He couldn’t hear Eumenes and he couldn’t see what was happening and his imagination was worse than the reality as the dust swirled and thickened. He clenched his reins and worried, riding back and forth on his ridge. He watched the people watering their horses and tried to urge them to go faster, to cut through the crowds on the riverbank, to get back in battle order.
‘Eumenes can handle a fight with barbarians,’ Philokles said.
‘Not if he’s badly outnumbered.’ Kineas shook his head. ‘Athena, be with us in our hour of need.’ Kineas turned to Diodorus. ‘Should we send him reinforcements?’
Diodorus shook his head. ‘Let’s wait for his report. Ares, I’m getting sick of this.’
Just when Kineas was preparing to order Diodorus into the scrub, Eumenes returned, riding across the ford with six empty saddles. He was injured, blood all down one booted leg, and his face was pinched with anger and pain. ‘The scrub is full of them,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of them. Sogdians, I think — I don’t know whether they’re Craterus’s or Spitamenes’ — who in Hades can tell?’ He shook his head. ‘We rode into an ambush. I’m sorry. It is my fault.’
Kineas watched. ‘Samahe says they’re from Craterus.’ The Sakje, their mounts watered, were already clearing the Oxus and returning to their positions. The Olbians were slower, and the heavily armoured Sauromatae were used to having maiden archers to do this sort of thing while they baked like ovens. They were slow. Kineas cursed the bad luck of it all — and the loss of the remounts and manpower that the horse herds and the wagon columns had taken. Then he reached out and clasped Eumenes’ hand. ‘In war, we lose men. We carry the responsibility. ’ In his head, his words sounded unbearably pompous. ‘You did the job I sent you to do. Did you hurt them?’
Eumenes shook his head, at the edge of a sob. ‘I walked into the ambush,’ he said. ‘They were waiting in the scrub. I should know better. ’ Sullenly, he said, ‘I hurt them. I pushed them out of the scrub and back up the bank, but they’ll be back.’ He looked across the river, where the dust of the skirmish hung in the still air, and wiped his brow. He’d lost the brow band that held his hair.
Philokles reached into his shoulder pack and produced another. ‘Let me tie your hair, lad,’ he said kindly.
Eumenes continued to slouch, looking at the ground in misery. ‘I should have done better,’ he said again.
Kineas rubbed his chin. ‘Sit straight and suck it up,’ he said.
Stung, Eumenes sat straight.
‘That’s better,’ Kineas said. He nodded. ‘Let Philokles look at your wound, and then back to your troop and get the rest of the horses watered. Mourn the dead later. Help me win this thing now.’
Eumenes saluted. He dismounted and let Philokles tie his hair and look at the cut on his thigh. Before he could ride away, Srayanka rode up.
‘Let me send Parshtaevalt,’ she said. ‘We need to clear it before the fucking Sogdae make attacks on our Sauromatae.’
Kineas started to refuse. Then he looked at Philokles and Diodorus. ‘I dislike breaking up my force,’ he said.
Eumenes pulled his helmet off, his face red with exertion. He spoke cautiously, conscious of his defeat. ‘I took casualties trying to rattle them,’ he said. ‘I think that…’ He hesitated, and then drove on. ‘I think Srayanka is right.’
Diodorus nodded. ‘It wouldn’t take many of their arrows falling on the Sauromatae to cause trouble,’ he said. ‘There’s something going on with them that I don’t like.’
Kineas waited another moment, thoughts racing like a galloping horse, and then exhaled. ‘Go!’ Kineas said to Srayanka. She turned and waved to Parshtaevalt, who raised his bow and pointed one end of it at certain horsemen, and they were away — a hundred riders vanishing into the tamarisk scrub in the Oxus valley. They seemed to ride impossibly fast for the broken ground, passing through Ataelus’s prodromoi in their picket line. Samahe, visible in her red and gold, raised her bow in salute as the Sakje rode by, and Parshtaevalt whooped.
A flight of birds burst from the foliage on the far side of the river and then ten Sakje were up the bank. They were hunkered down on their horse’s necks, and they were fast, flowing over the ground more like running cats than men and women on horses.
What if the scrub was full of Sogdae? Where was Craterus? Was he already scouting another ford on the Oxus? Indecision or, to call the cat by its true name, fear moved through Kineas’s guts like the flux. Sweat from his helmet dripped down his brow and then down his face like tears, and he could smell the dirt on his chinstrap, which stank like old cheese. He prayed for wind. He prayed that he had guessed well. He peered into the gathering dust. The light was going as the afternoon grew old.
A chorus of thin shouts on the afternoon breeze, and riders swept out of the farthest foliage two stades away across the muddy river, firing as they came, ripping shots at the Sakje, who turned and fled as if their horses had neither momentum nor bones — they fled like a school of Aegean fish before the onrush of a predator, a porpoise or a shark. The leaders of the Sogdae pressed the handful of Sakje hard, and one man mounted on a big roan rode flat out for Parshtaevalt, visible because his horse harness was studded with gold. The Sakje chief turned his body an impossible three-quarters rotation and shot straight back over the rump of his horse into his pursuer, catching him in the belly and robbing him of life. Parshtaevalt then slowed his horse and caught the dead man’s reins, shouting his war cry. He brandished his bow while a dozen Sogdians bore down on him and another handful shot at him. He grinned, waved his bow and rode off, again shrieking his war cry so that it rang off the sides of the Oxus valley while arrows fell around him and all the ridges rang with cheers.
The Sogdians, angry now, pounded after the handful of Sakje, more and more riders emerging from the brush to avenge their fallen warrior. They were close on the tails of the Scythian horses when the other seventy Sakje appeared out of the river bed and fired a single volley of arrows and charged home under their own lethal rain, emptying a dozen saddles in as many heartbeats.
Shattered, the Sogdians broke and ran. The Sakje pursued them hard, right up the bank, and dust rose around them as their hooves pounded the dry earth. After a few breaths, they came back, whooping and waving their bows and spears. Parshtaevalt rode back to where he’d dropped his man and, heedless of the stray shafts of the remaining Sogdians, slipped from his horse and cut the hair and neck skin from his downed enemy before leaping on to his pony. He collected his riders with a wave and then they were back among the officers in the river bed.
Parshtaevalt’s hands were bloody to the elbow, and rivulets of blood had run all the way down his torso where he had raised his arms in the air to show his trophies. ‘Too long have I been the nursemaid!’ he said in his excellent Greek. ‘Aiyeee!’
Srayanka kissed him, and most of the rest of the Sakje pressed forward to touch him.
Kineas was grinning. ‘Was that Achilles?’ he asked.
Philokles met his grin with one of his own. ‘I have seldom seen anything so beautiful,’ Philokles said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘Praise to Ares that I was allowed to see so brave an act. Ah!’ He sang:
Ares, exceeding in strength, chariot-rider, golden-helmed,
Doughty in heart, shield-bearer, saviour of cities, harnessed in bronze,
Strong of arm, unwearying, mighty with the spear,
O defence of Olympus, father of warlike Victory,
Ally of Themis, stern governor of the rebellious,
Leader of righteous men, sceptred king of manliness,
Who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets
In their sevenfold courses through the aether
Wherein your blazing steeds ever bear you