settlers.
Kineas discovered that it was Niceas he was hanging on for when he saw the unmistakable width of Coenus’s broad shoulders coming down the ridge from the west. Closer up, the dozen Greek troopers were obviously not a returning patrol, and closer still, Kineas could see Niceas, swathed in fur robes, riding a big pony.
Kineas sent a boy for his riding horse and went out to meet them, his throat tight. It remained tight while he embraced Niceas, who winced and cursed, and Coenus, and Crax and Sitalkes and Antigonus. Niceas looked twenty years older, and Coenus looked considerably thinner, but the rest of them smiled a great deal and shuffled when Kineas praised them.
Privately, Coenus was less sanguine. ‘He’s not the same,’ Coenus said. Niceas was sitting on the rim of the hearth, visibly soaking up warmth. ‘I’m not sure he’ll ever fight again. But he’s alive, and he’s as tough as a slave’s sandal.’ Coenus drank back his wine — his third cup — and swallowed a handful of olives.
‘Was it hard?’ Kineas asked.
‘Never,’ Coenus said. ‘Best hunting of my life. Like Xenophon’s notion of Elysium. After Lot came, we sent back for grain, and later the farmers came to us. It was never dull, and those are good men you gave me.’ His grin had a self-conscious air to it. ‘I loved it.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Niceas says we should carve a kingdom out of this land.’ Coenus, usually fastidious, had a bushy beard, and he rubbed it with his fingers as if embarrassed by it. ‘I want to sign up. I’ll put a shrine to Artemis in that valley — I know just the spot. I’ll hunt until I’m too old to ride, and then I’ll sit around losing my teeth and telling lies.’ Then he stopped grinning. ‘Watching him was hard,’ he said.
Niceas was grey with fatigue and went to bed too soon.
Kineas lay next to Niceas in the tent. Niceas slept more deeply than he had before his wound, and he lay still, as if in death, so that Kineas often listened to him like an anxious parent with a sick child, leaning across the older man’s body to hear his soft breathing. Tonight, Kineas had Philokles on his other side — it was a cold, damp night with a threat of freezing rain in the air, and every man in the army pushed close to his tent mates.
Kineas was tired with worry and relief, but sleep would not come, and he lay listening to the sounds made by his night guards, by two thousand horses in the dark, by a few foolish soldiers lingering late by their mess fires. They, too, were relieved to find that boats were waiting for them.
And then, as subtle as the first fall of snow, he was… standing amidst the bones at the base of the tree, surrounded by the silent combat of dead friends against dead foes. He reached for a limb and drew himself up until the combat beneath him vanished and he looked up. The tree towered over him, reaching into the sky. He noticed that the tree lacked the misty quality of his first dreams — now it was as palpable and as solid as any tree outside the world of dreams.
The owl shot by and made a showy landing above him, and squawked. Kineas grinned at it.
‘I know what I’m here for,’ he told the owl. Instead of a slow climb, he reached for a branch overhead, planted his feet and leaped to grab the next major limb.
He just caught it, and he hung for a moment, the strain on his arms as real as anything in the outer world, and it took the concentration of all his years on the floor of various gymnasiums to lever himself up and over, to lie panting for a full minute before he pushed himself up and climbed carefully to his feet…
In the agora of his youth with a sack of scrolls hanging over his arm — fourteen, too young to be a man and old enough to desire to be one. Diodorus and Graccus walked by his side, alert for trouble. Demosthenes had spoken in the assembly against Philip of Macedon, and all of the agora was talking about it. Kineas and his two best friends drifted from group to group, abandoning the safety of their group of rich boys to listen to the conversation of older men.
There was a large circle of men gathered around Apollion, and he walked around them. Apollion — tall, handsome, blond Apollion, who the assembly loved and who fought in the front rank in the phalanx — had made advances, just yesterday, making it clear that he could push Kineas’s career as an orator if Kineas would suck his dick for a few years. He’d put it better than that, but Kineas’s anger — and fear, for Apollion was a big man, dangerous in combat and in the assembly — blinded him to rational behaviour. He’d struck Apollion, in front of everyone in the gymnasium, and fled.
