Kineas realized that Calchus, for all his overbearing ways, was working quite hard to make Kineas welcome. ‘You, a matchmaker?’
Calchus put an arm around his shoulder. ‘I said it when you first came. Your father saved our whole family. I don’t forget. You’re fresh from the city — you think I’m a big frog in a little pond. I see it. And I am. Isokles and I — we argue about everything, but we are the men of substance here. And there’s room for more. The pond’s not that small.’
For Calchus, that was a long, emotional speech. Kineas hugged him and got a crushing squeeze in return.
Calchus went off to watch slaves being loaded for Attica. Kineas went back to working on his tack. He was sitting with his back against the outside of the paddock, using the wall for shade, with his bridle laid out in pieces and a new headstall to sew on, when young Ajax loomed above him.
‘Good day to you, sir,’ he said.
‘Your servant, Ajax. Please accept the accommodation offered by this tuft of grass.’ Kineas waved to it and passed a skin full of sour wine, which Ajax drank as if it were ambrosia.
‘My father sent this for you to look at.’ He had a bag of scrolls over his shoulder like a student in the agora. He hoisted it to the ground.
Kineas opened one, glanced at the writing — a very neat copyist — and saw that it was Herodotus.
‘It is only Book Four — the part about the Scythians. Because — well, my father says you are leaving — leaving tomorrow. For Olbia. So you won’t have time to read much.’
Kineas nodded and picked up the headstall. ‘I probably won’t have time to read the first scroll,’ he said.
Ajax nodded. He then sat in silence. Kineas resumed his work, using a fine bronze awl and the backing of a soft billet of wood to punch a neat row of holes down each side of the new headstall. He looked at Ajax from time to time from under his eyebrows — the boy was anxious, fidgeting with scraps of leather and bits of thread. But silent. Kineas liked him for his silence.
He kept working. When the holes were punched, he waxed a length of linen cord and fitted it to a needle — the needle was too large for the job, but it was the only good needle in the camp. Then he began to sew.
‘The thing is…’ Ajax began. But he lost heart and the words just hung there.
Kineas let them dangle for a bit while he finished his length of cord and threaded a new one. ‘The thing is?’ he said gently.
‘I want to see the world,’ Ajax announced.
Kineas nodded. ‘Laudable.’
‘Nothing ever happens here.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ Kineas wondered if he could live in a place where the festivals and the gymnasium were the sum of excitement. But on this day, facing the loss of a horse, an uncertain journey and the tyrant of Olbia, he felt that a life of certain boredom looked preferable.
‘I want to — to join your company. To ride with you. I can ride. I’m not much with a javelin but I could learn, and I can box and wrestle and fight with the spear. And I spent a year with the shepherds — I can sleep rough, start a fire. I killed a wolf.’
Kineas looked up. ‘What does your father say?’
Ajax beamed. ‘He says that I can go with you if you are fool enough to take me.’
Kineas laughed. ‘By the gods. That’s just what I expect he said. He’s coming to dine here tonight.’
Ajax nodded vigorously. ‘So am I. And Penelope — my sister — is going to sing. She sings beautifully, and she weaves wool better than merchant’s wool. And she is beautiful — I shouldn’t say it, but she is.’
Kineas hadn’t encountered this level of instant hero worship before. He couldn’t help but bask in the admiration for a little while. But not long. ‘I shall be pleased to meet your sister. I will talk to your father tonight. But Ajax — we’re mercenaries. It’s a hard life. Fighting for the boy king — that was soldiering for the city, in a way, even if we got a rough reception when we came home. Sleeping rough, aye. And worse. Days without sleep. Nights on guard, on horseback, in enemy country.’ His voice trailed off, and then he said, ‘War isn’t what what it was, Ajax. There is no battle of champions. The virtues of our ancestors are seldom shown in modern war.’
He stopped himself, because his words were having the opposite effect from what he had planned. The boy’s eyes were shining with delight. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen. At the festival of Herakles.’
Kineas shrugged. Old enough to be a man. ‘I’ll talk to your father,’ he said. And when Ajax started to stammer thanks, he was merciless. ‘By the crooked-minded son of Cronus, boy! You could die. Pointlessly, in someone else’s fight — a street brawl, defending a tyrant who despises you. Or from a barbarian arrow in the dark. It’s not Homer, Ajax. It’s dirty, sleepless, full of scum and bugs. And on the day of battle, you are one faceless man under your helmet — no Achilles, no Hector, just an oarsman rowing the phalanx toward the enemy.’
Wasted words. He hoped they were not prophetic, because he still had some Homer in him after ten years of the real thing. He dreaded the pointless death in an alley, or a wine-shop squabble. He’d seen them happen to other men.
Late afternoon and his tack was clean and neat, the horses were inspected, the other men as ready as they needed to be, the armour and cornell-wood javelins packed in straw panniers for the baggage animals. He’d moved from the paddock to the base of the farm’s lone oak tree with a blanket to repair, but Kineas found it difficult to keep his eyes open. The coming dinner reminded him of the girl, Ajax’s sister, and what she would have meant — home, security, work. And her mere mention reminded him that it had been months since he had lain with a woman. Probably not since he left the army. And the contrast seemed vivid. Without even meeting Ajax’s sister, he could see her, at least in the guise of his own sisters. Demure. Quiet. Beautiful, remote, devout, cautious. Intelligent, perhaps, but certainly ignorant, without conversation.
His longest liaison in the army had been with Artemis. Not, obviously, her real name. She was a camp follower, a prostitute, although she insisted on being called Hetaera and claimed that she would be one in time. Loud, opinionated, violent in her loves and hates, given to drinking undiluted wine, she had seen more war than most of the soldiers, for all that she wasn’t yet twenty.
She’d stabbed a Macedonian file-closer who tried to rape her. She’d fucked most of the men in his troop, adopted them and been adopted. She had her own horse, could recite whole passages of Homer and dance every dance the men could — all the Spartan military dances, all the dances of the gods. The night before a battle, she would sing. Like Niceas, she was born in a brothel near the agora in Athens. She made the whole company, even the Corinthians and the Ionians, learn the anthem of Athens, to which she was fiercely patriotic.
Come, Athena, now if ever!
Let us now thy Glory see!
Now, O Maid and Queen, we pray thee,
Give thy servants victory!
She turned their drab followers into part of the company, got them messes, dealt with their squabbles and ruled them. And gave them value. And she had said to Kineas one ngiht, ‘Two things a girl needs to make it in this army; a hard heart and a wet cunny. That’s not in Homer, but I’d wager that it was the same for the girls at Troy.’
Artemis was well known to pick a unit she liked and go to the strongest man in it, until he died or she grew restless or he didn’t provide for her. She wouldn’t abide a non-provider. Kineas had kept her a year, in camp and city. She’d left him for Phillip Kontos, a Macedonian hipparch, a good professional move, and he didn’t hate her for it, although it occurred to him behind closed eyelids under a tree on the Euxine that he had expected her to stay with him.
Like the women, the life. He didn’t see much hope of becoming a farmer.
He fell asleep and Poseidon sent him a dream of horses.
He was riding a tall horse — or he was the horse, and they flowed together on an endless plain of grass — floating, galloping, on and on. There were other horses, too, and they followed, until he left the plain of grass for a plain of ash. And then they neighed and fell behind, and he rode on alone. And then they were at a river — a ford, full of rocks. On the far bank was a pile of driftwood as tall as a man, and a single dead tree, and on the ground beneath his hooves were the bodies of the dead…
He awoke with a start, rubbed his eyes and wondered what god had sent him such a dream. Then he rose
