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

way, contenting themselves with curses and bow-waving. Heron himself continued to scowl as he shouted orders to his hyperetes .
    Lot had formed the Sauromatae into a block and wheeled them into line with Heron’s troop. The hoplites were already deploying to the right. Philokles the Spartan had taken his young men out of the line and was running to Heron, his transverse scarlet plume bobbing as he ran. The Greeks had been at war all summer. They could form line from column in any direction, at speed, without wasted orders.
    Marthax’s line halted well out on the plain, a good two stades clear of the Greeks and the Sauromatae.
    Ataelus had an arrow on his string, and he was looking at Kineas. Kineas shook his head and rode to the girl. ‘What the fuck have you done?’ he shouted at her, harsher than he meant.
    ‘Taken what is mine, and what is yours,’ she said. Around her milled two dozen horses, all white and flashing silver.
    ‘You have stolen the royal chargers?’ Kineas asked.
    ‘My father said that after Satrax you would be king,’ she said with the simplicity of childhood. ‘Satrax is dead. They are yours - except for the white foals. Those are mine. ’
    Kineas was tempted to put her over his knee. ‘Ares and Aphrodite. Heron - give me four men with a flag of truce to return these horses.’
    Heron told off troopers, who looked afraid. He rubbed his forehead and allowed his bronze Boeotian helmet to dangle on its cheek strap. ‘I prefer to be called Eumeles,’ he said. ‘At least in front of my men.’
    Kineas smothered annoyance. Heron took himself very seriously, but when he wasn’t acting like an ephebe with his first lover, he was becoming a fine officer. ‘Very well, Eumeles,’ Kineas said.
    The Sakje host sat silently at a distance.
    Prince Lot took Kineas’s arm. He spoke quickly, emphatically, gesturing at Marthax in the opposite line.
    Ataelus kneed his horse forward and translated. ‘For saying, Marthax not king. Give horses, Marthax for being king. You for making him king.’ Ataelus nodded.
    The girl laughed. ‘You don’t want to be the one who makes Marthax king of the Sakje, do you?’
    Kineas sat and cursed, but he didn’t want to offend Srayanka. He wished she was there to advise him.
    The two forces watched each other for an hour, and then the Sakje began to trickle away. They had discipline when they needed it, but Marthax’s force was not as unified or as singular of purpose as Kineas had feared. Before his eyes, men and women rode off, collected their camps and departed - small lords first and then great lords. In three hours, Marthax had just two thousand horsemen.
    At that point, Kineas ordered his line to form column. He briefed his officers - Memnon and Philokles for the foot, Diodorus and Heron and Lot for the cavalry. They were careful and slow - forming a hollow square from a line was not child’s play - and they marched with the spears on the outside and the cavalry in the middle with the wounded and the baggage.
    It was late afternoon when Kineas began to believe he had broken contact. He knew how quickly Marthax could be on him if he wanted to move. The rain had started again, thunderclouds racing over the plains and pausing to soak the whole column and fill the river over its banks, so that brown water ran among the trunks of trees and washed more bodies off the battlefield, the ugly, bloated things passing down the river next to them.
    ‘The glory of battle,’ Philokles said by his side. He was watching two bodies bob in the current.
    Kineas had halted his horse on a rise, just twenty stades south of the great bend. Philokles stepped out of the ranks of the phalanx to stand with him. In the distance, half a dozen Sauromatae girls sat their horses in a rough skirmish line on a river bluff, watching their back-trail.
    Philokles pulled off his helmet and ran his free hand through his hair. Kineas ignored the Spartan’s mood. ‘If Xenophon had had a dozen