Storm of arrows t-2

by Christian Cameron

  Kineas nodded at Antigonus as troopers fell in behind. ‘Stay together!’ he ordered. ‘Let’s go!’

  The trumpet sounded again. Somewhere in the dust, Ataelus would hear it and so would Lot and Srayanka.

  Kineas headed into the cloud, following the fleeing enemy.

  The grey-brown cloud was suddenly full of horsemen. Kineas was shocked to see how many. Bactrians, he thought, from the heads of the horses and the colourful saddle cloths. And then he was on them.

  They didn’t stand, seemed confused, unaware until the last seconds that they were in danger. Kineas didn’t trouble to throw his javelin, but simply unhorsed men to the left and the right with the haft. Behind him, the broadening point of the rhomboid blew through their line and it unravelled like a moth-eaten garment. Men and horses boiled away from Kineas and his escort to vanish underfoot or away into the dust.

  ‘Rally! Rally!’ Kineas called, and again the trumpet call rang out.

  ‘Change face — left!’ Kineas called to Antigonus. The Gaul raised the trumpet and the call rang out. Kineas couldn’t see past the next two files, because now the sand and dust moved like a heavy fog full of spirits, but he pivoted his own horse and went from being the point of the formation to being its rightmost flank.

  Trust your men. If the manoeuvre had been carried out, his rhomboid now faced directly along the Macedonian flank. In the dust, he couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Charge!’ Kineas called.

  Antigonus sounded the trumpet. The formation moved, gathering speed, and Kineas began to encounter opponents — confused men whirling their horses in the battle haze. The path of the charge and the enemy formation — or lack thereof — left Kineas and his flank without opposition. They rode slowly, maintaining contact with the centre of the formation, which was doing all the fighting.

  Samahe knew exactly where to find him, reading his mind as neatly as a shaman, probably riding to the trumpet sound. ‘Heh! Kineas!’ she called as she came out of the dust.

  Kineas called out. ‘Samahe! On me!’

  ‘For fucking like gods!’ Ataelus’ grin was so wide that it split his round face in two as he cantered out of the dust behind his wife. ‘Hah! I own them all!’ He waved his uninjured arm. ‘I ride all the way around their flank. Craterus is for retreat. Yes?’

  Kineas had to grin at that. ‘I’m going to the north,’ he shouted.

  Ataelus shouted ‘Yes!’ and rode back into the dust.

  ‘Halt!’ Kineas called to Antigonus, and waited while the trumpet sang. ‘Face to the right!’ Kineas said, and again the trumpet’s brazen voice carried above the dust. He couldn’t hear very well and he couldn’t see ten horse-lengths. He had only his last glance at the battlefield and his guess to go by.

  He was again the point of the rhomboid — if there was a formation at all. ‘Trot!’ he called, putting his knees to Thalassa. She was calm as ever and she carried him easily. He put a knee in the middle of her back and sat up for a moment but could see nothing and almost lost his seat as she flowed over an obstruction.

  When he felt that enough time had passed, he began to angle towards the west, leading the formation — if he had any formation — into a gradual wheel along the river, but a stade north, sweeping for the Macedonian cavalry.

  The dust began to clear. In as many strides of his horse, he could see his hands on the reins, see a clump of grass in his path, and then he was clear and could see the dust cloud and the squadron of Sogdian horse waiting with obvious indecision just clear of the rising column of dust. The dust of the battle haze was so thick that it rose into the air as if the grass itself were afire.

  Kineas unwrapped the sweat scarf from his throat where he wore it to keep his cuirass from chaffing against his neck, and wrapped it again, sweat stinging his face, around his mouth.

  He kept angling west. He looked back.

  The rhomboid was still there. Carlus and Antigonus and Diodorus emerged from the wall of sand behind him, and then Hama, Dercorix and Tasda, and behind them four more. The spacings were far from perfect and there seemed to be a whole wing missing — perhaps ten men — but after two blind facings and a charge, it was like a miracle.

  The other two troops were nowhere to be seen.

  The Sogdians to their left front had only just seen them. They were moving — the subtle movement of men and horse like a wind through tall grass that betokens indecision and fear.

  Kineas whirled, keeping his seat. ‘Straight through them!’ he yelled.

  His men gave a weary shout. They gathered speed.

