‘Take it!’ over his shoulder. Again the lance struck over his shoulder and he risked a glance back — Lot was behind him. ‘Take it!’ he shouted.
Kineas didn’t want a lance in this insane press. ‘Cover me!’ he shouted, parrying again to protect his horse, and the Sauromatae prince drove his lance into the Macedonian’s unprotected head, killing him. And then Darius was there, and Carlus, and then Sitalkes, clearing his way through the press like a young Achilles, his helmet lost and his spear red and gold in the setting sun.
Darius did an insane thing, rising on his own horse’s back and then jumping to the horse of the last man Kineas had dropped, moving like an acrobat. His sword licked out, blinding a man and then showering blows on his helmet until he ducked and fell away.
Carlus, on his elephantine horse, simply pushed through the press, and for heartbeats it seemed that he might unhorse Kineas in his eagerness. Next to him, at the edge of Kineas’s awareness, was Philokles, raining blows without pause on his opponents like Ares come to earth.
Like a log jam in a Thracian river in spring, the Macedonians gave slowly. Thalassa went forward a short lunge — a single step. Kineas could only parry, his arms too weak to make the strong cuts required to put an armoured man down in the dust. But there were no blows coming at him to parry. Darius and Carlus had taken his place in the line. He hauled on Thalassa’s reins and let Lot squeeze past him, thrusting strongly. Sitalkes cut down the trumpeter even as he set the instrument to his lips, and Sitalkes snatched the golden trumpet and raised it high, exulting, and died like that with a Macedonian lance in his side.
When another Sauromatae knight pushed past him, Kineas sagged and let them all past as the melee grew farther and farther away — a few feet, and then an ocean of sound away. He took a blow on the back from a Sauromatae who thought he was the enemy and he reeled, and the man apologized and rode clear with him, holding him against Thalassa’s back.
‘You did me no damage,’ Kineas said.
‘You are badly wounded,’ the man said. Decorus — he had a name that sounded like that. Kineas couldn’t get his head up.
‘No,’ he said. He was, in fact, wounded, somewhere under his shirt of scale armour. High on his left side, something wet had happened and there was a cut on his right side as well, and a lot of bruises. And breathing hurt again — more — more still. ‘Go back to it, Dekris.’
‘Thank you, lord.’ The young man tipped his helmet down, pulled his lance out from under his thigh and looked right and left. ‘Sounds more open over there,’ he said, and plunged away to the left.
Kineas sat on his charger, alone, long enough to wish that he had a skin of water. Some random blow had cut the strap to his clay bottle. He got his head up, blew the snot from his nose and looked around. There was still no wind and the hanging dust made the air seem heavy and sick.
The prodromoi were still behind the fighting formations. While he took deep breaths, Ataelus came up, and Samahe, and Temerix. They competed to give him water. Temerix had some wine. He felt better immediately. Temerix gave him a piece of sausage with garlic in it — loot from some skirmisher fight, because the Sakje had nothing like it — and he wolfed it down. He hadn’t eaten in hours — so he sat a quarter stade from the hottest cavalry fight he’d ever seen, sharing a sausage with his scouts. His sense of the battle began to return despite the dust.
The sun was setting and the air on his sunburned, dirty face seemed cooler. ‘Thanks for the sausage,’ he said to Temerix, who grinned. ‘Let’s go and win this thing,’ he said, which sounded pompous, but that’s the way it looked to him.
The melee had left him behind. The Companions weren’t breaking — they were simply losing. All around Kineas, Scythian horsemen and women — not armoured nobles, but simple warriors from all the tribes — cantered up. Some peered at him. A few saluted him and called Baqca, and all threw themselves into the melee, often shouting for the prodromoi to join them. But the scouts waited with the discipline of two years of campaigns.
This, he knew, was what Zarina had meant. The Scythians had a lifetime of coordinated hunting on the plains. They knew when a beast was wounded, and they rode to the fight, every warrior choosing their own moment. His few hundred were now just the tip of the spear, and thousands of Dahae and Sakje were coming in behind them, riding into the war-storm to fire arrows or thrust with their swords. Many had changed horses after their initial panic, and they were comparatively fresh. The shock was over and they scented victory.
