‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Listen, my love — I can rally my men in an hour. Marthax will never stand against us — the Grass Cats and the Cruel Hands and my phalanx will break him in the dawn. You will be queen.’
She smiled — a smile that showed him that she had thought all of this through, and didn’t need his political guidance, however much she loved him. ‘I would be queen of nothing,’ she said. ‘This way, my child will be king. Now go.’
‘Child?’ he said, dumbstruck, as she pushed him away and yelled for Hirene, her trumpeter.
And then he was no longer a lover or a warrior, but a general, and he had work to do. Srayanka’s column, with herds of horses, goats and sheep, and a hundred heavy wagons, moved east just after dawn. Kineas’s Greek cavalry shadowed their departure, and Ataelus’s scouts watched Marthax.
Marthax was mounted, the rising sun flashing on his gold helm and his red cloak, and his warriors had their bows in their hands, but they didn’t move.
The sun was high in the sky by the time Kineas’s hoplites marched south, but they were going home and they were happy to be moving. They sang the paean as they marched past Marthax’s men. They had fought Macedon together, and neither side seemed interested in conflict.
Kineas ignored Diodorus’s hand on his bridle and his admonitions and rode clear of his column. He trotted up a short slope to where Marthax, massive and red, sat on his war charger — a great beast easily two hands taller than any horse in the army. Around him sat his knights and his leaders. Kineas knew them all. They had been comrades, until yesterday.
‘Are we enemies?’ Kineas asked, without preamble.
Marthax looked sad. He shrugged. ‘Will you marry her?’ he asked.
‘The Lady Srayanka? Yes, I intend to marry her.’ Kineas had a linen sack in his hand, and he toyed with the knot of the string securing the neck of the bag.
‘Then we are enemies,’ Marthax said slowly. ‘I cannot allow you — the king of Olbia — to wed my most powerful clan leader.’
Kineas met his eyes, and thought of the last year — planning a campaign and executing it, with this man at his side, his humour, his great heart, his invincible size and clear head. ‘You are making a mistake,’ he said quietly. ‘I am not the king of Olbia. I do not want your throne — and nor do you.’
Marthax — a man who never quailed, who knew no fear — glanced away, looking over the plains. ‘I will be king,’ he said. ‘And I am not Satrax, to tolerate her scheming. She will wed me, or no one.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You are being a fool. Who is giving you this advice? She will not marry you — you don’t even want her! And her claim to the kingship is better. The first time you make a mistake, the tribes will desert you.’
Marthax turned slowly back to him. He shrugged. ‘I have spoken my words,’ he said. ‘If she returns from the east, she will be my subject, my wife or a corpse.’
Kineas opened the sack and dropped the contents on the ground. ‘She was almost a corpse last night,’ he said.
Around them, the knights shifted and a murmur of discontent came like a breeze over grass.
Marthax looked at the head lying there. ‘You have murdered one of my knights,’ he said, but he appeared more confused than angry.
‘This one attacked her yurt in the night,’ Kineas said, pointing at the head of Graethe. ‘He had fifty men. They are all dead.’ Kineas looked around. ‘You are making a terrible mistake, Marthax, and someone is leading you to it.’ Kineas raised his voice. ‘Let me be clear. You — and you alone — have split the clans. This one paid for his attempt to murder the lady. Now she is riding east, to fight the monster. You will let her go. You will let her go. ’ He took a deep breath. ‘I am the lord of the walking spears, and of the flying horses. And I am baqca. Harm her on her march east, and I will burn your City of Walls, and no merchant will ever come to the sea of grass again.’
‘Go and fuck yourself, Greek,’ Marthax said, rising to his full height in the saddle.
‘No gold. Nowhere to sell your grain. The end of your way of life. How long will you be king, Marthax? Will you last out the summer?’ Kineas rode his horse right up close. Marthax towered over him, but Kineas was too angry to be afraid.
‘Go, before we do you harm,’ Marthax said through his teeth.
