Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  ‘What did he offer you to betray me?’ she asked, very close.

  Kineas wondered if there was a killer standing behind him. He was weaponless and her tone belied the clean purity of her scent - she was angry, working herself up for murder. ‘I refused to hear his offer,’ Kineas said.

  ‘Really?’ she asked. For the first time, he had said something that took her by surprise. She returned to her throne and sat. To Kineas, her motions seemed to take a very long time.

  ‘Really,’ Kineas answered.

  She sighed. ‘I would like to trust you,’ she said.

  Kineas shook his head gently. ‘You trust no one,’ he said. He looked around. ‘May I have a chair?’

  She gave him a small smile. ‘I can do better than a chair.’ She motioned, and a proper couch was brought for him. While he arranged himself on it, another was brought for her. More couches arrived and her courtiers, half a dozen men in a mix of Persian and Greek dress, settled on to them uneasily. She arranged herself on hers with her usual grace, rose on one elbow and toasted Kineas with her gold goblet.

  Kineas poured a libation to the gods and then toasted her with a line from Aristophanes that made her smile.

  She took a long drink of her wine and then rolled on to her stomach. ‘If I have you killed, right now, I can buy your soldiers and fight any campaign I please,’ she said.

  Kineas’s stomach twisted. He was not immune to fear, and his hands betrayed him. He clenched his goblet. She was serious.

  ‘My soldiers would storm this citadel and put everyone in it to the sword,’ he said, with the best imitation of calm he could muster. He could hear the fear in the end of his sentence.

  Her guard captain revealed himself, standing just out of his line of vision to his right, by snorting his disdain. ‘Try, fucking Greek.’

  Banugul gave an enigmatic smile and indicated her guard captain with her chin. ‘This is Therapon, my strong right arm.’

  Kineas took a deep breath. He didn’t turn his head, although he noted the alcove where the man was standing. ‘Every one of your men is bribable. You have little discipline - so little that even now, the towers on the citadel’s north walls are empty because the men don’t want to get that cold. No one is watching the north wall.’

  ‘No one can climb the north wall,’ the queen said, but her eyes flicked to the guard captain, and he looked away.

  ‘Like Leosthenes, Diodorus, my second, is a childhood friend from Athens. You could never bribe him, lady. Unlike this dog of a Thessalian you keep to bully your guards, my men are soldiers, fresh from a summer of victory.’ He was beginning to convince himself, and his words flowed faster. ‘If you murder me, all of you will die.’

  She met his eye easily, and smiled. It wasn’t a smile of seduction, but a smile of pure calculation. She was not young. Nor was she old. She was at the turning point of age, where the lines at the corners of her eyes did not mar her looks but only added to her dignity. ‘What was Artabazus’s offer?’ she asked for the second time.

  ‘I refused to hear it,’ Kineas repeated.

  Her eyes opened wider for a fraction of a second and then narrowed. ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘I cannot be tempted by something I haven’t heard,’ Kineas said. ‘Do you know the famous soldier Phocion?’

  ‘I know his name and his reputation. His honour is proverbial.’ She raised her eyebrows expectantly. She smiled, and Kineas knew that he was not going to die. He thought he had her measure.

  ‘He used to tell us that the best way to avoid temptation,’ Kineas felt the tension falling away from him, ‘was to avoid temptation.’

  She nodded, eyebrows arched. ‘I often seek temptation out,’ she said. ‘But I am a queen.’ She looked at the grapes in the bowl next to her. ‘Every grape,’ she said, taking one, ‘has been seeded in my kitchens by slaves. That is the fate that awaits you if I discover that you have received more messengers from Artabazus. Have I made myself clear?’

  Kineas held his ground. ‘If Leosthenes the Athenian comes to my camp, I will always receive him, Despoina. And I will present myself for examination immediately afterwards.’

  ‘Strange man,’ she said. She looked at him for some time, eating grapes. ‘Am I a temptation?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kineas said.

  She nodded, her face serious. ‘Yet you do not avoid me.’

  Kineas rubbed his chin and chewed a grape. ‘I concede your point.’

