He had been riding for almost a minute with only his knees, his charger responding magnificently, but now Kineas reached again for the dangling reins, looking right and left, exhausted by the intensity and the exertion. His breath came in wracking heaves and his knees threatened to lose their grip on his mount. His right wrist barely responded.
Diodorus smacked Red Cloak in the side of his helmeted head with the full swing of his cornel-wood javelin, and the man went down, unconscious or dead. Diodorus immediately began bellowing for the Olbians to rally. Eumenes met Kineas’s eyes — he’d downed his man and was also looking around. In the river bed, the big Keltoi on their heavy chargers had blasted the rest of the bodyguard to shreds and were cleaning up. Carlus was already off his horse, stripping the corpses of his victims. Sitalkes gave Kineas a satisfied smile — not bloodlust, but pleasure at being alive.
The shattering noise of the melee died suddenly to horse sounds and human agony.
Diodorus was everywhere, rallying his men and watching the battle. Kineas let him do it. He was riding for Srayanka.
To the north, Bain’s riders were pressing closer to the beleaguered mercenaries and the Macedonian mounted infantry, firing as they went. The whole fight had become a dust cloud and a cacophony of noise. Horses were dying with screams of anguish. To the south, something had happened — Kineas couldn’t see any fighting at all, but neither was there any sign of the mercenary infantry. To the east there was a battle haze rising — someone was engaged with the Sauromatae in the river bed.
All of it could wait while he greeted her. She was off her horse, standing against one of the ancient altars.
‘Srayanka,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I feel as if I’m going to die,’ she said, so very much herself that Kineas had to smile despite her words. He started to dismount, leaving Thalassa to crop grass in the middle of a battle.
‘Fight your battle!’ she said through gritted teeth. And then she gave a cry, somewhere between grunt and scream.
‘You-’ he said, and took her in his arms.
‘Bah,’ she murmured into his cloak. ‘You’re covered in blood.’ But she smiled.
Behind him, Andronicus called to him. He turned to see Andronicus and beyond him he saw Ataelus coming from the west, riding flat out.
‘Look!’ yelled Eumenes. He was pointing west, beyond Ataelus. Kineas turned.
There was a dust cloud — a huge cloud that rose like an avenging god over the plains. It was large enough to be another army, and that army was close.
‘Athena guard us!’ Kineas prayed, reaching for his helmet and finding it gone. A random arrow fell close. ‘Rally the Olbians!’
Diodorus had the task in hand. Philokles ran up leading his horse. He, too, began to call for the Olbians to rally. Antigonus surfaced from a knot of Keltoi and began to beat them into column.
‘Rhomboid!’ Kineas yelled to Diodorus.
Ataelus rode down into the ford and his horse’s hooves raised a crystal spray from the red-brown water. His face was a mask of panic. Time slowed. Kineas had time to release Srayanka so that she slumped by the altar.
Urvara seized his hand and broke the spell. ‘She’s karsanth!’ The Sakje woman wheeled her horse and pointed at Srayanka. ‘ Karsanth! Do you understand?’
Kineas didn’t understand, and Ataelus was there, and time was speeding along. ‘Big column — ten and ten, a hundred times — more! For coming here!’ He gesticulated wildly.
Kineas took a deep breath, the scent of honeysuckle and copper blood mixing like a drug in his nose. Karsanth? Poisoned? ‘Who?’ he asked Ataelus. ‘Macedonian?’
Ataelus shook his head. ‘Big and fast,’ he said. ‘For waiting too long,’ he said with bitter self-recrimination.
‘What is karsanth?’ Kineas asked Ataelus and Eumenes.
They looked at each other while Urvara shook her head. ‘ Karsanth! Karsanth! How stupid are you? ’ She was as frustrated with herself as with him.
Bain’s Sakje were out of the river bed now, up on the bank of the river in the sand and gravel, riding in a tight ring around the crumbling wreck of two hundred Macedonians and mercenary cavalry. Even as he watched, Bain waved his bow and his trumpeter blew a long, complex call, almost like a paean, and the Sakje turned inward as one and fell on the Macedonians hidden in the dust cloud. Except that the Macedonians weren’t considered the best cavalry in the world for nothing, and even shot to pieces by archery they couldn’t answer, they hadn’t lost their will to fight. In the few heartbeats Kineas watched, he saw Bain die on a lance.
