Storm of arrows

3

The late summer rain flattened the sea of grass and filled the rivers to a depth that only a mounted man could cross, even at the best fords. It washed away the blood and carried the glut of corpses at the Ford of the River God down to the sea, where the people of the city of Olbia watched them float by, bloated, gross and stinking. Being merchants, most of them kept a rough count of what they saw, and smiled grimly.

The rain fell for days, so that every hearth was wet and there was no place in a Greek house that was really dry, as woollen blankets and woollen tunics clung on to the damp. Smoke rising over the city told of fitful fires from sodden wood, and the scent of woodsmoke competed with the reek of wet wool and the underlying itch of wet manure.

Those who counted the corpses in the river looked at the gates and the roads beyond and wondered what had transpired on the sea of grass. They waited for word from their brothers, fathers, sons and husbands, lovers — virtually the whole free male population. A few had floated by. Women wept. Men looked at the citadel above them, with its Macedonian garrison, and their curses rose to heaven.

As the days passed and the rain continued to fall, the curses flowed like the rain. The imprecations began to flow by day and by night. A pair of Macedonians — farm boys, really, for all their airs — were caught in the agora and beaten by slaves. The garrison commander, Dion, responded savagely, throwing two-thirds of his garrison into the market at dawn and killing a dozen men, including a citizen.

After that, the city was quiet. Dion told the tyrant that he had the city cowed.

The tyrant called him a fool, and drank more unwatered wine.

Next evening, another Macedonian farm boy had his throat cut. The fools that did it dumped his body at the gate of the citadel. Dion gave his orders — in the morning, he’d make them rue it.

The rain had made the city wall slick. The men climbing along the wall in the damp darkness were grateful for the heavy hemp rope with knots every span, and even more grateful for the strong arms of their friends and slaves at the top of the wall. They were up in a few terror-filled moments — embraced — and gone into the dark.

‘We’re too far from the gate,’ an older man said. His recent wounds pained him, and his temper — never really quiet — was savage. ‘If they have archers on the walls, we’re all dead.’

The men around him were leaning forward, keen as hunters, listening for any sound from the city below them. The nearest walls were two stades away. Every man stood at the head of his horse, both hands up, ready to stop a whinny or a neigh.

‘Shut up,’ the hyperetes said. ‘Watch for the torches.’

‘They ought to be in there by now.’

‘Caught on the wall, maybe,’ someone else said.

‘ Shut the fuck up. ’ The hyperetes’ whisper carried all the savagery of his full voice.

Feet pounding through the lower city — too much noise, and no help for it. Wood slamming on stone as a woman leaned over her balcony to see what the fuss was and, seeing bronze, slammed her shutters home.

Breath hoarse, legs pumping, feet splashing through the wet ordure of the city without care for the slime. Shields pounding away against backs, the straps cutting a man’s wind and leaving bruises on his shoulders. Eyes straining to follow the man in front, turn after turn, so that the long file of men wound like a worm through the slave quarter where most free men went only to get a quick fuck against a house, if that. Not this time.

The citadel — another wet wall of rock towering into the dark. And no ropes. No friends inside.

Of course, that was not exactly true.

The postern gate was open.

Dion could feel that the city below him was restless. He expected resistance. He was glad of it. Time to clean house.

‘Follow me, boys,’ he said to his men, a quarter taxeis of raw Macedonian recruits — just enough professionals to act as file-closers. There’d been talk — ugly talk — about the number of Macedonian floaters coming down the river, but he wouldn’t hear it. Dion had his orders.

As his duty men opened the citadel’s main gate, he turned to address those behind him. ‘Kill everyone you find in the streets,’ he said. His voice carried well in the rain, so that even the men pressed flat against the gate towers could hear him clearly. Their faces would have made studies for statues of Furies.

At a wave of his hand, their heavy sandals rang out on the citadel’s arched roadway and Dion’s garrison trotted into the lower city. Off in the murk towards the east, the sun was rising. Men could see the shields carried by the men in front as they ran, their heavy tread carrying a sound of menace.

