Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  ‘With the prodromoi,’ she said.

  ‘The scouts are all gone for the Kaspian,’ Kineas said. He was disconcerted again. Thunder rumbled in the distance, late-summer thunder that did not bring rain.

  She frowned and shook her head rapidly. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she said. She took his hand and pulled on it like one of his sisters wanting a honey treat in the agora. ‘Hurry!’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. Now she seemed far away.

  ‘ Because you’ll die ’ came the deeper voice. But the girl looked as startled as he was, and ran off down the hill and into the gathering dark.

  When Kineas awoke, Niceas was at his shoulder, shaking him. ‘I knew you’d slipped off to have a kip,’ he said.

  Kineas looked around and gradually realized that he was curled up against the kurgan’s stone. His body was like ice, and he was scared.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked the sky.

  Niceas’s raillery vanished and was replaced by concern. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Kineas put his head in his hands. ‘The veils between the world of dreams and the waking world are tearing,’ he said. ‘Or I am going mad.’

  The next night, Kineas dreamed of his own death, and he dreamed of the tree, and he dreamed of skeletal figures offering him the gift of sand from their mouths — one a Persian archer, another a man he’d bought a cup of wine after the sack of Tyre. Sometimes they were not even recognizable — the worst was a corpse with no head, who vomited sand from the stump of its neck. Dreams like this cost him his rest, and he began to fear to place his head on his cloak. And he could not face the tree dreams. The idea of climbing the tree was like an assault on his Hellenism, and the dreams were worse now that he had left the city behind.

  In the morning he rode among the camps. He watched the Sindi farmers and the Maeotae fishermen drying their salmon. He watched the Athenian captains purchase fish sauce by the hundred beakers in the market on the beach and load their cargoes before they weighed anchor and beat slowly out through the grey-green waves of the shallow sea towards the dykes that almost — but not quite — blocked navigation on Lake Maeotis. When their sails vanished over the horizon, the enormity of his commitment to the expedition — his own fortune and his inherited wealth were heavily engaged — began to weigh on him, and that, combined with lack of sleep, made him dangerous.

  Kineas knew that Niceas was watching him with growing alarm, perhaps even anger. Niceas did his best to keep his Kineas busy: arranging inspections, riding the beach, throwing a seaside symposium to wish the sailors of Pantecapaeum farewell. None of them served to occupy Kineas fully, and his temper grew shorter and shorter. So did Niceas’s.

  After a few days of inactivity and more nights of brutal dreams, Diodorus’s command marched, carrying most of the remaining grain from the magazine that Eumenes had arranged. The herds of cattle were already down by a third.

  ‘Why don’t we ride with Diodorus?’ Niceas asked. ‘The prince can get himself across the height of land — Ares, he could ride all the way to Marakanda without us.’

  ‘Go with Diodorus if you want,’ Kineas said.

  Niceas whirled on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Strategos,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a burr under my butt for a week and I don’t have to take it. I’m trying to help and you are shutting me out.’

  ‘I can’t go to fucking sleep,’ Kineas said.

  Niceas handed him a flagon of wine left from the symposium. ‘Philokles told me how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Start drinking. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  ‘I’m the commander of this expedition,’ Kineas said. ‘I can’t get drunk.’

  Niceas held out the flagon. ‘Greek wine for Greek dreams, Philokles says.’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I’m not as bad as that yet.’

  Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘All the gods keep me from the day you are worse.’

  Kineas managed a smile. ‘You’re right. I need to get out of this camp.’

  Niceas rubbed his nose. ‘About fucking time.’

  Kineas smiled back. ‘Let’s go hunting. We’ll catch Diodorus as we go. I’ll inform Lot.’

  10

  The pressure in Kineas’s head subsided as soon as he rode away from Lake Maeotis, so that by the time his horse had completed the first of the great curves of the Tanais, he felt nothing but an agonizing fatigue. He allowed Niceas to lead him on for a few parasangs and they camped on a bluff that hung over the great river like a fortress built by nature.

  ‘I just want to sleep,’ Kineas said.

  Niceas handed him a horn cup of watered wine. ‘Drink this first,’ he said.

  Kineas looked across the river at the farms on the north shore. ‘We’re in Asia, according to Herodotus.’

  Niceas shrugged. ‘I’ve been to Asia before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if you insist on keeping this up, we’ll have to hunt.’

  Kineas nodded. Instead of relaxation, he felt only the anxieties of a commander away from his troops. ‘I shouldn’t have left the army,’ he said, and drank the wine. Then he had another cup, and finally he fell asleep.

  The tree climbed away above him, an endless profusion of fecundity, with ripe fruit — apples, lemons and richer prizes all dangling in a riot of colour and life. Birds swooped in and out of the tree, plucking food from the tangle of branches. And around the fruit branches, up and up, to a layer of branches and clouds that hid the horizon, there were branches of hardwood and softwood, each lush and perfect, without disease, so that the tree was all trees, and it covered the world.

