The man looked up from the crowd he was haranguing and gave Kineas a wolfish grin.
Kineas froze, caught between the desire to defy and the desire to flee.
Diodorus didn’t hesitate. ‘It’s like finding Socrates talking in the agora,’ he called out.
Many of the older men laughed aloud. Apollion often liked to quote Socrates — but Socrates had been notoriously ugly. It was a two-edged gibe.
Grinning like the fox he was, Diodorus gave Kineas a shove to get him moving again. ‘Don’t act like a deer caught in torchlight,’ Diodorus hissed. ‘He’ll think you’re pining for him.’
Graccus, who admired Apollion, shook his head. ‘I’d have him in a moment.’ He grinned — he was given to grins. ‘I can’t imagine what he sees in you!’ He swatted Kineas on the leg.
‘He’s saving himself for Phocion,’ Diodorus said, and Kineas, stung at last, smacked him in the ear. Phocion — Athens’s greatest soldier — taught all of them in swordsmanship and in the use of the spear. It set them apart from other rich boys, many of whom disdained military service as something for those too stupid to make money.
Kineas called them idiotai, after Thucydides.
In the dream world, Kineas knew what was coming, and part of his mind flinched from it, even as he experienced it again…
They had crossed the agora and were well down the road to the gates, far from their own haunts, still listening to men gossip and discourse. They were in a bad part of Athens, where men went for cheap wine and cheap sex.
‘We should get out of here,’ Graccus said quietly.
Diodorus looked around. ‘Those are brothels!’ he said. He sounded interested. ‘Some day, I’m going to purchase a hetaira and fuck her every minute of the day.’
‘Is this before or after you’ve sailed beyond the Pillars of Herakles?’ Kineas jibed, but a commotion in the doorway of the nearest knocking shop drew their attention.
‘I’ve fucking paid for an hour, and I’ll have every fucking grain of sand in the glass,’ shouted a man. He sounded like a foreigner — a Corinthian or a Theban. He had a boy by the neck. The boy was short, tough-looking, with heavy dark circles under his eyes. He was naked and there was blood running down his legs.
He wasn’t crying. His shoulders were rigid with tension. He suddenly burst into action, breaking free of the foreigner, but the man was too fast. He tripped the boy, and then, as he went down, he kicked him savagely in the stomach, so that the boy heaved up, vomiting. The foreigner stepped back. He turned back to the brothel keeper. ‘I’ll fuck him in the street if I please,’ he said, his voice so devoid of strain or inflection that the hairs rose on Kineas’s neck.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Graccus said.
Kineas felt something inside him — some combination of his own ideas of right, of Apollion’s desire to force him to have sex, his anger at having failed to stand up to the man.
The brothel keeper shook his head. ‘Respected sir, you must not abuse him — and if he refuses you, you must go.’ The brothel keeper was not a small man and he wasn’t cowed. He wouldn’t have held his place if violence cowed him. ‘The boy is not a slave. You are a foreigner. If you make a fuss, I’ll have you taken.’
The foreigner moved suddenly, grabbing the brothel keeper’s ears and slamming his head against the doorpost of the brothel. Then he raised his knee and smashed it into the brothel keeper’s chin. ‘Anyone else want some?’ he asked the street. He reached down and picked up the boy. Closer up, Kineas could see that the boy wasn’t as young as he had thought — he was, in fact, a few years older than Kineas, just scrawny and ill-fed.
Diodorus reached out a hand, but he was too late. Kineas slipped away and stood in front of the foreigner, whose eyes glittered with something Kineas hadn’t seen before.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said.
The foreigner was a soldier — he had all the marks of wearing armour on him, and a heavy knife at his belt of the kind soldiers wore when they didn’t wear swords. ‘Or?’ the man said. He didn’t grin or frown. It was as if his face was dead. Kineas’s voice cracked in fear, but he stood his ground.
