Nor, to my shame, could I tell the two sides apart at first. Dust rose all around us, and every one of them had their facecloths buttoned across their faces against the biting cold and the blown grit. Sparthius had an arrow in his thigh and was out of the fight, and Bulis and Aristides were swapping swaggering sword-thrusts with a pair of Medes — Bulis, the better swordsman, was getting the worst of it because he wasn’t a good horseman, and Aristides, who had a magnificent horse, was steadily pushing his opponent back, turning him, until the man’s horse stumbled and went over the lip of a gully, never to rise again. Some of the Persians used their bows at point-blank range, instead of spears or swords. Aristides’ servant, Nikeas, took an arrow in the face and went down.
My mare, despite the two arrows in her, had tossed me and then stood stock still, within reach. How like a horse, eh? I must have twitched, because Hector — with a courage few could have emulated — dismounted to help me up. He got her reins and handed them to me and I got her head around and with a gut-wrenching wave of pain I got my left leg over her back and turned her to face the next wave of enemy, Babylonian sword in my hand, to drive Sparthius’s opponent off him. He was badly hit and barely in the fight; his strength was ebbing, desperation on his features.
I couldn’t reach his opponent, but I could reach the rump of his opponent’s horse, and I cut down into the horse’s hindquarters mercilessly and the horse gave a great shudder and fell, one leg clawing the air and the other apparently ruined by my cut. I hate to hurt a horse — but Sparthius was about to go down, and I got an arm around him and put my horse into the man fighting Bulis. By ill luck — for him — he’d just turned to deal with Aristides, and I cut him so hard in the neck I almost severed his head, but my Babylonian blade was too flexible for such a cut and it bent — but didn’t break.
He fell dead, and the blade returned to shape.
Hector speared a Lydian who was about to throw his spear into Cyrus’s unprotected back.
And the fight was over.
Horse fights with bows are deadly. Most of the enemy force were dead — or were dead a few moments later when dismounted men cut their throats. We had six dead and another three with mortal wounds — most of them from arrows.
Nikeas, blessed by the gods, had a nasty and disfiguring scar; the arrow had ploughed a furrow along his forehead and torn a length of scalp the width of my hand, so that it hung free — and knocked him unconscious. But the boy’s skull was thick and well formed and turned the point, although we were all treated to a sight of bone itself.
Aristides — Athenian gentleman of many talents — came to the fore. As Cyrus’s men killed their mortally wounded, there was a young man — too young, I thought — with an arrow lodged deep in his chest. He was incredibly brave — sitting with his back against a rock, making jokes.
I caught Cyrus looking at him, and he turned away. ‘He knows the mercy stroke is coming,’ Cyrus said, and he choked on the words.
But Aristides, who was crouched over Nikeas, looked up. ‘What?’ he asked. He left his hypaspist on the ground and went to the Persian boy. He made a measurement with his fist laid against the centre of the boy’s chest — and looked back at me.
There was a man — Amu. He was the largest of Cyrus’s men, with a big hennaed beard. I had spoken to him several times, mostly to hear the tales of his life in the East, because he came from the mountains above mystical India. He stood behind the boy with a wicked knife in his hand — and frowned.
Aristides looked right at Amu. ‘No!’ he said.
Amu spoke no Greek. Arisitides spoke no Persian.
But Cyrus was there, and he shouted ‘Hold!’ in Persian and leaped to put his hand on the big man’s arm. Amu paused. Every one of the surviving Persians looked at Arisitides.
‘I can save him,’ he said.
He opened the boy’s jacket. Without warning, he struck the arrow — hard — with the palm of his hand. The head burst out the boy’s back, and there was blood — but not too much blood, I felt.
Every head followed Aristides as he moved around the boy, holding his shoulder. He leaned the boy forward. He was chatting away in Greek — I have told a poor story if you don’t know that Aristides never chattered, but now he spoke of the weather, the trees, the boy’s bravery. .
I knelt down and translated it all. The boy watched me as if I were a priest of his god of light, and suddenly Aristides said:
‘Tell him, “Be brave. There will be a lot of pain.”’
I repeated his words. With Amu’s help, Aristides seized the arrow and cut it at the entrance wound with a tool they used for horses’ hooves, and then pulled by the head — unbarbed, by the gods — and it came out with a wet sucking noise.
He pushed honeyed wine into both ends of the wound and put pads of combed flax — which we had in abundance — on both entrance and exit wounds.
The boy’s eyes never left mine, and he never uttered a squeak. Amu sat down by him — knife carefully sheathed — and praised him.
‘It’s his son,’ Cyrus said. ‘Pactyans, from Argosia. Hard men.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Tell your Athenian I thank him. We all thank him.’
I watched Aristides, now sewing up his hypaspist’s scalp. ‘We got you into this,’ I said.
Cyrus shrugged. ‘We say co istādehi daste oftādeh gir in the north.’
It was an expression I’d often heard. ‘As long as you are standing, give a hand to those who have fallen.’
He shrugged. ‘Yes. But also, it is hard to see which comes first. Mardonius is my master’s enemy — and a man whose actions are, I believe, bad for the Great King and bad for the empire.’ He met my eye. ‘But I sense that we are soon to be foes.’
I could tell you some marvels of that trip — the monster we killed in the high passes of the Antitauros Mountains, and the spiders of the high plains of Cilicia — but that is not tonight’s tale. We rode for fifty days from Melitene, nor did we escape winter unscathed, and those shivering nights along the Paroreios come back to me on cold nights here, lying under three blankets with the wounded boy between me and Amu; hiding for a day in a highland village because Sparthius’s wound had become infected and Aristides, who’d become our doctor, wanted honey to put on it. The mountains seemed full of armed men — the reward offered for us must have been immense enough to engage the interest of every bandit in the hills.
I have never been so cold. But as the boy Araxa fevered, grew worse, and then — very slowly — began to recover, Amu grew closer to us, and then the natural bonds of a fight and shared food saved us, and by the time was saw the green fields of the upper Kogamos, we were comrades — Spartans and Athenians and Persians all together, and Sparthius’s recovery — he was emaciated but growing stronger by the day — was as much a cause for cheer to Karesna, one of the Persians, as the boy Araxa’s recovery had been.
By a quirk of fate, we were all hale — aside from some virulent head colds and a lot of coughing — as we rode down out of winter into the green valley that led to Sardis.
Two days later, I stood before Artapherenes.
He looked terrible.
He had circles under his eyes and his skin looked grey. His face was puffy, and he had a paunch, and he clearly found movement difficult. His son — also Artapherenes — waited on him — and glowered at me.
The Satrap of Lydia and Ionia returned my bow of thanks and waved his eldest son away. ‘Go and embrace Cyrus!’ he said. ‘I must talk to Arimnestos alone.’
We were served cups of hot cider by a slave who spilled some, and then we were alone.