  His feet were mired in the mud and the blood of the dead at the base of the tree, and when he moved he could feel the bones breaking under his feet no matter how careful he was. He needed to climb — indeed, he could see a pair of young eagles cradled in one of the branches above him, and they called to him, and he had to go to them. Their needs were greater than his. But as he began to push through the ordure, a corpse rose from the muck to confront him. It rose gracefully, without the stiffness that the dead so often displayed, and the corpse’s face was fresh and clean and unmarked despite the wounds on his body.

  It was Ajax.

  Ajax smiled. It was a smile full of sadness and other things — comradeship, love, loss and longing — but it was a smile. He reached out his hand towards Kineas, and Kineas took the hand.

  Around them, other corpses appeared, familiar corpses — the men from his other dreams, a silent clamour of dead and rotting flesh. Kineas shied away from them, but they pushed at him, each with a handful of sand.

  Beyond the heartbreaking spectacle of dead companions and friends — men whose deaths in many cases sat on his shoulders, who had died under his orders or at his side — was a dreadful plain of dead, Persians and Getae and others, trailing away to the horizon.

  Ajax pulled at him and then pushed him towards the tree, interposing his body between Kineas and the other dead. Kineas seized the trunk and threw himself up to the first branch with all of his dream strength, threw a leg over the first branch and hung there, terrified and sweating, as Ajax vanished in a melee of the dead, and Kineas felt that he had abandoned the boy, left him for dead, and he wept. And the weeping was excruciating, raw pain coming from his eyes as if the eyes themselves were threatening to burst from his head, and then grains of sand poured from his eyes into his hands, sand intermixed with blood, and he screamed and screamed and…

  Niceas had his arms and was murmuring in his ear until he calmed. In his fear- and fatigue-swamped thoughts, he knew that Niceas was speaking to him as he would to a scared horse, and that comforted him, and despite his fears, he slipped back into sleep.

  It amazed him that he returned to the dream in the same place, with one leg over the rough, oak-tree bark of the tree’s lower limbs. He could not see the ground, only the sort of low mist that rolled over the sea of grass in the autumn, and the dead were gone. He was on the tree. He admitted to himself, there in the power of the dre
am, that he had resisted going to the tree since the day of the battle, and now he welcomed it.

  He climbed to the branch where he had seen the young eagles, and they were gone — higher in the tree, he could see now. They leaned out from their branch, their immature and drab brown plumage somehow comic, and watched him with curious eyes, and made raucous calls at him as he hoisted himself to another branch. Each branch at this height was as large as a noble tree in a royal forest in Persia, or in a temple grove in Arcadia, and climbing the main trunk was a matter of careful searching for hand- and footholds in the rough bark. He searched, and climbed, and his head was filled with memories from his youth — memories of sitting in the dust of the agora in Athens and listening to tutors and philosophers, some wiser than others, some brilliant rhetoricians and one unable to speak more than a few phrases without halting and staring blankly at the world around them, often to the hoots of his companions — his own hoots.

  Why? Why had he been so derisive? The man was a pupil of Plato, a brilliant mind who studied many things in the circle of the heavens, but his halting speech had earned him nothing but ridicule. And their tutors had done nothing to stop them, until the poor man had fled the agora. Even in dream, Kineas winced at remembering that he had been the first to call an insult, feeling bold, manly, adult.

  And why had their tutors not restrained them?

  Perhaps because they, mere tutors to the idle rich, enjoyed the discomfiture of one more gifted than they?

  It was a deeply painful memory, an ignoble act in which he led others to act badly. And it had been one of the moments that defined his leadership over the other youths — his daring had made him a leader.

  The consequence of an evil act had been his own success as a leader. Of course, his leadership of aristocratic youths had caused him to be sent to Alexander, and then exiled. And Moira had sent him from exile to be archon of Olbia, and then to here.

  He pondered it all, and climbed higher.

  There were other forms of horror than rotting corpses…

  He awoke in the morning, better rested than he had been in weeks, to the roar of Niceas’s snores. Below the bluff on which they had camped, the Tanais swept by majestically, still swollen by the rain that had lasted a month, as wide as a lake. The sun rose and then leaped into the pink-striped sky as Apollo’s winged chariot began its course across the heavens. Kineas listened to the sounds of the forest behind him, watched a herd of deer come to the river beneath the bluff, an easy javelin throw that he passed because he could feel the peace of Zeus on the whole of the Tanais and he had no wish to break the truce. Birds called.

  He was confused by his dreams. It was years since he had last thought about tormenting the scholar in the agora, but he now knew the dream to be a true one — indeed, he now remembered the incident, and his secret shame. He felt the shame anew. He nodded at the thought, having learned something. He was tired, but strangely full of new life.

  ‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.

  ‘ No,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.

  Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.

  Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things — his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.

  Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few dactyloi above the surface of the water.

  ‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.

