Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  Kineas flicked his shield out, caught another man’s shield with his own rim and pulled. Then his sword licked out, thrusting into the man’s chest. He thrust too hard and his borrowed sword fouled, caught on a rib. He kicked, pulled, pushed with his shield as the dying man screamed.

  The sword broke at the hilt, leaving Kineas with a hand’s-breadth of iron.

  Too late to hesitate.

  He threw the hilt into his next opponent’s face. Then, using a pankration move learned from Phocion, he lunged, throwing his shield leg back, and his empty sword hand grasped the rim of the next man’s shield and used it as a lever, ripping the arm in a circle and breaking it. He hammered his shield into the man’s undefended face as he fell, grabbed for the man’s sword and missed. The man’s sword clattered against the cobbles of the floor, vanished in the darkness. A spear punched into his shield, penetrating the bronze surface and embedding in the wood lining. Kineas used his superior leverage to rip the shield free. Again the spear came at him, this time raking his shin because he couldn’t see it coming low. He stepped back and the spearman came forward, the point of a three-man wedge that filled the corridor.

  Darius was still fighting a man from the last rush. He gave a shout and his opponent screeched as Darius cut off his hand. The man backed away, blood spurting from the stump, and the three spearmen lost several heartbeats as they tried to cover him.

  ‘Sword!’ Kineas said. He put his hand back.

  Darius slapped his own sword into the open hand.

  Just like that.

  Kineas stepped forward, took the lead man’s spearhead on his shield where he could feel it and pushed, fouling the man’s weapon. The man set his feet and pushed back, his mates helping him. Kineas felt the strain and tilted his shield, bent his knees and rolled low, passing his shield under the lip of his opponent’s, kneeling on the damp flagstone. He cut low, felt an impact and stood up, pushing with his legs as Darius came up to guard his back, and the lead man staggered back, shouting that he was cut, and the rest broke, fleeing as best they could from the terror of the darkness and the blood.

  Darius rose next to him, having found the sword of the man whose wrist he’d severed.

  ‘Thanks,’ Kineas said. The daimon of combat left him, and his knees began to shake. He was alive! He almost fell. His chiton was drenched in sweat.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Darius said in court Persian. He was grey, but he managed a smile. ‘Could I have my sword back, do you think?’

  Kineas met his eye. They exchanged swords, and something more.

  Between them, with shaking hands, they got the postern open. Instead of fleeing, they admitted Kineas’s guardsmen, who, drawn by his shouts, were already tearing at the door from the outside. And then, leaving four men under Sitalkes to hold the gate and sending a mounted man to the camp, Kineas led the rest of them back into the citadel for the Kelt.

  They found him alive, cleared the corridor in front of him and retreated from a volley of arrows. Carlus was wounded in more places than Kineas could count in the dark, and he was no longer smiling.

  ‘You come!’ he said, six or seven times, before he passed out. He fell a few feet from the postern and no one could carry him, so they pulled him to one side and prepared to hold the corridor, piling tables and trunks against the walls as cover from arrows.

  ‘You should go, sir,’ Sitalkes said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Darius. He was still bleeding, despite a linen wrap, and his pallor had reached a dangerous level. He spoke as if sleepwalking.

  Kineas longed to go, but his own sense of himself as a man wouldn’t permit it. ‘No,’ he said.

  They waited for a rush of guardsmen. Twice, men peeked around the far corner of the corridor, bronze glinting in the fitful light of the cressets. The nearest one was burning down, past the pitch to the solid wood that burned faster but gave less light. Pine wood smoke and ordure scents mixed, and smoke began to fill the corridor.

  An arrow whispered out of the dark. It glanced off Sitalkes’ cavalry breastplate and ripped across another man’s bridle hand before embedding itself in an upturned table.

  They all crouched low, as much to get their heads out of the smoke as to avoid the arrows.

  ‘Get ready,’ Kineas said.

  ‘Listen!’ Darius said, and collapsed, his limbs loosening all at once so that he slumped forward and his head rang as it hit a table.

  ‘Shit,’ said Sitalkes. He and one of the Keltoi grabbed the Persian under the arms and pulled him out of the line and back to the relative safety of the door.

  ‘I hear it too,’ said another man. ‘Fighting!’

