messenger. In Olbia, the drunken tyrant could also be the philosopher king.
Cyrus stood at his right hand and wrote the terms of the treaty. The king and the archon drafted it in an hour and clasped hands, each swearing by Apollo and by their own gods to support the other in war, should Macedon march in the spring. They did not pledge eternal friendship. The king did not agree that Olbians were free to travel the plains without hindrance, but he did agree to forbear taxing them for as long as the treaty was in effect.
After they clasped hands, the archon mounted a horse and escorted the king to the walls of the city, and the two men chatted as they rode. Kineas, directly behind the archon, heard more silence than chatter. In the arch of the gate, the archon drew rein.
‘We will need to meet in the spring to discuss strategy,’ he said.
The king looked out over the city’s fields and nodded. ‘I will need time — and space — to muster my people.’
The archon was an excellent rider. Kineas hadn’t had an opportunity to note it before. He surprised Kineas by backing his horse a few steps and catching Kineas’s bridle. ‘My hipparch pressed me to make this war, O King. So I’ll send him to you in the spring.’
Satrax nodded. ‘I will look forward to that,’ he said.
The archon nodded. ‘I thought you might. We’ll know for sure about what Antipater plans when the Athenian grain fleet comes in the spring.’
The king’s horse was restive. He calmed it with a hand on its neck and some words in Sakje, and then he reached for Kineas’s hand. ‘In the spring, when the ground sets hard and the grass is green, I will send you an escort.’
The streets were crowded, and the gate was almost surrounded by the people of the town and the suburb. The king waved in farewell, and then he made his horse rear and leap, so that it almost seemed that the two would gallop across the sky, instead of merely riding along the road.
At his side, the archon said, ‘You enjoyed your time among these barbarians?’
And Kineas, who could dissemble when need required, said, ‘I befriended one of their war leaders. I had this whip as a guest gift.’
The archon nodded slowly. ‘Your friendship with these bandits may be more of a boon than I thought, Athenian. They like you.’ He nodded again. ‘Their king is not a simple man. He has education.’ He gave a nasty grin. ‘He is young and arrogant.’
‘He was a hostage in Pantecapaeum,’ Kineas said.
‘Why did I never meet him?’ the archon asked. He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps I did. They breed like maggots. And their women are so unchaste — hard to know which little bastard is the get of which sire. Still, they’ll make good fodder if we must fight this war.’ Kineas stiffened but said nothing. ‘Which I will now work like a slave to prevent.’ The archon turned his horse. ‘Back to the palace!’
Cleitus gave a dinner in his honour on the night when Athens honoured her dead and her heroes, and he drank too deep of too much wine. He drank too much wine because he was called to speak in public. At Cleitus’s urging, and with help from Diodorus and Philokles, he prepared an oration, and after dinner, when urged by Cleitus and all the guests, he rose from his couch and went to the centre of the room like the politicians who had attended his father’s dinners in Athens. He had never thought to use such tactics himself, and his hands shook so that he had to thrust them into his tunic.
‘Gentlemen of Olbia,’ he began formally. But that wasn’t the tone he wanted at all, especially with the quaver in his voice and he smiled, shrugged, rubbed his beard. ‘Friends and sponsors.’ Better. ‘It has been said — indeed, it’s being said right now, somewhere not far from here — that having been sponsored as a citizen and then raised to hipparch, I have repaid your kindness by plunging you into desperate war.’
They looked interested, but no more. The younger men — Eumenes, for instance — had no idea what a war would mean. They were excited by it. The older men had the means to board their ships and vanish around the coast, to Heraclea or Tomis or even to Athens.
Kineas took a deep breath. ‘The war is none of our making. Alexander — the boy king who I served — is now a man. More than a man, he has declared himself a god. He marches to conquer, not just the Medes, but the whole world.’ Kineas spread his arms like an actor. Funny how these things came back to you. Kineas hadn’t practised rhetoric in ten years, at least.
