Storm of arrows

10

The pressure in Kineas’s head subsided as soon as he rode away from Lake Maeotis, so that by the time his horse had completed the first of the great curves of the Tanais, he felt nothing but an agonizing fatigue. He allowed Niceas to lead him on for a few parasangs and they camped on a bluff that hung over the great river like a fortress built by nature.

‘I just want to sleep,’ Kineas said.

Niceas handed him a horn cup of watered wine. ‘Drink this first,’ he said.

Kineas looked across the river at the farms on the north shore. ‘We’re in Asia, according to Herodotus.’

Niceas shrugged. ‘I’ve been to Asia before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if you insist on keeping this up, we’ll have to hunt.’

Kineas nodded. Instead of relaxation, he felt only the anxieties of a commander away from his troops. ‘I shouldn’t have left the army,’ he said, and drank the wine. Then he had another cup, and finally he fell asleep.

The tree climbed away above him, an endless profusion of fecundity, with ripe fruit — apples, lemons and richer prizes all dangling in a riot of colour and life. Birds swooped in and out of the tree, plucking food from the tangle of branches. And around the fruit branches, up and up, to a layer of branches and clouds that hid the horizon, there were branches of hardwood and softwood, each lush and perfect, without disease, so that the tree was all trees, and it covered the world.

His feet were mired in the mud and the blood of the dead at the base of the tree, and when he moved he could feel the bones breaking under his feet no matter how careful he was. He needed to climb — indeed, he could see a pair of young eagles cradled in one of the branches above him, and they called to him, and he had to go to them. Their needs were greater than his. But as he began to push through the ordure, a corpse rose from the muck to confront him. It rose gracefully, without the stiffness that the dead so often displayed, and the corpse’s face was fresh and clean and unmarked despite the wounds on his body.

It was Ajax.

Ajax smiled. It was a smile full of sadness and other things — comradeship, love, loss and longing — but it was a smile. He reached out his hand towards Kineas, and Kineas took the hand.

Around them, other corpses appeared, familiar corpses — the men from his other dreams, a silent clamour of dead and rotting flesh. Kineas shied away from them, but they pushed at him, each with a handful of sand.

Beyond the heartbreaking spectacle of dead companions and friends — men whose deaths in many cases sat on his shoulders, who had died under his orders or at his side — was a dreadful plain of dead, Persians and Getae and others, trailing away to the horizon.

Ajax pulled at him and then pushed him towards the tree, interposing his body between Kineas and the other dead. Kineas seized the trunk and threw himself up to the first branch with all of his dream strength, threw a leg over the first branch and hung there, terrified and sweating, as Ajax vanished in a melee of the dead, and Kineas felt that he had abandoned the boy, left him for dead, and he wept. And the weeping was excruciating, raw pain coming from his eyes as if the eyes themselves were threatening to burst from his head, and then grains of sand poured from his eyes into his hands, sand intermixed with blood, and he screamed and screamed and…

Niceas had his arms and was murmuring in his ear until he calmed. In his fear- and fatigue-swamped thoughts, he knew that Niceas was speaking to him as he would to a scared horse, and that comforted him, and despite his fears, he slipped back into sleep.

It amazed him that he returned to the dream in the same place, with one leg over the rough, oak-tree bark of the tree’s lower limbs. He could not see the ground, only the sort of low mist that rolled over the sea of grass in the autumn, and the dead were gone. He was on the tree. He admitted to himself, there in the power of the dream, that he had resisted going to the tree since the day of the battle, and now he welcomed it.

He climbed to the branch where he had seen the young eagles, and they were gone — higher in the tree, he could see now. They leaned out from their branch, their immature and drab brown plumage somehow comic, and watched him with curious eyes, and made raucous calls at him as he hoisted himself to another branch. Each branch at this height was as large as a noble tree in a royal forest in Persia, or in a temple grove in Arcadia, and climbing the main trunk was a matter of careful searching for hand- and footholds in the rough bark. He searched, and climbed, and his head was filled with memories from his youth — memories of sitting in the dust of the agora in Athens and listening to tutors and philosophers, some wiser than others, some brilliant rhetoricians and one unable to speak more than a few phrases without halting and staring blankly at the world around them, often to the hoots of his companions — his own hoots.

Why? Why had he been so derisive? The man was a pupil of Plato, a brilliant mind who studied many things in the circle of the heavens, but his halting speech had earned him nothing but ridicule. And their tutors had done nothing to stop them, until the poor man had fled the agora. Even in dream, Kineas winced at remembering that he had been the first to call an insult, feeling bold, manly, adult.

And why had their tutors not restrained them?

Perhaps because they, mere tutors to the idle rich, enjoyed the discomfiture of one more gifted than they?

It was a deeply painful memory, an ignoble act in which he led others to act badly. And it had been one of the moments that defined his leadership over the other youths — his daring had made him a leader.

The consequence of an evil act had been his own success as a leader. Of course, his leadership of aristocratic youths had caused him to be sent to Alexander, and then exiled. And Moira had sent him from exile to be archon of Olbia, and then to here.

He pondered it all, and climbed higher.

There were other forms of horror than rotting corpses…

He awoke in the morning, better rested than he had been in weeks, to the roar of Niceas’s snores. Below the bluff on which they had camped, the Tanais swept by majestically, still swollen by the rain that had lasted a month, as wide as a lake. The sun rose and then leaped into the pink-striped sky as Apollo’s winged chariot began its course across the heavens. Kineas listened to the sounds of the forest behind him, watched a herd of deer come to the river beneath the bluff, an easy javelin throw that he passed because he could feel the peace of Zeus on the whole of the Tanais and he had no wish to break the truce. Birds called.

