Kineas moved as if his side had pained him. ‘She is dead, then?’
The Macedonian shovelled food with his fingers. After he chewed he looked up. ‘She was our luck, just as she was yours. Kontos killed her when she chose to stay with us, the fucker. She wouldn’t go west with him.’
Diodorus had known Artemis, as had Antigonus, but the big Gaul was at his own fire. Diodorus snorted to cover his sorrow. Artemis had led the camp followers when they were in Alexander’s army. She had been Kineas’s woman from Issus to Ecbatana. ‘No,’ he said, glancing at Kineas. ‘No, she wouldn’t.’ He raised his cup. ‘Here is to her memory.’
Ptolemy accepted the cup, poured a little for her shade. ‘Aye.’
Kineas slopped some from his own bowl and drank. ‘I put Kontos in the earth,’ he said.
The fireside fell silent.
‘Small world,’ the Macedonian said. ‘Surely the gods must have willed it so - that you, whom she loved best, avenged her.’
‘I doubt that she loved me best,’ Kineas said, pleased despite his own words. ‘I dreamed that she was dead,’ he added. ‘You may go in the morning. Take a horse. Philokles here will see you clear of our pickets.’
Ptolemy stretched his legs out towards the fire. The nights were surprisingly cool, despite the blast of heat every day at noon. ‘I praise Ares that I was taken by Greeks,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there is some point in praying to the gods, after all. I would have expected to have my balls pulled off by now by barbarians. You won’t ask for ransom?’
Kineas looked up at Diodorus and Philokles. They both shook their heads. ‘No. You may ride clear. We took half a dozen troopers as well. You can take them with you.’
Ptolemy nodded. He looked around. ‘Alexander would forgive you like a shot, Kineas. And hire your whole command. Sakje? With Greeks? Name your price.’
‘I am not for sale,’ Kineas said. ‘And I have done nothing that needs to be forgiven, Macedonian.’
‘Is this some misbegotten Athenian plot? Don’t be a fool.’ Ptolemy pressed close. ‘Let me use this god-given opportunity. Listen! We knew somebody was beating up our pickets. Ever since early summer, we’ve had reports of mercenary Greek horse on the Oxus. Now that I’ve found you, come with me! Whatever Spitamenes is paying you, the king will beat it!’
Around the fire, Kineas’s friends laughed.
‘Spitamenes has no friends here,’ Srayanka said. Her Greek was excellent now.
‘You’re the Amazon!’ Ptolemy said. He was typical of Macedonians - Kineas could see that, having ascertained that she was a woman, and a suckling woman, he had dismissed her as being of less importance than the saddle blanket on which he sat. ‘The pregnant Amazon!’ He looked from her to Kineas and back. ‘Your girl?’
‘My wife, the Lady Srayanka, Queen of the Assagatje.’ Kineas gestured towards her.
She chuckled, even as she adjusted her son on her nipple and put a hand under her breast to support him.
Ptolemy looked at her more carefully. Then he looked at Kineas, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘If you killed Kontos, then you defeated Zopryon, didn’t you?’
Kineas smiled slowly and wickedly. ‘I didn’t do it by myself,’ he said.
Ptolemy was pale, even in the ruddy firelight. ‘So . . .’ he said. All friendliness was gone from his voice. ‘Fucking ingrate. Alexander made you.’
Kineas felt the blood in his face. Nonetheless, he struggled to remain calm - if only because his calm would infuriate the Macedonian all the more. ‘I am an Athenian.’
‘You are a fucking Hellene fighting for barbarians.’ Ptolemy was livid and, like most fighting men, heedless of consequence.
Kineas had no trouble meeting his gaze, even when the Macedonian stumbled to his feet, fists closed and twitching.
‘You are a barbarian, fighting for barbarians,’ Kineas said. He sat up from his reclining position. ‘I owe Alexander nothing. I was dismissed by him - and exiled for serving him. My city has commanded my service against him.’
‘Athens has sent an army into this haunted desert?’ Ptolemy slumped. ‘That’s not possible!’
