‘I will miss you, Kineas,’ Petrocolus said. ‘The city will miss you.’
Kineas embraced the older man, and then embraced his son, Cliomenedes, who would be acting as the city hipparch. The two men, father and son, were now the most powerful political figures in the city, but there were already factions. Nicomedes’ nephew, Demosthenes, had taken up much of the rhetoric of Cleomenes the elder, Eumenes’ father, who had betrayed the city to Macedon — a fact that was already dwindling in the consciousness of many citizens. Demosthenes had not emerged from his house in a week — but his terror would pass. He had both money and voices in the assembly. He would not be quiet long.
On the other hand, Kineas had arranged — or more properly, Diodorus, Sappho and Philokles had arranged — that the assembly chose Petrocolus as archon. He was one of the city’s richest men, he had hundreds of clients and he had earned his own fortune through hard work and quick wit, and his son was a hero of the war. Together, they had the leverage to hold Demosthenes at bay.
Kineas handed the older man the ivory stool with relief and a certain pride. ‘Don’t sit on it too often,’ he said. ‘It becomes addictive.’
Petrocolus accepted it and nodded gravely. ‘I will keep it for you,’ he said, but Kineas shook his head.
‘I don’t expect to return,’ he said. He pointed to Demosthenes, where he stood glowering with a bodyguard of armed slaves and some followers — most of them men who had once followed Nicomedes.
Kineas thought bitter thoughts about his fellow citizens, and Greeks in general. He had watched his father play the game of democracy, and now he played it himself. Men like Cleomenes the elder and Demosthenes played it without rules or ethics, bending men with money to suit their own tastes, never considering the eudaimonia of the city as a whole — or so Kineas saw them. He hated that good men like Anarxes, a rich farm boy who had ridden in the second troop, served loyally all summer and acted as Eumenes’ second officer when the older boy was lying wounded, now rose in the assembly to demand that Kineas show his accounts for city money he expended. The man did so at the behest of his new political master, and Kineas was sorry for it — and hurt. And the more eager to leave, before the call for an accounting crippled him. Or before he lost the special regard he had received.
He waved to the crowd and embraced the old man one more time, and then he waded out into the surf and climbed the side of Demostrate’s galley. The navarch gave him a hand up the side. ‘You could have ruled,’ he said by way of greeting.
Kineas liked the ugly man. Demostrate was an effective commander, a retired pirate and a loyal ally. ‘Would you, if you had the chance?’ he asked.
Demostrate laughed, a roar like Poseidon’s. ‘Never!’ he said. ‘Easier to calm the waves in a storm than to ride the tides of public opinion.’ He gave a lopsided grin that made him look like a satyr — or more like a satyr. ‘Bad enough that I stopped being a pirate.’
Kineas smiled to himself, and said less than he might once have, but went aft to the awning, where Philokles and Diodorus and Niceas waited, and the red ball of the sun rose in the east, licking the waves to ripples of fire, so that they seemed to be sailing into the east on a road of flame.
PART II
The same sun burned like a line of fire on the late-summer grass of the prairies beyond the low beach in the Bay of Salmon where a dozen galleys were pulled up on their sterns. Small waves lapped against their armoured beaks, and gulls shrieked and whirled where a crowd of Sindi fishermen hauled a net full of silver fish from their boat to the temporary market, where they would be sold for hard cash.
Beyond the warships, the grain fleet of Athens was anchored out in the Bay of Salmon, well clear of the sloping sand and mud. The great ships were not built to beach like warships — with their size, they required the support of a volume of water or their hulls might split, heavy supporting members breaking under the strain. So they anchored out in the deep water, and local boats and hastily built barges emptied their holds and took their cargoes on to the beach, a reversal of the usual process.
Sauromatae horse-herders drove their spare horses straight over the rails of the great ships so that the horses plunged into the sea. The girls then leaped naked into the sea behind them, tangled their fists in sea-wet manes and swam ashore with their charges.
Philokles, equally naked in the late-summer sun, laughed. ‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea, must love you, Athenian,’ he said.
Kineas gave the Spartan half a smile. ‘All the gods love a man who plans carefully,’ he said.
‘Not Aphrodite,’ Philokles said with a wry smile. ‘The goddess born on foam hates a man who plans too much.’ He frowned. ‘You never mention the Foam-born when you make sacrifice.’
Kineas’s eye caught Sappho, cloaked like a matron despite the sun and wearing a large conical straw hat, sitting on a stool further down the beach with Diodorus’s not inconsiderable camp furniture. ‘Speak to me not of Aphrodite,’ he said. ‘I ask only that she withhold her hand from me until I see Srayanka.’
‘Brother, that is exactly the way in which mortals ask the Foam-born for trouble,’ Philokles said. His eyes continued to follow the Sauromatae girls as they rode their horses out of the water. ‘Have you ever wondered why Poseidon is Lord of Horses and Lord of the Sea?’
Kineas, his head full of figures and the minutiae of the landing, shook his head. ‘I must confess that I have not.’
Philokles ignored the hint. ‘I used to think that perhaps our ancestors — those Dorians who came to Sparta and took it in the time after Menelaus and fair Helen — that perhaps they brought a lord of chariots, and the locals had a lord of the ocean, and as the two peoples merged, they merged their gods.’
Kineas was drawn to his friend’s lesson despite himself. ‘I can never decide whether you should be teaching in the agora as a philosopher or thrown from a tall rock as a blasphemer,’ he said with mock concern. But he was listening.
‘But just now, watching those girls, I wonder if it is not hidden, like all other lessons, inside the Poet,’ Philokles said. ‘Wherever the long-haired Achaeans travelled, they took chariots — it is in the Iliad.’
‘True enough,’ Kineas said, amazed that he had never given the matter a thought, though as for most Athenian boys, the Iliad had been the centre of his every military fancy since he first heard it performed in his father’s tiled garden.
‘And the Poet must have seen what we are seeing many times before he lost his sight,’ the Spartan added, peering from beneath his hand. ‘Perhaps I was too simple. Perhaps the Lord of Horses and the Lord of the Sea have always gone together.’
‘Perhaps you’ve just noticed that the Sauromatae girls are naked, and extraordinarily handsome,’ Kineas said.
Philokles released a great sigh. ‘Aphrodite is close to you, brother,’ he said. He gave a wry grin that made him look ten years younger. ‘When women stir my loins, they must be stirring indeed.’
Kineas had no time to consider naked women of any sort, however, because as soon as the bulk of his army had landed he had to put it in a state of defence, had to start the parts of it in motion, had to arrange orders to cover various eventualities, because he was not marching the whole of it together but sending pieces of it across the three thousand stades that separated them from the Kaspian Sea to the east.
Eumenes had done his job. Herds of cattle waited on the beach, already penned together with Sindi shepherds and Sindi sheep. Inland, Ataelus’s prodromoi had marked the road with signs used by the Sakje — sticks and bits of fleece, skulls of dead animals, piles of stones. Kineas could read them, and the Sauromatae girls could read them better. Ataelus was gone — long gone, by all accounts — but Eumenes had been waiting for them when the first warships pulled up on the flats, and he and Philokles and Leon were due to head east as soon as the first troops were prepared to travel — the infantry under Lycurgus, because they would be the fastest to ship and the best at defending the camps.