Storm of arrows

20

Philokles met them in a grove of willows four hundred stades further east, on the banks of the Polytimeros, which swelled there to be more than a stade wide and flowed just dactyloi deep. The willows were ancient and there were three different altars arrayed beneath the canopy. Darius was asleep under an awning of cloaks held on spears.

Kineas dismounted in the cool shade and they embraced.

‘I have seen her,’ Philokles said.

Kineas felt the slow flame of hope rekindle in his heart.

‘Get your column under cover of the trees and let’s talk,’ he said. He looked thinner, and beneath his eyes were circles of darkness like a mask of despair.

Eight hundred warriors with ten thousand horses are difficult to hide, but Diodorus and Andronicus and Bain did their best while Kineas drank water and Darius roused himself from sleep. He looked as wrecked as Philokles.

When he was seated, Philokles began.

‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘And I disobeyed you. I convinced Ataelus to stay with me and let the queen’s messenger find his own way home. I took Darius to Alexander’s camp. Alexander has so many stragglers since the massacres on the Jaxartes that I walked straight through the sentries without a question.’ He shrugged. ‘I won’t make an epic of it. Darius found the women by posing as a slave. I learned — almost without effort, I must concede — that a column of mercenaries was to march to the relief of Marakanda.’

Darius nodded. ‘I learned that Alexander ordered the Amazons to Kandahar. One of them is pregnant and Alexander wants her to deliver among his women. She is to be escorted by the relief column for Marakanda.’ He gave Philokles a smile. ‘It was as if the gods intended us to know — the Amazons are a three-day wonder in the camp, and there is no security. Tribesmen come and go. Alexander is recruiting Sogdians, and any barbarian with a bow can ride in through the gates.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘This is so much like a miracle that it seems like a trap. How many in the column?’

‘Two thousand men. Greek mercenary infantry, and a more polyglot crew of scum you can’t imagine. I’d have been decarch in another day. I had to leave before they placed me in command of the whole expedition. ’ He gave a tired smile. ‘Four hundred mercenary cavalry under an officer I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘Listen, Kineas, Alexander is mad. Worse, the distrust and the politics of that camp are as bad as anything I’ve ever seen. It is not so much an army as a collection of factions. The death of Parmenion has cut them hard.’

Kineas nodded. ‘He did a lot of the work,’ he admitted.

‘And a handful of Hetairoi, with some mounted Macedonian infantry as prodromoi and a hundred Macedonian cavalry under Andromachus,’ Darius said, completing the report. He jerked a thumb at the men in column picketing their horses. ‘We can take them.’

Kineas winced. ‘Companions?’ he asked. His tone reminded them of what a tough proposition a few hundred Companions on wretched played-out horses had been a year before.

Philokles rubbed his beard. ‘You are right to be cautious. The Macedonians are dangerous — every one of them is as good as a Spartiate. They’ve been out here so long that war is the only life they know.’ His tone was frankly admiring.

‘So much for the philosophy of peace,’ Kineas said mockingly.

‘I was born a Spartan,’ Philokles said with slow dignity. ‘Philosophy was learned later.’

‘Yet you think we can take them.’ Kineas started to ease himself out of his breastplate.

Philokles stood. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘They’ll be here in two days. I sat in the command tent and listened to Cleitus tell Pharnuches, their commander, his march route. I sent Ataelus north and waited until the column marched. There’s not another crossing this easy for a hundred stades.’

Darius chuckled. ‘We even marched with the column,’ he said. ‘The Amazons have a cavalry escort — a dozen of Hephaestion’s own Companions.’

‘He commands the Companions now,’ Philokles put in, as Diodorus came up with the other officers.

‘Who does?’ Diodorus asked. His armour was off, and he took a helmet full of muddy water from Ataelus and poured it over his head. ‘Damn, that’s good.’

Ataelus grinned. ‘For sick making — too much water,’ he said.

‘Hephaestion commands the Companions,’ Philokles said.

‘Fucking catamite,’ Diodorus said. ‘Alexander must be hard up for cavalrymen.’

Philokles shrugged, and Darius flushed. Diodorus raised his hands to mollify them. ‘Well, he is a catamite. He manipulates Alexander — always has. Hephaestion couldn’t command a squadron of cavalry in a religious parade.’

Philokles raised an eyebrow at Diodorus. The two men fell silent and something passed between them. Philokles rolled his shoulders, as if he had been carrying weights and they had finally been put aside. ‘Have it as you will — you two know these people better than I. But the troopers guarding Srayanka are the best of the best. They’re right in the centre of the column.’

Kineas nodded. ‘Then that’s where the blow needs to fall,’ he said.

He put out pickets, a few of the Sakje riding as much as fifty stades south and east, and then he and his selected officers rode the banks of the river for twenty stades north and south, but Philokles’ ambush site was the best. To the north of the island of willows was another island covered in poplar, and to the south was a third island covered in rose bushes and tamarisk. More tamarisk grew in a shield-shaped tangle to the north and east along the bank and spreading away south, blocking the line of sight of the approaching force.

That night, he gathered all the officers down to the lowliest file leader and drew a map in the sand. He oriented them on the island of willows where they stood.

‘Here is the river,’ he said, showing the course of the Polytimeros. ‘Here is the trade road they will come up. The trees from the spring banks shade the road and offer cover.’ He allowed the tip of his stick to follow the road. ‘Just south of here is a stand — really a thicket — of tamarisk and poplar. The road winds between the trees and the river.’ Kineas indicated the riverbank and the current river bed. ‘The battlefield will be shaped like a diamond. They enter the diamond here, when they begin to pass between the woods and the river. Their scouts will not find Temerix in the tamarisk trees,’ (a ripple of laughter for the pun), ‘and will pass down the road. If any of them are really professional, they’ll ride right around the trees to the south. If so, we can forget them. The bulk of the column will enter the defile here,’ he indicated the top of the diamond, ‘and march along the road. There will be eight hundred of them in the front division and they’ll cover two stades of road. When the head of the column is ready to cross the Polytimeros here,’ and he indicated the island of willows where they stood, ‘the middle of the column will be passing Temerix. Understand?’ He received a chorus of nods and grunts. ‘I’ll show you in the morning, in any case. Unless some hothead screws it up, the column will keep marching across the Polytimeros. The infantry in the first division will either cross and keep marching, if they’re idiots, or they’ll cross and form in battle order to cover the second division, if they’re acting like soldiers.’

