Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  ‘The baqca is correct,’ she said. ‘I go to drive Upazan from the Tanais.’

  ‘Good!’ Graethe said. ‘You promised Marthax a kurgan.’

  ‘We will build to the skies,’ she promised. ‘When Upazan is driven from the mouth of the Tanais.’

  ‘We have brought him,’ Graethe said. He pointed at a travois, dragged by two tired horses.

  She looked at the frozen blood on the hides, but there was nothing to be seen of the dead king except a corpse-shaped bundle of furs.

  They rode east, across the rising ground, and back to the coast at Hygreis, the first town of Srayanka’s eastern kingdom that had been.

  The Maeotae greeted them with open arms. Her outriders paid hard gold for grain and she camped for two days. The weather was milder on the shores of the Bay of Salmon.

  ‘The world will be mud in ten days. Or less,’ Urvara said.

  Melitta nodded, sitting her horse on the high dunes north of the town. ‘I know, lady. But from here, we could ride the dunes and the hard sand all the way home.’

  Urvara laughed. ‘Too easily, I forget that you grew up here. With your foreign words and your face, I forget that you really are one of us. Ride the dunes! The sea road. Inland clans like mine forget these things.’

  ‘I am not the first lord of ten thousand horses to launch an early campaign,’ Melitta said.

  Parshtaevalt laughed. ‘No, you are not. In fact, Satrax did the same to the Getae, with your father holding his hand – after the Getae did the same to us. Oh, how they burned us! We fought that whole war before the grain came in.’

  Melitta nodded. ‘Four days to Tanais.’

  Urvara’s horse began to shy at the smell on the wind – roast pork. ‘Then?’

  Parshtaevalt shook his head at Urvara. ‘What do you think? Then we fight.’

  Melitta shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. It will take another ten days of sunshine to make the grass dry enough to ride – maybe twenty. We will build a kurgan for Marthax – next to my father’s. And a fortified camp – a base. Food, grain, shelter.’

  Graethe laughed. ‘The Sakje don’t need a shelter,’ he said. ‘We have four thousand riders. Twenty thousand horses. In less than a month our horses will be fat.’

  Melitta shook her head. ‘This will not be a war like any other the Sakje have fought,’ she said. ‘I am young, but I remember that in my youth, my mother alone could lead five thousand riders into the field. Now the whole fighting strength of the royal Sakje – the keepers of the western gate – is ten thousand horsemen. How many Sauromatae are there?’

  ‘Too many,’ Urvara said. ‘I already miss Ataelus.’

  ‘He’ll meet us at Tanais,’ Melitta said.

  Urvara said nothing.

  Tanais had stood on a bluff above the river. In her youth, Melitta remembered the hippodrome and the temples – a beautiful marble temple in the Ionian style, dedicated to Athena Nike by her father’s friends and Uncle Leon, who had paid for most of it. She remembered the buildings laid out in a neat grid, new and clean, and a statue of her father mounted on a horse, cast in bronze, his sword pointing east at the lands where they had fought Iskander.

  It was all gone. The pedestal of the statue – a big marble plinth with scenes from the battles in the east carved around the base – still sat alone at the top of the bluff, but mud and snow covered the scars of burning, and the statue itself was now armour and arrowheads and a thousand other bronze implements.

  She sat on Gryphon, his feet planted in the midst of the ruin of her childhood, and all the dreams her parents had shared, and she wept. In some complex way, she hadn’t quite believed that Tanais was destroyed until she saw it. She realized that she had awakened that morning, eager to ride, expecting – what? Expecting to find the old freedman in the hippodrome? Bion waiting in his stall?

  In a way, it made her job easier. She didn’t hesitate to order the top of the bluff scraped clean. The plinth from her father’s statue went into the wall that her Sakje constructed, aided by the farmers of the surrounding country. They came in with their grain within hours. She had them build her a granary in the Sindi way – they burned a huge fire to thaw the ground, and then dug the dirt out, digging down many times the height of a man and lining the pit with stones. Then they covered it with a thatch roof, supported by beams floated down the river.

  As the Sindi and the Maeotae worked, the Sakje built another great fire on the shore. When the embers began to cool, they dug a tomb chamber deep into the dry dirt, and more logs went into a wooden house in the dirt. They laid Marthax in the house and killed a hundred horses in the trench outside. Every man and woman brought a square of turf, and many of the Sindi and the Maeotae came as well, and the kurgan went up and up.

