Funeral Games

3

The plain of Thatis was an endless succession of rich brown streams, swollen with the rain. Maeotae farmers tilled the mud in silence, and only a handful even raised their eyes to watch them if they were forced to come into a village. It was all so dull that they were almost captured owing to simple inattention. They were walking along the wooded edge of a field of wheat when Coenus raised his head.

‘I smell horses,’ he said.

‘Ares!’ Philokles whispered.

Just across the hedge, in the next field, were a dozen horsemen, led by a tall man in a red cloak with a livid scar on his face. Two dismounted soldiers were beating a peasant. Scar-face watched with an impatience that carried over a stade of broken ground.

Melitta’s heart went from a dead stop to a gallop.

‘Just keep walking,’ Philokles said.

Theron didn’t know much about horses, and he walked off, but Satyrus jumped in front of Coenus’s mount and got his hands on Bion’s nose. ‘There, honey,’ he said in Sakje. ‘There, there, my darling.’ He looked up at Coenus, who gave him a nod.

They walked along the edge of the field until they came to a path going off up the ridge, deeper into the woods.

‘What were they doing?’ Melitta asked.

‘Nothing good,’ Philokles spat. ‘Keep moving.’ He grunted. ‘Thank the gods they missed us.’

They climbed the ridge, apparently without being spotted, but when they reached the open meadow at the top, they could see horsemen across the meadow, working the field carefully despite the pouring rain. Another group of horsemen was in the trees below them – they saw the second group as soon as they stopped.

‘Think they’ve seen us?’ Philokles asked.

Coenus shook his head, his lips almost white. ‘We must be leaving tracks. Or some poor peasant saw us and talked. But they don’t know where we are – not exactly. If they did, they’d be on us.’

They watched for another minute from the cover of the trees. Melitta could see six of the enemy horsemen, all big men on chargers – Greeks, not Sauromatae. The lead man had a face with a red wound across it, and it looked as if his nose had been cut off. Even a hundred horse-lengths away, it looked horrible.

‘Off the trail and up the next ridge,’ Coenus said. ‘Fast as we can. We’re heartbeats from being caught. If they see us, we’re done.’

Up until then, Melitta had thought that the going couldn’t get any harder – constant rain, endless trudging along, no food to speak of.

None of it had prepared her for walking across country instead of walking on trails. Every branch caught at her. Every weed, every plant growing from the forest floor tore at her leggings and her tunic. Her boots filled with things that cut her feet, and Philokles wouldn’t stop. They came to a stream, swollen from days of rain, and no one offered her a hand – the water came up to her belly, and proved to her that she hadn’t actually been wet until then.

‘Don’t move,’ Philokles said.

She was halfway up the muddy bank, one sodden boot on a rock and the other still in the stream, when the order came.

Satyrus was in the stream.

Without turning her head, she could see that well upstream, half a stade or more, a man on a horse had just emerged from the thick brush of the valley and was looking right at them.

‘Do not move,’ Philokles said, quite clearly, at her side.

He was moving.

So was Satyrus. Without a splash, her brother lowered himself into the water and vanished.

Melitta turned her head, as the Sakje taught, because nothing gives the human form away to a pursuer like the face. She pressed herself into the bank and tried to ignore the cold of the water on her left leg. It would be worse for Satyrus, who was now fully immersed.

She could feel the enemy’s hoof beats through the earth. He was riding along the verge of the stream.

Beside her, Philokles began to pray quietly, first to Artemis and Hera, and then to all the gods. She joined him.

The hoof beats stopped suddenly, and she heard a splash.

‘By the Maiden!’ Coenus said. His voice sounded as loud as a trumpet.

Melitta looked upstream, and saw a horse thrashing in the deep water of the next long pool above the ford.

‘The bank collapsed under him,’ Philokles said. ‘Stay still!’

The horse thrashed again, and then the rider emerged on the bank, just a few horse-lengths away. He was cursing in fluent Greek. He was an officer – his breastplate showed fine workmanship.

‘Dhat you, Lucius?’ called a voice from where they’d come. A voice that couldn’t be more than ten horse-lengths away, and sounded as if it had a horrendous cold.

‘Yes!’ Lucius shouted, his voice betraying his annoyance. ‘My fucking horse put me in the drink.’ He stood on the bank and wrung out his cloak. ‘That you, Stratokles?’