Eumenes, translating at his side, paused. Kineas understood him to be explaining to the Sakje why the Greek mercenaries would form a battle line on the other side. Kineas waited for him to finish. The Sakje nodded and pursed their lips in approval of such a professional move — the assumption that every river crossing was an ambush impressed them.

‘The Sakje squadron will be behind the island of poplars here,’ he said. They’d be well down the river bed, hidden by the next island to the north and by the habit of scouts to get across watercourses as quickly as possible. The notion that the watercourse was itself a highway might not occur to them. Even if it did, few of them would ride two stades off the line of march to check out an island.

He hoped.

‘When the signal is given, the Sakje show themselves and attack the rear of the first division. Harass them, shower them with arrows, but do not close. All I require is that the first division be unable to fall back to support the second division.’

Bain agreed, but the gleam in his eye told another story. Kineas resolved to send Eumenes to keep him in check.

‘The Olbian cavalry will be here.’ Kineas indicated the base of the woods, just a stade from the crossing. ‘The woods will screen us until it is too late. If they see us early,’ Kineas shrugged, ‘we fight it out. But if they don’t see us, we charge straight for the prisoner escort. If they run back along the road, they’re meat for Temerix. If they flee into the river, we’ll hunt them down. Remember that Srayanka and Urvara are waiting. Pray for some luck.’ He paused. ‘At the same time, Temerix starts punching arrows into the second division. They either counterattack into the thorns or they flee down the sides of the watercourse into the stream bed.’ Kineas pointed at the far side of the diamond. ‘The Sauromatae knights are here, behind the island of roses. If the Macedonians come down into the river, the Sauromatae deal with them. Again,’ and here Kineas turned to Lot, ‘we are not here to fight a battle. We are here to get Srayanka and Urvara. Kill some Macedonians if you can, but listen for the second trumpet.’ He looked around them, Sakje and Olbians and swarthy Temerix, again in the position of maximum danger. ‘When the second trumpet sounds, you break like a cloud of swallows fleeing a hawk on the plains and vanish like morning mist. We rally at the last camp on the Oxus. Unless we fuck up massively, there will be no pursuit because they don’t have the horses to follow us across the plain. Right?’

Nods and grunts.

‘Sounds beautiful,’ said Diodorus. He was grinning. ‘What do you think will really happen?’

Kineas couldn’t help but grin back, because the dream of the thunderbolt was still with him, and because the power to see Srayanka and hold her in his arms again lay in his own hands, and he was not a boy. ‘It will all go to shit and we’ll fight our way through it,’ he said. ‘Look, friends. If all else fails, cut your way to the middle of the column and get the girls. Unless the gods are against us, they’ll get free of the escort on their own.’

Philokles leaned in. ‘Srayanka is heavily pregnant,’ he said. He looked around with the embarrassment most men kept for discussions of sex and women’s matters. ‘I may have forgotten to mention this.’

A thunderbolt. Kineas looked at his friend with his mouth gaping like a landed fish.

Philokles cocked his head to one side. ‘I did forget to mention it,’ he said. ‘She told Darius that if she weren’t so heavy, they’d all have ridden free weeks ago. They may not be able to escape on their own.’

Kineas took a deep breath — he had known, in a vague way, that she was pregnant. This was more real. He felt a blow in his gut and the sudden pierce of anxiety like an arrow in his side. But he thought of Phocion and refused to bow to fate.

‘Cut your way to the middle of their column. Get the women. And then run like fire on the plain.’ He pointed at Temerix. ‘As soon as they try for you, you run down the trails you’ve cut and out of the back of the woods — right past us and on to your ponies. Understand?’

Temerix never smiled. He gave a curt nod, like a man given unnecessary and patronizing instructions.

‘Hey!’ Ataelus said. He rattled off some rapid Sakje to the chiefs, and they all grinned together. He turned back to Kineas. ‘If the wind for us, give them fire in the faces.’

Kineas pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he agreed.

In the morning, he led them on a ride around the invisible boundaries of his diamond until every man understood his orders. At nightfall, Samahe came to tell him that the Macedonian column was camped eighty stades up the Polytimeros.

That night, he dreamed again of the thunderbolt in his hand and Ataelus awakened him before the sun with a report from the outer pickets. The Macedonians were moving.

It was difficult to hide eight hundred men. Teams of Sindi brushed the main road clear of tracks while the little army set itself in its positions. Men hurried unnecessarily and were injured. A horse fell down the spring bank of the river and had to be killed, and the process of butchering and disposing of the horse took so long that Kineas was close to screaming with frustration.

Even after a hundred helmets full of water, the place where the horse had died was a mass of blood and flies.

Kineas clamped down. ‘Leave it,’ he said, his teeth clenched, glaring at the miserable Sakje rider who had caused the disaster. ‘To your places.’

Kineas was mounted on Thalassa. It was the mare’s first time in combat, and she stood tall and firm as Kineas mounted. She snorted, raised her head and then settled herself.

‘You are quite a horse,’ Kineas said. He clucked his mare into motion and played with the catch on his breastplate. A fine piece of work last spring, the piece of armour had taken so many blows that it was misshapen, and the shoulder catch no longer seated firmly in the back plate. When it popped, the two moving plates rubbed his shoulder raw. He determined to get a new one.

Where in Hades would he find a new Greek breastplate here, on the edge of the world? On the corpse of a Macedonian, of course. Except that he couldn’t see this fight leaving him time to strip a corpse.

