Storm of arrows

32

‘ I want the enemy to see nothing but Sakje,’ Kineas said. Srayanka nodded, as did Lot.

Sitting on his cloak, Kineas was fixing his blue horsehair crest to his helmet. He had an odd feeling, as if he had done all these things before so many times that he was an actor, playing the same part on many different days in the theatre.

All around him, the Olbians were polishing their gear and affixing their helmet crests, the hyperetes of each troop moving among them to inspect their work. Men used ash gathered from their last fire pits to put a fine polish on their bronze. Men skilled with stones put a fine edge on spear points and swords. A few of the Keltoi spoke loudly, but most were quiet.

Philokles sat on a rock, sober. He was combing out his hair. Behind him, the red rim of the sun rose above the distant mountains in the east.

Sitalkes, who had once been Kineas’s slave, came up holding a pair of javelins, with long, thin shafts and linen throwing cords. ‘I didn’t think you had any,’ he said, looking at the ground.

‘May Ares bless you, Sitalkes!’ The pleasure of a good weapon made Kineas beam. ‘I hadn’t even thought of it. Where did you get them?’ He hefted one. ‘They’re beautiful!’

Sitalkes glanced at Temerix, who was watching from a distance, glaring at them under heavy brows. ‘Temerix made the points. I set them.’ He grinned. ‘Good wood. Cut-down lances.’

The two heads were gemlike, gleaming blue-red in the first light, far better work than was usually expended on javelins. Kineas embraced Sitalkes and then walked over and embraced Temerix, who stared at the ground while being hugged and then laughed aloud when the strategos turned away.

Kineas thought that he’d never heard the Sindi smith laugh.

As ordered, Srayanka’s people patrolled the edge of the river, their forms visible in a flash of gold or bronze or red leather. Most of her warriors were hidden in stands of trees on the near side of the Jaxartes, and a handful, the boldest, prowled the far bank.

The enemy force announced itself just before the end of the dawn, when shadows were still long on the ground and spear points winked against the last of the darkness. Their dust cloud showed them to be moving carefully, and their outriders made contact with Ataelus’s prodromoi and drove them back easily. Kineas watched from a stand of trees on the ridge, his helmet under his arm, his reserves hidden in a fold of ground behind him.

At the water’s edge, an hour later, two squadrons of Bactrians pushed Parshtaevalt unceremoniously across the river, brushing aside his heroics and the feverish archery of his companions in one quick charge that sent the Sakje fleeing for their lives. Srayanka was forced to reveal all of her ambushers to stem the rout. Her counter-charge stopped the Bactrians on the near bank and emptied a number of saddles, but the small size of her force was revealed.

The enemy commander came up with his staff and more cavalry.

‘Eumenes,’ Kineas said with satisfaction. He knew the Cardian immediately from his heavy athletic physique. The story was that Philip, Alexander’s father, had seen the Cardian fighting in an athletic contest and drafted him on the spot. The Cardian had never disappointed the father or the son, and his physique, superb as it was, came second to his brain.

Eumenes rallied the Bactrians easily and his force began to deploy along the river, easily outflanking Srayanka’s Sakje on both flanks. The enemy commander had men on fresh horses, and quivers full of arrows, and the Sakje began to flinch, giving ground from the riverbank and then abandoning the tree line altogether.

‘Pen-pusher,’ Diodorus said with disgust, referring to the Cardian’s post as military secretary. They were lying in the gravel at the edge of the ridge. ‘Caution personified.’

Kineas nudged him and pointed carefully, drawing his friend’s attention to the bright flash of a golden helmet. ‘ He won’t be cautious,’ he said.

Upazan was waving his lance, pointing across the river.

Upstream a stade or so, Ataelus’s prodromoi burst from cover into the flank of a troop of mercenary horse, shooting at the gallop. The enemy cavalry detached some files to defeat them.

Across the river, Eumenes gave a sharp nod, as if the revealing of Ataelus’s ambush had decided him. The Bactrian cavalry put away their bows. Upazan was already in the water with thirty armoured Sauromatae.

