Kineas stopped and gave a military salute, and then led the smith forward. He explained the situation in a few words, and the king watched him carefully, and then asked the smith sharp questions in unaccented Sindi.
The smith answered in single words.
The king turned to Kineas. ‘If you do this thing, you may create tension with the Cruel Hands — these are their people. It seems to me that they’ve been allowed to fall through the cracks in the pot while we carried on the war. This man says you rescued his band, and he wants to swear his oath to you.’ The king’s displeasure was obvious. ‘If I let him swear to you, I make you a lord,’ he said. ‘I am not sure that I am prepared to make you a lord — and I suspect I would insult my cousin. Srayanka will not forgive either of us. Knowing that, will you accept his oath, and be his lord?’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I do not desire to be any man’s lord.’
The king was visibly taken aback. Then he said, ‘Just when I think I know you Greeks, you shock me again. That you must vote to make a war that is already upon you — that you will own a slave but will not take a man’s oath of service.’
Kineas held the king’s eye. ‘I will not be his lord,’ he said. ‘I will take him and all his men in service, as psiloi, and I will pay them a wage and see that they are fed. And when Srayanka returns, I will see that those who wish her lordship receive it.’
The king nodded and rubbed his chin. He spoke again in Sindi, and after a while the smith nodded. He offered Kineas his hand, and they shook. And then Niceas took the smith away, to find him and his band a place to camp, instead of the wet river bank where they had been in hiding for days.
‘What news?’ Kineas asked, when they were gone.
The king glanced at Marthax, and then at Kam Baqca. The three held each other’s eyes, excluding Kineas. Then they all turned to Kineas together. ‘We wondered how long you could remain absent,’ the king said.
Kineas took an arrow from the king’s pile and held it up to the sun. The arrowhead had three blades, each wickedly barbed on the back, cast in bronze. ‘I have to act the hipparch,’ he said finally. ‘What we did in the assembly — the effects will linger a long time. In effect, we deposed the archon.’
‘Who may already be dead,’ Kam Baqca said in her odd, Ionic Greek.
‘You have seen it?’
‘I see nothing but the monster on the sea of grass. But people tell me tales.’
The king nodded, and the distance Kineas had felt on the ride back from the Getae campaign was there, and deeper, too. There was pain in the king’s eyes. ‘I, too, have to act. I have dead this day, Kineas — too many dead. Because, as you said, Zopryon learned quickly. Thessalian cavalry smashed the Patient Wolves — a simple trap. A hundred empty saddles, and an angry clan.’
Kineas bent his head.
The king went on. ‘Your tyrant killed those men. If you had been here to advise, they would not have ridden off so eagerly, so blindly, the second time.’
‘Or they would have,’ Marthax said with a harsh shrug. ‘Don’t make too much of it, Lord. We have dealt raking wounds and taken a bee sting in return.’
The king swung to Kineas. ‘Just as you predicted, he learns quickly. Now the boat is fully in current, is it not? And I must ride it until it washes up at my destination or smashes on the rocks. This battle — it is close now, is it not?’ He glared at both of them. ‘I am now committed to the battle you wanted.’
Kineas stood still. He looked at Kam Baqca, and she swirled the tea in her cup and looked at the last leaves there. He could smell the resin and pine odour of her drug on the wind — there was a brazier lit at her feet. She raised her head and their eyes met. Her eyes were huge, deep, and brown, and in them… he could see the column moving across the sea of grass, as he swooped lower and lower, and he could see the bands of Sakje spread around the column for stades in all directions. The Macedonian column came on like a man’s boot kicking an anthill, but the ants rode in closer, bolder than real ants, and every ant dealt a wound. But the seeing faded into another seeing, and the Macedonian column became a snake with a huge head, or a giant maggot, eating everything in its path and spewing wreckage out the tail — chewing on Sakje and Olbians, on triremes and city walls, exuding the excrement of burned homes and fields of stubble, fresh graves and unburied corpses.
