Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  He related the tales of his life as he sat beside a small fire, heating water to clean Niceas, who was still unconscious and had no control of his bodily functions. ‘I left home six years ago to fight the Great King,’ he said. He gave a wry smile. ‘The usurper, that is. Darius.’ He shrugged. ‘Real Persians — the true Persians of the great plain — he was never our king.’ He looked into the fire, rolled over to get more firewood and winced as the cut on his hip pained him.

  Kineas nodded.

  ‘And your Alexander rode right into our rebellion. He defeated us in the west — were you there?’

  Kineas nodded. ‘Pinarus river. I was with the Allied Cavalry.’

  Darius shook his head. ‘I was still a rebel. Then, after Alexander won, it was clear to most noblemen — clear enough to my father — that if we continued to rebel, we were handing our empire to the foreigner. So we marched to the so-called Great King at Ecbatana, and followed him to Gaugamela.’ He shrugged. ‘You were there?’

  Kineas nodded. ‘On our left.’

  Darius looked surprised. ‘Our right? I was there!’ He winced again. ‘By fire, you cut me deep.’

  Kineas began trying to feed soup to Niceas. Beyond the fire, the Sauromatae and the Sakje were mourning the dead woman, singing her songs to her pyre. The smell of horse meat was strong.

  ‘It might have been deeper,’ he said.

  The Persian nodded. ‘So it might. I was at Gaugamela, and we almost broke you.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Kineas said with satisfaction. He might not serve Macedon any more — indeed, he was probably an enemy of Macedon, when sides were counted — but Gaugamela had been the last fight of the Hellenes against the Persians, and he was proud of his role there. He had won the laurel for valour, because his unsung Allied Cavalry had held the line when the Persian cavalry threatened to break Parmenion’s flank and bury the taxeis under an avalanche of Persians.

  ‘It was the longest fight I can remember. I lost two horses — and lived.’

  Kineas nodded in agreement. In his experience, most field battles were decided fairly quickly, and the other side took the punishment when they broke. At Gaugamela, the decision hung in the balance for an hour, and both sides died.

  ‘After the battle, my father was dead and my household dispersed. My cousin claimed the lordship — he was older and…’ the Persian gave an expressive shrug. ‘We never got home. We moved north into Hyrkania, but there were too many wolves there already and we kept going until we came here. We thought to carve out a kingdom, far from the Hellenes.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile, the same smile he’d worn when he lost his sword in the fight. ‘We ended up as bandits.’

  ‘This might make a good kingdom,’ Kineas said. He pointed at Niceas’s form. ‘He thinks so.’ They sat in companionable silence for some time. Eventually, Kineas asked, ‘Are you worth a ransom?’

  ‘Somewhere, if my mother lives, I have some small riches,’ the man admitted. He shrugged again — he shrugged a lot. ‘I doubt it. You Greeks have everything around Ecbatana now, and most of our eastern holdings, too. We had a tower in Bactria — I doubt it even tried to hold your mad king.’

  ‘Not my mad king,’ Kineas began. It was his turn, and the young Persian with the perpetual shrugs was a good companion. Kineas intended to win him as a friend and put him in a troop — he was a good sword, too good to waste. But Niceas chose that moment to sputter around a spoonful of soup. His body gave a spasm and he sprayed soup out of his mouth.

  His eyes were open.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he said.

  Kineas felt his eyes fill with tears. ‘You stupid cocksucker,’ he said with tones of those born to the agora in Athens. ‘You fell off your horse!’

  Niceas smiled. ‘More soup,’ he said.

  The next day, Diodorus caught up with them. His part of the army camped above them on the heights where the road turned east and went down into the country of the Rha. Diodorus came down the ridge with a dozen troopers, including Coenus and Eumenes.

  Diodorus went straight to Niceas, as did Coenus. Afterwards, Diodorus ordered a tent put up for the strategos, and Eumenes went to fetch it. ‘I heard the old man was dead,’ Diodorus said. His face was still red and blotched from emotion — perhaps from weeping. ‘He’s saved my life more times than my nanny paddled my behind. I came as fast as I could.’

  Kineas nodded. He’d slept through the night once Niceas’s sleep had given way to healthy snores, and he felt ten years younger. ‘I thought he was gone,’ Kineas admitted.

