Tyrant: Storm of Arrows (22 page)

Niceas shrugged. ‘Stupid fucking question,’ he said. And then he aimed a mock blow at Kineas, who ducked and . . .
awoke.

The next day Niceas responded to Kineas with grunts. He never swore. If he didn’t want things, he simply turned his head away like a child. The night before they were due to take ship to Hyrkania, he suddenly turned to Kineas.

‘I don’t want to die like this,’ he said.

Kineas hadn’t heard so much in his voice in a week. He stopped pouring wine. ‘You aren’t dying,’ he said.

Niceas shrugged, head down, shoulders sagged. ‘I am. You can’t see it, but I am.’

Further prodding revealed nothing and promises of a physician led only to the turned head.

And then he forgot those worries as they prepared to sail on the Kaspian Sea, and a new set of worries descended on him.

A
hard winter sun cast the last of its cold light over the icy beach as the pentekonter hove to in the appointed bay in Hyrkania, the anchor stone cast while the rowers backed water against the growing wind, and at last came to rest - a fitful rest, as Poseidon rocked them.

The Land of Wolves lay under a blanket of snow when Kineas finally waded ashore in the bleak twilight, bare-legged and cursing the cold water, wolves howling in the distance. Crax and Sitalkes clambered over the side of the pentekonter carrying Niceas in a litter while Coenus pushed the horses over the rail and into the water to swim ashore on their own. They’d lost one at sea - a slow death of terror for Coenus’s favourite mare, a painful, terrible event - and the big man was subdued, but when they were all on the beach he led them in a prayer of thanks to Poseidon and then they sang the hymn to Apollo in the last light of the sun.

The merchants’ stalls at the top of the gravel beach were either closed tight or lined in drifted snow. There was no welcoming party. So they rubbed their horses down as best they could, drying them with straw from a mouldering stack Crax found and then headed inland on the only visible track. Kineas sent Crax and Sitalkes out as scouts, made sure that all his men were armed and went back to the beach to pay the last coins of his passage to the captain, a piratical Persian called Cyrus.

‘How far to the camp?’ he asked as the Persian counted the coins and tested the silver ones with his teeth.

‘Three stades. Less.’ The man smiled, showing too many teeth. ‘Before the waters went down, the town was on the beach.’ He shrugged. ‘It must be as the gods will it, eh?’

Kineas agreed that it was so.

‘You’re going to fight Iskander, yes?’ the Persian asked. And not for the first time. He had a gold toothpick which flashed around his lips as he talked.

‘Yes.’

Cyrus extended a hand. ‘Good luck. They say he is a god.’

Kineas nodded. ‘He says he’s a god.’

‘Excellent argument,’ the pirate said. ‘They say you might throw a garrison into the fort you built at Errymi.’

‘I might,’ said Kineas, anxious to be gone but unwilling to be rude.

‘Good for business. Might get a piece of the grain trade.’ Cyrus winked. ‘Boats like mine would pay a fee to have a real harbour in the north.’

‘I’ll think on it,’ Kineas said, and they clasped arms again.

The camp was less than three stades inland, east of the beach and south of the town itself, as the scarred man had said, and as they approached, they saw a pair of towers built of wood and rubble, and closer up, earth walls and neat rows of huts. Outside the walls there was a sprawl of cruder huts and leather tents. And emerging from the gate between the two timber towers came a troop of well-mounted Greek cavalry led by Diodorus and Philokles.

The snow in the air accented the smell of burning oak from the hearth fires, and closer to the market they smelled olive oil, something none of them had seen in a month. Niceas raised his head at Kineas’s side. ‘Smells like home,’ he said.

‘I think we are home,’ Kineas answered.

It took Kineas days to stop marvelling at the quality of the camp - and his praise was appreciated at first and later resented a little because it suggested he hadn’t expected as much of them. In fact, Diodorus had plenty of experience in building fortified camps and Philokles had chosen the site well: on a clear running stream, with a broad meadow stretching away to the north for exercise. The town of Namastopolis sat well above them, three more stades to the south, surrounded by tiny subsistence farms. It wasn’t a rich place, more like a robber-baron’s holding than a town, and the citadel was an ugly fortress of crude stone atop the acropolis, although rumour had it that the inside was as opulent as the outside was prosaic.