‘Yes!’ The man addressed as Stratokles was closer. ‘More tracks!’ He emerged as he was calling out, walking into the grey light and the rain just as Lucius came up the bank to meet him. They were perhaps three horse-lengths away, and a long peal of thunder rolled across the hilltops and echoed from the valleys.

Only the overhang of the bank and the thin greenery of a single bush stood between Melitta and her pursuers.

Thunder barked overhead, and a lightning flash followed close, the bang almost intimate.

‘Fuck Eumeles, and fuck this. What tracks?’ Lucius demanded. ‘No one’s paying me enough to do this shit. If Zeus throws one of those bolts at me-’

‘Look!’ Stratokles said. His voice was thick, and even without moving her head, Melitta could see that he was the man with a wound on his face.

‘Whatever. One horse. Maybe two. We’re looking for six men – isn’t that right? And a pair of children?’

Lightning struck again, just as close, and a gust of wind tore through the trees.

‘They aren’t moving in this crap. I can’t move in this crap.’ Lucius looked around. ‘There are bandits here, and I don’t really want to find them. They’ll fight back! And this storm is going to flood this stream. Let’s get moving.’

‘The peasants said-’ Stratokles began.

‘Screw the peasants, my lord! Listen, that fool you caught last night – he’d say anything. You wouldn’t let that creepy Sicilian torture him – well, good on you, lord, but sometimes it is the way. We asked the question ten times before he answered. If he’d known, he’d have told us right away.’ Lucius snorted. ‘Give me a hand up.’

There was a squelching noise.

‘Anything down there?’ came a call from up the hill. Melitta could hear the jangling of bridles and all the music of a troop of horses.

The rain came down, heavier than ever, and Stratokles pulled his wool cloak up over his head. ‘Fuck the weather,’ he said. ‘We’ll never get a scent. And I’m not all that sure we saw a hoof print. Everything fills with water as soon as – bah. To Hades with it. Let’s go back.’

‘Let’s find a rich peasant and kick him out of his house,’ Lucius said.

‘Ndothing down here!’ Stratokles called. ‘Sound the rally.’ He put a hand to his nose and shook his head.

Then Melitta could hear the sound of a horn being blown, three calls repeated over and over. She clung to her patch of bank and shivered, moving as little as possible. She couldn’t feel her leg.

Time passed. She had time to wonder if she could do any lasting harm to her leg by leaving it numb, and to watch a fish swimming in the current and wonder if she could become a fish, and she had time to wonder how Coenus was doing, and then Philokles’ hands reached down, grabbed her shoulders and lifted her clear of the stream.

‘Sometimes the gods are with us,’ he said. ‘Where’s your brother?’

‘Somewhere in the water,’ she managed to choke out, and then she collapsed against Bion, who nuzzled her.

Theron dragged Satyrus out of the water where he had taken cover in a bed of reeds, downstream at the bend. He couldn’t walk.

‘We can’t build a fire,’ Theron said.

Philokles grabbed her shoulder. ‘Walk,’ he ordered.

Melitta hated to be weak, but she couldn’t make her limbs move. ‘Can’t,’ she said. Satyrus just shook his head.

‘Crawl then,’ Coenus said. ‘It’ll get you warm.’

So they did. It was a new low, crawling through the wet woods, feet filthy, hair sodden, but it soon restored enough warmth for them to stand, then walk. Satyrus used one of the Sauromatae ponies to keep him erect for a while, and they walked on. Melitta had lost one of her Sakje boots, so sodden that it lost all shape and fell off her foot. After another stade, she found that she was dragging it by the laces – she was so tired that she hadn’t noticed until it got caught in some undergrowth.

‘How are you?’ she asked her brother.

‘Fine,’ he said, and gave her a smile. That smile was worth a great deal. She drew some energy from it.

‘I thought you were dead!’ she whispered fiercely.

‘Me too!’ he said back, and they both smiled, and then it was better.

But Coenus was worse. He began to cough, and to tremble. Immersion was the last thing he’d needed, and now he was gaining in heat what the rest of them lost, and starting to mumble.

‘We need to get him into a bed,’ Theron said. ‘I could use one, too.’

Philokles nodded. They went over the top of the ridge, and then down towards the cook fires of another village.

‘They didn’t follow us over the ridge,’ Theron offered as an opinion.

Philokles shrugged. ‘I’m about to risk our lives on it,’ he said.

They came down on to the muddy road just short of a small plank bridge. Theron went across first, looking at the ground and then at the far tree line before motioning the rest of them to follow him.