He was confused by his dreams. It was years since he had last thought about tormenting the scholar in the agora, but he now knew the dream to be a true one — indeed, he now remembered the incident, and his secret shame. He felt the shame anew. He nodded at the thought, having learned something. He was tired, but strangely full of new life.

‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.

‘ No,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.

Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.

Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things — his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.

Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few dactyloi above the surface of the water.

‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.

The augury was of the best, and more, the truce of the god was broken by the Lord of the Heavens himself. Grabbing a javelin, Kineas crept carefully down the bluff and then moved from tree to tree along the riverbank. In the distance he could see a series of farms at the next bend of the river, smoke coming from their hearths in the new morning.

The lead buck raised his head and Kineas, downwind, froze. A doe’s head came up, and then another’s. It was a long throw, and the time Kineas would take to change his stance to make a cast would render it impossible. He waited.

Another head came up — a young buck. He took a step towards Kineas, and turned his head as if trying to see something across the river.

Kineas remained motionless.

The doe’s head went down, back to drinking, and then the young buck moved a step and did the same. Kineas took a step, and then another, now almost flat to the ground.

A head came up. Kineas couldn’t see as well, having sacrificed line of sight for his own cover. He stopped moving. He was in range now, but awkwardly placed behind a hillock of grass where a great tree had fallen, probably during a spring flood, and then rotted into the loam to leave a miniature ridge.

Above him, just a plethron away on the bluff, Niceas rose to his feet and stretched. The heads came up, watching this new movement. Across the river, the eagle, freshly gorged on salmon, let out a raucous screech of contentment. As the herd’s heads turned together, Kineas rolled from behind his hillock to his feet. In their panic at his appearance, the young buck fouled one of the does and both stumbled, losing a stride, and his javelin flew, arcing into the heavens before falling to strike the young buck between the shoulder blades. He took one stride and fell, legs splayed, already dead. The doe leaped his corpse and ran.

Kineas opened the buck, giving a prayer to Artemis he had learned as a boy, and gralloched his kill in a nearby tree. He left the buck hanging there and washed in the river before climbing the bluff with a pair of steaks wrapped in oak leaves.

‘Somebody’s feeling better,’ Niceas said. He was huddled in his cloak with a horn cup in his fist.

Kineas laid the steaks on their leaves by the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. He wore a grin that split his face like an athlete’s crown of honour.

Niceas began cutting green branches from the alder at the top of the bank. ‘If you wanted to go hunting, you could just have said,’ he joked.

Kineas shrugged, still looking across the river. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted,’ he said.

‘Fair enough,’ Niceas answered. He speared the deer meat carefully, putting three of the springy sticks into each steak and then putting the sticks deep into the loam around their fire. In the fire pit, he pushed the coals from Kineas’s earlier blaze into deep piles, one each under the lattices supporting the meat. The meat began to sizzle almost immediately and Kineas’s stomach made a wet noise. They both chuckled.

‘It’s hot,’ Niceas said. He’d boiled water in a copper mess pot and added the herbs he’d learned from the Sakje and some honey. It was a good drink in the morning, and it saved the wine.

Kineas took the cup from his outstretched hand and drank. He smiled. ‘We’re going to end up becoming Sakje,’ he said. ‘What’s the herb?’

‘Something the Sakje call “ garella ”,’ he said. ‘I found some growing here when we made camp.’

‘Bitter,’ Kineas said. ‘Good with honey.’

Niceas shrugged. ‘It’s warm and wet. Srayanka — your Medea — likes the stuff. That’s how I learned about it.’

Kineas nodded and drank more. It tasted better. Or was that his imagination?

‘We could go back to Athens,’ Niceas said.

Kineas stepped back from the fire as if he had been burned. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘We could go back to Athens. Your exile is lifted — all your estates restored. Right?’

Kineas looked at the other man. ‘Where is this coming from?’

Niceas shrugged, pulled the sticks from the ground and flipped one of the pieces of meat. It smelled delicious, and it had very little fat. ‘The plains aren’t good for you. All these dreams. And war. We’ve had enough war, haven’t we?’

Kineas looked at his hyperetes as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Have you had enough war?’

‘The first time I saw it, that was enough,’ Niceas said. ‘But like Memnon, it’s the only life I’ve ever known. I keep waiting — waiting for you to retire, so that I can retire, too.’

Kineas was watching his friend’s face. ‘I will not be going back to Athens, old friend.’

Niceas shook his head. ‘Of course not. Silly of me to mention it, only — only I don’t see an end. We ride east. Then what? You find Medea and live happily ever after. What about the rest of the boys? Do we just pick a Sakje bride and settle down, or what? Do we fight Alexander? Do we just go on fighting Alexander? Maybe keep moving east? Come back here and make war on Marthax?’ Niceas was growing angrier as he spoke. ‘It won’t ever end, Kineas. You’ll become fucking Alexander, at this rate. What’s it for?’

Kineas rubbed his beard, stung. ‘I promised Srayanka.’

Niceas nodded. ‘You promised her. Did you promise her Eumenes? Diodorus? Antigonus? Coenus? Me?’ At each name, his voice rose. ‘We’ll leave our fucking skulls out east in some Tartarus of wilderness beyond the world, won’t we?’

