picked men, but he was the chosen leader of the Cruel Hands and Kineas needed him there.
Bain did not take naturally to drill, but he did take to command, and Diodorus, who had worked with both adolescents and barbarians, quickly let the young knight know that his position of command rested on his ability to keep his riders interested in the Greek drills.
‘They’ll never be very pretty,’ Andronicus said. He was working into Niceas’s role as the command hyperetes. Every time Kineas heard his Gaulish Greek at his elbow, he missed Niceas, but Andronicus had the skills to do the job. ‘But they already use the wedge, and they can rally on the trumpet call, and those two skills will win battles.’
Diodorus had grander plans, as he showed Kineas the next afternoon. Two troops of the Olbians formed up with Bain’s Sakje in line behind them. At a trumpet signal, the Sakje began to fire arrows over the Olbians, who lunged forward into a charge, supported by the volleys of arrows coming over their heads.
Diodorus rode back to Kineas and pulled off his helmet. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Like the hippotoxotai in our father’s time.’
Kineas had noted that Barzes, a Hyrkanian they had picked up at Namastopolis, had lost his horse to a friendly arrow. He pointed this out. ‘If the Sakje get a surprise — if you slam into an unexpected obstacle, or your charge falls short — you get to eat a lot of your own arrows.’
‘Don’t be a stick,’ Diodorus said. ‘It’ll change cavalry warfare.’
Kineas shrugged. ‘You’re wily Odysseus,’ he said. Then he grinned. ‘Looks good to me.’
Diodorus smiled. ‘If I’m Odysseus,’ he said, ‘I suppose you’re Agamemnon.’
Kineas made a face. ‘Ouch,’ he said.
With Lot’s picked men and his own cavalry, he had almost eight hundred veterans of last year’s campaign. He drilled them, amusing the Sakje and boring the Sauromatae, teaching them a few simple trumpet commands, wedge and rhomboid, how to charge and how to rally quickly, until they were all on the verge of revolt, and then he gave them two days of feast and squandered the remaining grain on feeding the chargers.
Samahe came in with word that Lot’s western scouts had made contact with Coenus. He was far away beyond the Salt Hills, but he was across the desert and he already had an escort of Sauromatae. Word of his approach did more for the Olbians than a hundred speeches, because he brought gold for their pay and wine, as well as news of home.
Samahe was covered with dust and the smell of horse sweat preceded her into Srayanka’s wagon by several heartbeats. Kineas gave her a cup of wine, which she consumed with the satisfaction of a connoisseur.
‘Summer on the plains,’ she said. ‘Stink-fucking desert.’ She tossed off the rest of the wine. ‘Not like home, where grass stays for summer. High grass is gone.’
‘Ataelus will be back soon,’ Kineas said, and she smiled.
‘I stink like dog,’ she said. ‘Bath in roses for him!’
Her pleasure at the imminence of her mate made Kineas feel as if his heart was opening inside his chest. He smiled at her, but his mind called out Srayanka!
He worked to prepare to rescue her. But he didn’t believe in it.
Kineas sacrificed to the gods and prayed, and on the eighth day he was standing in the brutal sun, wearing a straw hat as wide as his shoulders and grooming his horse with a Sakje brush, a marvellous tool woven like rope from horse tail with bristles of a mysterious animal that apparently lived in the far north. He had groomed four horses for thousands of stades and the brush remained as stiff and fresh as the day Urvara had given it to him, in the hours before the great battle at the ford. He treasured it. Now he was thinking of her and Srayanka when he heard voices calling from the main camp. He saw a rider coming out of the sun, with pickets calling for him on either hand, and he ran up the riverbank to his camp, still holding his brush.
Nihmu rode out of the sun. She was exhausted, her eyes set deep in her head with dark smudges under them as if she’d been struck. She was as thin as a stick of tamarisk, and when she dismounted by Kineas she drank all the water he could give her. The water seemed to make her grow a little, and suddenly she grinned like the sun bursting forth from a sky of clouds. ‘Ready your horses, King! Ataelus says, and Philokles says, that they have found a way to rescue the lady.’