The village was so small that they were through it while Coenus was still muttering an internal debate as to whether to steal the town’s single horse. A wealthy peasant watched them ride by from the shelter of his stone house. No one spoke to them.

Theron turned aside and asked the wealthy peasant for lodging. The man went inside and they heard him drop the bar on his door.

‘Every one of these bastards will remember us,’ Philokles spat. ‘Peasants. Like helots. Sell you for a drachma.’

Theron wolfed down warm bread stolen from a farmyard, passing pieces to the children and to Coenus, who ate it ravenously. Other than the bread, they gained nothing from the town. Just beyond was the next river, and the ferry, and then they had to stop and wait for half an hour in the endless rain while Philokles checked it out.

Sure enough, there was a party of cavalry keeping watch on the ferry. Philokles spotted them when their sentry got restless and dismounted in the trees to relieve himself.

‘Now what?’ Melitta asked.

‘We’re already wet,’ Philokles said. ‘We ride upstream and cross with the horses.’

It took them the rest of the day, and they made camp in a tiny clearing between two stones with ancient carving, just at nightfall. Their fire was weak and wet, and smoked constantly, so that it was difficult to sit close enough to get warm, and they had nothing to eat but the last of the bread.

It was the longest night Melitta could remember. Thunder came, and lightning, and whenever it flashed, she woke – if she was sleeping at all – to find her brother’s eyes locked on hers. The night stretched on and on – long enough for her to have an ugly dream about her mother, and another about Coenus, caught by wolves and eaten, and then the sky was grey in the east and the ground was pale enough to see to walk.

‘Nothing to keep us here,’ Philokles said.

Theron sat on his haunches, his fingers clenched until the knuckles were white on his walking stick. ‘We need food.’

‘Any ideas?’ Philokles asked. ‘If not, keep walking.’

When the sun was high in the sky, somewhere beyond the endless grey clouds, they reached another swollen stream.

‘I don’t think this is the Hypanis,’ Philokles said, shaking his head. ‘Ares, I have no idea where we are. I hope I haven’t got you going in circles.’

‘No,’ Coenus muttered. ‘Not circles.’

Every time they awoke, Melitta expected Coenus to be dead. But so far, he wasn’t.

‘Not circles,’ he said. ‘Not Hypanis, either.’

They crossed with the horses, again, all wet to the bone as every person had to swim some of the distance with one hand on a pony.

‘The horses are failing,’ Philokles said when they were done. He was wearing his chlamys like a giant chiton, pinned at the shoulders. It made him look even bigger.

‘We need a house,’ Theron said. ‘I don’t think Coenus will make another night in the open.’

‘I doubt we’re ahead of the bastard’s cordon,’ Philokles said. ‘We’ll never escape them if we spend a night in a town.’

‘Maybe they’re past us,’ Theron argued. ‘They can’t be everywhere.’

‘You just want to sleep in a bed,’ Philokles accused.

‘Is that so bad?’ Theron asked. ‘I’d like a cup of wine, too.’

It was Coenus’s fever that convinced Philokles to risk a night in a house. He walked down the trail and found a farmer’s field, and exchanged a few words with the man, and he came back to them where they waited in the trees.

‘I like him. He’s the village headman, and I think he can be trusted.’ Philokles looked at Coenus. ‘We need to get out of the rain.’

‘Don’t take the risk on my account,’ Coenus muttered. Theron ignored him and nodded.

The farmer, called Gardan the Blue for his bright blue eyes, was friendly, and his wife welcomed the twins as if they brought her house good fortune. They sat together in the main room of the house, swathed in dry wool and warm for the first time in five days, enjoying a meal of goat and lentils and barley bread. They ate like hungry wolves.

Melitta assumed that they would buy fresh horses from the extensive string she had seen in the paddocks, concealed in a stand of woods away from the road. She waited for Philokles to mention it, and when he didn’t, she nudged him.

‘If we buy their horses, we can make better time,’ she said.

Philokles looked at her with ill-concealed sorrow. ‘I have the gold from the men we killed, and our gear,’ he said. He nodded in the direction of the farmer. ‘We can’t give him a fair price for his horses. Not and have the money to take a ship.’

Neither of the twins had given a thought to the sea. ‘But where will we get a ship?’ Melitta asked.

Philokles looked around at the farmer, smiled grimly and shook his head at the children. ‘Quiet. He’s a good man, and I don’t want to have to kill him to keep you alive. Understand?’