  They had been ten days at Tanais when Ataelus rode in with a hundred riders at his back, and four hundred grim-faced men on ponies with bows and axes. They had Sauromatae ponies and Sauromatae coats of hide, and they sang as they came.

  The Maeotae farmers came out to line the roads to greet them. The roads were swampy, and women cursed the cold mud on their legs, but they cheered as Ataelus rode by.

  Ataelus dismounted by Melitta and embraced her. ‘You remember Temerix?’ he asked.

  Temerix was the same – a figure of menace. He was older but no smaller. He had a new scar on his face. ‘I hear you cut a path to us,’ the smith said. ‘I was behind you two days – they were too thick, and I had to ride away.’ He laughed, and it was a fell sound. ‘But I raised the northern valleys,’ he said. He pointed at the men behind him. ‘Upazan’s tax collectors won’t be riding home.’

  ‘And – Lu?’ Melitta asked. Lu was another fixture from her childhood – her nurse, her confidante. Temerix’s wife from far to the east.

  ‘Lu sends her love,’ Temerix said. ‘Love’ sounded odd in his mouth. But he smiled, and years fled from his face. ‘By all the gods, Srayanka’s daughter, we will have good times now.’

  Melitta hugged Ataelus again. ‘I worried you were gone so long,’ she said.

  ‘Upazan’s men were already in the high ground when I found the smith,’ he said. ‘They thought that we had fled! Hah! The ground is strewn with corpses.’ He looked to the side. ‘Coenus is wounded.’

  ‘That is hard news. He is – the captain of my guard.’ She almost said the man I trust the most.

  ‘He is forming the men of the upper Tanais into a militia,’ Ataelus said in Sakje. ‘The wound is not so bad.’

  Melitta chewed on her hair. ‘We have a secure base, and grain,’ she said. ‘As soon as the ground is dry, let us ride up the valley and see what Upazan has.’ In private, she worried that Ataelus, Temerix and Coenus had shown her power to Upazan too early.

  Ten days of spring breezes. Ten days of watching farmers scratch their heads, of watching the more daring lead their oxen into the fields and all but vanish in the rich, black mud, the great beasts scarcely able to walk for the clods adhering like melted cheese to their hooves.

  Even when many of the farmers began to plough in earnest, breaking the new soil once, and then again, and a third and even a fourth time before planting their seed, still she waited, because Ataelus was tireless, and Samahe rode the hills with her maidens, and spring came slowly there.

  In the valleys, girls danced the spring dances under the trees, and seeds were planted that needed no dirt to grow, and laughter filled the air as the first green shoots leaped from the ground as an answer to Demeter’s prayer and Persephone’s return. Melitta, who had not thought about sex in five months, felt the pangs of interest, first in one boy, then in another, until the urge of spring was so powerful that she took refuge in being the queen. She began to dress the part, and she put her bodyguard and Urvara, who was in most ways her first minister, between her yearnings and her body.

  Even with the knights of her bodyguard, she was short and direct, and she did not encourage discussion.

  And then came a day, when the first roses were budding, w
hen the Athenaea had been celebrated, that Ataelus and Samahe pronounced that the ground was hard. Melitta rose to her feet and flicked her riding whip. ‘Send for my horses,’ she said.

  The army was away that day.

  They rode with spare horses to hand, a vanguard commanded by Temerix well in advance against ambush and a rearguard trailing well behind the main body against disaster. They took no wagons, and they rode two hundred stades a day or more – even over the high ground.

  Melitta made time to ride with the maidens – young women, all painfully younger than she was herself, and she was angered at the loss of youth and freedom. At first they were quiet and foolishly respectful, and then they were boastful and foolishly loud, bragging of the men they would kill and the others they would bed, or playing at sex among themselves, and she resented them.

  She also resented Nihmu, who since Coenus’s absence had withdrawn more and more into the spirit world, taking smoke every day or more, and speaking of her dreams as if they were the premonitions of her youth. Her assumption of the mantle of a baqca angered some and pleased others, as the tides of tribal politics ran, but Tameax avoided her and refused to lend her a drum or speak her rituals with her.

  She confronted Nihmu in the fake privacy of her smoke tent, forcing herself through the deep, rich fumes to speak her mind. ‘I need you as a counsellor,’ Melitta said. ‘I have a baqca.’

