Lycurgus shrugged. ‘Cross that desert when we come to it,’ he said, and they laughed.
After listening to Kineas and Leon and wrangling over half-made plans, they were all tired. Arguments had begun to have a personal edge and the fumes of last night’s wine were like poison. It was then that Sappho entered, and Arni, and a dozen of the barracks slaves, with ewers of water and flagons of wine and loaves of bread.
‘Best of women!’ Diodorus said, and got a real smile from his companion.
Kineas bit into the bread - crusty and excellent - and savoured the olive oil with it. ‘Sappho, you are a paragon.’
She lowered her eyes and smiled. ‘I crave a boon, Kineas.’
Kineas mopped his beard with his bread. ‘Anything,’ he said, expecting humour.
‘Allow me to accompany the army,’ she said.
Kineas flicked a look at Diodorus, but he appeared as surprised as if a bolt from Zeus had fallen among them.
Sappho took his hesitation for an opportunity. ‘Every army has followers, ’ she said. ‘I can manage them. I can ride a horse. I am as hard as a rock.’
Kineas, whose hands could remember the muscles in Srayanka’s legs, doubted that Sappho was as hard as she thought, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that she was correct. Every army had followers. Often, their fortunes affected the morale of the army. Generals and strategoi often ordered them to be abandoned, as if the men who served in the ranks had no feelings for the bodies that warmed their beds or the voices that shared their campfires. They were wrong.
Kineas looked at Diodorus - she was, at least temporarily, his property in many ways. Diodorus smiled his devious smile, and Kineas wondered if the man hadn’t known of her request all along. Kineas disliked being managed as much as most men, but he liked Sappho well enough, and he liked the idea of having an ‘officer’ to deal with the followers.
‘You agree to obey my orders?’ he asked. ‘And if I order you home, you’ll go as meek as a lamb?’
She raised her eyes. ‘I am always as meek as a lamb, Strategos,’ she said.
No one had referred to him as strategos before. He felt himself blushing. Nonetheless, he hardened his tone. ‘That is not an answer,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will agree to obey you - in all things.’
She raised her eyes just a little on the last word, so that he caught a flash of their colour. The glance affected him. He turned his head away and tried to ignore the pulse that shot from his head to his groin. And met Diodorus’s eyes - and his raised eyebrow. Kineas looked away in confusion, made an excuse to walk out to relieve himself, counted to a hundred in Sakje. Then he rejoined his company, made jokes and laughed at them, and fell back into the tide of masculine camaraderie.
After they had shared bread and wine, Kineas rose and carried his wine cup to the centre of the room.
‘A year ago in this room I asked my officers to swear an oath. If you will accompany me against Alexander, I’ll ask you to swear again.’ He raised his cup.
Niceas rose and gave him a rare grin. ‘Who’d’ve thought, a year ago, when we had a tyrant to tame and the threat of Macedon stirring, that today we’d be planning to march an army into the east?’
Diodorus, sober, raised his cup. ‘Who’d have thought that we would be officers with commands? Or rich men? Or citizens?’
Coenus raised his cup. ‘Who would have guessed which among us would have fallen, and which would live to ride again?’
Andronicus raised his wine. ‘Give us your oath, Strategos. For me, I long to ride.’
Then Kineas raised his cup. ‘Hear us, God who shakes the mountains and whose bolts cause men to fear. Hear us, Goddess of the olive who wears the aegis. Hear us, God whose horses ride the very waves, whose hand raises the storm or stills it. May all the gods hear us. We swear that we will remain loyal to each other and the company until it is dissolved by us all in council.’ Kineas spoke the words and they repeated them with gusto, no voice lacking, just as they had a year and more before, and the new voices were no softer than the old.
Despite the late afternoon hour when the meeting broke, Kineas threw on a cloak and went to the palaestra. He needed to feel the daimon of exercise. He was introspective enough to question his own motives in welcoming the Theban woman on the expedition to the east. He suspected that he would regret it even as his unexercised body fantasized about her.
He banished her green eyes on the sand of the palaestra. By the time he had loosened the muscles around his two healing wounds and freed his thighs from ten days of lassitude, the sun was low in the sky, but he was determined to run.
