A man rode up the gentle slope from the ford towards the Olbian ambush. He was humming to himself and looking at the ground with professional curiosity. Another flanker joined him. Behind the two scouts, the rest of the advance guard passed, riding quickly, and turned due north to cross the ford, heading for Marakanda. Men fought to keep their horses from drinking and suddenly the advance guard was thrown into confusion. Orders were shouted and any man who stopped lost control of his horse as it started to drink.
‘More fucking Dahae?’ asked the first scout. He was pointing at something in the dust.
‘Somebody butchered a horse in the stream bed,’ said the other scout. ‘I don’t like it. If they passed that close to us, we should see their dust.’ He looked up, his eyes searching the very ground where Kineas and Diodorus lay. ‘Fu-uck,’ he said, his thick Macedonian accent and his Illyrian hill drawl exaggerated by fear. ‘Unless they’re right here!’
The first man struck him lightly. ‘Get a grip,’ he said.
The second man shook his head. ‘Fuck yourself, whoreson puppy. Look at those prints — erased. No dust cloud. Dead horse.’
Behind them, the last of the advance guard turned and headed across the ford, the horses complaining. The last of their horses splashed into the shallow brown water and the smell of mud carried back to the two men lying in the briars.
‘Pharnuches is a useless fucking cunt,’ the first scout said. His voice had a hard edge of fear now, too. ‘Even if you’re right-’
The second rider turned and dashed for the trade road. Behind him, a full squadron of mercenary cavalry rode down the defile, two by two, moving fast. The men had their helmets on and their armour and they were looking to the left and to the right. Their horses were just as eager for water as the last unit’s.
‘Cavalry is in front,’ Diodorus whispered.
Kineas grunted in reply, his voice now covered by the trotting cavalry. That meant that the infantry would be in the second division — almost immune to Temerix’s arrows, if they had their armour on.
Nothing he could do about it now.
A large group of riders halted in a tangle at the edge of the ford with the two scouts shouting at them.
‘Hetairoi,’ Kineas said. He began pushing himself backwards as fast as he could.
Five Royal Companions in dun-coloured cloaks and white tunics with heavy armour, a richly dressed man in a purple and yellow cloak and a breastplate, and another in a red cloak. Three women in Sakje dress on good horses, one bent over her saddle, face grey with effort — Srayanka — and another, clearly Urvara, flirting with the Royal Companions. Diodorus crawled backwards.
‘Doesn’t matter!’ Kineas said. He was, in his nerves, answering his own question, unvoiced. It no longer mattered if the ambush was discovered.
As if on cue, he heard the shrieking cry of Bain’s elite Sakje, and the ground shook with their hooves. Kineas threw himself up on to his tall charger. He glanced back. They were all there.
‘Walk!’ he ordered, and they started forward without Andronicus’s trumpet. They were in a tight column of fours — that’s what they had cut a path to fit, the path that the scouts had no doubt noticed. He had traded rapid deployment for perfect concealment. As soon as his horse emerged from the gap into the clear ground just south of the ford, he called, ‘Form front!’ and the column began to knit itself into a rhomboid behind him as the head continued to ride forward at a walk.
He turned his head in time to see Bain’s Sakje loose a flight of arrows into the mercenary cavalry. They were caught facing the wrong way, with many of their horses head-down in the water, drinking deeply, and their horses suffered terribly in the first volley, their unarmoured rumps feathered like hedgehogs. Two dozen horses went down and the Mercenary cavalry behind dissolved into chaos as the Sakje galloped past along the river bed. Now every warrior shot for himself and some rode ridiculously close. Bain himself, wearing the transverse plume of a long-dead Macedonian officer, leaned so close to an armoured officer waving a sickle-bladed kopis that it seemed that his arrowhead brushed the man’s cloak before he loosed with a whoop that sounded across two stades and hundreds of men.
Kineas took in Bain’s attack in a glance. He pulled his helmet’s cheek plates down on his head and fastened the chinstrap. The enemy’s command group was now cut off from their cavalry. The thing could be done.
The command group and the Hetairoi had not failed to note that hundreds of well-trained cavalry were emerging from their flank. Their commander in the purple cloak gesticulated, turned and yelled.
