurgus, because they would be the fastest to ship and the best at defending the camps.

Kineas divided the rest of the army into two groups. Ataelus was gone with the first group — just the elite prodromoi, used to living off the land. They had been off as soon as their horses swam ashore, scouting the route that the army would take across the high ground. Kineas expected daily reports from the scouts — Ataelus had enough riders to send a messenger every morning.

Diodorus commanded the second group, composed of the bulk of the Greek infantry and the Sindi psiloi. They would make their best speed to the coast of the inland sea, where shipping should by then await them, covered by two troops of Olbian cavalry.

Prince Lot would lead the rest: the Sauromatae as well as Heron’s troop of cavalry and Eumenes’ troop. They were to move across the trail blazed by Ataelus in easy stages, starting last by a week and covering the movement of the other groups because they were the best fitted to living off the steppe.

The Greek infantry marched out of the camp in good order on the second day after their landing, their goods piled on their mules. Every one of them had just completed a summer on campaign. They carried too much baggage, but that was true of soldiers the world over. Their bodies were hard, and they sang as they marched out.

The hoplites set off at a pace that would eat a parasang (thirty stades) in an hour — a pace they and their donkeys could maintain all day if required. Barring disaster, they would have crossed the high ground between Lake Maeotis and the Kaspian Sea in thirty days, swamps, ridges and all, and still have purchased grain to eat while they awaited Leon’s boats on the Kaspian.

The whole army marched, and ate, as Greek soldiers had marched for generations. Every man belonged to a mess group — eight or ten men and their women and slaves under a file leader. They marched together, fought together as a file and ate together, buying their food from the daily common market and cooking it by turns over the group’s fire when they camped. That fire was often the centre of their lives — home and hearth combined. They had no tents and no blankets but the cloaks they all carried, and rain or snow or beating sun, they could live, and march.

The system was so old and so endemic to Greeks that even the gentry — the cavalry and the officers — followed the same system. At the very top, the strategos was not expected to cook — he was too busy. But he could cook, and he did, on occasion. Greek notions of democracy were not limited to politics, and Spartan or Athenian, Olbian or Heraklean, every Hellene soldier knew that his food was his own responsibility.

Kineas was much given to thoughts of food these days. He dreamed of food supply at night when he wasn’t fighting against the dreams of the tree, and awake, he pondered how to ship grain ahead of his army, pondered the purchase of additional mules, pondered the possibilities of farming failures and war and the results for his tenuous supply.

‘Do as you think best,’ Kineas had said to Philokles before they rode away, wrapped in his Spartiates cloak of scarlet, sitting beside Leon in a splendid blue cloak that lacked the wear of a season in the field, a study in contrasts. ‘Don’t be tied to my plan. Make your judgements on the ground. If we can ride around the north of this Hyrkanian Sea — the Kaspian — or if it seems better to you, or if you cannot hire the shipping, or if it is too late in the season-’

Philokles put his hand on Kineas’s shoulder. ‘You’ve already told us every word of your worries,’ he said.

Kineas gave a wry smile. ‘I will worry until I see you again,’ he said, and Leon shifted his weight, embarrassed by their obvious emotion.

Kineas smiled at Leon. ‘Don’t feel it too keenly when this plan of ours is discarded,’ he said. ‘We may never make Hyrkania.’

‘I won’t let you down,’ Leon said.

‘I’ll while away the stades discoursing on your flaws and bring him back cured of hero worship,’ Philokles said. He stroked the neck of his heavy charger, a magnificent animal he had preserved throughout the year’s campaigns by the simple expedient of fighting on foot. ‘I haven’t missed you, you brute,’ he said. ‘My thighs will burn like a river of fire before night.’

He embraced Kineas, and they patted each other’s backs for a long minute. Then they parted, and Kineas embraced Leon. ‘Do well,’ he said, and turned away to hide his tears.

Kineas found it difficult to wave goodbye to Philokles.

An hour later, Kineas stood on a low hill — almost certainly an ancient kurgan like the one that now held the body of Satrax — and watched his infantry with pride. He had climbed the kurgan alone to have time to think, a luxury for a commander, even of a thousand men. He waved at Philokles, who still sat his charger like a sack of grain, and Leon, who rode like a centaur and carried a shield on horseback, one of the few men Kineas had ever seen do such a thing. Neither saw him until the army was already a stade out on the plain, their singing just a chant on the wind, when Leon happened to look at the top of the old mound and Kineas saw him trot his mount alongside Philokles. The Spartan turned in his saddle, looked, put a hand to his eyes and then waved.

Kineas waved back enthusiastically. He found that he was crying again. He waved until he had to strain his eyes to see them, and then he sat in the hollow at the top, resting his shoulders against the stone, and closed his eyes.

‘May the gods send that I see you again,’ he swore.

‘ You will,’ said a deep voice behind him, but when he turned there was no one there but the Sakje child.

‘How do you know?’ Kineas asked her.

She looked at him with all the puzzlement that children use for adults who don’t behave themselves. ‘Know what, lord?’

Kineas bit back a retort. The voice had been hers — and yet had not been hers. ‘Surely there is someone else for you to haunt, girl,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said simply, and came around him to sit on the sacred stone that capped the kurgan. The sword that should have rested in the stone or in the earth beside it was gone, either long since rusted into the ground or taken for its power by a yatavu, a sorcerer. Ordinary mortals avoided sitting on the kurgan stones, fearing the spirits of the dead. She did not.

‘What is your name, girl?’ Kineas asked.

‘When will you come for your horses, Strategos?’ she asked. ‘They pine for you — and you ride inferior blood. You are king. I say so. My father says so. It pains him to see you astride some Getae hack when you should be riding a royal horse.’