  She leaned forward, interested. ‘Men do not usually allow women victories in conversation. You concede my point. But? There is a but?’

  ‘You are observant, my lady. But you are my employer, and to avoid you would create misunderstanding. You are a queen, and any temptation you offer will come with enough barbs to hook a Euxine salmon.’

  She raised her chin and allowed a slight smile to indicate that his point had merit. ‘I grew to womanhood at a Persian court. Both of my uncles were poisoned. My mother was murdered with a sword. My father now seeks to kill me. Do you understand?’

  Kineas nodded, hands calming gradually. ‘You keep your slaves nude to know if they carry weapons.’

  She pulled her legs under her and leaned towards him. ‘I disarm my enemies in any way I can,’ she said. ‘I have few enough weapons. If I were a man, I would be strong. I am a woman. What would you have me do?’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m a canny fish. I can see the hook and the bait and even the boat.’

  She curled a lip. ‘What a very safe answer.’ She motioned past him, and a man with a lyre sat on a stool and began to sing. He was excellent and his purity commanded silence. Kineas turned his head to find that the singer was fully clothed - not a slave.

  ‘Persian?’ he asked after the first performance.

  ‘Lycian,’ she answered. ‘Or Carian.’

  Kineas stroked his chin. ‘The words are strange, but the cadence is like Homer.’

  Her body faced the singer, but she turned her head to him, stretching her neck and back. Her smile was as beautiful as dawn in the mountains, and as fresh. ‘Are all Athenians as well educated as you are?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He put a hand over his goblet so that the wine slave backed off. ‘Where did you learn Greek?’ He looked away, towards the singer. Therapon glared at him steadily. His hate made an emotional counterpoint to Banugul’s magnetism, and Kineas steadied himself on it.

  ‘Darius’s chief eunuch was a Greek. And my sister and I were prisoners of Alexander for two years.’ She smiled as if they were conspirators. ‘While you still served him.’

  Kineas felt like a fool for missing the obvious connection that they had shared the whole campaign. ‘Of course - you were taken with the women after Issus?’

  Banugul rolled over, and Kineas was conscious of her body, even across a gap of several feet. ‘I remember them cheering your name when you won the prize,’ she said. ‘We were waiting with the dowager, wondering if you barbarians would rape us.’ She managed to make the experience sound light-hearted. ‘But you were all too busy slapping each other’s backs to mind us much. It was days before Alexander looked at us.’

  Kineas had been unconscious for days after Issus, but he somehow doubted that she had heard his name being cheered. He frowned at the attempts at flattery. ‘It is odd, that we were in the same camp for so long.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, conscious that she had stepped wrong, and waved for the singer to perform. ‘Not so odd,’ she said. ‘If the gods willed it so.’

  Warm for the first time in days, Kineas rode down the hill to the neat Greek military camp. A pair of sentries stood huddled in every tower and there were twenty men in the guardhouse by the gate. He inspected every one, chatting with the sentries, listening to the boredom of the Sauromatae and the complaints of the Greeks, until he was satisfied that they were alert. He was cold again, cold from a wind that seemed to blow warmth out of the top of his head. He swore that he would abandon Hellenism and get a Sakje cap before he wrapped hims
elf in furs and blankets and shivered. He lay for a while, trying to imagine Srayanka beside him. He had a hard time seeing her face, and it tended to slide into a narrower face with blonde hair that made him shiver.

  ‘I need to leave here,’ he said aloud.

  The transition from anxious wakefulness to sleep was so sudden that he . . . was taken unawares by the presence of the tree and the pair of young eagles screaming above him. They called and swung out over the endless combat of the dead, pecking at dead foes. Ajax and Graccus and Nicomedes seemed more outnumbered than ever, but he was not to be deterred. He had to find Srayanka. He reached out a hand for the branch above, swung to gather momentum and reached out a leg to hook and roll. In a moment, he was surrounded by brambles and bracken, thorny stuff that tore at his skin and pricked at his hands, his forearms, his eyes . . .

  He was climbing a thicket, or crawling through it, blind. He had to reach Srayanka, and she was somewhere on the other side of the brambles and thorns, and he threw himself at the flexible, prickly mass and made no dent on it except to tear his arms and leave ribbons of blood on the trunk of the tree.