Kineas drained the garella and sat. He pulled his legs up close and put his arms around them. ‘Why didn’t you say all this back in Olbia?’

Niceas shrugged. ‘It didn’t really come to me until I saw what this campaign was doing to you. And when I saw the ships sail off. That hurt.’

Kineas turned his face away. ‘I have to do this. You don’t. I told you all that in Olbia.’

Niceas’s voice was gentle instead of angry. ‘That’s horse shit, Hipparch. We’ll all follow wherever you choose to go. You have trained us to be that way, and now we are. Diodorus won’t leave you, I won’t leave you. Now Eumenes won’t leave you. It’s almost funny, because every one of us has our own little following — the damned following the damned following Kineas.’

Kineas thought of the other boys hissing their catcalls after the fleeing philosopher. Instead of an angry retort, he nodded. ‘Would it help if I promised that this was the last time?’ he asked.

Niceas shook his head. ‘No. Because being who you are, it won’t be the last time. But it’d help those of us who follow you if you put some planning into the trip home, instead of just the trip out.’

Kineas met his friend’s eyes. ‘I won’t be coming home,’ he said.

Niceas met his glance. ‘If you say so. Maybe the rest of us will, though.’

Kineas nodded. ‘I understand.’

‘Good,’ said Niceas. ‘Because the meat’s done.’

An hour later, they were riding across the plains between the oak woods and the river. They passed farms and Maeotae farmers, paler than the Sindi but wearing the same colourful clothes. They were prosperous, and the women wore gold, even when they worked with hoes in their gardens or brought in the harvest. Twice, the mounted pair passed groups of Maeotae in their hundreds reaping a field of wheat. There was grain in every basket and more coming in every apron. Stone barns and turf barns dotted the landscape along the river, each with a small dock and every one bursting with wheat.

Kineas shook his head. ‘The golden fleece,’ he said.

Niceas nodded. ‘Alexander is wasting his time on Persia,’ he said. ‘These are the richest farms I’ve ever seen.’

When the sun stood at the top of the sky, Kineas stopped where a group of Maeotae sat in the shade of a great oak tree, eating bread and cheese. He dismounted. The men watched him warily.

‘Do any of you speak Greek?’ he asked.

The oldest of the farmers stood and approached, but he shook his head.

‘Sakje?’ Kineas asked.

The farmer smiled, showing more teeth than gaps. They were a handsome people, with hair as golden as their crops in autumn and the stature of those who ate well all through the year. ‘Some,’ he said.

‘You know Olbia?’ Kineas asked.

The farmer nodded.

‘We are from Olbia. An army is coming this way, up the Tanais. My army. We’ll pay for grain.’ Kineas found that Sakje forced him to be succinct.

The farmer nodded. ‘Soldiers come. Horsemen come,’ he said. ‘Say same. Pay gold for grain.’ He nodded.

Kineas held up a silver owl. ‘I’d buy bread and cheese, if I could,’ he said.

The farmer shrugged. He went to his wife and returned with a basket full of bread and cheese. ‘For nothing,’ he said with evident pride. ‘For friend.’

Niceas nodded. ‘Any farmer would do the same. These are good folk.’ He went to his horse and removed a cut of the buck and carried it to the farmer. ‘For nothing,’ he said in Sakje, and the farmer grinned at him.

They rode on, eating as they went. ‘March discipline must be good,’ Niceas said, ‘or those folk would be pissing themselves at the sight of soldiers.’

‘This is Grass Cat land,’ Kineas said.

‘I don’t think those Maeotae would agree,’ Niceas said. ‘This is no man’s land.’ He looked at Kineas under his brows. ‘You could build something here,’ he said.

Kineas looked at him. ‘Build something?’ he asked.

Niceas grunted, and they rode on.

They stayed the night in a heavy stone house. Kineas got a bed by the hearth — the nights had developed a bite — and he was asleep as soon as his head was on the furs.

The two young eagles were above him again, and they were noisy. He smiled at them and they regarded him with curiosity, and then he began to climb to them. He got one leg well up to a knot in the bole of the great tree and pressed himself close to keep his balance, and wrapped his arms around the trunk…

Around her waist, and she made to push him away, just the palm of her hand and not very hard. He pushed her chiton up with his free hand until he could feel the warm vellum of her hip under his fingers, and his erection took on a life of its own.

‘No, my lord,’ she said, but without much force. More weariness than refusal, really. She was pretty, with heavy breasts and a slim waist, and all the young men wanted her. She had smiled at him many times, and today when she came into the stable with two buckets of water he had kissed her, and now he had her under him in the straw.

He ran his hand under the thin wool, over the mound of her belly and on to her breast. The garment bunched around her hips and she moved them in discomfort. ‘Stop!’ she said, with a little more emphasis. ‘Please?’ she asked.

He ran his hand over her nipple and it sprang to life under his hand and she moaned. ‘No, master. Lord. No,’ she said. He kissed her and she responded, slowly at first and then more, until she was tugging at him and he was in her, spending as quickly as he entered her. Then she rose and dusted off the straw and pulled her chiton into shape, wiped her thighs a little and went back to watering horses.

She never smiled at me again, Kineas thought. I raped her. She was a slave and she could no more refuse me than refuse to eat, but let’s call an action by its proper name. It was rape.

‘Yes,’ said Kam Baqca. She was mounted on her great charger, and she towered above him. ‘It was not meant with anger, but it was ill done. When a lord forces a slave, where is the crime?’

