Kineas took in Bain’s attack in a glance. He pulled his helmet’s cheek plates down on his head and fastened the chinstrap. The enemy’s command group was now cut off from their cavalry. The thing could be done.
The command group and the Hetairoi had not failed to note that hundreds of well-trained cavalry were emerging from their flank. Their commander in the purple cloak gesticulated, turned and yelled.
Kineas’s men were less than a stade away. Srayanka appeared injured - he could see something terribly wrong in her body language. He raised his right fist holding a javelin. ‘Trot!’ he shouted.
Urvara ripped a Macedonian kopis from the scabbard of one of the Royal Companions. She removed one of his hands on the back cut and reared her horse. Behind her, a second Hetairoi trooper drew his sword and moved to execute Srayanka. Hirene, Srayanka’s trumpeter, her grey braids flying, tackled the Macedonian, wrapping her arms around him to pin them. They fell to the ground together and vanished in the rising dust.
Srayanka, free, cut at a third Royal Companion with her riding whip, whirled her horse and rode for the willow trees on the island. The command group was in turmoil - Urvara cut at a second man, her blow sheering through the layers of leather on his corslet and drawing blood.
Macedonian contempt for women was costing them heavily.
‘Charge!’ Kineas roared. His horse flew like Pegasus over the gravel and sand.
The general’s bodyguards were both brave and skilled. They formed well, even as Urvara’s brilliant riding and frenzied sword cuts were bringing chaos to their rear ranks, and they launched themselves - all fifty of them - in a counter-charge. But the front rank had only ten strides to gain momentum and Kineas’s Olbians had the whole gentle slope behind them and half a stade at the gallop, and they threw the bodyguard flat at the impact, their horses smashing chest to chest with the Macedonian chargers like warships using their rams, bearing them over. Kineas didn’t throw his javelin - he used it to parry the xyston of a Companion and got himself a painful thrust at his badly protected left shoulder from a lance as he closed, but Thalassa did the work and his first two opponents didn’t stay upright to face him. Only when the mare’s momentum was spent climbing the shale on to the willow island did he have to fight hand to hand. A Royal Companion, his helmet gone, stood his ground on a heavy gelding and struck out hard with his long xyston, rising and thrusting two-handed. Kineas parried and got his helmet under the point and let his charger carry him in. Close up, belly to belly, the two horses reared, their hooves milling. Kineas caught his own spear up in two hands, left hand near the head and right hand on the butt, and thrust, his point ripping at the man’s arms, cutting his reins, punching in over the top of his bronze breastplate and into his throat.
And then another man, with a red cloak. Kineas tried to sweep him out of the saddle with the haft of his spear and the man cut the shaft in two with a powerful sword cut. Kineas leaned out to avoid the man’s back swing and Thalassa backed away. Kineas got his Egyptian machaira clear of the scabbard in the pause and then the two men closed, their horses whirling around each other like fighting dogs. Red Cloak was no master swordsman, but he was strong as an ox, heavy, tough, well armoured, and even when Kineas landed a heavy blow on the point of his shoulder, the man only grunted. He had a short dagger in his off hand now, and he leaned in close and punched the dagger at Kineas’s midriff, but Kineas’s bronze corslet turned the stroke. Kineas cut again, a high feint that he turned into an attack, using the man’s strong parry against him and reversing his cut so that the Egyptian sword went in under the man’s sword arm, but Red Cloak’s corslet held. Thalassa was backing away, Kineas’s eyes were full of sweat and he ducked his head and launched a flurry of blows. Red Cloak took a cut high on his arm and then cut back hard, and Kineas’s parry wasn’t strong enough to stop the blow from shearing his plume and ripping the helmet free against the chinstrap, snapping Kineas’s head back. He saw white, and again Thalassa saved his life. He felt his mount rise up and thrust with her legs. As the horse fell forward on to its front feet, Kineas’s vision cleared and he parried high, and the two blades locked, the hard edge of the Egyptian sword biting into the soft iron of the Macedonian kopis’s forte, and the two riders came together. The bigger man tried to grapple with his dagger coming in at Kineas’s thighs, and Kineas ripped his whip from his sash and slashed the man’s reaching arm left-handed and was rewarded with a grunt of pain, and then both horses tumbled together and righted themselves with scrambles and kicks that pushed them apart. Kineas was past Red Cloak, free of the mêlée. He looked back and Diodorus was thrusting at the big man repeatedly with a javelin, keeping him at arm’s length. Red Cloak was yelling in Macedonian Greek for some help.
Kineas turned Thalassa with just his knees, intending to finish Red Cloak. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his unarmoured arm, feeling the pain in his left shoulder for the first time, and came face to face with Purple Cloak, who had only a short sword and was fully engaged with Urvara. She threw Kineas a look - exasperation or desperation - and Kineas rode into the enemy general’s flank, tipping him to the ground without a blow, where Carlus finished him with a spear thrust. Legs locked on Thalassa’s barrel, Kineas found himself in a knot of desperate Macedonians in dust-coloured cloaks, probably Purple Cloak’s bodyguard. He cut right and left, took another blow on his left shoulder that cut the leather straps on his armour and kneed his charger into a run, bursting through the enemy and into the clear, blind with pain. He grabbed for his lost reins, missed them, but Thalassa turned under him like an equine acrobat, wheeling so sharply that Kineas almost lost his seat. The three bodyguards were locked with Carlus and Sitalkes. Kineas could see the blue plume on Diodorus’s helmet beyond Carlus’s giant form. He leaned forward on his mare’s neck, gasped a gulp of air and glanced at his left shoulder, which appeared uninjured despite the pain. Then he tapped Thalassa’s barrel with his heels and the horse responded with another powerful lunge forward, so that he crashed full into Sitalkes’ opponent, knocking the man’s horse back and losing the enemy rider his seat. Sitalkes put the man down with brutal economy while Kineas engaged his other opponent, trapping his sword in a high parry, cutting his bridle hand with a circular overhead feint and then killing him with a blow to the neck.
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 mêlée 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 broad 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 tw
enty 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.
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows Page 31