Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  Philokles explained that every captain was an independent operator. The boats were small - half the size of a Greek pentekonter, and some smaller than that, with ten or twelve oars a side. A few were sailing vessels, like large fishing smacks. Kineas cast his eyes across them and shook his head, changing the subject again to calm his temper. ‘I don’t see transport for two thousand horses,’ he said.

  Philokles rubbed his forehead, pulled his cloak tighter against the autumn wind and met Kineas’s eye. ‘Two hundred horses at a time,’ he said. ‘It was the best I could do.’

  Kineas nodded apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean you haven’t done your best,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough that you are here, and with food and so much transport. Let’s start shipping them across the sea. How many days?’

  ‘Two days each way, with luck and a friendly wind. It is a very small sea.’

  Kineas shaded his eyes with his hand, pushing his straw hat back on his head to keep the flapping brim out of his line of sight. ‘We captured quite a few horses on the way here,’ he said. ‘Let us arrange sacrifices to Poseidon, and some games - horse races such as the Trident-bearer values above all things. Let us celebrate his power tonight. And then let’s start loading. The autumn is wearing on, and winter is coming.’

  Kineas was among the last of his men to leave for the winter camp in Hyrkania. He stayed on the beach in Errymi to shepherd the men across, to keep morale high on the beach, to prevent incidents with the locals . . . and to wait for Niceas.

  As the weeks passed, while storms slowed the ferries and the stores of food dwindled and the conditions in the seaside camp worsened, he found that his presence heartened his men and that all his skills as a leader were required to prevent mischief and even murder. He had the cavalrymen dig earthworks, an unheard-of demand that served to raise a barrier against the constant wind and, more importantly, against boredom - at least until the walls were complete.

  Prince Lot’s knights were even less inclined to dig than Greek aristocrats, but time and the example of Prince Lot himself got most of them to it, and Kineas was too versed in military leadership to believe that every one of the Sauromatae needed to be set to digging. Some hunted - for food and also for bandits. The killing of Lot’s elder daughter was a mistake for which the masterless men of the high plains paid for three months, and the aggressive mourning of the Sauromatae would cease only when the last boats were rowed away from the empty marching camp. Kineas didn’t intend to burn the huts that had been built, however. Instead, he handed the finished work to a group of Maeotae farmers, dispossessed men whose families had been burned out by the bandits and who had fled to the marshes to eke out a living. With the marching camp as a fortified town, they had every chance of holding their own. A dozen Keltoi, too badly wounded in the fall’s fighting to make the crossing, would remain as military settlers.

  Kineas discovered that it was Niceas he was hanging on for when he saw the unmistakable width of Coenus’s broad shoulders coming down the ridge from the west. Closer up, the dozen Greek troopers were obviously not a returning patrol, and closer still, Kineas could see Niceas, swathed in fur robes, riding a big pony.

  Kineas sent a boy for his riding horse and went out to meet them, his throat tight. It remained tight while he embraced Niceas, who winced and cursed, and Coenus, and Crax and Sitalkes and Antigonus. Niceas looked twenty years older, and Coenus looked considerably thinner, but the rest of them smiled a great deal and shuffled when Kineas praised them.

  Privately, Coenus was less sanguine. ‘He’s not the same,’ Coenus said. Niceas was sitting on the rim of the hearth, visibly soaking up warmth. ‘I’m not sure he’ll ever fight again. But he’s alive, and he’s as tough as a slave’s sandal.’ Coenus drank back his wine - his third cup - and swallowed a handful of olives.

  ‘Was it hard?’ Kineas asked.

  ‘Never,’ Coenus said. ‘Best hunting of my life. Like Xenophon’s notion of Elysium. After Lot came, we sent back for grain, and later the farmers came to us. It was never dull, and those are good men you gave me.’ His grin had a self-conscious air to it. ‘I loved it.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Niceas says we should carve a kingdom out of this land.’ Coenus, usually fastidious, had a bushy beard, and he rubbed it with his fingers as if embarrassed by it. ‘I want to sign up. I’ll put a shrine to Artemis in that valley - I know just the spot. I’ll hunt until I’m too old to ride, and then I’ll sit around losing my teeth and telling lies.’ Then he stopped grinning. ‘Watching him was hard,’ he said.

  Niceas was grey with fatigue and went to bed too soon.

  Kineas lay next to Niceas in the tent. Niceas slept more deeply than he had before his wound, and he lay still, as if in death, so that Kineas often listened to him like an anxious parent with a sick child, leaning across the older man’s body to hear his soft breathing. Tonight, Kineas had Philokles on his other side - it was a cold, damp night with a threat of freezing rain in the air, and every man in the army pushed close to his tent mates.

  Kineas was tired with worry and relief, but sleep would not come, and he lay listening to the sounds made by his night guards, by two thousand horses in the dark, by a few foolish soldiers lingering late by their mess fires. They, too, were relieved to find that boats were waiting for them.

  And then, as subtle as the first fall of snow, he was . . . standing amidst the bones at the base of the tree, surrounded by the silent combat of dead friends against dead foes. He reached for a limb and drew himself up until the combat beneath him vanished and he looked up. The tree towered over him, reaching into the sky. He noticed that the tree lacked the misty quality of his first dreams - now it was as palpable and as solid as any tree outside the world of dreams.

  The owl shot by and made a showy landing above him, and squawked. Kineas grinned at it.

  ‘I know what I’m here for,’ he told the owl. Instead of a slow climb, he reached for a branch overhead, planted his feet and leaped to grab the next major limb.

  He just caught it, and he hung for a moment, the strain on his arms as real as anything in the outer world, and it took the concentration of all his years on the floor of various gymnasiums to lever himself up and over, to lie panting for a full minute before he pushed himself up and climbed carefully to his feet . . .

  In the agora of his youth with a sack of scrolls hanging over his arm - fourteen, too young to be a man and old enough to desire to be one. Diodorus and Graccus walked by his side, alert for trouble. Demosthenes had spoken in the assembly against Philip of Macedon, and all of the agora was talking about it. Kineas and his two best friends drifted from group to group, abandoning the safety of their group of rich boys to listen to the conversation of older men.

  There was a large circle of men gathered around Apollion, and he walked around them. Apollion - tall, handsome, blond Apollion, who the assembly loved and who fought in the front rank in the phalanx - had made advances, just yesterday, making it clear that he could push Kineas’s career as an orator if Kineas would suck his dick for a few years. He’d put it better than that, but Kineas’s anger - and fear, for Apollion was a big man, dangerous in combat and in the assembly - blinded him to rational behaviour. He’d struck Apollion, in front of everyone in the gymnasium, and fled.

  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 killed 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 t
hen 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.