Tyrant (73 page)
Authors: Christian Cameron
The Macedonian horses could barely stumble along, and many of the Macedonian cavalrymen were fighting dismounted. His two hundred appeared out of the dust and bit into the red-cloaked companions to his front as a complete surprise, and they were knocked flat. Many died, and many more fought back like desperate men.
Kineas found Phillip Kontos in the battle haze. The man’s horse reared, throwing back his magnificent cloak, and Kineas knew him, and gave a yell. Kontos knew him, too - and they came together with a crash of armour and horses, chest to chest. Kontos was his match, blow for blow, and their horses bit at each other, the enemy officer’s stallion a better mount than his, but luck was against him, and Kineas’s weakest blow went past his guard and fingers sprayed away from his adversary’s sword hand like twigs from an axe - and the man fell against the mane of his horse and from there to the ground. Kineas circled him, wanting his horse and his javelins. Kontos clutched the ruins of his sword hand and looked up at him, battle rage spent, and before Kineas could consider mercy, Ataelus shot him dead.
Kineas whirled his brute of a horse and looked around. The battle had moved past him. Ahead, Coenus was dismounted, collecting javelins, and Sitalkes was finishing an opponent. Ataelus pushed past him to shoot, and every time he had an arrow knocked, he reared his horse for an extra span of height, and every arrow emptied another saddle. While Kineas pushed his horse into motion. Diodorus engaged an officer, cut hard with his heavy javelin, and a Thessalian lance caught him in the back plate and unhorsed him.
Kineas dug in, knees and heels, and his horse responded, flowing over the ground. Kineas’s sword flicked out - right through the eyes and nose of the Thessalian - a blow rang against his helmet and he cut backwards underarmed, and saw Ataelus behind him, rising to shoot even as Kineas’s new enemy whirled his javelin to strike again. Kineas’s sword cut the man’s thigh and Ataelus’s arrow emerged from the bronze of his helmet, and then Kineas had Diodorus’s wrist in his hand and he got him up behind without stabbing him with the sword while Ataelus continued to fire point blank into the mêlée.
I’m not a general anymore, Kineas thought. He saw Kontos’s riderless horse, rode at it and it shied, but Ataelus was there with a lasso. Diodorus slipped off his gelding and got a leg over the strange horse. ‘Apollo, he’s a giant!’ he called.
They were almost alone - a minute away from the combat and it had moved south. The ground had dried, and the dust was rising faster - the familiar dust that gathered over every mêlée. Nothing was visible a javelin’s throw away - closer than that, men were just shapes moving in the dust, like ghosts.
Kineas took a breath, looked around, put his heels to his gelding, and the brute responded. Kineas had time to be pleased, and then he was back in the madness.
Something had changed. The noise was different and the whole shifting mass of the fight was moving west like an ocean current. Kineas pressed after it. A flurry of blows - his sword bit deep and locked in the bone of a man’s arm, and it was gone behind him in the brawl. He had no time to regret its loss - he had a dagger, and his whip - and he used both, pressing his next opponent close, slashing the Sakje weapon across the man’s face and then finishing him with the dagger, clutching his mount with his knees to keep from slipping.
Something caught him in the hip - a flare of pain and then nothing more, and there was a javelin trapped between his leg and his horse. He grabbed at it, pulled it clear of his girth strap and fell straight to the ground as the strap gave under him.
He never felt the blow that put him down.
Horses hooves all around him, grunts, the scream of a horse, and he couldn’t get his feet under him - right leg wouldn’t answer. Dust in his mouth, filling his throat - a horse stepped on him and stepped away without testing his breastplate with its whole weight, and he still had no breath - dust everywhere, and hooves, and a javelin.
‘Kineas!’ screamed Coenus. He whirled a javelin, swinging it two-handed like a Thrake sword, clearing a space around his commander, and Sitalkes was there - he still had a javelin to throw, and he threw hard, killing the man at Kineas’s right, and then he unhorsed another and pushed his horse past Kineas, and Coenus had one of his wrists and Niceas had the other - he was up.
Ataelus had another horse. He grinned, his face a mask of grime with two burning blue eyes. Somewhere between him, voices cheered ‘Apollo!’ and Ataelus reached for his gorytos and came away without an arrow.
