thought they were going to live — he could feel the loosening in his bowels and the daimon of combat winging away, leaving only bone-ache and heart-ache. But he’d seen the Medes flee — they weren’t interested in taking casualties to beat up his rearguard.
‘I will command the Sakje,’ Srayanka said, her chin high. ‘Eumenes and Urvara may assist me.’
Kineas saluted her with a bloody javelin. ‘Welcome back, Lady of the Cruel Hands,’ he said in Sakje. They were cheering her, Olbian and Sakje together, a roar that must have sounded like a taunt to the Medes across the river. Srayanka raised her knife and the shouts came again.
Kineas felt the wind in his hair as he looked around for Ataelus. The man was stripping Bain’s corpse, taking his arrows. Everywhere, Sakje and Sauromatae were stripping the corpses of the fallen.
‘Ataelus! Light the fires!’ Kineas called.
Ataelus nodded and one of his scouts galloped off into the dust.
Samahe came up from the stream bed, her gorytos empty. She reined in next to Thalassa and handed Kineas his helmet, the blue plume of horsehair severed and the plume-box that held it smashed flat.
‘Thanks!’ he said, slapping her back. She grinned wordlessly and turned away. Kineas wrestled with his helmet, which was deformed and wouldn’t go over his head. He tried to bend it between his hands while he watched the Persians, but the bronze was too tough and he couldn’t get it back into shape. He tied the chinstrap and slipped it over his sword hilt.
‘They’re getting ready to have a go at us,’ Darius said at his side. The Persian had a cut on his face that had bled over his whole front and the linen burnoose he wore over his helmet was cut and flapped like a pair of wings.
But the Medes showed no further interest in them. While the first flames flickered in the grass and the Olbians re-formed a column of fours and retired, Spitamenes and his Bactrians and Medes began to press the Greek mercenaries to the east.
‘Poor bastards,’ Eumenes said.
Lot grimaced. ‘We did all the work,’ he said in his own tongue.
Behind them, the slaughter of the mercenaries began.
Srayanka’s spasms came closer and closer.
Ten stades north and west of the battlefield, the column halted where they had left their remounts. Every man changed horses and drank water. Behind them, they could still hear the fighting, and see the dust.
Urvara wept with no explanation. Eumenes held her shoulders. And Srayanka, between contractions that were sharper and closer now, asked for Hirene. Kineas was bent over her, holding her bloody sword hand.
‘I saw her fall,’ he said.
Srayanka cried out. When she was done, she said, ‘She was my spear-maiden, my mentor.’ The Greek word made her lips curl.
‘I will see that we recover her corpse,’ Kineas said. He cursed his inability to soften his words, but he was still on the battlefield in his mind, and Srayanka was grey and plastered in sweat, her beautiful hair lank and glued to her face. She was dying.
She lay on a horse blanket, her only privacy the backs of Kineas’s friends — Philokles and Eumenes and Andronicus, Ataelus and Samahe and Lot and Antigonus clutching at a wounded arm and murmuring charms, and the young Nihmu as the midwife. Srayanka groaned patiently and then screamed, drank water, and the men’s faces reflected a kind of fear and exhaustion that the battlefield hadn’t wrought. Nihmu laughed at them.
‘Come, my queen!’ she said. ‘Push! The eagles are pecking at their shells!’
Srayanka screamed one more time, as Kineas chewed his lip and watched his rearguard pickets and hated his life and every decision he had made as his love lay dying in the sand soaked with her own blood. She writhed and sweated and he knew she was going.
Nihmu’s eyes, calm and clear, met his. ‘Trust me,’ she said.
He prayed.
‘Sing!’ screamed Srayanka.
‘Sing!’ shouted Nihmu.
Kineas’s eyes met Diodorus’s, and together they began the paean of Athena. Voices took it up, the circle of his friends and then beyond, and to its martial cry his daughter was born.
And a minute later, he had a son.
He took them in his arms while Nihmu did what had to be done and the women washed Srayanka. The boy howled and the girl looked at him with enormous blue eyes full of questions, unmoved even when her cord was cut and tied off, unmoved when she was washed. Then she reached a hand and grabbed for his beard and burbled, apparently pleased with the world she saw. In his right hand, his son screamed and screamed when his cord was cut and then settled against his father’s armour, waving his arms, blinking at the light.
They were so small. He had never held anything so small in all his life. And when Nihmu reached out to take them, he hesitated. But the moment the two of them lay on their mother’s breast their faces changed, and the girl’s calm became the boy’s, and they settled.
Men pounded his back and women kissed his cheek. He had two children, and a wife, and he was alive.
And an hour later they were riding across the sand, free. Behind him, Samahe carried their daughter, and Nihmu carried their son, and Kineas offered a prayer to Nike.
21
‘ That went as well as could be expected,’ Diodorus said that night, when they were gathered around a fire of tamarisk. They were passing a Spartan cup of water, because that was all they had.
Kineas was busy sewing at the straps on his breastplate, punching holes with Niceas’s awl and thinking of the man, while Srayanka slept with her head on his lap. Their children slept in a hastily woven basket that was near enough the fire to keep them warm. ‘Which part of my plan did you like best?’ Kineas asked.
Philokles was lying on his cloak. He intercepted the cup. ‘I liked how few of us died,’ he said.
Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the loss of Bain and half a dozen Sakje when they pressed too close to the unbeaten Macedonians, the action might have cost them nothing. Even with the attack of the Persians and Bain’s error, the ambush had emptied very few saddles.
‘Someday I intend to plan a battle and have it work,’ Kineas said.
Philokles nodded. ‘That’s when you’ll realize you are in the Elysian Fields,’ he answered. ‘Pah, there’s nothing in this cup but water!’
Eumenes took the cup, sipped the water and raised an eyebrow. ‘Polytimeros?’ he said, rolling the water gently in the cup. ‘Day before yesterday? Nice silt, muddy aftertaste-’
He had to duck as Leon swung his water skin. The two young men smiled at each other.
As Philokles vanished into the dark, Urvara came up beside Eumenes, took the cup, finished the contents and raised two heavy eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you Greeks tired enough? By all the gods! Go to sleep!’
Kineas could have sworn she was addressing Eumenes.
‘After a battle, Greek men like to gather and tell each other that they’re alive,’ Diodorus said. He turned to Ataelus, who sat back to back with his wife. Both of them were sewing, he making a repair to a bridle while his wife repaired her moccasins. Diodorus asked, ‘What do the Sakje do after battle?’
Ataelus narrowed his eyes so that they sparkled with reflected firelight. ‘For lying about how many enemies killed,’ he said.
Urvara sat on the ground as if her knees had betrayed her. ‘How is Srayanka?’
Kineas grinned. He couldn’t help it — the grins seemed to roll out of him despite the fatigue. He never wanted to go to sleep — he wanted to stay like this for ever, triumphant, exhausted, drunk on joy, with her head across his lap. ‘She’s asleep. Tough as a ten-year-old sandal.’
Urvara looked at the children. ‘I thought we would die,’ she said. ‘Hah! I’m alive!’
Eumenes, usually so silent, gave her an approving grin. ‘I think you’ve got it exactly,’ he said.
She crossed her legs and put her hand on her chin. ‘Not the battle, fool of a Greek. Any idiot can survive a battle. You did.’
