Tyrant: Storm of Arrows (32 page)

Kineas got his head into his breastplate. ‘Diodorus—’

Diodorus pushed past him. ‘You’re done, Strategos. Let us do our jobs. Right, follow me!’

Kineas refused to be set aside. Still wearing his captured shield, he pushed in behind Diodorus. They shoved the makeshift barriers out of the way in one long push.

‘Don’t be a fool, Kineas,’ Diodorus said.

‘I know how to get to the gate!’ Kineas said.

An arrow came out of the dark.

‘Shit,’ Diodorus said. ‘Charge!’ he yelled, and he was off down the corridor.

Kineas struggled to keep up and a flood of men led by Eumenes pushed behind him. At the corner, Eumenes pushed his strategos out of the way and got ahead. Side by side with Diodorus, he cleared the corridor, killing an archer and wounding another before the mass of them broke, screaming in panic.

The Hellenes poured in behind them. More men were coming through the postern, and they followed their appointed leaders blindly into the smoke and the darkness. Leon pushed past Kineas without knowing him and raced down the corridor to Diodorus and Eumenes, who were ten strides ahead, and they went up an undefended flight of stairs. Kineas could barely make his legs push him up behind them. Two more men passed him. The sounds of fighting were closer.

‘We’re above the gate,’ Diodorus said, apparently to Eumenes.

In the distance, ‘
Apollo! Apollo!
’, and the screams of wounded men. That was Philokles’ roar. Kineas felt new strength from the gods flood into his legs, and he flew up the rest of the stairs and saw Eumenes’ silver-chased breastplate glitter coldly at the end of another passageway and Leon’s black legs shining in the torchlight. Kineas ran, his bare feet slapping on stone.

The stupid barbarian archers were running for their friends and leading Diodorus to the gate. Kineas understood that even as he leaped over another dead archer in the semi-darkness. There was more smoke than before - something was on fire.

‘Athena!’ Diodorus roared - difficult to believe that such a thin man could release such a war cry. ‘
Apollo!
’ Closer.

Kineas was right behind Eumenes and another trooper - Amyntas, one of Heron’s gentlemen - and Leon. Eumenes and Leon were shoulder to shoulder, looking like gods in the flickering light. Diodorus hammered his shoulder into a closed door and it gave. As Leon and Eumenes added their weight, the door blew open and all three stumbled. An archer shot. Panicked or not, his arrow flew over Leon’s bowed head and punched Amyntas off his feet. Kineas leaped over the falling man and cut the archer down. His own sword felt good in his hand. He raised his shield and took an arrow, and then another, and pushed forward.

A spearhead came past him: Eumenes, covering him. He roared his war cry - it came out thin and high, ‘Athena!’ - and then he felt resistance against his shield and Eumenes was shoving against his back and he cut low. The resistance gave way and he felt a rush of cold air.

There were stars overhead. He was standing at the entrance to a tower, up on the wall and close to the main gate.

Somehow, Philokles had opened the gate. He stood in the courtyard, killing, with bodies all around him and the whole mass of the garrison trying to evict him and the men with him. ‘Apollo!’ he roared, and Kineas answered ‘Athena!’ and the garrison soldiers looked up and saw their doom behind them on the wall.

With the unanimity of despair, they broke, and the Hellenes hunted them through the corridors and killed them where they found them. The citadel was stormed, and too many of the Olbians had fallen in the taking to allow for any human behaviour by the stormers. They were animals, and like animals they roared through the rooms and corridors, destroying, raping, killing.

Kineas made no attempt to stop it. He could not have stopped it had he wished - the law of war was strict and the citadel had been stormed. And he lacked any will to resist. He came down from the wall with an avenging rush and they cleared the courtyard in moments, but the Olbian dead were everywhere, some burned with hot sand and some stabbed with many spears, and between Philokles’ wide spread legs was the body of Niceas.

Kineas threw himself on the body of his boyhood friend. Niceas was burned with sand and had a great gash on his unhelmeted head and a spear in his side, but he still had breath in him.

‘He lives!’ Kineas proclaimed.

Niceas shook his head gently. ‘Saves you the price of a brothel,’ he said, and coughed blood.

‘No,’ Kineas said. ‘No - Niceas!’

‘Graccus is waiting for me,’ Niceas said. He smiled, like a man who sees home at the end of a long journey, and died.

And Kineas held him for a while, until the skin under his forearms started to cool.

