Tyrant: Storm of Arrows (54 page)

‘No one will drink,’ Nihmu said by his side. The girl was so darkly tanned that she rivalled Leon’s looks, and she had a straw hat over a linen wimple to guard her face from the sun. ‘The water is for the children, and your people know it.’

Kineas looked at her, stunned to silence. He didn’t think that he had the discipline to pass on a mouthful of water.

The water skin was already back to Carlus. Carlus looked at it with obvious longing, but he didn’t put it to his mouth. Instead, he handed it to Kineas. The skin was more than half full - some of the riders had taken a sip. But their discipline was remarkable, and humbling. Kineas took enough water to loosen his tongue in his mouth.

‘We must have water tonight,’ Nihmu said. ‘Or many will die.’

Kineas looked at her. ‘Why don’t you find water?’ he asked.

‘I did,’ she said. ‘That water.’ The wineskin was still in his hands, and he passed it across to Srayanka
.
‘It is a long ride to that water, lord. I can take you there. Ataelus will help. But you must lead.’ Nihmu turned her head away to look at the horizon.

‘Thank you,’ Srayanka said. ‘But do you think I could drink when all my people were thirsty?’

‘All have had their fill, lady,’ Kineas said. ‘Now you drink.’

Kineas’s eyes burned with unspent tears and Srayanka hung her head.

But she drank.

As she drank, her throat moving with the gulps of water, her drinking noises and the sounds of horses and conversation and Nihmu’s light voice wove themselves like the border on a garment, so that in one moment they were disparate threads and in the next the voice of the god.

‘
The time is soon. It is time to be complete
.’

Kineas stiffened, and the hair on his neck rose like the hackles of a dog, and his stomach recoiled.

None of them would forget that afternoon, because it seemed to go beyond a tale of hours. The sun beat down as if the gods had a burning lens focused on their column, and the heat was reflected off the scrubby grass like light from a bronze mirror. The horses took shorter strides and the dust of their passage rose to the skies like the smoke of a funeral pyre.

At the edge of dark, Kineas called a halt. The horses protested. He pushed Thalassa - still as brave as she had been at noon - through the throng to Diodorus. ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘Then we mount and ride on. The thirst,’ he paused to rub his heavy tongue over his throat, ‘it will not get any better,’ he said.

Diodorus nodded.

Philokles waited until Kineas had dismounted and picketed his charger. Then he came up to Kineas and held out a cup. ‘Drink, brother,’ he said.

‘I will not,’ Kineas said. ‘I will not drink your water.’

‘You must command. And this is watered wine - the last from Coenus. Let us pour a libation to the gods and drink.’

Kineas took the Spartan cup and tipped a healthy portion into the dust. ‘By Zeus who shakes the heavens and Poseidon who shakes the earth, Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow, and Hera whose breasts are as white as the snow on Olympus, Athena wise in war, Ares clad in bronze, Aphrodite who riseth from the waves and Hephaestion the lame smith, Artemis the huntress, Hermes, god of travellers, who might relieve us in this waterless desert, and all the gods,’ he said. And he drank.

Even as he handed the wine to Philokles, it went to his head, so that he threw his dirty cloak on the warm ground by Srayanka and before she had fed Lita, he was . . .

He awoke to darkness and children crying.

By his side, Nihmu squatted, the thin hide of her leggings, worked with a thousand animals whirling in a geometric tangle of hooves and antlers and gold cones, tinkled at her shins and ankles. ‘We must ride, lord,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Kineas said. He felt that he was speaking down a tunnel, an endless tunnel lined with sound and light and motion and life - too much life.

He turned to Srayanka, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘I have done it,’ he said. There was awe in his voice, and for the first time in his life, Kineas felt no fear.

Srayanka rolled to her knees from her cloak. She reached out and touched his face. ‘Ahh!’ she said. ‘How the people will worship you.’

Kineas held her in his arms. ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Let’s get these people to water.’ His mouth was dry, but he could speak, and he could still taste the wine, and he gave the goddess a silent prayer and a smile in the dark.

They stumbled twenty stades in two hours, the worst time they had ever made, and then they rode another ten stades in a matter of minutes, because the horses could smell the water. This time, there was no holding them, no discipline, no attempt to stop the beasts or the people. Kineas gave Thalassa her head and she lengthened her stride, galloping the last stades in a few heartbeats. Even Kineas could smell the water. It gleamed like liquid pitch in the light of the new moon, a broad pond dug by the prodromoi, and they stood well clear as the horses rushed upon it and drank, more and more of them pouring in behind so that the first comers were pushed right out of the water and the weaker horses were knocked down. A mare screamed and her desperation drove other horses back, and her rider tried to get her to her feet, but the horses were mad with thirst.