Lower down, many of the town’s least reputable elements had picked up and moved to sit at the gate of the military camp, because the soldiers brought money, and the town had the means to take it away. The sprawl at the gate featured a market - almost an agora - where the soldiers bought food and oil for their messes. There were legitimate merchants there, with wine and olive oil, weapons and armour. There were a dozen wine shops, from a newly built tavern with solid walls, its own hearth and prostitutes hanging over the balcony of the
exedra
, to hide tents with a board over a pair of wooden horses and a few amphorae of wine stuck base down in the snow. Followers abounded, from prostitutes of both sexes in the market, to new wives in the snug huts that lined the streets inside the walls with military precision. Kineas’s little army numbered almost twelve hundred men and women, at least half the population of the town and citadel above them.

The town and the citadel had its own soldiers, a mix of Greek mercenaries released from Alexander’s armies, deserters and survivors of various Persian armies. They put on airs and swaggered, but the Olbians didn’t think much of them, and Lot’s Sauromatae had killed a couple in brawls - rather to make a point, Diodorus said.

Kineas heard Diodorus’s report after he had eaten, slept, steamed and run. He listened to his officers report in turn, rubbing his beard as Leon gave them a report on the army’s treasury (a report that made the strategos very thoughtful indeed) and Eumenes spoke on the state of the horses after their long march and short sail (a report that depressed every cavalryman present).

Lycurgus gave a hard smile. ‘You’ll all be hoplites before more snow falls,’ he said.

‘We need a lot of fresh horses,’ Niceas growled, one of his rare contributions.

‘Let’s save the ones we have first,’ Kineas said. ‘Coenus, what shall we do?’

Coenus was reading from a scroll. ‘You’d think Xenophon, who fought his whole life from horseback, would have mentioned this problem.’ He shook his head. ‘Buy more grain. Feed them as if we were fattening them for sacrifice. I’ll ride out and find a good winter pasture with some rock under their feet - they’re wet to the fetlocks all the time, the poor things.’ He looked around. ‘We’ll need to buy more horses,’ he said apologetically.

‘We don’t have as much money as I would have wished,’ Kineas said. ‘Even as it is, we’ll need to send a convoy back to the Bay of Salmon and get more money. Leon and I will have to sell estates. Ares and Aphrodite, but we spend money like water!’

Philokles pretended to be looking through the cabin’s log walls at the citadel. ‘I know where there’s money,’ he said.

‘Is this another Spartan solution?’ Kineas asked.

‘She’s a harlot and a brutal ruler. The peasants hate her. She squeezes them for cash and flaunts it.’

There was a knock at the door. Darius, now a section leader in second troop, bowed from the waist. ‘There is a messenger from the palace. I held him at the gate as per Niceas’s standing orders.’

Niceas nodded. ‘Escort him to the guardhouse and get his message. He comes no farther than the guardhouse.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘Why are you so adversarial with the palace?’ he asked his officers.

Sappho came in through the door and pushed the linen chlamys she wore as a wimple back from her face.

‘Have you already had trouble with the queen?’ Kineas asked.

His receiving room was larger than all the space he’d had in the barracks at Olbia. Diodorus and Philokles sat in barbarian chairs, Niceas lay on a couch, Coenus reclined with a bucket of scrolls, while Eumenes, Darius and Leon sat at the desk doing accounts. Ataelus sat quietly on another barbarian chair, speaking with Prince Lot and Samahe. Sappho sat in a chair that had obviously been set aside for her.

Kineas wondered why she was present. ‘I’m glad you have all made yourself comfortable in my absence,’ he said.

Darius returned, a drift of cold entering with him. ‘The strategos is invited to attend the queen,’ he said in a neutral voice.

Kineas looked around the room, a hint of annoyance in his tone as no one was answering his questions. ‘You dislike her? Philokles, has she given you trouble?’

Philokles raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not the sort of man who would have trouble with the queen,’ he said. He laughed. ‘No, she’s given no trouble.’

Eumenes blushed and kept his head down.