  Coenus was feeding the hyperetes more barley soup. ‘He still looks like shit,’ he said.

  Niceas croaked something about feeling better.

  Kineas shook his head. ‘He took an arrow in the side. We weren’t in armour. Bad decision on my part. And the bandits were good — damned good. Tough fight.’

  Coenus thrust his chin at the Persian who was tending the soup. ‘Prisoner?’

  Kineas nodded. ‘And recruit. When Eumenes gets back, put him in his troop. He’s a swordsman — as good as me. I assume he can ride.’

  Coenus laughed. ‘He is a Persian.’ He coughed. ‘You and Ataelus killed all his friends…’

  ‘I get the feeling he doesn’t miss them. If he cuts all our throats, I’ll be proven wrong.’ Kineas pulled his cloak tighter. ‘I’ll stay here with Niceas.’

  Coenus and Diodorus exchanged glances. ‘Nah,’ said Coenus. ‘You’re the strategos. This isn’t the only bandit band — ask Ataelus. The plains are full of them, by all accounts. You go and command. Leave me with my section and I’ll bring the old boy along when he’s ready.’

  Diodorus stepped forward. ‘He’s right, Kineas.’

  Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘You are both correct, of course. Very well. Coenus, I’ll send your section down the ridge. Diodorus, let’s get Ataelus and plan the next set of marches. Lot is five days behind you. Somebody gets to tell him that his daughter is dead.’

  Diodorus winced as if cut.

  The high plains between the Tanais and the Rha were indeed full of bandits — an endless profusion of masterless Persians and outlawed nomads and Macedonian deserters, so that there wasn’t an intact farmstead between the two rivers. Four years of war in Hyrkania and the south had filled the high plains with the human flotsam of war, and like wolves on the verge of a hard winter, they were desperate men. When forced, they fed on each other, band against band. All raided the settlements on the expanding edge of their self-made desert. Ataelus had already lost three men to them before the fight with the bandits on the Tanais, and his prodromoi were eager for revenge.

  Kineas and Diodorus assigned the second troop, heavy with the Keltoi, to reinforce Ataelus. Kineas took charge of the column and Diodorus took charge of the extermination of the bandits. He didn’t catch as many as he wanted to, but the main body crossed the high plains to the valleys of the Rha without losing a single horse or man, and unknown to them, the Sindi and Maeotae farmers blessed them. Diodorus drove the larger groups across the marshes to the north, and twice he caught bands and the Keltoi and the Sauromatae wrecked them. They brought back a rich haul of horses, some very fine, and enough gold and silver to please the men who did the fighting. Casualties were gratifyingly light — as was to be expected when employing overwhelming force.

  Kineas called his new horse ‘Thalassa’, after days of riding the magnificent silver charger and trying out various temporary names (‘Brute’ seemed the front runner, as the beast towered over most of the other warhorses by the width of a man’s hand). The big horse had the colour of a stormy day at sea. She was sure-footed and had an amazing quality of stillness — not lack of spirit, but something like patience — that suited a commander’s horse. And on the day that Sappho insisted that so noble an animal needed a better name than ‘Brute’, the lead elements of the army crested the last ridge of the Rha’s frontier and saw the Kaspian sparkling in the distance, the Bay of the Rha full of ships, and like Xenophon’s men seventy
years before, they cried out for the sea, and the name was given.

  The crossing had not been particularly arduous except for recruits and the men of second troop who’d spent a week fighting bandits, but the army’s grain supply was very low — most men had only a day’s grain in their packs, or less if they’d been improvident. The sight of fifty small boats in the bay raised everyone’s spirits, and the presence of Philokles on the gravel and mud beach drew a roar of acclaim. Kineas embraced him.

  ‘Does this place have a name?’ Kineas asked. Philokles smelled clean.

  ‘Errymi, the Maeotae call it.’ The Spartan gave a wry smile. ‘It is good to see you, Kineas.’

  Kineas embraced him again for an answer. ‘Are all those for us?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘If we can pay,’ Philokles answered. ‘Otherwise, I suspect they’ll murder me and sail away.’

  Kineas watched the mules bearing the army’s treasury coming down the last ridge, guarded by the most trustworthy men in the army. ‘And wintering over?’

  ‘Northern Hyrkania,’ Philokles responded. ‘Strategos, your kingdom awaits.’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t want a kingdom.’