They went to bed without another word.

In the morning, the farmer walked them to the edge of the road. He bowed to the twins. ‘Young master? Young mistress? May I speak freely?’

Satyrus nodded. ‘You are a free farmer,’ he said seriously. ‘You can say anything that you want.’

Gardan tugged at his beard. ‘You’re on the run,’ he said. He looked at Philokles. ‘You don’t have a clean garment among you.’

Philokles nodded, looked around and then said, ‘It’s true. The Sauromatae attacked the city with help from Eumeles. Soon enough, some of them will come down this road looking for us.’ He shrugged. ‘I recommend that you be helpful to them.’

The farmer nodded. He rubbed his beard. He was a short man, swarthy as many of the Maeotae were, although he had the blue eyes of a Hellene and jet-black hair from the age of heroes. ‘My uncle fought with Marthax at the Ford of the River God,’ he said. ‘We remember your father.’ He tugged his beard again. ‘I know what happened at the town,’ he said slowly. He looked at Philokles. ‘Been two patrols through, both Sauromatae. Farmers round here don’t take kindly to such people. A man was killed.’ He shrugged and pointed at the heavy bow that rested on pegs over the door. ‘They may come back to burn us out, and then again they may not,’ he said with something like satisfaction. Then he seemed to gather himself. ‘I’m chattering. What I mean to say is, no one in this steading will give you away. Nor any of our neighbours. We know who you are. And there’s five good geldings down the road in a pasture. No one’s watching them.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll tell the next barbarian that the last barbarian stole them.’

His wife came out of her door into the yard, a bag of feed in her hand. ‘There’s clean fabric and wool blankets,’ she said.

Philokles didn’t answer. Instead he looked at the twins. ‘This is a lesson,’ he said. ‘I have told you of Solon and Lycurgus, and I have read to you from Plato and from other men who account themselves wise. But this is the lesson – that good returns good and evil returns evil. These people have saved our lives because your father was a good man, and your mother has ruled fairly and well. Remember.’

Satyrus nodded soberly. ‘I will remember.’ He extended a hand to the farmer, who clasped it.

Melitta rode forward a few steps. ‘When I am queen,’ she said, ‘I will return this favour a hundredfold.’ She kissed the wife and clasped hands with the man.

The horses were just where the farmer had said, and three of them had bundles tied to their backs.

‘When you are queen?’ Satyrus asked.

Melitta shrugged. ‘It is a role, brother. We are exiles. Perhaps we will return. Those people just gave us all of their profit from a year of farming – the whole generation of their horses, the wool from their sheep – there’s linen here that was grown as flax in Aegypt and paid for with the wheat. They gave it all in one open-handed gesture, like heroes – because of who we are.’ She shrugged. ‘They are more like heroes than we are.’

Satyrus spent too much time gulping against sobs. Now he did it again. They rode through the rain in silence.

Philokles was quiet too.

‘Why are you crying?’ Satyrus asked.

Philokles met his eyes, not even trying to hide the tears. ‘All we built,’ he said heavily. ‘A decade of war to create peace. Gone.’ He took a rasping breath. ‘You have no idea what was given to gain this land and the peace it deserves.’ He shrugged. ‘Leave them Hermes and the other horse – they’re good beasts, and then Gardan won’t be at such a loss.’

Satyrus nodded. He took his tack off Hermes and put it on the strange gelding, and then whispered to the old cavalry horse for a bit. He looked sheepish when he was done.

‘Mama says Pater always talked to his horses,’ he said defensively. Then he gave a wry smile. ‘At least Hermes will survive this adventure, if we don’t.’

‘We’re doing pretty well, I think, given the odds,’ Theron said. With a meal in him and a dry chiton, he was a new man.

‘Our father gave his life for this country,’ Melitta said.

‘Not just your father, my dear.’ Philokles managed a smile. ‘A great many men, and no few women.’ He looked back into the rain, and his smile faded, and he seemed to be watching something else, somewhere else. ‘I hate the gods,’ he said.

Coenus shook his head. ‘I hate impiety,’ he said. ‘It’s foolish for a man to hate the gods.’

‘Someone’s feeling better,’ Theron said.

Five fresh horses made all the difference. They rode hard, but the horses were changed regularly. The blankets and clean clothes and the gold pins they were wearing made them look prosperous instead of desperate, although the wiser elders on the road wondered quietly why they were out in the rain at all, or moving at such speed.