‘Put him down,’ Kineas said. ‘And don’t even think of harming me.’ Me came out as a squeak, as the man dropped the boy to fall in the garbage of the street. ‘My father is-’
‘I don’t give a fuck about your father, little arse-cunt,’ the man said. He was fast, and he swung hard, punching Kineas in the side of the head before he was ready. Pain exploded in Kineas’s head and he stumbled, hit the wall of the brothel and bounced back, almost into the foreigner’s arms.
Guided by the gods.
The man wasn’t ready for him and as Kineas jostled him, his right hand closed — of its own accord — on the man’s knife. The man shoved him, annoyed now, and Kineas stumbled back with the knife in his hand.
‘Put that down or I’ll rip the flesh off your face,’ the man said.
Graccus was no fool, he was screaming for the watch, running back to the agora because the watch didn’t come down here.
A stone hit the man in the head. It was well thrown, a jagged bit of mortar from the ill-kept tenements, and it made the sound of a dropped melon when it hit. The man’s eyes flicked to Diodorus.
‘You’re dead,’ he said, without changing facial expression. He stepped forward, intent on Kineas.
The boy — the older boy — had one of his legs. The man tripped, stumbled and Kineas blocked a piece of his blow with his left arm and thrust hard with the knife, the whole weight of his stocky body behind the blow. But he struck too high and the knife caught the man’s breastbone and skidded up, cutting sinew, slashing all the way across to the point of the shoulder.
The man shrieked and punched, left-right-left, and one of the blows caught Kineas and flung him back, his jaw broken and blood pouring from his nose. Tears burst from his eyes.
He didn’t drop the knife or lose sight of his opponent. That much of Phocion’s training stuck. He was conscious that this was a fight to the death, and that to lose control to the pain would be the end. But beyond that, his body seemed to be in the fight by itself, with his brain unable to affect the outcome.
And above it, Kineas the dreamer already knew the outcome. And the pain.
The street was filling with people and many were calling for the watch while others wagered on the outcome.
Kineas set himself in his sword stance, left leg forward, left arm out like a shield, knife close to his body. Blood and tears and mucus were running down his face and his whole head hurt.
The foreigner was also hurt. He took the respite to step on the boy lying under him, breaking his ribs with an audible popping sound. The boy screamed in rage, fear, helpless pain.
The man stepped over him and pointed at Diodorus. ‘Run,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll kill you next.’
Diodorus hit him with a paving stone. He half-missed his throw, because it was too heavy, and so instead of hitting the man’s head, it fell short on the man’s right foot.
The man screamed in pain, his right leg collapsing. But even from one knee, he managed to stumble at Diodorus, landing a heavy blow that knocked the red-haired boy unconscious.
Kineas made himself attack. He stepped forward, limbs leaden with fear, and made a half-hearted cut. The man took it on his arm and moved to punch Kineas, but he couldn’t put weight on his shattered foot and he fell.
Kineas was on him without thought of chivalry. He fell on the man’s back and plunged the dagger into the man’s kidneys — not once, but three or four times.
The man flipped him off, rolling and pinning him in one move. He reached back, his fingers searching for Kineas’s eyes, for his throat. Kineas stabbed wildly, squirmed, landed a feeble cut that nonetheless invoked the man’s flinch reflex and then he was on his feet, slick with the man’s blood.
The man was gushing blood. He half rose to his feet. ‘Ares,’ he complained, as if in a conversation. ‘Spear-wielder, I’m being kille
d by a pair of whores in an alley!’
‘I’m no whore, mercenary!’ Kineas hissed through split lips and blood and a broken jaw. He felt the balance shift. He was going to win. He stood taller.
The foreigner sat, suddenly. ‘You’ve killed me,’ he said, as if in wonder. ‘Not a whore, you say?’ He tilted his head to one side, like a dog watching a man. ‘Got the guts to put me down, boy? Or are you going to stand there and let me bleed out?’
‘I’m Kineas, Cleanus’s son, a citizen of Athens.’ Kineas held the man’s glittering eyes, stepped in close despite those arms and plunged his dagger into the man’s throat as if he were hitting the paint on the practice stake behind Phocion’s house.
