Kineas felt like a fool for missing the obvious connection that they had shared the whole campaign. ‘Of course — you were taken with the women after Issus?’
Banugul rolled over, and Kineas was conscious of her body, even across a gap of several feet. ‘I remember them cheering your name when you won the prize,’ she said. ‘We were waiting with the dowager, wondering if you barbarians would rape us.’ She managed to make the experience sound light-hearted. ‘But you were all too busy slapping each other’s backs to mind us much. It was days before Alexander looked at us.’
Kineas had been unconscious for days after Issus, but he somehow doubted that she had heard his name being cheered. He frowned at the attempts at flattery. ‘It is odd, that we were in the same camp for so long.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, conscious that she had stepped wrong, and waved for the singer to perform. ‘Not so odd,’ she said. ‘If the gods willed it so.’
Warm for the first time in days, Kineas rode down the hill to the neat Greek military camp. A pair of sentries stood huddled in every tower and there were twenty men in the guardhouse by the gate. He inspected every one, chatting with the sentries, listening to the boredom of the Sauromatae and the complaints of the Greeks, until he was satisfied that they were alert. He was cold again, cold from a wind that seemed to blow warmth out of the top of his head. He swore that he would abandon Hellenism and get a Sakje cap before he wrapped himself in furs and blankets and shivered. He lay for a while, trying to imagine Srayanka beside him. He had a hard time seeing her face, and it tended to slide into a narrower face with blonde hair that made him shiver.
‘I need to leave here,’ he said aloud.
The transition from anxious wakefulness to sleep was so sudden that he… was taken unawares by the presence of the tree and the pair of young eagles screaming above him. They called and swung out over the endless combat of the dead, pecking at dead foes. Ajax and Graccus and Nicomedes seemed more outnumbered than ever, but he was not to be deterred. He had to find Srayanka. He reached out a hand for the branch above, swung to gather momentum and reached out a leg to hook and roll. In a moment, he was surrounded by brambles and bracken, thorny stuff that tore at his skin and pricked at his hands, his forearms, his eyes…
He was climbing a thicket, or crawling through it, blind. He had to reach Srayanka, and she was somewhere on the other side of the brambles and thorns, and he threw himself at the flexible, prickly mass and made no dent on it except to tear his arms and leave ribbons of blood on the trunk of the tree.
He strove and strove, angry, frustrated…
He awoke, his cloak wrapped in a tangle around his legs, his heavy Hyrkanian blanket pulled up between his legs, the hairy wool scraping at his flesh. He was cold.
He got up, moving carefully in the darkness, and remade his bed, adding another blanket from his pack roll on the floor. Then he lay in the new warmth of his blankets and waited to fall asleep. Whatever thought he summoned, whatever plan he touched in his mind, the image before his eyes was of Banugul, turning her head to smile at him. He eventually defeated her smile with a tally of the grain wagons his army would require in the spring, and he fell back to sleep, warm and frustrated.
13
T heir sport that season was archery. Hyrkania had a crueller winter than the Euxine cities ever saw, with snow in drifts more than once and freezing rain every week, but it was still clement enough to exercise horses and shoot the Sauromatae bows.
Lot and Ataelus started it, setting up straw bundles against the earthen walls of the camp’s citadel and shooting for wagers. Kineas knew a good thing when he saw one — a sport that benefited his troops and cost very little, passed the time, maintained discipline — perfect. He offered prizes at a weekly competition, good prizes, and he competed himself.
The first weeks saw Ataelus’s prodromoi and all the Sauromatae gathered to laugh at the sight of Greeks shooting the bow. Some were either natural shots or had practised, especially the gentry from the Euxine cities — Heron was a fine shot, as were several of his riders. Eumenes shot with a sort of weary acceptance, as if his Apollo-like skills were a curse and not a gift. But others were not so fortunate. One young man from the phalanx somehow managed to snap his bow while stringing it, the resulting lash of the bowstring drawing blood. Many of the tribesmen thought this the finest jest they’d ever seen, which didn’t do much for the daimon of the whole corps and led to two nasty incidents. Other men simply missed the targets, week after week — Diodorus threatened to stop competing on the basis that his exceptional ability to shoot arrows over the top of the straw was undermining his authority.