‘My city is Olbia,’ Kineas said with pride. ‘I am the hipparch of Olbia. Every man at this fire is a citizen of Olbia. The cities of the Euxine united with the Sakje - the Assagatje - to destroy Zopryon. He would have enslaved every man and woman on the Euxine, Ptolemy. He wanted it all.’ Kineas stood up, handing his daughter to Darius, and spat in the fire. ‘We lost hundreds of riders. Not one Macedonian boy lived to see his mother on a farm near Pella. Not one horse trotted across the grass to his pasture in the high hills.’
Srayanka’s voice was angry and arrogant. She didn’t rise. ‘Tell your king that if he comes on to the plains, we will give him the same. The sea of grass is not for Macedon. My father died teaching Philip that lesson - and none of us are afraid to school the son.’
‘Olbia?’ Ptolemy asked. His anger was quenched. ‘Where the fuck is Olbia?’
That made all the veterans around the fire laugh, because just two years before, most of them would have said the same.
Kineas gave half a grin. ‘The richest city of the Euxine.’ Even as he spoke, he could see the city as if he stood on the bluff by the Borysthenes, looking down at the Temple of Apollo and the golden dolphins. ‘With Pantecapaeum, richer than all the cities of Greece combined.’
Ptolemy controlled his anger, aware that he was one captured Macedonian. ‘That’s not saying much,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen Persepolis and Ecbatana. Greece is poor.’
‘Rich enough, with their Sakje allies, to stop Macedon for ever.’ Kineas sat again.
Ptolemy’s long and thoughtful face took on an intense look. ‘You may speak your sophistry as you will - the king will never forgive you. We aren’t even allowed to mention Zopryon’s name. The survivors of the fight on the Polytimeros were threatened with decimation - one in ten to be executed. He actually carried out half a dozen before he ordered them stopped. Did you know that? And we were sworn to eternal silence on the defeat.’
Philokles nodded. ‘He guards his myth of invulnerability,’ he said. And then, looking closely at the Macedonian’s face, he said, ‘You hate him.’
Stung, Ptolemy stumbled away from Philokles. Antigonus, arriving out of the darkness with a skin of captured wine, caught his shoulders and steadied him. ‘Careful, laddy,’ Antigonus said in his heavily accented Greek.
Ptolemy looked around and slumped again. He sighed. ‘We all love him and we hate him. He is half god and half monster.’ He raised his head. ‘Like many men, I would like to go home. I would like to stop playing the endless game of betrayal and politics and advantage for power and influence in the army. I would like to build something. Something real.’
Philokles raised an eyebrow, frowned and nodded. ‘So stop?’
Ptolemy shook his head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ Philokles asked.
‘Because if Ptolemy stops playing, somebody under him will have him killed and move up,’ Kineas said, and Diodorus nodded agreement. ‘We never played the Macedonian game - we’re just Greeks. But we watched.’ Kineas looked at Ptolemy’s face and thought about how often Philokles had asked him questions like this with the same intensity. It was interesting to see him do it to another man, to see the effect, the confusion, the sudden self-doubt.
‘Best join us,’ Diodorus said. ‘We’ve Numidians and Kelts and Megarans and Spartans. There’s a Babylonian Jew in second troop - or so he claims. We’ve a couple of Persians. Why not a Macedonian?’
Ptolemy laughed. ‘You are—’ He looked around the firelight. ‘Hah!’ he laughed, shaking his head. ‘You will actually let me go?’
Kineas nodded. ‘Be my guest.’
Ptolemy stood at attention. ‘I am honour-bound to report everything I have seen and heard,’ he said.
Philokles spoke up again. ‘But will you?’ he asked.
Ptolemy suddenly looked younger and more vulnerable than he ha
d throughout his time by the fire. ‘I - I must,’ he said.
Philokles shrugged. ‘Except that if you tell the king everything, you will never see home. First, because tyrants always blame the messenger. Is that not true, Kineas?’
‘Are you asking me because I know so many tyrants, or because I have been one?’ Kineas asked. ‘But yes.’
‘Which you well know, yes?’ Philokles, in his turn, rose to his feet. ‘And because if you tell Alexander all you know, you will change his campaign. His Amazon - his prize! - is right here. And so is the man who defeated Zopryon.’ Philokles had never looked more like a philosopher, despite his stained tunic and dirty legs, than at that moment, gleaming and golden in the firelight, leaning forward like a statue of an orator. ‘If you tell him, he will drop everything to fight us - out on the grass. And you will never see home.’ Philokles’ eyes were sparkling. ‘And you know it.’