They were eight more days from the Hypanis River, and as they trotted over the rain-sodden landscape, Melitta knew that she couldn’t have walked the whole way. And Coenus – despite his fevered wound, was better for the saddle and for sleeping dry. Gardan the Blue had packed them a heavy wool blanket, carefully felted, as big as the roof of a small house – the work of four or five women for a whole winter. It made a waterproof shelter.

They were in better shape when they came down the last slope to the Hypanis, a small party with packhorses and good clothes and enough rest to make good decisions.

‘I’m afraid of the ferry,’ Melitta heard Philokles say to Theron and Coenus. He sent Theron ahead, but Theron came back with the news that, aside from outrageous rates, the ferry was safe.

‘We’ve ridden clear,’ Philokles said. He shrugged. ‘They have so much ground to cover – Eumeles can’t be everywhere.’

Theron bargained with the ferryman the way a slave bargains for fish in the agora, hectoring the man and threatening to swim the river himself on horseback until the man conceded, a copper obol at a time, and finally they were crossing with their whole train for a single silver owl. Coenus watched in silent disapproval, but his fever was so high that he couldn’t contribute much. His face said that they should be above such things.

The rain stopped while they watched the brown Hypanis flow past their broad raft. It took the effort of the ferryman, both his sons and Theron to wrestle the unwieldy thing against the current, and they had to make two trips, because the rush of water prevented the horses from swimming well.

Philokles paid down a second silver owl without being asked, and the ferryman bit it with a knowing smile.

‘You overpaid,’ Theron said.

‘He risked his boat for us,’ Philokles said. ‘And no one will follow us for a day or so.’

Theron pursed his lips. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘The river will go down if the rain stops.’

Coenus roused himself. ‘The river will go up for another day, as the water comes down from the hills.’ He pointed at the loom of the mountains to the east and south, where the foothills of the Caucasus were visible even in the clouds.

‘And I put a cut in the pull rope,’ Philokles said with a shrug. When Theron glared, Philokles shrugged again. ‘I paid for the rope. And he was an arse-cunt.’

They were another day riding to the sea at Gorgippia, a small town that owed allegiance to no one. The town existed to make fish sauce for the Athens market and not much else, and the smell hit them ten stades away. In the harbour, vats of fish guts gave vent to a stench so strong that the twins gagged and breathed through their mouths.

‘Poseidon!’ Melitta swore. ‘I can taste it on my tongue!’

Satyrus was glad to see her make a joke. It had been a quiet ride.

Philokles was on edge from the moment they entered the town, but there were no boats in the harbour except local fishing craft, and after some careful probing in wine shops, he grew more confident.

‘No one has been here,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Eumeles may have given up.’

Coenus was gasping like a man suffocating. Philokles remounted and supported his friend. ‘He needs cool baths and a doctor,’ he said.

Normally, a party of gentlemen would look for the richest house and try to arrange guest-friendship. Normally, the children of the Lady Srayanka would have had no trouble finding lodging. But Philokles didn’t want to show his hand yet. He took them to the best of the waterfront wine shops and paid a few obols for some beds in a wooden barn behind the drying sheds. The straw was clean, and the smell of animals was refreshing compared to the overpowering odour of rotting fish.

Coenus went to sleep the moment he was off his horse.

‘That is a tough man,’ Theron said.

‘He thinks he’s a pompous aristocrat, though,’ Philokles said. He had a clean, wet linen towel, and he wiped the Megaran’s face. ‘He’s far gone, Theron.’

Theron put his head down on the bigger man’s chest and listened, and then felt this wrists. ‘We need to change his bandages,’ he said. ‘I doubt that there’s much that a doctor can do that we can’t,’ he said to Philokles. Eight days of rain and silent children had caused them to pool their knowledge about many things, and they had each other’s measure.

Coenus didn’t wake up as the two men and the twins rolled him over, sat him up and unwrapped the bandages. The cut that went high across his ribs looked better, with new pink flesh along the dark red line of the scab.

The lower cut that had, as best they knew, not quite penetrated his guts, was infected along its whole length, the skin inflamed above and below the line of the wound and two long tendrils of angry red tissue like the trailing legs of a squid. There was pus at the ends of the wound.