Kineas thought the question was rhetorical, but the dream lingered, as did the question, and…

He awoke with the question on his mind, and the sure knowledge that his body thought that Srayanka was too far away.

He rose and drank a honey drink that he enjoyed and ate fresh bread. The farmer spoke to him at length, discoursing about the harvest, apparently, and hoping for the dry spell to continue. Kineas understood one word in five, but he knew that the man meant well.

They rode on in the morning, poorer by a silver owl and their horses loaded with food. The rafters of the house had been packed with produce — drying herbs, cheese, dried meats — and the family had owned four goblets of gold.

‘These people are rich!’ Niceas said. ‘But no slaves!’

Kineas rubbed his beard and rode on. ‘A form of riches all its own,’ he said, thinking of his dreams.

Niceas nodded thoughtfully. ‘What was he on about, there at the end?’

Kineas rubbed his beard again. ‘Weather and crops. And something else. I think he was warning me about bandits, although it might just as well have been an admonition against being bandits.’

Niceas grunted. ‘You saw the scorch marks on the stone?’ he said.

Kineas had seen them. ‘Recent,’ he said, and Niceas nodded.

That afternoon they caught up with Diodorus’s rearguard. Coenus was surprised to see Kineas, but his men kept good watch, and he was saluted and greeted and cosseted as he and Niceas rode the length of the column. They halted for the night with the cavalry and shared a buck that Coenus killed, intending to ride on in the morning, despite Diodorus’s protests.

That night Kineas had another dream of his youth that left him quiet when he woke, a dream in which he and some boys tormented a dog. It had happened. He had forgotten it.

As he mounted after breakfast, Diodorus came up on horseback with Sappho and several of his own staff.

‘The strategos should not be haring about alone,’ Diodorus said. ‘Local people say there are bandits in the hills.’

Niceas grunted.

Kineas raised an eyebrow. ‘Should I be afraid?’ he asked.

Diodorus shrugged. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.

‘Ataelus will have scouted the country,’ Kineas said.

‘This valley is broad enough that Ataelus could put one of his bare-breasted scouts every stade and not cover it,’ Diodorus mocked. ‘You just want to have adventures.’

‘Yes,’ Kineas said. Anything he added would only encourage more teasing.

Over Diodorus’s shoulder, Sappho smiled. She was mounted on a cavalry charger, a bigger horse than most women could handle. She rode well.

‘Lucky bastard,’ Diodorus said. After a pause he said, ‘Let me come, too.’

Kineas considered it a moment. He’d like few things better than to have his last two Athenians riding by his side, two of the three men in the world that he loved most. But he shook his head, looking at the column. ‘They need you,’ he said.

Diodorus grimaced. ‘Truer words were never spoke,’ he said ruefully. He shrugged. ‘They need you, too.’

Sappho pulled her horse up by them. ‘“Reason, my lord, may dwell within a man,”’ she said, quoting Sophokles.

‘“And yet abandon him when troubles come,”’ Diodorus said, capping her quote with relish. Their eyes met, and they shared a smile that touched the faint lines at the corners of her eyes.

Kineas looked at both of them. ‘I take it that means I have your permission to ride on?’ he asked.

Diodorus nodded, laughing.

They rode along the river for half a day, and Kineas said nothing beyond comments on the fields and the weather. Finally, as they crested a long ridge to see another in the distance and rising ground all around them, Kineas turned to Niceas. ‘Do you ever think on the evil acts you’ve done?’ he asked.

Niceas looked out over the river. ‘All the time,’ he said.

‘And?’ Kineas asked.

Niceas looked at him and frowned. ‘And what? They’re done. I can’t undo them. I can only try not to commit them again.’

Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘If we ever return to Athens, I’m going to set you up as a philosopher.’

Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘If we ever return to Athens,’ he said, ‘you are going to set me up as a brothel keeper. Perhaps I’ll teach the boys and girls some philosophy.’

Kineas grinned at the picture and rode on, keeping his thoughts to himself. After dinner, they curled in their cloaks, the fire crackling away, and for the first time in weeks sleep evaded Kineas.

‘I missed this,’ he said.

Niceas snorted. ‘What, four weeks in Olbia and you missed lying on the ground?’

Kineas rolled on his back and stared up at the wheel of heaven. ‘Longer than that. Remember the ferryman when we crossed the Tanais?’

‘Who thought we’d all be dead when the Getae came? I’ll never forget that night. Why?’

Kineas said, ‘That night I thought a dozen men and a pair of slaves was a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I was thinking it was funny that I could forget how much of a burden it was to lead.’

Niceas grunted.

‘You?’ Kineas asked. ‘Why do you remember it?’

Niceas rustled — he was changing position while trying to keep the warmth trapped under his cloak. ‘It was the last time I slept by Graccus,’ he said. Niceas and Graccus had been friends and lovers for years, and Graccus, of course, had died the next day.

‘I’m an idiot,’ Kineas said.

Niceas snuggled against his back. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

When they mounted their horses the next morning, they could see that the ground rose on either side of them, and the river ran fast through a narrow channel, so that there was no longer any possibility of a ford or a crossing. Kineas killed another buck from horseback, a mounted throw that earned him a grin from Niceas.

‘Show-off!’ Niceas shook his head. ‘You could have lost your best spear!’

Kineas grinned back and they divided the meat and then bathed in the swift-flowing water to wash off the blood. It felt like ice.

