Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.

  Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.

  Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things - his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.

  Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few dactyloi above the surface of the water.

  ‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.

  The augury was of the best, and more, the truce of the god was broken by the Lord of the Heavens himself. Grabbing a javelin, Kineas crept carefully down the bluff and then moved from tree to tree along the riverbank. In the distance he could see a series of farms at the next bend of the river, smoke coming from their hearths in the new morning.

  The lead buck raised his head and Kineas, downwind, froze. A doe’s head came up, and then another’s. It was a long throw, and the time Kineas would take to change his stance to make a cast would render it impossible. He waited.

  Another head came up - a young buck. He took a step towards Kineas, and turned his head as if trying to see something across the river.

  Kineas remained motionless.

  The doe’s head went down, back to drinking, and then the young buck moved a step and did the same. Kineas took a step, and then another, now almost flat to the ground.

  A head came up. Kineas couldn’t see as well, having sacrificed line of sight for his own cover. He stopped moving. He was in range now, but awkwardly placed behind a hillock of grass where a great tree had fallen, probably during a spring flood, and then rotted into the loam to leave a miniature ridge.

  Above him, just a plethron away on the bluff, Niceas rose to his feet and stretched. The heads came up, watching this new movement. Across the river, the eagle, freshly gorged on salmon, let out a raucous screech of contentment. As the herd’s heads turned together, Kineas rolled from behind his hillock to his feet. In their panic at his appearance, the young buck fouled one of the does and both stumbled, losing a stride, and his javelin flew, arcing into the heavens before falling to strike the young buck between the shoulder blades. He took one stride and fell, legs splayed, already dead. The doe leaped his corpse and ran.

  Kineas opened the buck, giving a prayer to Artemis he had learned as a boy, and gralloched his kill in a nearby tree. He left the buck hanging there and washed in the river before climbing the bluff with a pair of steaks wrapped in oak leaves.

  ‘Somebody’s feeling better,’ Niceas said. He was huddled in his cloak with a horn cup in his fist.

  Kineas laid the steaks on their leaves by the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. He wore a grin that split his face like an athlete’s crown of honour.

  Niceas began cutting green branches from the alder at the top of the bank. ‘If you wanted to go hunting, you could just have said,’ he joked.

  Kineas shrugged, still looking across the river. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Niceas answered. He speared the deer meat carefully, putting three of the springy sticks into each steak and then putting the sticks deep into the loam around their fire. In the fire pit, he pushed the coals from Kineas’s earlier blaze into deep piles, one each under the lattices supporting the meat. The meat began to sizzle almost immediately and Kineas’s stomach made a wet noise. They both chuckled.

  ‘It’s hot,’ Niceas said. He’d boiled water in a copper mess pot and added the herbs he’d learned from the Sakje and some honey. It was a good drink in the morning, and it saved the wine.

  Kineas took the cup from his outstretched hand and drank. He smiled. ‘We’re going to end up becoming Sakje,’ he said. ‘What’s the herb?’

  ‘Something the Sakje call “garella”,’ he said. ‘I found some growing here when we made camp.’

  ‘Bitter,’ Kineas said. ‘Good with honey.’

  Niceas shrugged. ‘It’s warm and wet. Srayanka - your Medea - likes the stuff. That’s how I learned about it.’

  Kineas nodded and drank more. It tasted better. Or was that his imagination?

  ‘We could go back to Athens,’ Niceas said.

  Kineas stepped back from the fire as if he had been burned. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘We could go back to Athens. Your exile is lifted - all your estates restored. Right?’

  Kineas looked at the other man. ‘Where is this coming from?’

  Niceas shrugged, pulled the sticks from the ground and flipped one of the pieces of meat. It smelled delicious, and it had very little fat. ‘The plains aren’t good for you. All these dreams. And war. We’ve had enough war, haven’t we?’

  Kineas looked at his hyperetes as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Have you had enough war?’

  ‘The first time I saw it, that was enough,’ Niceas said. ‘But like Memnon, it’s the only life I’ve ever known. I keep waiting - waiting for you to retire, so that I can retire, too.’

  Kineas was watching his friend’s face. ‘I will not be going back to Athens, old friend.’

  Niceas shook his head. ‘Of course not. Silly of me to mention it, only - only I don’t see an end. We ride east. Then what? You find Medea and live happily ever after. What about the rest of the boys? Do we just pick a Sakje bride and settle down, or what? Do we fight Alexander? Do we just go on fighting Alexander? Maybe keep moving east? Come back here and make war on Marthax?’ Niceas was growing angrier as he spoke. ‘It won’t ever end, Kineas. You’ll become fucking Alexander, at this rate. What’s it for?’

  Kineas rubbed his beard, stung. ‘I promised Srayanka.’

  Niceas nodded. ‘You promised her. Did you promise her Eumenes? Diodorus? Antigonus? Coenus? Me?’ At each name, his voice rose. ‘We’ll leave our fucking skulls out east in some Tartarus of wilderness beyond the world, won’t we?’

