King of the Bosphorus t-4

by Christian Cameron

Melitta walked over to the Standing Horses' fire and nodded to Buirtevaert, who smiled. He had a long braid that he wore on the side of his face, wrapped in gold wire and braided with gold bells. The love-lock said that he was married. 'What's her name?' Melitta asked.

  'Daen,' he said, his face breaking into a smile that raised her opinion of him still higher. One day, may a man light up like that at the thought of me. So far, Buirtevaert was a competent and obedient sub-chief, one of the few men his age not made foolish by her presence.

  'I look forward to meeting her,' Melitta said.

  'Porridge, lady?' he asked. The Standing Horses had a huge copper cauldron in which they made all their meals. This morning's grain had no doubt been put straight in over last night's deer-meat stew.

  When I was in Alexandria I longed for the plains. Now I long for Alexandria. Where is my son? What kind of mother am I?

  'You are sad,' Buirtevaert said. 'Do you have a man you miss?' He looked away, as if just asking such a thing was outside the bounds of courtesy. 'I am sorry, lady.'

  'Do you know that I have a son?' Melitta asked. 'He'll be eight months old in a few days.' She shook her head. 'My man – is dead.'

  Buirtevaert shook his head. 'I had heard that you were widowed,' he said. 'To be young and alone in spring…' He shrugged. 'It is like all the songs…' He trailed off, embarrassed. Most of those songs were about randy widows.

  She had to smile at his confusion. Her position as lady seemed to have added twenty years to her age. Young people amused her. Perhaps she was becoming her mother.

  'Lady!'

  Melitta turned to see her knights mounting. Scopasis was pointing at the approaching rider. At this distance, Melitta knew her as Samahe.

  'News!' Scopasis called. He trotted up with Melitta's riding horse, and she made herself mount. All her sores cracked open together, and she felt the blood and pus creep into the dirty linen – already cold where the outside air crept under her coat.

  Samahe came up and hugged her. She returned the embrace with interest. 'I was just wishing for a girl,' she said. 'And here you are.'

  Samahe smiled. 'You need a trumpeter,' she said laughing. 'Maybe a lover.'

  'A girl?' Melitta asked. In Alexandria she knew lots of girls who lay with girls. The whole idea made her laugh. She slapped her thigh and cursed at the pain.

  Samahe laughed too. But then she was serious. 'A girl in your bed means no talk and no babies,' she said. She shrugged. 'I've never done it myself.' She rolled her eyes, suggesting that perhaps she had. 'Listen – I am not here for bed-talk. Ataelus thinks Urvara's seen Upazan's advance scouts – yesterday, and far from here. North and east and east again.'

  'How old is this news?' Melitta said, suddenly all business.

  'Three, perhaps four days.' Samahe looked around. 'You have a fair force. Ataelus asks you to come north to him. If you come, you must come now and ride hard.'

  Melitta gestured to Scopasis and to Buirtevaert to join her. 'We've cleared the valley to the ferry. Not much else to be done.' She looked at her commanders. 'Can we move back north and find Ataelus?'

  'With Samahe to guide us?' Buirtevaert asked. 'Let's be on our way!'

  Scopasis nodded. 'I long to put my sword against this Upazan's throat,' he said.

  Melitta nodded, feeling the new crusts of the sores on her thighs. 'Me too,' she said. Five days in the saddle – five nights with a warm companion who braided her hair and talked, sometimes, of things other than how many men she might kill, or how many horses such and such a man took in such and such a raid. Of babies and harmless gossip about who had whom in her blankets.

  Samahe's greatest contribution was the salve she had for riding sores, and the discipline she brought to changes of clothes. Samahe travelled with two pairs of trousers and two coats, and every time they crossed a stream, she stopped, stripped and changed, drying the wet pair on the rump of her packhorse. Melitta learned that women nomades needed to take special care of themselves to avoid the sort of sores she had, and worse. She learned a great deal from travelling with Samahe, and the best of it was that Samahe taught her without comment or superiority.

  They found two more of the war parties before they caught Ataelus, and when they found him, he too had been collecting the outriders, so that together they had a polyglot force from all the people of almost a thousand riders.

