Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  Kleisthenes shook his head, but went back into the main tent looking for the scroll.

  Hephaestion, annoyed and used to getting his way, leaned past Alexander and shot a fist at the pregnant woman’s face. Heavy as she was, she moved with the blow, taking a piece of it on the crown of her head and then she was under his reach, inside his arms. He grunted and stepped back. She had his sword. He was purple with rage.

  ‘You will never conquer even the Massagetae with soldiers like this,’ she said. She held the sword in an easy stance despite her bulk. ‘Release us, O King. We have done you no harm, and the traitor Spitamenes kidnapped us from the sea of grass. He is your enemy as well as mine and if you release me, my clans will hunt him like a dog.’

  Alexander glanced at his swordless companion with grave disappointment and then turned back to Srayanka. ‘When your children are born, they will make excellent hostages,’ he said. ‘You will live comfortably with my women and when I march into your land in a few years, you can help me.’ He turned to Kleisthenes, ignoring Hephaestion. ‘The sea of grass is real! We can march to Thrace!’

  Kleisthenes was watching Hephaestion. ‘She does seem to be a real Amazon, majesty.’

  Hephaestion calmed himself. ‘I want the young one for myself,’ he said.

  Srayanka still held the sword. ‘She is the lady of the Grass Cats, a war leader and mistress of a thousand horses.’

  Hephaestion’s humour was restored by Srayanka’s reaction. ‘She can spread her legs for me as well as any woman,’ he said, and a few of the soldiers in the tent laughed. ‘Give me back my sword before someone gets hurt,’ he said in the voice he used to reason with women and animals.

  Srayanka nodded, as if thinking. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Alexander, and she cut Hephaestion across the unarmoured top of his thighs so that blood flowed like water — not a deep cut, but a painful one. Then she tossed the sword on the ground at Alexander’s feet as his guards grabbed her. ‘I don’t imagine you’ll spread a lot of legs anytime soon,’ she said into the pandemonium.

  Alexander regarded her with a mixture of horror and pleasure. ‘I shall call you Medea!’ he said.

  Srayanka shrugged. ‘Many men do,’ she said. ‘Release me, or you will suffer by it.’

  Alexander grinned — his first spontaneous grin since his ragtag army had fought its way through the drifts of snow from Kandahar. ‘I will never release you, lady,’ he said. Behind him, guardsmen and slaves were seeing to Hephaestion.

  Srayanka drew herself up, and her pregnancy only added to her dignity. ‘We will see,’ she said. She flicked a glance at Hephaestion, who was rising with the aid of two other men.

  ‘You will be raped by dogs and the corpses of your unborn children ripped from your womb and fed to them,’ Hephaestion shouted. ‘I will have you tortured until you have no skin, until-’

  Alexander slapped him and he subsided, but his eyes watched Srayanka with feverish hate.

  ‘We will see,’ she said.

  18

  Luck, good fortune, careful planning and the will of the gods got Kineas’s force across the desert in the full bloom of spring, with water at every major depression and flowers blossoming among the desolate rocks. Fifteen days after they marched, on the feast of Plynteria in Athens, the army was reunited at the edge of the endless grass that rolled away to every horizon but the one behind them, heat mirage and dust devils and a line of purple mountains in the sunset as the last token of Hyrkania.

  ‘You make good time,’ Lot said, clasping Kineas’s forearm. ‘You have truly become Sakje.’

  Kineas flushed at the praise. ‘We had perfect weather and water in every hole.’

  Lot grinned. In Sakje, he said, ‘That’s why you cross a desert in the spring. Come — I have a little bad wine and Samahe is reporting on Ataelus’s adventures in the east.’

  ‘You seem happy,’ Kineas said.

  ‘I’m home!’ Prince Lot said. ‘I think I never expected to live to get here. And here we are! My messengers are out on the grass, riding for our yurts and our people. We’ll make rendezvous in the Salt Hills, and then we will have such a feast!’

  Kineas nodded. ‘How far to the Salt Hills?’

  Lot led on to his ‘tent’, merely a square of tough linen staked over a pair of lances. Mosva poured them wine in gold cups. ‘The cups are better than the wine,’ he said. ‘Ten days and we’ll be in the hills. Ten hard days, and then you’ll have all the fodder you need until you reach Srayanka.’ The Sauromatae prince sniffed the air, which was heavy with dust and pollen, like an open bazaar. ‘That is the smell of home!’