  Kineas drained the garella and sat. He pulled his legs up close and put his arms around them. ‘Why didn’t you say all this back in Olbia?’

  Niceas shrugged. ‘It didn’t really come to me until I saw what this campaign was doing to you. And when I saw the ships sail off. That hurt.’

  Kineas turned his face away. ‘I have to do this. You don’t. I told you all that in Olbia.’

  Niceas’s voice was gentle instead of angry. ‘That’s horse shit, Hipparch. We’ll all follow wherever you choose to go. You have trained us to be that way, and now we are. Diodorus won’t leave you, I won’t leave you. Now Eumenes won’t leave you. It’s almost funny, because every one of us has our own little following - the damned following the damned following Kineas.’

  Kineas thought of the other boys hissing their catcalls after the fleeing philosopher. Instead of an angry retort, he nodded. ‘Would it help if I promised that this was the last time?’ he asked.

  Niceas shook his head. ‘No. Because being who you are, it won’t be the last time. But it’d help those of us who follow you if you put some planning into the trip home, instead of just the trip out.’

  Kineas met his friend’s eyes. ‘I won
’t be coming home,’ he said.

  Niceas met his glance. ‘If you say so. Maybe the rest of us will, though.’

  Kineas nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good,’ said Niceas. ‘Because the meat’s done.’

  An hour later, they were riding across the plains between the oak woods and the river. They passed farms and Maeotae farmers, paler than the Sindi but wearing the same colourful clothes. They were prosperous, and the women wore gold, even when they worked with hoes in their gardens or brought in the harvest. Twice, the mounted pair passed groups of Maeotae in their hundreds reaping a field of wheat. There was grain in every basket and more coming in every apron. Stone barns and turf barns dotted the landscape along the river, each with a small dock and every one bursting with wheat.

  Kineas shook his head. ‘The golden fleece,’ he said.

  Niceas nodded. ‘Alexander is wasting his time on Persia,’ he said. ‘These are the richest farms I’ve ever seen.’

  When the sun stood at the top of the sky, Kineas stopped where a group of Maeotae sat in the shade of a great oak tree, eating bread and cheese. He dismounted. The men watched him warily.

  ‘Do any of you speak Greek?’ he asked.

  The oldest of the farmers stood and approached, but he shook his head.

  ‘Sakje?’ Kineas asked.

  The farmer smiled, showing more teeth than gaps. They were a handsome people, with hair as golden as their crops in autumn and the stature of those who ate well all through the year. ‘Some,’ he said.

  ‘You know Olbia?’ Kineas asked.

  The farmer nodded.

  ‘We are from Olbia. An army is coming this way, up the Tanais. My army. We’ll pay for grain.’ Kineas found that Sakje forced him to be succinct.

  The farmer nodded. ‘Soldiers come. Horsemen come,’ he said. ‘Say same. Pay gold for grain.’ He nodded.

  Kineas held up a silver owl. ‘I’d buy bread and cheese, if I could,’ he said.

  The farmer shrugged. He went to his wife and returned with a basket full of bread and cheese. ‘For nothing,’ he said with evident pride. ‘For friend.’

  Niceas nodded. ‘Any farmer would do the same. These are good folk.’ He went to his horse and removed a cut of the buck and carried it to the farmer. ‘For nothing,’ he said in Sakje, and the farmer grinned at him.

  They rode on, eating as they went. ‘March discipline must be good,’ Niceas said, ‘or those folk would be pissing themselves at the sight of soldiers.’

  ‘This is Grass Cat land,’ Kineas said.

  ‘I don’t think those Maeotae would agree,’ Niceas said. ‘This is no man’s land.’ He looked at Kineas under his brows. ‘You could build something here,’ he said.

  Kineas looked at him. ‘Build something?’ he asked.

  Niceas grunted, and they rode on.

  They stayed the night in a heavy stone house. Kineas got a bed by the hearth - the nights had developed a bite - and he was asleep as soon as his head was on the furs.

  The two young eagles were above him again, and they were noisy. He smiled at them and they regarded him with curiosity, and then he began to climb to them. He got one leg well up to a knot in the bole of the great tree and pressed himself close to keep his balance, and wrapped his arms around the trunk ...

  Around her waist, and she made to push him away, just the palm of her hand and not very hard. He pushed her chiton up with his free hand until he could feel the warm vellum of her hip under his fingers, and his erection took on a life of its own.

  ‘No, my lord,’ she said, but without much force. More weariness than refusal, really. She was pretty, with heavy breasts and a slim waist, and all the young men wanted her. She had smiled at him many times, and today when she came into the stable with two buckets of water he had kissed her, and now he had her under him in the straw.

  He ran his hand under the thin wool, over the mound of her belly and on to her breast. The garment bunched around her hips and she moved them in discomfort. ‘Stop!’ she said, with a little more emphasis. ‘Please?’ she asked.

  He ran his hand over her nipple and it sprang to life under his hand and she moaned. ‘No, master. Lord. No,’ she said. He kissed her and she responded, slowly at first and then more, until she was tugging at him and he was in her, spending as quickly as he entered her. Then she rose and dusted off the straw and pulled her chiton into shape, wiped her thighs a little and went back to watering horses.