Theron put his head down and smelled the wound, and shook his head. ‘Wet and dry and wet and dry for eight days? It’s a miracle that he lives. Apollo’s arrow is doing him more damage than the original wound – the infection is deeper than when we crossed the ferry. Send the children to make a sacrifice to the golden archer, and let you and I do what we must do.’

Satyrus knew, even as a queen’s son, when he was being dismissed so that adults could do adult things. He bowed and caught his sister’s hand. ‘We’ll find a temple,’ he said.

They walked out of the barn into the first sun they’d seen since the fight at the river. Hand in hand, they walked along the smooth pebbles of the beach that gave the town its existence. If it hadn’t been for the smell of fish, the place would have been pleasant. As it was, it was like Tartarus.

‘The smell will kill him,’ Melitta said. ‘I’ve read it – it is a miasma, and it will choke his lungs.’

‘Let us go and make a sacrifice,’ Satyrus said.

Melitta nodded, head high to hide tears. Then she said, ‘Do you believe in gods, brother?’

Satyrus glanced at her and squeezed her hand. ‘Lita, I know things are bad – but the gods-’

She pulled at his hand. ‘Why would gods be so childish?’ she asked. ‘Satyrus, what if Mama is dead? Have you thought about it? If she is dead – it is all gone. Everything. Our whole lives.’

Satyrus sat on a wooden fish trap. He pulled her down next to him. Then he put his head in his hands. ‘I think about it all the time – round and round inside my head.’

She nodded. ‘I think Mama is dead.’ She looked out to sea. ‘There’s been something missing – something gone-’ She lost her battle with tears and subsided into his shoulder.

Satyrus wept with her, clinging to her. They wept for a few minutes, until the tears had no point, and then they both stopped, as if on cue.

‘Coenus is still alive,’ Satyrus said.

‘Our father’s friend,’ Melitta added. They got up together. Hand in hand, eyes red, they walked up the shingle towards the town, such as it was.

Behind them, a long triangular sail cut the horizon.

They found the Temple of Herakles two stades outside of town, on a small bluff that looked over the bay and seemed free of the smell. It was the only temple that the town had, and the priestess was old and nearly blind, but she had a dozen attendants and a pair of healthy slaves. She received them on the portico of the temple, seated on a heavy wooden chair. Her attendants gathered around her, sitting on the steps.

Satyrus thought that she looked friendly, but she scared him too. It was Melitta who first gathered the courage to speak.

‘We need to make sacrifice for a friend who is sick,’ Melitta said. They were still holding hands, and they bowed together.

‘Come here, child,’ said the crone, raising her head to look at them around her cataracts. ‘Handsome children. Polite. But unclean. You are both unclean. At your age!’ She sniffed.

Satyrus bowed his head. ‘Unclean, despoina?’

She gripped his right hand in hers, and he felt the bite of her nails in his palm. She raised it to her nostrils. ‘I can smell blood even through the fish sauce, boy. You killed. You have not cleaned yourself. And your sister – she too has killed.’ She raised her head again, and smoke from the temple brazier behind her rose in a fantastic curl behind her head like a sign from the god.

Satyrus made the satyr’s head sign with his left hand to avert misfortune. ‘How may I become clean?’ he asked.

She tugged at his hand. ‘You are a gentleman, I can see that. Where are you from?’

He didn’t want to resist her tug. He looked into her eyes, but the cataracts made them hard to read. He felt a rush of fear. ‘We – we come from Tanais,’ he said.

‘Ahh,’ she said, as if satisfied. ‘And how do a pair of children come to me soaked in blood?’

‘Men tried to kill us,’ Melitta said. ‘Bandits. We shot them with bows.’

‘One of them was a girl,’ Satyrus said, the words coming from deep within him. ‘I shot her to end her pain. She had an arrow in her guts and she begged-’ He sobbed. He could see her sweat-filled hair.

The priestess nodded. ‘Life-taking is a nasty business,’ she said. ‘Horrible for children.’ She turned to her attendants. ‘Bathe the boy for the ritual. Then bathe the girl.’ To Satyrus, she said, ‘When you are clean, you may sacrifice a black kid – each – and I will say the prayer lest some uncleanness cling to you.’ She looked unseeing out over the bay. ‘Where is your friend?’ she asked.

‘Friend?’ asked Satyrus, who was still thinking of the girl he’d killed. He wondered if her face would ever leave him.

‘You have a friend who is sick, yes?’ the priestess asked. Her voice rasped like the sound of a woman scraping cheese with a grater. ‘This temple also serves Artemis and Apollo. Did you not know?’