Other men were drawn to him, and his progress across the exercise floor attracted an entourage, and his announcement that he would run brought a chorus of approval. Philokles appeared at his side, and Diodorus as well, and Coenus.
They ran well, without a lot of conversation except some rude banter about the length of Kineas’s legs - more banter when he slowed out by Gade’s Farm, and then they had only enough air in their lungs to run. Memnon led the pack, his dark skin untouched by frost or the exertion, and he ran with his head up as if he could go all day and all night - which he probably could. Philokles stayed close to him all the way, and the two were just visible to Kineas, a dark back and a pale back in the distance.
Kineas was at the rear of the pack, a stade or more behind the leaders, and he ran on willpower and annoyance, burning off the last of his wine and bad temper and temptation, the air coming out of his mouth in gasps until he got his second wind. With the dolphin gates in sight, his head came up again, and he ran across the agora in fine shape, gaining some lost ground. Memnon was already running a strigil across Philokles in the marble portico of the palaestra, and the steam from the baths was welcome, but Kineas felt like a better man before he ran past the temple of Apollo, and he enjoyed his bath with the devotion of a man who might not see a gymnasium for sixty thousand stades - or ever again.
He was lying in the steam with a slave working carefully around the wound on his bicep when Helladius sat on the next slab.
‘It must be nice to be so young,’ said the priest. ‘I was comforted that I could run at your shoulder, but then, in sight of the gates, a god gifted you with new strength and you ran away from me as if I stood still.’
Kineas laughed and pointed at Philokles, who was waving goodbye - clean, strigilled, massaged and cloaked for the walk home. ‘You must be old indeed, to finish behind me,’ he said.
‘Memnon looks like a statue of Ares,’ said Helladius. ‘And your friend the Spartan might be Zeus.’
‘You are full of flattery today, priest,’ Kineas rolled over so that he could look the man in the eye.
‘It is not that the dead require anything from you,’ the priest said suddenly.
Kineas felt his stomach twist as if he’d just seen a corpse.
‘It is rather that they are trying to give you something,’ Helladius continued. His rich and melodious voice was somehow wrong for the message he was conveying. As if something else was using his voice to speak.
‘What are they trying to give me?’ Kineas asked.
‘Philokles might be Herakles, or Achilles, come to life,’ said the old priest, as if nothing of moment had been said.
‘That is for you to learn,’ said the slave in his accented Persian-Greek. Kineas sat up suddenly and whirled on the slave.
‘What do you say?’ he demanded.
The slave looked afraid. ‘Master?’ he asked and backed a step, fearing a blow.
Kineas looked at the priest. ‘Didn’t you hear him?’ Kineas asked.
The priest looked puzzled. ‘Do you speak his barbarian tongue? I doubt he speaks much Greek.’
Kineas was slow to place himself back under the slave’s hands. ‘Didn’t you speak to me of my dreams?’ he asked, after a long silence.
Helladius summoned another slave who began to massage the older man’s legs. ‘I questioned the gods, and sought answe
rs in augury, and none was granted me. It is a difficult question.’
Kineas felt the cold sweat of fear despite the steam and the pleasant fatigue of the run.
The fear would not leave him. And it banished all thoughts of Sappho.
8
The expedition gathered a momentum of its own, so that by the day the first grain ships raised their sails, Kineas had volunteers from throughout the north shore of the Euxine, many of them men for whom he had little use, and a cheering crowd to see them all off. He stood on the beach with Petrocolus and watched the last chargers embark, and the last soldiers.
‘I will miss you, Kineas,’ Petrocolus said. ‘The city will miss you.’
Kineas embraced the older man, and then embraced his son, Cliomenedes, who would be acting as the city hipparch. The two men, father and son, were now the most powerful political figures in the city, but there were already factions. Nicomedes’ nephew, Demosthenes, had taken up much of the rhetoric of Cleomenes the elder, Eumenes’ father, who had betrayed the city to Macedon - a fact that was already dwindling in the consciousness of many citizens. Demosthenes had not emerged from his house in a week - but his terror would pass. He had both money and voices in the assembly. He would not be quiet long.