  He strove and strove, angry, frustrated . . .

  He awoke, his cloak wrapped in a tangle around his legs, his heavy Hyrkanian blanket pulled up between his legs, the hairy wool scraping at his flesh. He was cold.

  He got up, moving carefully in the darkness, and remade his bed, adding another blanket from his pack roll on the floor. Then he lay in the new warmth of his blankets and waited to fall asleep. Whatever thought he summoned, whatever plan he touched in his mind, the image before his eyes was of Banugul, turning her head to smile at him. He eventually defeated her smile with a tally of the grain wagons his army would require in the spring, and he fell back to sleep, warm and frustrated.

  13

  Their sport that season was archery. Hyrkania had a crueller winter than the Euxine cities ever saw, with snow in drifts more than once and freezing rain every week, but it was still clement enough to exercise horses and shoot the Sauromatae bows.

  Lot and Ataelus started it, setting up straw bundles against the earthen walls of the camp’s citadel and shooting for wagers. Kineas knew a good thing when he saw one - a sport that benefited his troops and cost very little, passed the time, maintained discipline - perfect. He offered prizes at a weekly competition, good prizes, and he competed himself.

  The first weeks saw Ataelus’s prodromoi and all the Sauromatae gathered to laugh at the sight of Greeks shooting the bow. Some were either natural shots or had practised, especially the gentry from the Euxine cities - Heron was a fine shot, as were several of his riders. Eumenes shot with a sort of weary acceptance, as if his Apollo-like skills were a curse and not a gift. But others were not so fortunate. One young man from the phalanx somehow managed to snap his bow while stringing it, the resulting lash of the bowstring drawing blood. Many of the tribesmen thought this the finest jest they’d ever seen, which didn’t do much for the daimon of the whole corps and led to two nasty incidents. Other men simply missed the targets, week after week - Diodorus threatened to stop competing on the basis that his exceptional ability to shoot arrows over the top of the straw was undermining his authority.

  ‘Didn’t you learn to shoot as an ephebe?’ Kineas asked, wickedly. In fact, he could remember taunting Diodorus as the luckless seventeen-year-old failed to hit the target again and again.

  Diodorus responded with a grunt, but when they wrestled later in the morning, Kineas noticed that he was being dropped in the icy mud with a certain annoying regularity. Diodorus was angry. Kineas kept his taunts to himself after that.

  Six weeks of constant archery meant that the meanest of the hoplites could hit a bale of summer straw, and the best were becoming quite proficient. Kineas placed orders for bows and arrows with the local craftsmen. He knew his Anabasis well enough to appeciate that arming all his troops with bows, even if they were merely carried in the baggage, would make them more capable of dealing with the threats they would face in mountain passes and high valleys where the battlefield tactics of the phalanx and the cavalry rhomboid didn’t apply.

  Some men preferred the sling and Diodorus convinced Kineas that slings were an acceptable distance weapon, so that some dozens of the Euxine Greeks could be seen pounding at the straw bales with long slings and heavy rocks. They lacked the range, but had enough hitting power to drop an ox - a demonstration that Diodorus performed to the applause of all the slingers on the winter feast of Apollo.

  The barbarian Sauromatae were far more of a leadership challenge than the Euxine Greeks. They were a long way from home, wintering in a military camp, subject to regulations that they barely understood and seldom respected. But the military successes against the bandits and the willingness of the Greek officers to lead by example and be seen to fail at archery and other contests narrowed the gap.

  The greatest difficulty concerned breaches of discipline and how they should be punished. Kineas could remember quarrelling with Srayanka about Greek notions of punishment. She had maintained that she would have to kill a tribesman to enforce Greek discipline, because anything else would lead to blood feud. Memories of Srayanka and a growing understanding of tribal custom made Kineas careful. He couldn’t be seen to favour the barbarians, but he had to make his judgments fit their own notions of fairness.

  Kineas was never bored.