‘Let’s kill every fucker in the castle,’ Philokles said. He didn’t sound like himself. But Kineas thought it sounded like a fine plan.

Dawn. Smoke from burning sheds and the remnants of fires. Olbians, their faces black with soot, huddled against the wind, their bodies slack from exhaustion and guilt. Beyond sated. No man can survive a storming action and ever forget what he did when he was a beast.

A carpet of bodies from the courtyard to the throne room.

The floors were cold.

Leon had saved many of the citadel’s slaves. He and Nicanor and Eumenes had pushed them into the queen’s bedchamber and held the door. So in the light of dawn, Eumenes brought Banugul to Kineas where he sat on her throne. The blade of his Egyptian sword was clean, because he had wiped it fastidiously on the cloak of Sartobases. Just beyond Sartobases was the corpse of Therapon, who had died in the guards’ last stand, cut down by Philokles.

Kineas and Eumenes and Banugul were the only living people in the room. The scenes of orgy and debauchery on the walls were sad and pathetic.

‘I found her among the slaves,’ Eumenes said.

Kineas nodded.

‘I heard that - that Niceas is dead.’

‘Niceas is dead,’ Kineas said, and tears flowed. Eumenes joined him.

Kineas rose from her throne and walked to them. ‘I came to offer you life,’ he said. ‘You stupid bitch.’ The anger in him was great enough to kill her, but her death was not enough.

She met his eye steadily. ‘I had no choice,’ she said. ‘Kill me if you must. Throw my body to your wolves to rape if that sates you.’ Her voice shook with terror, and yet through her terror she was in control of herself. ‘I did what I had to, and failed. I will not go down to hell with lies.’

Kineas punched her so hard that her head snapped back and she shot off her feet and fell in a heap. ‘What could possibly excuse
this
?’ Kineas bellowed. She had fallen across the bodies of several of her courtiers, and she was fouled with their blood and worse. She spat blood and rose on one arm.

‘Alexander has murdered Parmenion,’ she said through a split lip and bruised jaw.

Kineas stumbled back and sat on the throne as if Ares had cut the sinews of his legs. ‘Gods,’ he said.

‘My so-called father will be on me in a month with five thousand men, desperate to wipe me out before he too is attacked by Alexander.’ She held her bruised head high. ‘I am not a slave, to bow my head. Alexander is my lord, and I will fight.’

Kineas didn’t want to look at her. The urge to kill was not sated. Every time he thought of Niceas’s corpse in the courtyard, he was ready to send more souls to Hades. But another part of him cried for redemption - the part that had roamed the corridors, exterminating archers who would have surrendered and joined him, perhaps, had his sword let them live. Yet another part accused him of behaving badly - seeking revenge on her for her role in showing him weak.

‘I’m sorry that I hit you,’ he said.

She said nothing. Her eyes roamed the room, looking at the dead.

‘Go to him, then,’ he said. ‘Take your slaves and go.’

‘You were right,’ she said, her voice dead.

‘Right?’ he asked. What did he expect her to say?

‘My garrison wasn’t worth a crap,’ she said coldly. ‘I wish you had joined me.’

He shook his head. ‘Get you gone before I change my mind,’ he said.

In an hour, she was gone. And he was master of a citadel full of corpses.

N
iceas’s funeral games lasted three days, after two weeks of preparations. Slaves and freedmen and farmers cleaned the citadel, and Kineas declared that all taxes and tribute would be remitted in exchange for a tithe on spring fodder and wagons. Nor did he offer any other choice - his soldiers collected the tithe with drawn weapons. It was ugly, like everything about Hyrkania in the aftermath of the escalade.

Eumenes and Leon seemed reconciled by their shared roles as heroes, but their reconciliation lasted only until they wrestled for the prize of the funeral games on the third day, with Mosva watching them. The bout became ugly and all their wounds were ripped open in a single word when Leon said something while his opponent had his head down in a hold, and then they were fighting like dogs.

Leon won.

Ataelus had returned with the rest of the prodromoi on the third day of games, in time to join all the old hands in throwing torches on to Niceas’s pyre. He wept with them, and threw his best gold-hilted dagger on to the roaring blaze.

Philokles had barely spoken since the storming. He sat in silence and was drunk most of the time. Only Kineas and Diodorus and Sappho knew that he had tried to kill himself with his sword. Sappho had caught him at it and they had all wrestled the blade away from him, Sappho cut and bleeding, until Philokles screamed, ‘Can I do nothing but injure and kill! Let me go!’ and subsided into weeping. That was in the first few days after the action, and Philokles wasn’t the only man in despair.

