Lot grinned. In Sakje, he said, ‘That’s why you cross a desert in the spring. Come — I have a little bad wine and Samahe is reporting on Ataelus’s adventures in the east.’
‘You seem happy,’ Kineas said.
‘I’m home!’ Prince Lot said. ‘I think I never expected to live to get here. And here we are! My messengers are out on the grass, riding for our yurts and our people. We’ll make rendezvous in the Salt Hills, and then we will have such a feast!’
Kineas nodded. ‘How far to the Salt Hills?’
Lot led on to his ‘tent’, merely a square of tough linen staked over a pair of lances. Mosva poured them wine in gold cups. ‘The cups are better than the wine,’ he said. ‘Ten days and we’ll be in the hills. Ten hard days, and then you’ll have all the fodder you need until you reach Srayanka.’ The Sauromatae prince sniffed the air, which was heavy with dust and pollen, like an open bazaar. ‘That is the smell of home!’
‘Will you leave us?’ Kineas asked.
‘Never!’ Lot said. ‘Now you are in my land! I will keep you as safe as you have kept me.’ He drank his cup and Kineas finished his. ‘Ten days’ hard riding and then we feast.’
Kineas turned to Mosva. In a way she was a woman, and then in another way she was just one of his troopers. ‘Do you fancy either Leon or Eumenes?’ he asked.
She gave the grin of a young woman just discovering her powers. ‘Both,’ she said, and laughed.
Lot nodded. ‘They are both fine young men.’ He shrugged. ‘Among my people, women choose their own mates. Both are rich, well-connected, brave and foreign.’ He grinned again. ‘My sister’s son inherits my tribes, no matter what road my daughter takes.’
‘Your sister’s son?’ Kineas asked.
‘Upazan,’ Lot answered, and he frowned, as if the name left a bad taste.
‘Ten days’ hard riding’ was repeated throughout the army as they rode east. The desert vanished behind them and they rode over downs of new grass, green as Persephone’s robe, but watercourses were rare and only rain saved them from serious consequences until they came to a great river flowing across their path, burbling brown with spring run-off across rocks.
Kineas was on his Getae hack and he led the horse down to the water, careful not to let the beast over-drink. Diodorus and Leon were doing the same. ‘Surely this isn’t the Oxus?’ Diodorus asked.
Kineas shook his head. ‘We must still be twenty days from the Oxus,’ he said. He rubbed his beard. ‘Or more. Lot!’ he shouted.
Prince Lot circled his horse through the drinking animals and splashed up.
‘What is this river called?’ Kineas asked.
Lot shrugged. ‘In Sakje, it is Tanais.’
Leon was pulling his gelding clear of the water, because the horse wanted to keep drinking and Leon had no intention of letting him. From the far bank, he shouted, ‘They’re all called Tanais! It means “river”.’
Lot shrugged. ‘No Greek name that I know,’ he said.
Leon, who interrogated every merchant and traveller they met, went to his pack and withdrew a scroll whereon he made a few marks. ‘This must be the Sarnios,’ he said. ‘At least, that’s what the horse-dealer called it.’
They camped in a bend of the Sarnios. Kineas sacrificed a young calf born on the march to the river goddess and ordered a few of their cattle slaughtered so that all the troops got a ration of meat with their grain. Later, well fed and greasy, they sat under the sky, wrapped in their cloaks against the cold night air, and watched the stars spread above them, backlit by the glow of Temerix’s forge in the bed of his wagon. Antigonus and Kineas worked on tack, repairing headstalls. Kineas saw that the charm Kam Baqca had given him so long ago in the winter camp on the Little Borysthenes was fraying, and he sewed it down tight. Antigonus had acquired a bronze chamfron, a piece of horse armour, but he couldn’t get it to fit his horse without troubling the animal. Every night it seemed he was making adjustments.
‘Wish she could talk,’ Antigonus joked. ‘Tell me if the cursed thing fits.’
