Ataelus rode up proudly, sitting on his tired pony like a king. ‘I take ten horses!’ he said. ‘You great chief. All warriors say so.’ He glanced at Srayanka, issuing orders to her inner circle. ‘Lady say you hero. Say you airyanam.’
Kineas grinned again.
While Ataelus praised him, the king rode into the laager. His armour was gold, and it was blinding in the setting sun. He looked right and left, and finding Kineas, he rode up to him — a mass of gold from head to toe.
‘It worked,’ he said. He struggled with the chinstrap on his Corinthian helmet, got it, and lifted the whole gilt thing off his head. His hair was matted flat, and he had a trickle of blood running out of one nostril. ‘By the gods, Kineas! The Getae will feel this for ten generations!’
‘We were lucky,’ Kineas said. ‘I thought of all the things that could have gone wrong while we rode. A foolish plan, and far too ambitious.’ He smiled wearily. ‘And I seem to remember that you were to have no part in this fight. I seem to remember Kam Baqca extracting a promise.’ You came! he wanted to say.
‘I said I would not place myself in any danger,’ the king grinned. ‘Nor did I. They were broken before we rode down the hill.’
He dismounted and opened his arms in embrace, and Kineas hugged him, armoured chest to armoured chest. ‘Oh, we pounded them!’ the king boasted. ‘The Cruel Hands lay so still that their scouts practically rode over their lines without seeing them. I must have killed six.’ The boy ended the embrace. ‘I feel foul. Tired. This is my first big fight — my first victory as king — and you gave it to me. I won’t forget.’ Satrax was stripping armour while he babbled. He was still fighting the laces on his scale vambrace. ‘Marthax says I should stay out of the fight — but if I didn’t fight, I would cease to be king. We are Sakje, not Greeks.’ He grinned, the same relief from tension on his face that could be seen on every other leader. ‘Sometimes I think that Marthax wants to keep all the glory for himself. Or that he wants to be king in my place.’ He seized a proffered cup of wine and drained it.
Kineas stepped up close and started on the other lace. Other men and women did the same, so that the king’s disarming was itself a celebration. They babbled to each other, exalted by victory and survival.
When his scale breastplate was dragged over his head, the king stepped out of it and then embraced Kineas again. ‘Smile,’ he said. ‘Laugh. We are alive. And now I believe we will defeat Zopryon. I believe we could defeat Alexander!’
The young king pounded his shoulders, and he smiled at them, suddenly wanting to be free of their embraces and their praise, feeling dirty. He slipped away gradually, telling himself that he was as eager to be free of his armour as the king had been free of his. Kineas went to a fire that the Olbians had appropriated and was greeted with a roar. Ajax helped him out of his breastplate, and Kineas felt lighter, if not younger.
Nicomedes came and placed an arm around Ajax’s broad shoulders. The age had fallen away from his face, and he was a gentleman of forty again. ‘We honour you, Hipparch,’ he said. ‘It is one thing to hear of your exploits, and another thing to see.’
Kineas looked at his legs, streaked with mud, and his arms, with blood and ordure mixed. All the rain had done was to streak it, and where he had lain in the mud, his tunic was soaked through and his side was itchy and his left arm was swollen. ‘If you are quoting someone, I don’t know it,’ Kineas said.
Nicomedes said, ‘I am a rich man, and I have been privileged to see many great craftsmen and artists at work. It is always the same — when you watch them work, you see the focus of their genius, and you know you have the real thing.’
Ajax laughed. ‘I doubt Kineas wants to be in your collection, my friend.’
Kineas half grinned. ‘Thanks — I think.’ He pulled off his tunic. ‘Can you get a slave to find my kit? I need to wear something else. In the meantime, I’m going to the river to bathe.’
Nicomedes made a show of sniffing his battered cloak. ‘A splendid idea.’
Ajax produced a strigil as Niceas joined them with another. ‘I have oil,’ Niceas said.
Ajax cheered him as if he’d won a race. As they walked, a few other men joined them — Leucon and Eumenes, and several of their young men. They walked the stade to the river on sore legs, and Kineas was happy, as happy as a man who can foretell his own death can be. He had lost four men in a hard campaign. He regretted them — but he knew he, and they, had done well, and he knew that for a few hours he didn’t have to worry about anything but the aches in his muscles and the fever in his wound. Death seemed very far away.
He listened to the younger men chatter, and he walked a little ahead of them, naked, with his filthy tunic over his shoulder. He heard the pounding of hooves and he turned.
Srayanka was behind him, with a few of her officers, all naked, covered as they all were in mud and filth, the horses as well as the riders. She saw him and he saw her, and she rode past him, her eyes flicking over his body even as he looked at hers. Then she was past, kicking her horse to a gallop, turning back to wave. She raced on, as beautiful as anything Kineas had ever seen despite the grime and the blood, her unbound black hair flying out behind her, her back straight as she gathered her horse for a jump and then leaped from the bank straight into the river with a splash like a leaping whale. All the rest of her warriors followed her.
The Olbians pointed and shouted and cheered. ‘Like Artemis and her nymphs,’ Nicomedes said. He appeared shocked. He took a breath. ‘Who expected such beauty on a day like this? I wish I had a painter — a sculptor — anyone to make that for me.’
‘I’ll settle for a bath,’ Niceas said.
‘Let’s run,’ said Kineas. And the Olbians began to run. They ran like Olympians, squandering their last reserves in the setting sun. And as they came to the bank they made the leap into the cold water, and they shouted as they fell.
Kineas swam across the broadest pool. The water was deep but full of silt from the rain, or stirred up by the horses. He didn’t care — it felt wonderful against his skin despite the cold. He swam with his tunic in his teeth, looking for her in the slowly falling dark.
He found her in the shallows under a tall tree. She was scrubbing her warhorse clean, scooping sand with her hands from the river bank and scrubbing at her horse’s legs where the big beast appeared to have waded in blood.
She smiled at him. ‘He bites,’ she said in Greek. ‘Not too close.’
Kineas stayed in the deep water. He was a practical man, and he was happy just to be with her, admiring her body — he began to wash his tunic as best he could. After a while, he passed behind her and went to the bank, where he collected a handful of her sand and began to grind away at the dried crud on his arms.
Down the pool, he could hear shrieks and shouts from the other Olbians. From the voices, it appeared that more and more were coming to bathe — more Olbians and more Sakje.
‘You airyanam,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. She pushed a tail of black hair back over her naked shoulder. She glanced downstream, and back at him.
He stepped up to her and she entered his arms as though they had rehearsed the embrace a thousand times, and her mouth came under his as easily as the clasping of two hands.
They wrapped themselves into each other…
For a few seconds, until Ataelus called, ‘Here they are!’ and they were surrounded, Cruel Hands and Olbians, laughing, jeering, with more than a few obscene suggestions.
Kineas slipped into deeper water to hide the truth of their assertions, still holding her hand, and she swam after him leaving her horse. And they swam together with their people until they were clean. They dried naked in the warm evening air, on the grass, and Agis the Megaran and Ajax both sang from the Iliad while the Greek men used olive oil and strigils on their skin, to the delight and amusement of all the Sakje. Then Marthax sang with Srayanka, turn and turn again, an endless ballad of love and revenge. Kineas found that the king had joined them, and he sat with the king while men fetched dry tunics and food, and then Srayanka finished singing and sat with her back against his as if they were old war companions. Her people had brought her clothes, and she was dressed, and she had given him a tunic of pale skin covered in embroidery like her own. It was barbaric. He put it on anyway.