  Out of the dust to their left, a single rider on a black horse emerged like a dark thunderbolt. Kineas knew it was Leon from the moment he saw the bull’s-hide shield on the man’s arm.

  Leon shot straight at the Sogdians. Their leader, a big man with a grey beard, wheeled his horse at the last moment, as if he hadn’t expected the Numidian’s charge to go straight home — and he was too late. Leon’s thrown javelin hit him low in the gut and knocked him to the earth, and Leon’s big gelding crashed past the other horse and right into the front of the Sogdian formation.

  The local men were as stunned as if a real thunderbolt had levelled their chieftain. Leon vanished into them. Their standard-bearer, another big man on a grey horse with a bronze bull’s head on a pole, shouted shrill orders and the Sogdians began to close their ranks. Arrows leaped out of their formation and fell towards Kineas.

  Ten strides away, Kineas cocked his light javelin back. Five strides out, he threw, and just as his horse’s head passed over the corpse of the chieftain, he lowered the point of his heavy spear to unhorse the man with the bull’s-head standard. Thalassa knocked the man’s horse flailing into the sand and sprang over, and Kineas lost his javelin in the man’s corpse.

  The fleeting moments of clear sight were gone, and again they were deep in the haze of Ares. Kineas reached for his Egyptian sword, gripped it and it wouldn’t budge from the scabbard. He raised his bridle gauntlet to block a blow and took it in the side. Pain, like rage, exploded. Thalassa whirled under him.

  Another blow against the scales of his corslet and then he was free in the swirling grit. His side hurt, but the daimon of combat was on him and he pinned his scabbard between his bridle arm and his side and ripped the sword free, almost losing his seat in the desperation of his efforts.

  He was alone. He turned Thalassa’s head in the direction he thought was right and urged her forward.

  Carlus emerged from the dust, his heavy spear dripping gore. ‘Hah!’ he grunted in greeting.

  Behind him, Hama pressed forward. ‘This way, lord,’ Hama called.

  The three of them rode into the veil of swirling sand.

  A man with a cloth wound around his domed helmet crashed his horse into Thalassa, and Kineas was back in the melee. He cut and parried, ever more conscious of the pain in his side and the rising tide of sound. This was a stand-up fight, not a rout. The Sogdians were no longer giving ground.

  The Olbians weren’t winning. He could hear their calls and the growing shouts of the Sogdians.

  He pushed Thalassa straight into his opponent’s horse and cut three times, sacrificing finesse for brute force and speed. One of his blows got through and the man reeled, his hands across his face as his horse twisted, all four legs plunging for balance. Kineas was past him.

  ‘Apollo!’ he shouted.

  All around him in the battle haze, he heard the shout taken up, and ahead of him: ‘Apollo!’

  He could see the horsehair crests on some of his men off to the right — just a glimpse as a fitful breeze whipped the flying dust. He bellowed ‘Apollo!’ again and pressed Thalassa with his knees. She responded with another surge of strength, bulling over another rider without Kineas landing a blow. Then a small man who seemed to be covered in gold landed a spear thrust straight into Kineas’s chest. The scales of his mail turned the thrust — the man had over-reached. Kineas cut at the shaft, failing to break it but swinging the head wide,
so Kineas was in close. He grabbed the haft with his bridle hand and pounded the Medea head of his pommel into the man’s face and their horses engaged, so that the two men were pressed breast to breast as their mounts whirled like fighting dogs, biting and kicking. Kineas reached his bridle hand around the man’s back — he was heavily armoured. Kineas’s left hand closed on the man’s sword belt and he wrenched the blade of his own sword up from where it was pinned between their chests — up and up again with each heave of their mounts. Thalassa rose on her hindquarters, biting savagely at the other horse’s rump and striking with her front hooves, and Kineas turned his wrist so that the Egyptian blade came up under the other man’s jaw…

  A spray of blood, and the gold man fell away, dead weight that almost carried him off Thalassa, and a blow against his helmet…

  Carlus roaring like a mad bull at his side, propping him up. Apollo! Hama on his other side and Leon’s shield coming out of the suffocating haze. He sat up, pain ebbing, muttered unheard thanks to Carlus and Hama.

  He’d lost the sword. He loved that sword — the sword Satrax had given him.

  Stupid reason to die, though. Antigonus was pressing through the haze.

