He threw the hilt into his next opponent’s face. Then, using a pankration move learned from Phocion, he lunged, throwing his shield leg back, and his empty sword hand grasped the rim of the next man’s shield and used it as a lever, ripping the arm in a circle and breaking it. He hammered his shield into the man’s undefended face as he fell, grabbed for the man’s sword and missed. The man’s sword clattered against the cobbles of the floor, vanished in the darkness. A spear punched into his shield, penetrating the bronze surface and embedding in the wood lining. Kineas used his superior leverage to rip the shield free. Again the spear came at him, this time raking his shin because he couldn’t see it coming low. He stepped back and the spearman came forward, the point of a three-man wedge that filled the corridor.
Darius was still fighting a man from the last rush. He gave a shout and his opponent screeched as Darius cut off his hand. The man backed away, blood spurting from the stump, and the three spearmen lost several heartbeats as they tried to cover him.
‘Sword!’ Kineas said. He put his hand back.
Darius slapped his own sword into the open hand.
Just like that.
Kineas stepped forward, took the lead man’s spearhead on his shield where he could feel it and pushed, fouling the man’s weapon. The man set his feet and pushed back, his mates helping him. Kineas felt the strain and tilted his shield, bent his knees and rolled low, passing his shield under the lip of his opponent’s, kneeling on the damp flagstone. He cut low, felt an impact and stood up, pushing with his legs as Darius came up to guard his back, and the lead man staggered back, shouting that he was cut, and the rest broke, fleeing as best they could from the terror of the darkness and the blood.
Darius rose next to him, having found the sword of the man whose wrist he’d severed.
‘Thanks,’ Kineas said. The daimon of combat left him, and his knees began to shake. He was alive! He almost fell. His chiton was drenched in sweat.
‘Think nothing of it,’ Darius said in court Persian. He was grey, but he managed a smile. ‘Could I have my sword back, do you think?’
Kineas met his eye. They exchanged swords, and something more.
Between them, with shaking hands, they got the postern open. Instead of fleeing, they admitted Kineas’s guardsmen, who, drawn by his shouts, were already tearing at the door from the outside. And then, leaving four men under Sitalkes to hold the gate and sending a mounted man to the camp, Kineas led the rest of them back into the citadel for the Kelt.
They found him alive, cleared the corridor in front of him and retreated from a volley of arrows. Carlus was wounded in more places than Kineas could count in the dark, and he was no longer smiling.
‘You come!’ he said, six or seven times, before he passed out. He fell a few feet from the postern and no one could carry him, so they pulled him to one side and prepared to hold the corridor, piling tables and trunks against the walls as cover from arrows.
‘You should go, sir,’ Sitalkes said.
‘Yes,’ said Darius. He was still bleeding, despite a linen wrap, and his pallor had reached a dangerous level. He spoke as if sleepwalking.
Kineas longed to go, but his own sense of himself as a man wouldn’t permit it. ‘No,’ he said.
They waited for a rush of guardsmen. Twice, men peeked around the far corner of the corridor, bronze glinting in the fitful light of the cressets. The nearest one was burning down, past the pitch to the solid wood that burned faster but gave less light. Pine wood smoke and ordure scents mixed, and smoke began to fill the corridor.
An arrow whispered out of the dark. It glanced off Sitalkes’ cavalry breastplate and ripped across another man’s bridle hand before embedding itself in an upturned table.
They all crouched low, as much to get their heads out of the smoke as to avoid the arrows.
‘Get ready,’ Kineas said.
‘Listen!’ Darius said, and collapsed, his limbs loosening all at once so that he slumped forward and his head rang as it hit a table.
‘Shit,’ said Sitalkes. He and one of the Keltoi grabbed the Persian under the arms and pulled him out of the line and back to the relative safety of the door.
‘I hear it too,’ said another man. ‘Fighting!’
Now Kineas could hear it. There was fighting somewhere else — Ares! What in Hades was going on? He rose to his feet and leaned out of the postern gate. There was movement on the slope below him, a line of shapes climbing the hill. He watched them for a long moment — one of the longest of his life — and then he identified something about the set of the cloak and the particular movements of the lead man.
‘Diodorus!’ he called.
In moments, the postern was crowded with armoured men — dismounted cavalry. Andronicus took command of all the Keltoi. Diodorus embraced Kineas.
‘We heard you were dead!’ he said.
‘Not dead yet.’ A roar shook the rafters. ‘What in Hades?’
‘Before we got your message, Philokles and Niceas said that something was wrong. They’re rushing the main gate.’
‘Ares and Aphrodite! They’ll be slaughtered!’ Kineas looked around wildly, even as Nicanor pushed forward, almost devoid of breath from the exertion of climbing the steepest face of the hill, Kineas’s helmet and breastplate clasped against his paunch.
‘Right,’ said Diodorus. He looked up and down the smoky corridor. ‘Andronicus, take your troop and push down that corridor. Eumenes, take your troop with me. Kill everyone.’
Kineas got his head into his breastplate. ‘Diodorus-’
Diodorus pushed past him. ‘You’re done, Strategos. Let us do our jobs. Right, follow me!’
Kineas refused to be set aside. Still wearing his captured shield, he pushed in behind Diodorus. They shoved the makeshift barriers out of the way in one long push.
‘Don’t be a fool, Kineas,’ Diodorus said.
‘I know how to get to the gate!’ Kineas said.
An arrow came out of the dark.
‘Shit,’ Diodorus said. ‘Charge!’ he yelled, and he was off down the corridor.
Kineas struggled to keep up and a flood of men led by Eumenes pushed behind him. At the corner, Eumenes pushed his strategos out of the way and got ahead. Side by side with Diodorus, he cleared the corridor, killing an archer and wounding another before the mass of them broke, screaming in panic.
The Hellenes poured in behind them. More men were coming through the postern, and they followed their appointed leaders blindly into the smoke and the darkness. Leon pushed past Kineas without knowing him and raced down the corridor to Diodorus and Eumenes, who were ten strides ahead, and they went up an undefended flight of stairs. Kineas could barely make his legs push him up behind them. Two more men passed him. The sounds of fighting were closer.
‘We’re above the gate,’ Diodorus said, apparently to Eumenes.
In the distance, ‘ Apollo! Apollo! ’, and the screams of wounded men. That was Philokles’ roar. Kineas felt new strength from the gods flood into his legs, and he flew up the rest of the stairs and saw Eumenes’ silver- chased breastplate glitter coldly at the end of another passageway and Leon’s black legs shining in the torchlight. Kineas ran, his bare feet slapping on stone.
The stupid barbarian archers were running for their friends and leading Diodorus to the gate. Kineas understood that even as he leaped over another dead archer in the semi-darkness. There was more smoke than before — something was on fire.
‘Athena!’ Diodorus roared — difficult to believe that such a thin man could release such a war cry. ‘ Apollo! ’ Closer.
Kineas was right behind Eumenes and another trooper — Amyntas, one of Heron’s gentlemen — and Leon. Eumenes and Leon were shoulder to shoulder, looking like gods in the flickering light. Diodorus hammered his shoulder into a closed door and it gave. As Leon and Eumenes added their weight, the door blew open and all three stumbled. An archer shot. Panicked or not, his arrow flew over Leon’s bowed head and punched Amyntas off his feet. Kineas leaped over the falling man and cut the archer down. His own sword felt good in his hand. He raised his
