Coenus laughed. ‘He is a Persian.’ He coughed. ‘You and Ataelus killed all his friends…’
‘I get the feeling he doesn’t miss them. If he cuts all our throats, I’ll be proven wrong.’ Kineas pulled his cloak tighter. ‘I’ll stay here with Niceas.’
Coenus and Diodorus exchanged glances. ‘Nah,’ said Coenus. ‘You’re the strategos. This isn’t the only bandit band — ask Ataelus. The plains are full of them, by all accounts. You go and command. Leave me with my section and I’ll bring the old boy along when he’s ready.’
Diodorus stepped forward. ‘He’s right, Kineas.’
Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘You are both correct, of course. Very well. Coenus, I’ll send your section down the ridge. Diodorus, let’s get Ataelus and plan the next set of marches. Lot is five days behind you. Somebody gets to tell him that his daughter is dead.’
Diodorus winced as if cut.
The high plains between the Tanais and the Rha were indeed full of bandits — an endless profusion of masterless Persians and outlawed nomads and Macedonian deserters, so that there wasn’t an intact farmstead between the two rivers. Four years of war in Hyrkania and the south had filled the high plains with the human flotsam of war, and like wolves on the verge of a hard winter, they were desperate men. When forced, they fed on each other, band against band. All raided the settlements on the expanding edge of their self-made desert. Ataelus had already lost three men to them before the fight with the bandits on the Tanais, and his prodromoi were eager for revenge.
Kineas and Diodorus assigned the second troop, heavy with the Keltoi, to reinforce Ataelus. Kineas took charge of the column and Diodorus took charge of the extermination of the bandits. He didn’t catch as many as he wanted to, but the main body crossed the high plains to the valleys of the Rha without losing a single horse or man, and unknown to them, the Sindi and Maeotae farmers blessed them. Diodorus drove the larger groups across the marshes to the north, and twice he caught bands and the Keltoi and the Sauromatae wrecked them. They brought back a rich haul of horses, some very fine, and enough gold and silver to please the men who did the fighting. Casualties were gratifyingly light — as was to be expected when employing overwhelming force.
Kineas called his new horse ‘Thalassa’, after days of riding the magnificent silver charger and trying out various temporary names (‘Brute’ seemed the front runner, as the beast towered over most of the other warhorses by the width of a man’s hand). The big horse had the colour of a stormy day at sea. She was sure-footed and had an amazing quality of stillness — not lack of spirit, but something like patience — that suited a commander’s horse. And on the day that Sappho insisted that so noble an animal needed a better name than ‘Brute’, the lead elements of the army crested the last ridge of the Rha’s frontier and saw the Kaspian sparkling in the distance, the Bay of the Rha full of ships, and like Xenophon’s men seventy years before, they cried out for the sea, and the name was given.
The crossing had not been particularly arduous except for recruits and the men of second troop who’d spent a week fighting bandits, but the army’s grain supply was very low — most men had only a day’s grain in their packs, or less if they’d been improvident. The sight of fifty small boats in the bay raised everyone’s spirits, and the presence of Philokles on the gravel and mud beach drew a roar of acclaim. Kineas embraced him.
‘Does this place have a name?’ Kineas asked. Philokles smelled clean.
‘Errymi, the Maeotae call it.’ The Spartan gave a wry smile. ‘It is good to see you, Kineas.’
Kineas embraced him again for an answer. ‘Are all those for us?’ Kineas asked.
‘If we can pay,’ Philokles answered. ‘Otherwise, I suspect they’ll murder me and sail away.’
Kineas watched the mules bearing the army’s treasury coming down the last ridge, guarded by the most trustworthy men in the army. ‘And wintering over?’
‘Northern Hyrkania,’ Philokles responded. ‘Strategos, your kingdom awaits.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t want a kingdom.’
Philokles gave an enigmatic smile. ‘How about a woman?’ he asked.
Kineas laughed. ‘I have a woman. She’s ten thousand stades distant, but I’ll catch up.’
Philokles gave him an odd look. ‘Have you made an offering to Aphrodite, brother?’ he asked.
