‘He was pitiful,’ Kineas said.
Philokles shook his head. ‘Note how he put you on the defensive. He made you swear a vow. He swore none.’
Kineas rode in silence for a stade. Then he shook his head. ‘You’re right.’
‘I am,’ Philokles said. He grinned. ‘Nevertheless, you can’t have hurt things. Perhaps you purchased a few more weeks of trust. My people in the citadel say that he fears an assassin — Persian courts are full of them.’
Kineas rode in silence again, and then said, ‘I fear the archon and I fear for him.’
‘He’s useless and self-destructive and he will betray us. Are you ready for it?’ Philokles asked.
‘We’ll have the army. Let’s beat Zopryon. Worry about the archon later. Wasn’t that your advice?’ Kineas drank some water. He looked out at the sea of grass. Somewhere, around the curve of the Euxine, Zopryon was coming — forty to fifty days away. Imagine — every day that he kept Zopryon at bay was another day of life. It was almost funny.
‘Does Medea know?’ Philokles asked.
‘What?’ asked Kineas, startled out of his reverie.
‘The Lady Srayanka. We call her Medea. Does she know about your dream?’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I thought it was you lot. You got the goldsmith to take her as a model?’
Philokles grinned. ‘I’ll never tell.’
‘Bastards, the lot of you. No, she doesn’t know, at least from me.’ Kineas watched the horizon. He ached to ride to her — day and night, until he got to the camp. Good, mature behaviour from a commander. He reached out a hand for the water skin and said, ‘Kam Baqca and the king have forbidden us to — be together.’
Philokles turned his head away, obviously embarrassed. ‘I know.’
‘You know?’ Kineas spluttered on his water.
‘It was discussed,’ Philokles said. He made a series of fidgets and motions indicating extreme embarrassment. ‘I was consulted.’
‘Ares and Aphrodite!’ Kineas said.
Philokles hung his head. ‘You had eyes for no one else.’ Philokles looked out over the plain. ‘She refused to speak to you. The king is mad with love for her. The three of you…’ He sighed. ‘The three of you threaten the whole war with your lovesickness.’
With the clear head of a man who had forty days to live, Kineas did not succumb to rage. ‘You may be right.’
Philokles glanced at him, searched for signs of anger. ‘You see that?’
‘I suppose. Solon had a rhyme — I don’t remember it, but it was about a man who thought that he was right and every other citizen in the city was wrong.’ Kineas gave a fleeting smile. ‘You, Niceas, Kam Baqca — I doubt that you are all wrong.’ His smile brightened. ‘Even now, I consider touching my heels to this horse and riding hard to her camp. Just a stade back I was thinking of it.’
Philokles grinned. ‘Her barb’s sunk deep. I can see why — she’s more like a Spartan woman than any barbarian I’ve ever seen.’ He took the water back. ‘Is it eros, or agape? Have you lain with her?’
‘You are like some pimply boyhood friend asking after my first conquest!’
‘No — I’m a philosopher studying my current subject.’
‘The girl in the golden sandals has, indeed, smacked me with the big fat grape of love,’ Kineas said, quoting a popular song from the Athens of his youth. ‘When, exactly, can two cavalry commanders find private time to make love?’ He rubbed the hilt of his new sword with his left hand.
Philokles smiled. He looked away. ‘Spartans manage such things pretty well on campaign. Even Spartiates.’
‘Bah, you’re all men. You just pick your cloak mate.’ Kineas raised an eyebrow.
The Spartan answered it. ‘Is your amazon a woman? I mean, besides the anatomy — she’s no more a woman than Kam Baqca is a man.’
Kineas felt his face grow hot. ‘I think she is,’ he said.
‘Going to settle her down in the top floor of your house and raise babies?’ Philokles said. ‘From what I’ve seen of Sakje women, I understand Medea all the better. Bred to freedom — life as a woman in Thebes would be slavery. Cruel Hands. You know why they call her that?’
‘Clan name,’ said Kineas.
‘In her case, she used to take heads from her kills — without a mercy blow.’ Philokles slung his water skin. ‘I’m not against her. I just want you to see that she will never be a wife — a Greek wife.’
‘Do I want a Greek wife?’ Kineas said.
‘Perhaps not,’ Philokles said. ‘But if you change your mind, she will be a fearsome foe. Medea indeed.’
Kineas turned away, waved to Ataelus, and choked, somewhere between laughter and tears. ‘Luckily,’ he said finally, ‘I’ll be dead.’
His first sight of the allied camp made him stop his horse and stare. Across the river, as far as he could see, from the low hill to the north of the ford in a great curve away to the south, there were herds of horses. He did as his tutor had taught him. He took a deep breath, kneed his own horse forward, and divided the vast expanse into a grid of manageable squares. He estimated the size of one square and began to count the animals in it, arrived at a reasonable answer, and multiplied by his approximate number of squares, adding the columns as he moved, until his horse was splashing across the ford and he was shaking his head at the impossibility of the figure he’d calculated.
Ataelus lead them to the king’s wagon. The king’s household, his personal clan, had their camp on the hilltop north of the ford, with fifty heavy wagons parked in a circle like a wooden fort. The king’s wagon was in the centre. At the base of the hill herds of horses, flocks of goats, and dozens of oxen milled in promiscuous confusion.
Kineas greeted Marthax, who stood within a ring of other nobles. ‘The raid?’ Kineas called out in Sakje.
Marthax waddled over with the rolling gait of a man who scarcely ever walked when he could ride. He spoke rapidly — too rapidly for Kineas to follow, although by now his Sakje was sufficient to register the raid’s success.
‘Ferry destroyed,’ Ataelus said. ‘All boats burned, and town for burning. No horse lost.’
Kineas winced. Despite the ill treatment of his column at Antiphilous the summer before, he hadn’t expected the whole town to be sacrificed to the war.
Marthax grinned. He said something, and all Kineas caught was a phrase about ‘baby shit’.
Ataelus said, ‘Lord say, I burned towns when you were baby.’
Kineas frowned at what he suspected the man had actually said, and Marthax grinned back.
Behind him, Philokles grunted. ‘The tyrant rears his head,’ he said.
Kineas looked back at him as he dismounted. ‘Tyrant?’
The Spartan also dismounted and rubbed his thighs. ‘Haven’t I said it a dozen times? War is the ultimate tyrant, and every concession you make him leads only to further demands. How many died at Antiphilous?’
Kineas sighed. ‘That’s war.’
Philokles nodded. ‘Yes. It is. And this is just the beginning.’
Kineas made the king laugh when he asked if the full muster was present.
‘A tenth of my strength, at most. I, too, have my stronger and my weaker chiefs. My Olbia and my Pantecapaeum, if you like.’
Kineas waved at the plain below the hill. ‘I counted ten thousand horses.’
Satrax nodded. ‘At least. Those are the royal herds. I am not the greatest of the Sakje kings but neither am I the least. They are also the herds of the Standing Horse, Patient Wolves, and Man Under Tree clans.’ He gazed out over the plain. ‘By midsummer we will have eaten the grass from here to the water god’s shrine upriver, and we will have to move.’ He shrugged. ‘But the grain is starting to come.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘So many horses.’
‘Kineas,’ said the king. ‘A poor Sakje, a man with no skills at the hunt and no reputation in battle, owns four horses. A poor woman has the same. A man with less than four horses isn’t welcome with his clan, because he can’t keep up with the hunt or the treks. Every man and every woman has at least four — most have ten. A rich warrior has a hundred horses. A king has a thousand horses.’