  Nihmu gave a dreamy smile. ‘I will never again lie with a man,’ she said, ‘and then I will recover all my powers.’

  Melitta wriggled out of the tent, enraged, as if the smoke had fed her anger as wood feeds a fire.

  Ataelus was gone from dawn until dark, hunting the high ridges. Samahe rode with him. Coenus was still ahead, training farmers in his beloved valley – where he had built the temple to Artemis. Urvara, Parshtaevalt and Graethe each had their own clans and their own factions.

  Melitta stopped wanting to weep. She stopped wanting to cry, to fuck, to have friends. In a matter of days, in the same way that she had made herself hard in order to survive, she made herself into the queen – silent, careful and exact. She became the woman she remembered standing silently by her bed in the firelight of the hall – hair wrapped in gold braid-cases, body hidden by the white doeskin jacket with its gold plates and careful caribou-hair embroidery.

  Sometimes, while holding her, her mother had wept. Those tears had always puzzled Melitta when she felt them on her cheeks when she was six years old. But now, standing alone, her hair in the same gold braid-cases and her breasts held in the same caribou coat, she felt the same emptiness – she knew it was the same.

  ‘I miss my son,’ she said to the wind.

  ‘Where is Satyrus?’ she asked the newborn sun.

  ‘Is this all there is?’ she asked the new flowers. And the army moved north.

  At the Temple of Artemis, she allowed herself the luxury of hugging Coenus.

  ‘My apologies, lady,’ he said with a deep bow. His left arm was in a sling. ‘I took a wound in the first fighting and I thought I might as well recuperate here.’

  Melitta had to admit, despite her annoyance with him, that his farmers looked dangerous. They were the only armoured infantry of her whole army, five hundred men in scale armour or heavy leather, with bows and spears and crescent-shaped shields like Thracians. ‘You are making them into Greeks,’ she accused.

  ‘I’d kill for half a hundred hoplites,’ Coenus allowed.

  ‘You are the captain of my guard,’ she said, pointedly.

  ‘I am,’ he allowed. ‘I apologize, lady.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You have trained them. Now let us march. And you can return to your duties.’

  He nodded brusquely and took his place, and his men joined the column, kissing their wives, embracing their children and marching away to the north. And that night she pounced on him in the relative privacy of her tent.

  ‘Have you seen Nihmu?’ she asked.

  ‘She no longer . . . has need of me,’ Coenus said. He narrowed his eyes. ‘Not that you have done anything to help her.’

  ‘I?’ Melitta asked. ‘I can’t even get her to talk. The moment the army halts, she is off her horse, taking smoke. She all but lives in the spirit world.’

  Coenus shook his head. ‘That is her choice. She wants back the powers that – that I’m unsure she ever had. I can’t stomach it. I rode away to leave her.’ He raised his head, and Melitta could see the tears. ‘I’m sorry, Melitta. I can’t watch her kill herself. Send me away again.’

  She shook herself. ‘You left me because of Nihmu?’ she asked sharply. ‘Coenus, I am twenty years old, commanding an army of strangers in a land that is often foreign to me.’

  ‘Could have fooled me,’ Coenus said. ‘They love you.’

  ‘They have no idea who I am. I’m not sure that I know who I am. I will soon be what they make me – the virgin goddess. Artemis come to life. My mother.’ She shook with fury. ‘And you rode away to avoid the consequences of seducing Nihmu from her husband!’

  Coenus stood up. ‘I don’t have to listen to this,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t seduce her from my friend. Much the opposite.’

  ‘Listen to me! I need you, damn it. But you – you led her astray. Admit it!’ Melitta didn’t like that Coenus was human – and she didn’t like the look on his face now.

  ‘I led her astray?’ Coenus spat.

  There was a commotion at the edge of the darkness beyond the fire. Hoof beats, and shouting.

  ‘We will talk of this later,’ Melitta said.

  ‘Where is the lady?’ a rider asked, and more hoof beats in the dark.

  Melitta raised her voice. ‘Here!’ she shouted, and even as she called, Coenus drew his sword and stepped between her and the rider.

  ‘You trust too easily,’ Coenus said.

  The rider stayed clear of the sword. ‘I am your sworn man,’ he said. ‘Lady, the camp at Tanais is under attack – Eumeles’ men are landing from ships!’

