Tyrant (37 page)

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Authors: Christian Cameron

BOOK: Tyrant
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Kineas watched them drill with Cleitus and half a dozen city gentlemen. He was unstinting in his praise, whether to his own men or to Memnon and the city officers when they approached at the end of the drill.
 
Memnon stopped and leaned on his spear. He had been charging about the field, black cloak flapping behind him, correcting faults and praising virtue, and now he panted like a dog. ‘I’ve got to get them out of all that armour,’ he said. He pointed to a group of young men at drill. ‘They keep all the old traditions here - the youngest, best fighters make a select company to cover the flank. I’ll try to keep them from wearing it.’
 
Kineas watched the older men standing in glittering ranks. ‘Depends on what we think they’re for,’ he said.
 
Nicomedes stopped flirting with Ajax and pushed his horse forward. ‘Surely we all know what hoplites are for,’ he said. ‘I used to serve as one myself, you may recall. Before the hipparch forced me to serve on horseback.’
 
Kineas smiled. ‘I gave you the excuse to buy that beautiful blue cloak and that exciting breastplate,’ he said. Then he turned back to Memnon. ‘For dash - or to chase down Thracians - our light-armed hoplites are the thing. But here on the plain . . .’ Here Kineas raised his head to gaze across the snow. He didn’t even know exactly where she was, but she was somewhere out in the endless white. He caught himself. ‘Here it is cavalry country. Armour makes a man braver, and steadies him, and keeps him safe from the javelins and bows.’
 
Memnon rubbed his jaw, which was as black as his cloak. ‘By Zeus, Hipparch, let us never have to face the bandits out in open country. I stood against the boy king at Issus, when his horse came against us. If they’d had bows, none of us would have escaped.’
 
‘Armour might stop the first push of a Macedonian taxeis,’ Kineas said.
 
Memnon curled his lip. ‘Keep my flanks secure, and I’ll stop them dead. These lads may hate the archon like fire hates water - many of them hate me, I dare say, and they’ll hate me worse before spring. But they’re good lads, and every man and boy has done his years in the gymnasium and in the field - real hoplites. Not so many of those left in Greece - most left their bones at Chaeronea. I hear you boned Cleomenes up the arse.’
 
Nicomedes snorted aloud. Cleitus looked away, embarrassed.
 
Memnon winked. ‘Cleomenes is one of the many men in this city who think they would make a good archon.’ He glared at Nicomedes. ‘But he’s more of a boil on the arse than his rivals, and no mistake.’ Memnon nodded to Kineas. ‘If you survive the winter, you’ll know ’em like I do. How’d you arrange for the assembly to make you a citizen? And hipparch?’
 
Kineas shook his head. ‘Cleitus did it. I was as surprised as any.’
 
‘The endless advantages of birth,’ Memnon spat. His face was unreadable behind the shape of his helmet. ‘Antipater is really marching here in the spring?’
 
Kineas nodded. ‘Yes, it is true.’
 
‘This isn’t some trick of the archon’s to keep us all biddable for another season? This is real? And you will fight him?’ Most of the hoplites were watching them.
 
‘Yes,’ Kineas said.
 
‘Why? You were one of the boy king’s men.’ Memnon took Kineas by the hand. His hand was hard as iron, and it held Kineas’s tight, as if to read him for truth.
 
‘I think a god told me to fight.’
Or a woman. Perhaps the gods spoke through her. Or Athena. Or all together.
Kineas knew he had to fight Macedon as clearly as he had ever known anything in his life. Such revelations were divine.
 
Memnon relinquished his hand. ‘I do not honour the gods as much as I should,’ he said. ‘But I would like to fight Macedon again.’ He turned on his heel and walked away across the last blades of autumn grass where it waved above the snow.
 
PART III
 
 
THE TASTE OF BRONZE
 
‘. . . but come, he shall taste the bronze at the point of our spears . . .’
Iliad
, Book 21
 
12
 
T
he sun shone on the first blades of spring grass that waved in the north wind, so that they rocked back and forth like a thousand beckoning fingers. Kineas pulled on his reins and looked back over the column toiling up the ridge that lined the riverbank, following it with his eye down the steep road, past the last files of the column and past the two baggage carts and the donkeys to fields by the city walls, where the whole force of the city’s hoplites could be seen marching. Memnon’s black cloak was a speck in the front rank. Beyond the fields and the mass of men stood the city on the river. The spring sun was warm and the clear yellow light gilded the marble of the temple of Apollo and lit the gold dolphins at the edge of the port with fire. From here, the archon’s citadel stood clear of the walls like an island in a pond.
 
At the boundary ditch, Kineas halted the column and waved to Niceas, who raised a trumpet to his lips. The shrill notes rang clear in the wind, and the long column bunched, heaved, and then formed itself into a compact rhomboid, with Kineas at the tip.
 
Kineas didn’t hide his grin of satisfaction.
 
Kineas trotted the formation across fields that belonged to Nicomedes and then ordered an abrupt change of direction, and the formation obliged - the turn was sloppy, but the rhomboid reformed quickly because, despite confusion, every man knew his place. Kineas raised his hand and Niceas blew the halt.
 
Kineas gave his warhorse a hard pressure with his knees and heels, and the big animal surged out of the formation. Under gentler pressure, the horse turned in a long curve as he accelerated to the gallop, so that Kineas was riding out to the left of his rhomboid and around it, looking for confusion, for error, for fatal weakness.
 
