Storm of arrows

22

By Kineas’s calculations, the feast to mark their wedding and their victory would fall on the Panathenaia, a festival that celebrated both Athena and Eros. He calculated the date with an eye to the grass on the plains and the speed with which his wife — and his wounded — could recover.

‘Nothing could be more fitting,’ said Diodorus, with a twinkle in his eye. He and Philokles could be seen plotting in all corners of the camp.

Coenus’s arrival made the celebrations possible. Scouts foretold him, and then Samahe located him and brought his column into their camp, cheered by Sakje and Sauromatae and Olbians alike.

Coenus’s column arrived with twenty fresh troopers to replace losses, a hundred heavy chargers from the plains of southern Hyrkania, forty talents of gold, his new bride Artemesia and news.

And wine.

Wine flowed for a week as if they were sitting on the plains of Arcadia and not those of Sogdiana. Olbians paid Sauromatae maidens to weave garlands of the shiny leaves that looked most like laurel, and they celebrated the mid-summer feast of Aphrodite a few days late, and no man or woman was altogether sober.

Coenus’s lady sat with Sappho, modestly dressed. The two of them had been sewing and embroidering for two days without cease, washing their hands frequently, and hiding their work from all comers.

‘You’ve shared the plan with the gentlemen, I take it?’ Coenus asked.

Kineas nodded, chewing on some unleavened bread made from proper wheat. ‘I proposed it to Srayanka and Diodorus as well.’

Philokles waved his bread at them. ‘Me, too,’ he said with his mouth full.

Coenus waved his arms at the west. ‘It’s becoming a reality already,’ he said. ‘Heron put a hundred men into the fort on the Rha under Crax and then sent his troop of horse to clear my way. Crax is the lord of all the Rha’s mouth, and he has recruited men in your name.’ Coenus gave a wry smile. ‘I also recruited some men in Olbia and Pantecapaeum, and I added mine to his rather than ship them across the Kaspian. Many of them had already guessed how much bullion I had.’ He shrugged.

‘And Lykeles?’ Kineas asked.

‘Not a complete fool,’ Coenus said fondly. ‘He had no idea of how he was being used. I set him straight. But mark my words — there will be war in the cities before next summer. Heraclea, the strongest city on the Euxine, is making noise of grabbing at the east-coast cities, and neither Olbia nor Pantecapaeum are ready.’

‘Heron?’

‘Heron is slowly gathering and training an army of the trash of Hyrkania, with Leosthenes as his captain and Lycurgus as the governor of Namastopolis.’ Coenus smiled. ‘He’s not hurting anyone, and his gold is keeping the best men for us. The rest have already gone south over the mountains to Parthia. The knives are out there, and everywhere that Alexander’s writ runs. He’s a fool to stay in the east. His western lands are going to desert him.’ Coenus shook his head. ‘And on top of all that, he’s recruiting Greeks himself.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m not one of Alexander’s worshippers,’ he said, ‘but a year ago, the tyrant of Olbia was telling me that Parmenion would bury him. Now Parmenion is dead. Alexander may be mad, he may leak hubris as most men bleed, but he is canny when it comes to ruling men.’ He paused. ‘He needs those Greeks. He’s bled a lot of men.’

Diodorus gave a hard smile. ‘We helped.’

Coenus nodded. ‘I won’t argue with you. Antipater walks in fear. Olympias is a force to be reckoned with, or so they say.’ He drank wine. ‘Ares, but that all seems so distant here.’

Diodorus gave a foxy grin. ‘The politics may be distant, but the God-King himself is just a thousand stades that way.’ He motioned to the east. ‘Probably less.’

Coenus sat up as if stung by a wasp. ‘That’s less than the distance from Athens to Sparta!’

‘Just so.’ Diodorus reached past his friend and poured wine into his cup. ‘His patrols and ours are already on the same ground. If he weren’t so focused on Spitamenes, he’d be after us already.’

‘So Crax is in the fort at Errymi,’ Kineas interrupted.

Coenus rubbed his beard. ‘He’s a good lord, and the Maeotae like him. His patrols keep them safe. There are already new farms on the Rha. I rode over the divide to the Tanais — there and back, if you know what I mean. I talked to the farmers on the Tanais. They know we cleared the bandits. Unless we over-tax them, they’ll be satisfied to have a lord — and a town.’

Kineas shook his head again. ‘I haven’t sworn to it yet.’

Coenus drank off the dregs of his wine. ‘Nonsense. The thing is as good as done.’

Sappho smiled, and so did Artemesia, and Srayanka laughed, all three of them watching the two babies.

Philokles slapped Kineas on the back. ‘Will you be a king?’ he asked.

Kineas was still laughing when Upazan rode by and something in the set of the man’s shoulders killed his laughter. ‘I would rather found a city with an assembly.’

Srayanka shrugged. ‘We have assemblies, too. But we have lords for war. If we do this thing, I think we should have a king.’

Nihmu reached into the circle of adults and took a warm round of bread. ‘The time of kings is coming,’ she said. She smiled apologetically, either for her words or for her theft of bread. ‘The time of assemblies is almost past.’ She smiled timidly. ‘That is what the priests said in Olbia.’