And then the watch came, and Diodorus’s father, and then his own father. He was wrapped in blankets, in attention and love, even in admiration. There were too many witnesses to the man’s brutality — and the brothel keeper was dead. Only later would parents ask why three boys had been standing outside a brothel.
Kineas insisted that his father’s slave carry the broken boy — the whore — home. A doctor set his ribs and Kineas sat by him, night after night, day after day. Diodorus came and took his turn, and Graccus. The boy lay still, so still Kineas often thought he was dead, and Kineas would lean across his body to hear him breathe, but gradually the dark stains like bruises faded from under the short boy’s eyes, and one day, they opened.
Months later, Kineas asked him one day while the four of them were climbing a crag on one of Kineas’s father’s farms, looking for bird’s eggs. ‘Why were you a whore?’
‘Not much fucking choice,’ Niceas answered. He fingered an amulet at his neck. ‘Only good thing I’ve got — I’m free. Not a fucking slave.’ He rubbed his nose in thought. ‘Being a free man doesn’t feed you.’
‘Is it better — being my groom?’ Kineas asked.
Niceas shrugged. ‘Stupid fucking question,’ he said. And then he aimed a mock blow at Kineas, who ducked and… awoke.
The next day Niceas responded to Kineas with grunts. He never swore. If he didn’t want things, he simply turned his head away like a child. The night before they were due to take ship to Hyrkania, he suddenly turned to Kineas.
‘I don’t want to die like this,’ he said.
Kineas hadn’t heard so much in his voice in a week. He stopped pouring wine. ‘You aren’t dying,’ he said.
Niceas shrugged, head down, shoulders sagged. ‘I am. You can’t see it, but I am.’
Further prodding revealed nothing and promises of a physician led only to the turned head.
And then he forgot those worries as they prepared to sail on the Kaspian Sea, and a new set of worries descended on him.
12
A hard winter sun cast the last of its cold light over the icy beach as the pentekonter hove to in the appointed bay in Hyrkania, the anchor stone cast while the rowers backed water against the growing wind, and at last came to rest — a fitful rest, as Poseidon rocked them.
The Land of Wolves lay under a blanket of snow when Kineas finally waded ashore in the bleak twilight, bare-legged and cursing the cold water, wolves howling in the distance. Crax and Sitalkes clambered over the side of the pentekonter carrying Niceas in a litter while Coenus pushed the horses over the rail and into the water to swim ashore on their own. They’d lost one at sea — a slow death of terror for Coenus’s favourite mare, a painful, terrible event — and the big man was subdued, but when they were all on the beach he led them in a prayer of thanks to Poseidon and then they sang the hymn to Apollo in the last light of the sun.
The merchants’ stalls at the top of the gravel beach were either closed tight or lined in drifted snow. There was no welcoming party. So they rubbed their horses down as best they could, drying them with straw from a mouldering stack Crax found and then headed inland on the only visible track. Kineas sent Crax and Sitalkes out as scouts, made sure that all his men were armed and went back to the beach to pay the last coins of his passage to the captain, a piratical Persian called Cyrus.
‘How far to the camp?’ he asked as the Persian counted the coins and tested the silver ones with his teeth.
‘Three stades. Less.’ The man smiled, showing too many teeth. ‘Before the waters went down, the town was on the beach.’ He shrugged. ‘It must be as the gods will it, eh?’
Kineas agreed that it was so.
‘You’re going to fight Iskander, yes?’ the Persian asked. And not for the first time. He had a gold toothpick which flashed around his lips as he talked.
‘Yes.’
Cyrus extended a hand. ‘Good luck. They say he is a god.’
Kineas nodded. ‘He says he’s a god.’
‘Excellent argument,’ the pirate said. ‘They say you might throw a garrison into the fort you built at Errymi.’
‘I might,’ said Kineas, anxious to be gone but unwilling to be rude.
‘Good for business. Might get a piece of the grain trade.’ Cyrus winked. ‘Boats like mine would pay a fee to have a real harbour in the north.’
‘I’ll think on it,’ Kineas said, and they clasped arms again.
