‘It looks like a great deal more work than my spear,’ Philokles said.
Kineas didn’t want to speak. It was the first time Philokles had shown interest in anything — much less humour.
Darius fitted a new fletching and put the shaft into the ground with the other six he’d made. ‘Hunting arrows are the hardest,’ he said.
‘Why?’ Kineas asked, to keep him talking, and to keep Philokles interested.
Darius shrugged the shrug of the young. ‘War arrows you never get back,’ he said. ‘I don’t even put nocks on them — I just cut a notch into the shaft and wrap a little cord around the base of the notch. But hunting arrows — you hope to get them back. And you shoot them farther, at harder targets. They need to be well made. My father always told us to make our own and not trust other men’s arrows.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Why the feathers, though?’
Darius shook his head. ‘You Greeks always ask why,’ he said. ‘Ask a real fletcher. I just do as my father taught me.’
Kineas laughed. Philokles looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Kineas shook his head. ‘There’s something profound there,’ he said. ‘But I’m too full of beef to get my tongue around it.’
Philokles laughed and punched his shoulder.
Across the Sarnios, flowers bloomed, and the Sauromatae girls made themselves wreaths and wore them as they rode, Mosva looking like Artemis. The hunters shot deer in the folds of the hills, and men, when they had water, sang songs to Demeter and her swift-footed daughter returned from exile. Darius shot a deer on the first day of hunting and was insufferably proud.
Despite Lot’s prediction, it took them a further ten days from the Sarnios, and it was one of those happy times that soldiers remember when they are old — seldom the boredom or the cold or the heat, but the beautiful spring on the plains and the Sauromatae girls riding along the flanks in fields of flowers. Meat was plentiful and horses that had been near death suddenly grew strong.
A month after leaving Hyrkania, the hills of Dahia were visible through the heat shimmer on the eastern horizon. Men grumbled and openly wondered about their wages, and they ogled the Sauromatae girls when they stripped their tunics to ride bare-chested in the spring sun.
Diodorus pulled his horse up next to Kineas. ‘The troops are better,’ he said. ‘Ares, it’s good to be clear of cursed Hyrkania!’
Kineas nodded and looked at his friend, recalled from a daydream of worry about Srayanka.
Diodorus glanced at Philokles, who was riding alone, lost in thought. ‘Is he better?’ Diodorus asked.
Kineas nodded. ‘I think so. Are you?’
Diodorus shrugged. ‘I’m a soldier. I’ve seen a sack before. I-’ he began, and fell silent.
Seeing them together, Philokles pushed his heavy stallion into a trot and the horse brought him up level with the other two. Philokles would never be a natural rider, but two years in the saddle had improved him.
‘You two look earnest,’ he said.
‘We’re talking about the troops,’ Diodorus said. ‘And morale.’
Philokles nodded. ‘They’re back to grumbling,’ the Spartan said. ‘Always a good sign.’
‘You’re better?’ Kineas asked.
Philokles shrugged. ‘I’m different,’ he said.
Kineas watched his cavalry riding by. ‘They’re all different,’ he said. ‘I’m different too.’
‘You let her live,’ Philokles said. ‘I have no moment of mercy to serve as a sop to my conscience. I just killed men until my arm was too tired to kill any more.’
‘I let her live for pretty much the same reason,’ Kineas said. ‘There was more fatigue in it than mercy.’
‘This is my last campaign,’ Philokles said. ‘I love you, but I cannot be a beast for ever.’
Kineas nodded slowly. ‘It was to have been Niceas’s last campaign,’ he said. ‘He asked me to buy him a brothel in Athens.’
‘Perhaps I’ll be the next to die, then,’ Philokles said, and laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t want a brothel, though.’ He looked over the plain. ‘It was merciful, but letting her live will cost us in the end. She can tell Alexander-’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You and I have both been spies, brother. The world is so full of spies,’ he gave Philokles half a smile, ‘that one more won’t be a ruffle on the grass.’ He looked out over the plains, the sea of grass, almost the same as the sea where he had met Srayanka except for the brush of purple brown on the far horizon that betokened a great range of mountains. Wind whispered in the new blades, rippling the green between pale and dark like the footprints of giants racing across the steppe.
‘Somewhere out on the sea of grass, Alexander is waiting,’ he said.
Diodorus shook his head. ‘Whatever he’s doing, he’s not waiting.’
Kineas nodded. If I don’t find Srayanka, I won’t care, he thought.
Two days on, and they met the outriders of the Sauromatae host, pickets at the edge of the green hills who watched their approach and cheered their lord, home from the wars. Lot rode at the front of the column and his young women rode along the flanks, bragging of their exploits and showing the heads of the men they’d killed. The column crested the first ridge and was able to look down into the caldera of an ancient volcano, with rich soil to the far wall several stades distant and a camp of yurts and tents that filled the plain on the far side of a small lake.
Then they feasted for a day, resting their horses, and listened to news of the world. Truce had failed. Alexander was at war with Spitamenes, and Spitamenes was laying siege to Marakanda, while Alexander tried to relieve his hard-pressed garrisons in the north along the Jaxartes. All the tribes had been called to gather on the Jaxartes to resist him if he tried to force a crossing, with mid-summer named for the muster.
And the ‘westerners’, Srayanka’s Sakje, were camped four days’ travel away, at a bend of the Oxus.
It was all Kineas could do to remain patient. In his mind, he could see the shape of the campaign — the Sauromatae chieftains sketched him the lie of the land, the hills and the desert and the two great rivers that flowed through the high plains.
Lot and his chiefs drew their world in the soft loam of the caldera floor, carefully building the Sogdian mountains to the east and the Bactrian highlands to the south, so that the mountains formed something like a curling wave design, or a cupped hand seen in profile. At the base of the palm was Merv, an ancient trade city that lay on the Margus river at the edge of the southern mountain range. Alexander had a garrison at Merv. At the tip of the curling wave lay Marakanda — the greatest city of the plains, also on the edge of mountains. Marakanda lay on the Polytimeros, a river that flowed out of the Sogdian mountains.
Between Merv and Marakanda flowed the mighty Oxus, the greatest river of the east. The valley of the Oxus passed between two ranges of mountains, rising far to the east in the highlands of Bactria, and it emptied into the Lake of the Sea of Grass, a distant body of water in the far north that Lot had seen and of which Leon had only heard rumours.
The far eastern border of the Sakje lay at the Jaxartes, which ran a complex course like a writhing snake, rising in the eastern Sogdian mountains and also emptying into the Lake of the Sea of Grass, roughly parallel to the Oxus, on a diagonal course from south-east to north-west. The land between the two great rivers was the land of the Massagetae, and the queen was rallying her army north of Marakanda on the Jaxartes, so rumour had it.
Kineas found their descriptions of the terrain bewildering, even with Leon to help him chart it and sort out the complexities. The two great rivers — the Oxus and the Jaxartes — seemed to rise close to each other and empty into the same body of water, yet they ran hundreds, sometimes thousands, of stades apart. He found it difficult to get some notion of distance out of the Sauromatae. This was their home, and the vast reach of grass — here green and deep, there patchy like the wool on a sick sheep — defined their world. They had ten alien words for the quality of grass and none for swimming.