Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  Coenus laughed and rubbed at a bare thigh, red with cold. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be more comfortable.’

  They continued to ride east.

  The next day, they saw a herd of deer in the distance and they killed one, riding wide of the herd and then pushing it back on Nihmu’s bow, the Sakje way. Coenus shook his head at the waste – he wanted to ride in among the deer with his javelins, but it was not to be. They needed meat, not sport.

  Nihmu’s arrows did the job, and Coenus butchered the young buck and they all rode on, bloody, with fresh meat in net bags on all the mounts. That night they feasted on venison and then had to stand watches to protect the rest of the meat from wolves. In the morning they rose early, built up the fire and ate again. The villages and farms of the high ground were gone. They were in the empty space, where of old the Sakje had ridden.

  ‘I feel more like a Sakje every day,’ Nihmu said.

  Coenus said nothing. He was sitting on his haunches, looking into the fire. Melitta noticed how often his eyes fell on Nihmu, and how often the Sakje woman’s eyes rested on Coenus.

  ‘We’ll need to hunt again in three days,’ he said. ‘And the horses will need something better than this grass if we’re going all the way to the Tanais high ground.’

  Nihmu put a hand on his cheek – a very personal gesture, for her, and one that made Melitta’s spine stiffen. ‘Hush – you worry too much, Greek man.’

  They laughed at each other for a moment, and Melitta was distinctly uncomfortable.

  They rode east again all day, and by the evening the Hypanis looked small enough to cross – the more so as they’d soaked themselves crossing a pair of tributaries that day. There was a tiny settlement – three stone huts and a cairn. The peasants at the ford said that the cairn and kurgan – a big one, hundreds of years old – were called Tblissa.

  ‘I was here as a girl,’ Nihmu said. They made a fire at the foot of the kurgan, and used a fire pit that had cinders as deep as Coenus bothered to dig. ‘Tip-lis was a chieftain of the old times, when the people rode into Persia and made war on the Medes and the Great King. He guards this ford.’

  Melitta was falling asleep, lulled by the sound of their horses eating grain purchased for ready cash from the peasants at the ford.

  ‘We should lay out our blanket rolls,’ Nihmu said.

  Melitta sat up. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

  Neither of the other two denied her, so she placed herself in the middle.

  They didn’t quibble or look askance at the arrangement, and she felt guilty for her suspicions. She was warmer than she wanted to be, almost crushed with the weight of sleepers on either hand, and then she was asleep.

  In the morning, they splashed through the ford, their baggage riding high to keep clear of the water, and then they were across. Coenus built a big fire and they dried everything that was damp and changed. It was too cold now to ride in wet leather or even wet wool.

  Even the horses came up to the fire.

  ‘Still some weeks until winter,’ Nihmu said, and Coenus grunted. Nihmu was warming herself by the fire, naked, and Coenus was smiling at her, and Melitta wanted to growl at them. Were they flirting, or serious?

  ‘Winter will come soon enough,’ Coenus said. He held his hands out to the fire. ‘Sooner to some of us than others,’ he added. He was fifteen years older than Nihmu and thirty years older than Melitta.

  An hour later they were away, climbing out of the vale of the Hypanis and heading north, into winter.

  Later that day there was snow – not enough to bury them, but enough to worry them. They kept going through it and made camp in the deep woods at the top of the biggest ridge they’d encountered so far – a quarter of the day to climb it. Now they were out of the peopled country, on the high plains where only the Sakje travelled, and Nihmu admitted to a certain dismay. There wasn’t a fire sign or a track to be seen.

  ‘Wait a few days,’ Coenus said.

  ‘The Dog Horses should have had a camp in that valley,’ Nihmu said. But she shrugged and ate three-day-old venison.

  That night, Melitta found that Coenus had built a shelter of brush and branches – very low, but snug and warm. He was quite proud of it, in a male way, but she had to admit that it was well contrived. He raked the fire into a heap of coals near the mouth of the shelter and they all got in. Melitta found that he’d built the shelter around their blanket rolls and that Nihmu was in the middle.