‘Giving birth!’ Eumenes shouted. ‘She’s giving birth! She’s in labour!’ The young man wheeled his horse and looked at her. She was crouched by the altar, unable to move, her face a rictus of pain.
Kineas looked back at the dust cloud, and over at his love, and before he even knew what he was going to say, his arm came up. He turned to Diodorus. ‘Take the Olbians — straight up the side and over the Companions. Wipe them out. Take the casualties — we need a clear retreat. You have to build the road. Do you understand?’
Diodorus slammed his sword hand into his breastplate in salute. His face was set. ‘I absolutely understand, Strategos.’
‘Carry on!’ Kineas turned to Andronicus. ‘As soon as you hit the Macedonians,’ he said, ‘sound the retreat. Sound it over and over. Understand?’
The big Gaul nodded.
Finally, Kineas rode to Srayanka. She had her forehead on the altar, and her whole body spasmed. Urvara rode up next to him and her look at Kineas begged him to do something.
Kineas reached down as Srayanka began to recover from her contraction. Their eyes met, and then their hands, and he reached to pull her across his saddle.
‘Do not mistake me for some weakling!’ she said. ‘I will ride! I am the Lady Srayanka, not some Greek camp follower!’
‘We must ride,’ he said patiently. Behind him, his ambush was coming apart, and men were dying.
She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. ‘So be it,’ she said. With bitter practicality, she said, ‘Get me on my horse.’
Kineas and Urvara managed it. She was not light, but they were strong, and behind them, the battle exploded into life.
Two hundred paces distant, the Olbian rhomboid crashed into the fight between the Sakje and the Companions. The Macedonians were brave and skilled, but they had neither the weight nor the numbers to stop the Olbians. The crash of the Olbian onset was like a hundred maniac cooks beating on copper cauldrons and it carried over the whole battlefield.
Srayanka had a Macedonian horse — a beauty, but not heavy enough for war. Kineas reached for her reins and she stopped him with a look.
‘I have not come all this way to lose you in a cavalry fight,’ he said.
‘I have not lived all my life on the back of a horse just to fall off when I’m pregnant,’ she answered. She smiled at him, but the edges of her lips were white.
Thalassa bore fatigue without any apparent change of gait. She went up the steep side of the ford in two bounds, and then Urvara was beside him, with Srayanka a stride behind. Andronicus’s trumpet rang out, three clear notes, and then again — the retreat.
Kineas reined in at the edge of the battle haze and risked a glance back. The new dust cloud was closer. To the south and east, Temerix’s men were already mounted on their ponies, jogging steadily across the last flat ground to the ford.
From the vantage point of a tall horse at the top of the riverbank, Kineas could now see the Sauromatae. Their bronze scale armour glinted in another battle cloud, half a stade east along the river bed. Somehow, the Greek infantry, the mercenaries, had moved into the stream bed.
Kineas shook his head, because this was all taking time and time was something he didn’t think they had, but even as he watched, Lot rode clear of the war haze, looking for the sound of the trumpet. Kineas made a sweeping gesture with his arm, pointing north and west. Lot pulled his helmet off and waved it, then gave a bro
ad nod to signal assent. He was still refastening his helmet when he went back into the cloud.
An arrow whistled out of the trees on the far bank and plucked one of Temerix’s psiloi from his pony. The man screamed and then Temerix dismounted, waving his men into formation on the surer footing of the island. He already had the golden bow in his fist, and he nocked and drew in one smooth motion. His first arrow brought an answering scream of pain from the poplar trees along the far bank.
Kineas turned to Eumenes and Urvara. ‘Gather up the Sakje. Rally them and cover the flight of the Sindi.’ He looked down at Philokles. ‘Are you walking for a reason?’
‘I fell off,’ the Spartan said.
Kineas might have grinned, except for the situation. ‘Then run back to Temerix and tell him to stop playing rearguard and get his arse across. And then come back. No heroics — we are not lingering.’