Kineas’s right hip was aflame and the leg was unresponsive. He could just stay astride the new horse - it hurt his balls to canter because he couldn’t get his knees to lock. He looked right and left - he could see nothing but battle haze and shadowy figures, but the sound to his left was the Paean of Apollo and he could
hear
as the Olbian hoplites pressed forward. He didn’t need to be able to
see
what was happening - invisible in the murk, the veteran Macedonians were giving way.
hear
as the Olbian hoplites pressed forward. He didn’t need to be able to
see
what was happening - invisible in the murk, the veteran Macedonians were giving way.
Somewhere in the dust, the king was finally on the field. Nothing else would have the same effect.
They had won. Kineas knew the feeling, having felt it in the dream - the certainty of victory.
He glanced around at his friends, and then, without a word, he pushed into the cloud again, feeling the strength of a god despite his wound, the daimon that lifts a man above himself in the eye of the battle storm, knowing that these were his last moments and determined to ride fate’s horse to the very end. He followed Sitalkes, who left a swathe of dead the width of his reach, because the enemy was in the cloud, and because that’s where the rest of his friends were, now.
And Srayanka.
There were grunts and calls and animal screams, but the song had changed - the battlefield was a hymn to victory for the Greeks, rout for the Macedonians - and there was cheering from the ford. ‘Apollo!’ again from the left. ‘Athena!’ from Coenus at his right hand.
The Macedonian army was dying.
Kineas had a javelin - too long and too heavy and the gods knew where he’d gotten it - he thrust it at a Macedonian face and the man went down, taking the javelin with him, and Kineas’s horse was astride the broken body of Kam Baqca, gold and dirt mingled beneath his horse’s hooves - another red cloak, and Sitalkes swept him from the saddle - the dust was rising faster, or the sun was stronger - the falling red cloak had the horsetail standard in his fist. Kineas hit him - hit him again, lashing him with the whip, screaming his war cry in the man’s panicked face. Sitalkes got a hand on the standard, and together they killed the man, and Sitalkes held the standard high. Sakje voices cheered - fresh voices, and closer, now.
More Macedonians - where were they coming from? Kineas’s head snapped back as something hit him a hard blow - he couldn’t see, but he hung on, his whip rising and falling, and then he was free, like a ship at sea that cuts loose an anchor, and he had his reins and the gelding was still under his command. He whirled his whip, his arm feeling like a chunk of wood; the tendrils of the weapon caught at an enemy helmet. As soon as it tore free, he saw . . . Sitalkes cut a man from his horse and a dismounted Macedonian cut at his side, clanging against his breastplate, and Sitalkes fell amid the hooves, gone in the dust - the standard going down again. Coenus killed the Macedonian, and Ataelus caught the standard.
Kineas was eye to eye with Zopryon. There was no shock - the man was where he ought to have been, at the centre of the battle cloud. Kineas had long enough to see defeat in his eyes - and rage.
Kineas lashed him with the whip, two quick blows, and one of them went home, a tendril of the lash wrapping under the brim of the man’s gilt helmet and taking an eye, but Zopryon’s back slash with his sword cut through the Sakje whip, leaving Kineas with a handle of gold and no weapon. Kineas leaned forward, and the gelding responded, rushing the bigger horse and catching him broadside on. The gelding’s teeth bit hard, and the stallion struck back - but Kineas caught Zopryon’s rising sword arm with his left hand and trapped it with his right, used the other man’s strength and his strong left leg against his horse’s spine to clasp him tight and pull him down - and they were in the dust, the horses a storm of teeth and hooves above them. Kineas fell on top, and their bronze breastplates bounced and winded them both. Kineas got an arm around the man’s neck - nose to nose, Zopryon’s breath was foul like a bad wound, and his eyes were those of an injured boar.
Zopryon, by luck or skill, forced Kineas back against his injured leg and Kineas screamed. Twice, Zopryon got the pommel of his sword against Kineas’s helmet, and his head rang with the blows, and darkness threatened.
Kineas had only one good leg, but rage and thirty years of wrestling broke the Macedonian’s bridle arm in a scream of sweat and blood. The crack of the arm seemed like the loudest sound on the battlefield - but pain, rage, desperation, strength born of despair allowed Zopryon to roll back, rise to his knees in the dust, and, ignoring his shattered left arm, cock his sword for a killing blow.
