Niceas begged the host’s indulgence, and then told a few tales of Graccus’s courage and a comic one of his boastfulness and all the men laughed, the eyes of the farmer’s younger sons shining like silver owls in the firelight. And then they were all telling tales of Graccus and other men who had fallen in the last few years.
Coenus rose and stood with one hand on his hip, and told the story of the fight on the fords of the Euphrates, when twenty of them on a scout caught the tail of Darius’s army in the moonlight. ‘Graccus was the first to take a life,’ he said in the phrasing of the Poet, ‘and a Mede splashed into the river at his feet when he plunged his spear into the man’s neck.’
Laertes told of how Graccus fought a duel with one of the Macedonian officers — on horseback, with javelins. It had made him famous and notorious in a day, and what Kineas best remembered was the time he’d spent averting King Alexander’s wrath. But it made a good story.
Alexander the farmer listened politely and mixed the wine with lots of water like a man who was being well entertained, and his sons sat and drank it all in. The eldest listened like a man being visited by men from another world, but Echo listened like a hungry man watching food.
Finally Agis, the closest they had to a priest, rose and spilled wine on the sand. ‘Some say it is a bitter thing when the bronze bites home, and the darkness falls over your eyes. Some say that death is the end of life, and some say it is the start of something new.’ He raised his cup. ‘But I say that Graccus was courteous and brave; that he feared the gods and died with a spear in his hand. Hard death is the lot of every man and woman born, and Graccus went to his with a song on his lips.’ Agis took a brand from the fire — pitch-filled pine that flared in the wind — and every man there, even the farmer’s sons, took more, and they walked along the beach to the funeral pyre. They sang the hymn to Demeter, and they sang the Paean, and then they flung their torches into the pile. It burst into flame as if a bolt from Zeus had struck it — a good omen.
They watched it burn until the heat drove them back, as well as the smell of roast meat. Then they drank again. Later, they rose from the straw and bowed, the better-born soldiers offering well-turned compliments to the host, and went off to sleep on the straw pallets in their tents. Kineas walked back with Niceas, who had tears running down his face. He had cried quietly for an hour, but the tears were drying now. ‘I can’t remember a symposium I liked so much.’
Kineas nodded. ‘It was kindly done.’
Niceas said, ‘I’ll give him my booty horse in the morning. Let it be from Graccus, for his feast. And thank you, sir, for thinking of him. I was afraid you had forgotten.’
Kineas shook his head. He punched his hyperetes in the shoulder and then embraced him. Other men came and embraced Niceas. Even, hesitantly, Ajax.
In the morning the pyre still smouldered, and the sun rose in splendour, casting a pink and yellow glow across everything before he was halfway over the rim of the world. Kineas heard the phrase ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ a dozen times before he had his horse bridled.
Niceas arranged with young Echo to fetch the hot bones from the pyre when they cooled, and then bury them in the family graveyard.
The column formed quickly and neatly, every packhorse bulging like a pregnant donkey with baskets of grain. Everyone knew their place by now and things happened more quickly — the tent came down fast, cloaks were rolled and stowed, horses fetched in from hobbles. Neither Kineas nor Niceas had to oversee the process. So, rosy fingered dawn had not yet given way to full day before Kineas, mounted, was saluting Alexander in his yard. Niceas had already given him a horse.
It was a pleasure to leave a place with friends left behind.
Niceas looked back as they rode over the first hill. ‘That boy will tend his grave as if he was one of the heroes,’ he said. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘Better burial than any of us have a right to expect,’ Kineas said, and Niceas made the peasant sign to avert an evil fate.
A stade later, Philokles rode up beside him. ‘Think you’ll ever be that man?’
Kineas grunted. ‘A farmer? Wife? Sons?’
Philokles laughed. ‘Daughters!’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could go back.’
Philokles raised his eyebrows. ‘Why not? Calchus and Isokles would have you in a flash.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You ask the damnedest questions. Does some god whisper in your ear “go and torment Kineas?”’
Philokles shook his head. ‘You interest me. The Captain. The soldier of renown.’
Kineas sat back on his horse, his ass high on the horse’s rump, and crossed his legs. It gave his thighs a rest at the cost of his behind. ‘Oh, come on. You’re a Spartan. You must have had a great deal of opportunity to plumb the thoughts of soldiers of renown.’
Philokles nodded curtly. ‘Yes.’
Kineas said, ‘So I command what — twelve men? Why me? Soldier of renown. Flatterer. May your words go to Zeus.’
‘But my Spartans would all claim they pined for a farm. So many would say it that it has become the norm to say it — perhaps even to think it. Perhaps I ask you because you are not a Spartan.’
‘Here’s my answer, then. Once, I wanted a farm and a wife. Now, I think I’d die of boredom.’
‘You love war?’
‘Pshaw. I love not-war. I love the preparation and the riding and the scouting and the planning — camaraderie, shared success, all that. The killing part is the price you pay for the not-quite-war part.’
‘Farmers have to plan as well. At least, good farmers do.’
‘Really?’ Kineas raised both his eyebrows in a parody of a tragedian’s look of surprise.
Philokles went on as if Kineas had spoken with genuine surprise. ‘Really. Good farmers plan carefully. Good farmers prepare and scout, their whole farm is like a file of hoplites, all trained to work together. But that’s not for you?’
Kineas shrugged. ‘No.’
Philokles nodded as if to himself, his eyes on the distant hills. ‘Perhaps it is something else.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘Spartan, do you ever talk about the weather? Or about music, athletic events, poetry, women you’ve bedded — any of those things?’
Philokles considered a moment. ‘Not often.’
Kineas laughed. ‘Why exactly are you with us?’ he asked again.
Philokles had begun to fall back along the column. He waved. ‘To learn!’ he shouted.
Kineas cursed and looked around for Ataelus. The Scyth had avoided the beachside symposium, but he was otherwise now comfortable with most of the men, especially Antigonus and Coenus — a former slave and a former nobleman. He had ridden off at the first blush of dawn to scout. Kineas wanted him back. It was time to begin to worry.
Kineas realized that he hadn’t worried about anything in a day, and he thanked the gods for Alexander the farmer again, calling down blessings on the man. And he thought about being a farmer, and he thought of the man’s instant friendliness, and wondered if he should have asked…
Ataelus appeared on the crest of a hill, well to the front, sitting confidently on his Getae horse and waiting for the column to reach him. Already Kineas could recognize him at a distance, just from his posture on the horse, so un-Greek, so relaxed. He might have been asleep.
Closer up, it became plain that he was.
Kineas rode up to him, cantering up the last rise. Ataelus was awake before he reached him, a hand waved in greeting.
‘Have a nice nap?’ Kineas asked.
‘Long ride. Many things. Yes?’
Kineas nodded. ‘What did you see?’
‘For me? I see many things, grass and hills. Also tracks of horses, many running horses. My people. No stinking fuck themselves Getae.’
Kineas felt a frisson of fear. ‘Your people? How recent? When were they here?’
‘Yesterday. Maybe yesterday. Two days if not for rain.’ The Scyth had a poor command of Greek’s complexities with nouns, and he tended to stick to the form he liked, the dative. ‘For rain?’ he said again, as a
