No person with great beauty ever fully values it, the sheer attraction, the pleasure of it, until it is lost. Only then did Melitta admit to herself that she had been beautiful. The kind of girl for which fashionable Alexandria boys wrote poems.
‘I have a feeling that my future as a valuable hetaira has taken a death-blow,’ she said, to mask her inner scream. She looked like something that had been dead.
‘How many men did you kill?’ a new voice asked, and a small man pushed into the lodge. Everyone shuffled to make room around the fire and the brazier as Ataelus sat cross-legged, his fierce face unusually happy. ‘You came back to us!’ he said.
Melitta took his hands and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Ah! Now I think I will live. My mother’s best warrior.’
‘You are like your mother born again,’ Samahe said.
‘Six,’ Melitta said. ‘At least six. I tried to let one live, but the gods took his life anyway.’
‘Aiyee!’ Ataelus shouted. ‘Six Sauromatae!’ He leaned back and laughed so hard that he had to cross his hands on his stomach. ‘Six, and took their horses and arms and brought them here! I have singers already singing it, lady.’ He leaned close. ‘I ask you – I have to ask you. You are here to raise the tribes?’
Melitta thought of her new face. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Good,’ Ataelus said. ‘My name is not enough. You – and Nihmu, and even Coenus, back from the time of Kineax – together, we will raise the tribes. You must grow well, so that we can ride. We will ride far.’
Samahe nodded. ‘Too long, we have been outlaws on our own grass.’
‘This winter, we take it all back,’ Ataelus said. ‘Upazan killed your father. Somehow he must die, despite the prophecy. Perhaps you will kill him.’
‘Prophecy?’ Melitta asked.
Nihmu looked at the ground. ‘Upazan may not die by a man’s blade,’ she said.
Melitta was going to say something derisive about superstition, but she knew that this was the wrong place.
These are my people now,
she thought.
‘We start with Marthax,’ Melitta said.
All the heads in the lodge turned to her. Ataelus shook his head. ‘I hear the voice of the Lady Srayanka – but I had thought to win over Parshtaevalt of the Cruel Hands first, and then the Grass Cats. Urvara is close to Olbia. She will be your friend.’
Melitta sat up straight. She looked at Nihmu. ‘The eagles are flown, Ataelus. When Marthax submits, all the tribes will come over, and we will not have civil war.’ She used the Greek word for internal strife, because Sakje lacked a way to express it. ‘It is the prophecy – which many should know. And should be in your song.’
Ataelus nodded and scratched his chin. ‘I will not treat you like a girl in council again. Marthax? He is old. His sons are all dead.’ Ataelus rocked back and forth. ‘Perhaps it could be done.’
Nihmu spoke up. ‘When I was a prophet, I sang it,’ she said. ‘But Melitta, I didn’t say that it had to be Marthax first.’
‘Melitta,’ Ataelus said, and shook his head. ‘Such a kindly name.’
‘Srayanka chose that name,’ Samahe said, with a dark look at her husband.
‘The people have chosen another. Just as Srayanka was “Cruel Hands” at war.’ Ataelus shrugged. ‘The people make names. I have one. You have one. She is a warrior – she came in with her kills and her spoil, and she was named.’
Samahe frowned.
‘What is my war name, Uncle?’ Melitta asked Ataelus.
‘Srakorlax,’ Ataelus said. ‘The scent of death.’
It was two weeks before she was ready to ride, and she still had spells of dizziness. But every day they came to her yurt, and in those two weeks, she felt herself change, as if her mind was moving to meet the new face that had been cut into her old face.
She had imagined, when leaving Alexandria, that she would have to prove herself to the Sakje – that she would have to win Ataelus, and then, with him at her back, impress the other Sakje.
It wasn’t like that at all. Instead, they were
instantly
her people. As if she had been awaited. Perhaps she had. And perhaps the gods had
given her the trial so that she and her scar could ride into their camps and lead them. But she sensed who they needed her to be, and every day she allowed herself to become that person.
After all, the person they needed was her mother. And she remembered her mother well.