That night was the coldest yet. Kineas was again feeling the weight of his responsibilities, and wondering if he could afford to ride off and leave them, and again he lay awake — still fearing his dreams, with the additional complication that he was sated with sleep. Niceas was already snoring beside him, and it was too cold to get out of his cloak and the heavy wool blanket that covered both of them. As it grew colder, he pushed in closer to Niceas, and then he worried about his army. Most of the hoplites in the vanguard wouldn’t have a spare blanket. He thought of Xenophon’s soldiers in the Anabasis, and he worried, and worrying, he fell asleep.

Ajax pushed him quickly to the tree, and his dead friends were fewer. Kleisthenes was gone. Kineas felt like a coward as he scrambled on to the tree and began to climb. It was easy to climb as high as he had gone before, and then…

Running through the fields north of his father’s farms, legs afire. Rabbit-hunting.

He was among the last men in the field, all the older men and the keener hunters stretched ahead in a long arc after the dogs. He could hear the dogs, their gross baying, their animal eagerness to kill, and it sickened him, and his legs slowed, unwillingness to see the result coinciding with his own fatigue. He fell further behind, so that even the slowest boys passed him.

The cry of the hounds changed, and their baying became a chorus of growls and then a ferocious roar that scared him. It always scared him. He slowed down further, hoping to avoid the end, but he could already smell it — the rich earth-and-copper smell of an animal wrenched apart by a dozen sets of jaws.

‘You are an embarrassment,’ his father said. ‘What did I tell you?’

Kineas cringed. ‘You said that I must not be last,’ Kineas said. ‘I tried!’ he whined.

His father’s fist caught him on the side of the head and knocked him flat. He could smell the dead rabbit and the sweat on his father and the other men. ‘Try harder,’ his father said…

He awoke exhausted, his bladder bursting. It was too early for the new light of day, and the cold was so deep that it was an effort of will to rise from the warmth of Niceas. The fire had sunk to mere embers, throwing little warmth and no light, and he tripped on their javelins before he found a place in the dark to relieve himself. A lifetime of camp discipline forced him to put the last of the wood on the fire but he couldn’t find the woodpile and he stumbled around, cursing the cold.

‘Piss for me, while you’re up,’ Niceas said.

Kineas found the firewood by tripping over it. He gathered it up, blind, and as he found the last decent stick he heard a horse. He put the firewood near the embers and felt for a javelin. He could barely stand with the fatigue of his dream.

‘You hear that?’ he asked.

‘Horse,’ Niceas said.

He heard Niceas dropping the blankets as he rose. It was that quiet. Kineas reached into the still-warm blankets and retrieved his sword. He put the baldric over his shoulder and felt for his sandals. He wasn’t sure he was awake — he could barely focus his attention.

Niceas bumped into him. ‘Two horses,’ he whispered, his mouth close.

Alert and ready, the two men crouched back to back. After a few minutes they retrieved their cloaks and donned them.

The sky began to show light — the first touch of the wolf’s tail.

‘If they’re coming, they’ll come now,’ Kineas said.

They didn’t.

When the sun was up, they found hoof prints in the stream bed that ran around the base of their hillside camp. A little further west, Niceas found the print of a shod horse, with a heavy toe iron like a Macedonian horse. He shook his head.

‘Could be anything,’ he said. ‘Might have been one of ours from yesterday. Ataelus, perhaps.’

Kineas couldn’t get over the notion that he was being watched. High ridges rose on either side of the river, and anything might be moving in the trees up there.

‘As soon as we ride out of the stream bed, we’re visible,’ he said.

‘So?’ asked Niceas.

‘Fair enough. Let’s get out of here.’ Kineas went back to their camp and finished the tea, then retied his cloak behind him.

They rode along the stream bed until it rejoined the road (such as it was) a couple of stades downstream, and then they rode quickly along the road, alternating trotting with short canters.

The Tanais was entering a great curve, and the valley broadened and deepened. The river was flowing almost due north. As the ground rose, Kineas watched for the path to fork east.

‘There’s a sight for sore eyes,’ said Niceas.

Kineas, intent on the trail, looked up to find a bare-chested Sauromatae girl sitting on a pony just half a stade away.

Ataelus met them at the top of the pass where the eastern road crossed the ridge before continuing east to the Rha and the Kaspian. He had half a dozen riders with him. Two of them were wounded.

‘For making happy!’ Ataelus proclaimed, and grasped his arm.

Kineas embraced the Sakje man. Then he pointed at one of the Sauromatae girls who was boiling a human skull in a pot. ‘What in Hades is that?’

‘Wedding present!’ Ataelus said, and laughed, slapping his knee with a calloused hand. He was so pleased with his retort that he translated it into Sakje and repeated it. All of his prodromoi howled.

Kineas shook his head. ‘Wedding present?’ he asked.

‘Sauromatae girl for needing to kill man before wedding,’ Ataelus said. ‘Clean skull for stinking less, yes?’ He grinned.

‘Who did she kill?’ Kineas asked.

‘Bandits,’ Ataelus said. ‘For finding bandits in hills. Farmers say “bandits kill us steal our grain” and I say “for finding bandits.”’

Niceas twisted his mouth and made a noise. ‘Macedonian-shod?’ he asked.

Ataelus looked at him without comprehending. Ataelus’s Greek was good enough, but it never seemed to get better than ‘good enough’ no matter how much time he spent with them.

Niceas got down and lifted a hoof of his Macedonian charger. He showed the shoe.