On the other hand, Kineas had arranged - or more properly, Diodorus, Sappho and Philokles had arranged - that the assembly chose Petrocolus as archon. He was one of the city’s richest men, he had hundreds of clients and he had earned his own fortune through hard work and quick wit, and his son was a hero of the war. Together, they had the leverage to hold Demosthenes at bay.
Kineas handed the older man the ivory stool with relief and a certain pride. ‘Don’t sit on it too often,’ he said. ‘It becomes addictive.’
Petrocolus accepted it and nodded gravely. ‘I will keep it for you,’ he said, but Kineas shook his head.
‘I don’t expect to return,’ he said. He pointed to Demosthenes, where he stood glowering with a bodyguard of armed slaves and some followers - most of them men who had once followed Nicomedes.
Kineas thought bitter thoughts about his fellow citizens, and Greeks in general. He had watched his father play the game of democracy, and now he played it himself. Men like Cleomenes the elder and Demosthenes played it without rules or ethics, bending men with money to suit their own tastes, never considering the eudaimonia of the city as a whole - or so Kineas saw them. He hated that good men like Anarxes, a rich farm boy who had ridden in the second troop, served loyally all summer and acted as Eumenes’ second officer when the older boy was lying wounded, now rose in the assembly to demand that Kineas show his accounts for city money he expended. The man did so at the behest of his new political master, and Kineas was sorry for it - and hurt. And the more eager to leave, before the call for an accounting crippled him. Or before he lost the special regard he had received.
He waved to the crowd and embraced the old man one more time, and then he waded out into the surf and climbed the side of Demostrate’s galley. The navarch gave him a hand up the side. ‘You could have ruled,’ he said by way of greeting.
Kineas liked the ugly man. Demostrate was an effective commander, a retired pirate and a loyal ally. ‘Would you, if you had the chance?’ he asked.
Demostrate laughed, a roar like Poseidon’s. ‘Never!’ he said. ‘Easier to calm the waves in a storm than to ride the tides of public opinion.’ He gave a lopsided grin that made him look like a satyr - or more like a satyr. ‘Bad enough that I stopped being a pirate.’
Kineas smiled to himself, and said less than he might once have, but went aft to the awning, where Philokles and Diodorus and Niceas waited, and the red ball of the sun rose in the east, licking the waves to ripples of fire, so that they seemed to be sailing into the east on a road of flame.
PART II
HIGH GROUND
9
The same sun burned like a line of fire on the late-summer grass of the prairies beyond the low beach in the Bay of Salmon where a dozen galleys were pulled up on their sterns. Small waves lapped against their armoured beaks, and gulls shrieked and whirled where a crowd of Sindi fishermen hauled a net full of silver fish from their boat to the temporary market, where they would be sold for hard cash.
Beyond the warships, the grain fleet of Athens was anchored out in the Bay of Salmon, well clear of the sloping sand and mud. The great ships were not built to beach like warships - with their size, they required the support of a volume of water or their hulls might split, heavy supporting members breaking under the strain. So they anchored out in the deep water, and local boats and hastily built barges emptied their holds and took their cargoes on to the beach, a reversal of the usual process.
Sauromatae horse-herders drove their spare horses straight over the rails of the great ships so that the horses plunged into the sea. The girls then leaped naked into the sea behind them, tangled their fists in sea-wet manes and swam ashore with their charges.
Philokles, equally naked in the late-summer sun, laughed. ‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea, must love you, Athenian,’ he said.
Kineas gave the Spartan half a smile. ‘All the gods love a man who plans carefully,’ he said.
‘Not Aphrodite,’ Philokles said with a wry smile. ‘The goddess born on foam hates a man who plans too much.’ He frowned. ‘You never mention the Foam-born when you make sacrifice.’
Kineas’s eye caught Sappho, cloaked like a matron despite the sun and wearing a large conical straw hat, sitting on a stool further down the beach with Diodorus’s not inconsiderable camp furniture. ‘Speak to me not of Aphrodite,’ he said. ‘I ask only that she withhold her hand from me until I see Srayanka.’
