threw himself at death.’
Niceas was right at Isokles’ ear — he had the man’s arms from behind. ‘Your son was a great man,’ he said. ‘But you’re a fucking idiot.’ He took a deep breath. Isokles sagged in his grasp. ‘We told your son every day to keep his head down and stop pushing himself at the gods.’ Niceas’s voice broke, and he, too, began to weep. ‘How many times?’ he cried, as he shook the father. ‘How many times did I tell him to watch his own back and mind his place in line?’
‘The night before the great battle,’ Philokles said, his nasal consonants broken like his nose, ‘Kineas told him to grow up and stop acting like an idiot.’
Leon, who had known the boy in a different way, spoke with the hesitation of a former slave. ‘My master — Nicomedes — asked him many times to take care.’
‘If Nicomedes were alive, I would kill him,’ Isokles said. ‘He bears the responsibility above all.’
Philokles, who had worn the wreath as the army’s hero himself, rose to his feet. ‘He burned very bright,’ he said. ‘He burned bright in virtue and honour and died young, and he will live for ever with the gods.’
Isokles, turned sane and grief-wracked eyes on him, the orbs white stele in the red wreck of his face. ‘Keep your philosophy, Spartan. He is dead. He might have lived and burned just as bright, growing wheat and rearing children in the sun.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Or disease might have crippled him, or accident. Or he might have drowned on a ship. He chose his way, Isokles, and despite all your sorrow, you are unjust to us who were his friends. He chose the manner of his life and death — more than most men, almost like a god. I honour him.’ Philokles shrugged. ‘He loved war. It is a terrible, stupid thing to love, and it showed its true face by destroying him.’
Isokles and Philokles stood nose to nose, the one crying tears from red eyes, the other still pouring blood from his nose so that he seemed almost to cry tears of blood.
And then Isokles fell forward into Philokles’ arms.
And they all wept together.
6
After grief, the hardest part was arranging who would go and who would stay. Many citizens — most of the hippeis — had little interest in further campaigning. For rich men, they had seen more war than they ever expected. Like most veterans, few of them had any inclination for more. Among the officers, all were either men of consequence or young men likely to rise as a result of their military service. The campaign against Alexander would do nothing to add to their civic laurels and their fathers were not eager to see them march. Indeed, it was only as a tribute to Kineas’s service to the city that the assembly voted to allow the expedition at all — and more than a few men rose to speak against it, led by Alcaeus, who bore Kineas ill will for his discipline during the campaign. For the first time in months, Kineas was referred to as an adventurer and a mercenary — charges that he met by rising and publicly renouncing the archonship. The city demanded that the army be sent ‘to open trade routes in the east’. But the men who were going called it what it was.
‘We’re going to fight Alexander,’ they said in the agora.
In the end, the expedition received the grudging sanction of the city, and later that of Pantecapaeum, Olbia’s sister city to the east.
Among the younger sons, there were quite a few who were willing to follow Kineas anywhere, and all of Kineas’s professional soldiers were content to go — soldiering was what they knew, and there was not likely to be another conflict around Olbia in the near future. Rumours from the plains came down the river with the grain, suggesting that Marthax no longer had any force in the field, and that every chieftain had gone home to see to his farmers and his grain as Philokles had predicted. It was also said that Macedon had a war against Sparta to prosecute, and no men to spare to avenge Zopryon.
Best of all, in the eyes of the assembly, Kineas proposed to take the Keltoi with him. That they yet lived was a sore subject to the more democratic elements in the city, as they had been the tyrant’s tool of oppression for five years and more. Many felt that they should have been massacred with the Macedonian garrison. Their presence in the hippodrome was more fodder for Alcaeus and his new allies. They were big men, Gauls and even Germans among them, and they scared the Greeks and the Sindi.
Memnon’s original three hundred, the first mercenaries the tyrant had hired, were all citizens now — but citizens without a trade. Memnon remained the commander of the phalanx, and he had told Kineas privately that he intended to stay behind, but that he had no hesitation in allowing his lieutenant Lycurgus or any of his men to sign on for the expedition to the east. The mercenaries had been hired to oppress the population, and later kept on to stiffen the raw men of the town. But the men of the town were all veterans now, and the mercenaries had little to do and no one to oppress.
And of course, some of the poorer citizens, or men just on the edge of poverty, saw the expedition as a chance for regular pay and a life they’d grown accustomed to in the summer.
Kineas had seen it all before, all his life. War begat war, and men with a taste of victory and plunder took to the life of the soldier eager for more easy gold, casually forgetting the nights in the rain and the pain of wounds and the constant fear.
In the end, he mustered three hundred ‘Greek’ horse under Diodorus, well mounted and well led, a better force than any squadron of mercenaries under the circle of the heavens, with the Keltoi in the ranks and all of Heron’s exiles. He had another three hundred infantry — all hoplites — under Lycurgus, with Philokles refusing rank but accepting some nebulous role. The loot of Macedon allowed Kineas to mount them all on mules, and the riches of Nicomedes allowed him to imagine that he could keep them all fed.
He also had fifty Sindi, the survivors of the company that Temerix had formed and still led. They were psiloi, armed with Sakje bows and heavy axes, tattooed men who feared nothing and looked for death and served as skirmishers for the phalanx.
Then there was Prince Lot and the Sauromatae, two hundred knights in the heaviest armour on the plains.
All told, with the inevitable tail any army carried, he had almost a thousand mouths to feed and more than two thousand animals to move. Only an Athenian grain fleet had the capacity to carry so many and the food to supply them, even for a week. Luckily, he had one to hand. He still worried about food and fodder for the march, and despite some chests of gold and a great deal of silver, he knew that eventually he would be forced to seize food to continue — a prospect that frightened him.
He had already sent Ataelus with his scouts and a dozen Sauromatae in a galley to locate camps on the shore of the Bay of Salmon and to pick a route inland. Before the assembly met, he sent Eumenes with Arni and a dozen Keltoi troopers to visit Pantecapaeum, Gorgippia on the east coast of the Euxine and even Dioskurias to the south by ship, with orders to buy cattle and get them driven to the Bay of Salmon. Eumenes needed to be out of the city anyway — the political factions were out for his blood because of his father’s treason, or so they said. Every day there hurt him more, and his presence was being used against Kineas politically. Someone was aiming at Kineas.
Already.
Some days he wondered why he was going, and why he was leading a thousand men to the same fate. He was rich, and powerful — in the way that Greeks accounted power. He could be tyrant. He could be king.
And his death awaited him in the east.
But so did Srayanka. And the sniping in the assembly was already getting to him.
The Battle of the Ford of the River God was only two months past, and already the assembly had returned to its traditional bickering, the unanimity of the early summer vanished with the threat of Macedon. Because Kineas had already relinquished the title of archon and the possibility of being tyrant, smaller fish began to circle the ivory stool, looking for power. Kineas said as much to Philokles.
‘Fish, you say,’ Philokles responded. They were seated together in the assembly, which had gathered in the hippodrome because of the seating — and because the balance of power of the city had shifted away from the citadel. ‘Vultures, more like.’
Demosthenes, Nicomedes’ nephew, had performed the political acrobatics of converting himself, overnight,