‘Didn’t you learn to shoot as an ephebe?’ Kineas asked, wickedly. In fact, he could remember taunting Diodorus as the luckless seventeen-year-old failed to hit the target again and again.
Diodorus responded with a grunt, but when they wrestled later in the morning, Kineas noticed that he was being dropped in the icy mud with a certain annoying regularity. Diodorus was angry. Kineas kept his taunts to himself after that.
Six weeks of constant archery meant that the meanest of the hoplites could hit a bale of summer straw, and the best were becoming quite proficient. Kineas placed orders for bows and arrows with the local craftsmen. He knew his Anabasis well enough to appeciate that arming all his troops with bows, even if they were merely carried in the baggage, would make them more capable of dealing with the threats they would face in mountain passes and high valleys where the battlefield tactics of the phalanx and the cavalry rhomboid didn’t apply.
Some men preferred the sling and Diodorus convinced Kineas that slings were an acceptable distance weapon, so that some dozens of the Euxine Greeks could be seen pounding at the straw bales with long slings and heavy rocks. They lacked the range, but had enough hitting power to drop an ox — a demonstration that Diodorus performed to the applause of all the slingers on the winter feast of Apollo.
The barbarian Sauromatae were far more of a leadership challenge than the Euxine Greeks. They were a long way from home, wintering in a military camp, subject to regulations that they barely understood and seldom respected. But the military successes against the bandits and the willingness of the Greek officers to lead by example and be seen to fail at archery and other contests narrowed the gap.
The greatest difficulty concerned breaches of discipline and how they should be punished. Kineas could remember quarrelling with Srayanka about Greek notions of punishment. She had maintained that she would have to kill a tribesman to enforce Greek discipline, because anything else would lead to blood feud. Memories of Srayanka and a growing understanding of tribal custom made Kineas careful. He couldn’t be seen to favour the barbarians, but he had to make his judgments fit their own notions of fairness.
Kineas was never bored.
The army had suffered through two snowstorms and had camped in Hyrkania for eight weeks when Kineas held his second court and various units brought their offenders to him to be judged. Sometimes the local Hyrkanian authority demanded to have the man sent to the citadel — which Kineas always refused. Each refusal required a visit to the citadel.
The Sauromatae, with their arrogance and their lack of interest in the niceties of trade and purchase, were frequently hauled before the court as thieves, an accusation likely to cause even the laconic Lot to lose his temper. Sauromatae gentlemen were only thieves in their own tribes if they stole horses, a ‘crime’ only when the stolen horse came from one’s own tribe. Horse thievery was punishable by immediate exile — or death. The arrest of a Sauromatae nobleman or woman for thievery led to open-air assemblies for fair prosecution and resolution. The Euxine Greeks viewed these open-air assemblies with much the same relish as the Sauromatae viewed archery matches. The entertainment value helped them deal with the snow.
‘The merchant says that you stole the value of the girl’s bond,’ Kineas said in passable Sakje. The Sauromatae trooper — a lord among his own people, dressed in a purple tunic with gold pl
aques over fine caribou-hide breeches worked in deer hair — stood straight as an arrow. His demeanour was respectful, but proud. His name was Gwair. Kineas thought of him as Gwair Blackhorse, to separate him from the other Sauromatae Gwair, also a lord, who rode a grey horse. Even with a foundation in Sakje, the Sauromatae clan names defeated him.
‘No, lord,’ the man said, standing tall. His eyes met Kineas’s and he smiled. ‘I liked her and she liked me.’ The man shrugged. ‘We fucked. She warmed my bed.’ He smiled. ‘We please each other, so she can stay with me.’
Kineas sighed. ‘She is a slave at this man’s brothel,’ he said. He indicated the Hyrkanian merchant next to him, a big man in his own right. Beside him stood Banugul’s captain of the guard, Therapon.
Gwair grinned. ‘He wants to fight me for her?’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You know better than that, Gwair.’
Blackhorse grinned again. ‘Stupid merchant can’t keep a girl like that. Girl like that is for heroes. You know that.’
