Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  Niceas shrugged. ‘It didn’t really come to me until I saw what this campaign was doing to you. And when I saw the ships sail off. That hurt.’

  Kineas turned his face away. ‘I have to do this. You don’t. I told you all that in Olbia.’

  Niceas’s voice was gentle instead of angry. ‘That’s horse shit, Hipparch. We’ll all follow wherever you choose to go. You have trained us to be that way, and now we are. Diodorus won’t leave you, I won’t leave you. Now Eumenes won’t leave you. It’s almost funny, because every one of us has our own little following — the damned following the damned following Kineas.’

  Kineas thought of the other boys hissing their catcalls after the fleeing philosopher. Instead of an angry retort, he nodded. ‘Would it help if I promised that this was the last time?’ he asked.

  Niceas shook his head. ‘No. Because being who you are, it won’t be the last time. But it’d help those of us who follow you if you put some planning into the trip home, instead of just the trip out.’

  Kineas met his friend’s eyes. ‘I won’t be coming home,’ he said.

  Niceas met his glance. ‘If you say so. Maybe the rest of us will, though.’

  Kineas nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good,’ said Niceas. ‘Because the meat’s done.’

  An hour later, they were riding across the plains between the oak woods and the river. They passed farms and Maeotae farmers, paler than the Sindi but wearing the same colourful clothes. They were prosperous, and the women wore gold, even when they worked with hoes in their gardens or brought in the harvest. Twice, the mounted pair passed groups of Maeotae in their hundreds reaping a field of wheat. There was grain in every basket and more coming in every apron. Stone barns and turf barns dotted the landscape along the river, each with a small dock and every one bursting with wheat.

  Kineas shook his head. ‘The golden fleece,’ he said.

  Niceas nodded. ‘Alexander is wasting his time on Persia,’ he said. ‘These are the richest farms I’ve ever seen.’

  When the sun stood at the top of the sky, Kineas stopped where a group of Maeotae sat in the shade of a great oak tree, eating bread and cheese. He dismounted. The men watched him warily.

  ‘Do any of you speak Greek?’ he asked.

  The oldest of the farmers stood and approached, but he shook his head.

  ‘Sakje?’ Kineas asked.

  The farmer smiled, showing more teeth than gaps. They were a handsome people, with hair as golden as their crops in autumn and the stature of those who ate well all through the year. ‘Some,’ he said.

  ‘You know Olbia?’ Kineas asked.

  The farmer nodded.

  ‘We are from Olbia. An army is coming this way, up the Tanais. My army. We’ll pay for grain.’ Kineas found that Sakje forced him to be succinct.

  The farmer nodded. ‘Soldiers come. Horsemen come,’ he said. ‘Say same. Pay gold for grain.’ He nodded.

  Kineas held up a silver owl. ‘I’d buy bread and cheese, if I could,’ he said.

  The farmer shrugged. He went to his wife and returned with a basket full of bread and cheese. ‘For nothing,’ he said with evident pride. ‘For friend.’

  Niceas nodded. ‘Any farmer would do the same. These are good folk.’ He went to his horse and removed a cut of the buck and carried it to the farmer. ‘For nothing,’ he said in Sakje, and the farmer grinned at him.

  They rode on, eating as they went. ‘March discipline must be good,’ Niceas said, ‘or those folk would be pissing themselves at the sight of soldiers.’

  ‘This is Grass Cat land,’ Kineas said.

  ‘I don’t think those Maeotae would agree,’ Niceas said. ‘This is no man’s land.’ He looked at Kineas under his brows. ‘You could build something here,’ he said.

  Kineas looked at him. ‘Build something?’ he asked.

  Niceas grunted, and they rode on.

  They stayed the night in a heavy stone house. Kineas got a bed by the hearth — the nights had developed a bite — and he was asleep as soon as his head was on the furs.

  The two young eagles were above him again, and they were noisy. He smiled at them and they regarded him with curiosity, and then he began to climb to them. He got one leg well up to a knot in the bole of the great tree and pressed himself close to keep his balance, and wrapped his arms around the trunk…

  Around her waist, and she made to push him away, just the palm of her hand and not very hard. He pushed her chiton up with his free hand until he could feel the warm vellum of her hip under his fingers, and his erection took on a life of its own.

