Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  The arrow fell from the sky, burning like a meteor in the last of the sun and he fell . . .

  Sitting on the ground as the alien spearmen pushed the javelin home in his guts . . .

  Alone in the courtyard, cut off from his friends and so tired, as blow after blow fell on his head and arms, and then . . .

  Standing over Nicomedes’ corpse, each blow sending another foe into the dust with a clash of bronze, and the cry of the army, ‘Apollo!’, and he knew that victory . . .

  An arm around her throat, she lashed out with feet, hands, everything, panic not quite winning over cunning, but the other hand held iron and it burned across her throat and warm wetness fell on her breasts and she screamed but no voice came and she fell into the dark . . .

  Alone under the standard, and all around kin fell, protecting, covering, armour a blaze of gold . . .

  The shock of the cold iron in his guts - killed in a winning fight - he might have laughed but there was nothing . . .

  A child’s cry . . .

  Screaming, red everywhere and pain like lightning in her flesh, waves that came so close that there was no rest and nothing but the lightning and the waves, moist waves of pain that carried her closer to the tunnel - an answering scream from beneath her feet, and the pressure lifted, but not the pain, and all her life pouring away between her legs . . .

  A child’s cry - familiar - and death all around him, the iron tunnel gripping him with a rider’s legs on the whole of his body, arms trapped. A child’s cry . . .

  Standing frozen with fear as the man in the red-crested helm beats the file-leader to the ground - the sick noise as the man’s spear crushes his breastbone and he rips it free, gore spraying - shield too heavy to lift to parry - frozen - the sudden . . .

  A child’s cry . . .

  Light.

  Three old crones and the end of a thread and the straight-limbed goddess with an owl fluttering by her shoulder, and she smiled . . .

  Light . . .

  He awoke to darkness and children crying.

  By his side, Nihmu squatted, the thin hide of her leggings, worked with a thousand animals whirling in a geometric tangle of hooves and antlers and gold cones, tinkled at her shins and ankles. ‘We must ride, lord,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Kineas said. He felt that he was speaking down a tunnel, an endless tunnel lined with sound and light and motion and life - too much life.

  He turned to Srayanka, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘I have done it,’ he said. There was awe in his voice, and for the first time in his life, Kineas felt no fear.

  Srayanka rolled to her knees from her cloak. She reached out and touched his face. ‘Ahh!’ she said. ‘How the people will worship you.’

  Kineas held her in his arms. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Let’s get these people to water.’ His mouth was dry, but he could speak, and he could still taste the wine, and he gave the goddess a silent prayer and a smile in the dark.

  They stumbled twenty stades in two hours, the worst time they had ever made, and then they rode another ten stades in a matter of minutes, because the horses could smell the water. This time, there was no holding them, no discipline, no attempt to stop the beasts or the people. Kineas gave Thalassa her head and she lengthened her stride, galloping the last stades in a few heartbeats. Even Kineas could smell the water. It gleamed like liquid pitch in the light of the new moon, a broad pond dug by the prodromoi, and they stood well clear as the horses rushed upon it and drank, more and more of them pouring in behind so that the first comers were pushed right out of the water and the weaker horses were knocked down. A mare screamed and her desperation drove other horses back, and her rider tried to get her to her feet, but the horses were mad with thirst.

  ‘Here! Here! For more water!’ Ataelus was shouting, over and over, because there was a second hole just a hundred strides away in the dark. Kineas had to drag Thalassa, usually the most obedient of horses, by her halter. He put both hands on the bit and pulled, abraiding her mouth until he got her head up and away from the water and moving, and then she finally got the message that there was a second source of water and she let out a shrill cry and ran, leaving Kineas with his hands skinned raw, lying in the sand. Another mare following her lead stepped very close to him and a third kicked him where his ribs were hurt and he screamed, and then Ataelus and Leon were dragging him clear of the horses as many of the lead stallions and mares dashed for the second waterhole.

  Kineas lay on the sand.

  ‘Is he hurt badly?’ Diodorus asked fearfully.

  ‘He has lost his breath,’ Philokles said. ‘I think he was kicked.’