  Now Kineas could hear it. There was fighting somewhere else — Ares! What in Hades was going on? He rose to his feet and leaned out of the postern gate. There was movement on the slope below him, a line of shapes climbing the hill. He watched them for a long moment — one of the longest of his life — and then he identified something about the set of the cloak and the particular movements of the lead man.

  ‘Diodorus!’ he called.

  In moments, the postern was crowded with armoured men — dismounted cavalry. Andronicus took command of all the Keltoi. Diodorus embraced Kineas.

  ‘We heard you were dead!’ he said.

  ‘Not dead yet.’ A roar shook the rafters. ‘What in Hades?’

  ‘Before we got your message, Philokles and Niceas said that something was wrong. They’re rushing the main gate.’

  ‘Ares and Aphrodite! They’ll be slaughtered!’ Kineas looked around wildly, even as Nicanor pushed forward, almost devoid of breath from the exertion of climbing the steepest face of the hill, Kineas’s helmet and breastplate clasped against his paunch.

  ‘Right,’ said Diodorus. He looked up and down the smoky corridor. ‘Andronicus, take your troop and push down that corridor. Eumenes, take your troop with me. Kill everyone.’

  Kineas got his head into his breastplate. ‘Diodorus-’

  Diodorus pushed past him. ‘You’re done, Strategos. Let us do our jobs. Right, follow me!’

  Kineas refused to be set aside. Still wearing his captured shield, he pushed in behind Diodorus. They shoved the makeshift barriers out of the way in one long push.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Kineas,’ Diodorus said.

  ‘I know how to get to the gate!’ Kineas said.

  An arrow came out of the dark.

  ‘Shit,’ Diodorus said. ‘Charge!’ he yelled, and he was off down the corridor.

  Kineas struggled to keep up and a flood of men led by Eumenes pushed behind him. At the corner, Eumenes pushed his strategos out of the way and got ahead. Side by side with Diodorus, he cleared the corridor, killing an archer and wounding another before the mass of them broke, screaming in panic.

  The Hellenes poured in behind them. More men were coming through the postern, and they followed their appointed leaders blindly into the smoke and the darkness. Leon pushed past Kineas without knowing him and raced down the corridor to Diodorus and Eumenes, who were ten strides ahead, and they went up an undefended flight of stairs. Kineas could barely make his legs push him up behind them. Two more men passed him. The sounds of fighting were closer.

  ‘We’re above the gate,’ Diodorus said, apparently to Eumenes.

  In the distance, ‘ Apollo! Apollo! ’, and the screams of wounded men. That was Philokles’ roar. Kineas felt new strength from the gods flood into his legs, and he flew up the rest of the stairs and saw Eumenes’ silver-chased breastplate glitter coldly at the end of another passageway and Leon’s black legs shining in the torchlight. Kineas ran, his bare feet slapping on stone.

  The stupid barbarian archers were running for their friends and leading Diodorus to the gate. Kineas understood that even as he leaped over another dead archer in the semi-darkness. There was more smoke than before — something was on fire.

  ‘Athena!’ Diodorus roared — difficult to believe that such a thin man could release such a war cry. ‘ Apollo! ’ Closer.


  Kineas was right behind Eumenes and another trooper — Amyntas, one of Heron’s gentlemen — and Leon. Eumenes and Leon were shoulder to shoulder, looking like gods in the flickering light. Diodorus hammered his shoulder into a closed door and it gave. As Leon and Eumenes added their weight, the door blew open and all three stumbled. An archer shot. Panicked or not, his arrow flew over Leon’s bowed head and punched Amyntas off his feet. Kineas leaped over the falling man and cut the archer down. His own sword felt good in his hand. He raised his shield and took an arrow, and then another, and pushed forward.

  A spearhead came past him: Eumenes, covering him. He roared his war cry — it came out thin and high, ‘Athena!’ — and then he felt resistance against his shield and Eumenes was shoving against his back and he cut low. The resistance gave way and he felt a rush of cold air.

  There were stars overhead. He was standing at the entrance to a tower, up on the wall and close to the main gate.

  Somehow, Philokles had opened the gate. He stood in the courtyard, killing, with bodies all around him and the whole mass of the garrison trying to evict him and the men with him. ‘Apollo!’ he roared, and Kineas answered ‘Athena!’ and the garrison soldiers looked up and saw their doom behind them on the wall.