Kineas sat down on the low bank of grass-covered earth created by the slow collapse of the roof of the kurgan and sighed. ‘They are fine horses,’ he admitted.

‘And my father is cross that you will not climb the tree. He says,’ and here she scrunched up her face and squared her shoulders so that her back was straighter, an eerie performance, ‘he says that you let your fear guide you instead of your sense as a baqca.’

Kineas sighed again. ‘Kam Baqca is dead,’ he said.

The little girl shrugged. ‘Many people are dead,’ she said. ‘Should they also be silent?’

Kineas spoke too fast, because he didn’t want an argument, and because she was annoying him. ‘We don’t believe that the dead speak.’

The little girl regarded him from under her straight dark brows. ‘That’s not true,’ she said.

Kineas caught his own mistake, and he laughed at his own inability to defeat a young woman in debate. ‘The dead may speak on great occasions,’ he said.

‘The dead may speak whenever it suits the gods to allow them to speak,’ the child said, as if teaching a lesson. ‘So you should not lie. The dead speak to Odysseus in the Odyssey. If the Poet says a thing, it must be true, don’t you think?’ She looked at him. He felt the hair on the nape of his neck begin to rise.

‘You have read the Poet?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she said, her young voice utterly dismissive. ‘And in plays — the dead speak all the time in plays. I saw one in Olbia.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘Who are you?’

She got up, laughing, for all the world like any other happy twelve-year-old girl. ‘Nihmu White Horse of the Royal Sakje,’ she said proudly. ‘Kam Baqca was my father, and Attalos One-Eye was my grandsire. Arraya Walks-Alone was my mother and Srayanka the Archer was my father’s mother.’ She rattled off her impressive lineage in the sing-song voice of memorization.

Kineas helped her down from the stone as he would any girl — and he remembered his sisters in the family olive groves, and how they had claimed to be women as soon as they could walk. This child seemed to be every age and no age. ‘Where do you camp?’ he asked.

‘With the prodromoi,’ she said.

‘The scouts are all gone for the Kaspian,’ Kineas said. He was disconcerted again. Thunder rumbled in the distance, late-summer thunder that did not bring rain.

She frowned and shook her head rapidly. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she said. She took his hand and pulled on it like one of his sisters wanting a honey treat in the agora. ‘Hurry!’

‘Why?’ he asked. Now she seemed far away.

‘ Because you’ll die ’ came the deeper voice. But the girl looked as startled as he was, and ran off down the hill and into the gathering dark.

When Kineas awoke, Niceas was at his shoulder, shaking him. ‘I knew you’d slipped off to have a kip,’ he said.

Kineas looked around and gradually realized that he was curled up against the kurgan’s stone. His body was like ice, and he was scared.

‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked the sky.

Niceas’s raillery vanished and was replaced by concern. ‘What’s the matter?’

Kineas put his head in his hands. ‘The veils between the world of dreams and the waking world are tearing,’ he said. ‘Or I am going mad.’

The next night, Kineas dreamed of his own death, and he dreamed of the tree, and he dreamed of skeletal figures offering him the gift of sand from their mouths — one a Persian archer, another a man he’d bought a cup of wine after the sack of Tyre. Sometimes they were not even recognizable — the worst was a corpse with no head, who vomited sand from the stump of its neck. Dreams like this cost him his rest, and he began to fear to place his head on his cloak. And he could not face the tree dreams. The idea of climbing the tree was like an assault on his Hellenism, and the dreams were worse now that he had left the city behind.

In the morning he rode among the camps. He watched the Sindi farmers and the Maeotae fishermen drying their salmon. He watched the Athenian captains purchase fish sauce by the hundred beakers in the market on the beach and load their cargoes before they weighed anchor and beat slowly out through the grey-green waves of the shallow sea towards the dykes that almost — but not quite — blocked navigation on Lake Maeotis. When their sails vanished over the horizon, the enormity of his commitment to the expedition — his own fortune and his inherited wealth were heavily engaged — began to weigh on him, and that, combined with lack of sleep, made him dangerous.

Kineas knew that Niceas was watching him with growing alarm, perhaps even anger. Niceas did his best to keep his Kineas busy: arranging inspections, riding the beach, throwing a seaside symposium to wish the sailors of Pantecapaeum farewell. None of them served to occupy Kineas fully, and his temper grew shorter and shorter. So did Niceas’s.

After a few days of inactivity and more nights of brutal dreams, Diodorus’s command marched, carrying most of the remaining grain from the magazine that Eumenes had arranged. The herds of cattle were already down by a third.

‘Why don’t we ride with Diodorus?’ Niceas asked. ‘The prince can get himself across the height of land — Ares, he could ride all the way to Marakanda without us.’

‘Go with Diodorus if you want,’ Kineas said.

Niceas whirled on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Strategos,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a burr under my butt for a week and I don’t have to take it. I’m trying to help and you are shutting me out.’

‘I can’t go to fucking sleep,’ Kineas said.

Niceas handed him a flagon of wine left from the symposium. ‘Philokles told me how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Start drinking. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

‘I’m the commander of this expedition,’ Kineas said. ‘I can’t get drunk.’

Niceas held out the flagon. ‘Greek wine for Greek dreams, Philokles says.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I’m not as bad as that yet.’

Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘All the gods keep me from the day you are worse.’

Kineas managed a smile. ‘You’re right. I need to get out of this camp.’

Niceas rubbed his nose. ‘About fucking time.’

Kineas smiled back. ‘Let’s go hunting. We’ll catch Diodorus as we go. I’ll inform Lot.’