  Both of them were very far away.

  29

  They emerged from the dry grass into the valley of the lake of the Jaxartes on the second day after the prodromoi found water. They had topped a ridge so shallow that they hadn’t been aware they had climbed it, and looked down to see, not desert, but stades of water stretching away towards the mountains that now rose to the south. Horses had died, and more horses were ruined, most of them in the last rush to water and the brutal mêlée that followed - but not a man or woman or child had died. The horses had suffered, and their exhausted riders had to fight them, man and woman against horse, to drag them from the water before they killed themselves drinking.

  Lot’s people helped, having experienced the same just a week before. They had waited at the first water, hoping that Srayanka’s people would catch up with them. Lot’s wife was gone into the high country with all their herds and the young and old, and Lot appeared older. The loss of his daughters and the desert had put white in his hair, but it had not robbed him of courtesy.

  ‘I apologize—’ he said to Srayanka, but she cut him off with a quick embrace and a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Are we Greeks? You saw to your people and I saw to mine - and here we are.’

  Lot smiled, but his smile faded as he regarded Kineas, who lay rolled in his saddle blanket, alert but mute.

  ‘He was kicked,’ Philokles said.

  ‘He seems to hear everything we say,’ Srayanka said.

  Lot nodded. ‘We had several in a bad way - always the ones who took the least water.’ His tone left something out.

  Kineas lay with an untouched Spartan cup of water in his right hand.

  ‘Did yours recover?’ Srayanka asked, as if the question were of little consequence.

  ‘One did,’ Lot replied.

  ‘Of how many?’ Philokles asked, and then repeated his question in Sakje.

  ‘Out of four,’ Lot said. He shrugged. ‘I apologize again. But for Upazan, the king would have had Iskander at the Oxus. It is a heavy weight I carry.’

  ‘Heavier than the loss of a daughter?’ Kineas said, his head coming up. ‘I have seen her, by the tree.’

  All the commanders, Greek and Sakje and Sauromatae, stopped talking.

  Tears rolled down Lot’s face. ‘No, lord. Not heavier than Mosva’s loss.’

  Kineas’s eyes went over Lot’s head, off into the blue sky. ‘Death is not as you think,’ he said. And then his head went down, and the light in his eyes dwindled, and he slept.

  He was aware of the passage of time, although his awareness was flawed and he knew it, the way a man with a fever is aware that time does not pass for him as it does for his wife bathing his brow and cleaning the bed. He heard the reassuring voices of those he loved best, friends and wife, the babble and scream of his children, and he felt such passion for them that it was like physical pain, like a javelin piercing his chest straight to his heart.

  He knew that a stranger had come, speaking a strange dialect, like Sakje, with many of the same words, but in a different tone with more music. He listened, but he didn’t open his eyes for a long time.

  When he did, he felt better and he could breathe without wheezing. He tried to sit up and gave a cry, curling into a ball, and Srayanka was there.

  ‘Hush, Kineas.’

  ‘I’m better,’ he croaked. ‘Oh, the
ill luck of it! Right where the spear hit me.’

  Srayanka stroked his hand. ‘I have news,’ she said.

  ‘I heard a stranger,’ Kineas said.

  ‘A messenger from the queen of the Massagetae, bidding us hurry to the muster. My husband is a famous warrior, I find. His fame carries even to the queen of the Massagetae.’

  Kineas smiled and fell asleep.

  For a day, he was aware of food, aware of wine, aware of Srayanka’s caress at his cheek. He would hold his children and feel the piercing spear of love. He saw it all through the veil of dreams, and none of it had the immediacy of his thoughts, which raced and raced like a herd of deer run by dogs. It was not unlike his childhood experience of high fever.

  One night he woke and Srayanka was weeping with the children in her arms. She looked at him and hissed, ‘I am not a fucking Greek!’ Then she lowered her voice still further. ‘Come back to me! Better that you had died than that I have this walking corpse!’

  And Kineas noted that what she said was true, in its way, but not important. I am dead, he thought. What did you expect?