A beggar was caught at the entrance to the agora and his guts tumbled out in his lap as Dion’s sword opened him.

The pair of torches rose above the dolphin gate like a pair of red stars rising in the morning.

The horsemen mounted in seconds, vaulting on to their mount’s backs with the practice of a summer of hard riding, no longer concerned about the sounds their horses might make. After a month, the time for waiting was over.

‘Now,’ ordered Kineas.

They rode down the long hill by the inner harbour and then straight through the gates, which stood wide open. There were bodies on the ground, but the horses didn’t shy. The horses had seen corpses before. Their hooves pounded the ground and they were louder than the tramp of Dion’s men, and more deadly, and where they passed they left only the silence of expectation.

In the citadel, no sooner had the garrison passed the gates than the men pressed against the wet rock walls leaped into the courtyard and butchered the watch. The men coming off the walls had been as raw as their victims once, but that was months ago, and the Macedonian farm boys died with as little regard as lambs at a sacrifice. A few had time to scream and one file-closer tried for the gate. He died with a heavy black spear through his back plate of tawed leather.

Dion cleaned his sword against the beggar’s rag of a cloak and led his men into the clear space of the agora. He was intelligent enough to wonder why the agora was empty — not even a single merchant opening his stall — but the cowards had to know that he would come for blood. He formed his men in a tight phalanx. Their motions masked all sound, but something made him uneasy, and as the last man fell into his place, Dion called for silence.

Hoof beats.

Dion was just turning to bellow an order when a spear punched under his armpit. The point emerged through his neck and he lived only a few seconds — just long enough to watch the wolves fall on his phalanx. They looked like wolves…

‘Kill them all,’ Memnon bellowed as he ripped his spear out of the corpse.

Kineas led his men up the road that ringed the citadel, still expecting a shower of arrows or red-hot sand, but there was a torch waving enthusiastically from the great tower over the arched gate and then he was in the echoing tunnel, his horse’s hooves beating hollowly against the paving stones. Then into the citadel itself — new blood in the courtyard, a dozen Macedonians dead in their armour and Philokles with his twenty picked men facing fifty Keltoi of the tyrant’s bodyguard across the courtyard.

In the cold iron dawn, Kineas could see the tyrant and his Persian minion at the back, shoving more Keltoi out of their barracks.

Kineas turned to Antigonus, Eumenes’ hyperetes and one of Kineas’s few original troopers. Antigonus was a Gaulish Kelt himself. ‘Tell them to step aside and we’ll accept their service. Or they may stand and die.’

Antigonus rode into the relative silence of the palace courtyard. Resignation could be read on every face — even the tyrant’s.

The citadel had fallen. The sounds of a successful escalade were the background to Antigonus’s voice. The road to the agora was full of city hoplites hunting the last of the garrison. The screams of the farm boys could be heard all the way across the river, and Dion’s head was already on a pike over the main gate.

Antigonus spoke in the Keltic tongue of his fathers, gesturing repeatedly with his spear at the men behind him, and once at the tyrant.

The leader of the Keltoi, a tall, thin man in a heavy golden torc and massive gold bracers, stood forth, his heavy Thracian sword held comfortably in both fists. He had tattoos in heavy blue that ran up his legs, under his tunic, and emerged again at his neck to cover his face. He nodded easily to Antigonus and then to Kineas.

When he spoke, his voice was sad. His Greek, while accented, was good. ‘We eat his food. We take his coin. We swear oaths.’ The heavy Kelt shrugged. ‘We die here.’ He pointed with his sword at the cobbled courtyard of the citadel.

The tyrant laughed. It was a bitter laugh. He stood straight and came forward — a little drunk, as was his wont. ‘Well, some things are worth buying,’ he said from the safety of the last rank of the Keltoi. ‘You came for my city after all,’ he said to Kineas.

Kineas felt the rage of gods grip him. But for this man and his plotting, Agis and Laertes would still live, so would Nicomedes, and Ajax, and Cleitus. And the king. ‘I came for you, traitor,’ he said thickly.