  ‘No, my lord,’ she said, but without much force. More weariness than refusal, really. She was pretty, with heavy breasts and a slim waist, and all the young men wanted her. She had smiled at him many times, and today when she came into the stable with two buckets of water he had kissed her, and now he had her under him in the straw.

  He ran his hand under the thin wool, over the mound of her belly and on to her breast. The garment bunched around her hips and she moved them in discomfort. ‘Stop!’ she said, with a little more emphasis. ‘Please?’ she asked.

  He ran his hand over her nipple and it sprang to life under his hand and she moaned. ‘No, master. Lord. No,’ she said. He kissed her and she responded, slowly at first and then more, until she was tugging at him and he was in her, spending as quickly as he entered her. Then she rose and dusted off the straw and pulled her chiton into shape, wiped her thighs a little and went back to watering horses.

  She never smiled at me again, Kineas thought. I raped her. She was a slave and she could no more refuse me than refuse to eat, but let’s call an action by its proper name. It was rape.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kam Baqca. She was mounted on her great charger, and she towered above him. ‘It was not meant with anger, but it was ill done. When a lord forces a slave, where is the crime?’

  Kineas thought the question was rhetorical, but the dream lingered, as did the question, and…

  He awoke with the question on his mind, and the sure knowledge that his body thought that Srayanka was too far away.

  He rose and drank a honey drink that he enjoyed and ate fresh bread. The farmer spoke to him at length, discoursing about the harvest, apparently, and hoping for the dry spell to continue. Kineas understood one word in five, but he knew that the man meant well.

  They rode on in the morning, poorer by a silver owl and their horses loaded with food. The rafters of the house had been packed with produce — drying herbs, cheese, dried meats — and the family had owned four goblets of gold.

  ‘These people are rich!’ Niceas said. ‘But no slaves!’

  Kineas rubbed his beard and rode on. ‘A form of riches all its own,’ he said, thinking of his dreams.

  Niceas nodded thoughtfully. ‘What was he on about, there at the end?’

  Kineas rubbed his beard again. ‘Weather and crops. And something else. I think he was warning me about bandits, although it might just as well have been an admonition against being bandits.’

  Niceas grunted. ‘You saw the scorch marks on the stone?’ he said.

  Kineas had seen them. ‘Recent,’ he said, and Niceas nodded.

  That afternoon they caught up with Diodorus’s rearguard. Coenus was surprised to see Kineas, but his men kept good watch, and he was saluted and greeted and cosseted as he and Niceas rode the length of the column. They halted for the night with the cavalry and shared a buck that Coenus killed, intending to ride on in the morning, despite Diodorus’s protests.

  That night Kineas had another dream of his youth that left him quiet when he woke, a dream in which he and some boys tormented a dog. It had happened. He had forgotten it.

  As he mounted after breakfast, Diodorus came up on horseback with Sappho and several of his own staff.

  ‘The strategos should not be haring about alone,’ Diodorus said. ‘Local people say there are bandits in the hills.’

  Niceas grunted.

  Kineas rai
sed an eyebrow. ‘Should I be afraid?’ he asked.

  Diodorus shrugged. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.

  ‘Ataelus will have scouted the country,’ Kineas said.

  ‘This valley is broad enough that Ataelus could put one of his bare-breasted scouts every stade and not cover it,’ Diodorus mocked. ‘You just want to have adventures.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kineas said. Anything he added would only encourage more teasing.

  Over Diodorus’s shoulder, Sappho smiled. She was mounted on a cavalry charger, a bigger horse than most women could handle. She rode well.

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ Diodorus said. After a pause he said, ‘Let me come, too.’

  Kineas considered it a moment. He’d like few things better than to have his last two Athenians riding by his side, two of the three men in the world that he loved most. But he shook his head, looking at the column. ‘They need you,’ he said.

  Diodorus grimaced. ‘Truer words were never spoke,’ he said ruefully. He shrugged. ‘They need you, too.’

