Tyrant: Storm of Arrows (41 page)

‘We must ride,’ he said patiently. Behind him, his ambush was coming apart, and men were dying.

She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. ‘So be it,’ she said. With bitter practicality, she said, ‘Get me on my horse.’

Kineas and Urvara managed it. She was not light, but they were strong, and behind them, the battle exploded into life.

Two hundred paces distant, the Olbian rhomboid crashed into the fight between the Sakje and the Companions. The Macedonians were brave and skilled, but they had neither the weight nor the numbers to stop the Olbians. The crash of the Olbian onset was like a hundred maniac cooks beating on copper cauldrons and it carried over the whole battlefield.

Srayanka had a Macedonian horse - a beauty, but not heavy enough for war. Kineas reached for her reins and she stopped him with a look.

‘I have not come all this way to lose you in a cavalry fight,’ he said.

‘I have not lived all my life on the back of a horse just to fall off when I’m pregnant,’ she answered. She smiled at him, but the edges of her lips were white.

Thalassa bore fatigue without any apparent change of gait. She went up the steep side of the ford in two bounds, and then Urvara was beside him, with Srayanka a stride behind. Andronicus’s trumpet rang out, three clear notes, and then again - the retreat.

Kineas reined in at the edge of the battle haze and risked a glance back. The new dust cloud was closer. To the south and east, Temerix’s men were already mounted on their ponies, jogging steadily across the last flat ground to the ford.

From the vantage point of a tall horse at the top of the riverbank, Kineas could now see the Sauromatae. Their bronze scale armour glinted in another battle cloud, half a stade east along the river bed. Somehow, the Greek infantry, the mercenaries, had moved into the stream bed.

Kineas shook his head, because this was all taking time and time was something he didn’t think they had, but even as he watched, Lot rode clear of the war haze, looking for the sound of the trumpet. Kineas made a sweeping gesture with his arm, pointing north and west. Lot pulled his helmet off and waved it, then gave a broad nod to signal assent. He was still refastening his helmet when he went back into the cloud.

An arrow whistled out of the trees on the far bank and plucked one of Temerix’s psiloi from his pony. The man screamed and then Temerix dismounted, waving his men into formation on the surer footing of the island. He already had the golden bow in his fist, and he nocked and drew in one smooth motion. His first arrow brought an answering scream of pain from the poplar trees along the far bank.

Kineas turned to Eumenes and Urvara. ‘Gather up the Sakje. Rally them and cover the flight of the Sindi.’ He looked down at Philokles. ‘Are you walking for a reason?’

‘I fell off,’ the Spartan said.

Kineas might have grinned, except for the situation. ‘Then run back to Temerix and tell him to stop playing rearguard and get his arse across. And then come back. No heroics - we are
not lingering
.’

Philokles saluted - the first time Kineas had ever seen him salute.

Srayanka reached out and took his hand in hers. Her nails dug into his bare forearms and she grunted. Sweat was pouring off her. Kineas tried to steady her.

Ataelus was watching the fight in the ford. ‘Spitamenes,’ he said, as if he was pronouncing a sentence of death. ‘For fucking Persians.’

Kineas looked over his shoulder. Temerix had his Sindi formed in an open line and they raised their bows together and loosed a volley that rose high and fell beyond the brush at the edge of the spring bank. Screams erupted and then a group of Iranian cavalry came through the trees and straight down the bank, riding like Sakje.

‘Athena stand with us,’ Kineas said. There were a hundred or more Medes. More like two hundred.

Kineas looked behind him. Eumenes had maybe twenty Sakje in a clump. If the Persians came up the bank and into the rear of the Olbians, it would be over. The Olbians would never recover.

Bad luck.
He was so close to pulling this off.

Temerix called another order, and his archers formed closer, a pitifully small wall at the edge of the island, but they had a three-foot-high bank to defend. They loosed again and their arrows slammed into the front of the Median charge, and wounded horses reared, tangling the charge in their fall, while others baulked the jump to the island. Philokles arrived, running hard, and he roared at Temerix, who ignored him. The Sindi chief slung his bow and took up his axe.

Eumenes had thirty riders and Urvara had another ten.

‘I’m sorry, my love,’ Kineas said. He was the only voice they would all obey, and there was no one with whom he could leave her. He reached up to pull his cheek plate down and again found it gone.