  It seemed pointless to protest. Melitta was determined to think no more about it. Later, she thought that perhaps she would stay awake and see what happened. But the next thing she knew, it was the grey light of morning, and she could hear the fire crackling away outside as Coenus fed the shelter into the fire. Melitta got up, rolled the blankets and tied them in neat bundles, the habits of her youth returning quite naturally, and looked around for Nihmu.

  ‘Swimming,’ Coenus said. He shrugged. ‘I know – insane. But she insisted.’

  Below them, Nihmu shrieked like a woman in childbirth, and Melitta could see her splashing water in the stream. When she came up to them, her skin was bright red, but she had filled the water bottles and their one kettle. Coenus put it on the fire and they had hot herb tea with a little wine in it before they set off.

  That day, they rode north and east on high ridges. It didn’t snow again, and the sun came out, fresh and warm, and the horses were playful.

  That night, they laughed at the fire, and sang Sakje songs to Coenus, who shook his head and told them they were both barbarians. Melitta discovered that she didn’t really care if two of her favourite adults were choosing to behave badly.

  ‘None of my concern,’ she said to the darkness.

  They sang more, and Coenus repaid them with parts of the Iliad, sung in a curious high voice that soothed and scared at the same time.

  ‘That part has a curious meaning,’ Coenus said when he was done telling of Thetis bringing new armour to her son by the sea.

  ‘Hush,’ Nihmu said, putting two fingers across his lips. ‘How often were you told as a child that retelling spoils the story?’

  Coenus grinned like a boy. ‘Too true, my lady.’ He sprang to his feet. ‘I’ll tell it to the wolves instead,’ he said, and walked off into the darkness.

  Melitta thought that her child’s grandfather was behaving like a much younger man.

  Seconds later he was back. His return took Melitta by surprise – she had just snuggled closer to Nihmu to share the other woman’s warmth. Coenus sprang past them and cast the deerskin from their kill straight on to the fire. It was untanned and still wet, if a little frozen, and they smelled burning hair and roasting meat.

  ‘Right below us,’ Coenus hissed. ‘Bottom of the valley. Twenty riders, all Sauromatae.’

  ‘You saw them?’ Nihmu asked, incredulous. It was quite dark.

  ‘Heard them,’ Coenus said. ‘Get the horses.’

  ‘I can just talk to them,’ Nihmu said. ‘The easterners would never trouble a Sakje party.’

  ‘Never is a long time,’ Coenus said. ‘The sea of grass is changed, and not for the better.’

  Coenus pulled the deerskin off the fire and they packed in the last of the firelight. Melitta’s heart pounded. While she packed her cloaks and blankets on her horse’s rump, she actually saw the fire glimmering below her in the valley.

  ‘They must have seen ours,’ Melitta said.

  Coenus shook his head, a blur of motion in the dark. ‘No – I put the camp in a hollow. I’m used to this sort of thing.’

  Melitta was annoyed with herself on a number of different levels – for allowing Coenus to make camp in her country, for not knowing as much about stealth as the Greek man.

  They heard a horse noise just over the rim of the hill.

  ‘They’re coming for us after all!’ Coenus hissed. ‘Leave the rest and ride!’

  He was on the back of his horse and moving, and there was a hissing in the air. Melitta got her le
g over her horse’s haunch and wished for her dear Bion, who would have been been ten strides away by now. But she settled her seat and grabbed her bow, ready strung, from her gorytos. Even as she rode her mount in among the trees, she had an arrow on the string. Some skills are never forgotten.

  Now she could hear shouts behind her – Sauromatae voices, their eastern accents and odd words carrying clearly on the cold air.

  ‘They were right here!’ a young man shouted. ‘Look! Coals and ashes!’

  ‘I shot one!’ another shouted.

  Melitta put her heels to her mount, dropped her bow back into its cover and her arrow into the quiver behind the bow case. There was nothing to shoot and riding through trees in the dark was hard enough.

  She kept going downhill, sure that this, at least, would carry her away from her pursuers. When she arrived at the base of the next valley, after a disorienting ride whose distance could only be measured in fear, she jumped her horse over the thin, black stream and rode along the open meadow, looking up the hill behind her to the south.