And then the child was there, pushing between the horses unseen. She stood by Kineas. ‘ He will pretend to be king until the eagles fly,’ she said. ‘ They will pick his bones.’
‘And take this carrion-imp with you,’ Marthax said.
Kineas scooped the girl up, turned his horse and rode back to his column. She squirmed for a while and then dropped off his lap to the ground.
‘I must get my horses,’ she said.
Kineas let her go. A Scythian — even a child — was nothing without her horses, and Kineas understood the pull. Even as he watched her running across the grass towards the royal herd, he saw Prince Lot and the Sauromatae mounting up. They had fewer remounts and no wagons, and lived in tents made of heavy felt. There were two hundred of them, with another fifty wounded on travois dragged behind spare animals.
Prince Lot saw him and approached. His Greek was terrible and his Sakje stilted. After a minute, Kineas had gathered that the Sauromatae wanted to travel with the Greeks. Kineas rode on, calling for Eumenes. The boy — scarcely a boy now — had three wounds and was still in a wagon, but he was well enough to sit up and translate.
‘He says, “I wish to travel with you. I spoke to the lady — she rides too fast for my wounded.” He says, “Srayanka said that you would follow her by the Bay of the Salmon.” He says, “I can show you the road, and my wounded will have more time to rest.”’ Eumenes listened to Lot’s last phrase and gave a weary smile. He pointed at the fading dust cloud that was Srayanka and her clans. ‘He says, “She should have been queen.”’
Kineas smiled at the first good news of the morning. ‘I will be delighted to have you with us,’ he said. He repeated this until Prince Lot smiled broadly.
Kineas also had a handful of Sakje prodromoi. Ataelus had recruited them — almost twenty now — with liberal promises of horses, and made them into his own small clan, including his new wife. None of them had deserted, even the two Standing Horses, and they gave Kineas eyes far in advance of his little army wherever they marched. Another of old Xenopon’s recommendations, even though the man had probably been too conservative to approve of Kineas’s use of ‘barbarians’ for the role.
Kineas waved Ataelus in from his intense watching of the main Sakje host, and told him to include the Sauromatae in his calculations. Ataelus grunted. He rode over to the column of travois, where the adolescent girls rode lighter horses, with their bows in their hands.
‘For them, for scouting,’ Ataelus said. He spoke to Lot, who nodded.
Kineas turned to leave them to it, and started for the head of the column, but suddenly Ataelus’s wife screamed a war cry, and other scouts were shouting. He turned his horse in time to see the lanky figure of Heron, the hipparch of the hippeis of Pantecapaeum, bringing up the rearguard. He wore his perpetual scowl as he watched his troop ride by.
There was movement from Marthax’s camp. Out on the plain of grass, a dozen horses ran. Behind them came a troop of Sakje, all in armour. They were slower than the horses they pursued, and they were losing ground. Farther back, Marthax’s main line had begun to move forward.
‘Shit,’ Kineas said. He knelt on the back of his ugly warhorse and tried to see through the dust already rising over Marthax’s line. The man had three thousand cavalry — no more — and he couldn’t hope to win a pitched battle against Kineas’s hoplites and his Greek cavalry. But he could do a lot of damage by harrying Kineas’s march. He could force Kineas to waste weeks. He could cost Kineas the city of Olbia and leave the army stranded on the plain, at the mercy of the winter.
It all went through Kineas’s head in a few seconds as he watched a little girl on a white horse galloping towa
rds him with a dozen more pale horses following her. The riders pursuing her were abandoning the chase as Heron’s rearguard blocked their way, contenting themselves with curses and bow-waving. Heron himself continued to scowl as he shouted orders to his hyperetes.
Lot had formed the Sauromatae into a block and wheeled them into line with Heron’s troop. The hoplites were already deploying to the right. Philokles the Spartan had taken his young men out of the line and was running to Heron, his transverse scarlet plume bobbing as he ran. The Greeks had been at war all summer. They could form line from column in any direction, at speed, without wasted orders.
