seemed to be a whole wing missing — perhaps ten men — but after two blind facings and a charge, it was like a miracle.
The other two troops were nowhere to be seen.
The Sogdians to their left front had only just seen them. They were moving — the subtle movement of men and horse like a wind through tall grass that betokens indecision and fear.
Kineas whirled, keeping his seat. ‘Straight through them!’ he yelled.
His men gave a weary shout. They gathered speed.
Out of the dust to their left, a single rider on a black horse emerged like a dark thunderbolt. Kineas knew it was Leon from the moment he saw the bull’s-hide shield on the man’s arm.
Leon shot straight at the Sogdians. Their leader, a big man with a grey beard, wheeled his horse at the last moment, as if he hadn’t expected the Numidian’s charge to go straight home — and he was too late. Leon’s thrown javelin hit him low in the gut and knocked him to the earth, and Leon’s big gelding crashed past the other horse and right into the front of the Sogdian formation.
The local men were as stunned as if a real thunderbolt had levelled their chieftain. Leon vanished into them. Their standard-bearer, another big man on a grey horse with a bronze bull’s head on a pole, shouted shrill orders and the Sogdians began to close their ranks. Arrows leaped out of their formation and fell towards Kineas.
Ten strides away, Kineas cocked his light javelin back. Five strides out, he threw, and just as his horse’s head passed over the corpse of the chieftain, he lowered the point of his heavy spear to unhorse the man with the bull’s-head standard. Thalassa knocked the man’s horse flailing into the sand and sprang over, and Kineas lost his javelin in the man’s corpse.
The fleeting moments of clear sight were gone, and again they were deep in the haze of Ares. Kineas reached for his Egyptian sword, gripped it and it wouldn’t budge from the scabbard. He raised his bridle gauntlet to block a blow and took it in the side. Pain, like rage, exploded. Thalassa whirled under him.
Another blow against the scales of his corslet and then he was free in the swirling grit. His side hurt, but the daimon of combat was on him and he pinned his scabbard between his bridle arm and his side and ripped the sword free, almost losing his seat in the desperation of his efforts.
He was alone. He turned Thalassa’s head in the direction he thought was right and urged her forward.
Carlus emerged from the dust, his heavy spear dripping gore. ‘Hah!’ he grunted in greeting.
Behind him, Hama pressed forward. ‘This way, lord,’ Hama called.
The three of them rode into the veil of swirling sand.
A man with a cloth wound around his domed helmet crashed his horse into Thalassa, and Kineas was back in the melee. He cut and parried, ever more conscious of the pain in his side and the rising tide of sound. This was a stand-up fight, not a rout. The Sogdians were no longer giving ground.
The Olbians weren’t winning. He could hear their calls and the growing shouts of the Sogdians.
He pushed Thalassa straight into his opponent’s horse and cut three times, sacrificing finesse for brute force and speed. One of his blows got through and the man reeled, his hands across his face as his horse twisted, all four legs plunging for balance. Kineas was past him.
‘Apollo!’ he shouted.
All around him in the battle haze, he heard the shout taken up, and ahead of him: ‘Apollo!’
He could see the horsehair crests on some of his men off to the right — just a glimpse as a fitful breeze whipped the flying dust. He bellowed ‘Apollo!’ again and pressed Thalassa with his knees. She responded with another surge of strength, bulling over another rider without Kineas landing a blow. Then a small man who seemed to be covered in gold landed a spear thrust straight into Kineas’s chest. The scales of his mail turned the thrust — the man had over-reached. Kineas cut at the shaft, failing to break it but swinging the head wide, so Kineas was in close. He grabbed the haft with his bridle hand and pounded the Medea head of his pommel into the man’s face and their horses engaged, so that the two men were pressed breast to breast as their mounts whirled like fighting dogs, biting and kicking. Kineas reached his bridle hand around the man’s back — he was heavily armoured. Kineas’s left hand closed on the man’s sword belt and he wrenched the blade of his own sword up from where it was pinned between their chests — up and up again with each heave of their mounts. Thalassa rose on her hindquarters, biting savagely at the other horse’s rump and striking with her front hooves, and Kineas turned his wrist so that the Egyptian blade came up under the other man’s jaw…
A spray of blood, and the gold man fell away, dead weight that almost carried him off Thalassa, and a blow against his helmet…
Carlus roaring like a mad bull at his side, propping him up. Apollo! Hama on his other side and Leon’s shield coming out of the suffocating haze. He sat up, pain ebbing, muttered unheard thanks to Carlus and Hama.
