Coenus raised his cup. ‘Who would have guessed which among us would have fallen, and which would live to ride again?’
Andronicus raised his wine. ‘Give us your oath, Strategos. For me, I long to ride.’
Then Kineas raised his cup. ‘Hear us, God who shakes the mountains and whose bolts cause men to fear. Hear us, Goddess of the olive who wears the aegis. Hear us, God whose horses ride the very waves, whose hand raises the storm or stills it. May all the gods hear us. We swear that we will remain loyal to each other and the company until it is dissolved by us all in council.’ Kineas spoke the words and they repeated them with gusto, no voice lacking, just as they had a year and more before, and the new voices were no softer than the old.
Despite the late afternoon hour when the meeting broke, Kineas threw on a cloak and went to the palaestra. He needed to feel the daimon of exercise. He was introspective enough to question his own motives in welcoming the Theban woman on the expedition to the east. He suspected that he would regret it even as his unexercised body fantasized about her.
He banished her green eyes on the sand of the palaestra. By the time he had loosened the muscles around his two healing wounds and freed his thighs from ten days of lassitude, the sun was low in the sky, but he was determined to run.
Other men were drawn to him, and his progress across the exercise floor attracted an entourage, and his announcement that he would run brought a chorus of approval. Philokles appeared at his side, and Diodorus as well, and Coenus.
They ran well, without a lot of conversation except some rude banter about the length of Kineas’s legs — more banter when he slowed out by Gade’s Farm, and then they had only enough air in their lungs to run. Memnon led the pack, his dark skin untouched by frost or the exertion, and he ran with his head up as if he could go all day and all night — which he probably could. Philokles stayed close to him all the way, and the two were just visible to Kineas, a dark back and a pale back in the distance.
Kineas was at the rear of the pack, a stade or more behind the leaders, and he ran on willpower and annoyance, burning off the last of his wine and bad temper and temptation, the air coming out of his mouth in gasps until he got his second wind. With the dolphin gates in sight, his head came up again, and he ran across the agora in fine shape, gaining some lost ground. Memnon was already running a strigil across Philokles in the marble portico of the palaestra, and the steam from the baths was welcome, but Kineas felt like a better man before he ran past the temple of Apollo, and he enjoyed his bath with the devotion of a man who might not see a gymnasium for sixty thousand stades — or ever again.
He was lying in the steam with a slave working carefully around the wound on his bicep when Helladius sat on the next slab.
‘It must be nice to be so young,’ said the priest. ‘I was comforted that I could run at your shoulder, but then, in sight of the gates, a god gifted you with new strength and you ran away from me as if I stood still.’
Kineas laughed and pointed at Philokles, who was waving goodbye — clean, strigilled, massaged and cloaked for the walk home. ‘You must be old indeed, to finish behind me,’ he said.
‘Memnon looks like a statue of Ares,’ said Helladius. ‘And your friend the Spartan might be Zeus.’
‘You are full of flattery today, priest,’ Kineas rolled over so that he could look the man in the eye.
‘ It is not that the dead require anything from you,’ the priest said suddenly.
Kineas felt his stomach twist as if he’d just seen a corpse.
‘ It is rather that they are trying to give you something,’ Helladius continued. His rich and melodious voice was somehow wrong for the message he was conveying. As if something else was using his voice to speak.
‘What are they trying to give me?’ Kineas asked.
‘Philokles might be Herakles, or Achilles, come to life,’ said the old priest, as if nothing of moment had been said.
‘ That is for you to learn,’ said the slave in his accented Persian-Greek. Kineas sat up suddenly and whirled on the slave.
‘What do you say?’ he demanded.
The slave looked afraid. ‘Master?’ he asked and backed a step, fearing a blow.
Kineas looked at the priest. ‘Didn’t you hear him?’ Kineas asked.
The priest looked puzzled. ‘Do you speak his barbarian tongue? I doubt he speaks much Greek.’
Kineas was slow to place himself back under the slave’s hands. ‘Didn’t you speak to me of my dreams?’ he asked, after a long silence.
Helladius summoned another slave who began to massage the older man’s legs. ‘I questioned the gods, and sought answers in augury, and none was granted me. It is a difficult question.’
Kineas felt the cold sweat of fear despite the steam and the pleasant fatigue of the run.
The fear would not leave him. And it banished all thoughts of Sappho.
8
The expedition gathered a momentum of its own, so that by the day the first grain ships raised their sails, Kineas had volunteers from throughout the north shore of the Euxine, many of them men for whom he had little use, and a cheering crowd to see them all off. He stood on the beach with Petrocolus and watched the last chargers embark, and the last soldiers.
‘I will miss you, Kineas,’ Petrocolus said. ‘The city will miss you.’
Kineas embraced the older man, and then embraced his son, Cliomenedes, who would be acting as the city hipparch. The two men, father and son, were now the most powerful political figures in the city, but there were already factions. Nicomedes’ nephew, Demosthenes, had taken up much of the rhetoric of Cleomenes the elder, Eumenes’ father, who had betrayed the city to Macedon — a fact that was already dwindling in the consciousness of many citizens. Demosthenes had not emerged from his house in a week — but his terror would pass. He had both money and voices in the assembly. He would not be quiet long.
On the other hand, Kineas had arranged — or more properly, Diodorus, Sappho and Philokles had arranged — that the assembly chose Petrocolus as archon. He was one of the city’s richest men, he had hundreds of clients and he had earned his own fortune through hard work and quick wit, and his son was a hero of the war. Together, they had the leverage to hold Demosthenes at bay.
Kineas handed the older man the ivory stool with relief and a certain pride. ‘Don’t sit on it too often,’ he said. ‘It becomes addictive.’
Petrocolus accepted it and nodded gravely. ‘I will keep it for you,’ he said, but Kineas shook his head.
‘I don’t expect to return,’ he said. He pointed to Demosthenes, where he stood glowering with a bodyguard of armed slaves and some followers — most of them men who had once followed Nicomedes.
Kineas thought bitter thoughts about his fellow citizens, and Greeks in general. He had watched his father play the game of democracy, and now he played it himself. Men like Cleomenes the elder and Demosthenes played it without rules or ethics, bending men with money to suit their own tastes, never considering the eudaimonia of the city as a whole — or so Kineas saw them. He hated that good men like Anarxes, a rich farm boy who had ridden in the second troop, served loyally all summer and acted as Eumenes’ second officer when the older boy was lying wounded, now rose in the assembly to demand that Kineas show his accounts for city money he expended. The man did so at the behest of his new political master, and Kineas was sorry for it — and hurt. And the more eager to leave, before the call for an accounting crippled him. Or before he lost the special regard he had received.
He waved to the crowd and embraced the old man one more time, and then he waded out into the surf and climbed the side of Demostrate’s galley. The navarch gave him a hand up the side. ‘You could have ruled,’ he said by way of greeting.
Kineas liked the ugly man. Demostrate was an effective commander, a retired pirate and a loyal ally. ‘Would you, if you had the chance?’ he asked.
Demostrate laughed, a roar like Poseidon’s. ‘Never!’ he said. ‘Easier to calm the waves in a storm than to ride the tides of public opinion.’ He gave a lopsided grin that made him look like a satyr — or more like a satyr. ‘Bad enough that I stopped being a pirate.’
Kineas smiled to himself, and said less than he might once have, but went aft to the awning, where Philokles