Diodorus, still reclining, said, ‘There is a god at your shoulder, Philokles.’
The others were silent. Some slurping and gurgling from Lita broke the solemnity of the moment.
Ptolemy was gone in the morning with the other prisoners. Philokles rode with him to the south, accompanied by Ataelus, and returned alone at midday, when the whole column was so far out on the sea of grass that the trees of the Polytimeros valley were lost in the haze. Only the mountains to the east marred the perfect bowl of the earth.
It was not until evening that the desert nature of the ground began to take its toll. The scouts had found waterholes, and their camps were based on those, but no single place gave sufficient water for eight hundred horses. Kineas had to fragment his command into four groups, based more on horse strength than on manpower. Srayanka and the Sakje were at another waterhole. He lay awake listening to the restless, under-watered horses. He was unused to sleeping alone, already missing his children. He awoke with a dry mouth. He drank water from the spring after the horses were clear, and there was more silt than refreshment.
By noon his mouth was like parchment, his tongue had taken on a presence in his mouth it had never had before and his clay water bottle, sized for Greece where dozen of streams crossed the plains, was almost dry. He had travelled through deserts before, in Persia and Media and west, by Hyrkania, so he knew to put a pebble under his tongue and to ration his water skin and pottery canteen carefully. He made sure that Antigonus and the under-officers checked the Greek and Keltoi troopers constantly, made them drink, watched them for signs of sickness.
Even with a host of water problems, they flew. Released from the rough ground at the foot of the Sogdian mountains, the four small columns moved at a pace that could only be maintained when every man had at least two mounts. Their second camp on the sea of grass came after what seemed like three hundred stades of travel - an incredible march for one day. The prodromoi rode back and forth between the columns, reporting on the water ahead and the distance that each troop had left to reach their camp, but soon enough the horses smelled the water and then they saw a stream rushing out of the hills - hills that had shifted from the eastern horizon towards the south, and were closer. The stream was still cool and the horses trumpeted when they smelled it and could barely be controlled.
‘For worrying,’ Ataelus confessed, as they watched the horses charge into the stream. ‘For one day on Great Grass.’ He pointed mutely at the chaotic drinking. ‘Next time, four days. And one night - no water.’ He shrugged. His shrugs were so Greek now that he could have sat on a wall in the agora of Athens.
‘We’ll survive,’ Kineas said.
Ataelus gave him a look that suggested that no amount of command optimism was going to cure a night without water.
They all camped together, because of the stream. Kineas snuggled up to Srayanka, and she snuggled back. ‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘I know I will lose you - so I resent being parted. I will yet be a silly girl.’
‘No,’ Kineas said, smelling the sweet grass and woodsmoke and horse smell of her. ‘How were the children?’
She rocked her hips, pushing back against him. ‘They were like babies. When their mouths get dry, they cry. Worry more when they don’t cry.’ She rolled her head back to him. ‘Most of the women who have borne children are gone - the only other women are spear-maidens. I wish I had someone to ask—’
‘Ask what?’ Kineas said.
‘Lita doesn’t - move - as much as I am for liking.’ She kissed him. ‘I am being a mother. Pay me no heed.’
Kineas lay still for a little while.
Srayanka rolled on to her back. ‘What are you for thinking?’
Kineas watched her in the starlight. ‘I’m thinking how many things there are to worry about. Babies and water, horses and water. Alexander. Death.’
Srayanka put her hand behind his head. ‘I can think of something we can do to stop worrying,’ she said, her right hand already playful. ‘But you must be quiet!’
Kineas chuckled into her lips. He started to say something witty and then he wasn’t thinking about much of anything.
About two minutes later, something hit Kineas’s rump. ‘Keep it down!’ Diodorus called, and forty men and two women laughed.
‘Told you to be quiet,’ Srayanka said. But her chuckles didn’t last long.
PART VI
THE BEACON
27
‘So this party of mixed Greeks and Scythians just let you go.’ Hephaestion was beginning to see Ptolemy as a competitor, and in his creed competitors needed to be destroyed.
Ptolemy was struggling not to lose his nerve or his temper. In his detached, commander’s brain, he wondered that a man could be afraid and enraged at the same time. The Poet always said that one drove out the other.