Philokles saluted — the first time Kineas had ever seen him salute.
Srayanka reached out and took his hand in hers. Her nails dug into his bare forearms and she grunted. Sweat was pouring off her. Kineas tried to steady her.
Ataelus was watching the fight in the ford. ‘Spitamenes,’ he said, as if he was pronouncing a sentence of death. ‘For fucking Persians.’
Kineas looked over his shoulder. Temerix had his Sindi formed in an open line and they raised their bows together and loosed a volley that rose high and fell beyond the brush at the edge of the spring bank. Screams erupted and then a group of Iranian cavalry came through the trees and straight down the bank, riding like Sakje.
‘Athena stand with us,’ Kineas said. There were a hundred or more Medes. More like two hundred.
Kineas looked behind him. Eumenes had maybe twenty Sakje in a clump. If the Persians came up the bank and into the rear of the Olbians, it would be over. The Olbians would never recover.
Bad luck. He was so close to pulling this off.
Temerix called another order, and his archers formed closer, a pitifully small wall at the edge of the island, but they had a three-foot-high bank to defend. They loosed again and their arrows slammed into the front of the Median charge, and wounded horses reared, tangling the charge in their fall, while others baulked the jump to the island. Philokles arrived, running hard, and he roared at Temerix, who ignored him. The Sindi chief slung his bow and took up his axe.
Eumenes had thirty riders and Urvara had another ten.
‘I’m sorry, my love,’ Kineas said. He was the only voice they would all obey, and there was no one with whom he could leave her. He reached up to pull his cheek plate down and again found it gone.
‘Sakje! Come and feast!’ Srayanka sang at his side, and her clear voice carried where a man’s voice might have been lost. She reached out and pulled his long knife from the scabbard at his waist.
More riders emerged from the battle haze behind her. She sang again, and every Sakje in earshot was grinning.
Kineas filled his lungs, judging the time as one more rider joined Urvara. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. He pointed his sword down the riverbank, and they started to move up behind him. He turned his head and saw Sitalkes, Darius and Carlus range themselves around Srayanka.
The Persian charge slammed into the Sindi. Axes swung against Persian swords, and Philokles bellowed and his heavy spear went through a Persian’s breastplate, tearing the man from his horse. His war cry sounded over the cacophony of battle like the cry of a hunting cat over the burble of a stream, and it froze the blood of more than one enemy.
The Sakje counter-charge seemed small and badly organized, but the Sakje weren’t Greeks — they didn’t require serried ranks to fight effectively. Instead of charging the Persian cavalry, the two groups slipped off to the left and right, every man and maid bent low, shooting hard. The Medes flinched away, fearing for their flanks, and suddenly robbed of their attempt to wrap around the Sindi, they halted and began to shoot. It was a natural decision for Asiatic cavalry, but it cost them the action.
Kineas felt like an idiot for risking himself — and Srayanka. Ataelus, at his shoulder, was rising and shooting, rising again, methodically pumping arrows into the Persians who were tangled with Temerix’s men. It was too late to halt, too late to swerve, so Kineas allowed Thalassa to push up the bank on to the island of willows. He was sword to javelin with a Persian veteran. He parried the spearhead and the man tried to use the haft to sweep him off his horse’s back. Kineas dropped the reins again, grabbed the haft and cut repeatedly at the man’s fingers, but his head burst in a spray of bone and blood and worse as Carlus struck him with a long-handled axe from the other side. An arrow hit Kineas in his breastplate like the kick of a mule on his right side, and he saw Srayanka’s face, streaked with pain and battle joy, red and white with exertion. She shrieked something that was lost in the battle, and the Medes answered a trumpet signal and flowed away — not broken, just not interested in further losses. The Sindi rose to their feet — aside from a handful, most had simply lain flat and waited for the Medes to ride away — and scrambled for the ponies who were dispersed over half a stade of island.
‘What are you doing here?’ Philokles roared at Kineas. Simultaneously, a tight knot of Medes, lost or desperate, punched through the Sindi and came at Kineas.
