Kineas waved for Ataelus to join him. With the exception of his abortive attempts to learn the Sakje tongue over the winter, Kineas hadn’t seen much of the Scyth. He gave the man a smile.
Ataelus looked tense. Kineas couldn’t remember seeing the man look so reserved. ‘Will we find the Sakje camp today?’ he asked the scout.
Ataelus made a face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Second hour after the sun is high, unless they were for moving.’ He didn’t look as if he relished the prospect.
Kineas rubbed his new beard. ‘Well, then. Lead on.’
Ataelus looked back at him gravely. ‘The lady — for waiting two weeks of you.’ He sighed heavily.
‘Do you mean she may have left?’ Kineas said in alarm. Ataelus’s Greek had improved considerably over the winter. His vocabulary was much bigger — his grammar was about the same. He could still be difficult to understand.
‘Not for leaving,’ Ataelus said heavily. ‘For waiting.’ He shook his reins and touched his riding whip to his pony’s flanks, and he was gone over the grass, leaving Kineas to worry.
Philokles joined Kineas as the column started forward. ‘What was that about?’
Kineas waved dismissively. ‘Our Scyth is in a state because we’re late.’
‘Hmm,’ said the Spartan. ‘We are late. And the lady doesn’t strike me as the sort of commander who likes to wait.’
Kineas rode out of the column, signalled to Leucon to join him, and barked out a string of commands that set the whole troop into an open skirmish line two stades wide. When the rough line was moving well, he rode back to Philokles, who as usual took no part in the manoeuvres.
‘She’ll understand that I was delayed,’ Kineas said. ‘So will the king.’
The Spartan pursed his lips. ‘Listen, Hipparch. If you were waiting for her, and you’d sat for two weeks while she drilled her cavalry…’ He raised an eyebrow.
Kineas was watching the skirmish line, which was sticking together pretty well. ‘I don’t-’
‘You don’t think of her as another commander. You think of her as a Greek girl with some equine skills. Better get over that, brother. She’s had to put up with two weeks of ribbing from her troopers about waiting like a mare in heat for her stallion — that’s my guess. Look how well you handle our teasing.’
The left half of the skirmish line was bunching up as the young troopers chatted while they rode. Riding with a horse length between each file pair took practice, and the line was starting to fall apart.
‘Sound HALT,’ Kineas bellowed. To Philokles, he said, ‘She may not even want me.’
The Spartan didn’t blink. ‘That’s a whole different problem — but if she didn’t want you, chances are Ataelus wouldn’t be looking so worried.’
Kineas watched the outer arms of his skirmish line galloping to the centre to form on their commander. ‘As always, I’d treasure your advice.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Make the same apologies to her that you’d make to a man.’
Kineas scratched his beard. ‘Kick me when I go wrong.’ He cantered for the command group to discuss the skirmish line.
They saw the first scouts by mid-morning — dark centaurs on the horizon who vanished between hoof beats. They found the camp in the afternoon, as Ataelus had predicted. Kineas’s stomach turned over at the sight of the wagons, and he clenched the barrel of his horse between his knees until the animal began to curvet and fidget. There were a few riders at the edge of the camp, and a mounted group was gathered at the edge of the river.
The riders came to them at a gallop — two young men resplendent in red leather and gold ornament flashing in the sun, who raced by the head of the column, waved, and raced off again yipping like dogs. They ran their horses right in among the crowd at the edge of the water.
Kineas led his column through the tall grass to the edge of the camp and ordered it to halt. He sat at the head of the column, feeling foolish because he didn’t know what to do. He’d expected that she’d come out and meet him. Instead, he saw that there was some sort of archery contest going on.
‘Shooting with bows,’ Ataelus said at his side. ‘Lady shoots next. See?’
Kineas saw. How had he missed her? Srayanka was seated on a grey mare at the edge of the water with a bow in her hand, her jacket half off so that one breast was bare in the warm spring sun, the sleeve falling free, one shoulder bare to the gold gorget at her neck. Her hair was bound in two heavy braids and as she turned her head, he saw her heavy brows and the focus of her expression.
That’s what she looks like, he thought. Yes.
‘Wait here,’ he said to Niceas. He motioned to Ataelus to attend him and touched his horse with his whip — her whip — and cantered across the grass to her.
A man was shooting. As Kineas reined in, the man kneed his horse into motion, first a canter and then a gallop along the flat grass at the water’s edge. He leaned out over his horse’s neck and shot an arrow into a bundle of grass. A second arrow appeared in his fingers and he shot it point blank, leaning so far down off his pony that the head of the arrow almost brushed the target as he released, and then he was past, turning in the saddle with a third arrow nocked, and he drew and released in one smooth motion. The last shot hung in the wind for a moment, the arrow visible as a black streak, before burying itself in the ground an arm’s length beyond the target. The other Sakje hooted and cheered.
Kineas looked back to Srayanka, and she took a deep breath, her whole body focused on the target of grass the way a hunting dog would watch a wounded stag. Like a man, Philokles had said. Her visible breast and the line of her muscular shoulder to her neck were like a Phidian status of Artemis, but the Athenian sculptor would never have known a woman’s face to have such an expression — set and hard with purpose.
Kineas stayed silent.
Without another glance she tapped her heels against her mare, and the horse leaped straight from a stand into a gallop. Her first arrow was in the air with the horse’s first full stride. She had three more in the fingers of her draw hand, and she flipped one like a conjuror, drew and shot, leaned out close to the target just as the man had done, her whole body at an impossible angle to the horse, her braided hair straight out behind her head, the muscles of her arm standing out with the strain of drawing the bow, her hips and legs one with her mount.
Kineas couldn’t breathe.
She put the last arrow on her bow and turned back so fast that her body seemed to rotate free of her waist and shot again, her arrow invisible until it punched through the grass target. And then, as the horsemen began to cheer, she drew a fifth arrow from the gorytos at her waist, whirled again and loosed, her upper body straining to the heavens like a priestess offering a prayer to Apollo. The arrow lofted up and up into the blue sky and hung as if caught by the god’s hand at the top of its arc before plummeting to the earth where it transfixed the bundle of grass. Before the arrow hit, she had slowed her horse as she turned to be greeted by the roars of all the warriors and the Greeks up the ridge.
The sound went on and on, though there were just fifty or so of them, with a high crescendo of screams — yeeyeeyee — from the women, and bass barking from the men. Several stepped forward, raising their hands in obvious congratulations, and an older woman — her trumpeter — rode up close and embraced her.
She handed the trumpeter her bow, turned and put her arm down into her sleeve and shrugged the jacket back over her naked shoulder. She walked her horse toward Kineas empty handed. He was still bellowing his appreciation like a good guest at a symposium. Behind him, the other Olbians were cheering, too.
He fell silent as she rode closer. Her eyebrows were just as he remembered, her nose long and Greek, her forehead clear and high. How could he have forgotten how large her eyes were? Or their brown flecks within the dark blue?