  Philokles gave an enigmatic smile. ‘How about a woman?’ he asked.

  Kineas laughed. ‘I have a woman. She’s ten thousand stades distant, but I’ll catch up.’

  Philokles gave him an odd look. ‘Have you made an offering to Aphrodite, brother?’ he asked.

  Kineas laughed. ‘No!’ he said.

  Philokles gave a distant smile. ‘You should.’ He looked over the sea. ‘Our winter camp is in a kingdom ruled by a woman, and she — she moved me, and I have no tenderness for women. I fear for you.’

  Kineas furrowed his brow, stung. ‘What reason have I ever given you to fear for my behaviour with a woman?’ he asked.

  Philokles continued to watch him with the air of a man who has seen the world. ‘I would prefer you to cross the Kaspian with your eyes open. This woman desires power, and men with power fascinate her. She lay with Alexander, they say. Now she awaits us.’ He glanced around. ‘She offers a great deal of treasure for our spring campaign.’

  Kineas shrugged. ‘I’m of a mind now to push on in spring. The march went well and the bandits in the hills put some gold in our coffers.’ He looked at the ships. ‘And our ally? Leon’s factor?’

  ‘Her late husband. She remains an ally — she paid Leon an enormous backlog of moneys owed without demur — but I doubt her. I wish you to be immune to her.’

  Kineas shook his head in mock wonder. ‘I am immune,’ he said.

  Nihmu laughed. ‘No man is immune to the yatavu of Hyrkania,’ she said, ‘except those who love only men.’ She came and went from the command group, red hair like a helmet crest announcing her arrival. She sat on her great white horse amid the mud and the flotsam on the beach. ‘If you fail, Strategos, your children will not rule here.’

  ‘What?’ Kineas shrugged and turned his back on her. She spoke like an oracle, but she was a stripling, and he was busy. ‘Think as you will. This is a foolish conversation. To whom do we speak about paying these ships?’ he asked Philokles.

  Philokles explained that every captain was an independent operator. The boats were small — half the size of a Greek pentekonter, and some smaller than that, with ten or twelve oars a side. A few were sailing vessels, like large fishing smacks. Kineas cast his eyes across them and shook his head, changing the subject again to calm his temper. ‘I don’t see transport for two thousand horses,’ he said.

  Philokles rubbed his forehead, pulled his cloak tighter against the autumn wind and met Kineas’s eye. ‘Two hundred horses at a time,’ he said. ‘It was the best I could do.’

  Kineas nodded apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean you haven’t done your best,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough that you are here, and with food and so much transport. Let’s start shipping them across the sea. How many days?’

  ‘Two days each way, with luck and a friendly wind. It is a very small sea.’

  Kineas shaded his eyes with his hand, pushing his straw hat back on his head to keep the flapping brim out of his line of sight. ‘We captured quite a few horses on the way here,’ he said. ‘Let us arrange sacrifices to Poseidon, and some games — horse races such as the Trident-bearer values above all things. Let us celebrate his power tonight. And then let’s start loading. The autumn is wearing on, and winter is coming.’

  Kineas was among the last of his men to leave for the winter camp in Hyrkania. He stayed on the beach in Errymi to shepherd the men across, to keep morale high on the beach, to prevent incidents with the locals… and to wait for Niceas.

  As the weeks passed, while storms slowed the ferries and the stores of food dwindled and the conditions in the seaside camp worsened, he found that his presence heartened his men and that all his skills as a leader were required to prevent mischief and even murder. He had the cavalrymen dig earthworks, an unheard-of demand that served to raise a barrier against the constant wind and, more importantly, against boredom — at least until the walls were complete.

  Prince Lot’s knights were even less inclined to dig than Greek aristocrats, but time and the example of Prince Lot himself got most of them to it, and Kineas was too versed in military leadership to believe that every one of the Sauromatae needed to be set to digging. Some hunted — for food and also for bandits. The killing of Lot’s elder daughter was a mistake for which the masterless men of the high plains paid for three months, and the aggressive mourning of the Sauromatae would cease only when the last boats were rowed away from the empty marching camp. Kineas didn’t intend to burn the huts that had been built, however. Instead, he handed the finished work to a group of Maeotae farmers, dispossessed men whose families had been burned out by the bandits and who had fled to the marshes to eke out a living. With the marching camp as a fortified town, they had every chance of holding their own. A dozen Keltoi, too badly wounded in the fall’s fighting to make the crossing, would remain as military settlers.