Ataelus nodded enthusiastically. ‘And Persian. And Sakje.’ He pointed to two small ponies with iron-grey hides and bloodstains.

‘What about Philokles?’ Kineas asked.

Ataelus shrugged. ‘Eight days ahead. More? For riding hard.’ Ataelus waved east.

Kineas nodded. ‘And Nihmu?’ he asked.

‘For child?’ Ataelus asked. ‘Nihmu yatavu child? For being somewhere! For being under the foot of my pony when I fight, or for dropping rocks on bandits. Who knows where the child is for going?’ He grinned. ‘Her horses I am for having.’ Sure enough, the dozen royal chargers towered over the scout’s remounts like a separate genus.

Niceas explained that Diodorus was a day or two behind, and Lot a week behind him.

Ataelus watched the ridges behind them while Niceas spoke. When Niceas finished, Ataelus pulled at his nose and drooped an eyelid. ‘Time to find bandits,’ he said. ‘For taking their horses, bring them fire. When Diodorus for coming, bandits scatter.’ He pointed down the other side of the ridge, towards the Kaspian and Hyrkania. ‘Bandits thick as rain, for fighting. Out on the high plains. All way to Rha. Lost two men getting Spartan to coast.’

Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘How many bandits, Ataelus?’

‘Many and many,’ Ataelus replied. ‘Kill bandits here, for making others feel fear. Yes?’

Kineas could see that Ataelus already had a plan. So he nodded.

Ataelus grinned. He motioned to one of the Sauromatae girls. She slipped off her mare, pulled her saddle blanket off her horse’s back and threw a double armful of dew-wet bracken on the fire. Thick grey-blue smoke pulsed into the sky. The Sauromatae girl put her blanket over the fire in one smooth motion, so that the smoke was cut off. Then she whipped it clear and another pulse of smoke shot upward.

She repeated this three times.

Ataelus grunted in satisfaction.

‘Neat trick,’ Kineas said.

‘Have we ever seen them do that before?’ Niceas asked.

‘No,’ Kineas answered.

Already there was a picket galloping up the ridge from the eastern road. He pulled on his reins in the camp and Samahe, Ataelus’s wife from the Cruel Hands, barked orders at him. He grinned, dismounted, cut another pony out of the herd, remounted and galloped away.

A pair of Sauromatae girls galloped in from another direction. Before the sun rose three fingers more, there were a dozen riders gathered, and they were riding hard along one of the many stream beds that criss-crossed the wooded ridges. A trickle of water flowed over rocks under their horse’s hooves, but the banks were clear of leaves or brush on either side up to the height of their horse’s withers, indicating how full these little valleys ran when the rains fell.

Ataelus seemed to know just where he was riding. Kineas was content to ride along.

The shadows stretched away when they stopped. All the Sakje and the Sauromatae dismounted and relieved themselves without letting go of their reins. Kineas and Niceas imitated them.

There was a hint of smoke on the cold wind over the strong smell of urine. A clear-eyed blonde woman handed him a gourd of water and he raised it in acknowledgement before he drank. She looked to be fourteen or perhaps fifteen. She had two skulls on the ornate saddle of her horse.

Kineas grinned at her and she returned the grin.

‘We for hitting them at dark,’ Ataelus said. ‘Understand for hitting?’ he smacked his right fist into his left hand.

‘I understand,’ Kineas said.

‘For watching two days, since girls get in fight and Samahe for finding camp.’ Ataelus shrugged.

There was something untold, some story that made Samahe wrinkle her nose and made one of the girls blush and wriggle in her saddle. A story he’d never know, Kineas thought.

‘You knew we were coming?’ Kineas said, suddenly making the connection.

‘Nihmu says for coming, says “protect him king”.’ Ataelus shrugged. ‘Not for needing child for telling for protecting.’

‘You watched us last night?’ Niceas asked.

‘No. For today since sun rose this way.’ Ataelus closed one eye and raised a hand, palm flat, just over the horizon.

Niceas shook his head. ‘They were on us last night. If they watched us meet…’

Kineas took a deep breath, suddenly eager to have it over with. ‘If they intended to ambush us, they’ve had all day to do it.’

The shadows lengthened across the meadows below them, and the air grew frostier as the sun’s rays fell further away. Niceas and Kineas had to work to curb the impatience of their horses. Kineas’s Getae horse was the worst, fretting constantly and jerking his head at any motion, so that Kineas had to dismount and hold his head.

The blonde woman gave him a glance of pity — pity that his horse was so ill-trained.

Twice they heard voices, both times Persian speakers getting water from the Tanais below them. Then, while the sun was just visible, they saw a pair of riders come out of the meadow and ride a short distance up the ridge, from where they had a good view of the eastern road at their feet.

Ataelus grunted in disgust, because by chance or purpose, the new pickets had a much better chance of warning the camp below of his approach than the pair they replaced. He clucked his tongue in his cheek as he watched them, and after a few minutes, he summoned one of the Standing Horse warriors in his band and the two of them rode off down the back of the ridge. Samahe dismounted and lay in the leaf mould, her hand shading her eyes.

Time dragged by. The Sauromatae women were as nervous as kittens, but their horses were calm, munching quietly on anything in reach and otherwise immobile. Niceas drew and resheathed his sword a dozen times. Kineas was busy keeping his under-trained horse from mischief.

He was amazed at their discipline. All over again. He couldn’t have kept a dozen Greek troopers so quiet without the hope of massive gain.