Thalassa fidgeted. Diodorus had all the Olbian cavalry in place behind the thickets, and four of Temerix’s Sindi were sweeping their back trail. One of them had a wicker case strapped to his back. They’d caught a young hawk and they’d release her to signal that the enemy was in sight — an old Sindi trick, so he was told.

In the river bed, clouds of flies plundered the rocks where the horse had been butchered and the sound carried up and down the river bed like a manifestation of some evil god. Otherwise, there was silence, punctuated by horse noises — bits on teeth, cropping grass, reins creaking or snapping, gentle whickers and snuffles — and horse smells. The gelding behind Kineas defecated and the clod fell to earth with a heavy plop.

Kineas had waited in a few cavalry ambushes. This one was too large. The sheer number of men and horses involved raised the likelihood of discovery. He tried to decide what he would do when they were discovered. Sweat ran down his face and neck and down the hollow of his back where armour and tunic didn’t quite meet.

To be so close to Srayanka without saving her — he banished that thought.

But when he glanced over his shoulder, he couldn’t make himself think of sacrificing his friends to rescue his wife.

He farted, long and low, and the men around him laughed. His hands clenched and unclenched on his reins, and he began to tap his whip against his thigh.

Diodorus came up beside him. ‘We should dismount,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll tire our horses.’

Kineas bit back a retort. ‘Yes,’ he said, and suited the action to the word. Thalassa grunted as he slipped off her back. Philokles tied his horse to a flowering bush with shiny leaves and lay down, as if to sleep.

Kineas hated him for the ease with which he went to sleep.

Dismounted, he could see nothing but three hundred horses and their riders and a wall of poplar trees. I should have arranged my position with a clear view of the enemy’s approach, he thought. His knees were weak. He looked at the sun, which hadn’t moved a finger’s span against the branch he had chosen as a marker.

He glanced around at Diodorus. He was flushed and fingering the edge of his machaira. When their eyes met, Diodorus walked his horse to where Kineas stood.

‘I feel like a virgin looking at his first girl,’ Diodorus said.

Philokles stood up from his nap. ‘The Olympic Games will be next year,’ he said, as if this was news. ‘I imagine the athletes have already left their homes for the games at Eleusis.’

Kineas looked around, mystified. ‘That was two weeks ago,’ he said.

‘Hmm.’ Philokles looked around, as if noticing all of the cavalry for the first time. ‘They go to win immortal glory in the striving of peace. All we’re going to do is rescue some barbarian woman from Alexander. Why are you two on edge?’ He grinned. ‘You have chosen an excellent site for an ambush and arranged your troops. All else is with the gods.’

Diodorus put his sword back in its sheath. ‘Sure. Fucking Spartan.’

Kineas took a steadying breath. ‘We take a great risk here,’ he began, and Philokles smiled.

‘Friends,’ he said, holding up his hand — and the hand shook. ‘I merely hide my fears better,’ he said.

Kineas performed a quick calculation. ‘I am in the grip of blind fear,’ he said. ‘We must have at least an hour. I am as stupid as the boy who let his horse roll down the riverbank. I should go and see to my men.’ He dusted his hands.

Then he went from man to man throughout the Olbians, clasping hands with every man and saying a few words. He teased, he mocked, he complimented, and behind him, three hundred Greeks and Keltoi and assorted professional cavalrymen breathed easier and smiled. As he moved among them, a breeze came up like the caress of a friendly goddess.

Kineas too breathed easier. It took him an hour to circle his troops, constantly on the lookout for the appearance of Ataelus or the sight of a bird rising over the woods in front of him. It kept him busy and he only thought of Srayanka fifty times.

When he came back, Philokles was making water against a stone and Diodorus was staring at the line of tamarisk trees as if he could bore a hole through them with his eyes. Kineas made a show of fastidiously avoiding the Spartan’s rock, and then he lay down in the shade of a silver-leafed poplar and pulled his broad straw hat over his eyes.

His stomach roiled and he could feel all of his stress pushing at his colon. His feet felt as if worms were crawling over them and his hands shook.

‘He’s over it,’ Diodorus said with irritation. ‘Now he’ll take a nap.’

Kineas smiled under his straw hat. Over it, he thought. Despite the growing heat, he was chilled to the bone. Over it.

Ambushes are different. In a field action, the commander — and the trooper — can watch the enemy deploy, can track the enemy’s countless errors and take comfort, can lose himself in preparation, giving orders or taking them.

In an ambush, he can only wait and the only two options are victory or disaster. No one will stay safely in reserve. No one is likely to escape from the grip of war.

Sakje and Olbian and Sauromatae, most of them were in the grip of fear and panic, and the trees and bushes moved with the quivering of men.

Still, all things considered, they were better off than the Macedonian column.

It was closer to noon than to morning when the hawk burst into the air over the thorn wood to their front, her flight so loud in all the silence that men who had achieved some sort of uneasy sleep were startled awake, all their fears returned.

‘Drink water, and mount!’ Kineas said in a fierce whisper. The whisper was passed back. Horses whickered despite the best efforts of their riders, and for a minute, the Olbians made as much noise as a bacchanal. Kineas glared at them, a vein throbbing at his temple, but it couldn’t be helped.

‘We’re fucking doomed,’ he said to Philokles.

The Spartan shrugged and drank water from a gourd. ‘Marching men hear nothing,’ he said. ‘And “We’re fucking doomed” is not a statement to inspire confidence in a commander.’

‘Teach that in Sparta, do they?’ Diodorus asked. ‘Oh, for the benefits of your education, Philokles.’

‘Shut up, both of you.’ Kineas pushed forward to the very edge of the trees. He handed Philokles his reins and waved at Diodorus. ‘Let’s go.’

‘You know how to hold a horse, right?’ Diodorus asked the Spartan.

‘If I forget, I’ll just run in circles flapping my arms and screaming at the top of my voice until you Athenians come and rescue me,’ he replied in a harsh whisper.