The man looked up from the crowd he was haranguing and gave Kineas a wolfish grin.
Kineas froze, caught between the desire to defy and the desire to flee.
Diodorus didn’t hesitate. ‘It’s like finding Socrates talking in the agora,’ he called out.
Many of the older men laughed aloud. Apollion often liked to quote Socrates — but Socrates had been notoriously ugly. It was a two-edged gibe.
Grinning like the fox he was, Diodorus gave Kineas a shove to get him moving again. ‘Don’t act like a deer caught in torchlight,’ Diodorus hissed. ‘He’ll think you’re pining for him.’
Graccus, who admired Apollion, shook his head. ‘I’d have him in a moment.’ He grinned — he was given to grins. ‘I can’t imagine what he sees in you!’ He swatted Kineas on the leg.
‘He’s saving himself for Phocion,’ Diodorus said, and Kineas, stung at last, smacked him in the ear. Phocion — Athens’s greatest soldier — taught all of them in swordsmanship and in the use of the spear. It set them apart from other rich boys, many of whom disdained military service as something for those too stupid to make money.
Kineas called them idiotai, after Thucydides.
In the dream world, Kineas knew what was coming, and part of his mind flinched from it, even as he experienced it again…
They had crossed the agora and were well down the road to the gates, far from their own haunts, still listening to men gossip and discourse. They were in a bad part of Athens, where men went for cheap wine and cheap sex.
‘We should get out of here,’ Graccus said quietly.
Diodorus looked around. ‘Those are brothels!’ he said. He sounded interested. ‘Some day, I’m going to purchase a hetaira and fuck her every minute of the day.’
‘Is this before or after you’ve sailed beyond the Pillars of Herakles?’ Kineas jibed, but a commotion in the doorway of the nearest knocking shop drew their attention.
‘I’ve fucking paid for an hour, and I’ll have every fucking grain of sand in the glass,’ shouted a man. He sounded like a foreigner — a Corinthian or a Theban. He had a boy by the neck. The boy was short, tough-looking, with heavy dark circles under his eyes. He was naked and there was blood running down his legs.
He wasn’t crying. His shoulders were rigid with tension. He suddenly burst into action, breaking free of the foreigner, but the man was too fast. He tripped the boy, and then, as he went down, he kicked him savagely in the stomach, so that the boy heaved up, vomiting. The foreigner stepped back. He turned back to the brothel keeper. ‘I’ll fuck him in the street if I please,’ he said, his voice so devoid of strain or inflection that the hairs rose on Kineas’s neck.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Graccus said.
Kineas felt something inside him — some combination of his own ideas of right, of Apollion’s desire to force him to have sex, his anger at having failed to stand up to the man.
The brothel keeper shook his head. ‘Respected sir, you must not abuse him — and if he refuses you, you must go.’ The brothel keeper was not a small man and he wasn’t cowed. He wouldn’t have held his place if violence cowed him. ‘The boy is not a slave. You are a foreigner. If you make a fuss, I’ll have you taken.’
The foreigner moved suddenly, grabbing the brothel keeper’s ears and slamming his head against the doorpost of the brothel. Then he raised his knee and smashed it into the brothel keeper’s chin. ‘Anyone else want some?’ he asked the street. He reached down and picked up the boy. Closer up, Kineas could see that the boy wasn’t as young as he had thought — he was, in fact, a few years older than Kineas, just scrawny and ill-fed.
Diodorus reached out a hand, but he was too late. Kineas slipped away and stood in front of the foreigner, whose eyes glittered with something Kineas hadn’t seen before.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said.
The foreigner was a soldier — he had all the marks of wearing armour on him, and a heavy knife at his belt of the kind soldiers wore when they didn’t wear swords. ‘Or?’ the man said. He didn’t grin or frown. It was as if his face was dead. Kineas’s voice cracked in fear, but he stood his ground.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said. ‘And don’t even think of harming me.’ Me came out as a squeak, as the man dropped the boy to fall in the garbage of the street. ‘My father is-’
‘I don’t give a fuck about your father, little arse-cunt,’ the man said. He was fast, and he swung hard,
