‘I have to.’ The king gestured at the horse. ‘Give him a try,’ he said.
Kineas caught the mane of the stallion in one hand and vaulted on to the beast’s tall back. He almost missed his seat — this monster was a hand taller than the Persian — and he was thankful that the animal waited patiently while his feet scrambled.
Satrax restrained his laughter with difficulty, pleased to see the Greek discomfited by the horse. Kineas made a clucking sound, and the big animal flowed into a curve. ‘What a gait!’ Kineas crowed. The beast’s easy flow of hooves was strangely familiar. He tried his knees alone, his hands free, and brought the stallion alongside the king’s mount easily. The two horses sniffed at each other like stable mates — which they probably were. They were the same colour.
‘Same dam?’ he said.
Satrax grinned. ‘Same dam and sire,’ he said. ‘Brothers.’
Kineas inclined his head. ‘I am honoured.’ He patted the horse’s shoulder, thinking of his conversation with Philokles. ‘I swear to you that no action of mine will harm your kingship. Nor will I wed Srayanka, or ask for her, without your permission.’ He slapped the horse. ‘This is a wonderful gift,’ he repeated.
‘Good,’ said the king. He nodded, obviously relieved and just as obviously still troubled. And jealous. ‘Good. Let’s get the army moving.’
It was later in the day when Kineas, who was becoming more enamoured of his new horse by the hour, realized why his gait seemed so familiar.
The silver horse was the stallion from the dream of his death.
18
They crossed the plains from west to east at speed. The Sakje set their usual pace, and the Olbians, with remounts provided, kept up. They made a hundred stades a day, by Kineas’s estimation, watering at rivers that crossed the plain at measured intervals, camping in established spots with fresh green grass for fodder and a few trees for firewood.
The level of organization was staggering, for barbarians. But Kineas no longer thought of them as barbarians.
Kineas had never seen an army of five thousand move so fast. If Zopryon pressed his men as hard as Alexander himself, he might make sixty stades, although patrols would go farther. And Kineas suspected he had not seen the fastest march of which the Sakje were capable.
Most of the campsites were shadowed by tall hills of turf that grew out of the plain, often the highest point for many hours riding. On the fourth evening, his muscles sore but his body clean, Kineas sat with his back against Niceas’s, rubbing tallow into his bridle leather and then working carefully at the headstall where it had begun to burst its stitches, making minute alterations in the fit as he went. The new horse had a big head.
Srayanka came with Parshtaevalt, and Hirene, her trumpeter. She had become less shy about seeking him out.
‘Come walk, Kineax,’ she said.
Kineas used the awl in his palm to punch two new holes, working carefully with the old leather. He needed the headstall to last until they were back at the camp at Great Bend, and no longer.
‘Soon,’ he said.
She sat down by him and pointed at his work to Hirene, who frowned. Niceas was cutting a Getae cloak to make a saddle blanket.
Hirene spoke quickly in Sakje. Her lip curled, whether in sneer or smile Kineas couldn’t tell. Srayanka laughed, a lovely sound, and sat gracefully on Kineas’s blanket.
‘Hirene say — you have uses, after all,’ Srayanka said. ‘The great war leader sews leather!’
Kineas ran a stitch back through the last hole, and then again, and then a third time, and then bit the linen thread as close as he could to the leather. Kineas buffed the headstall with the palm of his hand and then laid it carefully atop the pile of his tack. Parshtaevalt knelt by the pile and began to examine the bit.
‘Not good ours,’ he said. ‘But good.’ His Greek, like their Sakje, was improving by the day.
Niceas tossed his blanket on his own tack and waved across the fire for Ataelus to translate. To Parshtaevalt, he said, ‘You just show me, mate.’ He gave Kineas a friendly wink.
Hirene looked torn — she wanted to follow her mistress, but Srayanka shook her head. Turning to Kineas, she said, ‘Bring your sword.’
Kineas thought that he had the oddest courtship since Alexandros met Helen. But he fetched the Egyptian blade from his blanket, where the precious thing was rolled at the centre.
She took his hand, and they walked off into the red evening. By the camp, the turf was even and the grass bright green and short, but she led him out into the sea of grass, where hummocks made walking treacherous. They laughed together when their mutual refusal to relinquish the other’s hand cost them their balance.
Kineas looked back over his shoulder to find that they were in full view of the camp, stretching out to the north and south along the stream, and that many heads were turned, watching them.
Reading his thoughts, she said, ‘Let them watch. This hill is grave to the father of me. Here, we kill two hundred horses, send him to Ghanam. I baqca here.’
They came to the base of the mound. Closer up, it was clearer that the hill was made by the hands of men. Turfs were set like steps running up the barrow, and a deep trench, invisible from a stade away, ran clear around the base with a barrier of stone around the outside.
Srayanka led him around a quarter of the boundary ditch, and then they entered at a gate flanked by wild roses and began to climb the mound. She began to sing tonelessly.
The ball of the setting sun came to rest on the far horizon, bathing the green grass of the turf with red and orange and gold light, so that the hill appeared to be an amalgam of grass and gold and blood. Her singing increased in volume and tone.
‘Hurry!’ she said. She pulled at his hand, and they ran the last few steps to the top, where a stone sat in a slight depression. From the stone rose a bar of rusted iron. Closer up it proved to be the remnants of a sword, with the gold of the hilt still standing proud above the decay of the blade.
The sun was huge, a quarter gone beneath the curve of the world.
‘Draw your sword,’ she ordered.
Kineas drew his sword. She reached out and took the rusted sword reverentially by the hilt and drew it from the stone. She seized Kineas’s sword from him, and as the last rays of the sun turned its hilt to fire, she plunged it straight into the stone — deeper, if anything, than the other sword had been.
As the sun vanished, leaving the sky like a dye shop, with vivid reds and pale pink contrasting to the growing purple and dark blue veil of night, she stopped singing. She knelt facing the stone.
Kineas stood by her, embarrassed at his own ignorance of her ways, equally embarrassed by the extent of her barbarism — but she was a priestess, and it was not the Greek way to ridicule any people’s gods, so he knelt by her in the damp hollow. He could smell the moss on the stone, and the oil on his Egyptian blade, and the woodsmoke in her hair.
They knelt there until his knees burned and his back was a column of stone against his muscles. Darkness fell, complete, so that the plain beyond the hollow vanished, and there was only the sky and the stone, the smells of the hollow, and then the cry of an owl, and… he was flying over the plain of grass, looking for prey, the pinprick glow of uncountable stars sufficient light for him to see.
He rose higher over the plain, in lazy circles, and when he saw a circle of fires — a dozen circles of fire, a hundred circles of fire — then he descended again, watching the camp as he came down in spirals
…
As suddenly as she had knelt, Srayanka rose, took a pouch of seeds from her waist and scattered them in the hollow and on the stone.
Kineas got to his feet with considerable difficulty. One of his feet was asleep. But his mind was clear, part of it still high in the dark sky.
‘You are baqca,’ she said. ‘You dream strong dream?’