‘Ares’ balls, Kineas!’ Diodorus rolled off the top of the ridge and got to his feet. ‘He is coming across.’ Diodorus sounded as if he’d just been invited to a particularly fine party.

Kineas shook his head. ‘He ought to give it up. No point to a flank march that meets resistance.’

Diodorus stepped into the hand-loop on his spear haft and sprang on to his charger without touching her back, a dramatic mount that brought a rustle of approval from the Olbian troopers. He bowed from the saddle. ‘To Hades with that. He’s coming.’

Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘Showy bastard,’ he said to Diodorus and leaped on to the back of his second charger without touching the gelding’s back. He grinned at Diodorus, who shook his head.

‘Who’s the showy bastard now, Strategos?’ he asked.

Kineas took his spears from Carlus. ‘Now for victory,’ he said to the assembled Olbians and Keltoi. He touched his heels to the gelding’s flanks and rode carefully to the top of the ridge, until he could once again see into the valley of the Jaxartes.

Just as on the Oxus, the Macedonians and their allies had formed on a broad front, intending to swamp Srayanka’s thin force. Six squadrons of Bactrians, Sogdians and mercenary cavalry covered almost four stades along the bank, spread out because sometimes the banks were too high or the scrub too thick for cavalry. Eumenes’ trumpeter blew a long call and then repeated it, and the whole force came across in a rush. It showed better discipline than Craterus’s force had demonstrated, and Kineas’s opinion of Eumenes the Cardian went up again.

Srayanka’s household shot one volley at close range and broke, cantering to the rear, easily gaining ground on the riders coming across the river. The river was only dactyloi deep in most places, but horses wanted the water or they feared what lay beneath and they picked their way across.

Eumenes, visible in a purple cloak and a silvered bronze Boeotian helmet with a gold wreath of bravery atop it, sat peering under his hand, watching the ridge where Kineas sat on the back of his horse. He turned, shouting something at his hyperetes. Kineas felt like hiding, an irrational desire given that it was almost certainly too late for Eumenes to save his force from Kineas’s trap.

Kineas muttered a prayer to Tyche that she not punish him for this mental hubris. Of course, it was all still in the hands of the gods.

The trumpeter raised his trumpet at virtually the same moment that Diodorus led the whole of the Olbian cavalry over the ridge at the trot and put them straight into a gallop. The ridge was nothing — a few men high at its highest point — but it was sufficient to add momentum to the Olbians.

Eumenes’ trumpet call rang out.

Kineas watched as hundreds of enemy horsemen hesitated, in the river or just reaching the top of the bank. The signal was obviously a recall.

Kineas turned to Darius at his side. ‘Tell Lot, now,’ he said.

Darius grinned and pushed his horse into a gallop.

At his side, Philokles laughed. ‘All morning,’ he said, ‘I have been dreading the fact that I would finally have to fight on horseback.’

‘You’re a fine horseman,’ Kineas said.

‘The best in Sparta,’ Philokles said. He was laughing.

The Olbian cavalry struck the Bactrians and Sauromatae at the edge of the Jaxartes and blew through them, unhorsing dozens of men and knocking horses to the ground or into the water. Their wedge was scarcely disordered, and Diodorus led them on, right into the Jaxartes, an arrowhead pointed at the enemy commander.

Off to Kineas’s right, Srayanka rallied her household with a raised hand, turned her horse under her like a circus performer in Athens and led them straight back at the enemy. Her household formed its wedge at the trot and she kept her force slow, so that they hit the shattered tangle of the Bactrians and stayed to kill them.

Kineas could see Upazan’s helmet in the melee, and he saw Leon pushing to meet the Sauromatae boy. Leon downed a better-armoured foe with a spear thrust to the face, recovered to parry a lance thrust from an unhorsed man, and had to sidestep his horse to avoid being unhorsed himself. Sitalkes finished the man with the lance and Leon pressed in, but Upazan turned his horse, parrying blows from three Olbians, and ran.

Baulked of his prey, Leon reared his horse and threw his spear. It went over the Keltoi in front of him and struck Upazan squarely between the shoulders — and bounced off his scale thorax.