Kineas belly-crawled forward under the branches of the poplar, his forearms abraded by rose stems. He pushed forward until he could just see over a low ridge of earth. His line of sight was limited to the ford, the island of willows and the far side of the spring banks.

‘Philokles is better,’ Diodorus said, and Kineas glared him to silence.

The damned hawk was now circling the tamarisk wood, screaming her head off. ‘Remind me of this the next time the Sindi have an old trick,’ Kineas said.

Diodorus gave him a sharp nudge. The head of the Macedonian column was emerging from the gap between the spring bank and the tamarisk wood. Either they were moving very fast or the thrice-cursed bird had been released late.

There was an advance guard of Macedonian infantrymen mounted on nags. They had javelins instead of their pikes, but their corslets and short, guardless helmets marked them. Their horses were moving carefully, clearly tired. Even as he watched, the scout’s horses became restless with the discovery that there was water and they began to neigh.

A man rode up the gentle slope from the ford towards the Olbian ambush. He was humming to himself and looking at the ground with professional curiosity. Another flanker joined him. Behind the two scouts, the rest of the advance guard passed, riding quickly, and turned due north to cross the ford, heading for Marakanda. Men fought to keep their horses from drinking and suddenly the advance guard was thrown into confusion. Orders were shouted and any man who stopped lost control of his horse as it started to drink.

‘More fucking Dahae?’ asked the first scout. He was pointing at something in the dust.

‘Somebody butchered a horse in the stream bed,’ said the other scout. ‘I don’t like it. If they passed that close to us, we should see their dust.’ He looked up, his eyes searching the very ground where Kineas and Diodorus lay. ‘Fu-uck,’ he said, his thick Macedonian accent and his Illyrian hill drawl exaggerated by fear. ‘Unless they’re right here!’

The first man struck him lightly. ‘Get a grip,’ he said.

The second man shook his head. ‘Fuck yourself, whoreson puppy. Look at those prints — erased. No dust cloud. Dead horse.’

Behind them, the last of the advance guard turned and headed across the ford, the horses complaining. The last of their horses splashed into the shallow brown water and the smell of mud carried back to the two men lying in the briars.

‘Pharnuches is a useless fucking cunt,’ the first scout said. His voice had a hard edge of fear now, too. ‘Even if you’re right-’

The second rider turned and dashed for the trade road. Behind him, a full squadron of mercenary cavalry rode down the defile, two by two, moving fast. The men had their helmets on and their armour and they were looking to the left and to the right. Their horses were just as eager for water as the last unit’s.

‘Cavalry is in front,’ Diodorus whispered.

Kineas grunted in reply, his voice now covered by the trotting cavalry. That meant that the infantry would be in the second division — almost immune to Temerix’s arrows, if they had their armour on.

Nothing he could do about it now.

A large group of riders halted in a tangle at the edge of the ford with the two scouts shouting at them.

‘Hetairoi,’ Kineas said. He began pushing himself backwards as fast as he could.

Five Royal Companions in dun-coloured cloaks and white tunics with heavy armour, a richly dressed man in a purple and yellow cloak and a breastplate, and another in a red cloak. Three women in Sakje dress on good horses, one bent over her saddle, face grey with effort — Srayanka — and another, clearly Urvara, flirting with the Royal Companions. Diodorus crawled backwards.

‘Doesn’t matter!’ Kineas said. He was, in his nerves, answering his own question, unvoiced. It no longer mattered if the ambush was discovered.

As if on cue, he heard the shrieking cry of Bain’s elite Sakje, and the ground shook with their hooves. Kineas threw himself up on to his tall charger. He glanced back. They were all there.

‘Walk!’ he ordered, and they started forward without Andronicus’s trumpet. They were in a tight column of fours — that’s what they had cut a path to fit, the path that the scouts had no doubt noticed. He had traded rapid deployment for perfect concealment. As soon as his horse emerged from the gap into the clear ground just south of the ford, he called, ‘Form front!’ and the column began to knit itself into a rhomboid behind him as the head continued to ride forward at a walk.

He turned his head in time to see Bain’s Sakje loose a flight of arrows into the mercenary cavalry. They were caught facing the wrong way, with many of their horses head-down in the water, drinking deeply, and their horses suffered terribly in the first volley, their unarmoured rumps feathered like hedgehogs. Two dozen horses went down and the Mercenary cavalry behind dissolved into chaos as the Sakje galloped past along the river bed. Now every warrior shot for himself and some rode ridiculously close. Bain himself, wearing the transverse plume of a long-dead Macedonian officer, leaned so close to an armoured officer waving a sickle-bladed kopis that it seemed that his arrowhead brushed the man’s cloak before he loosed with a whoop that sounded across two stades and hundreds of men.

Kineas took in Bain’s attack in a glance. He pulled his helmet’s cheek plates down on his head and fastened the chinstrap. The enemy’s command group was now cut off from their cavalry. The thing could be done.

The command group and the Hetairoi had not failed to note that hundreds of well-trained cavalry were emerging from their flank. Their commander in the purple cloak gesticulated, turned and yelled.

Kineas’s men were less than a stade away. Srayanka appeared injured — he could see something terribly wrong in her body language. He raised his right fist holding a javelin. ‘Trot!’ he shouted.

Urvara ripped a Macedonian kopis from the scabbard of one of the Royal Companions. She removed one of his hands on the back cut and reared her horse. Behind her, a second Hetairoi trooper drew his sword and moved to execute Srayanka. Hirene, Srayanka’s trumpeter, her grey braids flying, tackled the Macedonian, wrapping her arms around him to pin them. They fell to the ground together and vanished in the rising dust.

Srayanka, free, cut at a third Royal Companion with her riding whip, whirled her horse and rode for the willow trees on the island. The command group was in turmoil — Urvara cut at a second man, her blow sheering through the layers of leather on his corslet and drawing blood.

Macedonian contempt for women was costing them heavily.

