‘There is a gentleman to see you,’ he said. He was afraid, or deeply moved.
Kineas could see Arni, another former slave, past Sitalkes’ shoulder. He rose, but he was unprepared for the man who entered.
‘Isokles!’ he said. Isokles was the father of Ajax. Ajax, who was dead, his body wrapped in linen, embalmed. Who had died serving Kineas, fighting for Olbia, a hero.
The man’s face was red from grief, his eyes haggard. ‘Kineas.’ He stood silently in the door. ‘My son is dead.’ The words tailed off, and the man stepped forward and put his arms around Kineas, and wept.
Niceas, who had also loved Ajax, took the father away and left Kineas in peace, so that he could read the letter from his boyhood hero. Phocion of Athens to Kineas, son of Nicocles, greeting, Fate, which cast you as a soldier of Macedon and then as an exile, now has raised you high. We hear the reports of your generalship for Olbia, and of your defeat of forces sent by Antipater to conquer the Euxine cities. Fools here prate of war with Macedon. The notion that Athens is a power in the world dies hard, and men, whether old or young, will deceive themselves about the power of their city, even when I offer them the example of Thebes. I write to you not as a supplicant, nor as a friend of Macedon, although either role might suit me. Instead, I write as the man who taught you to use a sword. The anti-Macedon party claims you as if you were their possession, their slave, and claims all of your actions as their own. They will ask you to gather your army and march into Thrace against Antipater. When they exiled you, and then sent you to Olbia, you were a tool — a sword. But now that you are a commander, you are the man who holds the sword. Beware what you cut. Please send my greetings to young Graccus, and to Laertes, son of Thallus, and Diodorus, son of Glaucus, and Coenus the Nisaean.
Kineas read Phocion’s letter with pleasure, because he could hear the man’s growl as he said the words aloud, and he could see on the scroll where words had been scraped out and others added with care. Phocion was the greatest Athenian soldier of his generation, perhaps of all time, and one of his father’s closest friends and political allies.
The second scroll was from Lycurgus, or rather from a scribe in his service. It had no greeting, and no salutation. Your exile will be lifted immediately. Consider the restoration of Amphipolis your next task, and Athens will again be great.
Amphipolis was an Athenian colony in Thrace, long since taken by Macedon. The recovery of Amphipolis — an old ambition of the Athenian assembly — would require the complete overthrow of Macedon as a power. Kineas made a face.
Diodorus came in from the exercise field fingering a bruise on his arm. ‘Ares is my witness, I need more time to heal. Little Clio just pounded me on the palaestra floor.’
‘The summer has put muscle on the boy, and you are getting old,’ Kineas said.
Diodorus winced.
‘Here is something that will lift the sting,’ Kineas said, holding out the letter from Phocion. Diodorus read it while drinking wine, then sat and drank again. ‘He can’t have known of the battle yet,’ he said.
Kineas handed over the other message. ‘It is not a long journey from the battlefield to this city by river. Nor to Athens, by sea, for a swift ship.’
Diodorus shook his head. He began to read.
Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘Something going on here that is beyond me,’ he said. ‘Amphipolis? Are they insane?’
Diodorus put down the second scroll. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I fear that Demosthenes and Lycurgus are so desperate to restore their party that they will dare anything. And we cost them nothing. They can cast us as dice and pay no political cost.’ He looked at the scroll. ‘Did they lift all of our exiles, or just yours?’
‘All of us,’ Kineas said. ‘Poor Laertes.’
‘He’d have done anything to win praise from old Phocion,’ Diodorus said, and then he grinned. ‘So would I.’
Kineas nodded. ‘I thought it would make you feel better.’
‘You won’t take us to war in Thrace?’ Diodorus asked.
Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m going east,’ he said. ‘And if I can find the money and the men, I’ll take an army.’
Diodorus picked up the letter from Phocion and pointed it at Kineas. ‘Against Alexander?’
Kineas narrowed his eyes, squinting against an invisible sun. ‘Against Alexander,’ he said. And then, because he and Diodorus were closer than most brothers, he grinned and said, ‘To Hades with Alexander. I want Srayanka, and to keep her, I’ll war down invincible Macedon. I swear that I would storm Olympus.’