‘But,’ he continued, ‘one of the ways we can tell that Alexander is not so much of a god as he would like to be, is that his wars still require men, and money. The gods, I think, could conquer the world with their own power. Alexander does it with the treasury of Persopolis and the manpower of the whole Greek world. And this hunger for treasure to fight his wars has cost Macedon dearly. None of the gold of Persopolis went home. None of the spoil of Babylon waits in chests of cedar in Phillip’s treasury. Olympia does not bathe in the pearls of the Nile. Alexander burns gold as other men burn wood.’ He took watered wine from a servant and sipped. ‘Antipater needs money. He needs to put his boot on the necks of the cities of Attica and the Peloponnese. He needs our grain and our gold, and he needs a war to toughen his levies before he sends them to his master, the god.’
He paused a moment to let that sink in. Then he began to pace around the circle of couches, speaking directly to them, first one and then another. ‘This will not be a simple war between cities, where hoplites clash and the winner dictates the terms to the loser or burns his fields. If Antipater takes this city, he will keep it. He will appoint a satrap to rule — one of his own men from Macedon.’ Kineas said the last directly to Nicomedes. It was done as if by chance, and Nicomedes’ smooth face didn’t betray whether the shot went home or not.
‘There will be a garrison of Macedonians and heavy taxes. No assembly, and no men of property. You might ask me how I know all this, and I will say that I know because I watched it done from Granicus to the Nile. You think the archon is a tyrant?’ Kineas looked around at the little starts — that had them awake. ‘The archon is the purest democrat next to a garrison of Macedon. You think that Antipater might benefit the city? Or perhaps that you can slip away and return in a few years when the business opportunities are better?’ Kineas stopped again and pointed at Lykeles. ‘Lykeles was a gentleman of Thebes. Ask him what the occupation of Macedon meant.’
They were restless, fidgeting on their couches, the older ones refusing to meet his eye. Like most rich men, they heard him, but they doubted that his words would apply — they’d find a way to bribe their way free, they were sure. But again, his argument hit home — every man present knew that Thebes had been utterly destroyed, the walls cast down, most of the citizens sold into slavery for attacking their Macedonian garrison. And that was Thebes, a pillar of the Greek world, the city of Oedipus and Epaminondas.
Kineas sipped more wine. ‘I will not tell you that we can defeat the might of Macedon. If Alexander came here, with seven taxeis of his veterans and four regiments of companions, with all this Thessalian horse and all his psiloi and his peltasts and the guard — then I would say that, despite our alliances and our own strength, we would be broken in an hour.
‘But it is not Alexander who marches. It will probably not even be Antipater — no mean general, let me tell you. It will be one of the junior generals who stayed home from the Persian wars, and are now eager for fame — eager to make a name on a march to the sea. That general will have two taxeis of Macedonians, and one of those will be raw. He will have one regiment of companions — every troublemaker that Antipater wants out of the country. He will have Thracians, Getae and Bastarnae. And that army, gentlemen, we can defeat. Or, even if we fail to defeat it, we can keep it on the plains so long that it will have no time to lay siege to this city.’
They lay quietly on their couches, listening and drinking wine. He made it clear that he was finished by sitting on his couch. He felt empty. He felt like a schoolboy who had given a speech and forgotten some part of it. He shrugged — oh, the birching that gesture would have gotten him from his rhetoric tutor. ‘That is the way I see it,’ he said, and felt the poverty of his summation.
Cleomenes rose in turn. He lay by himself — he had brought his son, but Eumenes had gone off to share the couch of Kyros. Most of the other men present either ignored him or fawned on him. Unlike Nicomedes and Cleitus, who were bitter rivals in trade and politics but appeared to enjoy each other’s company, Cleomenes was aloof, as if he didn’t want to be caught associating with his rivals.
‘The hipparch speaks well — for a mercenary.’ He looked around the room with patrician disdain. ‘Just as well might I visit another man’s city and tell him how he can, with enormous risk, win through to a little gain. But despite the fact that you, Cleitus, and you, Nicomedes, conspired to give this man the vote, I say he is a foreigner, a man with little stake in our city — surely not the same stake as I have. Why would a man of my accomplishments wish to provoke a war with Macedon? Our mercenary thinks so highly of his profession that he desires for us all to take part in it. I say that it is the business of his sort to make war. I have neither skill nor appetite for it. Men of