He’d lost the sword. He loved that sword — the sword Satrax had given him.
Stupid reason to die, though. Antigonus was pressing through the haze.
‘Rally! Sound “rally”!’ Kineas said. His voice sounded odd. He’d lost his helmet.
He glanced down, hoping to see the glint of Medea’s face on the golden grass at his feet. Instead he saw the blood running over his thigh from somewhere under his corslet.
The world became a tunnel. At the far end, Antigonus — or was it Niceas? — was shouting ‘ Rally! Rally! ’
Niceas turned around as if the world had slid sideways and the ground rose to meet him. Then there was a skull, speaking from a wall of sand.
‘Listen, Strategos. We will turn the monster south, away from the sea of grass. Let him play with the bones of other men! Your eagles will rule here, and the life of the people will be preserved. That is my purpose, and your purpose, too.’
Kineas shook himself. ‘I am no man’s servant.’
‘By the crooked-minded son of Cronus, boy! You could die. Pointlessly, in someone else’s fight — a street brawl, defending a tyrant who despises you. Or from a barbarian arrow in the dark. It’s not Homer, Ajax. It’s dirty, sleepless, full of scum and bugs. And on the day of battle, you are one faceless man under your helmet — no Achilles, no Hektor, just an oarsman rowing the phalanx towards the enemy.’
He heard himself — a younger and far more feckless man — speak the words.
The skull spoke with the voice of Kam Baqca, as if they sat together in the sun-dappled contentment of Calchus’s paddock. ‘That would have been your fate — face down in the slime of a street brawl, the tool of vicious men. And you are better. ’
Kineas found himself stitching away at a headstall — dear gods, he thought, I seem to have spent my entire adult life repairing horse-leathers. He was facing one of the commonest annoyances of a man sewing leather — he was just three stitches from completion and he was out of thread. Almost out of thread. He would have to stitch very carefully, taking the needle off the thread at every stitch to get it in again at the end. Even then, he wouldn’t make it — he could see that.
The handsome warrior leaned over and pulled at the dangling thread, and it lengthened — just a fraction. ‘You were a mercenary, and you chose to be something better. Go and die a king…’
It was dark. He was Kineas. The babes were crying and Srayanka’s hand was on his hand.
‘Oh, my love,’ she said in Sakje. She pressed his hand hard, so hard that the pain in his bones almost matched the pain in his left side.
‘I gather we won?’ Kineas asked.
She kissed him again. ‘I almost lost you,’ she said.
‘But we won the victory?’ he asked urgently.
‘Eumenes rallied the Olbians and came into the fight on your flank, breaking the last resistance. My Sakje harried the Macedonians for thirty stades. Some of my warriors are still riding.’
Well satisfied, Kineas slumped back into sleep — sleep free of skulls or any dreams.
And the next morning, so stiff that he could scarcely mount and needed Philokles to get on Thalassa, he rode to say goodbye to many friends as the two columns parted, and their women and children and many warriors turned east or west.
Even without his wounds, the partings would have been painful, and there were a few — Diodorus and Philokles — who tried to argue that he should go west with the column. But the wound in his side was mostly just cracked ribs — the new armour had held. He had cuts on his thigh and cuts on his arms, but so did every man who had been in the action.