  ‘What is this?’ she asked.

  ‘A taxeis of Eumeles’ foot soldiers landed from ships,’ he said. ‘We surprised them on the beach and killed dozens, but they drove us back into the fort.’

  Melitta shook her head to clear it. ‘Get me my chiefs,’ she said.

  Coenus sheathed his sword. ‘Artemis stand with us. They can’t have enough men to take the fort – we left half a thousand farmers to hold it.’

  Parshtaevalt came up first, tying his sash. ‘The farmers won’t hold unless they know we are coming,’ he said. ‘The dirt people don’t expect to fight alone – and who can blame them?’

  ‘How close are we to Upazan?’ Melitta asked Ataelus when he came.

  He looked at Samahe. She shrugged. ‘We haven’t found a single rider in the high ground,’ she said.

  Ataelus shrugged. ‘I think it was a mistake to attack his riders at the end of winter,’ he admitted. ‘But they were under my hand, and I took them.’

  ‘So Upazan has slipped away,’ Melitta said.

  ‘Back to the sea of grass north of the Hyrkanian Sea,’ Coenus said. ‘To raise his own army, I suspect.’

  All of the tribal leaders nodded.

  ‘And he’ll return when he wants, on his own terms,’ Urvara said. ‘While we have to fight to defend the farmers, he’ll hit us as he likes.’

  ‘And Eumeles can play the same game with his ships. If we rush to every town he threatens, he’ll sail away.’ Coenus smacked his open palm with his fist.

  Graethe scratched at his moustache. ‘What do we do, then? You Greeks are good at this sort of war – many fields, and many foes. Me, I want to ride, to feel a foe under my iron.’

  Melitta poked the fire with a stick and then recalled her pose as the unflappable queen. ‘We will have to relieve the fort at Tanais,’ she said. ‘How many soldiers were there?’ she asked the Sindi rider.

  He shook his head. ‘Many,’ he said.

  ‘A thousand?’ Coenus asked. ‘How many ships?’
/>
  ‘Many,’ the boy said. ‘I was sent to find the queen, and no one told me to count the ships.’

  ‘Let’s say he sent half his fleet – forty ships. At most, one taxeis of pikemen – perhaps with the best of the oarsmen as peltastai.’ Coenus spat on the grass. ‘I’m tired of being cold all the time,’ he said, as if this was germane.

  Parshtaevalt laughed. ‘You are unchanged by the passing of years,’ he said.

  ‘How could Eumeles be on us so fast?’ Urvara asked.

  Melitta shook her head. ‘It takes too long to move troops – and ships,’ she said. ‘This is some planned movement that we have interrupted.’

  ‘What if the rest of his army is coming behind?’ Graethe said.

  ‘We must relieve the fort,’ Melitta said again. ‘If we fail to save these farmers, the others will never trust us again.’

  And just like that, her notion carried. The chiefs walked off into the dark to ready their warriors to turn around in the morning.

  ‘Why are you so angry?’ Coenus asked. ‘They obey – better than they obeyed Satrax, as I remember.’

  ‘There is more to life than being obeyed,’ she said.

  She heard Scopasis laugh, close at hand. ‘People laugh,’ she said. ‘I seldom laugh any more. My mother never laughed, and now I know why.’

  ‘Then perhaps you know why I, an aristocrat, refuse to command,’ Coenus said.

  ‘I need you,’ she admitted, looking up at him. ‘

  I’ll see what I can do with Nihmu,’ he answered.

  The next morning, they rode back south, and the ground it had taken them seven days to cover was dryer, the mud hardened to dirt, and by the evening of the fourth day, their outriders were skirmishing with foragers from the enemy camp. The Sakje went right in among them, killing the mercenaries and driving the survivors back over the damp ground into their camp.

  Melitta went with Temerix, despite the advice of her chiefs. Coenus forced her to take Scopasis as a bodyguard, and together they rode with Temerix’s warband on their stout ponies. Then they took their bows, slung their axes and moved forward carefully, staying in the trees on the high ridges. Below, in the valley’s fields and meadows, she could see the horsemen moving, cutting off parties of Greek soldiers and shooting them full of arrows. There were burning farmhouses throughout the Tanais Valley. The sight sickened her, as if her valley had a deadly disease that had transmitted itself to her blood.