Diodorus grinned, and put a hand on his knee. ‘We all know,’ he said, and then avoided Kineas’s blow.
Isokles’ enduring grief did not pass in a day. Kineas sent the prodromoi out to find the best landings on the Bay of Salmon, and still the man grieved. Kineas began the complex problem of moving men and horses by ship, sending grain and cash to the selected landing sites, and still Isokles grieved. He moved listlessly around the barracks until Leon moved him to Nicomedes’ house — Kineas’s house, now. He came to the barracks every day and sat with the veterans to hear tales of his son — tales every man had to tell. Ajax and his relentless heroism were part of the tradition of the company. The boy had been reared on the heady wine of the Poet and the feats of Achilles had fired his blood. He had left a trail of single combats and brilliant exploits across that bloody summer, and his father heard them all, embellished by the passage of time, until Ajax seemed ready to take his place with the heroes of the Iliad — a place accorded to him by every trooper in the hippeis.
But after three days of hearing his son praised and drinking wine, Isokles pushed his way into where Kineas was surrounded by his staff, reading lists of goods to be shipped with his little army, and exploded like a nest of wasps hurled on to the floor.
‘He didn’t need to be a hero!’ Isokles shouted without preamble.
Diodorus sprang to his feet — Isokles had the gait and the look of a madman, his eyes were wild and he had a sword.
Kineas put a hand on his friend’s sword arm. ‘It is grief,’ he said.
Isokles was yelling, the sword almost forgotten as he shouldered his way towards Kineas. ‘He was handsome and young! He was well loved, smart enough at business! I sent him to you for a single summer, to knock the foolishness from his head, and he is dead. Dead for ever! Dead in a war that was nothing to him!’ Niceas grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms, but Isokles thrashed, nearly breaking Niceas’s grip — not an easy thing to do. Philokles tackled him around the waist and Isokles hammered his elbow into the Spartan’s face, breaking his nose in a fountain of blood.
‘You killed him! All of you, with your talk of glory and honour!’ Isokles spat the words glory and honour like poison.
Kineas considered reason. He had warned Isokles that his son might die, a year or more ago at a pleasant symposium in Tomis. But Isokles was beyond reason. And although Kineas had a lifetime of practice at watching those he loved die, and moving on, the death of the golden Ajax had cut at him too, so that he could seldom pass the room where the man’s body lay wrapped in linen without touching it or shedding a tear.
‘We all loved him,’ Kineas said quietly.
‘If you loved him he wouldn’t be dead. ’ Isokles came to a stop in the middle of the room, with Niceas pinning his arms and Philokles, his face a mask of blood, hanging gamely around his waist. ‘You used him for his heroism like other men use a prostitute for her sex.’ He wept bitterly.
That was a charge that bit deeply. Ajax’s relentless heroism had been a foundation of the daimon of the hippeis.
Kineas was silent. He didn’t have an answer for Isokles’ grief, and he felt the justice of the man’s charges. He had never wanted to take Ajax, but he had wanted the boy’s youth and enthusiasm for his company and for his own morale.
Isokles had stopped struggling now. He stood in the middle of the barracks floor, weeping. ‘All of you have stories of his heroism. He might have died in any of
them. You revelled in it — you stood back and watched as he threw himself at death.’
Niceas was right at Isokles’ ear — he had the man’s arms from behind. ‘Your son was a great man,’ he said. ‘But you’re a fucking idiot.’ He took a deep breath. Isokles sagged in his grasp. ‘We told your son every day to keep his head down and stop pushing himself at the gods.’ Niceas’s voice broke, and he, too, began to weep. ‘How many times?’ he cried, as he shook the father. ‘How many times did I tell him to watch his own back and mind his place in line?’
‘The night before the great battle,’ Philokles said, his nasal consonants broken like his nose, ‘Kineas told him to grow up and stop acting like an idiot.’
Leon, who had known the boy in a different way, spoke with the hesitation of a former slave. ‘My master — Nicomedes — asked him many times to take care.’