Eumenes the Cardian was looking around for support, and then he was riding away, followed by his staff, with Diodorus hard on his heels. The Athenian caught Eumenes’ trumpeter at the edge of the rising battle haze and tipped him out of the saddle with a swipe of his spear.

To the north, the enemy’s mercenary cavalry were across the stream and rallying on Srayanka’s flank, coming forward at a collected trot in a strong tetragon. Unlike Eumenes, the mercenary commander saw his part of the trap in time to respond, and he wheeled to face Lot’s Sauromatae on the flat ground a stade north of the ford, and both forces vanished in a towering cloud of dust.

Across the Jaxartes, Antigonus was sounding the rally call.

Kineas looked over the battlefield one more time. ‘You can’t have everything,’ he said. ‘The Sauromatae are in for a fight. Let’s go!’ He waved to his escort — the only reserve he had — and they were off, over the ridge and through the dust cloud of Srayanka’s last melee. Her golden gorget shone like the sun, and he found her easily.

‘I need to help Lot,’ he shouted.

‘Our horses are tired!’ she called, but she sent dozens of her household knights to swell his ranks as they rode north along the Jaxartes. The mercenaries were holding their own, their backs to the river, visible through the battle haze like spirits in the underworld.

‘Trot!’ Kineas ordered.

He had fifty men, and they began to pull in on either side of him to make a wedge. He wheeled his horse to make sure — sure! — that he would punch into the mercenaries and not disorder the Sauromatae, and then the dust stole his sight and he was in a tunnel of sound and fury and fear. A spear came out of the scrum and tore into his Getae gelding’s neck just as he threw his first — he never saw whether he hit his man or not — and then he was sword to sword with a Greek, and the Getae horse was sinking between his legs. He took a blow on his bridle gauntlet and hacked the man between his helmet and his cuirass and they went down together and he was punched off his feet by the next horse in his file riding over him. He curled into a ball, his side almost numb with pain where a horse hoof had hit him for the third time in four weeks. He tasted grit between his teeth and tried to spit. His own dying horse screamed as yet another horse trampled it and fell, and the weight of the horse’s rump crushed Kineas to the earth, drawing a scream of pain from him.

But the gods did not utterly desert him, and the horse’s weight was shared by his own gelding. They both rolled away, maddened, and yet no hoof caught him amidst the warp and woof of their tangle. He crawled a few feet clear.

‘Brother?’ Philokles asked. He reached down a strong hand and lifted Kineas out of the dirt and up on to his own charger’s back as if Kineas weighed less than Nihmu. ‘I would have sworn by all the gods that you had told me to avoid coming off my horse in a battle.’

Kineas put his hands around the Spartan’s waist. ‘Fuck yourself,’ he said thankfully.

The fight was over before Kineas was rehorsed, and he was the only casualty. His bodyguards were deeply ashamed, as neither of them had seen him fall, and their apologies had all the drama the Keltoi could bring to any theatre.

Lot emerged from the dust and pulled off his helm. His golden armour was scratched in several places and his sword was gone. ‘By the gods!’ he said. ‘That was a fight to remember. Who were they? Your cousins?’

Kineas watched the last of the Greeks crossing the Jaxartes, harried by Ataelus’s scouts and still in good order. ‘Greeks and Persians under a good officer,’ Kineas said. His side hurt when he laughed or breathed. He had broken ribs.

‘This officer?’ Lot asked, leading a horse forward. The man on the horse’s back looked defiant. He had bright blond hair and a heavy face.

Kineas didn’t know him. ‘Ransom?’ Kineas asked Lot, with a grimace for the pain.

Lot shrugged. ‘He was brave. I unhorsed him at the end — I thought I might keep him.’

Back at the ford, Srayanka and Diodorus’s trumpets were busy.

‘Where are you from, Hipparch?’ Philokles asked.

The man looked from one Greek spear to the next with wonder. ‘Amphipolis,’ he said. ‘You’re all Greek!’

Lot spat. ‘Eat my scrotum,’ he said in Sakje.

‘Listen, officer of Amphipolis,’ Kineas said. He felt the goddess at his elbow. ‘Listen, friend. Ride away. Go free. Your ransom is this — to go in person to the Parthenon and sacrifice to Athena.’