‘Sakje! Come and feast!’ Srayanka sang at his side, and her clear voice carried where a man’s voice might have been lost. She reached out and pulled his long knife from the scabbard at his waist.

More riders emerged from the battle haze behind her. She sang again, and every Sakje in earshot was grinning.

Kineas filled his lungs, judging the time as one more rider joined Urvara. ‘Follow me!’ he shouted. He pointed his sword down the riverbank, and they started to move up behind him. He turned his head and saw Sitalkes, Darius and Carlus range themselves around Srayanka.

The Persian charge slammed into the Sindi. Axes swung against Persian swords, and Philokles bellowed and his heavy spear went through a Persian’s breastplate, tearing the man from his horse. His war cry sounded over the cacophony of battle like the cry of a hunting cat over the burble of a stream, and it froze the blood of more than one enemy.

The Sakje counter-charge seemed small and badly organized, but the Sakje weren’t Greeks - they didn’t require serried ranks to fight effectively. Instead of charging the Persian cavalry, the two groups slipped off to the left and right, every man and maid bent low, shooting hard. The Medes flinched away, fearing for their flanks, and suddenly robbed of their attempt to wrap around the Sindi, they halted and began to shoot. It was a natural decision for Asiatic cavalry, but it cost them the action.

Kineas felt like an idiot for risking himself - and Srayanka. Ataelus, at his shoulder, was rising and shooting, rising again, methodically pumping arrows into the Persians who were tangled with Temerix’s men. It was too late to halt, too late to swerve, so Kineas allowed Thalassa to push up the bank on to the island of willows. He was sword to javelin with a Persian veteran. He parried the spearhead and the man tried to use the haft to sweep him off his horse’s back. Kineas dropped the reins again, grabbed the haft and cut repeatedly at the man’s fingers, but his head burst in a spray of bone and blood and worse as Carlus struck him with a long-handled axe from the other side. An arrow hit Kineas in his breastplate like the kick of a mule on his right side, and he saw Srayanka’s face, streaked with pain and battle joy, red and white with exertion. She shrieked something that was lost in the battle, and the Medes answered a trumpet signal and flowed away - not broken, just not interested in further losses. The Sindi rose to their feet - aside from a handful, most had simply lain flat and waited for the Medes to ride away - and scrambled for the ponies who were dispersed over half a stade of island.

‘What are you doing here?’ Philokles roared at Kineas. Simultaneously, a tight knot of Medes, lost or desperate, punched through the Sindi and came at Kineas.

The great royal charger leaped from a dead halt to a gallop in three strides, her heavy hooves crashing against the rocky island. Kineas had his last opponent’s spear and he whirled it end over end and thrust hard at the first rider, a man with a copper beard, and in a moment of fear-induced clarity Kineas wondered if he had fought this man before, at Issus or at Arbela. And then his spear went over the man’s parry and under his burnoose and the man flipped back over the rump of his horse, all his sinews loosed, and Thalassa went right through the knot of Medes as two weak blows rang on Kineas’s back plate. And then young Darius was there, yelling insults in Persian, his sword dripping blood on to his hand when he raised it over his head, and Philokles was standing over a dead Mede and the survivors rode across the island and vanished west. One of the men fleeing was tall with an excellent horse and gold embroidery on his scarlet cloak, and he was clutching his side.

Srayanka sat on her horse. She had his knife in her right hand, and there was blood on it, and she waved it at the retreating Medes. ‘Come back and fight, Spitamenes!’ she screeched. She was laughing, with tears streaming from her face, and then her arms dropped and she screamed like a dying mare, a war cry or a scream of pain - or both.

‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ Kineas said, for the first time in his life praying to both instead of cursing. ‘Now, run!’

Temerix’s men needed no second urging, regardless of the death wish of their captain. On the north bank, the Medes were forming again, wary now, and pointing downstream where the Sauromatae were vanishing into their own dust cloud.

On the south bank, Diodorus and Andronicus had the Olbians in hand, or close to it, and the bank was lined with horsemen as the Sindi scrambled back. Side by side with Temerix and Philokles, Kineas and Srayanka crested the south bank together.

Diodorus was in front of the reordered Olbians. The rear ranks were sketchy and their horses were blown, but the Olbians were ready to charge again.

‘You’re an idiot!’ Diodorus said cheerily. ‘Khaire, Srayanka.’