  ‘Rally! Sound “rally”!’ Kineas said. His voice sounded odd. He’d lost his helmet.

  He glanced down, hoping to see the glint of Medea’s face on the golden grass at his feet. Instead he saw the blood running over his thigh from somewhere under his corslet.

  The world became a tunnel. At the far end, Antigonus — or was it Niceas? — was shouting ‘ Rally! Rally! ’

  Niceas turned around as if the world had slid sideways and the ground rose to meet him. Then there was a skull, speaking from a wall of sand.

  ‘Listen, Strategos. We will turn the monster south, away from the sea of grass. Let him play with the bones of other men! Your eagles will rule here, and the life of the people will be preserved. That is my purpose, and your purpose, too.’

  Kineas shook himself. ‘I am no man’s servant.’

  ‘By the crooked-minded son of Cronus, boy! You could die. Pointlessly, in someone else’s fight — a street brawl, defending a tyrant who despises you. Or from a barbarian arrow in the dark. It’s not Homer, Ajax. It’s dirty, sleepless, full of scum and bugs. And on the day of battle, you are one faceless man under your helmet — no Achilles, no Hektor, just an oarsman rowing the phalanx towards the enemy.’

  He heard himself — a younger and far more feckless man — speak the words.

  The skull spoke with the voice of Kam Baqca, as if they sat together in the sun-dappled contentment of Calchus’s paddock. ‘That would have been your fate — face down in the slime of a street brawl, the tool of vicious men. And you are better. ’

  Kineas found himself stitching away at a headstall — dear gods, he thought, I seem to have spent my entire adult life repairing horse-leathers. He was facing one of the commonest annoyances of a man sewing leather — he was just three stitches from completion and he was out of thread. Almost out of thread. He would have to stitch very carefully, taking the needle off the thread at every stitch to get it in again at the end. Even then, he wouldn’t make it — he could see that.

  The handsome warrior leaned over and pulled at the dangling thread, and it lengthened — just a fraction. ‘You were a mercenary, and you chose to be something better. Go and die a king…’

  It was dark. He was Kineas. The babes were crying and Srayanka’s hand was on his hand.

  ‘Oh, my love,’ she said in Sakje. She pressed his hand hard, so hard that the pain in his bones almost matched the pain in his left side.

  ‘I gather we won?’ Kineas asked.

  She kissed him again. ‘I almost lost you,’ she said.

  ‘But we won the victory?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘Eumenes rallied the Olbians and came into the fight on your flank, breaking the last resistance. My Sakje harried the Macedonians for thirty stades. Some of my warriors are still riding.’

  Well satisfied, Kineas slumped back into sleep — sleep free of skulls or any dreams.

  And the next morning, so stiff that he could scarcely mount and needed Philokles to get on Thalassa, he rode to say goodbye to many friends as the two columns parted, and their women and children and many warriors turned east or west.

  Even without his wounds, the partings would have been painful, and there were a few — Diodorus and Philokles — who tried to argue that he should go west with the column. But the wound in his side was mostly just cracked ribs — the new armour had held. He had cuts on his thigh and cuts on his arms, but so did every man who had been in the action.

  And every muscle in his body hurt.

  The same was true of every trooper. Kineas was not of a mind to turn west.

  Rosy-fingered dawn brushed every gold trapping and made them kindle. Silver and steel were stained the delicate pink of new flowers and the grass itself wavered like new-forged bronze. The wagons of the Sakje were already rolling, their dust stained the same smoked pink as the sky and the farther clouds. Above and to the right, an eagle of good omen circled, searching for prey in the first light.

  At the edge of the last watercourse before the Polytimeros, Kineas stood by Thalassa, surrounded by his friends — Srayanka and Philokles on either side of him, supporting him: Diodorus with Sappho mounted at his side; Coenus and soft-handed Artemesia with Eumenes and Urvara resplendent in her gold gorytos and a necklace of gold and lapis; Antigonus and Andronicus standing silently, their gold torcs like bands of lava at their necks; Sitalkes in his Getae cloak, Ataelus and Samahe supporting him; and Parshtaevalt, resplendent in a captured Macedonian breastplate of muscled bronze; Leon quiet and still in an Olbian cloak; Nicanor weeping openly. Nihmu watched them with a stillness that belied her youth, as if her young eyes could record every moment like a scribe’s wax tablet. Temerix stood a little apart, braiding leather with his fingers even as he accepted the farewells of Sappho. The Sindi smith had been her ally in helping Philokles.

