Christian Cameron - Tyrant

Kineas shrugged. ‘Too late.’

Diodorus started to struggle with his breastplate, and Sitalkes handed him a length of leather. The two of them worked to tie the breastplate tighter. Niceas was organizing the survivors into a single troop.

‘Where’s the king?’ Diodorus asked.

Kineas pointed out to the west with his whip. ‘The king is coming,’ he said. Men stopped what they were doing to listen, and he shouted it, pointing across the melee and the rising dust. ‘The king is coming!’ and the word spread like a grassfire on the plains.

Diodorus gave his cynical half-smile. ‘Of course he is,’ he said, and slapped Kineas on the back plate. ‘Let’s ride to meet him.’

Kineas made a motion with his whip, and the Olbians fell in on him, and Grass Cats rode in a loose knot at their right.

As they rode north, more men joined them — wounded men, and men who had, perhaps, had enough of the fight, and now felt differently. Kineas didn’t harangue them. He just gathered them, his eyes on the horsetail standard.

Every Sakje eye was on the horsetail standard, and every Macedonian eye. Sacred to the one — royal to the other. Kineas gathered his men while the maelstrom swirled to a new centre. He kept them moving north, pecking at the melee to disengage those who could be pulled free.

The ground was losing its moisture, and the dust of the deadly battle haze was finally starting to rise.

Kineas watched the battle as he pushed north. The Macedonian horses were done — ruined by the campaign, not the battle — and they could never pursue when the Sakje gave ground, so that he was able to take men out of the battle lines and the Macedonians could do nothing in response but watch.

It took time, and he saw too much. He saw Nicomedes’ body pinned under Ajax’s horse — just a spear’s length from the mangled remains of Cleomenes the traitor. He saw Lykeles with a broken lance straight through his body, and gentle, priestly Agis would sing no more of the Poet’s words with a sword cut across his face and neck. The Olbian cavalry had held the worst of the first Macedonian charge, and paid.

And Varo of the Grass Cats was surrounded by his household with a ring of dead enemies like a hill fort. The survivors were grim faced, but they rallied under the leadership of Varo’s daughter, Urvara. He gathered them and moved north, while the attention of his enemy was locked on the horsetail standard.

And then the standard fell.

Every Sakje gave voice together, and despite the distortion of a thousand voices, Kineas knew the word. ‘ Baqca! They cried.

By then, Kineas had almost two hundred men — Olbians and men of Pantecapaeum, Diodorus and Andronicus, Coenus, Ataelus, Heron and Laertes with a length of linen tied around his bridle hand; two dozen Grass Cats and a handful of bloody Standing Horses as well as Niceas, Petrocolus and his troop. He was as far around the flank as he could spare the time to go, and he prayed to Athena that his two hundred men would, like Kam Baqca’s charge, distract Zopryon and his army for a few more minutes. The sun was high in the sky above the dust.

He pointed to where the standard had fallen. ‘That’s where Zopryon is!’ he called, his voice still strong. Sitalkes put a javelin in his hand.

He looked at his friends. There was no tree across the stream; he was on the wrong horse, no ford, the whole thing was insane. But the feeling of victory that suffused him was the same, and so he knew that this would be the time. And he meant to see it finished.

‘Zopryon’s head is Srayanka’s bride price!’ he yelled, and his voice held. They laughed, because of whom they were, Hellenes and Sakje laughing together, and their laughter was terrible.

‘Charge!’ he said, for the last time.

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 melee.

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 melee. 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.