Heron told off troopers, who looked afraid. He rubbed his forehead and allowed his bronze Boeotian helmet to dangle on its cheek strap. ‘I prefer to be called Eumeles,’ he said. ‘At least in front of my men.’
Kineas smothered annoyance. Heron took himself very seriously, but when he wasn’t acting like an ephebe with his first lover, he was becoming a fine officer. ‘Very well, Eumeles,’ Kineas said.
The Sakje host sat silently at a distance.
Prince Lot took Kineas’s arm. He spoke quickly, emphatically, gesturing at Marthax in the opposite line.
Ataelus kneed his horse forward and translated. ‘For saying, Marthax not king. Give horses, Marthax for being king. You for making him king.’ Ataelus nodded.
The girl laughed. ‘You don’t want to be the one who makes Marthax king of the Sakje, do you?’
Kineas sat and cursed, but he didn’t want to offend Srayanka. He wished she was there to advise him.
The two forces watched each other for an hour, and then the Sakje began to trickle away. They had discipline when they needed it, but Marthax’s force was not as unified or as singular of purpose as Kineas had feared. Before his eyes, men and women rode off, collected their camps and departed — small lords first and then great lords. In three hours, Marthax had just two thousand horsemen.
At that point, Kineas ordered his line to form column. He briefed his officers — Memnon and Philokles for the foot, Diodorus and Heron and Lot for the cavalry. They were careful and slow — forming a hollow square from a line was not child’s play — and they marched with the spears on the outside and the cavalry in the middle with the wounded and the baggage.
It was late afternoon when Kineas began to believe he had broken contact. He knew how quickly Marthax could be on him if he wanted to move. The rain had started again, thunderclouds racing over the plains and pausing to soak the whole column and fill the river over its banks, so that brown water ran among the trunks of trees and washed more bodies off the battlefield, the ugly, bloated things passing down the river next to them.
‘The glory of battle,’ Philokles said by his side. He was watching two bodies bob in the current.
Kineas had halted his horse on a rise, just twenty stades south of the great bend. Philokles stepped out of the ranks of the phalanx to stand with him. In the distance, half a dozen Sauromatae girls sat their horses in a rough skirmish line on a river bluff, watching their back-trail.
Philokles pulled off his helmet and ran his free hand through his hair. Kineas ignored the Spartan’s mood. ‘If Xenophon had had a dozen Sauromatae girls, he’d never have had to worry about scouting.’
‘And he’d never have written Anabasis,’ Philokles said. His voice was flat.
Kineas laughed — his first real laugh of the day. ‘I’ve spent all day thinking about Xenophon,’ he said.
‘Because we have to get to Olbia alive?’ Philokles asked. ‘Marthax won’t follow us. His army is going home.’
‘I saw,’ Kineas said.
‘You saw, my friend, but did you think? Marthax went to council to represent the faction that demanded that the war be over. Now he pays the price — even if he wanted to fight us, or Srayanka, he couldn’t.’
Kineas hadn’t thought of it that way. ‘I knew I kept you around for a reason, Spartan.’
‘I’m an Olbian citizen now,’ Philokles said. ‘Don’t you forget it.’
They stood together as the army passed, on their way home at last, and the rain fell.
3
The late summer rain flattened the sea of grass and filled the rivers to a depth that only a mounted man could cross, even at the best fords. It washed away the blood and carried the glut of corpses at the Ford of the River God down to the sea, where the people of the city of Olbia watched them float by, bloated, gross and stinking. Being merchants, most of them kept a rough count of what they saw, and smiled grimly.
The rain fell for days, so that every hearth was wet and there was no place in a Greek house that was really dry, as woollen blankets and woollen tunics clung on to the damp. Smoke rising over the city told of fitful fires from sodden wood, and the scent of woodsmoke competed with the reek of wet wool and the underlying itch of wet manure.
Those who counted the corpses in the river looked at the gates and the roads beyond and wondered what had transpired on the sea of grass. They waited for word from their brothers, fathers, sons and husbands, lovers — virtually the whole free male population. A few had floated by. Women wept. Men looked at the citadel above them, with its Macedonian garrison, and their curses rose to heaven.
As the days passed and the rain continued to fall, the curses flowed like the rain. The imprecations began to flow by day and by night. A pair of Macedonians — farm boys, really, for all their airs — were caught in the agora and beaten by slaves. The garrison commander, Dion, responded savagely, throwing two-thirds of his garrison into the market at dawn and killing a dozen men, including a citizen.
After that, the city was quiet. Dion told the tyrant that he had the city cowed.
The tyrant called him a fool, and drank more unwatered wine.
Next evening, another Macedonian farm boy had his throat cut. The fools that did it dumped his body at the gate of the citadel. Dion gave his orders — in the morning, he’d make them rue it.
The rain had made the city wall slick. The men climbing along the wall in the damp darkness were grateful for the heavy hemp rope with knots every span, and even more grateful for the strong arms of their friends and slaves at the top of the wall. They were up in a few terror-filled moments — embraced — and gone into the dark.
‘We’re too far from the gate,’ an older man said. His recent wounds pained him, and his temper — never really quiet — was savage. ‘If they have archers on the walls, we’re all dead.’
The men around him were leaning forward, keen as hunters, listening for any sound from the city below them. The nearest walls were two stades away. Every man stood at the head of his horse, both hands up, ready to stop a whinny or a neigh.
‘Shut up,’ the hyperetes said. ‘Watch for the torches.’
‘They ought to be in there by now.’
‘Caught on the wall, maybe,’ someone else said.
‘ Shut the fuck up. ’ The hyperetes’ whisper carried all the savagery of his full voice.
Feet pounding through the lower city — too much noise, and no help for it. Wood slamming on stone as a woman leaned over her balcony to see what the fuss was and, seeing bronze, slammed her shutters home.
Breath hoarse, legs pumping, feet splashing through the wet ordure of the city without care for the slime. Shields pounding away against backs, the straps cutting a man’s wind and leaving bruises on his shoulders. Eyes straining to follow the man in front, turn after turn, so that the long file of men wound like a worm through the slave quarter where most free men went only to get a quick fuck against a house, if that. Not this time.
The citadel — another wet wall of rock towering into the dark. And no ropes. No friends inside.
Of course, that was not exactly true.
The postern gate was open.
Dion could feel that the city below him was restless. He expected resistance. He was glad of it. Time to clean house.
‘Follow me, boys,’ he said to his men, a quarter taxeis of raw Macedonian recruits — just enough professionals to act as file-closers. There’d been talk — ugly talk — about the number of Macedonian floaters coming down the river, but he wouldn’t hear it. Dion had his orders.
As his duty men opened the citadel’s main gate, he turned to address those behind him. ‘Kill everyone you find in the streets,’ he said. His voice carried well in the rain, so that even the men pressed flat against the gate towers could hear him clearly. Their faces would have made studies for statues of Furies.