At the games, he was silent. He stood alone, and when men went to embrace him, he turned away. Kineas failed to move him. It was Ataelus who pushed past his rudeness. He placed himself in front of the Spartan, hands on hips, weeping unabashedly in the Scythian manner. When he had the silent man’s attention, he demanded, ‘Niceas for killing enemies?’

Philokles’s face was streaked with tears in the firelight. ‘Yes.’

‘How many in last fight?’ Ataelus asked. He didn’t seem to know, or care, what Philokles was suffering.

Philokles flinched. ‘Two,’ he said.

Ataelus nodded. ‘Two is good,’ he said. ‘And you?’ He looked at the Spartan curiously. ‘For revenge? You were killing?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Philokles bitterly. ‘I killed quite a few. Six or seven in combat - perhaps twice that in cowering, defenceless men. At least one woman. I am
very proud.
’

Ataelus, immune to his tone, nodded. ‘Good. Twenty men - good. And you, Kineax?’

Kineas shrugged. ‘The same.’

Ataelus shook his head. ‘For thinking my friend goes to hell alone! Long faces and tears! Dies like airyanãm! Kills two, even for being wounded! And friends who love him kill forty mens to serve him in death? For what crying?’

Kineas took his arm. ‘We behaved like beasts,’ he said. He didn’t know how to explain it to the Sakje.

But Ataelus shrugged him off. He looked around the ruddy faces lit by the pyre. ‘War is for making all men beasts,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Hunt men, kill men, act like beast, hunt like beast. Yes?’ He shook his head. ‘All war bad. All not-war good. But when for making war, then for fighting like beast. Yes?’ He shrugged. ‘Love Niceas,’ he said, and struck his chest. Then he embraced Philokles, who tried to avoid the embrace and was then trapped by the smaller man.

And one by one, all the old hands, the men who had ridden north from Tomis almost two years before and the men who had followed Alexander from Granicus to Ecbatana and the newer men who had stopped Zopryon on the plains, embraced like brothers, and they all embraced Philokles.

That night, for the first time in months, Kineas dreamed of the tree. And Niceas stood among the tangled roots with Ajax, and both of them offered him hands full of sand. He wept when he awoke, but he began to understand. It scared him.

Carlus survived, as did Darius. They each took the better part of the next month to recover, and Kineas had so many wounded from the storming that he couldn’t start his little force in motion. As it turned out, the weather, which had promised an early spring, then deteriorated, and it wasn’t until a week after Niceas’s funeral that they had another sight of the sun. The ground began to dry.

Kineas left Heron and Lycurgus in charge, just as Diodorus had originally planned, with orders to forward some of the bullion and use the rest to pay their garrison and cover Leon’s investments. The storming of the citadel had gained them all the queen’s treasures - not the richest hoard in the east, but enough to satisfy an army of a thousand men for some months and buy them as many remounts as they could find.

‘Are we founding an empire?’ Diodorus asked. ‘First the settlement on the Rha and now a town on the Kaspian.’

Kineas just looked at him. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘The fort on the Rha is Sakje territory, and this is in the satrapy of Hyrkania. We won’t hold either for any time. Just long enough to secure our retreat.’

Diodorus rubbed his beard. They all had them now. Winter had eliminated the last clean-shaven men. ‘Another hundred mercenaries came in today,’ he said. ‘Mostly Greeks.’

Kineas grunted.

‘Heron is trying to hire your Leosthenes to command a thousand hoplites,’ he said. ‘Leosthenes is ready to leave the satrap. Man’s doomed.’

‘As long as Heron pays with his own money, I told him he was welcome to try for Pantecapaeum,’ Kineas said. ‘We have no friends there. They exiled Demostrate, too.’

Diodorus whistled. ‘Heron will make a dangerous tyrant,’ he said.

Nicanor came into the megaron. ‘Prince Lot is ready to ride,’ he said.

Kineas already had his armour on. He went out into the weak spring sun, mounted Thalassa and rode to the head of the parade, where all of the Sauromatae waited, their goods loaded on pack mules and six heavy wagons. Lady Bahareh nodded to him as he rode past and Gwair Blackhorse raised his lance and gave a
ypp!
of exultation.