Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

by Christian Cameron

  The Sakje counter-charge seemed small and badly organized, but the Sakje weren’t Greeks - they didn’t require serried ranks to fight effectively. Instead of charging the Persian cavalry, the two groups slipped off to the left and right, every man and maid bent low, shooting hard. The Medes flinched away, fearing for their flanks, and suddenly robbed of their attempt to wrap around the Sindi, they halted and began to shoot. It was a natural decision for Asiatic cavalry, but it cost them the action.

  Kineas felt like an idiot for risking himself - and Srayanka. Ataelus, at his shoulder, was rising and shooting, rising again, methodically pumping arrows into the Persians who were tangled with Temerix’s men. It was too late to halt, too late to swerve, so Kineas allowed Thalassa to push up the bank on to the island of willows. He was sword to javelin with a Persian veteran. He parried the spearhead and the man tried to use the haft to sweep him off his horse’s back. Kineas dropped the reins again, grabbed the haft and cut repeatedly at the man’s fingers, but his head burst in a spray of bone and blood and worse as Carlus struck him with a long-handled axe from the other side. An arrow hit Kineas in his breastplate like the kick of a mule on his right side, and he saw Srayanka’s face, streaked with pain and battle joy, red and white with exertion. She shrieked something that was lost in the battle, and the Medes answered a trumpet signal and flowed away - not broken, just not interested in further losses. The Sindi rose to their feet - aside from a handful, most had simply lain flat and waited for the Medes to ride away - and scrambled for the ponies who were dispersed over half a stade of island.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Philokles roared at Kineas. Simultaneously, a tight knot of Medes, lost or desperate, punched through the Sindi and came at Kineas.

  The great royal charger leaped from a dead halt to a gallop in three strides, her heavy hooves crashing against the rocky island. Kineas had his last opponent’s spear and he whirled it end over end and thrust hard at the first rider, a man with a copper beard, and in a moment of fear-induced clarity Kineas wondered if he had fought this man before, at Issus or at Arbela. And then his spear went over the man’s parry and under his burnoose and the man flipped back over the rump of his horse, all his sinews loosed, and Thalassa went right through the knot of Medes as two weak blows rang on Kineas’s back plate. And then young Darius was there, yelling insults in Persian, his sword dripping blood on to his hand when he raised it over his head, and Philokles was standing over a dead Mede and the survivors rode across the island and vanished west. One of the men fleeing was tall with an excellent horse and gold embroidery on his scarlet cloak, and he was clutching his side.

  Srayanka sat on her horse. She had his knife in her right hand, and there was blood on it, and she waved it at the retreating Medes. ‘Come back and fight, Spitamenes!’ she screeched. She was laughing, with tears streaming from her face, and then her arms dropped and she screamed like a dying mare, a war cry or a scream of pain - or both.

  ‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ Kineas said, for the first time in his life praying to both instead of cursing. ‘Now, run!’

  Temerix’s men needed no second urging, regardless of the death wish of their captain. On the north bank, the Medes were forming again, wary now, and pointing downstream where the Sauromatae were vanishing into their own dust cloud.

  On the south bank, Diodorus and Andronicus had the Olbians in hand, or close to it, and the bank was lined with horsemen as the Sindi scrambled back. Side by side with Temerix and Philokles, Kineas and Srayanka crested the south bank together.

  Diodorus was in front of the reordered Olbians. The rear ranks were sketchy and their horses were blown, but the Olbians were ready to charge again.

  ‘You’re an idiot!’ Diodorus said cheerily. ‘Khaire, Srayanka.’

  ‘You hold here until the Sauromatae are away. Then you. Sakje last under Eumenes and Urvara.’ Kineas thought they were going to live - he could feel the loosening in his bowels and the daimon of combat winging away, leaving only bone-ache and heart-ache. But he’d seen the Medes flee - they weren’t interested in taking casualties to beat up his rearguard.

  ‘I will command the Sakje,’ Srayanka said, her chin high. ‘Eumenes and Urvara may assist me.’

  Kineas saluted her with a bloody javelin. ‘Welcome back, Lady of the Cruel Hands,’ he said in Sakje. They were cheering her, Olbian and Sakje together, a roar that must have sounded like a taunt to the Medes across the river. Srayanka raised her knife and the shouts came again.