‘What’s all this costing us?’ Kineas asked.

‘Actually, we’re getting a few minae a month profit. We’re defending her over the winter, aren’t we?’ Diodorus gave a wry smile. ‘I hadn’t realized that salesmanship was part of my duties.’

Kineas nodded. ‘Well done.’

‘Not all crap. Every one of these petty kingdoms in Hyrkania is out to eat every other one. Our arrival here guaranteed her farmers an uncontested harvest - that’s worth a few acres of land for one winter.’ Diodorus looked around the room. ‘Our troops have put a lot of silver into the locals - one way or another.’ He gave his words the intonation of an actor - a comic actor. Diodorus had a new scar on his brow from the fighting in the autumn. It made him look older. There was grey in his red hair that Kineas hadn’t noticed before - the price, no doubt, of command. He steepled his hands. ‘There’ll be Hades to pay in the spring,’ he said.

Other men were nodding their heads.

Kineas swirled the wine in his cup and waited.

‘She thinks we’ll fall into her arms and conquer her neighbours for her,’ Diodorus said. He and Sappho exchanged a glance, and Sappho raised a plucked eyebrow before her eyes went back to her scroll.

Leon looked up from his numbers, drew breath for speech and then thought better of it.

Kineas had to smile, despite his best resolve. ‘She’s a harlot?’ he asked.

‘She’s no harlot,’ Philokles said. ‘You’ll want to see for yourself.’ He paused. ‘She has wit.’

Diodorus leaned forward. ‘She calls herself Banugul. It’s a Zoroastrian saint’s name. The peasants call her Asalazar. That means the demon of honey.’ He gave a lopsided sneer. ‘It’s not meant as a compliment.’

Heron, silent until then, spoke up. ‘They say she’s Artabazus’s bastard daughter - Barsine’s sister. Barsine is still with Alexander. They’re rivals in every way. They say she’s the lovelier of the pair - and that Alexander preferred her, but needed the satrap’s alliance.’

Kineas shook his head. ‘So she’s been fobbed off with a piece of Hyrkania? She can’t be that beautiful, or she’d have got something better. Cappadocia, perhaps?’

They all laughed. Hyrkania was all rock - the farmers among the soldiers couldn’t stop commenting on the uselessness of the soil.

‘I think you’ve all been away from civilization too long, and begging Sappho’s pardon, you sound like characters in
Lysistrata
. You may all love her more than you love the gods - but when the ground is hard and our horses have their hooves hard and their summer coats, we’re riding for Marakanda,’ he said. ‘Srayanka is waiting, and Alexander’s army is growing.’

Diodorus nodded. ‘I’d rather be fighting Alexander right now.’ Again he and Sappho exchanged glances.

‘I must meet this goddess,’ Kineas said.

Diodorus cut in, ‘She’s trying to use us against her father. And she’s dangerous.’

Kineas nodded, his mind already moving on to the new logistikon that Leon was compiling. ‘Is there enough fodder and grain in this petty kingdom to get us moving in the spring?’

Leon cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he said. Under his dark skin, he was flushed. ‘But it will require some work to collect it. There are not enough wagons for us to buy. We’ll need more oxen to drag the wagons and some for beef on the hoof.’

Kineas glanced back at Diodorus. ‘Why would we fight her father?’

Diodorus shrugged. ‘For money?’

Sappho raised her eyes and then lowered them - again.

‘I think you’re all barking at shadows,’ Kineas said.

After a minute of silence, he turned on his heel and walked back into his sleeping quarters to change for his audience.

A slave brought Kineas wine while he rummaged through his baggage. He tried to read a new piece - new to him - by Aristotle. Its release had apparently enraged Alexander, but so far he could make nothing of it. He had just located his best sandals in the leather bag under the bed when he heard a noise behind him. He looked up when the curtain that guarded his sleeping quarters rustled, and he shot to his feet when he saw that it was Sappho.

She smiled enigmatically as she entered. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it is almost worth three years of forced sex and the loss of my husband and children to be free to enter a man’s quarters and speak my own mind.’

Kineas started to reply, but his mind was grappling with what she had said, and all that came out of his mouth was ‘I’m sorry.’