Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  The whole army marched, and ate, as Greek soldiers had marched for generations. Every man belonged to a mess group - eight or ten men and their women and slaves under a file leader. They marched together, fought together as a file and ate together, buying their food from the daily common market and cooking it by turns over the group’s fire when they camped. That fire was often the centre of their lives - home and hearth combined. They had no tents and no blankets but the cloaks they all carried, and rain or snow or beating sun, they could live, and march.

  The system was so old and so endemic to Greeks that even the gentry - the cavalry and the officers - followed the same system. At the very top, the strategos was not expected to cook - he was too busy. But he could cook, and he did, on occasion. Greek notions of democracy were not limited to politics, and Spartan or Athenian, Olbian or Heraklean, every Hellene soldier knew that his food was his own responsibility.

  Kineas was much given to thoughts of food these days. He dreamed of food supply at night when he wasn’t fighting against the dreams of the tree, and awake, he pondered how to ship grain ahead of his army, pondered the purchase of additional mules, pondered the possibilities of farming failures and war and the results for his tenuous supply.

  ‘Do as you think best,’ Kineas had said to Philokles before they rode away, wrapped in his Spartiates cloak of scarlet, sitting beside Leon in a splendid blue cloak that lacked the wear of a season in the field, a study in contrasts. ‘Don’t be tied to my plan. Make your judgements on the ground. If we can ride around the north of this Hyrkanian Sea - the Kaspian - or if it seems better to you, or if you cannot hire the shipping, or if it is too late in the season—’

  Philokles put his hand on Kineas’s shoulder. ‘You’ve already told us every word of your worries,’ he said.

  Kineas gave a wry smile. ‘I will worry until I see you again,’ he said, and Leon shifted his weight, embarrassed by their obvious emotion.

  Kineas smiled at Leon. ‘Don’t feel it too keenly when this plan of ours is discarded,’ he said. ‘We may never make Hyrkania.’

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ Leon said.

  ‘I’ll while away the stades discoursing on your flaws and bring him back cured of hero worship,’ Philokles said. He stroked the neck of his heavy charger, a magnificent animal he had preserved throughout the year’s campaigns by the simple expedient of fighting on foot. ‘I haven’t missed you, you brute,’ he said. ‘My thighs will burn like a river of fire before night.’

  He embraced Kineas, and they patted each other’s backs for a long minute. Then they parted, and Kineas embraced Leon. ‘Do well,’ he said, and turned away to hide his tears.

  Kineas found it difficult to wave goodbye to Philokles.

  An hour later, Kineas stood on a low hill - almost certainly an ancient kurgan like the one that now held the body of Satrax - and watched his infantry with pride. He had climbed the kurgan alone to have time to think, a luxury for a commander, even of a thousand men. He waved at Philokles, who still sat his charger like a sack of grain, and Leon, who rode like a centaur and carried a shield on horseback, one of the few men Kineas had ever seen do such a thing. Neither saw him until the army was already a stade out on the plain, their singing just a chant on the wind, when Leon happened to look at the top of the old mound and Kineas saw him trot his mount alongside Philokles. The Spartan turned in his saddle, looked, put a hand to his eyes and then waved.

  Kineas waved back enthusiastically. He found that he was crying again. He waved until he had to strain his eyes to see them, and then he sat in the hollow at the top, resting his shoulders against the stone, and closed his eyes.

  ‘May the gods send that I see you again,’ he swore.

  ‘You will,’ said a deep voice behind him, but when he turned there was no one there but the Sakje child.

  ‘How do you know?’ Kineas asked her.

  She looked at him with all the puzzlement that children use for adults who don’t behave themselves. ‘Know what, lord?’

  Kineas bit back a retort. The voice had been hers - and yet had not been hers. ‘Surely there is someone else for you to haunt, girl,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said simply, and came around him to sit on the sacred stone that capped the kurgan. The sword that should have rested in the stone or in the earth beside it was gone, either long since rusted into the ground or taken for its power by a yâtavu, a sorcerer. Ordinary mortals avoided sitting on the kurgan stones, fearing the spirits of the dead. She did not.

  ‘What is your name, girl?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘When will you come for your horses, Strategos?’ she asked. ‘They pine for you - and you ride inferior blood. You are king. I say so. My father says so. It pains him to see you astride some Getae hack when you should be riding a royal horse.’

  Kineas sat down on the low bank of grass-covered earth created by the slow collapse of the roof of the kurgan and sighed. ‘They are fine horses,’ he admitted.

  ‘And my father is cross that you will not climb the tree. He says,’ and here she scrunched up her face and squared her shoulders so that her back was straighter, an eerie performance, ‘he says that you let your fear guide you instead of your sense as a baqca.’

  Kineas sighed again. ‘Kam Baqca is dead,’ he said.

  The little girl shrugged. ‘Many people are dead,’ she said. ‘Should they also be silent?’

  Kineas spoke too fast, because he didn’t want an argument, and because she was annoying him. ‘We don’t believe that the dead speak.’

  The little girl regarded him from under her straight dark brows. ‘That’s not true,’ she said.

  Kineas caught his own mistake, and he laughed at his own inability to defeat a young woman in debate. ‘The dead may speak on great occasions,’ he said.

  ‘The dead may speak whenever it suits the gods to allow them to speak,’ the child said, as if teaching a lesson. ‘So you should not lie. The dead speak to Odysseus in the Odyssey. If the Poet says a thing, it must be true, don’t you think?’ She looked at him. He felt the hair on the nape of his neck begin to rise.

  ‘You have read the Poet?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, her young voice utterly dismissive. ‘And in plays - the dead speak all the time in plays. I saw one in Olbia.’

  Kineas shook his head. ‘Who are you?’

  She got up, laughing, for all the world like any other happy twelve-year-old girl. ‘Nihmu White Horse of the Royal Sakje,’ she said proudly. ‘Kam Baqca was my father, and Attalos One-Eye was my grandsire. Arraya Walks-Alone was my mother and Srayanka the Archer was my father’s mother.’ She rattled off her impressive lineage in the sing-song voice of memorization.

  Kineas helped her down from the stone as he would any girl - and he remembered his sisters in the family olive groves, and how they had claimed to be women as soon as they could walk. This child seemed to be every age and no age. ‘Where do you camp?’ he asked.

  ‘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 mêlée 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 dream, 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.