‘If Nicomedes were alive, I would kill him,’ Isokles said. ‘He bears the responsibility above all.’
Philokles, who had worn the wreath as the army’s hero himself, rose to his feet. ‘He burned very bright,’ he said. ‘He burned bright in virtue and honour and died young, and he will live for ever with the gods.’
Isokles, turned sane and grief-wracked eyes on him, the orbs white stele in the red wreck of his face. ‘Keep your philosophy, Spartan. He is dead. He might have lived and burned just as bright, growing wheat and rearing children in the sun.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Or disease might have crippled him, or accident. Or he might have drowned on a ship. He chose his way, Isokles, and despite all your sorrow, you are unjust to us who were his friends. He chose the manner of his life and death — more than most men, almost like a god. I honour him.’ Philokles shrugged. ‘He loved war. It is a terrible, stupid thing to love, and it showed its true face by destroying him.’
Isokles and Philokles stood nose to nose, the one crying tears from red eyes, the other still pouring blood from his nose so that he seemed almost to cry tears of blood.
And then Isokles fell forward into Philokles’ arms.
And they all wept together.
6
After grief, the hardest part was arranging who would go and who would stay. Many citizens — most of the hippeis — had little interest in further campaigning. For rich men, they had seen more war than they ever expected. Like most veterans, few of them had any inclination for more. Among the officers, all were either men of consequence or young men likely to rise as a result of their military service. The campaign against Alexander would do nothing to add to their civic laurels and their fathers were not eager to see them march. Indeed, it was only as a tribute to Kineas’s service to the city that the assembly voted to allow the expedition at all — and more than a few men rose to speak against it, led by Alcaeus, who bore Kineas ill will for his discipline during the campaign. For the first time in months, Kineas was referred to as an adventurer and a mercenary — charges that he met by rising and publicly renouncing the archonship. The city demanded that the army be sent ‘to open trade routes in the east’. But the men who were going called it what it was.
‘We’re going to fight Alexander,’ they said in the agora.
In the end, the expedition received the grudging sanction of the city, and later that of Pantecapaeum, Olbia’s sister city to the east.
Among the younger sons, there were quite a few who were willing to follow Kineas anywhere, and all of Kineas’s professional soldiers were content to go — soldiering was what they knew, and there was not likely to be another conflict around Olbia in the near future. Rumours from the plains came down the river with the grain, suggesting that Marthax no longer had any force in the field, and that every chieftain had gone home to see to his farmers and his grain as Philokles had predicted. It was also said that Macedon had a war against Sparta to prosecute, and no men to spare to avenge Zopryon.
Best of all, in the eyes of the assembly, Kineas proposed to take the Keltoi with him. That they yet lived was a sore subject to the more democratic elements in the city, as they had been the tyrant’s tool of oppression for five years and more. Many felt that they should have been massacred with the Macedonian garrison. Their presence in the hippodrome was more fodder for Alcaeus and his new allies. They were big men, Gauls and even Germans among them, and they scared the Greeks and the Sindi.
Memnon’s original three hundred, the first mercenaries the tyrant had hired, were all citizens now — but citizens without a trade. Memnon remained the commander of the phalanx, and he had told Kineas privately that he intended to stay behind, but that he had no hesitation in allowing his lieutenant Lycurgus or any of his men to sign on for the expedition to the east. The mercenaries had been hired to oppress the population, and later kept on to stiffen the raw men of the town. But the men of the town were all veterans now, and the mercenaries had little to do and no one to oppress.
And of course, some of the poorer citizens, or men just on the edge of poverty, saw the expedition as a chance for regular pay and a life they’d grown accustomed to in the summer.
Kineas had seen it all before, all his life. War begat war, and men with a taste of victory and plunder took to the life of the soldier eager for more easy gold, casually forgetting the nights in the rain and the pain of wounds and the constant fear.