Even as he thought it, he wondered if he was making a poor assumption. Perhaps the Greeks could do as well. Perhaps with training, some rides out with Sakje patrols…

Samahe rose to a crouch and Kineas snapped from his reverie to watch the ground below him. The two mounted pickets were almost invisible, even from above, but little movements in the trees betrayed their position to a careful watcher. But unlike Samahe, Kineas couldn’t see Ataelus or his partner, so the first he knew of their movement was a pair of arrows appearing from the rocks to the right and falling silently on the pickets.

‘Now!’ Samahe said in Sakje, and she vaulted on to her mare and set off down the hillside at a speed that terrified Kineas, who was right behind her and couldn’t, for the sake of honour, go any slower. He reached the valley floor at a gallop, already past his fear because the ride had been so bad in itself, and he readied a javelin as the pair of them raced across the meadow. He could see the camp now, and it seemed to be full of men and horses — dozens of them. A few had bows. One raised his and loosed, but the arrow flew well over Kineas, who ducked down on his horse’s mane and galloped on, straight at the heart of the bandit camp.

Samahe’s horse sidestepped some obstruction in the meadow grass, and on her next rise she shot, her arrow licking across the flowers and the sweet grass to drop one of the few bandits to get mounted. Her second arrow was in the air.

The Sauromatae girls weren’t shooting. They were screaming with all the gusto of the young warrior, screaming away their terror and their exhilaration, and they bore straight at the bandits by the river.

Kineas went through the camp without touching his reins. No one opposed him and he rode past the huddle of bandits at the riverbank and then up a short rise to a clearing in the riverbank woods, where there was an abandoned farmstead and the bandit horse herd. There were ten men in the clearing and despite the screams from the riverside, they seemed surprised when he appeared in their midst, and two of them were down before any got weapons to hand.

Kineas wheeled his horse and extended his arm, using the momentum of the move to twirl the shaft in his fingers so that he changed grips in a single stride of his mount, and a circle of blood drops flew from the point of his rotating javelin.

He felt like a god, at least for a moment.

One of the men had a bow and shot his horse, who crashed to the ground in another stride, and he fell, getting a leg under him and then rolling, javelin lost. He came up against a tree and he rolled to put the bole between him and the archer.

The archer laughed. ‘Try this!’ he called, in Persian. He shot. The arrow hit the tree and shattered, and the man laughed again. He had a black beard and kohl-rimmed eyes like a Bactrian nobleman.

Down by the river, men were dying. Blackbeard drew another arrow. ‘Get horses,’ he called over his shoulder, and two boys sprang to do his bidding.

Kineas pulled his cloak off and whirled it around his arm, moving to his right to a larger tree.

‘Try this, Greek!’ Blackbeard shot again, and his arrow hit the new tree.

Kineas jumped out and retrieved his javelin, avoiding the slashing hooves of his dying Getae mount and leaping behind another tree just as a third arrow skipped along the bark and slapped into the rolled cloak on his arm.

‘Try this, harlot!’ Kineas yelled, and threw his javelin. Then he charged, leaping a downed tree as he ran, heedless of the odds. It was better than letting a master archer take his time, and something had gone wrong in the fight by the river.

His javelin hit the man by the archer’s side, knocking him flat like the deer. The archer turned and ran, and Kineas ran after him. There were men in the clearing and they set themselves to stop him, but none put the archer’s life higher than his own, and Kineas ran through them, downing one with a sword cut as he ran by.

The two boys had grabbed a pair of horses apiece, and Blackbeard took the first he came to, tossed the boy clear of the saddlecloth and vaulted astride, pulling the horse’s head around. At the other side of the clearing, Samahe appeared, shooting as she came, and the other boy went down with an arrow in his guts, screaming. Kineas found himself crossing blades with yet another Persian — another nobleman, from the rags of purple on his cloak. The man had a good sword, and he was aggressive.

Blackbeard pulled his horse around and shot. So did Samahe. Neither hit. Both were moving fast, flat to their horse’s backs, and then Kineas had no attention to spare.

The Persian leaped in and cut hard at his head. Kineas parried and the blades rang together, and the Persian kicked at his shin under the locked iron. Kineas pushed his hooked blade up and over his opponent’s guard and then slipped a foot behind the man’s ankle and pushed, hoping for a throw, and the Persian jumped back, cutting high.

He was a swordsman.

Kineas parried and cut back, a short chop at his opponent’s hand, but the Persian had seen such a move before, and he made a hand-high parry that turned into an overhand cut to the head — and Kineas just managed a parry, taking a blow that was not quite a cut to the shoulder. His left hand closed on his Sakje whip in the sash at his back, and he pulled it clear and changed his stance to lead with his left foot, the whip out as a shield.

The Persian had a knife in his left hand and he stamped forward, leading with the knife.

Kineas backed away, kicked pine needles and risked a glance over his shoulder. Ataelus was shooting behind him — shooting back the way he had come. Something was wrong.

The Persian was smiling. He flicked with the knife — a feint with just enough power to draw blood. Kineas retreated a step and the Persian’s smile grew wider. He suddenly changed tempo, pivoting on his front foot and thrusting with his sword and then trying to trap Kineas’s sword against his own with the dagger.

Kineas just barely evaded the trap, twisting his body, pulling a muscle in his neck, inwardly cursing. Again he backed away, aware that this fight was taking too much time. Ataelus called out in Sakje — something about a wound.

