shield and took an arrow, and then another, and pushed forward.
A spearhead came past him: Eumenes, covering him. He roared his war cry — it came out thin and high, ‘Athena!’ — and then he felt resistance against his shield and Eumenes was shoving against his back and he cut low. The resistance gave way and he felt a rush of cold air.
There were stars overhead. He was standing at the entrance to a tower, up on the wall and close to the main gate.
Somehow, Philokles had opened the gate. He stood in the courtyard, killing, with bodies all around him and the whole mass of the garrison trying to evict him and the men with him. ‘Apollo!’ he roared, and Kineas answered ‘Athena!’ and the garrison soldiers looked up and saw their doom behind them on the wall.
With the unanimity of despair, they broke, and the Hellenes hunted them through the corridors and killed them where they found them. The citadel was stormed, and too many of the Olbians had fallen in the taking to allow for any human behaviour by the stormers. They were animals, and like animals they roared through the rooms and corridors, destroying, raping, killing.
Kineas made no attempt to stop it. He could not have stopped it had he wished — the law of war was strict and the citadel had been stormed. And he lacked any will to resist. He came down from the wall with an avenging rush and they cleared the courtyard in moments, but the Olbian dead were everywhere, some burned with hot sand and some stabbed with many spears, and between Philokles’ wide spread legs was the body of Niceas.
Kineas threw himself on the body of his boyhood friend. Niceas was burned with sand and had a great gash on his unhelmeted head and a spear in his side, but he still had breath in him.
‘He lives!’ Kineas proclaimed.
Niceas shook his head gently. ‘Saves you the price of a brothel,’ he said, and coughed blood.
‘No,’ Kineas said. ‘No — Niceas!’
‘Graccus is waiting for me,’ Niceas said. He smiled, like a man who sees home at the end of a long journey, and died.
And Kineas held him for a while, until the skin under his forearms started to cool.
‘Let’s kill every fucker in the castle,’ Philokles said. He didn’t sound like himself. But Kineas thought it sounded like a fine plan.
Dawn. Smoke from burning sheds and the remnants of fires. Olbians, their faces black with soot, huddled against the wind, their bodies slack from exhaustion and guilt. Beyond sated. No man can survive a storming action and ever forget what he did when he was a beast.
A carpet of bodies from the courtyard to the throne room.
The floors were cold.
Leon had saved many of the citadel’s slaves. He and Nicanor and Eumenes had pushed them into the queen’s bedchamber and held the door. So in the light of dawn, Eumenes brought Banugul to Kineas where he sat on her throne. The blade of his Egyptian sword was clean, because he had wiped it fastidiously on the cloak of Sartobases. Just beyond Sartobases was the corpse of Therapon, who had died in the guards’ last stand, cut down by Philokles.
Kineas and Eumenes and Banugul were the only living people in the room. The scenes of orgy and debauchery on the walls were sad and pathetic.
‘I found her among the slaves,’ Eumenes said.
Kineas nodded.
‘I heard that — that Niceas is dead.’
‘Niceas is dead,’ Kineas said, and tears flowed. Eumenes joined him.
Kineas rose from her throne and walked to them. ‘I came to offer you life,’ he said. ‘You stupid bitch.’ The anger in him was great enough to kill her, but her death was not enough.
She met his eye steadily. ‘I had no choice,’ she said. ‘Kill me if you must. Throw my body to your wolves to rape if that sates you.’ Her voice shook with terror, and yet through her terror she was in control of herself. ‘I did what I had to, and failed. I will not go down to hell with lies.’
Kineas punched her so hard that her head snapped back and she shot off her feet and fell in a heap. ‘What could possibly excuse this?’ Kineas bellowed. She had fallen across the bodies of several of her courtiers, and she was fouled with their blood and worse. She spat blood and rose on one arm.
‘Alexander has murdered Parmenion,’ she said through a split lip and bruised jaw.
Kineas stumbled back and sat on the throne as if Ares had cut the sinews of his legs. ‘Gods,’ he said.
‘My so-called father will be on me in a month with five thousand men, desperate to wipe me out before he too is attacked by Alexander.’ She held her bruised head high. ‘I am not a slave, to bow my head. Alexander is my lord, and I will fight.’
Kineas didn’t want to look at her. The urge to kill was not sated. Every time he thought of Niceas’s corpse in the courtyard, he was ready to send more souls to Hades. But another part of him cried for redemption — the part that had roamed the corridors, exterminating archers who would have surrendered and joined him, perhaps, had his sword let them live. Yet another part accused him of behaving badly — seeking revenge on her for her role in showing him weak.
‘I’m sorry that I hit you,’ he said.
She said nothing. Her eyes roamed the room, looking at the dead.
‘Go to him, then,’ he said. ‘Take your slaves and go.’
‘You were right,’ she said, her voice dead.
‘Right?’ he asked. What did he expect her to say?
‘My garrison wasn’t worth a crap,’ she said coldly. ‘I wish you had joined me.’
He shook his head. ‘Get you gone before I change my mind,’ he said.
In an hour, she was gone. And he was master of a citadel full of corpses.
16
Niceas’s funeral games lasted three days, after two weeks of preparations. Slaves and freedmen and farmers cleaned the citadel, and Kineas declared that all taxes and tribute would be remitted in exchange for a tithe on spring fodder and wagons. Nor did he offer any other choice — his soldiers collected the tithe with drawn weapons. It was ugly, like everything about Hyrkania in the aftermath of the escalade.
Eumenes and Leon seemed reconciled by their shared roles as heroes, but their reconciliation lasted only until they wrestled for the prize of the funeral games on the third day, with Mosva watching them. The bout became ugly and all their wounds were ripped open in a single word when Leon said something while his opponent had his head down in a hold, and then they were fighting like dogs.
Leon won.
Ataelus had returned with the rest of the prodromoi on the third day of games, in time to join all the old hands in throwing torches on to Niceas’s pyre. He wept with them, and threw his best gold-hilted dagger on to the roaring blaze.
Philokles had barely spoken since the storming. He sat in silence and was drunk most of the time. Only Kineas and Diodorus and Sappho knew that he had tried to kill himself with his sword. Sappho had caught him at it and they had all wrestled the blade away from him, Sappho cut and bleeding, until Philokles screamed, ‘Can I do nothing but injure and kill! Let me go!’ and subsided into weeping. That was in the first few days after the action, and Philokles wasn’t the only man in despair.
At the games, he was silent. He stood alone, and when men went to embrace him, he turned away. Kineas failed to move him. It was Ataelus who pushed past his rudeness. He placed himself in front of the Spartan, hands on hips, weeping unabashedly in the Scythian manner. When he had the silent man’s attention, he demanded, ‘Niceas for killing enemies?’
Philokles’s face was streaked with tears in the firelight. ‘Yes.’
‘How many in last fight?’ Ataelus asked. He didn’t seem to know, or care, what Philokles was suffering.
Philokles flinched. ‘Two,’ he said.
Ataelus nodded. ‘Two is good,’ he said. ‘And you?’ He looked at the Spartan curiously. ‘For revenge? You
