with a roar. Ajax helped him out of his breastplate, and Kineas felt lighter, if not younger.
Nicomedes came and placed an arm around Ajax’s broad shoulders. The age had fallen away from his face, and he was a gentleman of forty again. ‘We honour you, Hipparch,’ he said. ‘It is one thing to hear of your exploits, and another thing to see.’
Kineas looked at his legs, streaked with mud, and his arms, with blood and ordure mixed. All the rain had done was to streak it, and where he had lain in the mud, his tunic was soaked through and his side was itchy and his left arm was swollen. ‘If you are quoting someone, I don’t know it,’ Kineas said.
Nicomedes said, ‘I am a rich man, and I have been privileged to see many great craftsmen and artists at work. It is always the same — when you watch them work, you see the focus of their genius, and you know you have the real thing.’
Ajax laughed. ‘I doubt Kineas wants to be in your collection, my friend.’
Kineas half grinned. ‘Thanks — I think.’ He pulled off his tunic. ‘Can you get a slave to find my kit? I need to wear something else. In the meantime, I’m going to the river to bathe.’
Nicomedes made a show of sniffing his battered cloak. ‘A splendid idea.’
Ajax produced a strigil as Niceas joined them with another. ‘I have oil,’ Niceas said.
Ajax cheered him as if he’d won a race. As they walked, a few other men joined them — Leucon and Eumenes, and several of their young men. They walked the stade to the river on sore legs, and Kineas was happy, as happy as a man who can foretell his own death can be. He had lost four men in a hard campaign. He regretted them — but he knew he, and they, had done well, and he knew that for a few hours he didn’t have to worry about anything but the aches in his muscles and the fever in his wound. Death seemed very far away.
He listened to the younger men chatter, and he walked a little ahead of them, naked, with his filthy tunic over his shoulder. He heard the pounding of hooves and he turned.
Srayanka was behind him, with a few of her officers, all naked, covered as they all were in mud and filth, the horses as well as the riders. She saw him and he saw her, and she rode past him, her eyes flicking over his body even as he looked at hers. Then she was past, kicking her horse to a gallop, turning back to wave. She raced on, as beautiful as anything Kineas had ever seen despite the grime and the blood, her unbound black hair flying out behind her, her back straight as she gathered her horse for a jump and then leaped from the bank straight into the river with a splash like a leaping whale. All the rest of her warriors followed her.
The Olbians pointed and shouted and cheered. ‘Like Artemis and her nymphs,’ Nicomedes said. He appeared shocked. He took a breath. ‘Who expected such beauty on a day like this? I wish I had a painter — a sculptor — anyone to make that for me.’
‘I’ll settle for a bath,’ Niceas said.
‘Let’s run,’ said Kineas. And the Olbians began to run. They ran like Olympians, squandering their last reserves in the setting sun. And as they came to the bank they made the leap into the cold water, and they shouted as they fell.
Kineas swam across the broadest pool. The water was deep but full of silt from the rain, or stirred up by the horses. He didn’t care — it felt wonderful against his skin despite the cold. He swam with his tunic in his teeth, looking for her in the slowly falling dark.
He found her in the shallows under a tall tree. She was scrubbing her warhorse clean, scooping sand with her hands from the river bank and scrubbing at her horse’s legs where the big beast appeared to have waded in blood.
She smiled at him. ‘He bites,’ she said in Greek. ‘Not too close.’
Kineas stayed in the deep water. He was a practical man, and he was happy just to be with her, admiring her body — he began to wash his tunic as best he could. After a while, he passed behind her and went to the bank, where he collected a handful of her sand and began to grind away at the dried crud on his arms.
Down the pool, he could hear shrieks and shouts from the other Olbians. From the voices, it appeared that more and more were coming to bathe — more Olbians and more Sakje.
‘You airyanam,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. She pushed a tail of black hair back over her naked shoulder. She glanced downstream, and back at him.
He stepped up to her and she entered his arms as though they had rehearsed the embrace a thousand times, and her mouth came under his as easily as the clasping of two hands.
They wrapped themselves into each other…
For a few seconds, until Ataelus called, ‘Here they are!’ and they were surrounded, Cruel Hands and Olbians, laughing, jeering, with more than a few obscene suggestions.
Kineas slipped into deeper water to hide the truth of their assertions, still holding her hand, and she swam after him leaving her horse. And they swam together with their people until they were clean. They dried naked in the warm evening air, on the grass, and Agis the Megaran and Ajax both sang from the Iliad while the Greek men used olive oil and strigils on their skin, to the delight and amusement of all the Sakje. Then Marthax sang with Srayanka, turn and turn again, an endless ballad of love and revenge. Kineas found that the king had joined them, and he sat with the king while men fetched dry tunics and food, and then Srayanka finished singing and sat with her back against his as if they were old war companions. Her people had brought her clothes, and she was dressed, and she had given him a tunic of pale skin covered in embroidery like her own. It was barbaric. He put it on anyway.
The king sat stiffly with them, and then turned away, clearly angered, when Kineas donned the tunic. Later, when she kissed Kineas, an absent and affectionate peck as she reached past him for wine, the king rose to his feet. He spoke to her in rapid, angry Sakje.
She tossed her drying hair, flicked her eyes at Kineas and then nodded to the king. ‘My mind knows,’ she said clearly. ‘And my mind rules my body.’
The king turned and strode off into the dark.
Srayanka’s back remained warm against his, her iron and deerskin hand supple in his, and he was, again, as happy as a man could be who had only a few weeks to live.
In the morning, the army lay in a stupor of exhaustion and wine-sickness. A handful of Getae could have wrecked them. Kineas had never seen an army behave differently after a victory, but wondered if there might be a value in keeping a guard.
The swelling in his arm was less, and the heat from it almost gone, as if the river spirit had drawn away the poison. He was one of the first up, and having drunk some Sindi tea, he donned the leather tunic that Srayanka had given him. Despite its outre appearance, it was clean. His military tunic was damp, and despite his desultory washing while he watched Srayanka, it was still filthy, and the rest of his kit had vanished in the retreat — probably left at the last camp.
The king rode up to where Kineas was eyeing the Olbian’s string of captured Getae mounts, working to select a decent riding horse. To his eye, they were all too small.
‘I think it is time we spoke as men,’ the king said, with an obvious attempt at dignity. ‘You have given me a great victory. I would not be ungenerous.’
Kineas sighed and looked up at the king. ‘I am at your service, Lord.’ He looked at the ground, unused to discussing such matters. Then he looked back. ‘Are we speaking of Srayanka?’
The king wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘After Zopryon is defeated — would you marry her?’
Kineas shrugged. ‘Of course,’ he said, because he had to say something. Of course, if I were alive.
The king leaned down. ‘Perhaps the prospect is not as enticing — she is no Greek woman, and she is fierce. But she will not settle to be your leman — she is the chief of the Cruel Hands, too great a personage to be a trull. Perhaps you cannot wed her — perhaps you are already married, or promised?’
The king had mistaken his tone entirely. ‘I would be proud to be wed to the lady,’ Kineas said, and found that he meant it.
The king straightened in his saddle. ‘Really?’ He sounded surprised. ‘She would never live in a city. It would kill her.’ Now he met Kineas’s eye. ‘I have lived in a Greek city. I know the lady. She lives as a free spear maiden, and your city would kill her.’
Fantasizing aloud, Kineas said, ‘Perhaps I could buy a farm north of Olbia — she could visit.’ He laughed even as he spoke.
The king shook his head. ‘I like you, Kineas. I liked you from the first. But you come like the doom of my happiness. You brought this war, and now you will take my cousin. I will try to speak as a man, and not an outraged