  Only Darius was missing of all of Kineas’s closest companions, still out somewhere on the sea of grass, looking for Spitamenes.

  One by one those who were going west kissed those who were riding east. Coenus would command. Eumenes would lead the Olbians and Urvara the Sakje, with a tithe of the best warriors. With them would go Nicanor and Sappho, and Artemesia and Andronicus would go as Eumenes’ hyperetes.

  Coenus embraced Srayanka. Then he came face to face with Kineas. ‘My heart tells me that I will not see you again,’ he said.

  Kineas wiped hurriedly at his tears. ‘No, my friend. If what I have seen in the gates of horn is true, we will not hunt together this side of the Elysian Fields.’

  Coenus was an aristocrat and a Megaran. He stood straight, his face unmarked by tears. He even managed a grin. He took both of Kineas’s hands.

  ‘I honour the gods, Kineas, but after them I honour you. May Moira see fit to leave the thread of your life uncut that we may hunt the valleys of the Tanais together. I will dedicate a temple to Artemis, and I will never cease to think of you. And if the thread of your life must be cut, let it be a worthy end.’

  Diodorus spoke as though he was choking. ‘At times like this, I miss Agis the most,’ he said. To the others, who had not known the gentle Theban, he said, ‘Agis was our priest. He died at the River God’s Ford.’ He took one of Coenus’s hands. ‘We’ve ridden together for years,’ he said. ‘I find it hard to imagine a life without all of you.’

  Philokles cleared his throat. ‘I lack the god-given touch of gentle Agis,’ he said, ‘but I will attempt his part.’ At length as the Morning Star was beginning to herald The light which saffron-mantled Dawn was soon to suffuse over the sea, The flames fell and the fire began to die. The winds then went home beyond the Thracian Sea Which roared and boiled as they swept over it. The son of Peleus now turned away from the pyre and lay down, Overcome with toil, till he fell into a sweet slumber. Presently they who were about the son of Atreus drew near in
a body, And roused him with the noise and tramp of their coming. He sat upright and said, ‘Son of Atreus, and all other princes of the Achaeans, First pour red wine everywhere upon the fire and quench it; Let us then gather the bones of Patroclus son of Menoitios, Singling them out with care; they are easily found, For they lie in the middle of the pyre, while all else, both men and horses, Has been thrown in a heap and burned at the outer edge. We will lay the bones in a golden urn, in two layers of fat, Against the time when I shall myself go down into the house of Hades. As for the barrow, labour not to raise a great one now, But such as is reasonable. Afterwards, let those Achaeans who may be left at the ships When I am gone, build it both broad and high. When he was done, they were silent for the space a few heartbeats. Then Sappho embraced Diodorus once more, and Eumenes clasped Kineas’s hand. ‘We will build your kingdom,’ he said. ‘Your city,’ Kineas said. ‘Never my kingdom.’ And then Coenus mounted his horse, gathered his companions and rode into the sunrise.

  26

  Kineas’s ribs hurt too much for him to ride, so he travelled in a litter between two horses for three days as they raced north and east along the Polytimeros. Srayanka commanded. He never lost consciousness and there was no fever, but he passed the days in a haze of pain. By the fourth day he could ride, although the pain when his mount mis-stepped was remarkable — if brief.

  ‘Cracked ribs,’ Philokles said for the fourth time, pulling the bandages tight.

  ‘A bronze corslet would have turned that point without a bruise,’ Kineas said. ‘But the Sakje scale is easier to wear all day and covers better. Each people has its own ways.’

  ‘Thank you, Socrates.’ Philokles smiled.

  As soon as Kineas was mounted, Srayanka called a ‘moving council’. All the leaders, Greek and tribal, rode to the head of the column.

  Leon handed Kineas the Egyptian sword. ‘I thought you’d want this,’ he said. ‘We held the field.’

  Diodorus slapped the Numidian on the back. ‘Leon sent one of Temerix’s men for me. I brought the rest of the Olbians and Parshtaevalt here.’ His smug smile shattered into a brilliant grin. ‘Your wife crossed into their flank. Eumenes rode in on the other side. We wrecked ’em.’