then watched a falcon stooping out over the estuary of the Danube. He felt they were safe — in wild places, it was usually easy to feel the approach of an enemy.
For an hour, he watched Ajax bring up the horses one at a time, curry them and then hobble them again. The lad was thorough, although he had a rebellious set to his back that Kineas hadn’t seen before. But he checked hooves, rubbed each horse with straw, looked in their eyes and their mouths. He knew what he was about. Kineas went back to watching the horizon, and he was surprised when Ajax started walking towards him with a pair of horses — the time had flown by. But his hands were back to normal, his neck felt less strained and he was ready for a ride. Once mounted, he walked his horse to the near tent and tapped the poll with the butt of his javelin. Niceas put his head out.
‘We’re riding a dawn patrol. Have the slaves start the food. We’ll ride in an hour.’
Niceas buried a yawn with one of his big hands. ‘I’m on it.’
Kineas turned his horse and rode out with Ajax at his side. He rode straight north along the river, staying in low ground when he could and showing Ajax what he was doing at every step — keeping the rising sun from silhouetting him and his mount, using the brush along the river for cover and background, coming to a dead stop when he had to cross a rise. They made their way along the bank and then Kineas led them inland, almost due north, until they reached some high ground that he had seen while he was standing watch. They were almost a stade from the camp, and he slid to the ground, tossed his reins to Ajax and crawled to the crest on his hands and knees. He was showing off for the boy, but the cause was good — the boy needed to see how to do a dawn patrol correctly.
From the crest he could see an enormous arc of ground, all of it empty. Of course, every fold of it could contain a Scythian horde, but Kineas knew from experience how hard it was to keep men and animals in ambush without motion and dust for any length of time. He slid back down to Ajax. ‘Hobble your mount and keep watch up there until I come for you. I’ll have your slave bring you something to eat. If you see movement, run like the furies were on you.’
Ajax nodded, very serious. ‘Am I — in trouble?’
‘Certainly not. This is what we do on the dawn patrol. I have work to do — you already did yours. So you can loaf up here, watch the whole horizon, and wait for the men to have breakfast. It’d be the same if I had Diodorus here.’
Ajax let a smile break through. ‘Oh. Good. I’ll watch, then.’
Kineas rode back to camp by a different route, still keeping his silhouette away from prying eyes. He ate a bowl of reheated soup from the night’s dinner, re-curried his own charger and then put her into the remounts, choosing a smaller, lighter horse for his day’s work. He told Diodorus, Lykeles and Graccus to be prepared to hunt. They were eager for it.
Crax was working on the baggage animals under the careful eye of Niceas. He didn’t seem the worse for his misadventure, but when Kineas checked the baggage, he found that every girth the boy had done was loose or sabotaged. Kineas summoned the boy with a wave and knocked him flat on his back with a single blow of his fist.
‘I don’t like to hit a slave,’ Kineas said evenly. He paused to lick some blood where he had split the skin over a knuckle. ‘You tried to run last night. Fair enough. If I were a slave, I’d run for home, too. Then you rigged the baggage to slip — lost work and a late start for us. Bad job both times. If you try something like this again, I’ll just kill you — you didn’t cost me a copper obol and I don’t need a slave. Understand?’
The boy looked dazed — probably was, after two heavy blows.
‘But I do need more cavalrymen. Show me you can do the job and take the crap, and I’ll put you up as a groom in Olbia and free you in the gamelia. Or die. I hate to waste manpower, but I don’t like sloppy knots.’ Kineas turned away and rolled heavily on to the back of his light horse. He didn’t feel like vaulting, and his split knuckle hurt like fire.
He sent Ataelus to bring Ajax in, and then they were off across the plains of the Getae.
They made good time after they started, although Crax remained dazed and he had to be tied over a horse. By noon they were clear of the marsh to the east and riding on a board, flat grass plain dominated by a line of low rocky hills to the west. Lines of wind moved the tips of the grasses in waves. The sea of green rolled on and on over hummocks and low hills, all the way out to the horizon. It was terrain built for horses by the gods, and Kineas stopped at the top of the first low ridge and looked out under his hand while the sun crept up a finger’s breadth.
The magnitude of the view kept them silent, and then Ataelus dismounted, knelt, and kissed the ground, before giving a screech that vanished in the vastness of the sky.
‘Someone’s home,’ said Coenus with a grin.
When they found some tracks Ataelus rode all the way to the base of the hills and came back with a heavy black arrow that he handed to Kineas without comment.
‘Getae?’ Kineas asked.
Ataelus shrugged expressively and rode out ahead.
In early afternoon they flushed a small herd of roebuck in a deep gully cut by a small stream, and the three hunters rode ahead of them, cut out a big buck and brought him down with javelins. It was a pleasure to watch, and the aristocrat in Kineas appreciated how professional cavalrymen had mastered the mounted hunt in a way that few aristocrats would ever see, much less learn. He rode on, thinking of Xenophon, whose works on horses and hunting he had read in his youth. Coenus — an educated man, and often out of place in a company of mercenaries — doted on Xenophon, and could quote great swathes of his works. Seeing the returning hunters, he rode up next to Kineas, pointed, and said, ‘“Therefore I charge the young not to despise hunting or any other schooling. For these are the means by which men become good in war and in all things out of which must come excellence in thought and word and deed.”’
Somehow, that reminded him that he still had Isokles’s scrolls of the fourth book of Herodotus, and that pained him, because he couldn’t imagine having the time to read and he dreaded the scrolls getting soaked to illegibility.
Philokles came abreast of him. ‘Is this spot sacred, or may I ride here?’
Kineas snapped to full awareness. ‘Sacred?’ he said.
‘Only Niceas ever rides with you — or Ataelus, I suppose, and Coenus, when he needs a vent for his scholarship. And I’m bored, and my thighs are burning, and a little gentle conversation might get another few stades out of me.’
Kineas was looking over the Spartan’s head. ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong place for gentle conversation. Niceas! ’ He raised a hand. ‘Halt! Chargers and armour, now!’
The orderly column fell apart. The old soldiers were the fastest — Niceas was in his armour and up on his best warhorse while Ajax was still fumbling at a basket pannier for the sword he’d been lent. Philokles had no armour, so he sat on his horse and watched Kineas don his own.
‘What did you see?’ he asked.
‘Ataelus. He’s coming in towards us at a flat gallop, and shooting behind him — a nice trick if you can learn it. No — farther away. Look up the valley.’ Kineas had his breast and back plate fastened, his helmet locked and the hinged cheek pieces down, and was trying to get control of his charger, who was not having any of it.
Another minute passed as men forced their helmets on or fought with straps and buckles. Niceas served out javelins. Kineas finally got up on his warhorse, embarrassed by looking like a new recruit in front of his men. The grass here grew in heavy tufts that formed small mounds and made walking nearly impossible and mounting even more difficult. Horses on the other hand seemed to walk easily among the tussocks. From a distance, the hilly plain stretched away to the hills beyond like a rippled green cloth, with no sign of the treacherous ground under the lush green grass.
Ataelus was one grassy rise away, and Kineas could see riders pursuing him a few stades back. They were small men on small horses. A few had bows, most had javelins, and none had armour. There were quite a few of them. Even as they watched, Ataelus changed direction, riding wide of Kineas’s troop and heading north beyond bowshot.
‘Diodorus! Take — take Ajax and support the Scyth. Get on their flank and harry them if they ignore you. The rest of you, knee to knee. Now! Two lines, and move!’
He had ten fighting men — a tiny number, but they had some advantages and the Scyth had brought the
