shame. He felt the shame anew. He nodded at the thought, having learned something. He was tired, but strangely full of new life.
‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.
‘ No,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.
Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.
Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things — his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.
Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few dactyloi above the surface of the water.
‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.
The augury was of the best, and more, the truce of the god was broken by the Lord of the Heavens himself. Grabbing a javelin, Kineas crept carefully down the bluff and then moved from tree to tree along the riverbank. In the distance he could see a series of farms at the next bend of the river, smoke coming from their hearths in the new morning.
The lead buck raised his head and Kineas, downwind, froze. A doe’s head came up, and then another’s. It was a long throw, and the time Kineas would take to change his stance to make a cast would render it impossible. He waited.
Another head came up — a young buck. He took a step towards Kineas, and turned his head as if trying to see something across the river.
Kineas remained motionless.
The doe’s head went down, back to drinking, and then the young buck moved a step and did the same. Kineas took a step, and then another, now almost flat to the ground.
A head came up. Kineas couldn’t see as well, having sacrificed line of sight for his own cover. He stopped moving. He was in range now, but awkwardly placed behind a hillock of grass where a great tree had fallen, probably during a spring flood, and then rotted into the loam to leave a miniature ridge.
Above him, just a plethron away on the bluff, Niceas rose to his feet and stretched. The heads came up, watching this new movement. Across the river, the eagle, freshly gorged on salmon, let out a raucous screech of contentment. As the herd’s heads turned together, Kineas rolled from behind his hillock to his feet. In their panic at his appearance, the young buck fouled one of the does and both stumbled, losing a stride, and his javelin flew, arcing into the heavens before falling to strike the young buck between the shoulder blades. He took one stride and fell, legs splayed, already dead. The doe leaped his corpse and ran.
Kineas opened the buck, giving a prayer to Artemis he had learned as a boy, and gralloched his kill in a nearby tree. He left the buck hanging there and washed in the river before climbing the bluff with a pair of steaks wrapped in oak leaves.
‘Somebody’s feeling better,’ Niceas said. He was huddled in his cloak with a horn cup in his fist.
Kineas laid the steaks on their leaves by the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. He wore a grin that split his face like an athlete’s crown of honour.
Niceas began cutting green branches from the alder at the top of the bank. ‘If you wanted to go hunting, you could just have said,’ he joked.
Kineas shrugged, still looking across the river. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted,’ he said.
‘Fair enough,’ Niceas answered. He speared the deer meat carefully, putting three of the springy sticks into each steak and then putting the sticks deep into the loam around their fire. In the fire pit, he pushed the coals from Kineas’s earlier blaze into deep piles, one each under the lattices supporting the meat. The meat began to sizzle almost immediately and Kineas’s stomach made a wet noise. They both chuckled.
‘It’s hot,’ Niceas said. He’d boiled water in a copper mess pot and added the herbs he’d learned from the Sakje and some honey. It was a good drink in the morning, and it saved the wine.
Kineas took the cup from his outstretched hand and drank. He smiled. ‘We’re going to end up becoming Sakje,’ he said. ‘What’s the herb?’
‘Something the Sakje call “ garella ”,’ he said. ‘I found some growing here when we made camp.’
‘Bitter,’ Kineas said. ‘Good with honey.’
Niceas shrugged. ‘It’s warm and wet. Srayanka — your Medea — likes the stuff. That’s how I learned about it.’
Kineas nodded and drank more. It tasted better. Or was that his imagination?
‘We could go back to Athens,’ Niceas said.
Kineas stepped back from the fire as if he had been burned. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘We could go back to Athens. Your exile is lifted — all your estates restored. Right?’
Kineas looked at the other man. ‘Where is this coming from?’
Niceas shrugged, pulled the sticks from the ground and flipped one of the pieces of meat. It smelled delicious, and it had very little fat. ‘The plains aren’t good for you. All these dreams. And war. We’ve had enough war, haven’t we?’
Kineas looked at his hyperetes as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Have you had enough war?’
‘The first time I saw it, that was enough,’ Niceas said. ‘But like Memnon, it’s the only life I’ve ever known. I keep waiting — waiting for you to retire, so that I can retire, too.’
Kineas was watching his friend’s face. ‘I will not be going back to Athens, old friend.’
Niceas shook his head. ‘Of course not. Silly of me to mention it, only — only I don’t see an end. We ride east. Then what? You find Medea and live happily ever after. What about the rest of the boys? Do we just pick a Sakje bride and settle down, or what? Do we fight Alexander? Do we just go on fighting Alexander? Maybe keep moving east? Come back here and make war on Marthax?’ Niceas was growing angrier as he spoke. ‘It won’t ever end, Kineas. You’ll become fucking Alexander, at this rate. What’s it for?’
Kineas rubbed his beard, stung. ‘I promised Srayanka.’
Niceas nodded. ‘You promised her. Did you promise her Eumenes? Diodorus? Antigonus? Coenus? Me?’ At each name, his voice rose. ‘We’ll leave our fucking skulls out east in some Tartarus of wilderness beyond the world, won’t we?’
Kineas drained the garella and sat. He pulled his legs up close and put his arms around them. ‘Why didn’t you say all this back in Olbia?’
Niceas shrugged. ‘It didn’t really come to me until I saw what this campaign was doing to you. And when I saw the ships sail off. That hurt.’
Kineas turned his face away. ‘I have to do this. You don’t. I told you all that in Olbia.’
Niceas’s voice was gentle instead of angry. ‘That’s horse shit, Hipparch. We’ll all follow wherever you choose to go. You have trained us to be that way, and now we are. Diodorus won’t leave you, I won’t leave you. Now Eumenes won’t leave you. It’s almost funny, because every one of us has our own little following — the damned following the damned following Kineas.’
Kineas thought of the other boys hissing their catcalls after the fleeing philosopher. Instead of an angry retort, he nodded. ‘Would it help if I promised that this was the last time?’ he asked.
Niceas shook his head. ‘No. Because being who you are, it won’t be the last time. But it’d help those of us who follow you if you put some planning into the trip home, instead of just the trip out.’
Kineas met his friend’s eyes. ‘I won’t be coming home,’ he said.
Niceas met his glance. ‘If you say so. Maybe the rest of us will, though.’
Kineas nodded. ‘I understand.’
‘Good,’ said Niceas. ‘Because the meat’s done.’