The Greek officer sat straight. ‘I will do that,’ he said dully. His elation at escaping death was slipping into an awareness of defeat.

‘I’ll just keep your horse,’ Lot said, pulling the reins. ‘Take him, lord.’

‘Good!’ Kineas said. He mounted the Thessalian gratefully, although he needed help and it hurt. He pointed back to the far ridge where the remounts awaited and touched Philokles on the shoulder. ‘Let’s go and find the others.’

They rode away, Olbians and Keltoi and Sauromatae, leaving one Greek cavalryman alone, dismounted in the dust.

By the time they reached the ford, Eumenes was gone and they could hear his men rallying on the flat ground above the Jaxartes, already three stades away.

‘He won’t come back,’ Diodorus said.

Kineas watched the Macedonians from beneath his hand, breathing hard. ‘Athena, I thought I was done for.’ He kept watching. ‘I’m inclined to agree. He’s going somewhere else.’

Kineas looked back across the ford. ‘How badly did we hurt him?’

Philokles shook his head. ‘Thirty or forty men. A bee sting.’

Kineas nodded. ‘Let the prisoners go — dismounted. They won’t fight us again today if they have to walk.’ He slumped. ‘I need to wash in the river and I need someone — Philokles — to wrap my ribs so that I can ride.’

‘We could just ride away,’ Diodorus said.

Srayanka nodded. ‘We turned them,’ she said. ‘No man can say we have not done our part.’

Kineas dropped from his horse to the ground and Sitalkes helped Philokles strip his armour. They tried to be gentle, but Kineas felt his vision tunnel and twice he cried out from the pain. Free at last of the scale shirt, he picked himself up and walked into the water. The cold helped him, as did the feeling of the grit running away. He splashed water on his torso, wincing as every motion of his left arm sent a pulse of pain down his chest and into his groin.

Srayanka held out a sheet of linen as a towel. ‘All my maidens are jealous,’ she said.

Kineas tried to smile. He felt better, but there were so many layers of pain and fatigue that he wasn’t sure he could function. He had lost a great deal in the dust when his horse died under him.

Philokles took another length of linen from Leon and began to wind it around Kineas with the whole strength of his arms. Kineas couldn’t breath much, but the pain in his side diminished.

‘I think we’ve done our part,’ Diodorus said. He obviously didn’t like what he was seeing.

‘What was our part?’ Kineas asked. ‘We did our part when we stopped Alexander on the Oxus — when we rescued you, my lady. When we stopped Zopryon.’ Philokles was binding his chest, winding it around and around his upper thorax. Kineas found it difficult to breathe, and Srayanka could see it.

‘You are wounded. Take the children and the rest of the wounded and start west,’ she said. ‘We will yet cheat this prophecy.’

Kineas took the deepest breath he could manage and was delighted to find no pain at the bottom of the air, even as his twin vision saw things far away. ‘Even now, Zarina is winning or losing this battle,’ he said. ‘Listen to me! She planned to line the riverbank. Alexander has his siege artillery. Guess what will happen! The phalangites will have room to claw a foothold on the bank. When Alexander leads his cavalry across, will the Dahae and the Massagetae hold?’

Diodorus shrugged. ‘So?’ he said. ‘They’ll run, and then they’ll stop. Alexander will proclaim victory. Nothing will be changed. Isn’t that what we’ve learned on the plains?’

Philokles mounted his charger — the same horse that Satrax had given him in the snow, a year and more ago. ‘Now Kineas seeks to teach us a different lesson, my friend.’

Kineas took his children from Nihmu and kissed them both. ‘You will protect them?’ he asked.

‘Until they begin to protect me,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Baqca.’

Kineas turned for his horse. Philokles gave Kineas a hand and Srayanka pushed and together they got Kineas up on Thalassa.

‘Get the horses watered,’ Kineas said. ‘All of them.’

Srayanka nodded, as did Lot.

Kineas sat silent for a long time, and gradually his friends, his staff, the chieftains and all around him became quiet.

He was about to speak when he saw the eagle.