  Sappho pulled her horse up by them. ‘“Reason, my lord, may dwell within a man,”’ she said, quoting Sophokles.

  ‘“And yet abandon him when troubles come,”’ Diodorus said, capping her quote with relish. Their eyes met, and they shared a smile that touched the faint lines at the corners of her eyes.

  Kineas looked at both of them. ‘I take it that means I have your permission to ride on?’ he asked.

  Diodorus nodded, laughing.

  They rode along the river for half a day, and Kineas said nothing beyond comments on the fields and the weather. Finally, as they crested a long ridge to see another in the distance and rising ground all around them, Kineas turned to Niceas. ‘Do you ever think on the evil acts you’ve done?’ he asked.

  Niceas looked out over the river. ‘All the time,’ he said.

  ‘And?’ Kineas asked.

  Niceas looked at him and frowned. ‘And what? They’re done. I can’t undo them. I can only try not to commit them again.’

  Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘If we ever return to Athens, I’m going to set you up as a philosopher.’

  Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘If we ever return to Athens,’ he said, ‘you are going to set me up as a brothel keeper. Perhaps I’ll teach the boys and girls some philosophy.’

  Kineas grinned at the picture and rode on, keeping his thoughts to himself. After dinner, they curled in their cloaks, the fire crackling away, and for the first time in weeks sleep evaded Kineas.

  ‘I missed this,’ he said.

  Niceas snorted. ‘What, four weeks in Olbia and you missed lying on the ground?’

  Kineas rolled on his back and stared up at the wheel of heaven. ‘Longer than that. Remember the ferryman when we crossed the Tanais?’

  ‘Who thought we’d all be dead when the Getae came? I’ll never forget that night. Why?’

  Kineas said, ‘That night I thought a dozen men and a pair of slaves was a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I was thinking it was funny that I could forget how much of a burden it was to lead.’

  Niceas grunted.

  ‘You?’ Kineas asked. ‘Why do you remember it?’

  Niceas rustled — he was changing position while trying to keep the warmth trapped under his cloak. ‘It was the last time I slept by Graccus,’ he said. Niceas and Graccus had been friends and lovers for years, and Graccus, of course, had died the next day.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ Kineas said.

  Niceas snuggled against his back. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

  When they mounted their horses the next morning, they could see that the ground rose on either side of them, and the river ran fast through a narrow channel, so that there was no longer any possibility of a ford or a crossing. Kineas killed another buck from horseback, a mounted throw that earned him a grin from Niceas.

  ‘Show-off!’ Niceas shook his head. ‘You could have lost your best spear!’

  Kineas grinned back and they divided the meat and then bathed in the swift-flowing water to wash off the blood. It felt like ice.

  That night was the coldest yet. Kineas was again feeling the weight of his responsibilities, and wondering if he could afford to ride off and leave them, and again he lay awake — still fearing his dreams, with the additional complication that he was sated with sleep. Niceas was already snoring beside him, and it was too cold to get out of his cloak and the heavy wool blanket that covered both of them. As it grew colder, he pushed in closer to Niceas, and then he worried about his army. Most of the hoplites in the vanguard wouldn’t have a spare blanket. He thought of Xenophon’s soldiers in the Anabasis, and he worried, and worrying, he fell asleep.

  Ajax pushed him quickly to the tree, and his dead friends were fewer. Kleisthenes was gone. Kineas felt like a coward as he scrambled on to the tree and began to climb. It was easy to climb as high as he had gone before, and then…

  Running through the fields north of his father’s farms, legs afire. Rabbit-hunting.

  He was among the last men in the field, all the older men and the keener hunters stretched ahead in a long arc after the dogs. He could hear the dogs, their gross baying, their animal eagerness to kill, and it sickened him, and his legs slowed, unwillingness to see the result coinciding with his own fatigue. He fell further behind, so that even the slowest boys passed him.

  The cry of the hounds changed, and their baying became a chorus of growls and then a ferocious roar that scared him. It always scared him. He slowed down further, hoping to avoid the end, but he could already smell it — the rich earth-and-copper smell of an animal wrenched apart by a dozen sets of jaws.