Philokles looked at her and frowned. He was bleary with wine. ‘Why must it be a time of kings, child? Sparta has kings, and this is scarcely her finest hour,’ he said. ‘And why must you play the barbarian seeress all the time?’

Sappho shook her head. ‘The girl speaks only the truth, Philokles. And wasn’t Cassandra a Greek woman, and no barbarian?’

Kineas nodded. ‘Nihmu, your priests are aristocrats to a man and they desire a time of kings. Bad prophets predict futures that they desire. Good prophets speak only what the gods send.’

‘Oh, aristocrats are at fault, are they?’ Philokles asked.

‘Go to bed,’ Sappho said. ‘You are arguing, not debating.’ She sent Nihmu away with a whisper, and Kineas knew that she had sent the girl for Temerix.

Philokles resented her tone. He drew himself up. ‘I’m sorry if my wit is not up to your standards, madam,’ he said, and walked off into the night.

Sappho, after a worried look, took Diodorus’s hand and led him off. off. Srayanka put her daughter to her breast. ‘If that girl is Kam Baqca’s daughter,’ she asked, ‘who was her mother?’

Kineas drank wine and shook his head. ‘She told me. I can’t remember. Some lady with your name was her grandmother.’

‘Really?’ Srayanka asked. ‘Srayanka the archer? That would make us cousins. Why don’t I know her?’

‘No idea, my dear. I didn’t grow up here.’ Kineas stroked her hair, and then took his daughter and held her, marvelling again at the tiny hands and feet — and how it all worked. And how holding a child made him feel.

‘She frightens me,’ Srayanka said. ‘And if Kam Baqca ever lay with a woman, I would expect to know.’

Kineas raised an eyebrow. ‘I like her. Even when she’s a Cassandra.’

Srayanka took her daughter and put her back to the breast. ‘Greedy beast,’ she murmured. ‘I may be wrong, love. Kam Baqca was the oddest of beings, and he sacrificed his manhood, hmmm, seven years ago, or perhaps eight. So the thing is possible.’

Kineas could understand many things of the Sakje, but Kam Baqca’s exchange of gender made his stomach turn and he changed the subject. ‘You are ready for this wedding?’ he asked.

She switched breasts, while Samahe came and took the boy from his basket and began to change him. ‘We are already wed, husband. But it will be good for your Greek men to see the ceremony performed, and all our people want to drink wine.’ She smiled and changed the subject herself. ‘I like Lot’s wife.’

Kineas allowed his eyes to follow Upazan. ‘I wish she would bear him a son,’ he said.

Srayanka made a chucking sound with her tongue. ‘Stop thinking like a Greek. His son will not be his heir. That is not the Sauromatae way, or the Sakje way or the Massagetae way.’

‘His son might be his heir,’ Kineas said.

She nodded. ‘Less likely with the eastern clans than the western, but possible. But Upazan is his heir, and no child of Monae’s will change that. But they are young yet, and Lot is in the full flower of his warrior life. What concerns you?’

‘Upazan wants him dead. Upazan hates us, for whatever reason.’

‘No reason but the folly of youth.’ She smiled. ‘Lot should have brought him west.’

Samahe got up, her sewing rolled away in a sheet of linen. ‘That’s enough milk for any child,’ she said. She reached out and took the girl, who cried and had to be shushed by Kineas. Kineas played with her while his son latched on to Srayanka’s nipple in moments.

‘When will we name them?’ he asked, holding his daughter.

‘We will name them at the ceremony. They will be a month old, and that is a good age.’

‘Greek names or Sakje names?’ Kineas asked, trying to sound light.

‘Both, I think,’ she answered. ‘Satyrus — Satrax — for our son. And Melissa — Melitta to Kineas — for our daughter.’

Kineas bowed. ‘Well chosen,’ he said. ‘Just as well I wasn’t involved.’ He smiled at his daughter and gently touched her cheek. ‘Little honey bee,’ he said.

The baby’s eyes snapped open, and her tiny hand grabbed his finger.

‘She has you already,’ Srayanka laughed. ‘And what would you know of choosing Sakje names?’ she asked him. But her eyes danced. They kissed.

‘Your gown is almost finished,’ Samahe said.

Srayanka laughed. She loved looking fine, and she was delighted by the idea of a silk gown. ‘I can’t wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to bind my breasts or they’ll leak.’

Kineas handed his daughter to Samahe. ‘Some things are better for a man not to hear,’ he said.

All the world, it seemed, attended their feast. Sauromatae and Sakje, Olbians, Persian traders and even a western Kwin, the purveyor of the silk that made Srayanka’s cream Persian gown, embroidered around the hem and all the seams with Greek and Scythian animals and designs depending on which woman had been available to put her hand to the work. She wore the heavy gold collar of her rank and the high headdress of a priestess, with the green-hilted sword of Cyrus in a gold scabbard at her side. To Kineas, she looked like one of the ancient goddesses he had seen in Ecbatana.

