Tyrant (41 page)

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Authors: Christian Cameron

BOOK: Tyrant
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Kineas nodded to indicate he understood. ‘How many actions has she fought?’ he asked, pointing at Srayanka. ‘Raids? Battles?’
 
Eumenes phrased the question. His Sakje was better every day.
 
The black-haired man looked down at his reins and then up at the sun, as if looking for inspiration. ‘As many as the days of the moon,’ he said, through Eumenes.
 
‘Thirty?’ Kineas said aloud. ‘Thirty actions!’
 
Philokles, who always rode to the sound of a good conversation, appeared from the Sakje part of the column. ‘More than Leonidas,’ he said.
 
‘More than me,’ said Kineas.
 
‘More than me,’ said Niceas. He gave Kineas a grin. ‘I’ll be more respectful.’
 
On the seventh day, the scouts found a herd of deer, and a mixed group of hunters, Sakje and Olbian, rode away to procure fresh meat. They returned with six big carcasses, and Kineas stood beside Srayanka as they ordered the division of the meat. The youngest warriors of the Sakje were skinning the animals, and the Olbian’s slaves were breaking the joints and butchering.
 
Srayanka watched two young women skinning the biggest buck. Kineas watched her. He could see her desire to say something, or perhaps take the chore herself, although he couldn’t see that they were making any error.
 
A trio of Olbian cavalrymen, younger ones with no immediate duty, had gravitated to the sight because the two Sakje women had stripped naked to do the bloody work.
 
Srayanka glanced up from her own concerns when one of the Olbian men said ‘barbarian’ a little too aggressively. She turned to Kineas and raised an eyebrow.
 
Who needs language? he thought. He walked over to the knot of hippeis
.
‘If you gentlemen don’t have anything better to do, I expect I could teach you to do some basic butchering.’
 
The mouthy one - Alcaeus - shook his head. ‘That’s slave’s work,’ he said. ‘We’re just watching the amazons bathe in blood.’
 
‘They’re skinning the buck to get the skin, not to impress you with their charms. Move along, or I’ll put you to butchering.’ Kineas kept his voice low. He didn’t want to advertise the poor behaviour of his men. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Srayanka’s trumpeter and a half-dozen other Sakje, watching and flicking their riding whips.
 
Alcaeus put his hands on his hips. ‘I’m not on duty.’ He tossed his head arrogantly. ‘I can watch the barbarians show their tits if I want.’
 
His companions both moved away from him as if he had the plague. Kineas glanced around for Niceas or Eumenes - he would have preferred that this obvious indiscipline be dealt with by someone else. But they were both busy.
 
Still keeping his voice low, Kineas said, ‘No, you can’t. Don’t be a fool. Go to your horse and curry him. Then join the sentries until I order you in.’
 
The man looked affronted rather than sheepish. ‘I take my orders from Leucon,’ he said. ‘And besides—’
 
‘Silence!’ Kineas said in his battlefield voice. ‘Not another word.’
 
Alcaeus shifted his gaze to look past Kineas at the two women. He glanced at his two companions with all the arrogance of an adolescent assuring himself of an audience. He smirked. ‘You’re blocking my view,’ he said lazily.
 
Kineas lost his temper. It happened in a moment - he felt the flood of anger and then he had knocked the stupid boy unconscious with a single blow. It hurt his shoulder and split a knuckle. He turned on one of the man’s companions. ‘Roll him in his cloak and put him by his horse. Both of you stay with him until he wakes, and then help him curry his horse, mount it, and the three of you go on sentry until I recall you. Do you understand?
 
They all nodded, their eyes as round as Athenian owls.
 
When he returned to Srayanka and Ataelus, she shook her head. ‘For what you hit the man?’ she asked in passable Greek.
 
Kineas turned to Ataelus. ‘How do you say
disobey
?’
 
Ataelus shook his head. ‘What is
disobey
?’
 