And she grimaced at him, a very male look on her made-up face. ‘It is all I can see,’ she said. There was pain in her voice. ‘You too?’
‘Yes,’ said Kineas. ‘It comes to me awake, now.’
She nodded. ‘It will come more and more often. You are a strong dreamer.’ She looked at her tea leaves. ‘For the first time, I begin to hope for death, because I cannot bear to watch the monster cross the plains — the defiler, the tyrant. Everything it touches is polluted, stripped, killed. It will take me, soon enough.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘My body will be dung for the monster,’ she whispered.
Kineas glanced at the king, and Marthax. Marthax seemed to pretend he had heard nothing. The king turned away, embarrassed or saddened.
‘It is all I can see,’ she said again. ‘I am no use to the king, and I fear to tell him anything lest I rush him to this battle. I have raised the spirits that will fight — I have done what I can. Now I just sit and drink tea and wait for doom.’
Kineas nodded. ‘It is close,’ he said. He found that, despite everything, he wanted to comfort her.
She looked at him across her teacup, and her eyes drew him again. He looked away rather than fall back into the dream. The smell of her drug was powerful. She said, ‘Kineas — it is all balanced on a knife edge.’
The king ignored her and waved at the plains. ‘We haven’t slowed him as much as we hoped. His vanguard will be here tomorrow — or the next day at the latest.’
Kineas nodded.
The king gave a small shrug. ‘Since we began to harass him, he has pressed harder. His army is wounded — as Marthax says, we have hit hard. The faster he moves, the more stragglers he has — and no straggler lives to see another dawn. But he is moving fast, now. Another day — perhaps two. He’s leaving everything behind to make speed.’
Kineas nodded. ‘Best recall the clans. We want the army on this side before Zopryon closes the ford.’
The king gave him an angry glance. ‘I’m doing my best, Hipparch.’
Kineas leaned forward. ‘Let me help.’
The battle was closer — closer by a week than he had expected. A week less of life. When he allowed himself to think about it, he was neither completely committed to the idea of death, nor had he thought through all of the ramifications of his dream. The battlefield, for instance. If his death dream was accurate, the battle would not be fought at the Great Bend. This thought had tripped across the stage of his mind before, but this time, fresh from the king and riding a surge of excitement and worry, Kineas elected to do something about it.
And the time was now. His battle was upon him — no more than two days away. He’d spent an hour thinking just how the battle would happen. Philokles had challenged his assumptions — Philokles was right.
He hailed Niceas, and ordered him to fetch Heron, the hipparch of Pantecapaeum. Heron had learned quite a few lessons at Cleitus’s knee. If three weeks had not transformed him into the image of Hektor, if he had not yet learned to be courteous, professional, or polite, he had learned to be silent. He stood at every command meeting among the Greeks, a little distant from the others, a little hesitant to join in comment or laughter. He was a tall man, and he loomed over them, silent, and at times, sullen.
Kineas wanted to give the man a new start, and raise him in his own estimation.
‘Heron,’ he said, as the man came up.
‘Hipparch,’ Heron replied, with a civil salute. He was so tall that he appeared clumsy, and his legs were too long to look good on a horse. And he was dour — perhaps a reaction to being born ugly. He crossed his arms, not from nerves, but because they were so long that he had to do something with them. Kineas, who was too short to be accounted really handsome, felt some fellow feeling for the boy due to his ungainliness. Heron had something about him that suggested that when he was tested, he would not be found wanting — despite his attitude.
After offering him wine, Kineas went straight to business. ‘I need the river scouted, north and south. The Sakje tell me there are no fords for a hundred stades — I’d like to know that myself. I’m going to give you the picked scouts of all the troops. Go south first — the greatest calamity, at this point, would be if Zopryon got between us and Olbia.’ Kineas winced even as he made the comment. With the archon’s treason, if Zopryon could slip past them to the south, he could rest his army at Olbia, receive supplies, and march up the river at his leisure. It had occurred to him that Zopryon might march straight to Olbia, trusting to the ferry at the river mouth to get his