  ‘Will you leave us?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘Never!’ Lot said. ‘Now you are in my land! I will keep you as safe as you have kept me.’ He drank his cup and Kineas finished his. ‘Ten days’ hard riding and then we feast.’

  Kineas turned to Mosva. In a way she was a woman, and then in another way she was just one of his troopers. ‘Do you fancy either Leon or Eumenes?’ he asked.

  She gave the grin of a young woman just discovering her powers. ‘Both,’ she said, and laughed.

  Lot nodded. ‘They are both fine young men.’ He shrugged. ‘Among my people, women choose their own mates. Both are rich, well-connected, brave and foreign.’ He grinned again. ‘My sister’s son inherits my tribes, no matter what road my daughter takes.’

  ‘Your sister’s son?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘Upazan,’ Lot answered, and he frowned, as if the name left a bad taste.

  ‘Ten days’ hard riding’ was repeated throughout the army as they rode east. The desert vanished behind them and they rode over downs of new grass, green as Persephone’s robe, but watercourses were rare and only rain saved them from serious consequences until they came to a great river flowing across their path, burbling brown with spring run-off across rocks.

  Kineas was on his Getae hack and he led the horse down to the water, careful not to let the beast over-drink. Diodorus and Leon were doing the same. ‘Surely this isn’t the Oxus?’ Diodorus asked.

  Kineas shook his head. ‘We must still be twenty days from the Oxus,’ he said. He rubbed his beard. ‘Or more. Lot!’ he shouted.

  Prince Lot circled his horse through the drinking animals and splashed up.

  ‘What is this river called?’ Kineas asked.

  Lot shrugged. ‘In Sakje, it is Tanais.’

  Leon was pulling his gelding clear of the water, because the horse wanted to keep drinking and Leon had no intention of letting him. From the far bank, he shouted, ‘They’re all called Tanais! It means “river”.’

  Lot shrugged. ‘No Greek name that I know,’ he said.

  Leon, who interrogated every merchant and traveller they met, went to his pack and withdrew a scroll whereon he made a few marks. ‘This must be the Sarnios,’ he said. ‘At least, that’s what the horse-dealer called it.’

  They camped in a bend of the Sarnios. Kineas sacrificed a young calf born on the march to the river goddess and ordered a few of their cattle slaughtered so that all the troops got a ration of meat with their grain. Later, well fed and greasy, they sat under the sky, wrapped in their cloaks against the cold night air, and watched the stars spread above them, backlit by the glow of Temerix’s forge in the bed of his wagon. Antigonus and Kineas worked on tack, repairing headstalls. Kineas saw that the charm Kam Baqca had given him so long ago in the winter camp on the Little Borysthenes was fraying, and he sewed it down tight. Antigonus had acquired a bronze chamfron, a piece of horse armour, but he couldn’t get it to fit his horse without troubling the animal. Every night it seemed he was making adjustments.

  ‘Wish she could talk,’ Antigonus joked. ‘Tell me if the cursed thing fits.’

  Kineas finished his much smaller project and watched Darius attaching nocks to arrow shafts in the firelight. It was finicky work. ‘Wouldn’t you do better waiting for daylight?’ Kineas asked.

  The Persian had all his arrow-making kit spread on a pale blanket. ‘Ye
s,’ he said. He swore as his hand slipped and a finished nock went sailing off into the darkness. ‘But Temerix bought charcoal from a trader. He has enough to melt bronze and he’s casting the heads tonight.’

  Kineas grinned. ‘You could still put the nocks on in daylight,’ he said.

  Darius nodded. ‘There’s never time.’ He flicked a glance at Kineas. ‘The Sauromatae saw deer tracks today. I won’t be caught unprepared!’

  Kineas laughed. ‘You had all winter to make arrows.’

  Darius ignored his commander and concentrated on his task.

  ‘Uuggh!’ said Philokles, arriving with a bowl and a slab of meat. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘Glue,’ Darius said. He had another nock ready and was fitting it on a neat dovetail into the butt of the arrow’s shaft, where the string would catch it. He rolled the nock in glue and slid it home, wiping the excess with his thumb. Then he took three carefully prepared fletchings, all cut from heron feathers, and glued them in place on the shaft. He set the arrow point-first in the ground and went on to the next shaft, methodically placing and gluing the nock.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Philokles, interested despite himself. ‘Why not set the feathers straight on? What purpose do they serve?’