  Kineas felt the wind in his hair as he looked around for Ataelus. The man was stripping Bain’s corpse, taking his arrows. Everywhere, Sakje and Sauromatae were stripping the corpses of the fallen.

  ‘Ataelus! Light the fires!’ Kineas called.

  Ataelus nodded and one of his scouts galloped off into the dust.

  Samahe came up from the stream bed, her gorytos empty. She reined in next to Thalassa and handed Kineas his helmet, the blue plume of horsehair severed and the plume-box that held it smashed flat.

  ‘Thanks!’ he said, slapping her back. She grinned wordlessly and turned away. Kineas wrestled with his helmet, which was deformed and wouldn’t go over his head. He tried to bend it between his hands while he watched the Persians, but the bronze was too tough and he couldn’t get it back into shape. He tied the chinstrap and slipped it over his sword hilt.

  ‘They’re getting ready to have a go at us,’ Darius said at his side. The Persian had a cut on his face that had bled over his whole front and the linen burnoose he wore over his helmet was cut and flapped like a pair of wings.

  But the Medes showed no further interest in them. While the first flames flickered in the grass and the Olbians re-formed a column of fours and retired, Spitamenes and his Bactrians and Medes began to press the Greek mercenaries to the east.

  ‘Poor bastards,’ Eumenes said.

  Lot grimaced. ‘We did all the work,’ he said in his own tongue.

  Behind them, the slaughter of the mercenaries began.

  Srayanka’s spasms came closer and closer.

  Ten stades north and west of the battlefield, the column halted where they had left their remounts. Every man changed horses and drank water. Behind them, they could still hear the fighting, and see the dust.

  Urvara wept with no explanation. Eumenes held her shoulders. And Srayanka, between contractions that were sharper and closer now, asked for Hirene. Kineas was bent over her, holding her bloody sword hand.

  ‘I saw her fall,’ he said.

  Srayanka cried out. When she was done, she said, ‘She was my spear-maiden, my mentor.’ The Greek word made her lips curl.

  ‘I will see that we recover her corpse,’ Kineas said. He cursed his inability to soften his words, but he was still on the battlefield in his mind, and Srayanka was grey and plastered in sweat, her beautiful hair lank and glued to her face. She was dying.

  She lay on a horse blanket, her only privacy the backs of Kineas’s friends - Philokles and Eumenes and Andronicus, Ataelus and Samahe and Lot and Antigonus clutching at a wounded arm and murmuring charms, and the young Nihmu as the midwife. Srayanka groaned patiently and then screamed, drank water, and the men’s faces reflected a kind of fear and exhaustion that the battlefield hadn’t wrought. Nihmu laughed at them.

  ‘Come, my queen!’ she said. ‘Push! The eagles are pecking at their shells!’

  Srayanka screamed one more time, as Kineas chewed his lip and watched his rearguard pickets and hated his life and every decision he had made as his love lay dying in the sand soaked with her own blood. She writhed and sweated and he knew she was going.

  Nihmu’s eyes, calm and clear, met his. ‘Trust me,’ she said.

  He prayed.

  ‘Sing!’ screamed Srayanka.

  ‘Sing!’ shouted Nihmu.

  Kineas’s eyes met Diodorus’s, and together they began the paean of Athena. Voices took it up, the circle of his friends and then beyond, and to its martial cry his daughter was born.

  And a minut
e later, he had a son.

  He took them in his arms while Nihmu did what had to be done and the women washed Srayanka. The boy howled and the girl looked at him with enormous blue eyes full of questions, unmoved even when her cord was cut and tied off, unmoved when she was washed. Then she reached a hand and grabbed for his beard and burbled, apparently pleased with the world she saw. In his right hand, his son screamed and screamed when his cord was cut and then settled against his father’s armour, waving his arms, blinking at the light.

  They were so small. He had never held anything so small in all his life. And when Nihmu reached out to take them, he hesitated. But the moment the two of them lay on their mother’s breast their faces changed, and the girl’s calm became the boy’s, and they settled.

  Men pounded his back and women kissed his cheek. He had two children, and a wife, and he was alive.

