words for stupid thinking. You can be the tyrant of Olbia — you can be king. They worship you like a god. You have made their city something, and your army is now a strong one. The grain will make you rich, your hoplites will make you secure and your alliance with the Sakje will make you great.’
Kineas knelt and took her hands. ‘I don’t want to be rich,’ he said, and even as he said the words, he knew that they were as true as they were trite. The image of a long trek east to fight Alexander at her side stretched away like a dream, and beside it, the day-to-day world of patronage and politics seemed like a nightmare. ‘I don’t want to be tyrant, or king. I want you.’ He grinned like a boy. ‘I have had a dream that I will defeat Alexander.’
She smiled then, and he feared her a little, because it was not the smile of love, but the smile of triumph. ‘Then you shall have me, Airyanam. And we will go far,’ she said, and put her lips on his. ‘Even to the mountains of the east, and Alexander.’
When they had made love again, she wrapped herself around him despite the damp heat and their sweat, and together they fell asleep. And no sooner had he acknowledged the pleasure of such sleep, her smooth, hard leg pinned between his, than instead he was… astride the tree, a branch clenched between his legs. Farther along the branch, two eagles demanded food from a nest between Srayanka’s thighs. Their screaming demands drowned out her words. When he reached out to her, the larger chick nipped him, and he fell…
He glanced around, and all the warriors behind him were strange, all Sakje, in magnificent armour, and he himself wore a vambrace of chased gold on the arm he could see through the slits of his helmet. He was dry, sitting tall on a horse the colour of dark metal, and the battle was won, the enemy broken, and across the river, the survivors tried to rally in the driftwood and by the single old dead tree that offered the only cover from the bronze rain of Sakje arrows, and he raised Srayanka’s whip, motioned three times and they all began to cross the river. He was ready for the arrow when it came, and he almost greeted it, he knew it so well, and then he was in the water — hands grabbing at him…
He was dead, and walking the battlefield, but it was another battlefield, Issus, and the dead were rising all around him like men woken early from rest. And then they began to walk, rubbing at their wounds, some stuffing the intestines into their guts. They tried to speak but failed, and many shrugged, and then, Greek and Persian, they all began to walk away from the battlefield… and they were joined by the dead of Gaugamela, more Persians and fewer Greeks and Macedonians, all shuffling along in a column of the wretched dead.
A single figure emerged from the column. He had two deep wounds, one in his neck and another under his armpit, and his breastplate was gone, and his face was slack and empty of feeling, rotted and black, but Kineas could recognize Kleisthenes, a boyhood friend who had fallen in a nameless fight on the banks of the Euphrates. Kineas could feel that Kleisthenes was sad. Indeed, sadness came off him like heat from a fire. His jaw, almost naked of flesh three years after his death, was working, but no sound emerged. He reached out a hand and rested his finger bones on Kineas’s deeply scarred forearm.
‘What?’ Kineas demanded. ‘Speak!’
Kleisthenes’ jaw worked again, more like a man chewing meat than a man attempting to speak. His mouth opened, and sand came forth. The rotting figure gathered the sand as it vomited from his mouth, catching it in his hands. He held it out to Kineas as if it was a payment, or an offering.
Even in a dream, Kineas was terrified. He stumbled back.
‘Wake up now, or die in your sleep!’ said the voice of Kam Baqca..
Noises in the dark, and too much motion, and the wagon moving as if a man was climbing aboard. Kineas rolled off the furs and his hand was on his sword as the heavy felt that covered the wagon was ripped back and an arrow skidded along his back with a line of pain. There were torches in the dark, and the glint of weapons.
Srayanka was just coming to her knees and he pushed her down as another arrow bit deep into the wood of the wagon bed. Kineas roared ‘The dead!’ in Greek.
A black shape came up on to the wagon bed with a sword in each hand. Kineas was still half asleep, his mind in another world.