He rode all the way around, and then halted facing them. ‘Sound: Form Line by Troop!’ he called.
 
Many men were moving before Niceas could raise the heavy trumpet to his lips. It was a bad habit - something that needed to be worked on - but the performance of the manoeuvre was adequate. The four troops, each separated by an interval the width of four riders, formed along the edge of the road running north.
 
Again, Kineas didn’t disguise his pleasure. He rode to Diodorus, sitting at the head of his troop, and clasped his hand. ‘Well done,’ he said loudly.
 
Diodorus wasn’t much given to broad grins, but he looked as if his lips might split.
 
While the hoplites marched solidly up the ridge and began to deploy from column into their deep phalanx along the road, Kineas rode along the ranks of the hippeis as if inspecting, but his ride was more a long string of congratulations - troop commanders, hyperetes, individual troopers who had either shown great improvement or had natural skill. The third troop had most of Niceas’s new recruits from Heraclea, and Kineas saluted them as he went by - only six men, but their combined experience had already shown its effect.
 
Then he rode back to the centre of the line and knelt on his stallion’s back - a boy’s trick, but useful when you needed to address troops. The hoplites took the heavy shields off their shoulders and set the rims on the ground, planted the spikes of their spears and leaned on them for comfort.
 
‘Gentlemen of Olbia!’ he called.
 
Horses moved and made sounds, and a few pulled at their reins to be allowed to crop grass, but the men of the city were silent and still. The wind blew warm from the south, drying the ground, and the sun sparkled on bronze and silver and gilt along the ranks.
 
The quiet grew. It wrapped itself around them, a palpable thing, as if they sat in the midst of a bubble of eternity. It was one of those moments men recall by their firesides in old age - the whole scene seemed to be set in crystal.
 
Suddenly, nothing in Kineas’s prepared rhetoric was sufficient to the day. They were magnificent - the hoplites and the hippeis together. He said a prayer to Athena in his heart, and raised his hand, pointing at Olbia.
 
‘There is your city. Here beside you are your fellow citizens, hoplites and hippeis together. Here are your comrades. Look at them! Look to the left, to the right. These are your brothers.’ The words came to him from the air, and his voice carried in the unnatural calm.
 
‘War is coming,’ he said. He looked across the plain to the west, as if Zopryon’s army would appear on cue. ‘The fate of the city is in the hands of the gods. But it is also in your hands - in the hands of every man here.’
 
He looked up and down the ranks, and found that he didn’t have control of his voice. His throat was sore, and his eyes burned, and the image before him wavered and flowed, so that great gaps appeared in the lines of men where they blurred to his tear-filled eyes. He sat quietly, waiting for the moment to pass.
 
‘Zopryon believes that he will have a quick campaign - an easy conquest. I believe that with the help of the gods, we will stop him on the plain of grass and send him back to Macedon. That is why you have given your winter to training. That is why you are standing here rather than tilling your fields.’
 
The silence was still there, and the stillness. It was daunting. The wind from the plain of grass ruffled his horse’s mane, and he could hear the hairs move against each other.
 
‘I have served Macedon,’ he said at last. ‘In Macedon they say that Greece is done. That we love beauty more than war. That we are soft. That our only place is in their empire.’ He raised his voice. ‘But I say, what is more beautiful than this - to serve with your comrades, to stand beside them when the shields ring?’ And quoting the Poet, he said, ‘“My friends, Argives one and all - good, bad and indifferent, for there was never a fight yet, in which all were of equal prowess - there is now work enough, as you very well know, for all of you. See that you none of you turn in flight, daunted by the shouting of the foe, but press forward and keep one another in heart, if it may so be that Olympian Zeus the lord of lightning will grant us to repel our foes, and drive them away from our city.”’
 
The sound of the familiar words, Ajax’s famous speech that schoolboys learned by heart, drew a response, and they cheered - first the hoplites, and then all of them, so that the hoplites banged their shields with their spears and the horsemen’s swords rang against their breastplates - an ominous sound, the cheer of Ares.
 
Kineas wasn’t used to being cheered. He felt the daimon that infected him in combat, so that his chest was full and he felt more alive and he wondered if this was the feeling Alexander had every day.
 
Then he turned his head, embarrassed, and called to Niceas who trotted out of the ranks to him. ‘Sound: All Captains.’
 
Niceas blew the trumpet. The troop commanders and their hyperetes trotted out of the cheering ranks and halted in a neat line.
 
‘Gentlemen,’ Kineas began. He pulled his helmet off and wiped his eyes. Several of the officers did the same.
 
Nicomedes looked around him dry-eyed and said, ‘No wonder they call Greeks emotional.’
 
Memnon walked up in his big black cloak. ‘Good speech.
Fucking
good speech. Let’s go kill something.’
 
Kineas cleared his throat while the other men chuckled. ‘I’m off for the sea of grass. Memnon has the command while I’m away - Diodorus has the command of the hippeis.’ He looked them over. ‘Listen to me, gentlemen. The archon is now a desperate man - he fears this war just about as much as he fears you. I ask you to be careful in what you say or do in the assembly. I ask you not to provoke him in my absence - indeed, I ask you not to provoke him until we’ve seen the back of Zopryon.’

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