Tyrant: Storm of Arrows (16 page)

Kineas caught his own mistake, and he laughed at his own inability to defeat a young woman in debate. ‘The dead may speak on great occasions,’ he said.

‘The dead may speak whenever it suits the gods to allow them to speak,’ the child said, as if teaching a lesson. ‘So you should not lie. The dead speak to Odysseus in the
Odyssey
. If the Poet says a thing, it must be true, don’t you think?’ She looked at him. He felt the hair on the nape of his neck begin to rise.

‘You have read the Poet?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she said, her young voice utterly dismissive. ‘And in plays - the dead speak all the time in plays. I saw one in Olbia.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘Who are you?’

She got up, laughing, for all the world like any other happy twelve-year-old girl. ‘Nihmu White Horse of the Royal Sakje,’ she said proudly. ‘Kam Baqca was my father, and Attalos One-Eye was my grandsire. Arraya Walks-Alone was my mother and Srayanka the Archer was my father’s mother.’ She rattled off her impressive lineage in the sing-song voice of memorization.

Kineas helped her down from the stone as he would any girl - and he remembered his sisters in the family olive groves, and how they had claimed to be women as soon as they could walk. This child seemed to be every age and no age. ‘Where do you camp?’ he asked.

‘With the prodromoi,’ she said.

‘The scouts are all gone for the Kaspian,’ Kineas said. He was disconcerted again. Thunder rumbled in the distance, late-summer thunder that did not bring rain.

She frowned and shook her head rapidly. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she said. She took his hand and pulled on it like one of his sisters wanting a honey treat in the agora. ‘Hurry!’

‘Why?’ he asked. Now she seemed far away.

‘
Because you’ll die
’ came the deeper voice. But the girl looked as startled as he was, and ran off down the hill and into the gathering dark.

When Kineas awoke, Niceas was at his shoulder, shaking him. ‘I knew you’d slipped off to have a kip,’ he said.

Kineas looked around and gradually realized that he was curled up against the kurgan’s stone. His body was like ice, and he was scared.

‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked the sky.

Niceas’s raillery vanished and was replaced by concern. ‘What’s the matter?’

Kineas put his head in his hands. ‘The veils between the world of dreams and the waking world are tearing,’ he said. ‘Or I am going mad.’

The next night, Kineas dreamed of his own death, and he dreamed of the tree, and he dreamed of skeletal figures offering him the gift of sand from their mouths - one a Persian archer, another a man he’d bought a cup of wine after the sack of Tyre. Sometimes they were not even recognizable - the worst was a corpse with no head, who vomited sand from the stump of its neck. Dreams like this cost him his rest, and he began to fear to place his head on his cloak. And he could not face the tree dreams. The idea of climbing the tree was like an assault on his Hellenism, and the dreams were worse now that he had left the city behind.

In the morning he rode among the camps. He watched the Sindi farmers and the Maeotae fishermen drying their salmon. He watched the Athenian captains purchase fish sauce by the hundred beakers in the market on the beach and load their cargoes before they weighed anchor and beat slowly out through the grey-green waves of the shallow sea towards the dykes that almost - but not quite - blocked navigation on Lake Maeotis. When their sails vanished over the horizon, the enormity of his commitment to the expedition - his own fortune and his inherited wealth were heavily engaged - began to weigh on him, and that, combined with lack of sleep, made him dangerous.

Kineas knew that Niceas was watching him with growing alarm, perhaps even anger. Niceas did his best to keep his Kineas busy: arranging inspections, riding the beach, throwing a seaside symposium to wish the sailors of Pantecapaeum farewell. None of them served to occupy Kineas fully, and his temper grew shorter and shorter. So did Niceas’s.

After a few days of inactivity and more nights of brutal dreams, Diodorus’s command marched, carrying most of the remaining grain from the magazine that Eumenes had arranged. The herds of cattle were already down by a third.

‘Why don’t we ride with Diodorus?’ Niceas asked. ‘The prince can get himself across the height of land - Ares, he could ride all the way to Marakanda without us.’

‘Go with Diodorus if you want,’ Kineas said.

Niceas whirled on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Strategos,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a burr under my butt for a week and I don’t have to take it. I’m trying to help and you are shutting me out.’

‘I can’t go to fucking
sleep
,’ Kineas said.

Niceas handed him a flagon of wine left from the symposium. ‘Philokles told me how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Start drinking. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

‘I’m the commander of this expedition,’ Kineas said. ‘I can’t get drunk.’

Niceas held out the flagon. ‘Greek wine for Greek dreams, Philokles says.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I’m not as bad as that yet.’

Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘All the gods keep me from the day you are worse.’

Kineas managed a smile. ‘You’re right. I need to get out of this camp.’

Niceas rubbed his nose. ‘About fucking time.’

Kineas smiled back. ‘Let’s go hunting. We’ll catch Diodorus as we go. I’ll inform Lot.’

T
he pressure in Kineas’s head subsided as soon as he rode away from Lake Maeotis, so that by the time his horse had completed the first of the great curves of the Tanais, he felt nothing but an agonizing fatigue. He allowed Niceas to lead him on for a few parasangs and they camped on a bluff that hung over the great river like a fortress built by nature.

‘I just want to sleep,’ Kineas said.

Niceas handed him a horn cup of watered wine. ‘Drink this first,’ he said.

Kineas looked across the river at the farms on the north shore. ‘We’re in Asia, according to Herodotus.’

Niceas shrugged. ‘I’ve been to Asia before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if you insist on keeping this up, we’ll have to hunt.’

Kineas nodded. Instead of relaxation, he felt only the anxieties of a commander away from his troops. ‘I shouldn’t have left the army,’ he said, and drank the wine. Then he had another cup, and finally he fell asleep.

Niceas had his arms and was murmuring in his ear until he calmed. In his fear- and fatigue-swamped thoughts, he knew that Niceas was speaking to him as he would to a scared horse, and that comforted him, and despite his fears, he slipped back into sleep.

He awoke in the morning, better rested than he had been in weeks, to the roar of Niceas’s snores. Below the bluff on which they had camped, the Tanais swept by majestically, still swollen by the rain that had lasted a month, as wide as a lake. The sun rose and then leaped into the pink-striped sky as Apollo’s winged chariot began its course across the heavens. Kineas listened to the sounds of the forest behind him, watched a herd of deer come to the river beneath the bluff, an easy javelin throw that he passed because he could feel the peace of Zeus on the whole of the Tanais and he had no wish to break the truce. Birds called.

He was confused by his dreams. It was years since he had last thought about tormenting the scholar in the agora, but he now knew the dream to be a true one - indeed, he now remembered the incident, and his secret shame. He felt the shame anew. He nodded at the thought, having learned something. He was tired, but strangely full of new life.

‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.

‘
No
,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.

Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.

Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things - his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.

Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few
dactyloi
above the surface of the water.

‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.