  The augury was of the best, and more, the truce of the god was broken by the Lord of the Heavens himself. Grabbing a javelin, Kineas crept carefully down the bluff and then moved from tree to tree along the riverbank. In the distance he could see a series of farms at the next bend of the river, smoke coming from their hearths in the new morning.

  The lead buck raised his head and Kineas, downwind, froze. A doe’s head came up, and then another’s. It was a long throw, and the time Kineas would take to change his stance to make a cast would render it impossible. He waited.

  Another head came up — a young buck. He took a step towards Kineas, and turned his head as if trying to see something across the river.

  Kineas remained motionless.

  The doe’s head went down, back to drinking, and then the young buck moved a step and did the same. Kineas took a step, and then another, now almost flat to the ground.

  A head came up. Kineas couldn’t see as well, having sacrificed line of sight for his own cover. He stopped moving. He was in range now, but awkwardly placed behind a hillock of grass where a great tree had fallen, probably during a spring flood, and then rotted into the loam to leave a miniature ridge.

  Above him, just a plethron away on the bluff, Niceas rose to his feet and stretched. The heads came up, watching this new movement. Across the river, the eagle, freshly gorged on salmon, let out a raucous screech of contentment. As the herd’s heads turned together, Kineas rolled from behind his hillock to his feet. In their panic at his appearance, the young buck fouled one of the does and both stumbled, losing a stride, and his javelin flew, arcing into the heavens before falling to strike the young buck between the shoulder blades. He took one stride and fell, legs splayed, already dead. The doe leaped his corpse and ran.

  Kineas opened the buck, giving a prayer to Artemis he had learned as a boy, and gralloched his kill in a nearby tree. He left the buck hanging there and washed in the river before climbing the bluff with a pair of steaks wrapped in oak leaves.

  ‘Somebody’s feeling better,’ Niceas said. He was huddled in his cloak with a horn cup in his fist.

  Kineas laid the steaks on their leaves by the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. He wore a grin that split his face like an athlete’s crown of honour.

  Niceas began cutting green branches from the alder at the top of the bank. ‘If you wanted to go hunting, you could just have said,’ he joked.

  Kineas shrugged, still looking across the river. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Niceas answered. He speared the deer meat carefully, putting three of the springy sticks into each steak and then putting the sticks deep into the loam around their fire. In the fire pit, he pushed the coals from Kineas’s earlier blaze into deep piles, one each under the lattices supporting the meat. The meat began to sizzle almost immediately and Kineas’s stomach made a wet noise. They both chuckled.

  ‘It’s hot,’ Niceas said. He’d boiled water in a copper mess pot and added the herbs he’d learned from the Sakje and some honey. It was a good drink in the morning, and it saved the wine.

  Kineas took the cup from his outstretched hand and drank. He smiled. ‘We’re going to end up becoming Sakje,’ he said. ‘What’s the herb?’

  ‘Something the Sakje call “ garella ”,’ he said. ‘I found some growing here when we made camp.’

  ‘Bitter,’ Kineas said. ‘Good with honey.’

  Niceas shrugged. ‘It’s warm and wet. Srayanka — your Medea — likes the stuff. That’s how I learned about it.’

  Kineas nodded and drank more. It tasted better. Or was that his
imagination?

  ‘We could go back to Athens,’ Niceas said.

  Kineas stepped back from the fire as if he had been burned. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘We could go back to Athens. Your exile is lifted — all your estates restored. Right?’

  Kineas looked at the other man. ‘Where is this coming from?’

  Niceas shrugged, pulled the sticks from the ground and flipped one of the pieces of meat. It smelled delicious, and it had very little fat. ‘The plains aren’t good for you. All these dreams. And war. We’ve had enough war, haven’t we?’

  Kineas looked at his hyperetes as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Have you had enough war?’

  ‘The first time I saw it, that was enough,’ Niceas said. ‘But like Memnon, it’s the only life I’ve ever known. I keep waiting — waiting for you to retire, so that I can retire, too.’

  Kineas was watching his friend’s face. ‘I will not be going back to Athens, old friend.’

  Niceas shook his head. ‘Of course not. Silly of me to mention it, only — only I don’t see an end. We ride east. Then what? You find Medea and live happily ever after. What about the rest of the boys? Do we just pick a Sakje bride and settle down, or what? Do we fight Alexander? Do we just go on fighting Alexander? Maybe keep moving east? Come back here and make war on Marthax?’ Niceas was growing angrier as he spoke. ‘It won’t ever end, Kineas. You’ll become fucking Alexander, at this rate. What’s it for?’

  Kineas rubbed his beard, stung. ‘I promised Srayanka.’

  Niceas nodded. ‘You promised her. Did you promise her Eumenes? Diodorus? Antigonus? Coenus? Me?’ At each name, his voice rose. ‘We’ll leave our fucking skulls out east in some Tartarus of wilderness beyond the world, won’t we?’

  Kineas drained the garella and sat. He pulled his legs up close and put his arms around them. ‘Why didn’t you say all this back in Olbia?’