Kineas made a high attack with his sword, scoring just a touch of a cut against his opponent’s forearm and drawing the same high counterattack — but this time, Kineas gave the man’s sword hand the full weight of the lash of his riding whip and then cut low with his blade, catching the Persian just on the hip bone and cutting him deeply. The man fell back. He wasn’t grinning, but he had the grace to salute with his dagger hand.

Kineas leaped forward, cut hard at the Persian’s sabre and knocked it right out of the man’s hand — the lash had hurt, as Kineas could see.

‘Yield,’ he said in Persian.

The Persian glanced over his shoulder, where Samahe had an arrow pointed at his back. He nodded three times, as if some point of philosophy had just come to him, and tossed his dagger on the ground. ‘I yield,’ he said.

Kineas raised his own blade, stepped well back and looked for Ataelus and Niceas. Ataelus was at the horse herd, calling orders. Niceas was nowhere to be seen.

The swordsman was the only prisoner. His cousin — Blackbeard — hadn’t survived the archery duel with both Samahe and Ataelus, and the rest of their troop had been cut down or had fled. Kineas was a little surprised at the savagery of the Sakje — but only a little. He was more worried about Niceas.

Niceas lay out on the meadow of flowers with an arrow in his ribs. He wasn’t dead, but he was deeply unconscious from the fall, and the arrow had skidded up his ribs and ripped open his shoulder as well.

‘Shit,’ Kineas said.

‘I’ll save him,’ said Nihmu.

Kineas whirled. He hadn’t seen her approach, hadn’t seen her horse. She had a strung bow over her shoulder and her quiver was empty. She turned and ran across the meadow towards the bandit camp, and Kineas was left to make his comrade as comfortable as possible. He rolled Niceas’s cloak and put it under his head and cut the remnants of his tunic free from his body.

Nihmu came back with a copper beaker of water, still steaming hot from the bandits’ fire. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ she said with the confidence of an adult. Then, more quietly, ‘Sirven died.’

‘Sirven?’ Kineas asked.

‘Lot’s daughter older. The blonde girl.’ Nihmu shrugged. ‘I told her she would die if she fought here. But when she went down, they all fought over her body. Ataelus took a cut.’ She pointed at a red-haired girl of fourteen weeping. ‘Her sister lost a finger and took an arrow in the leg. They are all angry.’ She sounded like the child she was — and like an upset child, at that.

Kineas felt his post-battle fatigue come on him, as the daimon that animated him to fight left his body empty of feelings except sorrow.

Nihmu was washing the wound with hot water, her dark hair hanging in uncombed tangles over her face so that he couldn’t see her. ‘They are all angry.’ She repeated. ‘So they killed all the bandits.’

‘All?’ Kineas asked, turning to look for his prisoner.

‘You should stay by him. He will do you a good turn one day, that one. If Ataelus doesn’t take his hair.’

Kineas turned and trotted off into the dusk to find his Persian.

The man was burying Blackbeard. Kineas listened to the Sauromatae mourning Sirven and her sister. Mosva, he thought. She’s called Mosva. Kineas left his Persian prisoner working and walked down to the river to find Ataelus.

‘Stupid girl,’ Ataelus said bitterly. ‘Stupid Sauromatae barbarian girl.’ He had tears in his eyes and a quaver in his voice. ‘Fight like wild things, sword to sword with grown men — hard men. And me for fool! Too long fighting stupid Greeks.’

Kineas hugged the little Sakje, and pressed Samahe’s hand, and embraced the little red-haired princess, who clung to him and wept until he was embarrassed, and then for a good time beyond, so that he stared into the gathering darkness and patted her hair, thinking bleak thoughts about the quality of right and wrong, good and evil, and about how far he was from being a man of virtue when he couldn’t comfort a bereft sister. But eventually she felt his awkwardness and drew back with an apology, and then he punished himself and went to help the Persian bury his cousin. Later, he sat by the fire making barley soup for Niceas, who was deeply unconscious.

‘I came to find you,’ Nihmu said, kneeling by him. ‘I didn’t like it when they killed the prisoners. It made me afraid.’

‘Killing prisoners is never good. Sometimes it must be done — when they are wounded, and you can’t help them. Sometimes it — happens.’ He shrugged, the image of the Getae man he had killed a year before rising in his mind, so that he gave a little shiver of revulsion.

‘It is time. Are you climbing the tree yet?’ she asked.

Kineas nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I saw you in the dream world — three nights ago, I think it must have been. You are an eagle.’

Kineas shuddered again with a different disgust. Speaking of the dream world this way was like discussing sex — he knew men who did it, but he didn’t himself. Speaking of the dream world with this — this child — was almost impossible. ‘Yes,’ he said, repressing his feelings as well as he might.

She flicked a smile at him and put some herbs into the barley soup. ‘He won’t die,’ she said, as if Niceas’s continued existence were obvious to anyone.

Kineas looked at Niceas and felt tears come to his eyes. His throat threatened to close, and he couldn’t speak. He knew that Niceas might die — in any skirmish, on any day — but the reality of his unmoving body was deeply painful.

‘You need a horse,’ the girl said.

Kineas took a deep breath to deny it and then slumped. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I have a horse for you,’ the girl said. ‘A magnificent beast, who will carry you from now to the day you fall.’

Kineas smiled. ‘The way I ride, I may fall later today.’

Nihmu looked back at him with a child’s intensity and a child’s impatience for adult humour. ‘You know what I mean. Take the horse.’

And Kineas agreed.