Tyrant: Storm of Arrows by Christian Cameron Read Free Book Online

then the child was there, pushing between the horses unseen. She stood by Kineas. ‘ He will pretend to be king until the eagles fly ,’ she said. ‘ They will pick his bones .’
    ‘And take this carrion-imp with you,’ Marthax said.
    Kineas scooped the girl up, turned his horse and rode back to his column. She squirmed for a while and then dropped off his lap to the ground.
    ‘I must get my horses,’ she said.
    Kineas let her go. A Scythian - even a child - was nothing without her horses, and Kineas understood the pull. Even as he watched her running across the grass towards the royal herd, he saw Prince Lot and the Sauromatae mounting up. They had fewer remounts and no wagons, and lived in tents made of heavy felt. There were two hundred of them, with another fifty wounded on travois dragged behind spare animals.
    Prince Lot saw him and approached. His Greek was terrible and his Sakje stilted. After a minute, Kineas had gathered that the Sauromatae wanted to travel with the Greeks. Kineas rode on, calling for Eumenes. The boy - scarcely a boy now - had three wounds and was still in a wagon, but he was well enough to sit up and translate.
    ‘He says, “I wish to travel with you. I spoke to the lady - she rides too fast for my wounded.” He says, “Srayanka said that you would follow her by the Bay of the Salmon.” He says, “I can show you the road, and my wounded will have more time to rest.”’ Eumenes listened to Lot’s last phrase and gave a weary smile. He pointed at the fading dust cloud that was Srayanka and her clans. ‘He says, “She should have been queen.”’
    Kineas smiled at the first good news of the morning. ‘I will be delighted to have you with us,’ he said. He repeated this until Prince Lot smiled broadly.
    Kineas also had a handful of Sakje prodromoi . Ataelus had recruited them - almost twenty now - with liberal promises of horses, and made them into his own small clan, including his new wife. None of them had deserted, even the two Standing Horses, and they gave Kineas eyes far in advance of his little army wherever they marched. Another of old Xenopon’s recommendations, even though the man had probably been too conservative to approve of Kineas’s use of ‘barbarians’ for the role.
    Kineas waved Ataelus in from his intense watching of the main Sakje host, and told him to include the Sauromatae in his calculations. Ataelus grunted. He rode over to the column of travois, where the adolescent girls rode lighter horses, with their bows in their hands.
    ‘For them, for scouting,’ Ataelus said. He spoke to Lot, who nodded.
    Kineas turned to leave them to it, and started for the head of the column, but suddenly Ataelus’s wife screamed a war cry, and other scouts were shouting. He turned his horse in time to see the lanky figure of Heron, the hipparch of the hippeis of Pantecapaeum, bringing up the rearguard. He wore his perpetual scowl as he watched his troop ride by.
    There was movement from Marthax’s camp. Out on the plain of grass, a dozen horses ran. Behind them came a troop of Sakje, all in armour. They were slower than the horses they pursued, and they were losing ground. Farther back, Marthax’s main line had begun to move forward.
    ‘Shit,’ Kineas said. He knelt on the back of his ugly warhorse and tried to see through the dust already rising over Marthax’s line. The man had three thousand cavalry - no more - and he couldn’t hope to win a pitched battle against Kineas’s hoplites and his Greek cavalry. But he could do a lot of damage by harrying Kineas’s march. He could force Kineas to waste weeks. He could cost Kineas the city of Olbia and leave the army stranded on the plain, at the mercy of the winter.
    It all went through Kineas’s head in a few seconds as he watched a little girl on a white horse galloping towards him with a dozen more pale horses following her. The riders pursuing her were abandoning the chase as Heron’s rearguard blocked their