  ‘You are an embarrassment,’ his father said. ‘What did I tell you?’

  Kineas cringed. ‘You said that I must not be last,’ Kineas said. ‘I tried!’ he whined.

  His father’s fist caught him on the side of the head and knocked him flat. He could smell the dead rabbit and the sweat on his father and the other men. ‘Try harder,’ his father said…

  He awoke exhausted, his bladder bursting. It was too early for the new light of day, and the cold was so deep that it was an effort of will to rise from the warmth of Niceas. The fire had sunk to mere embers, throwing little warmth and no light, and he tripped on their javelins before he found a place in the dark to relieve himself. A lifetime of camp discipline forced him to put the last of the wood on the fire but he couldn’t find the woodpile and he stumbled around, cursing the cold.

  ‘Piss for me, while you’re up,’ Niceas said.

  Kineas found the firewood by tripping over it. He gathered it up, blind, and as he found the last decent stick he heard a horse. He put the firewood near the embers and felt for a javelin. He could barely stand with the fatigue of his dream.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘Horse,’ Niceas said.

  He heard Niceas dropping the blankets as he rose. It was that quiet. Kineas reached into the still-warm blankets and retrieved his sword. He put the baldric over his shoulder and felt for his sandals. He wasn’t sure he was awake — he could barely focus his attention.

  Niceas bumped into him. ‘Two horses,’ he whispered, his mouth close.

  Alert and ready, the two men crouched back to back. After a few minutes they retrieved their cloaks and donned them.

  The sky began to show light — the first touch of the wolf’s tail.

  ‘If they’re coming, they’ll come now,’ Kineas said.

  They didn’t.

  When the sun was up, they found hoof prints in the stream bed that ran around the base of their hillside camp. A little further west, Niceas found the print of a shod horse, with a heavy toe iron like a Macedonian horse. He shook his head.

  ‘Could be anything,’ he said. ‘Might have been one of ours from yesterday. Ataelus, perhaps.’

  Kineas couldn’t get over the notion that he was being watched. High ridges rose on either side of the river, and anything might be moving in the trees up there.
/>   ‘As soon as we ride out of the stream bed, we’re visible,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ asked Niceas.

  ‘Fair enough. Let’s get out of here.’ Kineas went back to their camp and finished the tea, then retied his cloak behind him.

  They rode along the stream bed until it rejoined the road (such as it was) a couple of stades downstream, and then they rode quickly along the road, alternating trotting with short canters.

  The Tanais was entering a great curve, and the valley broadened and deepened. The river was flowing almost due north. As the ground rose, Kineas watched for the path to fork east.

  ‘There’s a sight for sore eyes,’ said Niceas.

  Kineas, intent on the trail, looked up to find a bare-chested Sauromatae girl sitting on a pony just half a stade away.

  Ataelus met them at the top of the pass where the eastern road crossed the ridge before continuing east to the Rha and the Kaspian. He had half a dozen riders with him. Two of them were wounded.

  ‘For making happy!’ Ataelus proclaimed, and grasped his arm.

  Kineas embraced the Sakje man. Then he pointed at one of the Sauromatae girls who was boiling a human skull in a pot. ‘What in Hades is that?’

  ‘Wedding present!’ Ataelus said, and laughed, slapping his knee with a calloused hand. He was so pleased with his retort that he translated it into Sakje and repeated it. All of his prodromoi howled.

  Kineas shook his head. ‘Wedding present?’ he asked.

  ‘Sauromatae girl for needing to kill man before wedding,’ Ataelus said. ‘Clean skull for stinking less, yes?’ He grinned.

  ‘Who did she kill?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘Bandits,’ Ataelus said. ‘For finding bandits in hills. Farmers say “bandits kill us steal our grain” and I say “for finding bandits.”’

  Niceas twisted his mouth and made a noise. ‘Macedonian-shod?’ he asked.

  Ataelus looked at him without comprehending. Ataelus’s Greek was good enough, but it never seemed to get better than ‘good enough’ no matter how much time he spent with them.

  Niceas got down and lifted a hoof of his Macedonian charger. He showed the shoe.