Therapon rolled his shoulders. ‘I’ll fight him,’ he said. ‘And when I kill him, the queen will be satisfied.’
‘Not so fast,’ Kineas said. The problem was that Kineas knew that among the Sauromatae, slave girls went to those who could hold them — until the women stepped in. Sauromatae women fought with the lance and bow like the men, and were not easily crossed, and the men who married them had to be heroes. Kineas turned to Lot, who was sitting next to him. ‘Would you be so kind as to send for some of your noblewomen?’ Kineas said. ‘I think we need their help.’ Kineas had to be seen to do everything he could before he ordered a Sauromatae to be punished or to fight a duel that he was unlikely to win. Therapon was a dangerous man and none of the Sauromatae would be his match.
Lot raised an eyebrow and rose to his feet. Kineas’s initial impression of a slow, cautious man had turned out to be the product of the language barrier. Lot narrowed his eyes at Kineas, glanced at Therapon as if considering the man’s potency and gave one sharp nod. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Although, as you must know, I cannot summon them. I must go and ask.’
Kineas nodded. ‘Should I go?’
‘That would be better,’ Lot said.
‘This assembly is to wait my pleasure,’ Kineas said, and rose.
‘Get on with it,’ said Therapon. ‘Punish the barbarian and move on. I’m cold.’
Kineas ignored the Thessalian and turned to Niceas, who sat on a stool bundled in sheepskins. ‘Can you deal with the Greek defaulters while I’m gone?’
Niceas gave a wolfish smile, much more like his old self, and bawled out the name of a pair of hoplites who had started a fight with the local mercenaries. Kineas pulled his cloak about him, walked along the main street of the camp, past his own log megaron and Lot’s heavy wagon, to where the Sauromatae yurts lined the streets in Greek military order that made them look out of place, like regimented kittens.
Most of the women lived with their men, but the unmarried noblewomen had a yurt to themselves. Most were between fourteen and twenty, but a handful were older — spear-maidens who chose to remain warriors. Kineas rapped his riding whip against the doorpost and one of the young maidens popped her head out and immediately blushed and bowed her head.
‘Lord Kineas!’ she said.
Kineas smiled. No Greek called him ‘Lord Kineas’, and it was ironic that the Sauromatae accounted for most of his discipline problems, because man for man and woman for woman, they worshipped him, a far cry from the views of the average Olbian trooper.
‘I would like to see the Lady Bahareh, if she will receive me,’ Kineas said.
Bahareh came to the door of the tent, took his hand and led him inside. She was an older warrior, with grey in her braids and a face that was more leather than flower petal. She was also one of the army’s finest lancers and her deep female voice carried over any amount of strife. She held no particular rank, but in battle, she rose to command.
Kineas accepted a cup of her tea. ‘I wish you to come and help me with the judgment of Gwair Blackhorse,’ he said.
She raised an imperious eyebrow. ‘He took that heathen girl from the slaver. Is this a crime?’
Kineas nodded. ‘The slave is like a horse — a thing of value to the brothel keeper.’
Bahareh frowned. ‘So he should buy her.’ The Sauromatae women smiled. ‘She is quite a piece.’
‘The brothel keeper wants her returned. He does not wish to sell the woman.’ That’s what I tried first, Kineas thought.
Bahareh snapped her fingers and a pair of teenaged girls helped her don her long, fur-lined coat. It weighed almost as much as armour. Unlike a man’s, it fitted her figure — a very elegant garment, even for a barbarian. Another girl put her hair up and she pulled on a Sakje cap, extinguishing her sex utterly. She looked like any other well-to-do Sakje. As she rose to her feet, she asked, ‘Is the girl pregnant?’
Kineas wanted to slap her on the back.
‘I hadn’t thought to ask,’ Kineas said. ‘Let us assume she is pregnant.’
They were walking down the street. Lady Bahareh had longer legs than Kineas and he had to hurry to match her stride. ‘Then when she gives birth, if she lives, she is a free woman of the clan. He gives her a few horses as a birth present, and the baby is part of his family. That is the law.’