Kineas awoke on his feast day to find that he, too, had a magnificent gift — first, a wool tunic of the finest Sogdian work, made from a pair of matched shawls and decorated more fancifully than an Athenian gentleman would think quite right for everyday wear. His Greek friends had refurbished his red sandals and produced a gold laurel wreath for him to wear in his hair.

But the most magnificent gift sat in front of their wagon on an armour stand for all to view: a Sauromatae-style scale hauberk, the scales in alternating rows of silvered bronze and gilt and blue enamel, carefully fitted with dozens of different-sized scales to cover his torso and shoulders perfectly, the scales sewn to a new leather thorax. The resulting cuirass was heavy, but no heavier than his damaged Athenian breast- and back-plates, and it glowed in the summer sun with gilded Greek leg armour and a matching bridle gauntlet produced by Temerix in secret. His helmet, refurbished, had a new blue plume.

Diodorus fondled the gauntlet as if it was a woman’s arm. ‘They wear them in Italia,’ he said.

‘Craterus had one at Arbela,’ Kineas said. ‘We all admired it.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose it would do to wear armour for my wedding. ’

‘Soon enough,’ Nihmu said, doing a handstand nearby.

There were games — Sakje games and Greek games, with horse races and wrestling and shooting bows for distance and accuracy, but once the wine and fermented mare’s milk began to flow, the contests ran their courses and the contestants hurried to get their share of the drink. Kineas and Srayanka gave prizes to the winners, sitting together hand in hand on a pile of skins in the red sunset, their children in baskets at their feet.

‘Do you remember?’ Kineas asked. ‘On the sea of grass, riding to see Satrax?’

She laughed with him. ‘I didn’t have ten words of Greek,’ she said. ‘But oh, how I wanted you.’ She looked at him under her lashes, a look that was the more beautiful for its rarity, because she was more frequently the cavalry commander than the lover. ‘We held hands, I think.’

They danced and ate and drank wine until the sun set, and then they danced and sang and drank more, strong red wine from Chios that was like berries in the mouth, and they ate venison seasoned with pepper, which was too strong for some of the Greeks but delighted others. They had bread — rich, strong Greek bread, because Coenus had brought Olbian flour all the way across the sea of grass. And the Olbians had strong Maeotian fish sauce, three deep amphorae, to season their bread, and olive oil for the first time in three months, while the Sauromatae and the Sakje tried the Greek foods and passed around their own rich and heavily spiced mutton and foal with flatbreads and honey.

‘I brought cider,’ Coenus said, ‘but it was already turning by the time I reached Crax on the return trip, and we drank it to save it.’ He grinned and spoke slowly, the perfect aristocrat even staggering drunk. ‘We toasted the two of you, of course.’

They had built a bonfire that towered to the height of three tall men, tamarisk and willow and poplar on top, and the fire took with a rush after it had been blessed by a Persian fire priest who had come with the traders, and roared to life so that you could feel it on your back ten horse-lengths away. The burning cedar smell of the tamarisk mixed with the late honeysuckle and the briar roses that bloomed over every thicket in the river valley.

They were toasted and gifted, and they named their children in the last light of the sun at the top of Hirene and Bain’s kurgan, so that the swords of the two dead heroes caught the light and seemed to anoint the heads of the two infants.

Unmoved by all this spiritual glory, the babies roared against their hard fates in being kept up late, and received the plaudits of the crowd despite their ill manners. They were, after all, only a month old.

And then many of the Greek men appeared, drunk, singing obscene songs that Srayanka could only guess the meaning of — not that the guessing was hard, as most of them wore giant erect phalluses strapped to their groins, and they had convinced several young Sakje girls to be lewd. Battering pans and kettles, slobbering well-meant kisses, this raucous crew escorted them to their wagon. The serenade went on until Srayanka said they were waking the children.

‘Don’t hear that every day at a wedding in Athens!’ Diodorus called, and then they were gone.

‘There will be more wine than milk in these breasts,’ Srayanka said when finally they were alone.

‘No reason they shouldn’t share the feast,’ Kineas said. ‘At home, you would have a wet nurse.’

‘At home in Greece? A wet nurse, and slaves, and a life in a few rooms.’ She frowned. ‘I’m afraid you are wed to a barbarian.’

‘Well, Barbarian Queen? What will you have as a wedding present?’ he asked, kissing the side of her neck.

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Mmm?’ she whispered. She laughed at him and pushed him away. ‘Remember what happened the last time?’

‘Killers coming through the side of the wagon? By Zeus, that seems a long time ago.’ He laughed and snuggled next to her.

‘Even then, what I wanted was to take my people to war with Alexander,’ she said. ‘That is still what I want. And when we have fought him — win or lose — then we can return to the high ground by the Tanais. We will be king and queen of a united people. Our children will rule after us.’ She kissed his hand. ‘I want you to bring your people to the muster, King Kineas. That is what I want.’

Kineas knew what keeping that promise would mean. He dreamed of the tree and the river almost every night. But he looked into her eyes and thought that some fates were not as bad as they might seem. ‘To Alexander, then,’ he said.