‘Brother, that is exactly the way in which mortals ask the Foam-born for trouble,’ Philokles said. His eyes continued to follow the Sauromatae girls as they rode their horses out of the water. ‘Have you ever wondered why Poseidon is Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea?’
Kineas, his head full of figures and the minutiae of the landing, shook his head. ‘I must confess that I have not.’
Philokles ignored the hint. ‘I used to think that perhaps our ancestors - those Dorians who came to Sparta and took it in the time after Menelaus and fair Helen - that perhaps they brought a lord of chariots, and the locals had a lord of the ocean, and as the two peoples merged, they merged their gods.’
Kineas was drawn to his friend’s lesson despite himself. ‘I can never decide whether you should be teaching in the agora as a philosopher or thrown from a tall rock as a blasphemer,’ he said with mock concern. But he was listening.
‘But just now, watching those girls, I wonder if it is not hidden, like all other lessons, inside the Poet,’ Philokles said. ‘Wherever the long-haired Achaeans travelled, they took chariots - it is in the Iliad.’
‘True enough,’ Kineas said, amazed that he had never given the matter a thought, though as for most Athenian boys, the Iliad had been the centre of his every military fancy since he first heard it performed in his father’s tiled garden.
‘And the Poet must have seen what we are seeing many times before he lost his sight,’ the Spartan added, peering from beneath his hand. ‘Perhaps I was too simple. Perhaps the Lord of Horses and the Lord of the Sea have always gone together.’
‘Perhaps you’ve just noticed that the Sauromatae girls are naked, and extraordinarily handsome,’ Kineas said.
Philokles released a great sigh. ‘Aphrodite is close to you, brother,’ he said. He gave a wry grin that made him look ten years younger. ‘When women stir my loins, they must be stirring indeed.’
Kineas had no time to consider naked women of any sort, however, because as soon as the bulk of his army had landed he had to put it in a state of defence, had to start the parts of it in motion, had to arrange orders to cover various eventualities, because he was not marching the whole of it together but sending pieces of it across the three thousand stades that separated them from the Kaspian Sea to the east.
Eume
nes had done his job. Herds of cattle waited on the beach, already penned together with Sindi shepherds and Sindi sheep. Inland, Ataelus’s prodromoi had marked the road with signs used by the Sakje - sticks and bits of fleece, skulls of dead animals, piles of stones. Kineas could read them, and the Sauromatae girls could read them better. Ataelus was gone - long gone, by all accounts - but Eumenes had been waiting for them when the first warships pulled up on the flats, and he and Philokles and Leon were due to head east as soon as the first troops were prepared to travel - the infantry under Lycurgus, because they would be the fastest to ship and the best at defending the camps.
Kineas divided the rest of the army into two groups. Ataelus was gone with the first group - just the elite prodromoi, used to living off the land. They had been off as soon as their horses swam ashore, scouting the route that the army would take across the high ground. Kineas expected daily reports from the scouts - Ataelus had enough riders to send a messenger every morning.
Diodorus commanded the second group, composed of the bulk of the Greek infantry and the Sindi psiloi. They would make their best speed to the coast of the inland sea, where shipping should by then await them, covered by two troops of Olbian cavalry.
Prince Lot would lead the rest: the Sauromatae as well as Heron’s troop of cavalry and Eumenes’ troop. They were to move across the trail blazed by Ataelus in easy stages, starting last by a week and covering the movement of the other groups because they were the best fitted to living off the steppe.
The Greek infantry marched out of the camp in good order on the second day after their landing, their goods piled on their mules. Every one of them had just completed a summer on campaign. They carried too much baggage, but that was true of soldiers the world over. Their bodies were hard, and they sang as they marched out.
The hoplites set off at a pace that would eat a parasang (thirty stades) in an hour - a pace they and their donkeys could maintain all day if required. Barring disaster, they would have crossed the high ground between Lake Maeotis and the Kaspian Sea in thirty days, swamps, ridges and all, and still have purchased grain to eat while they awaited Leon’s boats on the Kaspian.
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows Page 11