faces and red hair, most of them. They were burying children, and the woman who had been raped and killed. Kineas tried not to look at her — wondered if he could have saved her by a simple charge into the town.
Then he made himself look at her. Simple courtesy, really. She was young, and she had died an awful death. He made himself breathe in and out. Next to her was an older woman — perhaps forty — with long blond braids and a small knife still stuck in her throat. ‘Tell them I can take them — all of them — with me.’ Kineas gestured.
Ataelus spoke to the broadest man — obviously a smith. Kineas understood all that he said.
The man shook his head and pointed at the row of little bodies with his shovel, and the blonde woman. All of the Sindi men were weeping.
Ataelus turned back to Kineas. ‘Very bad thing. When house took fire, mother killed childs. Then kill her with own knife — brave. And men vow fight to death — and then we come. So wife, all children dead. Men want die.’
‘Athena protect us,’ Kineas said in horror. ‘The mother killed her own children?’
Ataelus looked at him like an alien building. ‘No Sakje — dirt people or sky people — go as slave. Mother brave. Brave brave.’ The Sakje reached in his belt pouch and took out a pinch of seeds — the same seeds that Kam Baqca burned on her brazier. He threw the seeds into the grave, and threw a small, ornate knife from his boot beside it.
‘I honour her brave.’
Kineas heart seemed to swell to fill his chest, and he thought he might choke, and his eyes burned. He turned away, walked back to where Ajax and Eumenes were telling of their exploits, watched with some amusement by Nicomedes and Niceas.
‘Thirty men to help the townspeople dig graves for their fallen. Right now.’ Kineas’s voice broke as he said it, and he turned so that his officers wouldn’t see him unmanned. He was an old hand, and he had seen quite a few dead children, but this affected him so deeply that he was shaking.
He thought of Medea, killing her children at the end of the play, and he wondered what the playwright had missed. Or known.
The Olbians, aware of some change in their hipparch, dug without a grumble. The women and children were buried in an hour. The men gathered flowers to put on the graves, and Kineas threw a brooch in, as did many of the soldiers, so that the mother’s grave was heaped with things she might have counted as treasures if she had lived.
By the time the last flower was placed on the last child’s grave, Kineas had listened to all Ataelus had to tell him of the Getae to the north and west. When his column mounted, the Sindi men had Getae horses and a good wagon of their own. The Sindi men all had bows like Sakje bows, and every man had a heavy axe, and death in their faces.
‘North and east, right across the front of the Getae advance,’ Kineas said.
Ataelus smiled grimly.
After three days, Kineas had a hundred Sindi refugees, men and women and children, and his column was slowed to the speed of a walking man. And the Getae had taken notice. Three times he’d fallen on their raiders. Three times he’d destroyed the band he’d met. Every man in the Olbian column was a killer, now — there had been hard fighting in the last town, fighting inside the houses.
And with killing, death. Young Kyros, the brilliant javelineer, was dead, a Getae knife in his neck, and Nicomedes’ business partner, Theo, lay on a cart breathing as best he could with a punctured lung, waiting to die, and Sophokles, whose contempt for the rules of war had entertained them on the first trip to the Sakje, took a sword cut to his arm and bled out before his comrades could save him. Luck, good armour, and barbarian indiscipline had kept the rest of them alive, but they were exhausted in body and in spirit, and many of them had wounds — wounds they would survive, but which sapped their strength and their will to fight.
Kineas and Niceas bore down, becoming monsters of discipline. No shortcoming was tolerated. Niceas struck two young troopers in a single morning. Kineas wondered what Srayanka would think — or what she would do.
So it was a silent, sullen column that moved through a steady drizzle on the fourth morning, the tired men riding tired beasts, man and horse alike with their heads down. Niceas and Nicomedes were both out with the scouts, because the scouts required the immediate presence of their officers to keep them alert. Kineas blessed the handful of Sakje every hour. They were doing most of the work.
Ajax and Eumenes rode with a silent Kineas. Both glanced at him from time to time, but neither spoke.
Ataelus returned from his latest scout by midday.
‘Fuck-their-mothers Getae gather behind us,’ he said. ‘Three big bands. See them when night comes, if we camp.’
Kineas cursed and wiped water off his face. ‘I don’t want to lose them and I don’t want my camp stormed in the night,’ he said. ‘How many?’
Ataelus shrugged. ‘Many many. Ten hands and ten hands and ten hands and ten hands, in each group — and more. Too many to fight.’
Kineas nodded and waved to one of the Cruel Hand scouts, who cantered up. Like Ataelus, he didn’t look tired, depressed, or unhappy, and Kineas wished he had a hundred veterans. The advantages of taking his Olbian horse for this part of his plan against the raiders was now balanced by how brittle their spirit was. They’d recover — and be better soldiers for it — but not for some days.
‘Can you find the king?’ Kineas said.
The Sakje nodded.
‘Go find him. Tell him it will be tomorrow, just after dawn. I’ll make for the big hill.’
The Sakje turned his horse. He raised his whip to his forehead. ‘You good chief,’ he said in Greek. He waved at Ataelus, gave a loud yip in the direction of the other Cruel Hands, and rode off at a gallop.
Kineas watched him go, wondering if the king would come. Kineas had begun to distrust the king. Perhaps distrust is too strong a word, he thought. But the king, despite his youth, wanted Srayanka. And when Kineas had proposed to use his own men as bait, he’d seen something pass over the young man’s face.
The rest of the day was brutal. Kineas kept the column moving by force of will, the fear he could inspire, and force. He terrified women, he ripped children from their mother’s arms to put them on wagons, he struck Srayanka’s whip at the slowest oxen.
Towards evening, they came to a stream. He’d been here before, en route to the first action. Then they’d crossed easily, but now it was swollen with a day’s rain.
‘Athena protect us,’ he said grimly. He rode back to his officers. ‘Go among your men. Select all the veterans and send them to me.’
‘You’ll weaken the files,’ Niceas said.
‘I don’t think the files will fight. I need to survive the next hour.’ Kineas was looking through the rain at the last hill, where he hoped his scouts were watching his back trail.
Niceas shook his head. ‘Don’t do it.’
A day of absolute authority had its cost. ‘Obey!’ Kineas demanded.
Leucon shook his head — sombre, but sure. ‘They’ll fight, Hipparch. You just have to say something — they’re scared. Ares’ balls, sir, I’m scared too. I–I thought we’d have a rest.’
Kineas mastered his anger and turned his attention to Niceas. ‘Speak your mind, hyperetes.’
‘Don’t pull the veterans. Give ’em a talk, we lighten up a little, show them some respect, and they’ll fight like heroes.’
Kineas rubbed his jaw, watching a cart begin to cross, pulled with ropes by men waist deep in muddy water. ‘Think that’ll work?’
‘Worked on you, once or twice,’ Niceas said. ‘Pull the veterans and they’ll think you don’t trust them.’
Kineas smiled — his first smile in a day. ‘I’ll try it,’ he said. ‘Sound: Form line.’
Despite fatigue and rain, the two troops formed line on their tired horses like soldiers. Some men did it without raising their heads.
Kineas rode out to the front of the line. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘So I’m pretty sure you’re all tired. I’ve driven you like a coach drives athletes, and you’ve come up to the mark every day. And now we’re at this Hades-damned stream, and I have to ask you for more.’
He pointed at their back trail. ‘There are two thousand Getae behind us, about an hour’s march away.’ He swung Srayanka’s whip over his head and pointed past them. ‘A day’s march that way is the king of the Sakje.’ I