  Darius dropped a fletching in the grass by the fire and swore again. By the time he recovered it, there was glue on the feather itself and Darius threw it in the fire in disgust and began to cut another.

  ‘It looks like a great deal more work than my spear,’ Philokles said.

  Kineas didn’t want to speak. It was the first time Philokles had shown interest in anything — much less humour.

  Darius fitted a new fletching and put the shaft into the ground with the other six he’d made. ‘Hunting arrows are the hardest,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Kineas asked, to keep him talking, and to keep Philokles interested.

  Darius shrugged the shrug of the young. ‘War arrows you never get back,’ he said. ‘I don’t even put nocks on them — I just cut a notch into the shaft and wrap a little cord around the base of the notch. But hunting arrows — you hope to get them back. And you shoot them farther, at harder targets. They need to be well made. My father always told us to make our own and not trust other men’s arrows.’

  Philokles nodded. ‘Why the feathers, though?’

  Darius shook his head. ‘You Greeks always ask why,’ he said. ‘Ask a real fletcher. I just do as my father taught me.’

  Kineas laughed. Philokles looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Kineas shook his head. ‘There’s something profound there,’ he said. ‘But I’m too full of beef to get my tongue around it.’

  Philokles laughed and punched his shoulder.

  Across the Sarnios, flowers bloomed, and the Sauromatae girls made themselves wreaths and wore them as they rode, Mosva looking like Artemis. The hunters shot deer in the folds of the hills, and men, when they had water, sang songs to Demeter and her swift-footed daughter returned from exile. Darius shot a deer on the first day of hunting and was insufferably proud.

  Despite Lot’s prediction, it took them a further ten days from the Sarnios, and it was one of those happy times that soldiers remember when they are old — seldom the boredom or the cold or the heat, but the beautiful spring on the plains and the Sauromatae girls riding along the flanks in fields of flowers. Meat was plentiful and horses that had been near death suddenly grew strong.

  A month after leaving Hyrkania, the hills of Dahia were visible through the heat shimmer on the eastern horizon. Men grumbled and openly wondered about their wages, and they ogled the Sauromatae girls when they stripped their tunics to ride bare-chested in the spring sun.

  Diodorus pulled his horse up next to Kineas. ‘The troops are better,’ he said. ‘Ares, it’s good to be clear of cursed Hyrkania!’

  Kineas nodded and looked at his friend, recalled from a daydream of worry about Srayanka.

  Diodorus glanced at Philokles, who was riding alone, lost in thought. ‘Is he better?’ Diodorus asked.

  Kineas nodded. ‘I think so. Are you?’

  Diodorus shrugged. ‘I’m a soldier. I’ve seen a sack before. I-’ he began, and fell silent.

  Seeing them together, Philokles pushed his heavy stallion into a trot and the horse brought him up level with the other two. Philokles would never be a natural rider, but two years in the saddle had improved him.

  ‘You two look earnest,’ he said.

  ‘We’re talking about the troops,’ Diodorus said. ‘And morale.’

  Philokles nodded. ‘They’re back to grumbling,’ the Spartan said. ‘Always a good sign.’

  ‘You’re better?’ Kineas asked.

  Philokles shrugged. ‘I’m different,’ he said.

  Kineas watched his cavalry riding by. ‘They’re all different,’ he said. ‘I’m different too.’

  ‘You let her live,’ Philokles said. ‘I have no moment of mercy to serve as a sop to my conscience. I just killed men until my arm was too tired to kill any more.’

  ‘I let her live for pretty much the same reason,’ Kineas said. ‘There was more fatigue in it than mercy.’

  ‘This is my last campaign,’ Philokles said. ‘I love you, but I cannot be a beast for ever.’