Kineas went for his second dagger, trapped by his injured leg - too slow.
The first arrow went into the Macedonian just above the circle where his neck emerged from his breastplate. And then he seemed to grow arrows like some trick of a stage machine - one, then four.
Kineas was on one knee, and he couldn’t think very well, but he raised his head, and her blue eyes were there above a tall horse, and above them the dust rose like a funeral pyre. And even as he looked at her, the dust opened and he was looking at the sky. The sky above the dust was blue and in the distance, far out over the plain, clouds rose in pristine white. Up there, in the aether, all was peace. An eagle, best of omens, turned a lazy circle to his right. Closer, less auspicious birds circled.
A hand grasped his, hard as iron on the calloused side, and soft as doeskin on the back under his thumb.
And darkness took him.
He was sitting on a horse in the middle of a river - a shallow river, with rocks under his horse’s feet and pink water flowing over and around the rocks. The ford - it was a ford - was full of bodies. Men and horses, all dead, and the white water burbling over the rocks was stained with blood.
The river was enormous. He lifted his head and saw the far side, where piles of driftwood made the riverbank look like the shore of the sea, and a single dead tree rose above the red rocks of the shore. There were other men behind him, all around him, and they were singing. He was astride a strange horse tall and dark, and he felt the weight of strange armour.
‘Is this any river you have ever seen?’ Kam Baqca asked mockingly.
‘No,’ he admitted, feeling like a boy with his tutor.
‘The hubris of men, and their vanity, is beyond measurement.’ She laughed, and he looked at her, and the white of her face paint could not obscure the rot that had taken most of the flesh of her cheeks.
‘You’re dead!’ he said.
‘My body is dead,’ she said.
‘And mine?’ he asked. Even as he spoke he looked down, and the skin of his arm was firm and marked with all the scars that life had given him.
She laughed again. ‘Go back,’ she said. ‘It is not yet your time.’
There were three of them, sitting on the branches of the tree, and each was more hideous than the last. The one on the lowest branch reached above her and took something from the crone on the next branch, and when she looked at him, she had just one eye, but that was as bright as a young girl’s. She held up her hand, and from it dangled a thread, or perhaps a single hair of a child, and it was bright gold and shone with its own light, although it was shorter than the width of a man’s finger.
‘Not much left,’ she said, and she cackled. ‘But better than nothing, eh?’
‘Enough to father a child or two,’ giggled one of her hideous sisters.
‘Enough to defeat a god,’ roared the one on the highest branch. ‘But only if you hurry!’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Very little survives of the Scythian language, and I am an author, not a linguist. I chose to represent some Scythic words with Avestan, and some with modern Siberian words, and some with Ossetic words, all with the intention of showing how difficult a language barrier is, even when many words share common roots. I have very little skill with Classical Greek, and none with any of the other languages mentioned, and any errors in translation are entirely my own.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book - really, a series - like this does not spring full blown from an author like Athena from the brow of Zeus. Kineas and his world began with my desire to write a book that would allow me to discuss the serious issues of war and politics that are around all of us today. I was returning to school and returning to my first love - Classical history. And I wanted to write a book that my friend, Christine Szego, would carry in her store - Bakka-Phoenix bookstore in Toronto. The combination - Classical history, the philosophy of war, and a certain shamanistic element - gave rise to the volume you hold in your hand. Along the way, I met Professor Wallace and Professor Young, both very learned men with long association to the University of Toronto. Professor Wallace answered any question that I asked him, providing me with sources and sources and sources, introducing me to the labyrinthine wonders of Diodorus Siculus, and finally, to T. Cuyler Young. Cuyler was kind enough to start my education on the Persian Empire of Alexander’s day, and to discuss the possibility that Alexander was not infallible, or even close to it. I wish to give my profoundest thanks and gratitude to these two men for their help in re-creating the world of fourth century BC Greece, and the theory of Alexander’s campaigns that underpins this series of novels. Any brilliant scholarship is theirs, and any errors of scholarship are certainly mine. I will never forget the pleasure of sitting in Professor Wallace’s office, nor in Cuyler’s living room, eating chocolate cake and debating the myth of Alexander’s invincibility.
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