Kineas laughed. ‘No!’ he said.
Philokles gave a distant smile. ‘You should.’ He looked over the sea. ‘Our winter camp is in a kingdom ruled by a woman, and she — she moved me, and I have no tenderness for women. I fear for you.’
Kineas furrowed his brow, stung. ‘What reason have I ever given you to fear for my behaviour with a woman?’ he asked.
Philokles continued to watch him with the air of a man who has seen the world. ‘I would prefer you to cross the Kaspian with your eyes open. This woman desires power, and men with power fascinate her. She lay with Alexander, they say. Now she awaits us.’ He glanced around. ‘She offers a great deal of treasure for our spring campaign.’
Kineas shrugged. ‘I’m of a mind now to push on in spring. The march went well and the bandits in the hills put some gold in our coffers.’ He looked at the ships. ‘And our ally? Leon’s factor?’
‘Her late husband. She remains an ally — she paid Leon an enormous backlog of moneys owed without demur — but I doubt her. I wish you to be immune to her.’
Kineas shook his head in mock wonder. ‘I am immune,’ he said.
Nihmu laughed. ‘No man is immune to the yatavu of Hyrkania,’ she said, ‘except those who love only men.’ She came and went from the command group, red hair like a helmet crest announcing her arrival. She sat on her great white horse amid the mud and the flotsam on the beach. ‘If you fail, Strategos, your children will not rule here.’
‘What?’ Kineas shrugged and turned his back on her. She spoke like an oracle, but she was a stripling, and he was busy. ‘Think as you will. This is a foolish conversation. To whom do we speak about paying these ships?’ he asked Philokles.
Philokles explained that every captain was an independent operator. The boats were small — half the size of a Greek pentekonter, and some smaller than that, with ten or twelve oars a side. A few were sailing vessels, like large fishing smacks. Kineas cast his eyes across them and shook his head, changing the subject again to calm his temper. ‘I don’t see transport for two thousand horses,’ he said.
Philokles rubbed his forehead, pulled his cloak tighter against the autumn wind and met Kineas’s eye. ‘Two hundred horses at a time,’ he said. ‘It was the best I could do.’
Kineas nodded apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean you haven’t done your best,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough that you are here, and with food and so much transport. Let’s start shipping them across the sea. How many days?’
‘Two days each way, with luck and a friendly wind. It is a very small sea.’
Kineas shaded his eyes with his hand, pushing his straw hat back on his head to keep the flapping brim out of his line of sight. ‘We captured quite a few horses on the way here,’ he said. ‘Let us arrange sacrifices to Poseidon, and some games — horse races such as the Trident-bearer values above all things. Let us celebrate his power tonight. And then let’s start loading. The autumn is wearing on, and winter is coming.’
Kineas was among the last of his men to leave for the winter camp in Hyrkania. He stayed on the beach in Errymi to shepherd the men across, to keep morale high on the beach, to prevent incidents with the locals… and to wait for Niceas.
As the weeks passed, while storms slowed the ferries and the stores of food dwindled and the conditions in the seaside camp worsened, he found that his presence heartened his men and that all his skills as a leader were required to prevent mischief and even murder. He had the cavalrymen dig earthworks, an unheard-of demand that served to raise a barrier against the constant wind and, more importantly, against boredom — at least until the walls were complete.
Prince Lot’s knights were even less inclined to dig than Greek aristocrats, but time and the example of Prince Lot himself got most of them to it, and Kineas was too versed in military leadership to believe that every one of the Sauromatae needed to be set to digging. Some hunted — for food and also for bandits. The killing of Lot’s elder daughter was a mistake for which the masterless men of the high plains paid for three months, and the aggressive mourning of the Sauromatae would cease only when the last boats were rowed away from the empty marching camp. Kineas didn’t intend to burn the huts that had been built, however. Instead, he handed the finished work to a group of Maeotae farmers, dispossessed men whose families had been burned out by the bandits and who had fled to the marshes to eke out a living. With the marching camp as a fortified town, they had every chance of holding their own. A dozen Keltoi, too badly wounded in the fall’s fighting to make the crossing, would remain as military
