Tyrant (15 page)
Authors: Christian Cameron
Laertes told of how Graccus fought a duel with one of the Macedonian officers - on horseback, with javelins. It had made him famous and notorious in a day, and what Kineas best remembered was the time he’d spent averting King Alexander’s wrath. But it made a good story.
Alexander the farmer listened politely and mixed the wine with lots of water like a man who was being well entertained, and his sons sat and drank it all in. The eldest listened like a man being visited by men from another world, but Echo listened like a hungry man watching food.
Finally Agis, the closest they had to a priest, rose and spilled wine on the sand. ‘Some say it is a bitter thing when the bronze bites home, and the darkness falls over your eyes. Some say that death is the end of life, and some say it is the start of something new.’ He raised his cup. ‘But I say that Graccus was courteous and brave; that he feared the gods and died with a spear in his hand. Hard death is the lot of every man and woman born, and Graccus went to his with a song on his lips.’ Agis took a brand from the fire - pitch-filled pine that flared in the wind - and every man there, even the farmer’s sons, took more, and they walked along the beach to the funeral pyre. They sang the hymn to Demeter, and they sang the Paean, and then they flung their torches into the pile. It burst into flame as if a bolt from Zeus had struck it - a good omen.
They watched it burn until the heat drove them back, as well as the smell of roast meat. Then they drank again. Later, they rose from the straw and bowed, the better-born soldiers offering well-turned compliments to the host, and went off to sleep on the straw pallets in their tents. Kineas walked back with Niceas, who had tears running down his face. He had cried quietly for an hour, but the tears were drying now. ‘I can’t remember a symposium I liked so much.’
Kineas nodded. ‘It was kindly done.’
Niceas said, ‘I’ll give him my booty horse in the morning. Let it be from Graccus, for his feast. And thank you, sir, for thinking of him. I was afraid you had forgotten.’
Kineas shook his head. He punched his hyperetes in the shoulder and then embraced him. Other men came and embraced Niceas. Even, hesitantly, Ajax.
In the morning the pyre still smouldered, and the sun rose in splendour, casting a pink and yellow glow across everything before he was halfway over the rim of the world. Kineas heard the phrase ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ a dozen times before he had his horse bridled.
Niceas arranged with young Echo to fetch the hot bones from the pyre when they cooled, and then bury them in the family graveyard.
The column formed quickly and neatly, every packhorse bulging like a pregnant donkey with baskets of grain. Everyone knew their place by now and things happened more quickly - the tent came down fast, cloaks were rolled and stowed, horses fetched in from hobbles. Neither Kineas nor Niceas had to oversee the process. So, rosy fingered dawn had not yet given way to full day before Kineas, mounted, was saluting Alexander in his yard. Niceas had already given him a horse.
It was a pleasure to leave a place with friends left behind.
Niceas looked back as they rode over the first hill. ‘That boy will tend his grave as if he was one of the heroes,’ he said. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘Better burial than any of us have a right to expect,’ Kineas said, and Niceas made the peasant sign to avert an evil fate.
A stade later, Philokles rode up beside him. ‘Think you’ll ever be that man?’
Kineas grunted. ‘A farmer? Wife? Sons?’
Philokles laughed. ‘Daughters!’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could go back.’
Philokles raised his eyebrows. ‘Why not? Calchus and Isokles would have you in a flash.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You ask the damnedest questions. Does some god whisper in your ear “go and torment Kineas?”’
Philokles shook his head. ‘You interest me. The Captain. The soldier of renown.’
Kineas sat back on his horse, his ass high on the horse’s rump, and crossed his legs. It gave his thighs a rest at the cost of his behind. ‘Oh, come on. You’re a Spartan. You must have had a great deal of opportunity to plumb the thoughts of soldiers of renown.’
Philokles nodded curtly. ‘Yes.’
Kineas said, ‘So I command what - twelve men? Why me? Soldier of renown. Flatterer. May your words go to Zeus.’
‘But my Spartans would all claim they pined for a farm. So many would say it that it has become the norm to say it - perhaps even to think it. Perhaps I ask you because you are not a Spartan.’
‘Here’s my answer, then. Once, I wanted a farm and a wife. Now, I think I’d die of boredom.’
‘You love war?’
‘Pshaw. I love not-war. I love the preparation and the riding and the scouting and the planning - camaraderie, shared success, all that. The killing part is the price you pay for the not-quite-war part.’
‘Farmers have to plan as well. At least, good farmers do.’
‘Really?’ Kineas raised both his eyebrows in a parody of a tragedian’s look of surprise.
Philokles went on as if Kineas had spoken with genuine surprise. ‘Really. Good farmers plan carefully. Good farmers prepare and scout, their whole farm is like a file of hoplites, all trained to work together. But that’s not for you?’
Kineas shrugged. ‘No.’
Philokles nodded as if to himself, his eyes on the distant hills. ‘Perhaps it is something else.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘Spartan, do you ever talk about the weather? Or about music, athletic events, poetry, women you’ve bedded - any of those things?’
Philokles considered a moment. ‘Not often.’
Kineas laughed. ‘Why exactly are you with us?’ he asked again.
Philokles had begun to fall back along the column. He waved. ‘To learn!’ he shouted.
Kineas cursed and looked around for Ataelus. The Scyth had avoided the beachside symposium, but he was otherwise now comfortable with most of the men, especially Antigonus and Coenus - a former slave and a former nobleman. He had ridden off at the first blush of dawn to scout. Kineas wanted him back. It was time to begin to worry.
