Pantecapaeum farewell. None of them served to occupy Kineas fully, and his temper grew shorter and shorter. So did Niceas’s.
After a few days of inactivity and more nights of brutal dreams, Diodorus’s command marched, carrying most of the remaining grain from the magazine that Eumenes had arranged. The herds of cattle were already down by a third.
‘Why don’t we ride with Diodorus?’ Niceas asked. ‘The prince can get himself across the height of land — Ares, he could ride all the way to Marakanda without us.’
‘Go with Diodorus if you want,’ Kineas said.
Niceas whirled on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Strategos,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a burr under my butt for a week and I don’t have to take it. I’m trying to help and you are shutting me out.’
‘I can’t go to fucking sleep,’ Kineas said.
Niceas handed him a flagon of wine left from the symposium. ‘Philokles told me how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Start drinking. I’ll tell you when to stop.’
‘I’m the commander of this expedition,’ Kineas said. ‘I can’t get drunk.’
Niceas held out the flagon. ‘Greek wine for Greek dreams, Philokles says.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I’m not as bad as that yet.’
Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘All the gods keep me from the day you are worse.’
Kineas managed a smile. ‘You’re right. I need to get out of this camp.’
Niceas rubbed his nose. ‘About fucking time.’
Kineas smiled back. ‘Let’s go hunting. We’ll catch Diodorus as we go. I’ll inform Lot.’
10
The pressure in Kineas’s head subsided as soon as he rode away from Lake Maeotis, so that by the time his horse had completed the first of the great curves of the Tanais, he felt nothing but an agonizing fatigue. He allowed Niceas to lead him on for a few parasangs and they camped on a bluff that hung over the great river like a fortress built by nature.
‘I just want to sleep,’ Kineas said.
Niceas handed him a horn cup of watered wine. ‘Drink this first,’ he said.
Kineas looked across the river at the farms on the north shore. ‘We’re in Asia, according to Herodotus.’
Niceas shrugged. ‘I’ve been to Asia before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if you insist on keeping this up, we’ll have to hunt.’
Kineas nodded. Instead of relaxation, he felt only the anxieties of a commander away from his troops. ‘I shouldn’t have left the army,’ he said, and drank the wine. Then he had another cup, and finally he fell asleep.
The tree climbed away above him, an endless profusion of fecundity, with ripe fruit — apples, lemons and richer prizes all dangling in a riot of colour and life. Birds swooped in and out of the tree, plucking food from the tangle of branches. And around the fruit branches, up and up, to a layer of branches and clouds that hid the horizon, there were branches of hardwood and softwood, each lush and perfect, without disease, so that the tree was all trees, and it covered the world.
His feet were mired in the mud and the blood of the dead at the base of the tree, and when he moved he could feel the bones breaking under his feet no matter how careful he was. He needed to climb — indeed, he could see a pair of young eagles cradled in one of the branches above him, and they called to him, and he had to go to them. Their needs were greater than his. But as he began to push through the ordure, a corpse rose from the muck to confront him. It rose gracefully, without the stiffness that the dead so often displayed, and the corpse’s face was fresh and clean and unmarked despite the wounds on his body.
It was Ajax.
Ajax smiled. It was a smile full of sadness and other things — comradeship, love, loss and longing — but it was a smile. He reached out his hand towards Kineas, and Kineas took the hand.
Around them, other corpses appeared, familiar corpses — the men from his other dreams, a silent clamour of dead and rotting flesh. Kineas shied away from them, but they pushed at him, each with a handful of sand.
Beyond the heartbreaking spectacle of dead companions and friends — men whose deaths in many cases sat on his shoulders, who had died under his orders or at his side — was a dreadful plain of dead, Persians and Getae and others, trailing away to the horizon.
Ajax pulled at him and then pushed him towards the tree, interposing his body between Kineas and the other dead. Kineas seized the trunk and threw himself up to the first branch with all of his dream strength, threw a leg over the first branch and hung there, terrified and sweating, as Ajax vanished in a melee of the dead, and Kineas felt that he had abandoned the boy, left him for dead, and he wept. And the weeping was excruciating, raw pain coming from his eyes as if the eyes themselves were threatening to burst from his head, and then grains of sand poured from his eyes into his hands, sand intermixed with blood, and he screamed and screamed and…
Niceas had his arms and was murmuring in his ear until he calmed. In his fear- and fatigue-swamped thoughts, he knew that Niceas was speaking to him as he would to a scared horse, and that comforted him, and despite his fears, he slipped back into sleep.
It amazed him that he returned to the dream in the same place, with one leg over the rough, oak-tree bark of the tree’s lower limbs. He could not see the ground, only the sort of low mist that rolled over the sea of grass in the autumn, and the dead were gone. He was on the tree. He admitted to himself, there in the power of the dream, that he had resisted going to the tree since the day of the battle, and now he welcomed it.
He climbed to the branch where he had seen the young eagles, and they were gone — higher in the tree, he could see now. They leaned out from their branch, their immature and drab brown plumage somehow comic, and watched him with curious eyes, and made raucous calls at him as he hoisted himself to another branch. Each branch at this height was as large as a noble tree in a royal forest in Persia, or in a temple grove in Arcadia, and climbing the main trunk was a matter of careful searching for hand- and footholds in the rough bark. He searched, and climbed, and his head was filled with memories from his youth — memories of sitting in the dust of the agora in Athens and listening to tutors and philosophers, some wiser than others, some brilliant rhetoricians and one unable to speak more than a few phrases without halting and staring blankly at the world around them, often to the hoots of his companions — his own hoots.
Why? Why had he been so derisive? The man was a pupil of Plato, a brilliant mind who studied many things in the circle of the heavens, but his halting speech had earned him nothing but ridicule. And their tutors had done nothing to stop them, until the poor man had fled the agora. Even in dream, Kineas winced at remembering that he had been the first to call an insult, feeling bold, manly, adult.
And why had their tutors not restrained them?
Perhaps because they, mere tutors to the idle rich, enjoyed the discomfiture of one more gifted than they?
It was a deeply painful memory, an ignoble act in which he led others to act badly. And it had been one of the moments that defined his leadership over the other youths — his daring had made him a leader.
The consequence of an evil act had been his own success as a leader. Of course, his leadership of aristocratic youths had caused him to be sent to Alexander, and then exiled. And Moira had sent him from exile to be archon of Olbia, and then to here.
He pondered it all, and climbed higher.
There were other forms of horror than rotting corpses…
He awoke in the morning, better rested than he had been in weeks, to the roar of Niceas’s snores. Below the bluff on which they had camped, the Tanais swept by majestically, still swollen by the rain that had lasted a month, as wide as a lake. The sun rose and then leaped into the pink-striped sky as Apollo’s winged chariot began its course across the heavens. Kineas listened to the sounds of the forest behind him, watched a herd of deer come to the river beneath the bluff, an easy javelin throw that he passed because he could feel the peace of Zeus on the whole of the Tanais and he had no wish to break the truce. Birds called.
He was confused by his dreams. It was years since he had last thought about tormenting the scholar in the agora, but he now knew the dream to be a true one — indeed, he now remembered the incident, and his secret