‘Charge!’ Kineas roared. His horse flew like Pegasus over the gravel and sand.

The general’s bodyguards were both brave and skilled. They formed well, even as Urvara’s brilliant riding and frenzied sword cuts were bringing chaos to their rear ranks, and they launched themselves — all fifty of them — in a counter-charge. But the front rank had only ten strides to gain momentum and Kineas’s Olbians had the whole gentle slope behind them and half a stade at the gallop, and they threw the bodyguard flat at the impact, their horses smashing chest to chest with the Macedonian chargers like warships using their rams, bearing them over. Kineas didn’t throw his javelin — he used it to parry the xyston of a Companion and got himself a painful thrust at his badly protected left shoulder from a lance as he closed, but Thalassa did the work and his first two opponents didn’t stay upright to face him. Only when the mare’s momentum was spent climbing the shale on to the willow island did he have to fight hand to hand. A Royal Companion, his helmet gone, stood his ground on a heavy gelding and struck out hard with his long xyston, rising and thrusting two-handed. Kineas parried and got his helmet under the point and let his charger carry him in. Close up, belly to belly, the two horses reared, their hooves milling. Kineas caught his own spear up in two hands, left hand near the head and right hand on the butt, and thrust, his point ripping at the man’s arms, cutting his reins, punching in over the top of his bronze breastplate and into his throat.

And then another man, with a red cloak. Kineas tried to sweep him out of the saddle with the haft of his spear and the man cut the shaft in two with a powerful sword cut. Kineas leaned out to avoid the man’s back swing and Thalassa backed away. Kineas got his Egyptian machaira clear of the scabbard in the pause and then the two men closed, their horses whirling around each other like fighting dogs. Red Cloak was no master swordsman, but he was strong as an ox, heavy, tough, well armoured, and even when Kineas landed a heavy blow on the point of his shoulder, the man only grunted. He had a short dagger in his off hand now, and he leaned in close and punched the dagger at Kineas’s midriff, but Kineas’s bronze corslet turned the stroke. Kineas cut again, a high feint that he turned into an attack, using the man’s strong parry against him and reversing his cut so that the Egyptian sword went in under the man’s sword arm, but Red Cloak’s corslet held. Thalassa was backing away, Kineas’s eyes were full of sweat and he ducked his head and launched a flurry of blows. Red Cloak took a cut high on his arm and then cut back hard, and Kineas’s parry wasn’t strong enough to stop the blow from shearing his plume and ripping the helmet free against the chinstrap, snapping Kineas’s head back. He saw white, and again Thalassa saved his life. He felt his mount rise up and thrust with her legs. As the horse fell forward on to its front feet, Kineas’s vision cleared and he parried high, and the two blades locked, the hard edge of the Egyptian sword biting into the soft iron of the Macedonian kopis’s forte, and the two riders came together. The bigger man tried to grapple with his dagger coming in at Kineas’s thighs, and Kineas ripped his whip from his sash and slashed the man’s reaching arm left-handed and was rewarded with a grunt of pain, and then both horses tumbled together and righted themselves with scrambles and kicks that pushed them apart. Kineas was past Red Cloak, free of the melee. He looked back and Diodorus was thrusting at the big man repeatedly with a javelin, keeping him at arm’s length. Red Cloak was yelling in Macedonian Greek for some help.

Kineas turned Thalassa with just his knees, intending to finish Red Cloak. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his unarmoured arm, feeling the pain in his left shoulder for the first time, and came face to face with Purple Cloak, who had only a short sword and was fully engaged with Urvara. She threw Kineas a look — exasperation or desperation — and Kineas rode into the enemy general’s flank, tipping him to the ground without a blow, where Carlus finished him with a spear thrust. Legs locked on Thalassa’s barrel, Kineas found himself in a knot of desperate Macedonians in dust-coloured cloaks, probably Purple Cloak’s bodyguard. He cut right and left, took another blow on his left shoulder that cut the leather straps on his armour and kneed his charger into a run, bursting through the enemy and into the clear, blind with pain. He grabbed for his lost reins, missed them, but Thalassa turned under him like an equine acrobat, wheeling so sharply that Kineas almost lost his seat. The three bodyguards were locked with Carlus and Sitalkes. Kineas could see the blue plume on Diodorus’s helmet beyond Carlus’s giant form. He leaned forward on his mare’s neck, gasped a gulp of air and glanced at his left shoulder, which appeared uninjured despite the pain. Then he tapped Thalassa’s barrel with his heels and the horse responded with another powerful lunge forward, so that he crashed full into Sitalkes’ opponent, knocking the man’s horse back and losing the enemy rider his seat. Sitalkes put the man down with brutal economy while Kineas engaged his other opponent, trapping his sword in a high parry, cutting his bridle hand with a circular overhead feint and then killing him with a blow to the neck.

He had been riding for almost a minute with only his knees, his charger responding magnificently, but now Kineas reached again for the dangling reins, looking right and left, exhausted by the intensity and the exertion. His breath came in wracking heaves and his knees threatened to lose their grip on his mount. His right wrist barely responded.

Diodorus smacked Red Cloak in the side of his helmeted head with the full swing of his cornel-wood javelin, and the man went down, unconscious or dead. Diodorus immediately began bellowing for the Olbians to rally. Eumenes met Kineas’s eyes — he’d downed his man and was also looking around. In the river bed, the big Keltoi on their heavy chargers had blasted the rest of the bodyguard to shreds and were cleaning up. Carlus was already off his horse, stripping the corpses of his victims. Sitalkes gave Kineas a satisfied smile — not bloodlust, but pleasure at being alive.

The shattering noise of the melee died suddenly to horse sounds and human agony.

Diodorus was everywhere, rallying his men and watching the battle. Kineas let him do it. He was riding for Srayanka.