He pointed off to the south. The eagle was rising slowly from across the river, clearly burdened by something — probably a rabbit. The prey’s entrails hung down between the eagle’s wings, unbalancing his flight. The bird turned and beat slowly towards them, wings pumping the air.

Among the Greeks and Sakje all conversation ceased, and every head watched the bird as it flew slowly, erratically, and as it closed, Kineas could see that the eagle had been feeding on the carcass of the rabbit, whose blood stained its white fur in streaks. The eagle rose again on a draught of warm air as it came over the bend in the Jaxartes where the officers had gathered while Kineas’s wounds were tended. Then the eagle vented a raucous scream, pivoted on a wingtip and dropped the carcass of the rabbit, so that it plummeted to earth, making Thalassa shy and bouncing as high as a man’s head before flopping almost at Kineas’s feet. The eagle screamed again and turned away, leaving Kineas with an impression of fierce, mad intelligence from its golden eyes. Rid of the carcass, it flew like the wind itself, rose into the heavens and raced away.

The waves of pain from mounting had vanished with the eagle. He straightened his back and raised his voice. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Would you leave a brother in a fight? This is not about winning. Winning — it is just as Diodorus has said. This is about virtue. ’

‘And you will die for virtue?’ Diodorus asked, but his eyes were on the sky.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Kineas asked. ‘You never left me in the agora that day, Diodorus. You might have run.’

Diodorus put his hand before his eyes.

Kineas took a painful breath. ‘This is what we do, friends. Let’s do it well.’

Srayanka kissed him. Then she rose, clamping her mare between her legs and stretching her spine.

‘Sakje!’ she shouted. ‘Will you follow the king to battle!’

‘Baqca-King,’ they roared, a long, drawn-out roar like the sound of lions at the edge of night.

She was crying. Many of them were crying, but the dust dried their tears as they rode.

They rode five stades or more, seeing only the ephemera of battle — a fleeing rider, a wandering horse with its entrails dragging behind, screaming in pain. Time had flowed away under them like the rivers of the steppe, and it was afternoon, and despite fresh horses, they were tired.

And then they could hear the battle before they could see it, a cacophony of horse noise and metal that filled the air. Swirls of dust came floating over the low ridge in front of them as if ejected from the battle, or as if the spirits of the dead were fleeing.

Kineas stopped his horse at the base of the ridge. He waved to Ataelus. ‘Go and be my eyes,’ he said.

Ataelus gave a sad smile. ‘For you!’ he called, and he and his wife galloped diagonally up the ridge.

Kineas turned to the officers. ‘Dismount. Have the troopers take a drink,’ he said. ‘When we go over the ridge, we’ll have the Sakje on the right, the Sauromatae in the centre, and the Olbians on the left, where they are least likely to get entangled with the Massagetae or the Dahae.’ He looked at them all. ‘Unless Ataelus tells me something that shocks me, we will go over the ridge and straight into the maelstrom.’

Diodorus was ash-straight, sitting his horse as if on parade in Athens. ‘What is our objective?’ he asked.

Kineas raised an eyebrow. ‘I intend to cut my way to Alexander,’ he said. ‘But failing that, remember what Zarina said. You are warriors. Do as you will.’ He allowed himself a small smile. ‘Obedient warriors in crisp formations!’

He won an answering smile from Diodorus.

He was considering a farewell speech — a classic battle oration — when he saw Ataelus careering down the ridge, Samahe at his heels. The man’s body language screamed of disaster and Kineas abandoned his notion of a formal goodbye. ‘Mount,’ he called.

He waited until the slackers were mounted. ‘Walk,’ he called. He waved his arms to indicate that the Sauromatae and the Sakje should form arrowheads to the right as he had described. Srayanka reached out a hand — a hard hand with a doe-soft back — and they clasped hands like soldiers. ‘Goodbye!’ she said. ‘Wait for me across the river!’

‘Live long, Queen!’ he shouted back in Sakje, and they were parted, her column forming to the right as his bore straight up the ridge.

Ataelus pulled up next to him. ‘The Zarina’s standard is down,’ he said. ‘The Dahae are leaving the field.’

‘Ares wept!’ Diodorus said.

And Kineas thought, This is not what I saw.