  With the unanimity of despair, they broke, and the Hellenes hunted them through the corridors and killed them where they found them. The citadel was stormed, and too many of the Olbians had fallen in the taking to allow for any human behaviour by the stormers. They were animals, and like animals they roared through the rooms and corridors, destroying, raping, killing.

  Kineas made no attempt to stop it. He could not have stopped it had he wished — the law of war was strict and the citadel had been stormed. And he lacked any will to resist. He came down from the wall with an avenging rush and they cleared the courtyard in moments, but the Olbian dead were everywhere, some burned with hot sand and some stabbed with many spears, and between Philokles’ wide spread legs was the body of Niceas.

  Kineas threw himself on the body of his boyhood friend. Niceas was burned with sand and had a great gash on his unhelmeted head and a spear in his side, but he still had breath in him.

  ‘He lives!’ Kineas proclaimed.

  Niceas shook his head gently. ‘Saves you the price of a brothel,’ he said, and coughed blood.

  ‘No,’ Kineas said. ‘No — Niceas!’

  ‘Graccus is waiting for me,’ Niceas said. He smiled, like a man who sees home at the end of a long journey, and died.

  And Kineas held him for a while, until the skin under his forearms started to cool.

  ‘Let’s kill every fucker in the castle,’ Philokles said. He didn’t sound like himself. But Kineas thought it sounded like a fine plan.

  Dawn. Smoke from burning sheds and the remnants of fires. Olbians, their faces black with soot, huddled against the wind, their bodies slack from exhaustion and guilt. Beyond sated. No man can survive a storming action and ever forget what he did when he was a beast.

  A carpet of bodies from the courtyard to the throne room.

  The floors were cold.

  Leon had saved many of the citadel’s slaves. He and Nicanor and Eumenes had pushed them into the queen’s bedchamber and held the door. So in the light of dawn, Eumenes brought Banugul to Kineas where he sat on her throne. The blade of his Egyptian sword was clean, because he had wiped it fastidiously on the cloak of Sartobases. Just beyond Sartobases was the corpse of Therapon, who had died in the guards’ last stand, cut down by Philokles.

  Kineas and Eumenes and Banugul were the only living people in the room. The scenes of orgy and debauchery on the walls were sad and pathetic.

  ‘I found her among the slaves,’ Eumenes said.

  Kineas nodded.

  ‘I heard that — that Niceas is dead.’

  ‘Niceas is dead,’ Kineas said, and tears flowed. Eumenes joined him.

  Kineas rose from her throne and walked to them. ‘I came to offer you life,’ he said. ‘You stupid bitch.’ The anger in him was great enough to kill her, but her death was not enough.

  She met his eye steadily. ‘I had no choice,’ she said. ‘Kill me if you must. Throw my body to your wolves to rape if that sates you.’ Her voice shook with terror, and yet through her terror she was in control of herself. ‘I did what I had to, and failed. I will not go down to hell with lies.’

  Kineas punched her so hard that her head snapped back and she shot off her feet and fell in a heap. ‘What could possibly excuse this?’ Kineas bellowed. She had fallen across the bodies of several of her courtiers, and she was fouled with their blood and worse. She spat blood and rose on one arm.

  ‘Alexander has murdered Parmenion,’ she said through a split lip and bruised jaw.

  Kineas stumbled back and sat on the throne as if Ares had cut the sinews of his legs. ‘Gods,’ he said.

  ‘My so-called father will be on me in a month with five thousand men, desperate to wipe me out before he too is attacked by Alexander.’ She held her bruised head high. ‘I am not a slave, to bow my head. Alexander is my lord, and I will fight.’

  Kineas didn’t want to look at her. The urge to kill was not sated. Every time he thought of Niceas’s corpse in the courtyard, he was ready to send more souls to Hades. But another part of him cried for redemption — the part that had roamed the corridors, exterminating archers who would have surrendered and joined him, perhaps, had his sword let them live. Yet another part accused him of behaving badly — seeking revenge on her for her role in showing him weak.

  ‘I’m sorry that I hit you,’ he said.

  She said nothing. Her eyes roamed the room, looking at the dead.

  ‘Go to him, then,’ he said. ‘Take your slaves and go.’