So they sat in her yurt, and planned.
‘What of the Sauromatae?’ she asked.
‘We leave them to their stolen land,’ Ataelus said. ‘For now. First we ride west. Then, when we are strong, we ride back east.’
‘My brother intends to be king of the Bosporus,’ Melitta said. ‘He intends to make war on Eumeles.’
Ataelus nodded. ‘He will make war to win his father’s portion, as you will make war to win your mother’s. This is just as it should be – and you will be strong allies. But his road and ours are not the same. Marthax has taken the people too close to the cities, and the result is not good. I ask that you take the people back to the grass.’
‘Is that all you ask?’ Melitta said.
The others, warriors and friends, fell silent.
Ataelus gave a half-smile. ‘Too long, I have been the only voice to command.’
Melitta shook her head. ‘No. I speak no hidden censure, Ataelus. I have been gone for years. What else do you ask? What else do the people need?’
‘If we go back to the grass, as it was in Satrax’s time, all will be well,’ Ataelus said.
‘It may be that the wine cannot be put back in the flask,’ Samahe said to her husband. ‘The people like living closer to the settlements. What woman wears hides when she can have cloth? What man wears iron when the settlements sell fine bronze armour? Good Greek helmets?’
Ataelus made a face. ‘It is true,’ he said ruefully.
Nihmu sat forward. ‘Now that you can speak, it is time that you rejoined the worlds of the people – both worlds. Will you come into the smoke with me?’
Samahe frowned. ‘It is too soon.’
Nihmu shook her head. ‘It is
not
too soon. The lady almost lost herself in the spirit world coming here. This is because she has been too far from the spirits for too long.’
Melitta had always enjoyed the smoke, although she seldom, if ever, had the kind of revelations that the
baqcas
like her father and Nihmu derived from it. ‘I will come with you,’ she said.
Samahe frowned again. ‘Nihmu, are you baqca? I thought that your powers left you.’
Coenus put a hand on Nihmu’s shoulder, but she shook it off. ‘I am baqca!’ she said with too much emphasis.
‘Perhaps you should go and speak with Tameax,’ Samahe said.
‘He is?’ Nihmu asked, haughtily.
‘He is my baqca,’ Ataelus said, looking elsewhere. ‘He is young, but he does not lack power. He might guide you.’
‘I need no guidance, much less from a man,’ Nihmu shot back. ‘My prophecies are known in every tent on the plains.’
‘It is true,’ Samahe said. ‘But you were a virgin girl when you spoke those words, and your father spoke through your lips. Or so the people say.’
Melitta sensed pressures that she did not yet understand, a fracture among her closest friends. ‘Let us sit in the smoke,’ she said. ‘Then let us see your baqca. We will need the omens tested before we ride.’ She hardened her voice. ‘But before the midwinter feast, I want to find Marthax.’
Sakje people took smoke by erecting small tents of hide, shaped like the pyramids of Aegypt, the seams sealed with good pine pitch from the northern forests. Then they lit small braziers – ornate works of bronze and brass, many made by Greek smiths in the towns, with refined charcoal made by the Sindi charcoal-burners in the valleys. When the brazier was hot, the Sakje would throw handfuls of seeds – mostly from the wild hemp, but some from other plants; every man and woman had her own particular choices, for scent and depth of dreams – and the smoke would fill the tent, and people would sit and dream, or walk the spirit ways.
As a child, Melitta had thought nothing of the smoke, because every Sakje took smoke, her mother included. But after exposure to Alexandria, to the Aegyptian temples of Hathor and Bast, she saw the smoke with two sets of eyes. Greek Melitta saw it as a drug, little different from the poppy that both healed and destroyed, that gave beautiful dreams and nightmares, that both aided the physician and
was the physician’s despair. Indeed, watching three prostitutes share poppy by turning it to smoke in the night market of Alexandria had opened her eyes. To what the smoke might contain.