Marthax’s line halted well out on the plain, a good two stades clear of the Greeks and the Sauromatae.
Ataelus had an arrow on his string, and he was looking at Kineas. Kineas shook his head and rode to the girl. ‘What the fuck have you done?’ he shouted at her, harsher than he meant.
‘Taken what is mine, and what is yours,’ she said. Around her milled two dozen horses, all white and flashing silver.
‘You have stolen the royal chargers?’ Kineas asked.
‘My father said that after Satrax you would be king,’ she said with the simplicity of childhood. ‘Satrax is dead. They are yours — except for the white foals. Those are mine. ’
Kineas was tempted to put her over his knee. ‘Ares and Aphrodite. Heron — give me four men with a flag of truce to return these horses.’
Heron told off troopers, who looked afraid. He rubbed his forehead and allowed his bronze Boeotian helmet to dangle on its cheek strap. ‘I prefer to be called Eumeles,’ he said. ‘At least in front of my men.’
Kineas smothered annoyance. Heron took himself very seriously, but when he wasn’t acting like an ephebe with his first lover, he was becoming a fine officer. ‘Very well, Eumeles,’ Kineas said.
The Sakje host sat silently at a distance.
Prince Lot took Kineas’s arm. He spoke quickly, emphatically, gesturing at Marthax in the opposite line.
Ataelus kneed his horse forward and translated. ‘For saying, Marthax not king. Give horses, Marthax for being king. You for making him king.’ Ataelus nodded.
The girl laughed. ‘You don’t want to be the one who makes Marthax king of the Sakje, do you?’
Kineas sat and cursed, but he didn’t want to offend Srayanka. He wished she was there to advise him.
The two forces watched each other for an hour, and then the Sakje began to trickle away. They had discipline when they needed it, but Marthax’s force was not as unified or as singular of purpose as Kineas had feared. Before his eyes, men and women rode off, collected their camps and departed — small lords first and then great lords. In three hours, Marthax had just two thousand horsemen.
At that point, Kineas ordered his line to form column. He briefed his officers — Memnon and Philokles for the foot, Diodorus and Heron and Lot for the cavalry. They were careful and slow — forming a hollow square from a line was not child’s play — and they marched with the spears on the outside and the cavalry in the middle with the wounded and the baggage.
It was late afternoon when Kineas began to believe he had broken contact. He knew how quickly Marthax could be on him if he wanted to move. The rain had started again, thunderclouds racing over the plains and pausing to soak the whole column and fill the river over its banks, so that brown water ran among the trunks of trees and washed more bodies off the battlefield, the ugly, bloated things passing down the river next to them.
‘The glory of battle,’ Philokles said by his side. He was watching two bodies bob in the current.
Kineas had halted his horse on a rise, just twenty stades south of the great bend. Philokles stepped out of the ranks of the phalanx to stand with him. In the distance, half a dozen Sauromatae girls sat their horses in a rough skirmish line on a river bluff, watching their back-trail.
Philokles pulled off his helmet and ran his free hand through his hair. Kineas ignored the Spartan’s mood. ‘If Xenophon had had a dozen Sauromatae girls, he’d never have had to worry about scouting.’
‘And he’d never have written Anabasis,’ Philokles said. His voice was flat.
Kineas laughed — his first real laugh of the day. ‘I’ve spent all day thinking about Xenophon,’ he said.
‘Because we have to get to Olbia alive?’ Philokles asked. ‘Marthax won’t follow us. His army is going home.’
‘I saw,’ Kineas said.
‘You saw, my friend, but did you think? Marthax went to council to represent the faction that demanded that the war be over. Now he pays the price — even if he wanted to fight us, or Srayanka, he couldn’t.’
Kineas hadn’t thought of it that way. ‘I knew I kept you around for a reason, Spartan.’
‘I’m an Olbian citizen now,’ Philokles said. ‘Don’t you forget it.’
They stood together as the army passed, on their way home at last, and the rain fell.
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.
Breat
h 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.
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