Niceas had his arms and was murmuring in his ear until he calmed. In his fear- and fatigue-swamped thoughts, he knew that Niceas was speaking to him as he would to a scared horse, and that comforted him, and despite his fears, he slipped back into sleep.
It amazed him that he returned to the dream in the same place, with one leg over the rough, oak-tree bark of the tree’s lower limbs. He could not see the ground, only the sort of low mist that rolled over the sea of grass in the autumn, and the dead were gone. He was on the tree. He admitted to himself, there in the power of the dream, that he had resisted going to the tree since the day of the battle, and now he welcomed it.
He climbed to the branch where he had seen the young eagles, and they were gone — higher in the tree, he could see now. They leaned out from their branch, their immature and drab brown plumage somehow comic, and watched him with curious eyes, and made raucous calls at him as he hoisted himself to another branch. Each branch at this height was as large as a noble tree in a royal forest in Persia, or in a temple grove in Arcadia, and climbing the main trunk was a matter of careful searching for hand- and footholds in the rough bark. He searched, and climbed, and his head was filled with memories from his youth — memories of sitting in the dust of the agora in Athens and listening to tutors and philosophers, some wiser than others, some brilliant rhetoricians and one unable to speak more than a few phrases without halting and staring blankly at the world around them, often to the hoots of his companions — his own hoots.
Why? Why had he been so derisive? The man was a pupil of Plato, a brilliant mind who studied many things in the circle of the heavens, but his halting speech had earned him nothing but ridicule. And their tutors had done nothing to stop them, until the poor man had fled the agora. Even in dream, Kineas winced at remembering that he had been the first to call an insult, feeling bold, manly, adult.
And why had their tutors not restrained them?
Perhaps because they, mere tutors to the idle rich, enjoyed the discomfiture of one more gifted than they?
It was a deeply painful memory, an ignoble act in which he led others to act badly. And it had been one of the moments that defined his leadership over the other youths — his daring had made him a leader.
The consequence of an evil act had been his own success as a leader. Of course, his leadership of aristocratic youths had caused him to be sent to Alexander, and then exiled. And Moira had sent him from exile to be archon of Olbia, and then to here.
He pondered it all, and climbed higher.
There were other forms of horror than rotting corpses…
He awoke in the morning, better rested than he had been in weeks, to the roar of Niceas’s snores. Below the bluff on which they had camped, the Tanais swept by majestically, still swollen by the rain that had lasted a month, as wide as a lake. The sun rose and then leaped into the pink-striped sky as Apollo’s winged chariot began its course across the heavens. Kineas listened to the sounds of the forest behind him, watched a herd of deer come to the river beneath the bluff, an easy javelin throw that he passed because he could feel the peace of Zeus on the whole of the Tanais and he had no wish to break the truce. Birds called.
He was confused by his dreams. It was years since he had last thought about tormenting the scholar in the agora, but he now knew the dream to be a true one — indeed, he now remembered the incident, and his secret shame. He felt the shame anew. He nodded at the thought, having learned something. He was tired, but strangely full of new life.
‘I should not have stayed away from the tree,’ he said quietly.
‘ No,’ said the wind and the snores and the birds in the sky. It was terrifying, because the ‘no’ was not quiet.
Kineas sprang to his feet, but there was no one there but Niceas with his prosaic snores, and the deer, running along the river as if pursued by wolves. Even as he watched, the deer slowed, paused and, with infinite caution, began to drink again.
Kineas sighed and set to work builing the fire, hands shaking as they did after he had been in combat. He was patient and thorough, remembering many things — his first hunting expeditions with his father, his first days in the field with Niceas. He split small twigs with his eating knife and broke larger sticks into uniform lengths. From his pack he retrieved a tube of hollowed reed, carefully preserved through ten years of campaigns, and blowing through it softly, he raised the embers into hot coals and then summoned fire on the split twigs he had prepared, building upon those flames one stick at a time until he had a raging fire. He put a small bronze pot on for tea and sat back, temporarily satisfied.
Out in the river, a salmon leaped, and then another. A sea eagle swept in from the right, took a salmon in its great talons and beat away, wings struggling to handle the extra load, so that the great bird swept down the river a few dactyloi above the surface of the water.
‘Thank you, Lord of the Heavens, Keeper of the Thunderbolt,’ Kineas said.
The augury was of the best, and more, the truce of the god was broken by the Lord of the Heavens himself. Grabbing a javelin, Kineas crept carefully down the bluff and then moved from tree to tree along the riverbank. In the distance he could see a series of farms at the next bend of the river, smoke coming from their hearths in the new morning.
The lead buck raised his head and Kineas, downwind, froze. A doe’s head came up, and then another’s. It was a long throw, and the time Kineas would take to change his stance to make a cast would render it impossible. He waited.
Another head came up — a young buck. He took a step towards Kineas, and turned his head as if trying to see something across the river.
Kineas remained motionless.
The doe’s head went down, back to drinking, and then the young buck moved a step and did the same. Kineas took a step, and then another, now almost flat to the ground.
A head came up. Kineas couldn’t see as well, having sacrificed line of sight for his own cover. He stopped moving. He was in range now, but awkwardly placed behind a hillock of grass where a great tree had fallen, probably during a spring flood, and then rotted into the loam to leave a miniature ridge.
Above him, just a plethron away on the bluff, Niceas rose to his feet and stretched. The heads came up, watching this new movement. Across the river, the eagle, freshly gorged on salmon, let out a raucous screech of contentment. As the herd’s heads turned together, Kineas rolled from behind his hillock to his feet. In their panic at his appearance, the young buck fouled one of the does and both stumbled, losing a stride, and his javelin flew, arcing into the heavens before falling to strike the young buck between the shoulder blades. He took one stride and fell, legs splayed, already dead. The doe leaped his corpse and ran.
Kineas opened the buck, giving a prayer to Artemis he had learned as a boy, and gralloched his kill in a nearby tree. He left the buck hanging there and washed in the river before climbing the bluff with a pair of steaks wrapped in oak leaves.
‘Somebody’s feeling better,’ Niceas said. He was huddled in his cloak with a horn cup in his fist.
Kineas laid the steaks on their leaves by the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. He wore a grin that split his face like an athlete’s crown of honour.
Niceas began cutting green branches from the alder at the top of the bank. ‘If you wanted to go hunting, you could just have said,’ he joked.