The tyrant shrugged. ‘Odd how the public interest and self-interest coincide. I don’t imagine I could offer you gold to let me live?’

‘Fight me man to man,’ Kineas said. ‘If you win, my men will set you free.’

He began to ride around to the left, to get a clearer look at the tyrant. At his knee, another horseman moved with him.

It was a foolish challenge, and he felt like a fool for making it. He could barely stand after his wounds at the Ford of the River God and the attack in the dark. Single combat was for young men who wished to be Achilles, not middle-aged men in love.

The tyrant glanced around and laughed grimly. ‘No. I think not. Even if I won, these folk would butcher me like a heifer.’

Kineas shook his head in denial. ‘Only a dishonest man fears the dishonesty of others,’ he quoted.

The tyrant spat. ‘Spare me your philosophy. And the rest of you — you plan to follow him? Will you be as loyal to him as you were to me? Eh, Kineas? Ready to ride the lion?’

Kineas sat straighter. ‘I have no intention of taking control of the city,’ he said stiffly.

The tyrant smiled. ‘You lie.’ He shrugged. ‘But what do I care? Your ignorance will bring about the deaths of every man here — but I’ll be dead. My share in this story ends here, doesn’t it?’

The hippeis were calling for the tyrant’s death. They began to chant. The Keltoi readied their shields.

‘My ignorance?’ Kineas said. ‘Ignorance? I am ignorant of what sort of man would betray his own city to a foreign garrison! And I did not come to bandy words with such a traitor.’

The tyrant stood up straight, like a soldier on parade. He stood out from his Keltoi. ‘Listen to me, you aristocratic bastard,’ he said. ‘The world is about to go to shit. When Alexander and Parmenion go to war — listen! The monster has lost his mind. We need Antipater! It will all come apart now — everything the boy king did will collapse like a cheap market stall in a wind — and all his wolves will fight over the spoils. Are you ready for that?’

Behind Kineas, Antigonus translated the exchange. The Keltoi chieftain listened patiently, his sword cocked back over his shoulder, a pose he could apparently hold for hours.

Behind the Keltoi, on the steps of the palace, the tyrant’s Persian steward produced a bow — an elegant recurve bow that glowed with wax. He raised it at Kineas, but before he could shoot, he took an arrow in the chest and a second in the groin and he fell screaming. His squeals pierced the morning damp and made men — even hard men — flinch. The tyrant turned to glance over his shoulder. He grinned — a mad, death’s-head grin. Then he seized a dagger from the belt of the Kelt nearest him and flourished it high like an athlete.

‘Your turn, Kineas!’ he shouted. ‘By all the gods, Hama, I release you and your men from your oaths!’ And so saying, he plunged the dagger into his own neck.

Close at Kineas’s side, awaiting his chance, Ataelus the Scyth put his knees to his charger and it rose, rearing and punching both hooves like a boxer. At the top of its attempt to climb the heavens, he leaned out over his charger’s neck and fired two more arrows over the Keltoi.

Unlike the Persian, the tyrant went down without a sound.

Antigonus spoke again in the guttural Keltish tongue. The chieftain, Hama, spared the tyrant’s twitching corpse a respectful glance, and nodded.

‘I think we live,’ he said, and placed the point of his sword carefully on the ground. ‘Our oath dies with him.’ Around him, the Keltoi sheathed their weapons or laid them carefully on the wet paving stones.

Philokles walked over to the tyrant’s corpse like Ares claiming his spoil. ‘He died well,’ the Spartan said.

‘May I do as well,’ Kineas agreed.

Kineas managed to order a guard to protect the Keltoi from harm before a mob of his own soldiers put him up on a shield and carried him off to the agora. And even as the city rang with his acclaim, he thought of Srayanka, already out on the sea of grass, travelling east.

Taking the city had been the easy part. Because Satrax the King was dead, and the Sakje alliance was shattered, and Alexander the King of Kings was out on the sea of grass, and the old gods of Chaos were laughing.