Kineas felt his heart begin to pound in his chest, its pressure so great that it might not have beaten for days or even weeks before that moment. ‘How?’ he asked, seizing her hands.
Nihmu flicked the hair from her eyes. Her braids had decayed in hard riding and she had a halo of bronze hair around her face. She gave a weary shake of her head. ‘Not for telling me. Gods, I sound like Ataelus.’ She smiled. ‘Haven’t thought in Greek for many days, lord. I was told that you should bring the people along as quickly as you can to the forks of the Polytimeros. That’s all I know. And I am to tell you that Iskander is in the field, that Craterus is on the Polytimeros, that Spitamenes lays siege to Marakanda.’ She repeated these last in her sing-song voice of rote memorization.
‘Go to bed, girl,’ Kineas ordered. He turned to Diodorus. ‘Send Eumenes to Lot with the news. Tell him we’ll ride in the morning.’
Diodorus nodded. ‘Where exactly are the forks of the Polytimeros?’ he asked quietly.
Kineas rubbed his chin. ‘Best get some guides from Lot, too.’
Then he lay down in his cloak, out under the stars instead of in her wagon, and he waited for the veil of sleep to come over him.
He laughed, because no spray of colour, no cacophony of unreal sounds, no bestiary of dream monsters, could move him as his dreams had once moved him. In fact, he was angry.
Kam Baqca settled on the branch opposite him, her skeletal back nestled against the bark of the tree’s main trunk. ‘You are almost there,’ she said.
Kineas sat with his legs dangling down. Above him, a pair of eagles flew in growing circles around his head and cried. Kineas shouted, ‘You — the gods — have made me into an arrow and shot me from your bow. Any day now I will strike the target and shatter, and my day is over. For you, the arrow will have done its work. For me, there is only Srayanka and life. The honeysuckle is sweet. The briar rose smells like love and the Sakje women roll in the petals and sweet grass to prepare themselves for love, and I will be dead without seeing her again.’
Kam Baqca raised her head, so that he could see that most of the skin had flaked away from her face, leaving the skull. She was hideous, yet somehow comforting. Another part of his mind wondered why Ajax looked uncorrupted by death, while Kam Baqca, who died the same day, had rotted. ‘Are you a boy, to whine to me of how unfair it all is?’ she asked with arch contempt. ‘I am already dead. No lover will take me in his arms.’ She looked at her own arms — bone and withered sinew. ‘How lovely I am! If I roll in rose petals, will it cover the stink of corruption?’
He glared at her. ‘You chose your path.’
She smiled, her jaws hideous. ‘You chose your path too, King. Archon. Hipparch. You came east. Now finish your task like a craftsman. Go and fight the monster…’
He awoke to the sound of ten thousand strong jaws cropping grass. He lay in the grass and despair rose around him like early morning mist, and settled on him until he choked and wept. But when he fell asleep again, he… passed his dead friends and jumped into the tree again and climbed without much interest. He saw the top above him and marvelled at how far he had come. He looked down and saw a plain below him, stretching away to mountains that rose like a wall and went on for ever, and he knew awe. And then he stretched forth his hand to climb…
‘If you can’t control yourself better than that,’ Phocion said, ‘I will not bother to teach you any more.’
Kineas was standing in the sand of the practice ring, his arm numb and his eyes stinging with tears. ‘It’s not fair!’ he whimpered.
Phocion’s wooden sword slapped him on the side of the head. ‘Beasts fight with rage,’ he said. ‘Greeks fight with science. Any barbarian can out-rage you, boy.’
‘I am not a boy!’ Kineas bellowed. He meant it as a bellow. It came out as more of a squeak. The other young men waiting their turns tittered and giggled, or stood in embarrassed silence.
Kineas’s crime had been to state as a matter of fact that he was the best of Phocion’s pupils. Phocion had responded by disarming him — repeatedly — and beating him with soul-destroying ease, not once but ten times running. He used the same simple move over and over again, moving with lazy elegance, and Kineas’s responses grew more and more foolish with each engagement, until Kineas burst into tears.
Phocion stepped back. ‘If you are a man, then pick up that sword and use your brain.’
