contrasts. ‘Don’t be tied to my plan. Make your judgements on the ground. If we can ride around the north of this Hyrkanian Sea — the Kaspian — or if it seems better to you, or if you cannot hire the shipping, or if it is too late in the season-’
Philokles put his hand on Kineas’s shoulder. ‘You’ve already told us every word of your worries,’ he said.
Kineas gave a wry smile. ‘I will worry until I see you again,’ he said, and Leon shifted his weight, embarrassed by their obvious emotion.
Kineas smiled at Leon. ‘Don’t feel it too keenly when this plan of ours is discarded,’ he said. ‘We may never make Hyrkania.’
‘I won’t let you down,’ Leon said.
‘I’ll while away the stades discoursing on your flaws and bring him back cured of hero worship,’ Philokles said. He stroked the neck of his heavy charger, a magnificent animal he had preserved throughout the year’s campaigns by the simple expedient of fighting on foot. ‘I haven’t missed you, you brute,’ he said. ‘My thighs will burn like a river of fire before night.’
He embraced Kineas, and they patted each other’s backs for a long minute. Then they parted, and Kineas embraced Leon. ‘Do well,’ he said, and turned away to hide his tears.
Kineas found it difficult to wave goodbye to Philokles.
An hour later, Kineas stood on a low hill — almost certainly an ancient kurgan like the one that now held the body of Satrax — and watched his infantry with pride. He had climbed the kurgan alone to have time to think, a luxury for a commander, even of a thousand men. He waved at Philokles, who still sat his charger like a sack of grain, and Leon, who rode like a centaur and carried a shield on horseback, one of the few men Kineas had ever seen do such a thing. Neither saw him until the army was already a stade out on the plain, their singing just a chant on the wind, when Leon happened to look at the top of the old mound and Kineas saw him trot his mount alongside Philokles. The Spartan turned in his saddle, looked, put a hand to his eyes and then waved.
Kineas waved back enthusiastically. He found that he was crying again. He waved until he had to strain his eyes to see them, and then he sat in the hollow at the top, resting his shoulders against the stone, and closed his eyes.
‘May the gods send that I see you again,’ he swore.
‘ You will,’ said a deep voice behind him, but when he turned there was no one there but the Sakje child.
‘How do you know?’ Kineas asked her.
She looked at him with all the puzzlement that children use for adults who don’t behave themselves. ‘Know what, lord?’
Kineas bit back a retort. The voice had been hers — and yet had not been hers. ‘Surely there is someone else for you to haunt, girl,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said simply, and came around him to sit on the sacred stone that capped the kurgan. The sword that should have rested in the stone or in the earth beside it was gone, either long since rusted into the ground or taken for its power by a yatavu, a sorcerer. Ordinary mortals avoided sitting on the kurgan stones, fearing the spirits of the dead. She did not.
‘What is your name, girl?’ Kineas asked.
‘When will you come for your horses, Strategos?’ she asked. ‘They pine for you — and you ride inferior blood. You are king. I say so. My father says so. It pains him to see you astride some Getae hack when you should be riding a royal horse.’
Kineas sat down on the low bank of grass-covered earth created by the slow collapse of the roof of the kurgan and sighed. ‘They are fine horses,’ he admitted.
‘And my father is cross that you will not climb the tree. He says,’ and here she scrunched up her face and squared her shoulders so that her back was straighter, an eerie performance, ‘he says that you let your fear guide you instead of your sense as a baqca.’
Kineas sighed again. ‘Kam Baqca is dead,’ he said.
The little girl shrugged. ‘Many people are dead,’ she said. ‘Should they also be silent?’
Kineas spoke too fast, because he didn’t want an argument, and because she was annoying him. ‘We don’t believe that the dead speak.’
The little girl regarded him from under her straight dark brows. ‘That’s not true,’ she said.
Kineas caught his own mistake, and he laughed at his own inability to defeat a young woman in debate. ‘The dead may speak on great occasions,’ he said.
‘The dead may speak whenever it suits the gods to allow them to speak,’ the child said, as if teaching a lesson. ‘So you should not lie. The dead speak to Odysseus in the Odyssey. If the Poet says a thing, it must be true, don’t you think?’ She looked at him. He felt the hair on the nape of his neck begin to rise.
‘You have read the Poet?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, her young voice utterly dismissive. ‘And in plays — the dead speak all the time in plays. I saw one in Olbia.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘Who are you?’
She got up, laughing, for all the world like any other happy twelve-year-old girl. ‘Nihmu White Horse of the Royal Sakje,’ she said proudly. ‘Kam Baqca was my father, and Attalos One-Eye was my grandsire. Arraya Walks- Alone was my mother and Srayanka the Archer was my father’s mother.’ She rattled off her impressive lineage in the sing-song voice of memorization.
Kineas helped her down from the stone as he would any girl — and he remembered his sisters in the family olive groves, and how they had claimed to be women as soon as they could walk. This child seemed to be every age and no age. ‘Where do you camp?’ he asked.
‘With the prodromoi,’ she said.
‘The scouts are all gone for the Kaspian,’ Kineas said. He was disconcerted again. Thunder rumbled in the distance, late-summer thunder that did not bring rain.
She frowned and shook her head rapidly. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she said. She took his hand and pulled on it like one of his sisters wanting a honey treat in the agora. ‘Hurry!’
‘Why?’ he asked. Now she seemed far away.
‘ Because you’ll die ’ came the deeper voice. But the girl looked as startled as he was, and ran off down the hill and into the gathering dark.
When Kineas awoke, Niceas was at his shoulder, shaking him. ‘I knew you’d slipped off to have a kip,’ he said.
Kineas looked around and gradually realized that he was curled up against the kurgan’s stone. His body was like ice, and he was scared.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked the sky.
Niceas’s raillery vanished and was replaced by concern. ‘What’s the matter?’
Kineas put his head in his hands. ‘The veils between the world of dreams and the waking world are tearing,’ he said. ‘Or I am going mad.’
The next night, Kineas dreamed of his own death, and he dreamed of the tree, and he dreamed of skeletal figures offering him the gift of sand from their mouths — one a Persian archer, another a man he’d bought a cup of wine after the sack of Tyre. Sometimes they were not even recognizable — the worst was a corpse with no head, who vomited sand from the stump of its neck. Dreams like this cost him his rest, and he began to fear to place his head on his cloak. And he could not face the tree dreams. The idea of climbing the tree was like an assault on his Hellenism, and the dreams were worse now that he had left the city behind.
In the morning he rode among the camps. He watched the Sindi farmers and the Maeotae fishermen drying their salmon. He watched the Athenian captains purchase fish sauce by the hundred beakers in the market on the beach and load their cargoes before they weighed anchor and beat slowly out through the grey-green waves of the shallow sea towards the dykes that almost — but not quite — blocked navigation on Lake Maeotis. When their sails vanished over the horizon, the enormity of his commitment to the expedition — his own fortune and his inherited wealth were heavily engaged — began to weigh on him, and that, combined with lack of sleep, made him dangerous.
Kineas knew that Niceas was watching him with growing alarm, perhaps even anger. Niceas did his best to keep his Kineas busy: arranging inspections, riding the beach, throwing a seaside symposium to wish the sailors of