  Kineas discovered that it was Niceas he was hanging on for when he saw the unmistakable width of Coenus’s broad shoulders coming down the ridge from the west. Closer up, the dozen Greek troopers were obviously not a returning patrol, and closer still, Kineas could see Niceas, swathed in fur robes, riding a big pony.

  Kineas sent a boy for his riding horse and went out to meet them, his throat tight. It remained tight while he embraced Niceas, who winced and cursed, and Coenus, and Crax and Sitalkes and Antigonus. Niceas looked twenty years older, and Coenus looked considerably thinner, but the rest of them smiled a great deal and shuffled when Kineas praised them.

  Privately, Coenus was less sanguine. ‘He’s not the same,’ Coenus said. Niceas was sitting on the rim of the hearth, visibly soaking up warmth. ‘I’m not sure he’ll ever fight again. But he’s alive, and he’s as tough as a slave’s sandal.’ Coenus drank back his wine — his third cup — and swallowed a handful of olives.

  ‘Was it hard?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘Never,’ Coenus said. ‘Best hunting of my life. Like Xenophon’s notion of Elysium. After Lot came, we sent back for grain, and later the farmers came to us. It was never dull, and those are good men you gave me.’ His grin had a self-conscious air to it. ‘I loved it.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Niceas says we should carve a kingdom out of this land.’ Coenus, usually fastidious, had a bushy beard, and he rubbed it with his fingers as if embarrassed by it. ‘I want to sign up. I’ll put a shrine to Artemis in that valley — I know just the spot. I’ll hunt until I’m too old to ride, and then I’ll sit around losing my teeth and telling lies.’ Then he stopped grinning. ‘Watching him was hard,’ he said.

  Niceas was grey with fatigue and went to bed too soon.

  Kineas lay next to Niceas in the tent. Niceas slept more deeply than he had before his wound, and he lay still, as if in death, so that Kineas often listened to him like an anxious parent with a sick child, leaning across the older man’s body to h
ear his soft breathing. Tonight, Kineas had Philokles on his other side — it was a cold, damp night with a threat of freezing rain in the air, and every man in the army pushed close to his tent mates.

  Kineas was tired with worry and relief, but sleep would not come, and he lay listening to the sounds made by his night guards, by two thousand horses in the dark, by a few foolish soldiers lingering late by their mess fires. They, too, were relieved to find that boats were waiting for them.

  And then, as subtle as the first fall of snow, he was… standing amidst the bones at the base of the tree, surrounded by the silent combat of dead friends against dead foes. He reached for a limb and drew himself up until the combat beneath him vanished and he looked up. The tree towered over him, reaching into the sky. He noticed that the tree lacked the misty quality of his first dreams — now it was as palpable and as solid as any tree outside the world of dreams.

  The owl shot by and made a showy landing above him, and squawked. Kineas grinned at it.

  ‘I know what I’m here for,’ he told the owl. Instead of a slow climb, he reached for a branch overhead, planted his feet and leaped to grab the next major limb.

  He just caught it, and he hung for a moment, the strain on his arms as real as anything in the outer world, and it took the concentration of all his years on the floor of various gymnasiums to lever himself up and over, to lie panting for a full minute before he pushed himself up and climbed carefully to his feet…

  In the agora of his youth with a sack of scrolls hanging over his arm — fourteen, too young to be a man and old enough to desire to be one. Diodorus and Graccus walked by his side, alert for trouble. Demosthenes had spoken in the assembly against Philip of Macedon, and all of the agora was talking about it. Kineas and his two best friends drifted from group to group, abandoning the safety of their group of rich boys to listen to the conversation of older men.

  There was a large circle of men gathered around Apollion, and he walked around them. Apollion — tall, handsome, blond Apollion, who the assembly loved and who fought in the front rank in the phalanx — had made advances, just yesterday, making it clear that he could push Kineas’s career as an orator if Kineas would suck his dick for a few years. He’d put it better than that, but Kineas’s anger — and fear, for Apollion was a big man, dangerous in combat and in the assembly — blinded him to rational behaviour. He’d struck Apollion, in front of everyone in the gymnasium, and fled.