‘He’s got a dick instead of a brain,’ Niceas said. He glanced at Leucon. ‘Sorry. I know he’s your friend, but he’s a fool. He had it coming.’
Leucon looked miserable. ‘He’s been my companion since we were boys. He always gets what he wants — hard to change that now.’
Niceas gave a nasty grin. ‘Not that hard,’ he said.
Leucon put his head in his hands. ‘I feel that I’ve failed you, Hipparch. But also — I have to say this — I feel that… that you didn’t need to hit him. He’s a gentleman. No one has hit him since his first tutor.’
Kineas bridled, trying not to react.
Philokles spoke. ‘In Sparta, he could have been killed. On the spot.’
Leucon sat back on his stool, clearly shocked. ‘For a little back-talk? ’
Philokles shrugged. ‘Indiscipline is poison.’
Leucon looked at Eumenes. Eumenes didn’t meet his eye. ‘He’s the kind of bully who would draw a knife in a wine-shop brawl. I’ve seen him do it.’ He looked at Niceas and then back at Leucon. ‘I don’t like him.’
Kineas leaned forward. ‘That’s not at issue. Like or dislike — a commander is above them. I don’t dislike the boy — I hit him because he was disobedient. In my experience disobedience is a plague that starts slowly but spreads rapidly.’ He spread his hands to catch more warmth from the fire, leaned forward so that his elbows could rest on his thighs. He was cold, his knuckle and his shoulder both hurt, and he didn’t want to think of what damage he’d done to relations with Srayanka — or the Sakje. ‘He was offending the Sakje. He offended me. And he disobeyed a direct order.’ Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘I am a hard man. A mercenary. Perhaps your men needed to remember that.’ And then he sighed. ‘I let myself grow angry.’
Leucon looked more bewildered than informed. ‘What will I tell his father?’ he asked, before he walked off into the dark.
Philokles watched him go. ‘I take it Lady Srayanka was unimpressed.’ Kineas nodded. Philokles shook his head. ‘You did the right thing. What else could you do?’
Kineas rubbed his hands together. ‘You’re the philosopher. You tell me!’
Philokles shook his head. ‘I’m a Spartan first and a philosopher second, I suppose. I might have killed him.’
Kineas nodded wearily. ‘Odd. That’s what Srayanka said. She said if she had to hit a man, she’d kill him. Rather than leave an enemy at her back — or at least, that’s what I got from the whole thing.’
Eumenes said, ‘They don’t even strike their children.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m serious. I had a Sakje nanny. In war, or in a contest — no holds barred. But not for discipline.’ He thought for as long as it took Niceas to put an armload of wood on the fire, and then said, ‘I don’t think they even have a word for discipline.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ Philokles said.
Kineas left them to it. He sent Niceas to recall the three sentries before he went to roll in his cloak. Then he lay awake for a long time, thinking about women — his mother, his sisters, Artemis and Srayanka. He didn’t reach any conclusion at all. Artemis and Srayanka were like a different sex from his mother and sisters. It was not that he thought that Artemis and Srayanka were really so alike. Artemis used her sex as a tool to get what she wanted from men. Srayanka was a commander. And yet there was some basic similarity.
He thought of Philokles, telling him to treat Srayanka as if she were a man. The thought made him frown, and he fell asleep.
They didn’t ride together the next day. Kineas rode with his men, practising words with Ataelus as the grass vanished under their hooves. It wasn’t that everything was the same, nor that anything was different.
The same could be said in the Olbian section of the column. Kineas couldn’t define the problem, but something had changed. It confounded him — he had the ability to read his troops, and he knew that they agreed with him that Alcaeus deserved his punishment. In fact, from his demeanor, it appeared that Alcaeus himself felt he merited the blow. He looked sheepish now, rather than angry. And yet — something was different in the column, as if by demonstrating the force that underlay the discipline, Kineas had forfeited some of their goodwill.
Niceas added a barb to the situation when they were alone. ‘The idiot was ogling the Sakje girls, right? And you spend all your waking hours with one. You know what soldiers say when one man has something the others can’t have.’
Kineas had to admit the fairness of the point — at least, through the eyes of soldiers. He stroked his beard and blew on his cold hands. ‘You know, if all these pampered gentlemen soldiers have to complain about is my love life, they’re doing pretty well.’ He looked off at the horizon. ‘She won’t speak to me today.’
Niceas gave him a half-grin in return. ‘Exactly.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You worry too much, Hipparch.’ He glanced at the sky, where a line of heavy dark clouds came at them like a phalanx. One corner of his mouth curled. ‘The rich boys’ll sing a different tune soon enough.’
After three days of rain everyone in the column had plenty to complain about.
The three days were miserable for the Greeks, who spent them learning to live like soldiers, rather than like rich men on an extended hunt. Their cloaks were wet through — some men found that the blue dye in their cloaks ran, staining their skins — and their fires were fitful and smoky. The nights were cold and wet, and the troopers from Olbia finally learned to huddle together for warmth. It wasn’t really like sleeping — the best most men could manage was a troubled half-sleep as the pile of bodies moved, every man searching for warmth at the centre. By day they had their horses for warmth, and by the third day, most of them could sleep on horseback.
Kineas was just as miserable, because while he drilled his men and taught them to live in the rain, Srayanka eluded him. Worse, he sometimes caught her watching him, her face serious, her brows a single line across her face. She was judging him.
On the fourth day the sun shone, and towards evening they found the king.
The ‘city’ of the Sakje stretched for miles, and when he first saw the extent of the walls the size of it took Kineas’s breath away. A temple stood on a high bluff over the river, and around it lay an acropolis of large log structures, brightly coloured, and smaller buildings built of hewn timber and earth. The acropolis itself was small enough, but the walls that surrounded it ran off to join earthworks three men tall that ran off almost to the horizon.
‘It’s not really a city,’ Satrax said. They were standing together on the walls of the acropolis. ‘It’s really a big stock pen.’
Kineas had spent two days discussing plans with Marthax, the king’s principal warlord, and other of his inner council — Kam Baqca, the king himself, and Srayanka. Eumenes and Ataelus were exhausted from constant translation, and even the king, the only man among them to speak Sakje and Greek with equal fluency, was showing the strain. When Kineas slept, he had dreams of languages, where Sakje dogs accosted him in broken Greek, where objects named themselves in Sakje. He was learning the language, but his brain was tired all the time.
The king ordained a break, and dragged Kineas outside to see the sun. He was less distant, less aggressive, than he had been at their winter meeting.
Srayanka, who ignored Kineas as if he didn’t exist, spent most of her time with the king. While they debated the conduct of the war, she opposed him, always seeking the rashest course. In this, he sided with the young king and caution. She didn’t seem to hold the cautious policy against the king. She focused her discontent on just one man.
That morning, however, she was off with the other fighting women and Kam Baqca. Something about religion.
Kineas was heartsick, and only the loss of Srayanka’s favour informed him fully of what she had come to mean to him over the winter. He chided himself for being a fool — he had help in this from Niceas — and tried to concentrate on the weighty matters at hand. Of course she, as the greatest magnate among the Assagatje, would favour the king, who doted on her.