Kineas breathed out slowly. He was angry - too angry. ‘When I give an order, I expect the man to obey. If he won’t, he
disobeys
.’
 
Srayanka turned her head back and forth between them. Then she asked a short question in rapid Sakje. Kineas caught his own name and nothing more.
 
Ataelus shook his head, glanced at Kineas, and spoke at length, making gestures of riding and sleeping. To Kineas, he said. ‘She ask me, for how long am I with you? And I tell her. And she ask how often you hit men, and I say not so much.’
 
Srayanka’s eyes locked with his. They were like the blue of the Aegean when the sun returns after a squall. He was taller than she by half a head. She was standing quite close to him. She spoke directly to him, speaking slow, careful Sakje.
 
He didn’t understand a word.
 
Ataelus said, ‘She say - if I hit one man for hurt - if I hit one, I kill. Or he ride away or make for enemy.’ He stopped, looked back and forth, like a trapped animal. Finally he said, ‘Then she say - man watch girls. Men all fools when women show tits. So what? Why hit?’
 
Kineas was not used to having his judgement questioned in matters of command. He was not used to being questioned in public, through an interpreter, or by a woman.
 
Like a man, Philokles had said. But she could have had a man flayed to ribbons with a riding whip and he wouldn’t have questioned her authority.
 
He could feel the red in his face, feel his temper, rarely unleashed, building. He could feel his mind in revolt against the unfairness of it, against the censure in her eyes. He breathed in and out several times. He counted to ten in Sakje. Then he gave her a nod. ‘I will explain,’ he said in Greek, ‘when I am less angry.’
 
‘Good,’ she said, and walked away.
 
That night he related the incident to Leucon, Eumenes, Niceas and Philokles. They sat by a small fire, distant from the Sakje, who were quiet and kept to themselves.
 
‘He’s got a dick instead of a brain,’ Niceas said. He glanced at Leucon. ‘Sorry. I know he’s your friend, but he’s a fool. He had it coming.’
 
Leucon looked miserable. ‘He’s been my companion since we were boys. He always gets what he wants - hard to change that now.’
 
Niceas gave a nasty grin. ‘Not that hard,’ he said.
 
Leucon put his head in his hands. ‘I feel that I’ve failed you, Hipparch. But also - I have to say this - I feel that . . . that you didn’t need to hit him. He’s a gentleman. No one has hit him since his first tutor.’
 
Kineas bridled, trying not to react.
 
Philokles spoke. ‘In Sparta, he could have been killed. On the spot.’
 
Leucon sat back on his stool, clearly shocked. ‘For a little back-talk? ’
 
Philokles shrugged. ‘Indiscipline is poison.’
 
Leucon looked at Eumenes. Eumenes didn’t meet his eye. ‘He’s the kind of bully who would draw a knife in a wine-shop brawl. I’ve seen him do it.’ He looked at Niceas and then back at Leucon. ‘I don’t like him.’
 
Kineas leaned forward. ‘That’s not at issue. Like or dislike - a commander is above them. I don’t dislike the boy - I hit him because he was disobedient. In my experience disobedience is a plague that starts slowly but spreads rapidly.’ He spread his hands to catch more warmth from the fire, leaned forward so that his elbows could rest on his thighs. He was cold, his knuckle and his shoulder both hurt, and he didn’t want to think of what damage he’d done to relations with Srayanka - or the Sakje. ‘He was offending the Sakje. He offended me. And he disobeyed a direct order.’ Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘I am a hard man. A mercenary. Perhaps your men needed to remember that.’ And then he sighed. ‘I let myself grow angry.’
 
Leucon looked more bewildered than informed. ‘What will I tell his father?’ he asked, before he walked off into the dark.
 
Philokles watched him go. ‘I take it Lady Srayanka was unimpressed.’ Kineas nodded. Philokles shook his head. ‘You did the right thing. What else could you do?’
 
Kineas rubbed his hands together. ‘You’re the philosopher. You tell me!’
 