  Melitta embraced Ataelus for almost as long as Samahe did, and before he could tell her his news, she called a council of all the leaders present, and they stood around a fire on the first warm evening while young men and women sketched their patrols in the soft black earth and bragged of their deeds. Thyrsis told his tale well, as usual, and his hair gleamed in the firelight, and Melitta thought he was the handsomest man among the Sakje. And she saw Tameax, who smiled and frowned when he saw her.

  Two girls – Grass Cat girls, bent on mischief – had ridden to within sight of the old fort that Crax had once manned on the great inland sea that some called the Kaspian and others the Hyrkanian. There, on the good grass north of the fort, they had counted four thousand riders – or more.

  'Counting so many riders is hard,' the eldest girl admitted. 'Always my father asks me to count the stars. Now I know why.'

  A clump of boys came forward. They had seen Upazan and his golden helmet, they said. 'Breyat died,' one said. 'He was my friend. We saw them Sauromatae and they saw us, and we ran, and ran, over the grass, but Breyat's horse stumbled and he died.'

  There were dozens of such reports and the more recent were the most detailed.

  When the last scout, the last far-riding girl, had told her story, Ataelus rose. 'Upazan is coming into the high ground with his whole strength,' Ataelus said. 'Ten thousand warriors, more or less. Five times that number of horses. The grass is green, the ground is hard and now he comes.' Ataelus grinned. 'He is already too late. All the farmers are in the forts. All the grain is stored or burned.' Ataelus bowed to Melitta. 'You have already done well against him, lady. Without a saddle emptied, he must march into a desert.'

  'A desert with green grass,' Melitta said.

  Ataelus grinned, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. 'Green grass is good for a night or two, eh? But not if you have to sit in one place more than a day. Then the horses eat all the grass. Then you need grain.'

  Buirtevaert nodded. 'And if we had ten days without rain,' he said, 'we could burn the grass.'

  'Aye!' a dozen voices shouted.

  'Aye!' Ataelus said. 'That would be the end of Upazan's campaign. Eight years ago, he gambled everything on catching us unprepared, and he succeeded. Upazan thinks that the Sakje are soft. He hears that we live in the valleys, that we winter in houses. He caught us sleeping by the fire in the year of the flood, and he thinks to do it again.' Ataelus nodded, as if to himself.

  'This time, we have all the people on this side of the Borysthenes, and we are one people,' he said.

  'We will have a great battle,' Scopasis said.

  Thyrsis punched a fist in the air. He and Scopasis were suddenly friends – an unexpected development.

  Melitta looked around. They were all so – male. 'I don't want a great battle,' she said. 'I want to bore Upazan to death. I want to worry him like a pack of wolves with a buck in winter. I want to chew on him like worms on a corpse.'

  Ataelus grinned. 'That is your father's way!' he said. He turned to the others. 'Many of you are too young to have been at the Ford of the River God. Kineas and Marthax – they pulled in harness, those two, whatever happened afterwards.'

  Melitta knew a good political speech when she heard one. Ataelus was wooing the Standing Horses by catering to their version of events.

  'Together, they bled the Greeks, killing every straggler, taking their food, burning the grass. When we fought, their horses were like caribou in the last of winter.' Ataelus looked around, and every leader nodded with him. 'Melitta is right. No battle – or only a battle to finish the buck when the wolves have brought him down.'

  Buir
tevaert raised a hand, but Graethe, his chief, interrupted. 'Ataelus, none here will doubt you – or the lady. But it is only three hundred stades down the Tanais River to the fort. Not much distance to bleed the buck. Not like the great sea of grass.'

  Ataelus scratched his chin. 'You are right. But once he is on the river valley and over the high ground where the last of the sea of grass rolls, every tree will hide one of Temerix's archers. The valley is full of our dirt people, and they have bows.'

  Melitta rose to her feet. 'It is true. If Upazan comes down the Tanais – and I pray he does – then every stade will pull him deeper into our nets. You see a war of horses, because you are horsemen, but this will soon be a war of farmers, a war where a flight of arrows flies from a stand of trees – and what can the Sauromatae do? Ride in among the trees?'

  'Temerix's boys would reap them like wheat!' Gaweint said.