  And an hour later they were riding across the sand, free. Behind him, Samahe carried their daughter, and Nihmu carried their son, and Kineas offered a prayer to Nike.

  21

  ‘That went as well as could be expected,’ Diodorus said that night, when they were gathered around a fire of tamarisk. They were passing a Spartan cup of water, because that was all they had.

  Kineas was busy sewing at the straps on his breastplate, punching holes with Niceas’s awl and thinking of the man, while Srayanka slept with her head on his lap. Their children slept in a hastily woven basket that was near enough the fire to keep them warm. ‘Which part of my plan did you like best?’ Kineas asked.

  Philokles was lying on his cloak. He intercepted the cup. ‘I liked how few of us died,’ he said.

  Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the loss of Bain and half a dozen Sakje when they pressed too close to the unbeaten Macedonians, the action might have cost them nothing. Even with the attack of the Persians and Bain’s error, the ambush had emptied very few saddles.

  ‘Someday I intend to plan a battle and have it work,’ Kineas said.

  Philokles nodded. ‘That’s when you’ll realize you are in the Elysian Fields,’ he answered. ‘Pah, there’s nothing in this cup but water!’

  Eumenes took the cup, sipped the water and raised an eyebrow. ‘Polytimeros?’ he said, rolling the water gently in the cup. ‘Day before yesterday? Nice silt, muddy aftertaste—’

  He had to duck as Leon swung his water skin. The two young men smiled at each other.

  As Philokles vanished into the dark, Urvara came up beside Eumenes, took the cup, finished the contents and raised two heavy eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you Greeks tired enough? By all the gods! Go to sleep!’

  Kineas could have sworn she was addressing Eumenes.

  ‘After a battle, Greek men like to gather and tell each other that they’re alive,’ Diodorus said. He turned to Ataelus, who sat back to back with his wife. Both of them were sewing, he making a repair to a bridle while his wife repaired her moccasins. Diodorus asked, ‘What do the Sakje do after battle?’

  Ataelus narrowed his eyes so that they sparkled with reflected firelight. ‘For lying about how many enemies killed,’ he said.

  Urvara sat on the ground as if her knees had betrayed her. ‘How is Srayanka?’

  Kineas grinned. He couldn’t help it - the grins seemed to roll out of him despite the fatigue. He never wanted to go to sleep - he wanted to stay like this for ever, triumphant, exhausted, drunk on joy, with her head across his lap. ‘She’s asleep. Tough as a ten-year-old sandal.’

  Urvara looked at the children. ‘I thought we would die,’ she said. ‘Hah! I’m alive!’

  Eumenes, usually so silent, gave her an approving grin. ‘I think you’ve got it exactly,’ he said.

  She crossed her legs and put her hand on her chin. ‘Not the battle, fool of a Greek. Any idiot can survive a battle. You did.’

  Diodorus glanced around with a why me expression.

  ‘The capture! Always, Srayanka is for saying that we should ride free and leave her, and always we are for telling her that we will stay by her. But I think in my head “I must ride or die!” And Hirene ...’ and here she looked into the fire for a moment.

  Samahe spoke. ‘Hirene died a warrior death. She was a spear-maiden. ’

  Urvara acknowledged Samahe’s statement with a nod. ‘But still for dead, yes? But Hirene says “Go, Urvara! The Bronze One lusts to hurt you!” And I feared him, and I feared for Srayanka.’ She shrugged. ‘I cannot tell it. Much of it was women’s fear and no interest to men - Srayanka’s belly, the Bronze One’s lusts, no exercise, and for treating us like grass priestesses.’

  Eumenes, who hung on her every word, asked, ‘What is a grass priestess? ’ When Urvara raised her eyes and shrugged, Eumenes went on, ‘My nurse used to talk about them as if they were - hmm - prostitutes.’

  Urvara watched him. ‘What is prostitute?’ she asked.

  ‘A man or woman who takes money for fucking,’ Eumenes said in Sakje, using the coarsest of Sakje words for the act. Even in firelight, he could be seen to be blushing.

  Kineas finished his armour strap. He really needed a new breastplate, but the strap would hold for another action. He was laughing quietly at his young cavalry commander’s confusion.