Kineas could smell it too, and it smelled like horse sweat and dust, and a hint of apples far away. Thalassa gave a cry and took a step forward — rare for her to move unbidden — and Srayanka came out of the murk.
‘Aiiyee!’ she shrieked and they embraced. And then she backed her mare. ‘You are injured.’
Kineas just smiled at her. Then he reached out with his right hand and pulled her close, her gorget scraping dully against his scales, and they kissed like people who might have lost everything, despite everything.
‘We could ride away!’ she said when they parted. Her hand where she had embraced his left side was covered in blood.
‘Too late, my love,’ he said.
‘I cut that fuck Hephaestion,’ she said, as if passing the time of day. She handed him a javelin. ‘A late wedding present,’ she said. Her mouth thinned. ‘Lot went down to the grass,’ she said.
‘Ahh,’ he said, pain banished for a moment. Trumpets were sounding a recall. ‘I put Alexander out of the fight.’ He would mourn Lot later. And then he thought, I will join Lot soon enough, and he hurt, and it was wet, but he chuckled again. His grin was real. His fear was gone — really, he was already dead, and this last embrace was Athena’s favour. He sat back on Thalassa, legs still strong. ‘Let’s finish it,’ he said.
Srayanka’s eyes locked with his, one last time.
‘Take us!’ Ataelus said at his side. ‘Fresh horses!’
Kineas looked around. ‘Form a wedge then,’ he said, and Ataelus and Samahe barked multilingual commands and the scouts formed up. They advanced at a trot.
Side by side, Kineas and Srayanka pushed forward into the storm of Ares. The whole melee had motion now, and warriors made way for them as they pressed forward. All of their forces were intermixed, pressing forward with the strength of victory as the sun set red as a gaping wound behind them, blinding their opponents when it could penetrate the dust, and the daimon was on them all, and the Olbians shouted ‘Apollo’ and ‘Nike’ and few shouted ‘Athena’, while the Sakje and the Sauromatae began to shout something else — something that seemed wordless and built towards a word as they pressed forward, so that all the unfocused shouts began to be a word, repeated over and over, a thousand thin and tired voices making the voice of the war god.
‘BAQCA!’ they shouted.
And the sound carried him forward. He had time to think, This is what it is like to be a god, and he felt Nike, the euphoria of victory, suffuse him. And the Macedonians were breaking, having covered their retreat, exhausted, professional, superb, but now finished. Philotas might have held them longer, or Parmenion, but Hephaestion had already left the field with what he called wounds, and the thousand fickle spirits that warp even the best moved them to flow away.
Kineas broke through into the front rank and he threw his javelin, a long, high throw that caught the rump of a fleeing horse and stuck there.
‘Good throw,’ Philokles said. ‘I find it little different,’ he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation.
Kineas’s vision was tunnelling from the pain of the throw, but he managed a smile for the Spartan. ‘Hmm?’ he said, as if they were standing on the porch of the megaron in Hyrkania, talking philosophy.
‘A cavalry melee. Just the same. A lot of pushing, but with an animal doing the work.’ Philokles smiled. His right hand was red, the wrist was red and the arm that held his spear was streaked with blood drips to belie his tone. ‘I think I like it. A good way to fight one�
��s last battle.’
Kineas laughed, and it hurt. ‘You’re a good man,’ he said.
Philokles smiled. ‘I can’t hear you say that too often.’
The haze was clearing because the Scythians were too fatigued to pursue, and besides, the water of the Jaxartes was up to the hocks of their horses. Phalangites scrambled across the ford that they had won at such cost. Alexander’s charge had saved them, but they had no order and they were done for the day.
Kineas turned his head and he knew them all — every man and woman — and he saw how the dream was true and not true. He looked to the front and he saw a beaten army, awaiting only the last blow. Just at the base of the great dead tree a lone horseman sat on an armoured horse, his gold-covered helm red in the last of the sun. He had a bow.
