Kineas embraced him again for an answer. ‘Are all those for us?’ Kineas asked.
‘If we can pay,’ Philokles answered. ‘Otherwise, I suspect they’ll murder me and sail away.’
Kineas watched the mules bearing the army’s treasury coming down the last ridge, guarded by the most trustworthy men in the army. ‘And wintering over?’
‘Northern Hyrkania,’ Philokles responded. ‘Strategos, your kingdom awaits.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t want a kingdom.’
Philokles gave an enigmatic smile. ‘How about a woman?’ he asked.
Kineas laughed. ‘I have a woman. She’s ten thousand stades distant, but I’ll catch up.’
Philokles gave him an odd look. ‘Have you made an offering to Aphrodite, brother?’ he asked.
Kineas laughed. ‘No!’ he said.
Philokles gave a distant smile. ‘You should.’ He looked over the sea. ‘Our winter camp is in a kingdom ruled by a woman, and she — she moved me, and I have no tenderness for women. I fear for you.’
Kineas furrowed his brow, stung. ‘What reason have I ever given you to fear for my behaviour with a woman?’ he asked.
Philokles continued to watch him with the air of a man who has seen the world. ‘I would prefer you to cross the Kaspian with your eyes open. This woman desires power, and men with power fascinate her. She lay with Alexander, they say. Now she awaits us.’ He glanced around. ‘She offers a great deal of treasure for our spring campaign.’
Kineas shrugged. ‘I’m of a mind now to push on in spring. The march went well and the bandits in the hills put some gold in our coffers.’ He looked at the ships. ‘And our ally? Leon’s factor?’
‘Her late husband. She remains an ally — she paid Leon an enormous backlog of moneys owed without demur — but I doubt her. I wish you to be immune to her.’
Kineas shook his head in mock wonder. ‘I am immune,’ he said.
Nihmu laughed. ‘No man is immune to the yatavu of Hyrkania,’ she said, ‘except those who love only men.’ She came and went from the command group, red hair like a helmet crest announcing her arrival. She sat on her great white horse amid the mud and the flotsam on the beach. ‘If you fail, Strategos, your children will not rule here.’
‘What?’ Kineas shrugged and turned his back on her. She spoke like an oracle, but she was a stripling, and he was busy. ‘Think as you will. This is a foolish conversation. To whom do we speak about paying these ships?’ he asked Philokles.
Philokles explained that every captain was an independent operator. The boats were small — half the size of a Greek pentekonter, and some smaller than that, with ten or twelve oars a side. A few were sailing vessels, like large fishing smacks. Kineas cast his eyes across them and shook his head, changing the subject again to calm his temper. ‘I don’t see transport for two thousand horses,’ he said.
Philokles rubbed his forehead, pulled his cloak tighter against the autumn wind and met Kineas’s eye. ‘Two hundred horses at a time,’ he said. ‘It was the best I could do.’
Kineas nodded apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean you haven’t done your best,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough that you are here, and with food and so much transport. Let’s start shipping them across the sea. How many days?’
‘Two days each way, with luck and a friendly wind. It is a very small sea.’
Kineas shaded his eyes with his hand, pushing his straw hat back on his head to keep the flapping brim out of his line of sight. ‘We captured quite a few horses on the way here,’ he said. ‘Let us arrange sacrifices to Poseidon, and some games — horse races such as the Trident-bearer values above all things. Let us celebrate his power tonight. And then let’s start loading. The autumn is wearing on, and winter is coming.’
Kineas was among the last of his men to leave for the winter camp in Hyrkania. He stayed on the beach in Errymi to shepherd the men across, to keep morale high on the beach, to prevent incidents with the locals… and to wait for Niceas.
As the weeks passed, while storms slowed the ferries and the stores of food dwindled and the conditions in the seaside camp worsened, he found that his presence heartened his men and that all his skills as a leader were required to prevent mischief and even murder. He had the cavalrymen dig earthworks, an unheard-of demand that served to raise a barrier against the constant wind and, more importantly, against boredom — at least until the walls were complete.
Prince Lot’s knights were even less inclined to dig than Greek aristocrats, but time and the example of Prince Lot himself got most of them to it, and Kineas was too versed in military leadership to believe that every one of the Sauromatae needed to be set to digging. Some hunted — for food and also for bandits. The killing of Lot’s elder daughter was a mistake for which the masterless men of the high plains paid for three months, and the aggressive mourning of the Sauromatae would cease only when the last boats were rowed away from the empty marching camp. Kineas didn’t intend to burn the huts that had been built, however. Instead, he handed the finished work to a group of Maeotae farmers, dispossessed men whose families had been burned out by the bandits and who had fled to the marshes to eke out a living. With the marching camp as a fortified town, they had every chance of holding their own. A dozen Keltoi, too badly wounded in the fall’s fighting to make the crossing, would remain as military settlers.
Kineas discovered that it was Niceas he was hanging on for when he saw the unmistakable width of Coenus’s broad shoulders coming down the ridge from the west. Closer up, the dozen Greek troopers were obviously not a returning patrol, and closer still, Kineas could see Niceas, swathed in fur robes, riding a big pony.
Kineas sent a boy for his riding horse and went out to meet them, his throat tight. It remained tight while he embraced Niceas, who winced and cursed, and Coenus, and Crax and Sitalkes and Antigonus. Niceas looked twenty years older, and Coenus looked considerably thinner, but the rest of them smiled a great deal and shuffled when Kineas praised them.
Privately, Coenus was less sanguine. ‘He’s not the same,’ Coenus said. Niceas was sitting on the rim of the hearth, visibly soaking up warmth. ‘I’m not sure he’ll ever fight again. But he’s alive, and he’s as tough as a slave’s sandal.’ Coenus drank back his wine — his third cup — and swallowed a handful of olives.
‘Was it hard?’ Kineas asked.
‘Never,’ Coenus said. ‘Best hunting of my life. Like Xenophon’s notion of Elysium. After Lot came, we sent back for grain, and later the farmers came to us. It was never dull, and those are good men you gave me.’ His grin had a self-conscious air to it. ‘I loved it.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Niceas says we should carve a kingdom out of this land.’ Coenus, usually fastidious, had a bushy beard, and he rubbed it with his fingers as if embarrassed by it. ‘I want to sign up. I’ll put a shrine to Artemis in that valley — I know just the spot. I’ll hunt until I’m too old to ride, and then I’ll sit around losing my teeth and telling lies.’ Then he stopped grinning. ‘Watching him was hard,’ he said.
Niceas was grey with fatigue and went to bed too soon.
Kineas lay next to Niceas in the tent. Niceas slept more deeply than he had before his wound, and he lay still, as if in death, so that Kineas often listened to him like an anxious parent with a sick child, leaning across the older man’s body to hear his soft breathing. Tonight, Kineas had Philokles on his other side — it was a cold, damp night with a threat of freezing rain in the air, and every man in the army pushed close to his tent mates.
Kineas was tired with worry and relief, but sleep would not come, and he lay listening to the sounds made by his night guards, by two thousand horses in the dark, by a few foolish soldiers lingering late by their mess fires. They, too, were relieved to find that boats were waiting for them.
And then, as subtle as the first fall of snow, he was… standing amidst the bones at the base of the tree, surrounded by the silent combat of dead friends against dead foes. He reached for a limb and drew himself up until the combat beneath him vanished and he looked up. The tree towered over him, reaching into the sky. He noticed that the tree lacked the misty quality of his first dreams — now it was as palpable and as solid as any tree outside the world of dreams.