In the end, he mustered three hundred ‘Greek’ horse under Diodorus, well mounted and well led, a better force than any squadron of mercenaries under the circle of the heavens, with the Keltoi in the ranks and all of Heron’s exiles. He had another three hundred infantry — all hoplites — under Lycurgus, with Philokles refusing rank but accepting some nebulous role. The loot of Macedon allowed Kineas to mount them all on mules, and the riches of Nicomedes allowed him to imagine that he could keep them all fed.
He also had fifty Sindi, the survivors of the company that Temerix had formed and still led. They were psiloi, armed with Sakje bows and heavy axes, tattooed men who feared nothing and looked for death and served as skirmishers for the phalanx.
Then there was Prince Lot and the Sauromatae, two hundred knights in the heaviest armour on the plains.
All told, with the inevitable tail any army carried, he had almost a thousand mouths to feed and more than two thousand animals to move. Only an Athenian grain fleet had the capacity to carry so many and the food to supply them, even for a week. Luckily, he had one to hand. He still worried about food and fodder for the march, and despite some chests of gold and a great deal of silver, he knew that eventually he would be forced to seize food to continue — a prospect that frightened him.
He had already sent Ataelus with his scouts and a dozen Sauromatae in a galley to locate camps on the shore of the Bay of Salmon and to pick a route inland. Before the assembly met, he sent Eumenes with Arni and a dozen Keltoi troopers to visit Pantecapaeum, Gorgippia on the east coast of the Euxine and even Dioskurias to the south by ship, with orders to buy cattle and get them driven to the Bay of Salmon. Eumenes needed to be out of the city anyway — the political factions were out for his blood because of his father’s treason, or so they said. Every day there hurt him more, and his presence was being used against Kineas politically. Someone was aiming at Kineas.
Already.
Some days he wondered why he was going, and why he was leading a thousand men to the same fate. He was rich, and powerful — in the way that Greeks accounted power. He could be tyrant. He could be king.
And his death awaited him in the east.
But so did Srayanka. And the sniping in the assembly was already getting to him.
The Battle of the Ford of the River God was only two months past, and already the assembly had returned to its traditional bickering, the unanimity of the early summer vanished with the threat of Macedon. Because Kineas had already relinquished the title of archon and the possibility of being tyrant, smaller fish began to circle the ivory stool, looking for power. Kineas said as much to Philokles.
‘Fish, you say,’ Philokles responded. They were seated tog
ether in the assembly, which had gathered in the hippodrome because of the seating — and because the balance of power of the city had shifted away from the citadel. ‘Vultures, more like.’
Demosthenes, Nicomedes’ nephew, had performed the political acrobatics of converting himself, overnight, from an aristocratic snob who used his power to avoid military service, to a full-blown democrat bent on restoring complete power to the assembly. The fact that the man had avoided service with the hippeis and had seen no action over the summer sat ill with many of the assembly, but political memory was short and Demosthenes promised action on a number of fronts that would please the voters — the men in the phalanx. And when Alcaeus denounced Kineas for his anti-democratic harbouring of the Keltoi and ‘Cleomenes’ traitor son’, it was Demosthenes who rose to his feet amidst the hissing to support him.
One of his first proposals was that Kineas’s expedition to the east be held back until Kineas had cleared his accounts with the city. This proposal was met with another chorus of hissing when he first proposed it, but by the third meeting of the assembly, enough wine had passed enough lips for the idea to appear to have some merit.
Kineas sat and writhed like an unhappy child through the rest of the day. The resolution to call for his accounts failed by a good margin — but it had not been hooted down.
‘Ares and Aphrodite!’ Kineas said as he threw his cloak at his bed. ‘Accounts? What accounts?’
Philokles smiled, rubbing his beard. ‘I imagine that the honoured Demosthenes knows full well that we kept no accounts.’
Diodorus came in with his hetaira, who called herself Sappho, on his arm. She was an elegant woman of thirty, with good bones, a long nose and an imperious air that belied both humour and real learning. Diodorus had purchased her contract with his loot from the battle, and seemed satisfied with the exchange. ‘Bad day in the assembly?’ Diodorus asked. His freckles burned as he grinned.
‘Why don’t they ask at the citadel for accounts?’ Kineas said, his voice as close to a whine as his men had ever heard.
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