To the north, Bain’s riders were pressing closer to the beleaguered mercenaries and the Macedonian mounted infantry, firing as they went. The whole fight had become a dust cloud and a cacophony of noise. Horses were dying with screams of anguish. To the south, something had happened — Kineas couldn’t see any fighting at all, but neither was there any sign of the mercenary infantry. To the east there was a battle haze rising — someone was engaged with the Sauromatae in the river bed.

All of it could wait while he greeted her. She was off her horse, standing against one of the ancient altars.

‘Srayanka,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘I feel as if I’m going to die,’ she said, so very much herself that Kineas had to smile despite her words. He started to dismount, leaving Thalassa to crop grass in the middle of a battle.

‘Fight your battle!’ she said through gritted teeth. And then she gave a cry, somewhere between grunt and scream.

‘You-’ he said, and took her in his arms.

‘Bah,’ she murmured into his cloak. ‘You’re covered in blood.’ But she smiled.

Behind him, Andronicus called to him. He turned to see Andronicus and beyond him he saw Ataelus coming from the west, riding flat out.

‘Look!’ yelled Eumenes. He was pointing west, beyond Ataelus. Kineas turned.

There was a dust cloud — a huge cloud that rose like an avenging god over the plains. It was large enough to be another army, and that army was close.

‘Athena guard us!’ Kineas prayed, reaching for his helmet and finding it gone. A random arrow fell close. ‘Rally the Olbians!’

Diodorus had the task in hand. Philokles ran up leading his horse. He, too, began to call for the Olbians to rally. Antigonus surfaced from a knot of Keltoi and began to beat them into column.

‘Rhomboid!’ Kineas yelled to Diodorus.

Ataelus rode down into the ford and his horse’s hooves raised a crystal spray from the red-brown water. His face was a mask of panic. Time slowed. Kineas had time to release Srayanka so that she slumped by the altar.

Urvara seized his hand and broke the spell. ‘She’s karsanth!’ The Sakje woman wheeled her horse and pointed at Srayanka. ‘ Karsanth! Do you understand?’

Kineas didn’t understand, and Ataelus was there, and time was speeding along. ‘Big column — ten and ten, a hundred times — more! For coming here!’ He gesticulated wildly.

Kineas took a deep breath, the scent of honeysuckle and copper blood mixing like a drug in his nose. Karsanth? Poisoned? ‘Who?’ he asked Ataelus. ‘Macedonian?’

Ataelus shook his head. ‘Big and fast,’ he said. ‘For waiting too long,’ he said with bitter self-recrimination.

‘What is karsanth?’ Kineas asked Ataelus and Eumenes.

They looked at each other while Urvara shook her head. ‘ Karsanth! Karsanth! How stupid are you? ’ She was as frustrated with herself as with him.

Bain’s Sakje were out of the river bed now, up on the bank of the river in the sand and gravel, riding in a tight ring around the crumbling wreck of two hundred Macedonians and mercenary cavalry. Even as he watched, Bain waved his bow and his trumpeter blew a long, complex call, almost like a paean, and the Sakje turned inward as one and fell on the Macedonians hidden in the dust cloud. Except that the Macedonians weren’t considered the best cavalry in the world for nothing, and even shot to pieces by archery they couldn’t answer, they hadn’t lost their will to fight. In the few heartbeats Kineas watched, he saw Bain die on a lance.

‘Giving birth!’ Eumenes shouted. ‘She’s giving birth! She’s in labour!’ The young man wheeled his horse and looked at her. She was crouched by the altar, unable to move, her face a rictus of pain.

Kineas looked back at the dust cloud, and over at his love, and before he even knew what he was going to say, his arm came up. He turned to Diodorus. ‘Take the Olbians — straight up the side and over the Companions. Wipe them out. Take the casualties — we need a clear retreat. You have to build the road. Do you understand?’

Diodorus slammed his sword hand into his breastplate in salute. His face was set. ‘I absolutely understand, Strategos.’

‘Carry on!’ Kineas turned to Andronicus. ‘As soon as you hit the Macedonians,’ he said, ‘sound the retreat. Sound it over and over. Understand?’

The big Gaul nodded.

Finally, Kineas rode to Srayanka. She had her forehead on the altar, and her whole body spasmed. Urvara rode up next to him and her look at Kineas begged him to do something.

Kineas reached down as Srayanka began to recover from her contraction. Their eyes met, and then their hands, and he reached to pull her across his saddle.

‘Do not mistake me for some weakling!’ she said. ‘I will ride! I am the Lady Srayanka, not some Greek camp follower!’

‘We must ride,’ he said patiently. Behind him, his ambush was coming apart, and men were dying.

She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. ‘So be it,’ she said. With bitter practicality, she said, ‘Get me on my horse.’

Kineas and Urvara managed it. She was not light, but they were strong, and behind them, the battle exploded into life.

Two hundred paces distant, the Olbian rhomboid crashed into the fight between the Sakje and the Companions. The Macedonians were brave and skilled, but they had neither the weight nor the numbers to stop the Olbians. The crash of the Olbian onset was like a hundred maniac cooks beating on copper cauldrons and it carried over the whole battlefield.

Srayanka had a Macedonian horse — a beauty, but not heavy enough for war. Kineas reached for her reins and she stopped him with a look.

‘I have not come all this way to lose you in a cavalry fight,’ he said.

‘I have not lived all my life on the back of a horse just to fall off when I’m pregnant,’ she answered. She smiled at him, but the edges of her lips were white.

Thalassa bore fatigue without any apparent change of gait. She went up the steep side of the ford in two bounds, and then Urvara was beside him, with Srayanka a stride behind. Andronicus’s trumpet rang out, three clear notes, and then again — the retreat.

Kineas reined in at the edge of the battle haze and risked a glance back. The new dust cloud was closer. To the south and east, Temerix’s men were already mounted on their ponies, jogging steadily across the last flat ground to the ford.

From the vantage point of a tall horse at the top of the riverbank, Kineas could now see the Sauromatae. Their bronze scale armour glinted in another battle cloud, half a stade east along the river bed. Somehow, the Greek infantry, the mercenaries, had moved into the stream bed.