‘You hold here until the Sauromatae are away. Then you. Sakje last under Eumenes and Urvara.’ Kineas thought they were going to live - he could feel the loosening in his bowels and the daimon of combat winging away, leaving only bone-ache and heart-ache. But he’d seen the Medes flee - they weren’t interested in taking casualties to beat up his rearguard.

‘I will command the Sakje,’ Srayanka said, her chin high. ‘Eumenes and Urvara may assist me.’

Kineas saluted her with a bloody javelin. ‘Welcome back, Lady of the Cruel Hands,’ he said in Sakje. They were cheering her, Olbian and Sakje together, a roar that must have sounded like a taunt to the Medes across the river. Srayanka raised her knife and the shouts came again.

Kineas felt the wind in his hair as he looked around for Ataelus. The man was stripping Bain’s corpse, taking his arrows. Everywhere, Sakje and Sauromatae were stripping the corpses of the fallen.

‘Ataelus! Light the fires!’ Kineas called.

Ataelus nodded and one of his scouts galloped off into the dust.

Samahe came up from the stream bed, her
gorytos
empty. She reined in next to Thalassa and handed Kineas his helmet, the blue plume of horsehair severed and the plume-box that held it smashed flat.

‘Thanks!’ he said, slapping her back. She grinned wordlessly and turned away. Kineas wrestled with his helmet, which was deformed and wouldn’t go over his head. He tried to bend it between his hands while he watched the Persians, but the bronze was too tough and he couldn’t get it back into shape. He tied the chinstrap and slipped it over his sword hilt.

‘They’re getting ready to have a go at us,’ Darius said at his side. The Persian had a cut on his face that had bled over his whole front and the linen burnoose he wore over his helmet was cut and flapped like a pair of wings.

But the Medes showed no further interest in them. While the first flames flickered in the grass and the Olbians re-formed a column of fours and retired, Spitamenes and his Bactrians and Medes began to press the Greek mercenaries to the east.

‘Poor bastards,’ Eumenes said.

Lot grimaced. ‘We did all the work,’ he said in his own tongue.

Behind them, the slaughter of the mercenaries began.

Srayanka’s spasms came closer and closer.

Ten stades north and west of the battlefield, the column halted where they had left their remounts. Every man changed horses and drank water. Behind them, they could still hear the fighting, and see the dust.

Urvara wept with no explanation. Eumenes held her shoulders. And Srayanka, between contractions that were sharper and closer now, asked for Hirene. Kineas was bent over her, holding her bloody sword hand.

‘I saw her fall,’ he said.

Srayanka cried out. When she was done, she said, ‘She was my spear-maiden, my
mentor
.’ The Greek word made her lips curl.

‘I will see that we recover her corpse,’ Kineas said. He cursed his inability to soften his words, but he was still on the battlefield in his mind, and Srayanka was grey and plastered in sweat, her beautiful hair lank and glued to her face. She was dying.

She lay on a horse blanket, her only privacy the backs of Kineas’s friends - Philokles and Eumenes and Andronicus, Ataelus and Samahe and Lot and Antigonus clutching at a wounded arm and murmuring charms, and the young Nihmu as the midwife. Srayanka groaned patiently and then screamed, drank water, and the men’s faces reflected a kind of fear and exhaustion that the battlefield hadn’t wrought. Nihmu laughed at them.

‘Come, my queen!’ she said. ‘Push! The eagles are pecking at their shells!’

Srayanka screamed one more time, as Kineas chewed his lip and watched his rearguard pickets and hated his life and every decision he had made as his love lay dying in the sand soaked with her own blood. She writhed and sweated and he knew she was going.

Nihmu’s eyes, calm and clear, met his. ‘Trust me,’ she said.

He prayed.

‘Sing!’ screamed Srayanka.

‘Sing!’ shouted Nihmu.

Kineas’s eyes met Diodorus’s, and together they began the paean of Athena. Voices took it up, the circle of his friends and then beyond, and to its martial cry his daughter was born.

And a minute later, he had a son.

He took them in his arms while Nihmu did what had to be done and the women washed Srayanka. The boy howled and the girl looked at him with enormous blue eyes full of questions, unmoved even when her cord was cut and tied off, unmoved when she was washed. Then she reached a hand and grabbed for his beard and burbled, apparently pleased with the world she saw. In his right hand, his son screamed and screamed when his cord was cut and then settled against his father’s armour, waving his arms, blinking at the light.