Kineas grunted. ‘I see how to judge this. Listen, lady — I wish you to let it be known that tribesmen who visit the brothels must pay — every time — and that the next man who takes one of these girls to his yurt will suffer as if he stole her from another tribe. If you will do this for me,’ he stopped her in the middle of the street because her stride was so long that she was going to walk him back into the assembly before he was ready, ‘I will tell a lie and save Gwair Blackhorse.’
Bahareh was tall — almost eye to eye with him. She frowned. ‘It is not for you to punish a tribesman, Lord Kineas. That is for our prince to do.’
Kineas held her eye. ‘Lady, we will not make it through the winter as friends unless all obey. Surely it is the same in a winter camp of the Sauromatae?’
She toyed with her whip. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fair enough. Save Gwair — he’s a fool, but most men are — and I’ll whip the men into line.’ Her whip made a sharp whisper as it cut the air. ‘Lot is right to follow you,’ she said.
Kineas spent the better part of the next hour bargaining with the brothel keeper and the town’s self-appointed archon over the value of the woman, while Therapon, balked of his fight, stalked off. Kineas used her pregnancy to prise her loose from her owner. He made the whole clan pay her inflated value, putting Gwair neatly in the wrong with his own people. The process took roughly four times the time and money it would have taken him to punish one of his own people.
‘This is going to be a long winter,’ he said to Niceas.
‘That’s not good,’ Diodorus said, pointing to the gate.
Two horsemen came up in a shower of snow, riding hard. One of their pickets. The riders pressed right through the assembly.
‘There’s a boat down at the beach,’ Sitalkes said. His breath steamed and so did the breath of his horse, whose panting was audible. ‘From the fort we built at Errymi. Someone from Olbia.’
‘That’s not good,’ Diodorus repeated.
Kineas sent a patrol with spare horses down to the water, three stades distant, with Sitalkes in command. They came back with Nicanor, a freedman who was now the head of the household that had been Nicomedes’. Kineas had the man taken into the megaron, where he stood by the hearth, soaking up the heat. ‘I thought I’d never be warm again,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on that boat for three days, cold and wet through.’ He sighed. He was fat, over-dressed and very out of place, and the whine in his tone was not something often heard in Kineas’s camp.
‘Thank you for coming so fast. You have a message for me?’ Kineas asked gently.
The man reached inside his tunic and drew out a scroll tube. Even the bone tube hadn’t resisted all
of the wet, but the vellum inside was clear enough. Lykeles to Kineas of Athens, greetings. My friend, I received your request for funds and could not fill it. The city is near a state of war — the factions have twice attempted the murder of Petrocolus and his son. I dare not send wealth out of the city for fear that it will be stolen and used against us. I send Nicanor to you that you will see how hard-pressed I am. If you are not gone too far, please come back. And together we will crush this upstart. I know that I have failed you in this, but I cannot see another choice. I enclose a letter that arrived at the Maimakteria from Athens. Surely if our own city expects you to campaign against Amphipolis, your duty must recall you.
Kineas read the letter, and the enclosed letter from Demosthenes of Athens, or one of his faction, with growing alarm. He handed them both on to Philokles, who had been questioning Nicanor. The former slave was reduced to tears already.
‘You were very brave, crossing the Kaspian Sea at this time of year,’ Kineas said. He flicked a glance at the Spartan, as if to say ‘Look what you’ve done!’
Nicanor shook his head, eyes on the ground. ‘I had to come,’ he said. ‘Master Lykeles said — that I had to reach you — and — and I did.’
Philokles finished the letters and handed them to Diodorus.
‘They’re not up to ruling the city,’ Nicanor said. He was still looking at the ground. ‘That’s what I came to say. I served Nicomedes for ten years as his chief factor. I know how business is done. Lykeles wants to use direct action — he paid for a killing. I know — I found the money and I paid the killers.’
Kineas nodded. He had seen this coming; he suspected that he already knew. ‘Alcaeus?’ he asked.
Nicanor started, and his hands twitched. ‘You knew? Did you order it?’
Kineas shook his head.
‘He will make himself a tyrant. He cannot bargain. And Petrocolus is weak — kind, well-intentioned, but weak. He is lost without my master — that is, Nicomedes — and his friend Cleitus. He vacillates. His allies leave him.’
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