Yet in her heart, she was still a Sakje girl, and she did not doubt that the visions and pathways of the smoke were true ones, even if she understood the agency of the smoke better than others. So she lay curled on the floor of Nihmu’s smoke tent, sometimes raising the flap to draw a breath of fresh, sweet air, but mostly breathing deep of the pungent stuff, like burning pine boughs but somehow more deep.
For a long time, the smoke only reduced her pain, but then . . .
she was standing on the sea of grass in summer, and a red wind played among the ripe seed heads of the grass, so that ripples moved and swayed – the time of year when the Sakje said that the grass was alive.
And she saw Samahe’s yurt standing exactly where it stood in the waking world, but there were no other yurts and no horses, only the single structure. And in the centre of Samahe’s yurt there stood a tree, and that tree filled the yurt and rose through the smoke hole and away into the heavens.
And at the base of the tree stood a dead man, his bone arms crossed over the white ribs of his chest, his bony rump leaning on the tree, so that even in death he conveyed both impatience and arrogance.
It was not Melitta’s habit to be afraid, in the world of waking or in the spirit world, and she walked up to the dead man. ‘Why do you wait, dead man?’ she asked.
The skull of the dead man laughed, a hollow sound. ‘For you,’ he said.
‘Do I know you?’ she asked, and then, feeling a prick of fear, ‘Did I kill you?’
‘Do my bones still bear the meat and gristle of life, girl? Your dead still seek the tree, and their bones still seek to lose the meat of life. They would make a worse sight than me.’
Melitta found a skull impossible to read.
‘What do you want? This is my dream!’ she insisted.
‘You have walked far from the people, that you can argue with a spirit guide. Do you still speak the tongue of the people in your head? Because all I hear from you is Greek.’ The skull smiled – but the skull always smiled.
‘I speak Sakje!’ she insisted, but even as she said the words, they came from her mouth in Greek, and she watched them form into Greek letters and float towards the skeleton and the tree. A bony hand rose and waved
them away, as if they were insects in high summer.
‘Not really,’ the skeleton said. ‘You know the words, but not the way.’
‘Am I supposed to climb the tree?’ Melitta asked.
‘You? All I see here is a Greek girl who can kill men.’ The skull’s hollow laughter rang out.
Melitta stepped up closer to the self-professed spirit guide. ‘My father was a Greek man, and he climbed the tree. I wonder if you are a guide. Not all spirits in the world of dreams are beneficent.’
The skeleton shook with the force of its laughter, and her dream rang with it, like a gale on the plains. ‘Get hence, usurper!’ he roared. ‘I came to warn you, but you have failed the test.’
Melitta didn’t flinch. ‘I need no more tests,’ she said. ‘Be gone, spirit, before I break your bones.’
She awoke with a foul taste in her mouth and a pounding in her head, as if her temples were the tight-stretched skin of a drum and the drummer’s sticks beat her head in time to the pulsing of her heart.
Nihmu was weeping.
Melitta curled around her and stroked her forehead. ‘What’s wrong, Auntie?’
Nihmu rose suddenly, throwing Melitta back against the leather cushions on the floor. ‘Nothing!’ she said. ‘There is nothing wrong. I saw many spirit guides, and I have received much news. I must think.’
Melitta’s head hurt too much to ask further questions. She let Nihmu go, and then she breathed deeply of the fresh, cold air outside the tent. Her headache was banished in minutes and she knelt in the new snow outside, collecting the cushions, stripping the brazier and dumping the coals to hiss and steam in the snow. Then she knocked down the hide tent and folded it quickly, before it grew too cold and stiff.
All of these things, she realized in putting them away, were Samahe’s, not Nihmu’s. She took them back to Samahe’s yurt.
The Sakje woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her lodge, working by the light of two Greek lamps. She was weaving thongs through small bronze scales, repairing an armour shirt.
This was work that Melitta knew well from her youth, and she sat down with the other woman and began to cut a leather thong from a patch of caribou hide, holding the tough hide in her teeth and cutting with a sharp knife. They worked in silence because both women had
their mouths full. After some time, Samahe spat out the last of her thong. ‘You took smoke?’ she asked.