Diodorus paused, and allowed the pause to lengthen. ‘It is too bad they do not know us, because if they did, none of them would have allowed this to come about.’ He waited for Eumenes to finish his translation. ‘A year ago, I heard Satrax say this when Macedon drew near.’ He paused again, and in good Sakje, he said, ‘Let them feel the weight of our hooves.’
Around the fire, Olbian and Sindi and Sakje shrilled their war cries together. Diodorus turned to Kineas. ‘Lead us against the foe,’ he said.
Kineas rose. ‘I propose that we rescue Srayanka,’ he said. Forty voices bellowed agreement. Kineas raised his hands for silence. ‘It will require patience and discipline, like the campaign against the Getae, and luck, like all war.’
The circle of forty bellowed approval.
Kineas turned to Qares, the queen of the Massagetae’s messenger. ‘We will come to the muster. Srayanka has given oath to it, as has Prince Lot of the Sauromatae. But first we must do what we can to rescue our lady.’
Qares shook his head. ‘You may be too late, and come only to see the crows feast.’
Kineas nodded. ‘It may be as you say. But without Srayanka, we would never have come east. Tell your queen that we come, and the Sauromatae come — after we have tried our best to rescue Srayanka.’
Qares looked around the circle and chose to be silent.
‘I want to send scouts south,’ Kineas said. He pointed to Ataelus. ‘Ataelus will go east to the Massagetae with Qares.’ He nodded to Philokles with his chin. ‘Philokles will take a patrol south to Alexander,’ he said, and their eyes met. In his friend’s face, Kineas read distaste — and acceptance. With his Spartan education and his looks, Philokles could walk right into any mercenary unit in Alexander’s army and be accepted.
‘And I will ask Darius to ride to Spitamenes,’ he said.
Darius raised his eyes and looked first at Philokles and then at Kineas. He nodded, but his nod was hesitant.
Kineas’s eyes went back to the circle. ‘We will move south into the valley of the Oxus, staying concealed from everyone except the Sauromatae to the best of our ability. Ataelus assures me that this can be done. There we will await the reports of our scouts. One of the three will get us news of Srayanka. Only then will we act. Until then, there will be no raids, no private acts of revenge.’ His eyes left the Greeks and went to Parshtaevalt and the Sakje clan leaders. Young Bain, the wildest of the chiefs, met his eye.
‘I mean you, Bain,’ Kineas said. ‘If you raid without permission, you will be cast out.’
Bain glared. ‘Will we have revenge?’ he asked.
Kineas nodded. ‘I promise it,’ he said.
Bain rose to his feet. ‘I, Bain, the Bow of the West, swear not to raise my hand until the scouts return.’
The other chiefs, men and women, nodded approval.
The next morning, Ataelus, Philokles and Darius all rode forth from the riverside camp with retinues of tribesmen, guides and strings of horses. Kineas was left to sit beside the river, drilling his cavalry and gnawing his cheek with worry by day and dreaming of war and disaster and death by night.
After a week, Lot’s outriders came into camp and the two groups merged. The grass was too far gone where the Sakje had camped and both tribes moved north and west along the river. Their scouts found swathes of trampled grass and the passage of thousands of hooves on the main trade road, which crossed the Oxus just north of the Polytimeros.
The Sakje were moving east.
Kineas pressed on east for five days and then rested his Sakje and his Olbians, with Lot a day’s march away, closer to the bank of the Oxus. Their horse herds were too large to allow them to camp together easily when the grass was sparse, although there was a constant traffic both ways, a traffic in which Leon and Mosva played a role. The war and the trek had made for intermarriage and friendship bonds, and Kineas had seen that the tribes were not so much racial as customary, and when a family preferred one chief over another, they moved their horses to his herd and joined it.
The next night, the whole force was united on the banks of the Oxus. Where their horse herds mingled, brown water flowed in a watercourse three times as wide as the early summer stream, which divided and then reunited in twenty channels, creating thousands of islands, some covered in grass, others in trees. The smell of honeysuckle and briar rose flooded the senses, and the sound of ten thousand horses cropping the rich grass of the riverside meadows drowned out all other noise. At night, tamarisk fires smelled like cedar of Lebanon. All the water tasted of mud.
He used his new-found authority with the Sakje to select the best warriors from among all the clans and tribes that had followed Srayanka. He placed them together in a company of two hundred under Bain. Bain was a superb warrior and that made him a Sakje leader. Kineas would rather have had Parshtaevalt to command the picked men, but he was the chosen leader of the Cruel Hands and Kineas needed him there.
Bain did not take naturally to drill, but he did take to command, and Diodorus, who had worked with both adolescents and barbarians, quickly let the young knight know that his position of command rested on his ability to keep his riders interested in the Greek drills.
‘They’ll never be very pretty,’ Andronicus said. He was working into Niceas’s role as the command hyperetes. Every time Kineas heard his Gaulish Greek at his elbow, he missed Niceas, but Andronicus had the skills to do the job. ‘But they already use the wedge, and they can rally on the trumpet call, and those two skills will win battles.’
Diodorus had grander plans, as he showed Kineas the next afternoon. Two troops of the Olbians formed up with Bain’s Sakje in line behind them. At a trumpet signal, the Sakje began to fire arrows over the Olbians, who lunged forward into a charge, supported by the volleys of arrows coming over their heads.
Diodorus rode back to Kineas and pulled off his helmet. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Like the hippotoxotai in our father’s time.’
Kineas had noted that Barzes, a Hyrkanian they had picked up at Namastopolis, had lost his horse to a friendly arrow. He pointed this out. ‘If the Sakje get a surprise — if you slam into an unexpected obstacle, or your charge falls short — you get to eat a lot of your own arrows.’
‘Don’t be a stick,’ Diodorus said. ‘It’ll change cavalry warfare.’
Kineas shrugged. ‘You’re wily Odysseus,’ he said. Then he grinned. ‘Looks good to me.’
Diodorus smiled. ‘If I’m Odysseus,’ he said, ‘I suppose you’re Agamemnon.’
Kineas made a face. ‘Ouch,’ he said.
With Lot’s picked men and his own cavalry, he had almost eight hundred veterans of last year’s campaign. He drilled them, amusing the Sakje and boring the Sauromatae, teaching them a few simple trumpet commands, wedge and rhomboid, how to charge and how to rally quickly, until they were all on the verge of revolt, and then he gave them two days of feast and squandered the remaining grain on feeding the chargers.
Samahe came in with word that Lot’s western scouts had made contact with Coenus. He was far away beyond the Salt Hills, but he was across the desert and he already had an escort of Sauromatae. Word of his approach did more for the Olbians than a hundred speeches, because he brought gold for their pay and wine, as well as news of home.
Samahe was covered with dust and the smell of horse sweat preceded her into Srayanka’s wagon by several heartbeats. Kineas gave her a cup of wine, which she consumed with the satisfaction of a connoisseur.