Kineas shook his head, because this was all taking time and time was something he didn’t think they had, but even as he watched, Lot rode clear of the war haze, looking for the sound of the trumpet. Kineas made a sweeping gesture with his arm, pointing north and west. Lot pulled his helmet off and waved it, then gave a broad nod to signal assent. He was still refastening his helmet when he went back into the cloud.

An arrow whistled out of the trees on the far bank and plucked one of Temerix’s psiloi from his pony. The man screamed and then Temerix dismounted, waving his men into formation on the surer footing of the island. He already had the golden bow in his fist, and he nocked and drew in one smooth motion. His first arrow brought an answering scream of pain from the poplar trees along the far bank.

Kineas turned to Eumenes and Urvara. ‘Gather up the Sakje. Rally them and cover the flight of the Sindi.’ He looked down at Philokles. ‘Are you walking for a reason?’

‘I fell off,’ the Spartan said.

Kineas might have grinned, except for the situation. ‘Then run back to Temerix and tell him to stop playing rearguard and get his arse across. And then come back. No heroics — we are not lingering.’

Philokles saluted — the first time Kineas had ever seen him salute.

Srayanka reached out and took his hand in hers. Her nails dug into his bare forearms and she grunted. Sweat was pouring off her. Kineas tried to steady her.

Ataelus was watching the fight in the ford. ‘Spitamenes,’ he said, as if he was pronouncing a sentence of death. ‘For fucking Persians.’

Kineas looked over his shoulder. Temerix had his Sindi formed in an open line and they raised their bows together and loosed a volley that rose high and fell beyond the brush at the edge of the spring bank. Screams erupted and then a group of Iranian cavalry came through the trees and straight down the bank, riding like Sakje.

‘Athena stand with us,’ Kineas said. There were a hundred or more Medes. More like two hundred.

Kineas looked behind him. Eumenes had maybe twenty Sakje in a clump. If the Persians came up the bank and into the rear of the Olbians, it would be over. The Olbians would never recover.

Bad luck. He was so close to pulling this off.

Temerix called another order, and his archers formed closer, a pitifully small wall at the edge of the island, but they had a three-foot-high bank to defend. They loosed again and their arrows slammed into the front of the Median charge, and wounded horses reared, tangling the charge in their fall, while others baulked the jump to the island. Philokles arrived, running hard, and he roared at Temerix, who ignored him. The Sindi chief slung his bow and took up his axe.

Eumenes had thirty riders and Urvara had another ten.

‘I’m sorry, my love,’ Kineas said. He was the only voice they would all obey, and there was no one with whom he could leave her. He reached up to pull his cheek plate down and again found it gone.

‘Sakje! Come and feast!’ Srayanka sang at his side, and her clear voice carried where a man’s voice might have been lost. She reached out and pulled his long knife from the scabbard at his waist.

More riders emerged from the battle haze behind her. She sang again, and every Sakje in earshot was grinning.

Kineas filled his lungs, judging the time as one more rider joined Urvara. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. He pointed his sword down the riverbank, and they started to move up behind him. He turned his head and saw Sitalkes, Darius and Carlus range themselves around Srayanka.

The Persian charge slammed into the Sindi. Axes swung against Persian swords, and Philokles bellowed and his heavy spear went through a Persian’s breastplate, tearing the man from his horse. His war cry sounded over the cacophony of battle like the cry of a hunting cat over the burble of a stream, and it froze the blood of more than one enemy.

The Sakje counter-charge seemed small and badly organized, but the Sakje weren’t Greeks — they didn’t require serried ranks to fight effectively. Instead of charging the Persian cavalry, the two groups slipped off to the left and right, every man and maid bent low, shooting hard. The Medes flinched away, fearing for their flanks, and suddenly robbed of their attempt to wrap around the Sindi, they halted and began to shoot. It was a natural decision for Asiatic cavalry, but it cost them the action.

Kineas felt like an idiot for risking himself — and Srayanka. Ataelus, at his shoulder, was rising and shooting, rising again, methodically pumping arrows into the Persians who were tangled with Temerix’s men. It was too late to halt, too late to swerve, so Kineas allowed Thalassa to push up the bank on to the island of willows. He was sword to javelin with a Persian veteran. He parried the spearhead and the man tried to use the haft to sweep him off his horse’s back. Kineas dropped the reins again, grabbed the haft and cut repeatedly at the man’s fingers, but his head burst in a spray of bone and blood and worse as Carlus struck him with a long-handled axe from the other side. An arrow hit Kineas in his breastplate like the kick of a mule on his right side, and he saw Srayanka’s face, streaked with pain and battle joy, red and white with exertion. She shrieked something that was lost in the battle, and the Medes answered a trumpet signal and flowed away — not broken, just not interested in further losses. The Sindi rose to their feet — aside from a handful, most had simply lain flat and waited for the Medes to ride away — and scrambled for the ponies who were dispersed over half a stade of island.

‘What are you doing here?’ Philokles roared at Kineas. Simultaneously, a tight knot of Medes, lost or desperate, punched through the Sindi and came at Kineas.

The great royal charger leaped from a dead halt to a gallop in three strides, her heavy hooves crashing against the rocky island. Kineas had his last opponent’s spear and he whirled it end over end and thrust hard at the first rider, a man with a copper beard, and in a moment of fear-induced clarity Kineas wondered if he had fought this man before, at Issus or at Arbela. And then his spear went over the man’s parry and under his burnoose and the man flipped back over the rump of his horse, all his sinews loosed, and Thalassa went right through the knot of Medes as two weak blows rang on Kineas’s back plate. And then young Darius was there, yelling insults in Persian, his sword dripping blood on to his hand when he raised it over his head, and Philokles was standing over a dead Mede and the survivors rode across the island and vanished west. One of the men fleeing was tall with an excellent horse and gold embroidery on his scarlet cloak, and he was clutching his side.

