Crax looked Kineas in the eye. ‘I cleaned them. The throwing javelin was damaged in the fight. I cut the shaft a few fingers and reset the head. One of the farm boys drove the rivets.’
So you’ve decided to grow up, Kineas thought. He tossed the younger slave the obol. ‘You did a beautiful job, Crax. You remember what I told you? Good job, you’d be a free man.’
‘Yes sir.’ He was very serious.
‘I meant it. Same for your new little brother there. I don’t need slaves. I need men who can ride and fight. And I need to know which you both plan to be by the time we ride into Olbia. Ten days — two weeks at the outside. Understand?’
Crax said, ‘Yes, sir.’
The new boy looked terrified. Crax nudged him and said something barbarian, and the new boy coughed and mumbled something that might have been ‘yes, sir’ in what might have passed for Greek.
Kineas left the slaves to their share of the day of rest and walked back to the beach, where couches of straw had been prepared for twenty. He could smell the fish baking through the embers in the ground. He wondered if the clay would turn to pottery around the fish. It did.
As the Charioteer prepared to drive the sun under the world, they sat down to feast on the fish, with proper sauces and some wine — heavy red wine, a little past its best days but heady stuff. Alexander toasted and drank and so did his sons, as did every man of Kineas’s troop, until the last light was gone from the sky and the bones of the giant fish were picked clean.
Diodorus, on the next couch of straw, gave a yawn and stretched, his hair a halo of fire in the last of the sun. ‘Better day than I expected when we was in that rotten little town. Thanks to you, Alexander, and the blessing of the gods on you and yours for your hospitality.’
Kineas poured a libation on the ground and raised his kylix high. ‘Hear me, Athena, protector of soldiers! This man has been our friend and given us sacred hospitality. Bring him good fortune.’
One by one, other soldiers added their benisons. Some spoke with simple piety, others with aristocratic rhetoric. When the cup returned to Kineas, he again poured a libation. ‘This is the best we’ll come to a funeral feast for Graccus. So I drink to him and may his shade go down to Hades and dwell with heroes, or whatever fate he might best enjoy.’ Unlike Kineas, Graccus had been a devotee of Demeter. Kineas was not an initiate and had no wish to know what fate such men imagined in the afterlife, but he wished the man’s shade well.
Niceas begged the host’s indulgence, and then told a few tales of Graccus’s courage and a comic one of his boastfulness and all the men laughed, the eyes of the farmer’s younger sons shining like silver owls in the firelight. And then they were all telling tales of Graccus and other men who had fallen in the last few years.
Coenus rose and stood with one hand on his hip, and told the story of the fight on the fords of the Euphrates, when twenty of them on a scout caught the tail of Darius’s army in the moonlight. ‘Graccus was the first to take a life,’ he said in the phrasing of the Poet, ‘and a Mede splashed into the river at his feet when he plunged his spear into the man’s neck.’
Laertes told of how Graccus fought a duel with one of the Macedonian officers — on horseback, with javelins. It had made him famous and notorious in a day, and what Kineas best remembered was the time he’d spent averting King Alexander’s wrath. But it made a good story.
Alexander the farmer listened politely and mixed the wine with lots of water like a man who was being well entertained, and his sons sat and drank it all in. The eldest listened like a man being visited by men from another world, but Echo listened like a hungry man watching food.
Finally Agis, the closest they had to a priest, rose and spilled wine on the sand. ‘Some say it is a bitter thing when the bronze bites home, and the darkness falls over your eyes. Some say that death is the end of life, and some say it is the start of something new.’ He raised his cup. ‘But I say that Graccus was courteous and brave; that he feared the gods and died with a spear in his hand. Hard death is the lot of every man and woman born, and Graccus went to his with a song on his lips.’ Agis took a brand from the fire — pitch-filled pine that flared in the wind — and every man there, even the farmer’s sons, took more, and they walked along the beach to the funeral pyre. They sang the hymn to Demeter, and they sang the Paean, and then they flung their torches into the pile. It burst into flame as if a bolt from Zeus had struck it — a good omen.
They watched it burn until the heat drove them back, as well as the smell of roast meat. Then they drank again. Later, they rose from the straw and bowed, the better-born soldiers offering well-turned compliments to the host, and went off to sleep on the straw pallets in their tents. Kineas walked back with Niceas, who had tears running down his face. He had cried quietly for an hour, but the tears were drying now. ‘I can’t remember a symposium I liked so much.’
Kineas nodded. ‘It was kindly done.’
Niceas said, ‘I’ll give him my booty horse in the morning. Let it be from Graccus, for his feast. And thank you, sir, for thinking of him. I was afraid you had forgotten.’
Kineas shook his head. He punched his hyperetes in the shoulder and then embraced him. Other men came and embraced Niceas. Even, hesitantly, Ajax.
In the morning the pyre still smouldered, and the sun rose in splendour, casting a pink and yellow glow across everything before he was halfway over the rim of the world. Kineas heard the phrase ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ a dozen times before he had his horse bridled.
Niceas arranged with young Echo to fetch the hot bones from the pyre when they cooled, and then bury them in the family graveyard.
The column formed quickly and neatly, every packhorse bulging like a pregnant donkey with baskets of grain. Everyone knew their place by now and things happened more quickly — the tent came down fast, cloaks were rolled and stowed, horses fetched in from hobbles. Neither Kineas nor Niceas had to oversee the process. So, rosy fingered dawn had not yet given way to full day before Kineas, mounted, was saluting Alexander in his yard. Niceas had already given him a horse.
It was a pleasure to leave a place with friends left behind.
Niceas looked back as they rode over the first hill. ‘That boy will tend his grave as if he was one of the heroes,’ he said. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘Better burial than any of us have a right to expect,’ Kineas said, and Niceas made the peasant sign to avert an evil fate.
A stade later, Philokles rode up beside him. ‘Think you’ll ever be that man?’
Kineas grunted. ‘A farmer? Wife? Sons?’
Philokles laughed. ‘Daughters!’
Kineas shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could go back.’
Philokles raised his eyebrows. ‘Why not? Calchus and Isokles would have you in a flash.’
Kineas shook his head. ‘You ask the damnedest questions. Does some god whisper in your ear “go and torment Kineas?”’
Philokles shook his head. ‘You interest me. The Captain. The soldier of renown.’
Kineas sat back on his horse, his ass high on the horse’s rump, and crossed his legs. It gave his thighs a rest at the cost of his behind. ‘Oh, come on. You’re a Spartan. You must have had a great deal of opportunity to plumb the thoughts of soldiers of renown.’
Philokles nodded curtly. ‘Yes.’
Kineas said, ‘So I command what — twelve men? Why me? Soldier of renown. Flatterer. May your words go to Zeus.’
‘But my Spartans would all claim they pined for a farm. So many would say it that it has become the norm to say it — perhaps even to think it. Perhaps I ask you because you are not a Spartan.’
‘Here’s my answer, then. Once, I wanted a farm and a wife. Now, I think I’d die of boredom.’