Kineas finished his much smaller project and watched Darius attaching nocks to arrow shafts in the firelight. It was finicky work. ‘Wouldn’t you do better waiting for daylight?’ Kineas asked.
The Persian had all his arrow-making kit spread on a pale blanket. ‘Yes,’ he said. He swore as his hand slipped and a finished nock went sailing off into the darkness. ‘But Temerix bought charcoal from a trader. He has enough to melt bronze and he’s casting the heads tonight.’
Kineas grinned. ‘You could still put the nocks on in daylight,’ he said.
Darius nodded. ‘There’s never time.’ He flicked a glance at Kineas. ‘The Sauromatae saw deer tracks today. I won’t be caught unprepared!’
Kineas laughed. ‘You had all winter to make arrows.’
Darius ignored his commander and concentrated on his task.
‘Uuggh!’ said Philokles, arriving with a bowl and a slab of meat. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Glue,’ Darius said. He had another nock ready and was fitting it on a neat dovetail into the butt of the arrow’s shaft, where the string would catch it. He rolled the nock in glue and slid it home, wiping the excess with his thumb. Then he took three carefully prepared fletchings, all cut from heron feathers, and glued them in place on the shaft. He set the arrow point-first in the ground and went on to the next shaft, methodically placing and gluing the nock.
‘Hmm,’ said Philokles, interested despite himself. ‘Why not set the feathers straight on? What purpose do they serve?’
Darius dropped a fletching in the grass by the fire and swore again. By the time he recovered it, there was glue on the feather itself and Darius threw it in the fire in disgust and began to cut another.
‘It looks like a great deal more work than my spear,’ Philokles said.
Kineas didn’t want to speak. It was the first time Philokles had shown interest in anything — much less humour.
Darius fitted a new fletching and put the shaft into the ground with the other six he’d made. ‘Hunting arrows are the hardest,’ he said.
‘Why?’ Kineas asked, to keep him talking, and to keep Philokles interested.
Darius shrugged the shrug of the young. ‘War arrows you never get back,’ he said. ‘I don’t even put nocks on them — I just cut a notch into the shaft and wrap a little cord around the base of the notch. But hunting arrows — you hope to get them back. And you shoot them farther, at harder targets. They need to be well made. My father always told us to make our own and not trust other men’s arrows.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Why the feathers, though?’
Darius shook his head. ‘You Greeks always ask why,’ he said. ‘Ask a real fletcher. I just do as my father taught me.’
Kineas laughed. Philokles looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Kineas shook his head. ‘There’s something profound there,’ he said. ‘But I’m too full of beef to get my tongue around it.’
Philokles laughed and punched his shoulder.
Across the Sarnios, flowers bloomed, and the Sauromatae girls made themselves wreaths and wore them as they rode, Mosva looking like Artemis. The hunters shot deer in the folds of the hills, and men, when they had water, sang songs to Demeter and her swift-footed daughter returned from exile. Darius shot a deer on the first day of hunting and was insufferably proud.
Despite Lot’s prediction, it took them a further ten days from the Sarnios, and it was one of those happy times that soldiers remember when they are old — seldom the boredom or the cold or the heat, but the beautiful spring on the plains and the Sauromatae girls riding along the flanks in fields of flowers. Meat was plentiful and horses that had been near death suddenly grew strong.
A month after leaving Hyrkania, the hills of Dahia were visible through the heat shimmer on the eastern horizon. Men grumbled and openly wondered about their wages, and they ogled the Sauromatae girls when they stripped their tunics to ride bare-chested in the spring sun.
Diodorus pulled his horse up next to Kineas. ‘The troops are better,’ he said. ‘Ares, it’s good to be clear of cursed Hyrkania!’
Kineas nodded and looked at his friend, recalled from a daydream of worry about Srayanka.
Diodorus glanced at Philokles, who was riding alone, lost in thought. ‘Is he better?’ Diodorus asked.