‘Here! Here! For more water!’ Ataelus was shouting, over and over, because there was a second hole just a hundred strides away in the dark. Kineas had to drag Thalassa, usually the most obedient of horses, by her halter. He put both hands on the bit and pulled, abraiding her mouth until he got her head up and away from the water and moving, and then she finally got the message that there was a second source of water and she let out a shrill cry and ran, leaving Kineas with his hands skinned raw, lying in the sand. Another mare following her lead stepped very close to him and a third kicked him where his ribs were hurt and he screamed, and then Ataelus and Leon were dragging him clear of the horses as many of the lead stallions and mares dashed for the second waterhole.

Kineas lay on the sand.

‘Is he hurt badly?’ Diodorus asked fearfully.

‘He has lost his breath,’ Philokles said. ‘I think he was kicked.’

Both of them were very far away.

T
hey emerged from the dry grass into the valley of the lake of the Jaxartes on the second day after the prodromoi found water. They had topped a ridge so shallow that they hadn’t been aware they had climbed it, and looked down to see, not desert, but stades of water stretching away towards the mountains that now rose to the south. Horses had died, and more horses were ruined, most of them in the last rush to water and the brutal mêlée that followed - but not a man or woman or child had died. The horses had suffered, and their exhausted riders had to fight them, man and woman against horse, to drag them from the water before they killed themselves drinking.

Lot’s people helped, having experienced the same just a week before. They had waited at the first water, hoping that Srayanka’s people would catch up with them. Lot’s wife was gone into the high country with all their herds and the young and old, and Lot appeared older. The loss of his daughters and the desert had put white in his hair, but it had not robbed him of courtesy.

‘I apologize—’ he said to Srayanka, but she cut him off with a quick embrace and a kiss on the cheek.

‘Are we Greeks? You saw to your people and I saw to mine - and here we are.’

Lot smiled, but his smile faded as he regarded Kineas, who lay rolled in his saddle blanket, alert but mute.

‘He was kicked,’ Philokles said.

‘He seems to hear everything we say,’ Srayanka said.

Lot nodded. ‘We had several in a bad way - always the ones who took the least water.’ His tone left something out.

Kineas lay with an untouched Spartan cup of water in his right hand.

‘Did yours recover?’ Srayanka asked, as if the question were of little consequence.

‘One did,’ Lot replied.

‘Of how many?’ Philokles asked, and then repeated his question in Sakje.

‘Out of four,’ Lot said. He shrugged. ‘I apologize again. But for Upazan, the king would have had Iskander at the Oxus. It is a heavy weight I carry.’

‘Heavier than the loss of a daughter?’ Kineas said, his head coming up. ‘I have seen her, by the tree.’

All the commanders, Greek and Sakje and Sauromatae, stopped talking.

Tears rolled down Lot’s face. ‘No, lord. Not heavier than Mosva’s loss.’

Kineas’s eyes went over Lot’s head, off into the blue sky. ‘Death is not as you think,’ he said. And then his head went down, and the light in his eyes dwindled, and he slept.

He was aware of the passage of time, although his awareness was flawed and he knew it, the way a man with a fever is aware that time does not pass for him as it does for his wife bathing his brow and cleaning the bed. He heard the reassuring voices of those he loved best, friends and wife, the babble and scream of his children, and he felt such passion for them that it was like physical pain, like a javelin piercing his chest straight to his heart.

He knew that a stranger had come, speaking a strange dialect, like Sakje, with many of the same words, but in a different tone with more music. He listened, but he didn’t open his eyes for a long time.

When he did, he felt better and he could breathe without wheezing. He tried to sit up and gave a cry, curling into a ball, and Srayanka was there.

‘Hush, Kineas.’

‘I’m better,’ he croaked. ‘Oh, the ill luck of it! Right where the spear hit me.’

Srayanka stroked his hand. ‘I have news,’ she said.

‘I heard a stranger,’ Kineas said.

‘A messenger from the queen of the Massagetae, bidding us hurry to the muster. My husband is a famous warrior, I find. His fame carries even to the queen of the Massagetae.’