  Another sun, and another day in the saddle, his hips rolling easily with the gait of his charger, his mind far beyond the clouds. Around him they all chattered - so much talk! About him, about the weather, about the Massagetae and the Dahae and the tribes gathered in a great horde ahead of them, about Alexander’s army across the river. And then it was dark, and he dreamed of the assembly of Athens and listened to Demosthenes and Phocion debate further support to Alexander, reliving the moment when he was summoned by the council to lead the richest youth of the city to support Alexander. The dream was as clear as the first experience.

  He began to weep, because he had never thought to see Athens again, and because he missed it so much. How had he forgotten that the Parthenon shone so in the moonlight?

  ‘What is death, brother?’ asked a voice at his elbow.

  He was weeping, and he could only just remember why. But the question was an excellent one. It engaged his mind so that his tears were choked off. He looked at the heavens and finally he said, ‘The cessation of the body.’

  ‘And truth? What is truth?’

  Kineas took a deep breath. Again he was riding, and his hips moved with a life of their own. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said, and his ribs hurt like fresh bruises when he laughed. And in saying, he became aware from the tips of his hair to the aches in his wounds. He was sitting on his Getae hack, legs clamped to its narrow back, and around him were thousands of horses, cropping the grass of the Jaxartes valley, and he was Kineas.

  ‘What do you say?’ Srayanka asked, riding up, her face lit with hope.

  ‘I love you,’ Kineas said. He reached for her and winced at the wave of pain.

  She gave a little shriek like the one she sometimes uttered in passion. ‘You have returned!’

  ‘I was never very far away,’ he said. He grinned and rubbed his beard.

  ‘You climbed the tree?’ Nihmu asked, full of excitement. It was night, and they were eating dinner in a camp at the edge of the Jaxartes valley.

  ‘Be gone, bird of ill omen. Be gone with your barbarian notions of life.’ Philokles made to shoo the tanned girl away from Kineas, like a farmer moving poultry in his yard.

  ‘Shush, brother,’ Kineas said. He smiled at Philokles. To Nihmu, he said, ‘I climbed the tree. Now the tree is behind me.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not think that my tree and yours are the same.’

  ‘Your death?’ Nihmu asked.

  ‘Is my business, girl,’ Kineas snapped.

  ‘And Iskander?’ Leon asked.

  ‘Is a very capable commander, with a fine army.’ Kineas smiled. ‘I have dreamed of him and I have thought about his army.’ He shrugged. ‘But he’s across the river, as I understand.’

  Philokles was polishing his helmet, using tallow and fine grit on a pad of linen tow. ‘We’ve had brushes with his pickets every day since you went down, brother. I threw my best spear at Upazan just yesterday.’ Philokles gave a mirthless grin. ‘I find that all my wine-induced desires for peace vanish when I have a chance to kill.’ He put the helmet down on the ground and put a felt cap on his head, then donned the helmet, transforming from philosopher to spirit of Ares in a few heartbeats. ‘What is the point, Kineas? What is the point of all this marching, all this striving, all this killing? Did your precious tree tell you?’ He pulled his helmet off, obviously dissatisfied with the fit. He stared at the lacings.

  Kineas often found himself at a loss when debating with Philokles, but today the answers flowed into his mind like the Jaxartes in spate across the plains. ‘Come, brother, you know the answer.’ He laughed to see his brilliant and philosophical friend look at him so. He reached out and embraced Philokles. ‘What would Achilles say to you, Spartan? What would Socrates say?’

  Philokles drank water from a skin. He was blushing. ‘They would say that the point was virtue,’ he said.

  Kineas nodded. ‘Just so.’ He took a deep breath like a man who loved the taste of air. ‘Sometimes we kill because we are men of virtue and sometimes we abstain from killing for the same reason. Sometimes a man may choose to drink wine and another time he may choose to abstain. The doing of things is what earns the glory. We should need neither reward nor praise.’

  Nihmu stared from one to the other. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked with the annoyance of a young woman who thinks that her ignorance is being mocked. ‘Is this a Greek thing?’

  Kineas smiled and shook his head. ‘Perhaps, and perhaps not, child.’