Leon’s voice, away to the left, called through the red murk, ‘He’s mine!’ and started into the water.
Diodorus said, ‘Keep the line, by Ares!’
Kam Baqca was at his shoulder. ‘ It is time to cross the river,’ she said.
Kineas raised his sword, though the pain came in like the sea at flood tide. Above the red swirl of dust he could see the last of a blue sky, and high in the sky an eagle circled.
‘Charge!’ he said. He gestured…
EPILOGUE
The next day in the full light of the sun, Srayanka crossed the river with thirty riders, all spear-maidens, their armour clean, their horses groomed and their hair adorned with circlets of roses and grass. Srayanka wore the sword of Cyrus, the hilt of jade flashing its own message in the sun.
On the enemy side, they met an escort of Macedonians who were not so clean, and she nodded to herself. The escort was led by the one Kineas had known — Tolmy — and he was wounded. She gave him only a blank face. They rode through a silent camp of Macedonians — silent except for the groaning of the wounded and the shrill pain of the horses. Those who could stared at her as she passed.
She led her column past the siege machines where unwounded men stood ready, and past lines of tents and hasty shelters made of blankets, to where a dozen pavilions were pitched together, and Tolmy led them into a courtyard formed by the pavilions. ‘The king will see you here. He is wounded.’ He spoke very loudly, as if to a fool.
‘My husband put him down,’ she said, in Greek, and the Macedonian trooper’s mutterings were as ugly as her smile.
She did not dismount, although Tolmy beckoned to her several times.
‘The king awaits you,’ he said.
‘Tell him to come here. I do not dismount in a camp of enemies.’ She raised her chin.
Her heart pounded in her chest, until she reminded herself that she had nothing to lose. She kept her chin high and eventually the flap of the greatest tent opened and Alexander emerged. He was pale, and he limped, and he immediately sat when a seat was brought.
‘Only an Amazon would bring this courtesy, lady. Any other defeated king comes and kneels.’
Srayanka shrugged. ‘I am kind, then. I will not ask you to kneel.’
Alexander’s face was instantly a mask of rage. ‘It is you who are beaten,’ he spat.
She had a bag in her left hand. She opened it and threw the object it held on to the ground. It was Alexander’s golden helmet. ‘I might have put this atop a trophy such as the Greeks raise, across the river, and nothing could you do to stop me.’ She nodded at his silence. ‘Keep it with my thanks for your courtesy when I was a hostage.’
Alexander drew breath to speak and she raised her hand. ‘Listen. I have not come to mock. You killed my husband — but I will hold my hand. You will not come across the Oxus or the Jaxartes, and the Sakje will no longer support the usurper Spitamenes, whom I hate. That is my word. Cross the rivers and die. Go elsewhere and conquer as you will.’
‘I will conquer the world,’ Alexander said. His anger was quenched already by his burning curiosity, his interest, his appreciation.
She spat back, ‘Stay off the sea of grass, King.’ She shrugged. ‘Tell your slaves we came and gave you tribute, if you must. But stay off the sea of grass.’ She drew the sword of Cyrus from the scabbard at her side. ‘My people say this is the sword that Cyrus the Great King brought to the sea of grass. He left it with us. Come across the river and see what you will leave behind. I have spoken.’
She left him sitting on his ivory stool, holding his helmet. She didn’t wait for her escort of Macedonians, who had dismounted, expecting a longer parley. She gathered her maidens and they rode clear, and no hand was raised against them.
And across the river, at the top of the ridge that towered over the ford of the Jaxartes, a big man, naked in the sun, made a pile of all the Macedonian armour that his friends had stripped from the dead. He wept as he worked, but he worked hard, and many hands helped. He built the trophy carefully, until it towered above the ridge, and the helmet that graced the top had a blue plume and the bronze caught the sun and burned like a beacon.
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Storm of arrows t-2 Page 47