Kineas realized that he hadn’t worried about anything in a day, and he thanked the gods for Alexander the farmer again, calling down blessings on the man. And he thought about being a farmer, and he thought of the man’s instant friendliness, and wondered if he should have asked . . .
Ataelus appeared on the crest of a hill, well to the front, sitting confidently on his Getae horse and waiting for the column to reach him. Already Kineas could recognize him at a distance, just from his posture on the horse, so un-Greek, so relaxed. He might have been asleep.
Closer up, it became plain that he was.
Kineas rode up to him, cantering up the last rise. Ataelus was awake before he reached him, a hand waved in greeting.
‘Have a nice nap?’ Kineas asked.
‘Long ride. Many things. Yes?’
Kineas nodded. ‘What did you see?’
‘For me? I see many things, grass and hills. Also tracks of horses, many running horses. My people. No stinking fuck themselves Getae.’
Kineas felt a frisson of fear. ‘Your people? How recent? When were they here?’
‘Yesterday. Maybe yesterday. Two days if not for rain.’ The Scyth had a poor command of Greek’s complexities with nouns, and he tended to stick to the form he liked, the dative. ‘For rain?’ he said again, as a question.
‘Did it rain? Not yesterday.’ Kineas looked back at the column breasting the slope. ‘Your people - will they harm us?’
Ataelus slapped his chest. ‘Not for me.’ He grinned. ‘To go find them?’
Kineas pointed. ‘You are going to find them? And come back? Back to us?’
Ataelus nodded. ‘Find for them, come back for you.’
Kineas nodded. ‘I want to keep moving.’ He gestured at the column. ‘Keep moving?’
‘Come back for you,’ said Ataelus, still grinning. He waved at the column, turned his horse and rode off, heading north.
Kineas pulled his horse’s head back towards the column and ambled over to Niceas, who was watching the Scyth ride.
‘He’s found some of his own, and he’s going to meet them. Then he’ll come back. At least, that’s what I think he’s saying.’
Niceas swatted a fly with his hand. ‘More like Ataelus? All in a band? That’ll be exciting. Ares wept - mutter a prayer we don’t annoy them. Look at the fucking tracks!’
Kineas’s eyes followed Niceas’s pointing hand. They were riding over the ground that Ataelus must have spotted, a low trough between two hills that had the prints of hundreds of horses, all moving together. He realized that he was holding his breath.
‘Two hundred horses, easy.’ Niceas swatted at the fly pestering his horse’s neck, caught it and crushed it between his fingers, then flung the corpse of the thing from him in disgust. ‘Better hope they’re friendly, Captain.’
They rode the rest of the day without incident, it was a sunny, pleasant day on the plains. Water was sparser than Kineas had expected and with Ataelus gone, he had to use Lykeles as a scout for a camp. He came back late, near dusk.
‘Nothing but the beach,’ he said. ‘There’s a trickle of water coming in - enough to water us and the horses if we don’t foul it. It’s not much. I’ve been fifteen stades.’
Kineas nodded. ‘See any tracks?’
Lykeles nodded. ‘We’re following them, like as not. Next ridge over - it’s like the path to a horse fair.’
It was near dark by the time they dismounted. The tents bloomed immediately; the horses were hobbled close in. Antigonus and Laertes took first watch immediately and stayed mounted.
The slaves collected driftwood on the beach for a fire while Kineas debated with himself. A fire was a clear signal for many miles, especially on the shore of the bay. On the other hand, Ataelus seemed confident that his people were no threat. And yet - Ataelus was a barbarian, for all his qualities.
Nonetheless, Kineas gave Arni the nod and watched him use a steel to raise sparks on charred linen for the fire. On balance, two hundred horses’ worth of bow-wielding Scythians would obliterate them if it came to that, a force so strong compared with his own that it really wasn’t worth worrying about.
As the flames rose, however, he watched them and worried anyway.
Niceas had put him on watch with Ajax at dawn. Ajax didn’t avoid him any more, but he was distant, careful, different from the eager youth of the first mornings. On the other hand, he knew his business now, and he posted himself on a low ridge above the beach without the exchange of a word. Kineas curried the horses. There were twenty-eight of them, a good string for twelve men and three slaves. He curried his charger first and then his riding horse, then Niceas’s horses, and then all the other chargers. Diodorus was up by then. He woke the slaves and roused the fire and then lent a hand to the horses. They were all up, the work done, their cloaks rolled and the baggage loaded before the sun’s chariot was full over the rim of the world. The beach stretched away in a curve for a dozen stades, and Niceas elected to follow it. He wanted to cross a decent stream and get water for the horses. Water was his current worry. He waved to Ajax on the ridge above them, who waved back. Lykeles left the column and rode to join the young man and the pair of them flanked the column as they rode along the beach.
They crossed two tiny rivulets in the sand, too easily fouled by the first horses to reach them. By the third, he was more careful, sending dismounted men to lead their mounts one at a time to drink, digging a pit in the sand for flow and letting it fill. It still wasn’t a good drink. He sent Laertes riding up the beach for water. It felt odd to be so worried when the hillsides were damp between tufts of grass and their flank was covered by the sea, but the smaller horses were already flagging.
Laertes returned at noon. ‘Decent sized river at the bottom of the bay. Plenty of water, fresh as fresh. Lots of hoof marks, too.’
‘Good job.’ Kineas rode back along the column. ‘Right, no lunch, gentlemen. We’ll push through.’
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