  'When do we start?' Scopasis asked.

  'Now,' Melitta said, and Ataelus gave her a nod. 'Tonight. We will move tonight while we have the moon, and ambush them as they march in the morning.' Melitta lay by Gryphon in the wet grass, cold, miserable and as nervous as she'd ever been, and worried that the enemy might actually hear the beating of her heart. And it wasn't her first ambush by a long shot. She remembered lying in a hole of her own scraping near Gaza – remembered waiting for the Sauromatae in the snow, just a few valleys away.

  Gryphon's eyes were open, his ears pricked, intent. Off north, a bird circled.

  Melitta rolled her head in a slow circle, feeling the pain as her head passed the same point – over and over. Then she flexed her fingers in the dead man's gloves, trying to warm them.

  The wet grass had soaked through every layer she was wearing. How did these people do this, again and again? She wanted to raise her head, wanted to do something. She wondered if her bowstring was wet. She wondered if she looked foolish, lying in long wet grass with her household knights all around her. I'll bet my mother never worried about looking foolish, she thought.

  She heard them a long way off. Curiously, the first thing she heard was the dogs barking among the wagons, and then she heard the jingle of harnesses – the Sauromatae were great ones for chain-bits and cheekpieces, both of which made noise.

  This was Ataelus's battle. She was barely a commander – she'd given permission for it and then he'd done all the rest. It stood to reason – this was his ground, where he'd led his band for five years, where he knew every fold and every hill. And the site was magnificent – a gentle bowl with knife-sharp ridges rising high and clear, the last high grass before the trees started at the great bend of the Tanais. The trees provided them with somewhere to run, and the tiny folds of the hills, each a dozen horse-lengths from the next, allowed Ataelus to hide a thousand riders in ground that appeared to be as empty as a tabletop.

  Ataelus's plan depended on enemy arrogance. He assumed that Upazan would have few outriders, and they would mainly be on the trade road – after all, this was ground that the Sakje hadn't contested against the Sauromatae in five years. And Ataelus had ordered that when they attacked, they should kill everything – everything. Every animal, every man. This, he said, was not just vengeance. It was the kind of blow they had to deal Upazan to win the war.

  As Melitta listened to the sounds approaching, she wondered about Upazan – the man who had killed her father. Her mother had hated him, but never sworn vengeance. She had described him with contempt and yet some admiration. He was a skilled war leader, but a bad, greedy king, who ruled more by fear than by love.

  While she had the image of her mother's stories of Upazan in her head, she saw a rider cross her own small ridge. He was no Upazan. He was – she was – a mere scout.

  Not so arrogant. This one is far from the road and right in among us!

  The girl was riding without seeing, letting her horse do the work as the beast picked its way down the slope towards Melitta's knights. Already, the horse was sniffing the air.

  Melitta got her bow out of the gorytos by her side and thanked Artemis that she had lain on her right side. Gryphon twitched and the Sauromatae horse pricked its ears.

  The girl was lost in a waking dream. A lover? Can anything else cause you to lose yourself so completely? She pitied the girl, even as she rose to her knees.

  The girl turned, mouth open.

  Scopasis's arrow hit her in the side and Melitta's in the open mouth, and she fell with a dull thump.

  Her horse stood over her. After a long moment, it began to crop grass.

  Melitta put another arrow on her string. She wasn't cold any more. She looked right and left. Her household knights were crouched by their horses, bows in their hands. Their damp armour glowed in the orange light.

  She turned and looked back up the main ridge, trying to see Ataelus. He had woven himself a hide of grass, where he could sit on sheepskins with a whistle in his mouth. Melitta couldn't see him. She hoped he could see her.

  The horse started to move and Scopasis flowed forward and caught it before it could climb the little ridge in front of her and alert the enemy. The dead girl's eyes were wide open. She'd fallen with her head against a small rock, and her blue eyes seemed to watch them with the idiot stare of death.

  Melitta heard the hooves in front of her and a voice called out. Gryphon twitched again – responding, no doubt, to the Sauromatae voices.

  Anything for a few more seconds. Were they close? Far? Had the ambush already failed?