The camp was less than three stades inland, east of the beach and south of the town itself, as the scarred man had said, and as they approached, they saw a pair of towers built of wood and rubble, and closer up, earth walls and neat rows of huts. Outside the walls there was a sprawl of cruder huts and leather tents. And emerging from the gate between the two timber towers came a troop of well-mounted Greek cavalry led by Diodorus and Philokles.
The snow in the air accented the smell of burning oak from the hearth fires, and closer to the market they smelled olive oil, something none of them had seen in a month. Niceas raised his head at Kineas’s side. ‘Smells like home,’ he said.
‘I think we are home,’ Kineas answered.
It took Kineas days to stop marvelling at the quality of the camp — and his praise was appreciated at first and later resented a little because it suggested he hadn’t expected as much of them. In fact, Diodorus had plenty of experience in building fortified camps and Philokles had chosen the site well: on a clear running stream, with a broad meadow stretching away to the north for exercise. The town of Namastopolis sat well above them, three more stades to the south, surrounded by tiny subsistence farms. It wasn’t a rich place, more like a robber-baron’s holding than a town, and the citadel was an ugly fortress of crude stone atop the acropolis, although rumour had it that the inside was as opulent as the outside was prosaic.
Lower down, many of the town’s least reputable elements had picked up and moved to sit at the gate of the military camp, because the soldiers brought money, and the town had the means to take it away. The sprawl at the gate featured a market — almost an agora — where the soldiers bought food and oil for their messes. There were legitimate merchants there, with wine and olive oil, weapons and armour. There were a dozen wine shops, from a newly built tavern with solid walls, its own hearth and prostitutes hanging over the balcony of the exedra, to hide tents with a board over a pair of wooden horses and a few amphorae of wine stuck base down in the snow. Followers abounded, from prostitutes of both sexes in the market, to new wives in the snug huts that lined the streets inside the walls with military precision. Kineas’s little army numbered almost twelve hundred men and women, at least half the population of the town and citadel above them.
The town and the citadel had its own soldiers, a mix of Greek mercenaries released from Alexander’s armies, deserters and survivors of various Persian armies. They put on airs and swaggered, but the Olbians didn’t think much of them, and Lot’s Sauromatae had killed a couple in brawls — rather to make a point, Diodorus said.
Kineas heard Diodorus’s report after he had eaten, slept, steamed and run. He listened to his officers report in turn, rubbing his beard as Leon gave them a report on the army’s treasury (a report that made the strategos very thoughtful indeed) and Eumenes spoke on the state of the horses after their long march and short
sail (a report that depressed every cavalryman present).
Lycurgus gave a hard smile. ‘You’ll all be hoplites before more snow falls,’ he said.
‘We need a lot of fresh horses,’ Niceas growled, one of his rare contributions.
‘Let’s save the ones we have first,’ Kineas said. ‘Coenus, what shall we do?’
Coenus was reading from a scroll. ‘You’d think Xenophon, who fought his whole life from horseback, would have mentioned this problem.’ He shook his head. ‘Buy more grain. Feed them as if we were fattening them for sacrifice. I’ll ride out and find a good winter pasture with some rock under their feet — they’re wet to the fetlocks all the time, the poor things.’ He looked around. ‘We’ll need to buy more horses,’ he said apologetically.
‘We don’t have as much money as I would have wished,’ Kineas said. ‘Even as it is, we’ll need to send a convoy back to the Bay of Salmon and get more money. Leon and I will have to sell estates. Ares and Aphrodite, but we spend money like water!’
Philokles pretended to be looking through the cabin’s log walls at the citadel. ‘I know where there’s money,’ he said.
‘Is this another Spartan solution?’ Kineas asked.
‘She’s a harlot and a brutal ruler. The peasants hate her. She squeezes them for cash and flaunts it.’
There was a knock at the door. Darius, now a section leader in second troop, bowed from the waist. ‘There is a messenger from the palace. I held him at the gate as per Niceas’s standing orders.’
Niceas nodded. ‘Escort him to the guardhouse and get his message. He comes no farther than the guardhouse.’
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