  The army had suffered through two snowstorms and had camped in Hyrkania for eight weeks when Kineas held his second court and various units brought their offenders to him to be judged. Sometimes the local Hyrkanian authority demanded to have the man sent to the citadel - which Kineas always refused. Each refusal required a visit to the citadel.

  The Sauromatae, with their arrogance and their lack of interest in the niceties of trade and purchase, were frequently hauled before the court as thieves, an accusation likely to cause even the laconic Lot to lose his temper. Sauromatae gentlemen were only thieves in their own tribes if they stole horses, a ‘crime’ only when the stolen horse came from one’s own tribe. Horse thievery was punishable by immediate exile - or death. The arrest of a Sauromatae nobleman or woman for thievery led to open-air assemblies for fair prosecution and resolution. The Euxine Greeks viewed these open-air assemblies with much the same relish as the Sauromatae viewed archery matches. The entertainment value helped them deal with the snow.

  ‘The merchant says that you stole the value of the girl’s bond,’ Kineas said in passable Sakje. The Sauromatae trooper - a lord among his own people, dressed in a purple tunic with gold plaques over fine caribou-hide breeches worked in deer hair - stood straight as an arrow. His demeanour was respectful, but proud. His name was Gwair. Kineas thought of him as Gwair Blackhorse, to separate him from the other Sauromatae Gwair, also a lord, who rode a grey horse. Even with a foundation in Sakje, the Sauromatae clan names defeated him.

  ‘No, lord,’ the man said, standing tall. His eyes met Kineas’s and he smiled. ‘I liked her and she liked me.’ The man shrugged. ‘We fucked. She warmed my bed.’ He smiled. ‘We please each other, so she can stay with me.’

  Kineas sighed. ‘She is a slave at this man’s brothel,’ he said. He indicated the Hyrkanian merchant next to him, a big man in his own right. Beside him stood Banugul’s captain of the guard, Therapon.

  Gwair grinned. ‘He wants to fight me for her?’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘You know better than that, Gwair.’

  Blackhorse grinned again. ‘Stupid merchant can’t keep a girl like that. Girl like that is for heroes. You know that.’

  Therapon rolled his shoulders. ‘I’ll fight him,’ he said. ‘And when I kill him, the queen will be satisfied.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ Kineas said. The problem was that Kineas knew that among the Sauromatae, slave girls went to those who could hold them - until the women stepped in. Sauromatae women fought with the lance and bow like the men, and were not easily crossed, and the men who married them had to be heroes. Kineas turned to Lot,
who was sitting next to him. ‘Would you be so kind as to send for some of your noblewomen?’ Kineas said. ‘I think we need their help.’ Kineas had to be seen to do everything he could before he ordered a Sauromatae to be punished or to fight a duel that he was unlikely to win. Therapon was a dangerous man and none of the Sauromatae would be his match.

  Lot raised an eyebrow and rose to his feet. Kineas’s initial impression of a slow, cautious man had turned out to be the product of the language barrier. Lot narrowed his eyes at Kineas, glanced at Therapon as if considering the man’s potency and gave one sharp nod. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Although, as you must know, I cannot summon them. I must go and ask.’

  Kineas nodded. ‘Should I go?’

  ‘That would be better,’ Lot said.

  ‘This assembly is to wait my pleasure,’ Kineas said, and rose.

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Therapon. ‘Punish the barbarian and move on. I’m cold.’

  Kineas ignored the Thessalian and turned to Niceas, who sat on a stool bundled in sheepskins. ‘Can you deal with the Greek defaulters while I’m gone?’

  Niceas gave a wolfish smile, much more like his old self, and bawled out the name of a pair of hoplites who had started a fight with the local mercenaries. Kineas pulled his cloak about him, walked along the main street of the camp, past his own log megaron and Lot’s heavy wagon, to where the Sauromatae yurts lined the streets in Greek military order that made them look out of place, like regimented kittens.

  Most of the women lived with their men, but the unmarried noblewomen had a yurt to themselves. Most were between fourteen and twenty, but a handful were older - spear-maidens who chose to remain warriors. Kineas rapped his riding whip against the doorpost and one of the young maidens popped her head out and immediately blushed and bowed her head.