  She couldn’t see horse or riders, but there were shapes moving on the hillside, and shouts.

  She had lost Nihmu and Coenus and all the packhorses. She was alone in the dark, and there were ten or more riders pursuing her.

  She allowed her horse to find its own way along the meadow to the base of the next ridge while she considered her options. She wasn’t afraid – or rather, fear underlay her analysis, but didn’t push it.

  They had multiple horses; she had but one, and that one was average at best. That meant that a single error – a foot in a hole, a bad cut – and she would be taken. She knew a thousand tales of the people about pursuits like this – sometimes the hero ran, and sometimes he pursued. Such tales were often about the merit of horses.

  There was already snow on top of each ridge, but none in the valleys. Plenty of light on the snow – none at all in the woods.

  She went up the next ridge, clucking at her animal to make him go faster, taking the chance of laming him to gain the wood line and its relative concealment. She chewed on the end of her hair, and then, decision made, she rolled off her horse and led him in among the trees. Somewhere in her hasty dismount she lost arrows from her quiver and cursed, but she moved fast, tethered her gelding just over the crest of the next ridge and came back across the top with an arrow on her bow and two javelins from her saddle case tight in her cold fingers.

  It felt better to be the hunter than the prey. She lay down in a hollow of grass near the ridge’s summit, the frost heavy and white on her dark blue soldier’s cloak. Then she waited.

  She’d spent a fair amount of time waiting in her life – waiting for assassins, waiting for labour pains. She had the patience of the survivor. She lay still, colder and colder, her heart running faster or slower as the sounds of her pursuers came to her on the frosty air. The stars were different here, but childhood memory said that it was the middle of the second watch.

  She bit her lips to avoid nodding off. The whole idea of ambushing her pursuers seemed foolish now – they had seemed so close behind her, but now they seemed cautious. She thought of rising to her feet, collecting her horse and fleeing again – but then there was a noise, quite close.

  That option was gone.

  ‘One of them came this way!’ a young voice shouted. ‘I have found an arrow!’

  ‘Hush!’ an older voice said.

  They were close. Without turning her head, she could see a shadow – and a rising cloud of steam from a beast’s breath. The easterners were quiet.

  ‘I’ll blow my horn!’ the younger one said, in a mock whisper.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing!’ his companion hissed.

  Melitta’s heart was pounding, and her mind, wandering free in the last seconds before action, focused on the notion that she used to feel less fear. How does fear creep in? she asked herself. Then she took a deep breath and rolled to her left – feet planted, hips on line, the bow drifting up, the tension of the string and her arm and the draw, all one. She didn’t actually see her target or even, consciously, loose the arrow, but she was reaching with icy fingers for a second arrow – draw through the fingers, nock—

  Screams.

  Loose – drop the bow, left hand back to put it exactly into the gorytos, even as her right took a javelin. She was running forward. One was down, gut-shot and screaming, and the other was lying pinned under his horse, where her arrow had gone through his leg and into the horse’s guts and the beast was flailing in the snow. She didn’t bother with a throw, but pushed her slim javelin into his unprotected neck. The snow under him went black as the blood spurted and she ran on, straight at them. There were two more, and her legs were already tired, the tension in her hips left from childbirth and still not worked away, so that she was afraid to stop for fear she wouldn’t run well again. She swept down the hill and found a third man – his bow out. He shot, and she threw her javelin, and she was still running. She was above him on the steep ridge. Without time to plan, she jumped and hit him squarely, toppling him from his horse and getting a vicious stab in her face – flare of pain – her akinakes across his throat, and she rolled off him and grabbed at his horse’s reins.

  The beast didn’t move – the gods were with her, and she got herself into the high-backed Sauromatae saddle and was going, up the trail towards her own horse. Her new mount shied at the smell of blood and she clenched her knees and thumped her toes against his barrel and he was past the dead man and the wounded boy, still whimpering, and over the crest – she didn’t even dismount to get her horse, just dropped her remaining javelin into its scabbard, collected her horse’s reins and was away down the hill. As soon as she was back among trees, she made herself slow, made her horses walk. No snow this far down in the woods – nothing to give her away.