  ‘You were right,’ she said, her voice dead.

  ‘Right?’ he asked. What did he expect her to say?

  ‘My garrison wasn’t worth a crap,’ she said coldly. ‘I wish you had joined me.’

  He shook his head. ‘Get you gone before I change my mind,’ he said.

  In an hour, she was gone. And he was master of a citadel full of corpses.

  16

  Niceas’s funeral games lasted three days, after two weeks of preparations. Slaves and freedmen and farmers cleaned the citadel, and Kineas declared that all taxes and tribute would be remitted in exchange for a tithe on spring fodder and wagons. Nor did he offer any other choice — his soldiers collected the tithe with drawn weapons. It was ugly, like everything about Hyrkania in the aftermath of the escalade.

  Eumenes and Leon seemed reconciled by their shared roles as heroes, but their reconciliation lasted only until they wrestled for the prize of the funeral games on the third day, with Mosva watching them. The bout became ugly and all their wounds were ripped open in a single word when Leon said something while his opponent had his head down in a hold, and then they were fighting like dogs.

  Leon won.

  Ataelus had returned with the rest of the prodromoi on the third day of games, in time to join all the old hands in throwing torches on to Niceas’s pyre. He wept with them, and threw his best gold-hilted dagger on to the roaring blaze.

  Philokles had barely spoken since the storming. He sat in silence and was drunk most of the time. Only Kineas and Diodorus and Sappho knew that he had tried to kill himself with his sword. Sappho had caught him at it and they had all wrestled the blade away from him, Sappho cut and bleeding, until Philokles screamed, ‘Can I do nothing but injure and kill! Let me go!’ and subsided into weeping. That was in the first few days after the action, and Philokles wasn’t the only man in despair.

  At the games, he was silent. He stood alone, and when men went to embrace him, he turned away. Kineas failed to move him. It was Ataelus who pushed past his rudeness. He placed himself in front of the Spartan, hands on hips, weeping unabashedly in the Scythian manner. When he had the silent man’s attention, he demanded, ‘Niceas for killing enemies?’

  Philokles’s face was streaked with tears in t
he firelight. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many in last fight?’ Ataelus asked. He didn’t seem to know, or care, what Philokles was suffering.

  Philokles flinched. ‘Two,’ he said.

  Ataelus nodded. ‘Two is good,’ he said. ‘And you?’ He looked at the Spartan curiously. ‘For revenge? You were killing?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Philokles bitterly. ‘I killed quite a few. Six or seven in combat — perhaps twice that in cowering, defenceless men. At least one woman. I am very proud. ’

  Ataelus, immune to his tone, nodded. ‘Good. Twenty men — good. And you, Kineax?’

  Kineas shrugged. ‘The same.’

  Ataelus shook his head. ‘For thinking my friend goes to hell alone! Long faces and tears! Dies like airyanam! Kills two, even for being wounded! And friends who love him kill forty mens to serve him in death? For what crying?’

  Kineas took his arm. ‘We behaved like beasts,’ he said. He didn’t know how to explain it to the Sakje.

  But Ataelus shrugged him off. He looked around the ruddy faces lit by the pyre. ‘War is for making all men beasts,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Hunt men, kill men, act like beast, hunt like beast. Yes?’ He shook his head. ‘All war bad. All not-war good. But when for making war, then for fighting like beast. Yes?’ He shrugged. ‘Love Niceas,’ he said, and struck his chest. Then he embraced Philokles, who tried to avoid the embrace and was then trapped by the smaller man.

  And one by one, all the old hands, the men who had ridden north from Tomis almost two years before and the men who had followed Alexander from Granicus to Ecbatana and the newer men who had stopped Zopryon on the plains, embraced like brothers, and they all embraced Philokles.

  That night, for the first time in months, Kineas dreamed of the tree. And Niceas stood among the tangled roots with Ajax, and both of them offered him hands full of sand. He wept when he awoke, but he began to understand. It scared him.

  Carlus survived, as did Darius. They each took the better part of the next month to recover, and Kineas had so many wounded from the storming that he couldn’t start his little force in motion. As it turned out, the weather, which had promised an early spring, then deteriorated, and it wasn’t until a week after Niceas’s funeral that they had another sight of the sun. The ground began to dry.