‘ The time is soon. It is time to be complete.’
Kineas stiffened, and the hair on his neck rose like the hackles of a dog, and his stomach recoiled.
None of them would forget that afternoon, because it seemed to go beyond a tale of hours. The sun beat down as if the gods had a burning lens focused on their column, and the heat was reflected off the scrubby grass like light from a bronze mirror. The horses took shorter strides and the dust of their passage rose to the skies like the smoke of a funeral pyre.
At the edge of dark, Kineas called a halt. The horses protested. He pushed Thalassa — still as brave as she had been at noon — through the throng to Diodorus. ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘Then we mount and ride on. The thirst,’ he paused to rub his heavy tongue over his throat, ‘it will not get any better,’ he said.
Diodorus nodded.
Philokles waited until Kineas had dismounted and picketed his charger. Then he came up to Kineas and held out a cup. ‘Drink, brother,’ he said.
‘I will not,’ Kineas said. ‘I will not drink your water.’
‘You must command. And this is watered wine — the last from Coenus. Let us pour a libation to the gods and drink.’
Kineas took the Spartan cup and tipped a healthy portion into the dust. ‘By Zeus who shakes the heavens and Poseidon who shakes the earth, Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow, and Hera whose breasts are as white as the snow on Olympus, Athena wise in war, Ares clad in bronze, Aphrodite who riseth from the waves and Hephaestion the lame smith, Artemis the huntress, Hermes, god of travellers, who might relieve us in this waterless desert, and all the gods,’ he said. And he drank.
Even as he handed the wine to Philokles, it went to his head, so that he threw his dirty cloak on the warm ground by Srayanka and before she had fed Lita, he was…
In the mud at the base of the tree amidst the terrifying silence of the dream’s battle haze, a hundred maimed and bony hands reached for him. A knot of dead friends struggled back to back — Ajax and Nicomedes and Niceas still stood, but Graccus was gone…
He had the sword in his hand and he cut at the hands that tried to restrain him, and they flung themselves at him as he backed to the tree, and the stench rose through the dreamscape into his nostrils, so that all of the foulness of all the charnel pits in the world, all of the carnage of every battlefield, seemed to fill his nostrils, and above the sky was dark like the blackest storm at sea, and lightning forked across the dark iron of the heavens.
Something was on his back, something too horrible to contemplate, searching for his throat and his mind with its tendrils — hands — claws — and then it was gone, ripped free like the rising of a veil of mist, and he spun and fell to his knees in the muck. Immediately, he began to sink into the foul stuff.
‘Get up,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Did I die so that you could fail?’
Artemis stood over him, her slit throat the least awful of the wounds around him. New forces were in the field, and the wall of silently screaming dead foes had been pushed back several strides. She wore the armour she had worn the night before Arbela, when she had danced the Spartan dances like a man and two thousand soldiers had called her name.
He rose to his feet. She turned her back to him, but she looked back as he set his foot on the trunk. ‘I had a lot of friends,’ she said with a smile.
And then he was climbing, flying, riding a nightmare beast that climbed for him, swarming up the trunk like a lizard or a misshapen squirrel, right into the top and up to the barrier of thorns and branches interwoven like a farmer’s wall, and then he was mortal, no longer flying, bereft of his mount. He pushed his head into the branches and they fought him, but he gave a great heave, as Philokles might have done against a shield wall…
The arrow fell from the sky, burning like a meteor in the last of the sun and he fell…
Sitting on the ground as the alien spearmen pushed the javelin home in his guts…
Alone in the courtyard, cut off from his friends and so tired, as blow after blow fell on his head and arms, and then…
Standing over Nicomedes’ corpse, each blow sending another foe into the dust with a clash of bronze, and the cry of the army, ‘Apollo!’, and he knew that victory…
An arm around her throat, she lashed out with feet, hands, everything, panic not quite winning over cunning, but the other hand held iron and it burned across her throat and warm wetness fell on her breasts and she screamed but no voice came and she fell into the dark
…
Alone under the standard, and all around kin fell, protecting, covering, armour a blaze of gold…
The shock of the cold iron in his guts — killed in a winning fight — he might have laughed but there was nothing…
A child’s cry…
Screaming, red everywhere and pain like lightning in her flesh, waves that came so close that there was no rest and nothing but the lightning and the waves, moist waves of pain that carried her closer to the tunnel — an answering scream from beneath her feet, and the pressure lifted, but not the pain, and all her life pouring away between her legs…
A child’s cry — familiar — and death all around him, the iron tunnel gripping him with a rider’s legs on the whole of his body, arms trapped. A child’s cry…
Standing frozen with fear as the man in the red-crested helm beats the file-leader to the ground — the sick noise as the man’s spear crushes his breastbone and he rips it free, gore spraying — shield too heavy to lift to parry — frozen — the sudden…
A child’s cry…
Light.
Three old crones and the end of a thread and the straight-limbed goddess with an owl fluttering by her shoulder, and she smiled…
Light…
He awoke to darkness and children crying.
By his side, Nihmu squatted, the thin hide of her leggings, worked with a thousand animals whirling in a geometric tangle of hooves and antlers and gold cones, tinkled at her shins and ankles. ‘We must ride, lord,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Kineas said. He felt that he was speaking down a tunnel, an endless tunnel lined with sound and light and motion and life — too much life.
He turned to Srayanka, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘I have done it,’ he said. There was awe in his voice, and for the first time in his life, Kineas felt no fear.
Srayanka rolled to her knees from her cloak. She reached out and touched his face. ‘Ahh!’ she said. ‘How the people will worship you.’
Kineas held her in his arms. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Let’s get these people to water.’ His mouth was dry, but he could speak, and he could still taste the wine, and he gave the goddess a silent prayer and a smile in the dark.
They stumbled twenty stades in two hours, the worst time they had ever made, and then they rode another ten stades in a matter of minutes, because the horses could smell the water. This time, there was no holding them, no discipline, no attempt to stop the beasts or the people. Kineas gave Thalassa her head and she lengthened her stride, galloping the last stades in a few heartbeats. Even Kineas could smell the water. It gleamed like liquid pitch in the light of the new moon, a broad pond dug by the prodromoi, and they stood well clear as the horses rushed upon it and drank, more and more of them pouring in behind so that the first comers were pushed right out of the water and the weaker horses were knocked down. A mare screamed and her desperation drove other horses back, and her rider tried to get her to her feet, but the horses were mad with thirst.
‘Here! Here! For more water!’ Ataelus was shouting, over and over, because there was a second hole just a hundred strides away in the dark. Kineas had to drag Thalassa, usually the most obedient of horses, by her halter. He put both hands on the bit and pulled, abraiding her mouth until he got her head up and away from the water and moving, and then she finally got the message that there was a second source of water and she let out a shrill cry and ran, leaving Kineas with his hands skinned raw, lying in the sand. Another mare following her lead stepped very close to him and a third kicked him where his ribs were hurt and he screamed, and then Ataelus and Leon were dragging him clear of the horses as many of the lead stallions and mares dashed for the second waterhole.