  Kineas nodded slowly. ‘It was to have been Niceas’s last campaign,’ he said. ‘He asked me to buy him a brothel in Athens.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll be the next to die, then,’ Philokles said, and laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t want a brothel, though.’ He looked over the plain. ‘It was merciful, but letting her live will cost us in the end. She can tell Alexander-’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘You and I have both been spies, brother. The world is so full of spies,’ he gave Philokles half a smile, ‘that one more won’t be a ruffle on the grass.’ He looked out over the plains, the sea of grass, almost the same as the sea where he had met Srayanka except for the brush of purple brown on the far horizon that betokened a great range of mountains. Wind whispered in the new blades, rippling the green between pale and dark like the footprints of giants racing across the steppe.

  ‘Somewhere out on the sea of grass, Alexander is waiting,’ he said.

  Diodorus shook his head. ‘Whatever he’s doing, he’s not waiting.’

  Kineas nodded. If I don’t find Srayanka, I won’t care, he thought.

  Two days on, and they met the outriders of the Sauromatae host, pickets at the edge of the green hills who watched their approach and cheered their lord, home from the wars. Lot rode at the front of the column and his young women rode along the flanks, bragging of their exploits and showing the heads of the men they’d killed. The column crested the first ridge and was able to look down into the caldera of an ancient volcano, with rich soil to the far wall several stades distant and a camp of yurts and tents that filled the plain on the far side of a small lake.

  Then they feasted for a day, resting their horses, and listened to news of the world. Truce had failed. Alexander was at war with Spitamenes, and Spitamenes was laying siege to Marakanda, while Alexander tried to relieve his hard-pressed garrisons in the north along the Jaxartes. All the tribes had been called to gather on the Jaxartes to resist him if he tried to force a crossing, with mid-summer named for the muster.

  And the ‘westerners’, Srayanka’s Sakje, were camped four days’ travel away, at a bend of the Oxus.

  It was all Kineas could do to remain patient. In his mind, he could see the shape of the campaign — the Sauromatae chieftains sketched him the lie of the land, the hills and the desert and the two great rivers that flowed through the high plains.

  Lot and his chiefs drew their world in the soft loam of the caldera floor, carefully building the Sogdian mountains to the east and the Bactrian highlands to the south, so that the mountains formed something like a curling wave design, or a cupped hand seen in profile. At the base of the palm was Merv, an ancient trade city that lay on the Margus river at the edge of the southern mountain range. Alexander had a garrison at Merv. At the tip of the
curling wave lay Marakanda — the greatest city of the plains, also on the edge of mountains. Marakanda lay on the Polytimeros, a river that flowed out of the Sogdian mountains.

  Between Merv and Marakanda flowed the mighty Oxus, the greatest river of the east. The valley of the Oxus passed between two ranges of mountains, rising far to the east in the highlands of Bactria, and it emptied into the Lake of the Sea of Grass, a distant body of water in the far north that Lot had seen and of which Leon had only heard rumours.

  The far eastern border of the Sakje lay at the Jaxartes, which ran a complex course like a writhing snake, rising in the eastern Sogdian mountains and also emptying into the Lake of the Sea of Grass, roughly parallel to the Oxus, on a diagonal course from south-east to north-west. The land between the two great rivers was the land of the Massagetae, and the queen was rallying her army north of Marakanda on the Jaxartes, so rumour had it.

  Kineas found their descriptions of the terrain bewildering, even with Leon to help him chart it and sort out the complexities. The two great rivers — the Oxus and the Jaxartes — seemed to rise close to each other and empty into the same body of water, yet they ran hundreds, sometimes thousands, of stades apart. He found it difficult to get some notion of distance out of the Sauromatae. This was their home, and the vast reach of grass — here green and deep, there patchy like the wool on a sick sheep — defined their world. They had ten alien words for the quality of grass and none for swimming.

  Greek soldiers and Sindi clansmen wrestled and rode and ran and shot bows against their hosts. Kineas gave rich prizes from Banugul’s hoard, and Lot did as well. Temerix, the best bowman on foot, received a heavy bow with minute scales of gold under a glaze or varnish that somehow did nothing to reduce the flexibility of the weapon. His victory brought dark looks from Lot’s heir, his sister’s son Upazan, a handsome blond man who seemed to feel that his uncle had already lived too long and that any contest he lost must have been unfair. Upazan had many beautiful things — a gold helmet, magnificent scale armour, a red enamelled bow and a shield covered in silver that shone like a mirror and had a curling dragon as an emblem picked out in red and solid gold. He showed it all to Kineas with pride, and clearly desired more of the same.