The creature’s face was black. The thing hesitated — an all too human reaction — and then he swung both weapons together. The fog of the dream dropped a little more from Kineas’s eyes and he saw that his opponent was a man with charcoal on his face. Even as he realized this, he sensed that the man’s clumsy attack was a distraction, and as he ducked and parried he turned his head to see another black figure at the other end of the wagon, illuminated by the oil lamp. It was raising a bow, also hesitating, as if unsure what to shoot.
Kineas didn’t hesitate. He cut at his first adversary, a long overhand cut with a wrist rotation at the end, so that the man’s clumsy parry failed to stop the reversed curve of the Egyptian blade from cutting into his neck. He fell without a cry, his head half severed and black ink pouring out in the light of the moon.
Kineas leaped back and cut at the archer, and his blow severed the bow at the grip. One end of the cut bow snapped back and raked his hand, making him drop his sword with the pain, and the other end slashed across the bowman’s face. Kineas kicked him and the bowman fell back off the wagon. Another arrow whispered out of the darkness and passed between Kineas’s legs.
‘Alarm! Attack!’ Kineas shouted in Sakje. He could hear sounds of movement from the fires around them, and shouts in the distance, but the attackers were silent and otherworldly, and the hair on Kineas’s neck began to stand up.
Even in the darkness, he could see the hilt of his sword gleaming against the carpets of the wagon’s floor, and he bent and seized it. The grip was slippery with blood from his wound, and he bent to wipe his hand. Srayanka rose with her naked back to him, a bow in her hand, and shot before ducking again behind the cover of the benches.
Out in the dark, a man urged a general attack. Kineas could hear him demanding that they all ‘go together’. And argument — in Sakje. Human. Kineas took a deep breath and steadied himself, the last fumes of his dream forced down.
His brain was working. They were men — mere men, not vengeful spirits who would have no need for weapons and orders. And they cared nothing for him — they were here to kill Srayanka. That was the only explanation for the hesitation of the first attackers.
It appeared that Marthax had found a solution to the succession problem.
The plan and its execution followed each other in two breaths, and Kineas leaped down from the wagon bed and charged straight at the voice in the darkness. The Egyptian sword cut down a man who was just turning to confront his rush, and he pushed past the collapsing body and ploughed straight into a man in full armour. The man cut at him and their blades rang together as Kineas parried.
Kineas stepped back, placing the armoured man between him and a fire, so he could see. The man he’d cut down was screaming (no monster from the dark world, then), masking all other sound. The armoured man swung at him and Kineas retreated, ducking the heavy blows, but his ripostes fell on thick scale armour. He didn’t have enough light for fine work, and he felt the press of time — at any second, he could get a blade or an arrow in the back, and his naked flesh made a better target than these black-painted attackers.
He caught the next swing on his sword, pushed the other blade high, and stepped inside the man’s guard. Then he grappled the armoured man around the waist and threw him to the ground, where every scale on the man’s armour scraped against his naked chest. This was the fighting that Greeks trained for, and Kineas knew there was no Sakje who could stand against him. Down to the ground — fingers in the nose, thumb in the eye, knee in the groin — a spatter of blood, the smell of shit and his man was dead. Kineas listened while he wiped off the gore of the man’s eyes on the tunic under his armour and his gorge rose, because it was one thing to practise killing a man so close, and another to do it.
The wounded man was still screaming, and off to the left, closer to the wagon, there was fighting. He lost precious seconds finding his sword again and ran, terrified that he had taken too long and she was dead.
She was not dead. She was on the wagon, shooting down, and just below her, Philokles the Spartan stood with his heavy black spear. He had an arrow in his shoulder and another in his lower leg, and two dead men at his feet. A ring of adversaries stood beyond the reach of the black spear. There were more on the other side of the wagon, where Srayanka was shooting.
Kineas came up silently and cut, the Egyptian blade going cleanly through the man’s neck, and then he cut again, low, severing the tendons in a man’s legs. Then he bellowed ‘Athena!’ and Philokles made two rapid lunges with the spear. A man slammed into Kineas’s side and he was suddenly in a melee, blades all around him.
‘Apollo!’ from the other side of the wagon. Diodorus’s voice.
Kineas fell, both feet sliding out from under him — blood on wet grass — and a blade whistled through his