The Poet had never been to Sogdiana. ‘The Greeks made sure of it,’ he said. ‘There was a Spartan mercenary. He rode me clear of their lines.’
Alexander, far from being angry, seemed pleased. ‘So the Sakje barbarians have some Greek allies,’ he said. He rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘That makes it more of a fight, don’t you think?’
Hephaestion wasn’t through yet. ‘It might, if you believed this halfarsed story.’
Alexander looked at his closest companion with a certain scepticism. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do Sogdians take prisoners?’
‘No,’ said Hephaestion. ‘Of course not.’
‘Dahae? Sakje? Massagetae?’ Alexander was just like his tutor when he bored in on an argument. He was at his most annoyingly superior, but since the focus of his superiority was on Hephaestion and not him, Ptolemy was prepared to watch.
‘No,’ said Hephaestion, now surly as he understood the point being made.
‘Exactly. If his story was false, he wouldn’t be here. So Craterus lost, what, seventy Sogdians?’ Alexander snapped his fingers and received a cup of wine. Another cup was offered to Ptolemy, while Alexander shared his with Hephaestion.
Ptolemy nodded. ‘More like a hundred, lord.’
Alexander rolled the wine in his cup before he raised his eyes. ‘Craterus needs to be replaced.’
Ptolemy shook his head. ‘Who could have expected a trained commander in this wilderness? Or an enemy who could make three direction changes inside a few stades?’
Alexander’s steady and mismatched gaze didn’t waver.
So much for Craterus, Ptolemy thought.
‘Will you take command of the Sogdian cavalry?’ Alexander asked.
‘No,’ Ptolemy said, without a moment’s thought. ‘I would like to go back to commanding my taxeis.’
‘Very well,’ Alexander said. His annoyance was plain - blood rushed to his face. ‘Go back to foot-slogging with my compliments on your report.’ He made a hand motion that indicated dismissal. Ptolemy gave a brief bow - a sketchy compromise between a Macedonian head nod and a Persian bow - and withdrew.
As he left, Alexander turned to Hephaestion. ‘This Greek mercenary has hurt us several times. I can’t believe he’s a Spartan - they have no head for cavalry. Agesilaus
was the exception, not the rule.’
Hephaestion was pouting. ‘Xenophon was a Spartan,’ he said.
Alexander laughed. ‘What did you do while I went to my tutor?’ he asked. ‘Xenophon was an Athenian.’
Hephaestion knocked back his wine and shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I want to command the Sogdians.’
Alexander looked at him fondly. ‘You command my Companions,’ he said.
‘You need a soldier of proven worth to lead the Sogdians and stop the defeats we’ve taken in the little fights along the Oxus.’ Hephaestion raised his head.
Alexander met his eyes, put a hand on his head and ruffled his bronze curls. ‘It is not a job worthy of you,’ he said.
Hephaestion shrugged off his hand. ‘I want it.’
Alexander shrugged and turned his back. ‘No,’ he said.
‘I want—’ Hephaestion began.
‘No,’ Alexander said, in a tone of command. ‘Fetch Eumenes for me, please.’
Hephaestion stomped out of the tent and Eumenes came in alone. ‘Great King?’ he asked after an obeisance.
‘I need a cavalry commander to cover the movement on the Jaxartes. Who is it to be?’
Eumenes shrugged. ‘I thought Craterus had that job?’ he asked.
Alexander’s eyes bored into the Cardian’s, but Eumenes held his ground, not giving a hint that he already knew what had happened. After a moment, Alexander shook his head. ‘Craterus got beaten,’ he said.
‘I’ll do it,’ Eumenes said. His tone suggested that he didn’t want to do it.
‘Set a Greek to catch a Greek?’ Alexander said. ‘My thought exactly. There’s a Greek mercenary operating with Spitamenes. Take the Sogdians, a squadron of the mercenary horse and whatever foot you think will help and get him. He seems to have about four hundred horse. Perhaps twice that.’
Eumenes nodded. ‘Where is he now?’
Alexander had a rough sketch of Sogdiana on his camp table, although it showed nothing but towns, rivers and mountains. And even then, most of the distances were guesswork, even after a year’s campaigning. ‘Up where the Polytimeros meets the Sogdian mountains. He’ll be on the north bank of the Polytimeros, shadowing us.’
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows Page 40