Srayanka sat on her horse. She had his knife in her right hand, and there was blood on it, and she waved it at the retreating Medes. ‘Come back and fight, Spitamenes!’ she screeched. She was laughing, with tears streaming from her face, and then her arms dropped and she screamed like a dying mare, a war cry or a scream of pain — or both.

‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ Kineas said, for the first time in his life praying to both instead of cursing. ‘Now, run!’

Temerix’s men needed no second urging, regardless of the death wish of their captain. On the north bank, the Medes were forming again, wary now, and pointing downstream where the Sauromatae were vanishing into their own dust cloud.

On the south bank, Diodorus and Andronicus had the Olbians in hand, or close to it, and the bank was lined with horsemen as the Sindi scrambled back. Side by side with Temerix and Philokles, Kineas and Srayanka crested the south bank together.

Diodorus was in front of the reordered Olbians. The rear ranks were sketchy and their horses were blown, but the Olbians were ready to charge again.

‘You’re an idiot!’ Diodorus said cheerily. ‘Khaire, Srayanka.’

‘You hold here until the Sauromatae are away. Then you. Sakje last under Eumenes and Urvara.’ Kineas thought they were going to live — he could feel the loosening in his bowels and the daimon of combat winging away, leaving only bone-ache and heart-ache. But he’d seen the Medes flee — they weren’t interested in taking casualties to beat up his rearguard.

‘I will command the Sakje,’ Srayanka said, her chin high. ‘Eumenes and Urvara may assist me.’

Kineas saluted her with a bloody javelin. ‘Welcome back, Lady of the Cruel Hands,’ he said in Sakje. They were cheering her, Olbian and Sakje together, a roar that must have sounded like a taunt to the Medes across the river. Srayanka raised her knife and the shouts came again.

Kineas felt the wind in his hair as he looked around for Ataelus. The man was stripping Bain’s corpse, taking his arrows. Everywhere, Sakje and Sauromatae were stripping the corpses of the fallen.

‘Ataelus! Light the fires!’ Kineas called.

Ataelus nodded and one of his scouts galloped off into the dust.

Samahe came up from the stream bed, her gorytos empty. She reined in next to Thalassa and handed Kineas his helmet, the blue plume of horsehair severed and the plume-box that held it smashed flat.

‘Thanks!’ he said, slapping her back. She grinned wordlessly and turned away. Kineas wrestled with his helmet, which was deformed and wouldn’t go over his head. He tried to bend it between his hands while he watched the Persians, but the bronze was too tough and he couldn’t get it back into shape. He tied the chinstrap and slipped it over his sword hilt.

‘They’re getting ready to have a go at us,’ Darius said at his side. The Persian had a cut on his face that had bled over his whole front and the linen burnoose he wore over his helmet was cut and flapped like a pair of wings.

But the Medes showed no further interest in them. While the first flames flickered in the grass and the Olbians re-formed a column of fours and retired, Spitamenes and his Bactrians and Medes began to press the Greek mercenaries to the east.

‘Poor bastards,’ Eumenes said.

Lot grimaced. ‘We did all the work,’ he said in his own tongue.

Behind them, the slaughter of the mercenaries began.

Srayanka’s spasms came closer and closer.

Ten stades north and west of the battlefield, the column halted where they had left their remounts. Every man changed horses and drank water. Behind them, they could still hear the fighting, and see the dust.

Urvara wept with no explanation. Eumenes held her shoulders. And Srayanka, between contractions that were sharper and closer now, asked for Hirene. Kineas was bent over her, holding her bloody sword hand.

‘I saw her fall,’ he said.

Srayanka cried out. When she was done, she said, ‘She was my spear-maiden, my mentor.’ The Greek word made her lips curl.

‘I will see that we recover her corpse,’ Kineas said. He cursed his inability to soften his words, but he was still on the battlefield in his mind, and Srayanka was grey and plastered in sweat, her beautiful hair lank and glued to her face. She was dying.

She lay on a horse blanket, her only privacy the backs of Kineas’s friends — Philokles and Eumenes and Andronicus, Ataelus and Samahe and Lot and Antigonus clutching at a wounded arm and murmuring charms, and the young Nihmu as the midwife. Srayanka groaned patiently and then screamed, drank water, and the men’s faces reflected a kind of fear and exhaustion that the battlefield hadn’t wrought. Nihmu laughed at them.

‘Come, my queen!’ she said. ‘Push! The eagles are pecking at their shells!’

Srayanka screamed one more time, as Kineas chewed his lip and watched his rearguard pickets and hated his life and every decision he had made as his love lay dying in the sand soaked with her own blood. She writhed and sweated and he knew she was going.

Nihmu’s eyes, calm and clear, met his. ‘Trust me,’ she said.

He prayed.

‘Sing!’ screamed Srayanka.

‘Sing!’ shouted Nihmu.

Kineas’s eyes met Diodorus’s, and together they began the paean of Athena. Voices took it up, the circle of his friends and then beyond, and to its martial cry his daughter was born.

And a minute later, he had a son.

He took them in his arms while Nihmu did what had to be done and the women washed Srayanka. The boy howled and the girl looked at him with enormous blue eyes full of questions, unmoved even when her cord was cut and tied off, unmoved when she was washed. Then she reached a hand and grabbed for his beard and burbled, apparently pleased with the world she saw. In his right hand, his son screamed and screamed when his cord was cut and then settled against his father’s armour, waving his arms, blinking at the light.

They were so small. He had never held anything so small in all his life. And when Nihmu reached out to take them, he hesitated. But the moment the two of them lay on their mother’s breast their faces changed, and the girl’s calm became the boy’s, and they settled.

Men pounded his back and women kissed his cheek. He had two children, and a wife, and he was alive.

And an hour later they were riding across the sand, free. Behind him, Samahe carried their daughter, and Nihmu carried their son, and Kineas offered a prayer to Nike.