We swear oaths.’ The heavy Kelt shrugged. ‘We die here.’ He pointed with his sword at the cobbled courtyard of the citadel.
The tyrant laughed. It was a bitter laugh. He stood straight and came forward — a little drunk, as was his wont. ‘Well, some things are worth buying,’ he said from the safety of the last rank of the Keltoi. ‘You came for my city after all,’ he said to Kineas.
Kineas felt the rage of gods grip him. But for this man and his plotting, Agis and Laertes would still live, so would Nicomedes, and Ajax, and Cleitus. And the king. ‘I came for you, traitor,’ he said thickly.
The tyrant shrugged. ‘Odd how the public interest and self-interest coincide. I don’t imagine I could offer you gold to let me live?’
‘Fight me man to man,’ Kineas said. ‘If you win, my men will set you free.’
He began to ride around to the left, to get a clearer look at the tyrant. At his knee, another horseman moved with him.
It was a foolish challenge, and he felt like a fool for making it. He could barely stand after his wounds at the Ford of the River God and the attack in the dark. Single combat was for young men who wished to be Achilles, not middle-aged men in love.
The tyrant glanced around and laughed grimly. ‘No. I think not. Even if I won, these folk would butcher me like a heifer.’
Kineas shook his head in denial. ‘Only a dishonest man fears the dishonesty of others,’ he quoted.
The tyrant spat. ‘Spare me your philosophy. And the rest of you — you plan to follow him? Will you be as loyal to him as you were to me? Eh, Kineas? Ready to ride the lion?’
Kineas sat straighter. ‘I have no intention of taking control of the city,’ he said stiffly.
The tyrant smiled. ‘You lie.’ He shrugged. ‘But what do I care? Your ignorance will bring about the deaths of every man here — but I’ll be dead. My share in this story ends here, doesn’t it?’
The hippeis were calling for the tyrant’s death. They began to chant. The Keltoi readied their shields.
‘My ignorance?’ Kineas said. ‘Ignorance? I am ignorant of what sort of man would betray his own city to a foreign garrison! And I did not come to bandy words with such a traitor.’
The tyrant stood up straight, like a soldier on parade. He stood out from his Keltoi. ‘Listen to me, you aristocratic bastard,’ he said. ‘The world is about to go to shit. When Alexander and Parmenion go to war — listen! The monster has lost his mind. We need Antipater! It will all come apart now — everything the boy king did will collapse like a cheap market stall in a wind — and all his wolves will fight over the spoils. Are you ready for that?’
Behind Kineas, Antigonus translated the exchange. The Keltoi chieftain listened patiently, his sword cocked back over his shoulder, a pose he could apparently hold for hours.
Behind the Keltoi, on the steps of the palace, the tyrant’s Persian steward produced a bow — an elegant recurve bow that glowed with wax. He raised it at Kineas, but before he could shoot, he took an arrow in the chest and a second in the groin and he fell screaming. His squeals pierced the morning damp and made men — even hard men — flinch. The tyrant turned to glance over his shoulder. He grinned — a mad, death’s-head grin. Then he seized a dagger from the belt of the Kelt nearest him and flourished it high like an athlete.
‘Your turn, Kineas!’ he shouted. ‘By all the gods, Hama, I release you and your men from your oaths!’ And so saying, he plunged the dagger into his own neck.
Close at Kineas’s side, awaiting his chance, Ataelus the Scyth put his knees to his charger and it rose, rearing and punching both hooves like a boxer. At the top of its attempt to climb the heavens, he leaned out over his charger’s neck and fired two more arrows over the Keltoi.
Unlike the Persian, the tyrant went down without a sound.
Antigonus spoke again in the guttural Keltish tongue. The chieftain, Hama, spared the tyrant’s twitching corpse a respectful glance, and nodded.
‘I think we live,’ he said, and placed the point of his sword carefully on the ground. ‘Our oath dies with him.’ Around him, the Keltoi sheathed their weapons or laid them carefully on the wet paving stones.
Philokles walked over to the tyrant’s corpse like Ares claiming his spoil. ‘He died well,’ the Spartan said.
‘May I do as well,’ Kineas agreed.
Kineas managed to order a guard to protect the Keltoi from harm before a mob of his own soldiers put him up on a shield and carried him off to the agora. And even as the city rang with his acclaim, he thought of Srayanka, already out on the sea of grass, travelling east.
Taking the city had been the easy part. Because Satrax the King was dead, and the Sakje alliance was shattered, and Alexander the King of Kings was out on the sea of grass, and the old gods of Chaos were laughing.
4
The funeral of Cleitus was a city-wide occasion. Almost every household had dead to mourn, between the battle at the ford and the storming of the city and the tyrant’s excesses. The dead of the great battle were long since buried, and the trophy long since raised at the edge of a field of unburied enemies — a cursed spot to any Greek, and an uncomfortable thought — but the dead were still fresh in the memories of their city, and needed words said in public to mourn them.
Cleitus, who had once been the city’s hipparch, and remained the leader of the aristocratic faction until his death, remained unburied, because the tyrant had denied his family the right to conduct the funeral. He had feared the public reaction.
Now Kineas had the tyrant’s ivory stool. He did not wear a diadem and he did not reside in the palace — instead, he awoke as usual at the hippodrome barracks, where the tyrant’s ivory stool leaned against the wall like a reminder, or an accusation. He was in some middle ground between the absolute power of the tyrant and his old role as hipparch and strategos, or military commander. He ordered that the funeral be a public occasion, and he was obeyed.
The army had been in the city for five days. There were Athenian ships in the harbour demanding grain, and the first boats full of grain were on their way down the raging river to the port. The autumn market was opening on the plain north of the city, although it would be weeks before cargoes could be gathered for the Athenian merchants, who owned the largest ships in the world. On the third night, he had gone to the stables and bridled the Getae mare and ridden her out of the dark gates, past all the farms, to the beginning of the sea of grass. As the sun rose, he sat at the edge of her world, and he reached out like a baqca…
Across the plains that rolled under the new sun, past the camp where Marthax chewed on the ruin of his plans, then north and east around the Bay of Salmon, and there she was, rising in the dawn, naked to the waist, cleaning her teeth with a twig, and she gave a start as he came near and grinned…
He awoke cold, and tired like a drunkard, but he was happy again.
The next night, Kineas dreamed of Srayanka’s tribes and their horses riding over the sea of grass, and of the dead, and of the tree. He tried to banish his dreams. He longed to be away into the dawn.
On the high ground north of the market camped the little army of Sauromatae. City slaves had built them cabins against the late summer rain, but Prince Lot’s presence at his side served to remind Kineas, if he needed any reminder, that the sailing season was closing in, and he needed to leave soon if he was leaving at all. Five days in Olbia had revealed a host of reasons why he could not leave. The assembly had met twice and both times he had risen to announce his departure, and both times he had instead spoken of how many of the tyrant’s laws had to be repealed, and how essential it was that the rule of law be restored.
On the fourth day, the assembly made him archon.
He went back to the barracks and talked with Philokles and Diodorus for hours, and then he sat on the ivory stool in the agora and announced the funeral of Cleitus.
The funeral day promised to be warm and sunny, and the procession began to form under the stars of earliest morning, the first stars and clear sky they had seen in days. Diodorus had the hippeis mustered before the first blush of dawn on the sand of the hippodrome. He had good officers under him, veteran hyperetes, and every man in the ranks had served in a battle — some in three.