  Behind her, she could hear the fourth man calling for his friends – terrified.

  She was across the next stream and starting to worry about the wound on her face, which kept bleeding, so that the blood ran down her neck, colder and colder as it soaked the neck of her cloak. Then she was climbing again. She turned just short of the snow line and rode north and east, as best she could estimate in the moonless dark.

  She saw motion on the last ridge and shouts reached her, and later, a horn call, but she was still moving fast, wishing she had not taken a wound and wishing, too, that she’d taken the other two horses.

  Her new horse was a fine beast, with a deep chest and a wide rump, and she only changed horses to give him a rest. He had scars on his chest and a set of ritual scars on his hindquarters in the barbed shape of a gryphon. So she called him Gryphon, happy in the knowledge that he was a warhorse of some age and thus a proven mount.

  She lay up for an hour in a circle of tall spruce trees high on a ridge, where the snow was deep enough to hide the flames of a small fire. She needed the fire to melt water and refill her canteen and her water skin.

  Her whole face throbbed.

  She had lost her guide and her mentor. She had no food except the snack in her wallet, a honey cake wrapped in leaves and a big slice of cheese, both of which she consumed immediately, her cheek burning with pain as she chewed. She melted water in her helmet and filled her water skin and her canteen.

  Only then did it occur to her to search the big wallet on Gryphon.

  It was decorated in the Sauromatae way, made from two caribou skins sewn back to back, fur in, with decorations in dyed hair all over the outside.

  I killed someone important, she thought. She poured a little water from her helmet into her horn cup and had a sip. Even just warm enough to steam, it was marvellous. She looked at the embroidery, a full winter of work for someone sitting in a lodge or a yurt on the sea of grass, and shook her head at the ways of fortune – Tyche, as the Greeks said. This man had been a warrior – a good one, with a fine horse and good kit. Probably veteran of a hundred raids – smart enough to be well back of his scouts. But his one arrow had missed h
er, and she’d killed him – as much by luck as skill. If she’d come over the hill a few horse-lengths either way, and given him time . . .

  She sighed, wanting only to sleep. She reached her hands inside the warm softness of the embroidered wallet – so like Greek saddlebags, but made on the plains – and found that the wallet held two sets of treasures. She actually laughed aloud at the joy of it. There was a heavy fur hat, which she immediately put on her head, and a magnificent pair of embroidered mittens, made of caribou, lined in some fur that was soft and instantly warm on her fingers, and she almost cried.

  But she couldn’t stop. With her water bottles full and some food in her belly and mittens on her hands, she rode to the top of her ridge and looked north and south. Coenus and Nihmu, if they lived, would try to go back for her.

  If they lived. And if Melitta went back the way she had come, she was more likely to fall in with her pursuers. She still had no food – she was exhausted.

  ‘They’ll just have to get on without me,’ Melitta said aloud, and turned her horse’s head across the ridge, heading north and east, to the Tanais high ground of her girlhood.

  Three ridges further, and no sign of pursuit. She was afraid to sleep – afraid to stop at all – but her own horse was flagging. She got them into a creek bottom, with running water, overhanging trees and no snow over the grass. She hobbled and picketed her mounts. Then, cursing herself for a barbarian, she opened up the dead man’s beautiful wallet with her knife, slitting ten nights’ worth of sewing to open it out as a sleeping pad, put her cloak roll under her,and lay down.

  She lay open-eyed for longer than she could believe. Her horses made more noise than she could have imagined – whickering back and forth, crunching near-frozen greenery, belching, farting, drinking.

  She awoke to cold and dark. Her head and shoulders had come loose from her pile of blankets, and she was cold right through. She got up, wished she had some food and drank her canteen dry. Then she refilled it from the icy stream, working cautiously to avoid wetting any part of her, and collected her kit, making the sloppiest of knots to tie her bed roll. She could feel the pursuit. She’d killed a man of consequence. They would track her.