Philokles shook his head. ‘I’m a Spartan first and a philosopher second, I suppose. I might have killed him.’
 
Kineas nodded wearily. ‘Odd. That’s what Srayanka said. She said if she had to hit a man, she’d kill him. Rather than leave an enemy at her back - or at least, that’s what I got from the whole thing.’
 
Eumenes said, ‘They don’t even strike their children.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m serious. I had a Sakje nanny. In war, or in a contest - no holds barred. But not for discipline.’ He thought for as long as it took Niceas to put an armload of wood on the fire, and then said, ‘I don’t think they even have a
word
for discipline.’
 
‘Now
that
is interesting,’ Philokles said.
 
Kineas left them to it. He sent Niceas to recall the three sentries before he went to roll in his cloak. Then he lay awake for a long time, thinking about women - his mother, his sisters, Artemis and Srayanka. He didn’t reach any conclusion at all. Artemis and Srayanka were like a different sex from his mother and sisters. It was not that he thought that Artemis and Srayanka were really so alike. Artemis used her sex as a tool to get what she wanted from men. Srayanka was a commander. And yet there was some basic similarity.
 
He thought of Philokles, telling him to treat Srayanka as if she were a man. The thought made him frown, and he fell asleep.
 
They didn’t ride together the next day. Kineas rode with his men, practising words with Ataelus as the grass vanished under their hooves. It wasn’t that everything was the same, nor that anything was different.
 
The same could be said in the Olbian section of the column. Kineas couldn’t define the problem, but something had changed. It confounded him - he had the ability to read his troops, and he knew that they agreed with him that Alcaeus deserved his punishment. In fact, from his demeanor, it appeared that Alcaeus himself felt he merited the blow. He looked sheepish now, rather than angry. And yet - something was different in the column, as if by demonstrating the force that underlay the discipline, Kineas had forfeited some of their goodwill.
 
Niceas added a barb to the situation when they were alone. ‘The idiot was ogling the Sakje girls, right? And you spend all your waking hours with one. You know what soldiers say when one man has something the others can’t have.’
 
Kineas had to admit the fairness of the point - at least, through the eyes of soldiers. He stroked his beard and blew on his cold hands. ‘You know, if all these pampered gentlemen soldiers have to complain about is my love life, they’re doing pretty well.’ He looked off at the horizon. ‘She won’t speak to me today.’
 
Niceas gave him a half-grin in return. ‘Exactly.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You worry too much, Hipparch.’ He glanced at the sky, where a line of heavy dark clouds came at them like a phalanx. One corner of his mouth curled. ‘The rich boys’ll sing a different tune soon enough.’
 
After three days of rain everyone in the column had plenty to complain about.
 
The three days were miserable for the Greeks, who spent them learning to live like soldiers, rather than like rich men on an extended hunt. Their cloaks were wet through - some men found that the blue dye in their cloaks ran, staining their skins - and their fires were fitful and smoky. The nights were cold and wet, and the troopers from Olbia finally learned to huddle together for warmth. It wasn’t really like sleeping - the best most men could manage was a troubled half-sleep as the pile of bodies moved, every man searching for warmth at the centre. By day they had their horses for warmth, and by the third day, most of them could sleep on horseback.
 
Kineas was just as miserable, because while he drilled his men and taught them to live in the rain, Srayanka eluded him. Worse, he sometimes caught her watching him, her face serious, her brows a single line across her face. She was judging him.
 
On the fourth day the sun shone, and towards evening they found the king.
 
The ‘city’ of the Sakje stretched for miles, and when he first saw the extent of the walls the size of it took Kineas’s breath away. A temple stood on a high bluff over the river, and around it lay an acropolis of large log structures, brightly coloured, and smaller buildings built of hewn timber and earth. The acropolis itself was small enough, but the walls that surrounded it ran off to join earthworks three men tall that ran off almost to the horizon.

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