The great royal charger leaped from a dead halt to a gallop in three strides, her heavy hooves crashing against the rocky island. Kineas had his last opponent’s spear and he whirled it end over end and thrust hard at the first rider, a man with a copper beard, and in a moment of fear-induced clarity Kineas wondered if he had fought this man before, at Issus or at Arbela. And then his spear went over the man’s parry and under his burnoose and the man flipped back over the rump of his horse, all his sinews loosed, and Thalassa went right through the knot of Medes as two weak blows rang on Kineas’s back plate. And then young Darius was there, yelling insults in Persian, his sword dripping blood on to his hand when he raised it over his head, and Philokles was standing over a dead Mede and the survivors rode across the island and vanished west. One of the men fleeing was tall with an excellent horse and gold embroidery on his scarlet cloak, and he was clutching his side.
Srayanka sat on her horse. She had his knife in her right hand, and there was blood on it, and she waved it at the retreating Medes. ‘Come back and fight, Spitamenes!’ she screeched. She was laughing, with tears streaming from her face, and then her arms dropped and she screamed like a dying mare, a war cry or a scream of pain — or both.
‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ Kineas said, for the first time in his life praying to both instead of cursing. ‘Now, run!’
Temerix’s men needed no second urging, regardless of the death wish of their captain. On the north bank, the Medes were forming again, wary now, and pointing downstream where the Sauromatae were vanishing into their own dust cloud.
On the south bank, Diodorus and Andronicus had the Olbians in hand, or close to it, and the bank was lined with horsemen as the Sindi scrambled back. Side by side with Temerix and Philokles, Kineas and Srayanka crested the south bank together.
Diodorus was in front of the reordered Olbians. The rear ranks were sketchy and their horses were blown, but the Olbians were ready to charge again.
‘You’re an idiot!’ Diodorus said cheerily. ‘Khaire, Srayanka.’
‘You hold here until the Sauromatae are away. Then you. Sakje last under Eumenes and Urvara.’ Kineas thought they were going to live — he could feel the loosening in his bowels and the daimon of combat winging away, leaving only bone-ache and heart-ache. But he’d seen the Medes flee — they weren’t interested in taking casualties to beat up his rearguard.
‘I will command the Sakje,’ Srayanka said, her chin high. ‘Eumenes and Urvara may assist me.’
Kineas saluted her with a bloody javelin. ‘Welcome back, Lady of the Cruel Hands,’ he said in Sakje. They were cheering her, Olbian and Sakje together, a roar that must have sounded like a taunt to the Medes across the river. Srayanka raised her knife and the shouts
came again.
Kineas felt the wind in his hair as he looked around for Ataelus. The man was stripping Bain’s corpse, taking his arrows. Everywhere, Sakje and Sauromatae were stripping the corpses of the fallen.
‘Ataelus! Light the fires!’ Kineas called.
Ataelus nodded and one of his scouts galloped off into the dust.
Samahe came up from the stream bed, her gorytos empty. She reined in next to Thalassa and handed Kineas his helmet, the blue plume of horsehair severed and the plume-box that held it smashed flat.
‘Thanks!’ he said, slapping her back. She grinned wordlessly and turned away. Kineas wrestled with his helmet, which was deformed and wouldn’t go over his head. He tried to bend it between his hands while he watched the Persians, but the bronze was too tough and he couldn’t get it back into shape. He tied the chinstrap and slipped it over his sword hilt.
‘They’re getting ready to have a go at us,’ Darius said at his side. The Persian had a cut on his face that had bled over his whole front and the linen burnoose he wore over his helmet was cut and flapped like a pair of wings.
But the Medes showed no further interest in them. While the first flames flickered in the grass and the Olbians re-formed a column of fours and retired, Spitamenes and his Bactrians and Medes began to press the Greek mercenaries to the east.
‘Poor bastards,’ Eumenes said.
Lot grimaced. ‘We did all the work,’ he said in his own tongue.
Behind them, the slaughter of the mercenaries began.
Srayanka’s spasms came closer and closer.
Ten stades north and west of the battlefield, the column halted where they had left their remounts. Every man changed horses and drank water. Behind them, they could still hear the fighting, and see the dust.
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