  Urvara laughed aloud. ‘Grass priestess is girl who worships grass with her back,’ she laughed. ‘Not for taking money. For taking nothing!’ When she saw that they weren’t laughing, she shrugged. ‘Macedonians treat us as if we are for fucking.’ She shook her head. ‘Never for seeing us for warriors.’

  Kineas found that his free hand was stroking Srayanka’s neck. Urvara was not telling her whole story - she was making light of something that pained her deeply, and Kineas, who knew both warriors and Sakje, could read her anger and her pain. But he couldn’t think of anything to say, and the moment passed. Urvara wiped a hand across her eyes and departed the circle.

  Within seconds, Philokles emerged from the dark. ‘Admit it, I’m the best man in this army,’ he said, and produced a skin of wine. The resulting cheer might have been heard in Marakanda. After the first cup had been poured into the thirsty sand for the gods, Philokles filled the cup and passed it.

  Leon sat, and Sitalkes, and Darius, and then the others, and they drank together. And Nihmu appeared by Kineas. She looked down at him, her eyes dancing. She bent and kissed Srayanka’s sleeping brow, and then she touched his cheek. ‘This is how they’ll remember you,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kineas said. ‘For delivering the children.’

  She smiled. ‘I have been trained,’ she said.

  ‘You did well. You are growing up.’ He took one of Srayanka’s golden plaques from her dress - she had a dozen of them around the neck - and Kineas cut one away carefully and gave it to Nihmu.

  She beamed at his praise. ‘Thank you, lord.’ She took the plaque, gave him a shy grin from under lowered eyes and slipped away.

  Eumenes drank from the cup and chatted with Philokles, then left the circle in his turn. He returned a little later with Urvara in tow, and they shared the wine cup, hands lingering. Kineas watched them with a smile, but he didn’t smile as Philokles methodically finished the wine skin, silently drinking for oblivion.

  The Olbians, Lot’s Sauromatae and the Sakje made camp together at a great bend in the Oxus after moving fast for a thousand stades to avoid retribution from Alexander. They went to a site Lot knew on the northern Oxus where the river ran deep along the inner bank and shallow on the outside of the curve, and there was grazing for ten thousand horses in the belly of the bow - grazing already used by other passing tribes, but not nibbled flat. A thousand lodges, yurts and wagons were set up along the deepest water, and parties went to get firewood and red deer as far as twenty stades away. In this site they were closer to Coenus, when he came, and ready to cross the river and head east to the rendezvous on the Jaxartes when their wounded had recovered.

  Eumenes and Urvara took a party of mixed Olbians and Sakje back to the site of the ambush. They returned with more plunder and Hirene’s corps
e as well as Bain’s. The two of them were given a kurgan on the outer bank of the Oxus. Srayanka declined to officiate, and Kineas, urged by Nihmu, took the part of both king and priest. Diodorus laughed at him and called him a superstitious peasant, and there was a barb to his words, but they all brought their squares of turf and the ceremony and the feast helped to settle something intangible.

  ‘We’ll all be Sakje in a few years, at this rate,’ Diodorus said, like a man scratching a scar.

  ‘Kineas likes being a Sakje,’ Philokles said.

  Kineas started to react angrily, but he bit down on his first reply and thought for a moment instead.

  ‘I like their freedom,’ Kineas said.

  Philokles nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And the way they worship you like a god.’

  ‘What are we doing?’ Diodorus asked. ‘I’ve bitten my tongue long enough. You’re a brilliant strategos, Kineas - I, for one, would follow you anywhere. That last was your best work. We routed twice our weight - in Macedonians - and slipped away from another army. By Ares! I love to follow you.’ He looked at the ground between his feet, and then slowly raised his head again. ‘But there’s too much, Kineas. Most of our troopers have fought four heavy actions in two summers. You need to tell them when they can go home.’

  Philokles nodded. ‘It’s true, my friend. We saved Srayanka and we struck a blow against Macedon. As far as most of your Olbians are concerned, the war is over and it is time to ride home and tell a lot of lies. These aren’t Spartans. They aren’t even Macedonian peasants to whom we’ve promised the world. These are men with lives, and they’d like to go home.’

  Kineas sighed. ‘I know. I see the same fatigue in the Keltoi that I see in Eumenes.’

  Diodorus went back to watching the ground between his sandals. ‘What’s next?’