She shook her head, and her smile warned him that he had wounded her. ‘I am a hetaira,’ she said with grim courtesy, ‘not a flute girl.’
When she was gone, Diodorus looked ruefully at Kineas. ‘Who knows?’ he asked.
Kineas knew, but he rubbed his beard and made a mental note to explain to Diodorus sometime what was plain enough to him — that in her mind, Sappho was still a matron of Thebes. Ill usage, slavery and worse had not broken her notions of proper behaviour. He honoured her for it.
When Sappho was gone, the talk grew louder, the jokes a little wilder, but every speaker seemed to be waiting for something, and the party lacked focus until Kineas rose to his feet. Kineas waited for a pause in the noise and raised his cup, and they all raised theirs, as if they had been waiting all evening for this moment.
‘I want to talk about the expedition to the east,’ he said. He gave them a grin. ‘Against Alexander!’
They sighed together, as if relieved. Lot gave a shrill yip like a Sauromatae war cry.
‘Are we allowed to say that aloud?’ Philokles asked.
Kineas was sober and serious. ‘I am going east because I need to be out of this city, and because my destiny is there. Moira awaits me in the east. I cannot be plainer with you than that.’
Around him, the men who knew of the power of his dreams nodded, all gaiety gone, while others looked puzzled. Memnon laughed.
Kineas ignored him. ‘I must go. That is not true of you. Many of you — all of you, now — have property here and reasons to stay. Every man of you can settle to a farm and a wife. And I am too fond of you to force you to come. Indeed…’ His voice choked a little and he faltered. He drank some wine to cover his confusion, and then said, ‘Indeed, I don’t expect to return. And I do not wish that to be your fate.’
They looked at him with questions, their eyes brimming with misgiving, and he saw the hesitation he sought. He had considered the matter for days, and decided he would do his best to make the ones he loved most stay in Olbia.
But Philokles made a mocking noise with his lips and then laughed. ‘Your life or death is with the gods,’ he said. ‘And the same can be said for every man among us.’
Kineas shot his friend a look, but Philokles ignored him, as he often did.
‘Our fearless leader believes that he goes to his death in the east,’ Philokles said in a mocking tone. ‘Of course, he was equally certain that the recent action on the Borysthenes would be his death. It would appear that the dreams sent to him by the gods were mistaken.’
All the men laughed, because there was no mockery more precious to them than the rare moments when Philokles turned his tongue, sharp as bronze, on Kineas. It was precisely because Kineas was their leader — in many ways, the best man among them, and every one of them conscious of his advantages — that they enjoyed it the more when he was the butt of humour.
Kineas pointed to the Spartan. ‘You mock sacred things,’ he said.
Philokles grinned. ‘No, my lad, I mock you. Unless, like the tiresome boy king, you have appointed yourself a god?’
Kineas narrowed his eyes, red tingeing his vision as rage threatened him. He rose from his couch and began to stalk towards his friend. ‘I do not want to drag my friends to their deaths!’ he bellowed.
Philokles drew himself up to his not inconsiderable height, as if to remind Kineas that his rage might accomplish nothing — and laughed again. ‘Your friends will follow you to the ends of the earth,’ he said, ‘if only to see what you do next.’
The party cheered him, and Kineas deflated, pleased that so many of them clamoured to go, and touched — and bemused — by Philokles’ tone. ‘And I call you my friend,’ he said.
‘You get too much worship and insufficient straight talk,’ Philokles said in a low voice, his tone covered by the laughter. ‘You need us. And I’m damned if I’ll let you go off and find a way to die.’ Then he turned to the others.
‘Hear me, men of Olbia. Kineas of Athens marches east, not to open a road for trade, but to make war on Alexander, king of Macedon. He makes this war not for his own profit, but on behalf of every man in Greece. If there was a lion loose in a nearby town, would you not pick up your spear and go to kill it? So, then — take up your spear and go with us, for the monster is loose on the sea of grass.’
And then they rose from their couches and crowded around, and Kineas embraced them amidst a storm of affection, and was humbled.
In the dawn of the next day, while the guests of the symposium slept in drunken fitfulness, Demosthenes awakened at a loud noise. He shouted until his slaves were awake, and he made their lives more unbearable than usual seeking explanations for the dead frog in his water cup. He scared them sufficiently that it was several hours before any of them dared to tell him that he had a long mark in red ochre drawn on his throat like a giant grinning mouth.
He fainted.
He did not appear when invited for dinner at the barracks, and his excuses were sketchy.
Later, Kineas spoke to the survivors of the symposium in the barracks. They were quieter from the results of the night’s debauch.
‘This will be the largest expedition of its kind since Darius crossed the plains,’ he said, tapping a copy of Herodotus — Isokles’ copy, in fact. ‘The difference is that we’ll have the cooperation of most of the tribes, or at least we won’t have their outright enmity. But the major issue will not be hostile action. It will be food.’
He gestured to Leon, who sat with Niceas. ‘We have worked out a logistikon based on a thousand men and two thousand animals,’ he said. ‘All of you served enough with the Sakje last summer to know how they live on the plain. With our own scouts and the Sauromatae, we should never lack for grass or meat.’
The cavalry professionals all nodded.
‘But we will lack grain for the chargers and bread for the troops. Greek soldiers eat bread. Opson is all very nice, but it is grain that we need. And it is easier to buy it as we go than to try to carry it with us.’
Philokles raised his hand. ‘Grain is so cheap here,’ he said. Other men nodded in agreement. Olbia was the capital of the grain trade. The stuff flowed around them like the waters of the Borysthenes river, even in a summer beset by flooding and war.
Kineas nodded. ‘I thought so too,’ he said, ‘and so I learned a new lesson of war. Listen.’ He picked up Leon’s scroll. ‘Assume that every soldier eats a measure of grain a day, and every horse eats two measures,’ he quoted. The old soldiers nodded agreement at the figures. ‘That means that our little army will consume five thousand measures of grain a day.’ He looked up from the scroll. ‘Every man can carry ten measures of grain in addition to his equipment. Each horse can carry twenty measures of grain in addition to its equipment. So the army can sally forth with ten days’ food.’ His eyes raked them. ‘It is at least ten thousand stades to the roof of the world where the Massagetae await us. At best, if we never slow, we will take sixty days to cross the sea of grass. The Sakje themselves allow fifty days for their fastest men, and ninety days for tribes.’
He began to make marks on the wall of the barracks with a piece of charcoal from the hearth. ‘None of us has traversed the land to the east except Prince Lot and, of course, Ataelus. I have only his report, and the contributions of the more adventurous merchants from here and Pantecapaeum. If we go north to follow Srayanka, we risk tangling with Marthax — even if his forces are disbanded. And we’ll have to cross great marshes as we go east. Srayanka will follow the great road of the Sakje — the high grassland that runs east into Sogdiana and Bactria and the land of the Massagetae.’
‘We’ll have to wait for spring,’ Coenus said with a happy shrug.
Niceas sneered at him. ‘I take it we have another option?’ he asked Kineas with the raise of an eyebrow.