  Philokles nodded. ‘It is the Greek thing, child. The struggle for virtue.’

  Kineas took the helmet from Philokles. ‘You are the last man on earth to wear the Corinthian helmet, brother. What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘The lining is all worn out.’

  Kineas nodded. ‘Nothing for it but to pull the leather and sew a new one.’

  Philokles nodded. ‘I was being lazy.’ He took his belt knife and cut the threads, and in one motion ripped the liner clear. ‘Ares help me if we are attacked now,’ he said.

  Nihmu shook her head. ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about,’ she said, and stalked off.

  When she was gone, Diodorus joined them, with Leon and Srayanka. Ataelus sat heavily on the ground. He looked thin.

  ‘Queen Zarina,’ Ataelus said. ‘For asking you.’ He waved at the eastern horizon. ‘For much messengers.’

  Diodorus nodded. ‘When will we reach her?’

  Srayanka stretched. ‘Two more days and we will reach the muster. Even going slowly. The horses are getting their coats back.’

  Kineas nodded. ‘I want to talk to Spitamenes first,’ he said. ‘He must be close.’

  ‘Gods, is this some baqca thing?’ Diodorus asked.

  Kineas rubbed his chin and pulled his beard, enjoying his friend’s discomfort. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s ten years in the saddle. Think of it, friend. When we were on the Oxus, Spitamenes was a hundred stades south of us. He never caught us on the Polytimeros. No one has said that Alexander caught him. We were all going to the same place. He can’t be far.’

  Philokles laughed. ‘And we call Diodorus a fox. Well reasoned, Kineas!’

  Ataelus grunted. ‘Could have asked me. Fuck-their-mothers Persae at the second water today. Garait said this.’ He shrugged.

  Kineas turned to kiss Srayanka. ‘I want to talk to the old bandit first. Then we ride to the muster.’

  ‘The old bandit sold me to Iskander,’ she said.

  ‘I want to settle that before we ride into an alien camp,’ Kineas said.

  Srayanka rolled her eyes.

  30

  The next day, Kineas met Spitamenes. Garait located his camp and Ataelus led him there. Darius was the intermediary, and Kineas rode with a short train of followers to share a meal with the last Persian in the field against Alexander. Philokles joined them, eager to observe.

  The Persian leader was tall and spare, with t
he greying remnants of red-gold hair in his beard. He was a handsome man despite a great beak of a nose, and he had an immediate presence. He rode a magnificent Nisaean charger, and he was deeply religious, so that even in the midst of his first meeting with Kineas, he paused for prayers.

  In his presence, Kineas knew that the man was a fanatic. How could he be else? And confronted with the man, it was as if his new-found wisdom was being tested against his old hatreds. Spitamenes had sold his wife to Alexander for what he thought of as a higher cause. The gambit had failed, and now the Persian was sorry, but his apology had the distant quality that indicated he would do as much again if it would serve to push the hated invader off the sacred soil of Persia.

  At his side sat Darius, translating freely, although Kineas’s Persian was of a high standard and many other men spoke the same languages. But Darius did not look at Spitamenes with worship, or even admiration. Early on, Spitamenes pointed out Darius, who was greeting his friends and file-mates among the Olbians. ‘That one loves you more than his own country,’ Spitamenes said.

  ‘We are guest friends and war-friends,’ Kineas said. ‘He has saved my life several times.’ Kineas was watching the Persians, Medes and Bactrians around the fires. Spitamenes had fewer than a thousand men and only the same number of horses. He had lost the campaign that summer and his men looked the part - dirty, tired, eyes dead. They sat on the grass with only their saddle rugs for seats. They had no followers, no women and very little chatter. They built their fires right on the grass rather than digging pits like the Greeks, so that the whole camp smelled of burning grass, and from time to time the grass would catch again and burn until a tired warrior stomped it out. They were dirty and yet they were proud, heads high, glaring at him as if he and Philokles were the personification of the enemy.

  Spitamenes turned his head away, clearly displeased. Then he asked, ‘Where is your beautiful wife?’