  She never smiled at me again, Kineas thought. I raped her. She was a slave and she could no more refuse me than refuse to eat, but let’s call an action by its proper name. It was rape.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kam Baqca. She was mounted on her great charger, and she towered above him. ‘It was not meant with anger, but it was ill done. When a lord forces a slave, where is the crime?’

  Kineas thought the question was rhetorical, but the dream lingered, as did the question, and . . .

  He awoke with the question on his mind, and the sure knowledge that his body thought that Srayanka was too far away.

  He rose and drank a honey drink that he enjoyed and ate fresh bread. The farmer spoke to him at length, discoursing about the harvest, apparently, and hoping for the dry spell to continue. Kineas understood one word in five, but he knew that the man meant well.

  They rode on in the morning, poorer by a silver owl and their horses loaded with food. The rafters of the house had been packed with produce - drying herbs, cheese, dried meats - and the family had owned four goblets of gold.

  ‘These people are rich!’ Niceas said. ‘But no slaves!’

  Kineas rubbed his beard and rode on. ‘A form of riches all its own,’ he said, thinking of his dreams.

  Niceas nodded thoughtfully. ‘What was he on about, there at the end?’

  Kineas rubbed his beard again. ‘Weather and crops. And something else. I think he was warning me about bandits, although it might just as well have been an admonition against being bandits.’

  Niceas grunted. ‘You saw the scorch marks on the stone?’ he said.

  Kineas had seen them. ‘Recent,’ he said, and Niceas nodded.

  That afternoon they caught up with Diodorus’s rearguard. Coenus was surprised to see Kineas, but his men kept good watch, and he was saluted and greeted and cosseted as he and Niceas rode the length of the column. They halted for the night with the cavalry and shared a buck that Coenus killed, intending to ride on in the morning, despite Diodorus’s protests.

  That night Kineas had another dream of his youth that left him quiet when he woke, a dream in which he and some boys tormented a dog. It had happened. He had forgotten it.

  As he mounted after breakfast, Diodorus came up on horseback with Sappho and several of his own staff.

  ‘The strategos should not be haring about alone,’ Diodorus said. ‘Local people say there are bandits in the hills.’

  Niceas grunted.

  Kineas raised an eyebrow. ‘Should I be afraid?’ he asked.

  Diodorus shrugged. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.

  ‘Ataelus will have scouted the country,’ Kineas said.

  ‘This valley is broad enough that Ataelus could put one of his bare-breasted scouts every stade and not cover it,’ Diodorus mocked. ‘You just want to have adventures.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kineas said. Anything he added would only encourage more teasing.

  Over Diodorus’s shoulder, Sappho smiled. She was mounted on a cavalry charger, a bigger horse than most women could handle. She rode well.

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ Diodorus said. After a pause he said, ‘Let me come, too.’

  Kineas considered it a moment. He’d like few things better than to have his last two Athenians riding by his side, two of the three men in the world that he loved most. But he shook his head, looking at the column. ‘They need you,’ he said.

  Diodorus grimaced. ‘Truer words were never spoke,’ he said ruefully. He shrugged. ‘They need you, too.’

  Sappho pulled her horse up
by them. ‘“Reason, my lord, may dwell within a man,”’ she said, quoting Sophokles.

  ‘“And yet abandon him when troubles come,”’ Diodorus said, capping her quote with relish. Their eyes met, and they shared a smile that touched the faint lines at the corners of her eyes.

  Kineas looked at both of them. ‘I take it that means I have your permission to ride on?’ he asked.

  Diodorus nodded, laughing.

  They rode along the river for half a day, and Kineas said nothing beyond comments on the fields and the weather. Finally, as they crested a long ridge to see another in the distance and rising ground all around them, Kineas turned to Niceas. ‘Do you ever think on the evil acts you’ve done?’ he asked.

  Niceas looked out over the river. ‘All the time,’ he said.

  ‘And?’ Kineas asked.

  Niceas looked at him and frowned. ‘And what? They’re done. I can’t undo them. I can only try not to commit them again.’

  Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘If we ever return to Athens, I’m going to set you up as a philosopher.’

  Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘If we ever return to Athens,’ he said, ‘you are going to set me up as a brothel keeper. Perhaps I’ll teach the boys and girls some philosophy.’

  Kineas grinned at the picture and rode on, keeping his thoughts to himself. After dinner, they curled in their cloaks, the fire crackling away, and for the first time in weeks sleep evaded Kineas.

  ‘I missed this,’ he said.

  Niceas snorted. ‘What, four weeks in Olbia and you missed lying on the ground?’

  Kineas rolled on his back and stared up at the wheel of heaven. ‘Longer than that. Remember the ferryman when we crossed the Tanais?’

  ‘Who thought we’d all be dead when the Getae came? I’ll never forget that night. Why?’

  Kineas said, ‘That night I thought a dozen men and a pair of slaves was a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I was thinking it was funny that I could forget how much of a burden it was to lead.’

  Niceas grunted.