triumph.’
They turned quietly and rode back across the ridge, to camp and perhaps to grapple a few hours of sleep from the last of darkness and the pre-battle jitters.
But not for Kineas. He lay awake, his body entwined with hers. He no longer needed sleep. He no longer intended to cede a moment to sleep.
The end was as close as the point of his spear.
32
‘ I want the enemy to see nothing but Sakje,’ Kineas said. Srayanka nodded, as did Lot.
Sitting on his cloak, Kineas was fixing his blue horsehair crest to his helmet. He had an odd feeling, as if he had done all these things before so many times that he was an actor, playing the same part on many different days in the theatre.
All around him, the Olbians were polishing their gear and affixing their helmet crests, the hyperetes of each troop moving among them to inspect their work. Men used ash gathered from their last fire pits to put a fine polish on their bronze. Men skilled with stones put a fine edge on spear points and swords. A few of the Keltoi spoke loudly, but most were quiet.
Philokles sat on a rock, sober. He was combing out his hair. Behind him, the red rim of the sun rose above the distant mountains in the east.
Sitalkes, who had once been Kineas’s slave, came up holding a pair of javelins, with long, thin shafts and linen throwing cords. ‘I didn’t think you had any,’ he said, looking at the ground.
‘May Ares bless you, Sitalkes!’ The pleasure of a good weapon made Kineas beam. ‘I hadn’t even thought of it. Where did you get them?’ He hefted one. ‘They’re beautiful!’
Sitalkes glanced at Temerix, who was watching from a distance, glaring at them under heavy brows. ‘Temerix made the points. I set them.’ He grinned. ‘Good wood. Cut-down lances.’
The two heads were gemlike, gleaming blue-red in the first light, far better work than was usually expended on javelins. Kineas embraced Sitalkes and then walked over and embraced Temerix, who stared at the ground while being hugged and then laughed aloud when the strategos turned away.
Kineas thought that he’d never heard the Sindi smith laugh.
As ordered, Srayanka’s people patrolled the edge of the river, their forms visible in a flash of gold or bronze or red leather. Most of her warriors were hidden in stands of trees on the near side of the Jaxartes, and a handful, the boldest, prowled the far bank.
The enemy force announced itself just before the end of the dawn, when shadows were still long on the ground and spear points winked against the last of the darkness. Their dust cloud showed them to be moving carefully, and their outriders made contact with Ataelus’s prodromoi and drove them back easily. Kineas watched from a stand of trees on the ridge, his helmet under his arm, his reserves hidden in a fold of ground behind him.
At the water’s edge, an hour later, two squadrons of Bactrians pushed Parshtaevalt unceremoniously across the river, brushing aside his heroics and the feverish archery of his companions in one quick charge that sent the Sakje fleeing for their lives. Srayanka was forced to reveal all of her ambushers to stem the rout. Her counter- charge stopped the Bactrians on the near bank and emptied a number of saddles, but the small size of her force was revealed.
The enemy commander came up with his staff and more cavalry.
‘Eumenes,’ Kineas said with satisfaction. He knew the Cardian immediately from his heavy athletic physique. The story was that Philip, Alexander’s father, had seen the Cardian fighting in an athletic contest and drafted him on the spot. The Cardian had never disappointed the father or the son, and his physique, superb as it was, came second to his brain.
Eumenes rallied the Bactrians easily and his force began to deploy along the river, easily outflanking Srayanka’s Sakje on both flanks. The enemy commander had men on fresh horses, and quivers full of arrows, and the Sakje began to flinch, giving ground from the riverbank and then abandoning the tree line altogether.
‘Pen-pusher,’ Diodorus said with disgust, referring to the Cardian’s post as military secretary. They were lying in the gravel at the edge of the ridge. ‘Caution personified.’
Kineas nudged him and pointed carefully, drawing his friend’s attention to the bright flash of a golden helmet. ‘ He won’t be cautious,’ he said.
Upazan was waving his lance, pointing across the river.
Upstream a stade or so, Ataelus’s prodromoi burst from cover into the flank of a troop of mercenary horse, shooting at the gallop. The enemy cavalry detached some files to defeat them.
Across the river, Eumenes gave a sharp nod, as if the revealing of Ataelus’s ambush had decided him. The Bactrian cavalry put away their bows. Upazan was already in the water with thirty armoured Sauromatae.
‘Ares’ balls, Kineas!’ Diodorus rolled off the top of the ridge and got to his feet. ‘He is coming across.’ Diodorus sounded as if he’d just been invited to a particularly fine party.
Kineas shook his head. ‘He ought to give it up. No point to a flank march that meets resistance.’
Diodorus stepped into the hand-loop on his spear haft and sprang on to his charger without touching her back, a dramatic mount that brought a rustle of approval from the Olbian troopers. He bowed from the saddle. ‘To Hades with that. He’s coming.’
Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘Showy bastard,’ he said to Diodorus and leaped on to the back of his second charger without touching the gelding’s back. He grinned at Diodorus, who shook his head.
‘Who’s the showy bastard now, Strategos?’ he asked.
Kineas took his spears from Carlus. ‘Now for victory,’ he said to the assembled Olbians and Keltoi. He touched his heels to the gelding’s flanks and rode carefully to the top of the ridge, until he could once again see into the valley of the Jaxartes.
Just as on the Oxus, the Macedonians and their allies had formed on a broad front, intending to swamp Srayanka’s thin force. Six squadrons of Bactrians, Sogdians and mercenary cavalry covered almost four stades along the bank, spread out because sometimes the banks were too high or the scrub too thick for cavalry. Eumenes’ trumpeter blew a long call and then repeated it, and the whole force came across in a rush. It showed better discipline than Craterus’s force had demonstrated, and Kineas’s opinion of Eumenes the Cardian went up again.
Srayanka’s household shot one volley at close range and broke, cantering to the rear, easily gaining ground on the riders coming across the river. The river was only dactyloi deep in most places, but horses wanted the water or they feared what lay beneath and they picked their way across.
Eumenes, visible in a purple cloak and a silvered bronze Boeotian helmet with a gold wreath of bravery atop it, sat peering under his hand, watching the ridge where Kineas sat on the back of his horse. He turned, shouting something at his hyperetes. Kineas felt like hiding, an irrational desire given that it was almost certainly too late for Eumenes to save his force from Kineas’s trap.
Kineas muttered a prayer to Tyche that she not punish him for this mental hubris. Of course, it was all still in the hands of the gods.
The trumpeter raised his trumpet at virtually the same moment that Diodorus led the whole of the Olbian cavalry over the ridge at the trot and put them straight into a gallop. The ridge was nothing — a few men high at its highest point — but it was sufficient to add momentum to the Olbians.
Eumenes’ trumpet call rang out.
Kineas watched as hundreds of enemy horsemen hesitated, in the river or just reaching the top of the bank. The signal was obviously a recall.
Kineas turned to Darius at his side. ‘Tell Lot, now,’ he said.
Darius grinned and pushed his horse into a gallop.
At his side, Philokles laughed. ‘All morning,’ he said, ‘I have been dreading the fact that I would finally have to fight on horseback.’
‘You’re a fine horseman,’ Kineas said.
