He ran his hand over her nipple and it sprang to life under his hand and she moaned. ‘No, master. Lord. No,’ she said. He kissed her and she responded, slowly at first and then more, until she was tugging at him and he was in her, spending as quickly as he entered her. Then she rose and dusted off the straw and pulled her chiton into shape, wiped her thighs a little and went back to watering horses.
She never smiled at me again, Kineas thought. I raped her. She was a slave and she could no more refuse me than refuse to eat, but let’s call an action by its proper name. It was rape.
‘Yes,’ said Kam Baqca. She was mounted on her great charger, and she towered above him. ‘It was not meant with anger, but it was ill done. When a lord forces a slave, where is the crime?’
Kineas thought the question was rhetorical, but the dream lingered, as did the question, and…
He awoke with the question on his mind, and the sure knowledge that his body thought that Srayanka was too far away.
He rose and drank a honey drink that he enjoyed and ate fresh bread. The farmer spoke to him at length, discoursing about the harvest, apparently, and hoping for the dry spell to continue. Kineas understood one word in five, but he knew that the man meant well.
They rode on in the morning, poorer by a silver owl and their horses loaded with food. The rafters of the house had been packed with produce — drying herbs, cheese, dried meats — and the family had owned four goblets of gold.
‘These people are rich!’ Niceas said. ‘But no slaves!’
Kineas rubbed his beard and rode on. ‘A form of riches all its own,’ he said, thinking of his dreams.
Niceas nodded thoughtfully. ‘What was he on about, there at the end?’
Kineas rubbed his beard again. ‘Weather and crops. And something else. I think he was warning me about bandits, although it might just as well have been an admonition against being bandits.’
Niceas grunted. ‘You saw the scorch marks on the stone?’ he said.
Kineas had seen them. ‘Recent,’ he said, and Niceas nodded.
That afternoon they caught up with Diodorus’s rearguard. Coenus was surprised to see Kineas, but his men kept good watch, and he was saluted and greeted and cosseted as he and Niceas rode the length of the column. They halted for the night with the cavalry and shared a buck that Coenus killed, intending to ride on in the morning, despite Diodorus’s protests.
That night Kineas had another dream of his youth that left him quiet when he woke, a dream in which he and some boys tormented a dog. It had happened. He had forgotten it.
As he mounted after breakfast, Diodorus came up on horseback with Sappho and several of his own staff.
‘The strategos should not be haring about alone,’ Diodorus said. ‘Local people say there are bandits in the hills.’
Niceas grunted.
Kineas raised an eyebrow. ‘Should I be afraid?’ he asked.
Diodorus shrugged. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.
‘Ataelus will have scouted the country,’ Kineas said.
‘This valley is broad enough that Ataelus could put one of his bare-breasted scouts every stade and not cover it,’ Diodorus mocked. ‘You just want to have adventures.’
‘Yes,’ Kineas said. Anything he added would only encourage more teasing.
Over Diodorus’s shoulder, Sappho smiled. She was mounted on a cavalry charger, a bigger horse than most women could handle. She rode well.
‘Lucky bastard,’ Diodorus said. After a pause he said, ‘Let me come, too.’
Kineas considered it a moment. He’d like few things better than to have his last two Athenians riding by his side, two of the three men in the world that he loved most. But he shook his head, looking at the column. ‘They need you,’ he said.
Diodorus grimaced. ‘Truer words were never spoke,’ he said ruefully. He shrugged. ‘They need you, too.’
Sappho pulled her horse up by them. ‘“Reason, my lord, may dwell within a man,”’ she said, quoting Sophokles.
‘“And yet abandon him when troubles come,”’ Diodorus said, capping her quote with relish. Their eyes met, and they shared a smile that touched the faint lines at the corners of her eyes.
Kineas looked at both of them. ‘I take it that means I have your permission to ride on?’ he asked.
Diodorus nodded, laughing.
They rode along the river for half a day, and Kineas said nothing beyond comments on the fields and the weather. Finally, as they crested a long ridge to see another in the distance and rising ground all around them, Kineas turned to Niceas. ‘Do you ever think on the evil acts you’ve done?’ he asked.
Niceas looked out over the river. ‘All the time,’ he said.
‘And?’ Kineas asked.
Niceas looked at him and frowned. ‘And what? They’re done. I can’t undo them. I can only try not to commit them again.’
Kineas rubbed his beard. ‘If we ever return to Athens, I’m going to set you up as a philosopher.’
Niceas raised an eyebrow. ‘If we ever return to Athens,’ he said, ‘you are going to set me up as a brothel keeper. Perhaps I’ll teach the boys and girls some philosophy.’
Kineas grinned at the picture and rode on, keeping his thoughts to himself. After dinner, they curled in their cloaks, the fire crackling away, and for the first time in weeks sleep evaded Kineas.
‘I missed this,’ he said.
Niceas snorted. ‘What, four weeks in Olbia and you missed lying on the ground?’
Kineas rolled on his back and stared up at the wheel of heaven. ‘Longer than that. Remember the ferryman when we crossed the Tanais?’
‘Who thought we’d all be dead when the Getae came? I’ll never forget that night. Why?’
Kineas said, ‘That night I thought a dozen men and a pair of slaves was a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I was thinking it was funny that I could forget how much of a burden it was to lead.’
Niceas grunted.
‘You?’ Kineas asked. ‘Why do you remember it?’
Niceas rustled — he was changing position while trying to keep the warmth trapped under his cloak. ‘It was the last time I slept by Graccus,’ he said. Niceas and Graccus had been friends and lovers for years, and Graccus, of course, had died the next day.
‘I’m an idiot,’ Kineas said.
Niceas snuggled against his back. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’
When they mounted their horses the next morning, they could see that the ground rose on either side of them, and the river ran fast through a narrow channel, so that there was no longer any possibility of a ford or a crossing. Kineas killed another buck from horseback, a mounted throw that earned him a grin from Niceas.
‘Show-off!’ Niceas shook his head. ‘You could have lost your best spear!’
Kineas grinned back and they divided the meat and then bathed in the swift-flowing water to wash off the blood. It felt like ice.
That night was the coldest yet. Kineas was again feeling the weight of his responsibilities, and wondering if he could afford to ride off and leave them, and again he lay awake — still fearing his dreams, with the additional complication that he was sated with sleep. Niceas was already snoring beside him, and it was too cold to get out of his cloak and the heavy wool blanket that covered both of them. As it grew colder, he pushed in closer to Niceas, and then he worried about his army. Most of the hoplites in the vanguard wouldn’t have a spare blanket. He thought of Xenophon’s soldiers in the Anabasis, and he worried, and worrying, he fell asleep.
Ajax pushed him quickly to the tree, and his dead friends were fewer. Kleisthenes was gone. Kineas felt like a coward as he scrambled on to the tree and began to climb. It was easy to climb as high as he had gone before, and then…
Running through the fields north of his father’s farms, legs afire. Rabbit-hunting.
He was among the last men in the field, all the older men and the keener hunters stretched ahead in a long arc after the dogs. He could hear the dogs, their gross baying, their animal eagerness to kill, and it sickened him, and his legs slowed, unwillingness to see the result coinciding with his own fatigue. He fell further behind, so that even the slowest boys passed him.