  Childhood came to her aid. 'Here I am!' Melitta called in soft Sauromatae. Scopasis flicked her a look – delight in her guile.

  A young warrior came over the ridge that covered their front, his horse lunging forward as the boy leaned on his neck, showing off for his girl.

  This time all of the household were ready, and he was dead before his horse could pull up. The horse itself took a dozen shafts and fell to its knees, then the animal gave a shrill scream – surprise and agony – and went down.

  They froze, as if the horse's death had cast a spell. Again, Melitta tuned her head, looking for Ataelus, listening for his whistle, and there was nothing. Melitta prayed to the Huntress in her head, begging that the slaughter of children be over. Greeks had a horrible myth, where Apollo and his sister slaughtered the children of a woman who had dared to suggest that her children were as beautiful as Leto's. It was on a hundred pots, it was pictured in temples, woven into wall-hangings, engraved on armour – a horrible, horrible story.

  Having just killed two children, Melitta loathed it more than ever. Artemis, free me from this burden. Let my next foe be a man, or a woman grown.

  Somewhere below them, a bit made a metallic sound and a man gave an order.

  How close are they? Melitta wondered.

  Her heart pounded against her chest. She wondered how she had managed to be nervous earlier, when the enemy had been out of earshot. Now her hands trembled, and Gryphon kept stirring under her hands.

  In front, she heard a woman's voice call out 'I can't find them!' in the tones of a mother.

  Artemis! she shrieked in her mind. To kill the mother after the children!

  A man's voice answered, saying they were 'up the hill' and there was some rough laughter, and then-

  Ataelus's whistle.

  She had Gryphon on his feet and she was in the saddle – no idea how she'd got there, reins in hand and bow. All the knights were up and they surged in one line to the top of their ridge and there was the whole of the Sauromatae host at her feet, a sea of horses on the sea of grass.

  A row of wagons moved in front of her, pulled by oxen just like Sakje wagons.

  Scopasis gave a shrill yell – AIAIAIAIAIA! – and all her knights took it up and they went down the ridge and began killing.

  Melitta shot automatically, intent on clearing the wagons as Ataelus had suggested. She shot the drivers and then she rode in close and killed oxen with her long-handled axe. Scopasis kept her knights close, but they left a trail of corpses behind them, and this was no
t battle. The men Melitta shot had no weapons and some of the bodies were very small.

  She closed her heart to it. This was life or death for the Sakje. I am the queen of the Assagatje, she said to herself, and shot down another young mother by a wagon. I am Artemis, and you are not my people.

  They ripped through the wagons like a boat cutting through the sea, and to her left and right were the other bands, doing equal execution. Before the sun had risen the width of a finger, the Sauromatae had lost more wealth in people and animals than they could replace in ten years. The Sakje took nothing. They slaughtered. As Ataelus had ordered.

  Beyond the chaos of the massacre, she could see the enemy rallying his warriors. They had not been among the wagons, but now they were coming.

  Ataelus had ridden in a hundred fights, and his guile was a fathomless ocean compared to most men's. He had prepared ambushes to attack the rescuers, had placed them carefully, and now he released them, so that the first avenging brothers, husbands, sisters, turning to rescue their loved ones, riding blind with hate to the massacre, were caught in the flank and rear, riddled with arrows and driven into the blood-soaked earth to join their families.

  Melitta had stopped killing. She allowed Gryphon to pick his way free of all the death, and she leaned from the saddle only to use her axe on a horse that screamed, over and over again, as it dragged its entrails across the ground.

  Suddenly Ataelus was at her shoulder. She glared at him, for a moment hating this jolly small Sakje the way she'd never hated Upazan or even Eumeles.

  He raised an eyebrow. 'Time to withdraw,' he said. That was all.

  'We're winning!' she said, disgusted. Disgusted in a dozen different ways. Perfectly aware that Philokles would say that there was no real difference between this and her private war against the Sauromatae in the winter valleys. None at all.

  Ataelus shrugged. 'Always leave an ambush while you are winning,' he said.

  'I'll write that down, shall I?' she said.

  She rode back among her knights, wishing again that she had a trumpeter. 'Withdraw!' she yelled, and Scopasis came up by her side.