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, when 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She also resented Nihmu, who since Coenus’s absence had withdrawn more and more into the spirit world, taking smoke every day or more, and speaking of her dreams as if they were the premonitions of her youth.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.
Four hours they walked the ridges, and never saw an enemy except in the valley below, and Temerix grunted every time he saw a devastated farmstead. And while they never saw an enemy, Temerix’s men found dozens of farmfolk, Sindi and Maeotae, living in small caves or dirt hollows where they’d fled the depredations of the enemy.
Melitta wanted to weep at every group of them. They reached out to touch her, and she smiled for them instead, and told them that it would be all right.
And then they moved on – closer and closer to the enemy camp. By afternoon, the camp was visible, just a few stades from her mother’s city on the bluff. They were camped at the foot of her father’s kurgan, in a big rectangle of earth and wood stakes.
She lay with the Sindi smith, on earth still wet enough to soak through her clothes and armour, and watched the gates of the camp. There were two, and both were guarded. Parties of the enemy were coming down both roads to get in their camp as quickly as possible.
Temerix nodded. ‘Now we fight,’ he said.
Unlike her other chiefs, he didn’t ask her permission. He spoke in Sindi, and men jumped to do his bidding. He turned to her. ‘Go to kill Greeks,’ he said. ‘You?’
She got to her feet, adjusted her gorytos and her akinakes, and nodded. ‘Me too,’ she said.
Temerix’s eyes flicked over to Scopasis and back to her. ‘Loose five arrows and run,’ he said. ‘Understand?’
Scopasis nodded.
Melitta nodded. It was not her first ambush, but Temerix had no way of knowing that.
‘I shoot first arrow,’ Temerix said. And then he was off, running down the hillside.
The Sindi were fast on rough ground – as fast as horsemen, or even faster, at least for short bursts. And their progress was eerie – almost inhuman, as she had to watch them carefully not to lose them in the scrub and tree cover of the hillside. Their ragged cloaks and dun colours vanished against the valley’s spring green.
The soldiers on the road were too fixated on the horsemen behind them. They were well formed, and they held together, but they had no flank guards and no advance party – just sixty men under a senior file-leader, moving at a jog back along the road, with another twenty light-armed men – peltastai, probably rowers from the fleet, armed only with javelins and knives.
Temerix had chosen to catch them on the same stretch of road where Melitta had had her first taste of combat, all those years before. Where her brother had saved Coenus. Where Theron had proven to be a friend. It seemed odd, to be fighting on the same ground again, as if her life was going around some sort of loop.
She put herself behind an oak so big that she and Scopasis wouldn’t have been able to encircle it with their arms. She could hear the Greeks on the road.