Kineas’s men were less than a stade away. Srayanka appeared injured — he could see something terribly wrong in her body language. He raised his right fist holding a javelin. ‘Trot!’ he shouted.
Urvara ripped a Macedonian kopis from the scabbard of one of the Royal Companions. She removed one of his hands on the back cut and reared her horse. Behind her, a second Hetairoi trooper drew his sword and moved to execute Srayanka. Hirene, Srayanka’s trumpeter, her grey braids flying, tackled the Macedonian, wrapping her arms around him to pin them. They fell to the ground together and vanished in the rising dust.
Srayanka, free, cut at a third Royal Companion with her riding whip, whirled her horse and rode for the willow trees on the island. The command group was in turmoil — Urvara cut at a second man, her blow sheering through the layers of leather on his corslet and drawing blood.
Macedonian contempt for women was costing them heavily.
‘Charge!’ Kineas roared. His horse flew like Pegasus over the gravel and sand.
The general’s bodyguards were both brave and skilled. They formed well, even as Urvara’s brilliant riding and frenzied sword cuts were bringing chaos to their rear ranks, and they launched themselves — all fifty of them — in a counter-charge. But the front rank had only ten strides to gain momentum and Kineas’s Olbians had the whole gentle slope behind them and half a stade at the gallop, and they threw the bodyguard flat at the impact, their horses smashing chest to chest with the Macedonian chargers like warships using their rams, bearing them over. Kineas didn’t throw his javelin — he used it to parry the xyston of a Companion and got himself a painful thrust at his badly protected left shoulder from a lance as he closed, but Thalassa did the work and his first two opponents didn’t stay upright to face him. Only when the mare’s momentum was spent climbing the shale on to the willow island did he have to fight hand to hand. A Royal Companion, his helmet gone, stood his ground on a heavy gelding and struck out hard with his long xyston, rising and thrusting two-handed. Kineas parried and got his helmet under the point and let his charger carry him in. Close up, belly to belly, the two horses reared, their hooves milling. Kineas caught his own spear up in two hands, left hand near the head and right hand on the butt, and thrust, his point ripping at the man’s arms, cutting his reins, punching in over the top of his bronze breastplate and into his throat.
And then another man, with a red cloak. Kineas tried to sweep him out of the saddle with the haft of his spear and the man cut the shaft in two with a powerful sword cut. Kineas leaned out to avoid the man’s back swing and Thalassa backed away. Kineas got his Egyptian machaira clear of the scabbard in the pause and then the two men closed, their horses whirling around each other like fighting dogs. Red Cloak was no master swordsman, but he was strong as an ox, heavy, tough, well armoured, and even when Kineas landed a heavy blow on the point of his shoulder, the man only grunted. He had a short dagger in his off hand now, and he leaned in close and punched the dagger at Kineas’s midriff, but Kineas’s bronze corslet turned the stroke. Kineas cut again, a high feint that he turned into an attack, using the man’s strong parry against him and reversing his cut so that the Egyptian sword went in under the man’s sword arm, but Red Cloak’s corslet held. Thalassa was backing away, Kineas’s eyes were full of sweat and he ducked his head and launched a flurry of blows. Red Cloak took a cut high on his arm and then cut back hard, and Kineas’s parry wasn’t strong enough to stop the blow from shearing his plume and ripping the helmet free against the chinstrap, snapping Kineas’s head back. He saw white, and again Thalassa saved his life. He felt his mount rise up and thrust with her legs. As the horse fell forward on to its front feet, Kineas’s vision cleared and he parried high, and the two blades locked, the hard edge of the Egyptian sword biting into the soft iron of the Macedonian kopis’s forte, and the two riders came together. The bigger man tried to grapple with his dagger coming in at Kineas’s thighs, and Kineas ripped his whip from his sash and slashed the man’s reaching arm left- handed and was rewarded with a grunt of pain, and then both horses tumbled together and righted themselves with scrambles and kicks that pushed them apart. Kineas was past Red Cloak, free of the melee. He looked back and Diodorus was thrusting at the big man repeatedly with a javelin, keeping him at arm’s length. Red Cloak was yelling in Macedonian Greek for some help.
Kineas turned Thalassa with just his knees, intending to finish Red Cloak. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his unarmoured arm, feeling the pain in his left shoulder for the first time, and came face to face with Purple
