‘You have read the Poet?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, her young voice utterly dismissive. ‘And in plays — the dead speak all the time in plays. I saw one in Olbia.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘Who are you?’
She got up, laughing, for all the world like any other happy twelve-year-old girl. ‘Nihmu White Horse of the Royal Sakje,’ she said proudly. ‘Kam Baqca was my father, and Attalos One-Eye was my grandsire. Arraya Walks-Alone was my mother and Srayanka the Archer was my father’s mother.’ She rattled off her impressive lineage in the sing-song voice of memorization.
Kineas helped her down from the stone as he would any girl — and he remembered his sisters in the family olive groves, and how they had claimed to be women as soon as they could walk. This child seemed to be every age and no age. ‘Where do you camp?’ he asked.
‘With the prodromoi,’ she said.
‘The scouts are all gone for the Kaspian,’ Kineas said. He was disconcerted again. Thunder rumbled in the distance, late-summer thunder that did not bring rain.
She frowned and shook her head rapidly. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she said. She took his hand and pulled on it like one of his sisters wanting a honey treat in the agora. ‘Hurry!’
‘Why?’ he asked. Now she seemed far away.
‘ Because you’ll die ’ came the deeper voice. But the girl looked as startled as he was, and ran off down the hill and into the gathering dark.
When Kineas awoke, Niceas was at his shoulder, shaking him. ‘I knew you’d slipped off to have a kip,’ he said.
Kineas looked around and gradually realized that he was curled up against the kurgan’s stone. His body was like ice, and he was scared.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he asked the sky.
Niceas’s raillery vanished and was replaced by concern. ‘What’s the matter?’
Kineas put his head in his hands. ‘The veils between the world of dreams and the waking world are tearing,’ he said. ‘Or I am going mad.’
The next night, Kineas dreamed of his own death, and he dreamed of the tree, and he dreamed of skeletal figures offering him the gift of sand from their mouths — one a Persian archer, another a man he’d bought a cup of wine after the sack of Tyre. Sometimes they were not even recognizable — the worst was a corpse with no head, who vomited sand from the stump of its neck. Dreams like this cost him his rest, and he began to fear to place his head on his cloak. And he could not face the tree dreams. The idea of climbing the tree was like an assault on his Hellenism, and the dreams were worse now that he had left the city behind.
In the morning he rode among the camps. He watched the Sindi farmers and the Maeotae fishermen drying their salmon. He watched the Athenian captains purchase fish sauce by the hundred beakers in the market on the beach and load their cargoes before they weighed anchor and beat slowly out through the grey-green waves of the shallow sea towards the dykes that almost — but not quite — blocked navigation on Lake Maeotis. When their sails vanished over the horizon, the enormity of his commitment to the expedition — his own fortune and his inherited wealth were heavily engaged — began to weigh on him, and that, combined with lack of sleep, made him dangerous.
Kineas knew that Niceas was watching him with growing alarm, perhaps even anger. Niceas did his best to keep his Kineas busy: arranging inspections, riding the beach, throwing a seaside symposium to wish the sailors of Pantecapaeum farewell. None of them served to occupy Kineas fully, and his temper grew shorter and shorter. So did Niceas’s.
After a few days of inactivity and more nights of brutal dreams, Diodorus’s command marched, carrying most of the remaining grain from the magazine that Eumenes had arranged. The herds of cattle were already down by a third.
‘Why don’t we ride with Diodorus?’ Niceas asked. ‘The prince can get himself across the height of land — Ares, he could ride all the way to Marakanda without us.’
‘Go with Diodorus if you want,’ Kineas said.
Niceas whirled on him. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Strategos,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a burr under my butt for a week and I don’t have to take it. I’m trying to help and you are shutting me out.’
‘I can’t go to fucking sleep,’ Kineas said.
Niceas handed him a flagon of wine left from the symposium. ‘Philokles told me how to deal with this,’ he said. ‘Start drinking. I’ll tell you when to stop.’
‘I’m the commander of this expedition,’ Kineas said. ‘I can’t get drunk.’
Niceas held out the flagon. ‘Greek wine for Greek dreams, Philokles says.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, friend, but I’m not as bad as that yet.’
Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘All the gods keep me from the day you are worse.’
Kineas managed a smile. ‘You’re right. I need to get out of this camp.’
Niceas rubbed his nose. ‘About fucking time.’
Kineas smiled back. ‘Let’s go hunting. We’ll catch Diodorus as we go. I’ll inform Lot.’
10
The pressure in Kineas’s head subsided as soon as he rode away from Lake Maeotis, so that by the time his horse had completed the first of the great curves of the Tanais, he felt nothing but an agonizing fatigue. He allowed Niceas to lead him on for a few parasangs and they camped on a bluff that hung over the great river like a fortress built by nature.
‘I just want to sleep,’ Kineas said.
Niceas handed him a horn cup of watered wine. ‘Drink this first,’ he said.
Kineas looked across the river at the farms on the north shore. ‘We’re in Asia, according to Herodotus.’
Niceas shrugged. ‘I’ve been to Asia before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, if you insist on keeping this up, we’ll have to hunt.’
Kineas nodded. Instead of relaxation, he felt only the anxieties of a commander away from his troops. ‘I shouldn’t have left the army,’ he said, and drank the wine. Then he had another cup, and finally he fell asleep.
The tree climbed away above him, an endless profusion of fecundity, with ripe fruit — apples, lemons and richer prizes all dangling in a riot of colour and life. Birds swooped in and out of the tree, plucking food from the tangle of branches. And around the fruit branches, up and up, to a layer of branches and clouds that hid the horizon, there were branches of hardwood and softwood, each lush and perfect, without disease, so that the tree was all trees, and it covered the world.
His feet were mired in the mud and the blood of the dead at the base of the tree, and when he moved he could feel the bones breaking under his feet no matter how careful he was. He needed to climb — indeed, he could see a pair of young eagles cradled in one of the branches above him, and they called to him, and he had to go to them. Their needs were greater than his. But as he began to push through the ordure, a corpse rose from the muck to confront him. It rose gracefully, without the stiffness that the dead so often displayed, and the corpse’s face was fresh and clean and unmarked despite the wounds on his body.
It was Ajax.
Ajax smiled. It was a smile full of sadness and other things — comradeship, love, loss and longing — but it was a smile. He reached out his hand towards Kineas, and Kineas took the hand.
Around them, other corpses appeared, familiar corpses — the men from his other dreams, a silent clamour of dead and rotting flesh. Kineas shied away from them, but they pushed at him, each with a handful of sand.
Beyond the heartbreaking spectacle of dead companions and friends — men whose deaths in many cases sat on his shoulders, who had died under his orders or at his side — was a dreadful plain of dead, Persians and Getae and others, trailing away to the horizon.
Ajax pulled at him and then pushed him towards the tree, interposing his body between Kineas and the other dead. Kineas seized the trunk and threw himself up to the first branch with all of his dream strength, threw a leg over the first branch and hung there, terrified and sweating, as Ajax vanished in a melee of the dead, and Kineas felt that he had abandoned the boy, left him for dead, and he wept. And the weeping was excruciating, raw pain coming from his eyes as if the eyes themselves were threatening to burst from his head, and then grains of sand poured from his eyes into his hands, sand intermixed with blood, and he screamed and screamed and…