Christian Cameron: Force of Kings

He wasn’t thinking it, but he had never looked better in his life — in his blue military cloak, armour and a fresh white chiton.

The steps seemed quite remarkably long, and he was not without doubts, although Abraham had embraced him at the foot of the steps as if they would never be parted.

But when he saw her with Banugul and Sappho, and Kallista, he knew his case was made, and the jury was all his own.

Their eyes met.

She gave him the grin — the impish grin — he remembered from her father’s house. She stuck out the tip of her tongue.

Something flowed out of him, then — some lingering effect of wounds, or the last spirit of the blow to his head, or just some lingering poison of evil, and he was filled with eudaimonia. He walked up to her and — greatly daring — bent to kiss her in public.

Her eyes suggested he would pay later for this familiarity, but she stood her ground.

‘Marry me?’ he asked.

‘What, no foreplay?’ she asked. ‘I hear you make pretty speeches.’

‘Marry me?’ he asked again.

‘This is your notion of wooing?’ she asked.

‘It is when all the people I love are together — and I’m in a hurry.’ He grinned.

And she grinned.

And somewhere beyond the rim of the world, armies marched — Pyrrhus of Epirus prepared to invade Sicily, and Cassander laid siege to Corcyra, and busy, busy plotters and hardened killers up and down the Inner Sea faced each other across tables and battlefields.

But north of the Euxine, the grain grew in endless plains, unburned by war. The farmers tilled the ground, and the groves gave olives, if only small ones, and the horses grew fat on the plains, and cattle grew fat in the fields, and the Sakje and the Sarmatians, the Maeotae and the Sindi, the Greeks in the cities, from the lowest to the highest, put their shields on the walls and their swords and axes above their hearths and made babies. And grain, and silver and gold. And older men told boys what it had been like when Niceas held the dooryard in Hyrkania, when Philokles fell saving Alexandria, when Kineas defeated Alexander, when their king warred the One-Eye and saved Asia.

But they were also careful to tell their sons and daughters that in war there was blood and torment, fire and loss, many losers and few victors.

It might have lasted for ever, this paradise.

In fact, they had less than thirty years.

But they used them well.