‘We did not,’ Melitta said. She saw now the statue of her patron goddess among the Greeks, a young woman with a bow. She bowed deeply to the priestess. ‘We have a sick friend in town.’

The priestess nodded. ‘The men in the trireme are searching for you. You will be safe here, and nothing is more important than that we make you clean. I will send a slave to your friends. They must come here.’

Satyrus turned and for the first time saw the trireme coming into the harbour under sail.

Coenus came up the bluff in a litter while the trireme was performing the laborious task of turning around under oars and backing her stern on to the beach. She was full of men – Satyrus could see the warm wink of sun on bronze on her deck. Philokles put the horses in a stand of oaks behind the temple.

‘You bet your life on an old priestess,’ he said.

Satyrus stared at the marble under his feet. ‘You didn’t lie to the people in the wine shop.’

Philokles nodded. ‘I didn’t tell them the truth, either. They assumed that we were small merchants from up the coast, and I let them think it.’ He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. The navarch on that fucking trireme will be on to us in twenty questions.’

Theron dumped a heavy wool bag inside the precincts of the temple. ‘Are we asking sanctuary? Or running?’

The old priestess emerged, supported by the larger of her two slaves. ‘The children are bathing to be clean in the eye of the gods,’ she said, ‘a process that would benefit you too, oath-breaker.’ Then she pointed at Coenus with a talon-like finger. ‘Take him to the sanctuary. We will not give him up, nor will those dogs from Pantecapaeum have him. The rest of you should ride as soon as you are clean. He’ll only slow you.’

Philokles bowed. ‘As you will, holy one. Why do you help us?’

She shook her head in annoyance. ‘I can tell the difference between good and evil. Can’t you?’

‘Then you know why I broke my oath,’ Philokles said.

‘I?’ she asked. ‘The gods know. I am a foolish old woman who loves to see brave men do worthy deeds. Why did you break your oath?’

‘To save these children,’ Philokles said.

‘Is that the only oath you’ve broken?’ she asked, and Philokles winced.

She turned. ‘The girl is bathed and clean,’ she said. ‘Come, boy.’

He followed the old woman into the sanctuary, which was sumptuous beyond anything in Tanais, with walls picked out in coloured scenes showing the triumph of Herakles, the birth, the trials of Leto and more than he could easily take in. There was a statue of Apollo as a young archer, in bright orange bronze, his eyes and hair gold, and his bow of bronze shooting a golden arrow. In the centre of the sanctuary was a pool. The water moved and bubbled. Above the pool stood a great statue of Herakles, nude except for a lion skin, standing in the first guard position of the pankration. The sight of the statue made the hair stand up on the back of Satyrus’s neck, and he smelled wet fur, a heady, bitter smell like a cat. Or a lion skin.

‘This is the pool of the god,’ she said. ‘It was here before there was a temple. We do not let just any traveller enter this pool. Remember as you go in that Herakles was a man, but by his deeds he became a god.’

An attendant took his chiton, unpinned the pins and threw the garment into the fire that burned on the altar. He dropped the brooches – not his best pair, but solid silver – into a bowl on the altar, and the fire on the altar flared and smoked.

‘The god accepts your offering and your state,’ the priestess said. ‘Into the water with you.’

Satyrus thought that his sister had just done this. He wondered why he hadn’t seen her.

Strong hands grasped him and he hit the water and was under it in a moment. The water was warmer than blood and bubbled fiercely, fizzing around his limbs and with bubbles rising between his legs and up his chest. He rose to the surface and took a breath, eyes tightly closed, and somebody placed a hand on his head. ‘Pray,’ he was commanded, and the hand pressed him down into the pool.

He could hear the voice counting above him. The bubbles continued to rise around him and he was on the edge of panic, his hair rising in the water and his skin scoured and his breath stopped so that coloured flashes came before his eyes, and still the hand pressed on his head. The pool was too small for him to stretch his arms. He was trapped.

‘Pray!’ the voice said.

Lord of the sun, golden archer, he began. What was he praying for? He wanted to live! Not drown!

Coenus.

Golden archer, take your shaft from the side of my friend Coenus, he prayed. And forgive me for killing that girl. I only did it because – she begged – I couldn’t stand her pain!

But what if she, too, could have been healed?

Lion killer, hero, make me brave! He prayed fervently, and an image of the golden statue of the god at pankration filled his mind.

The hand on his head released him and he shot up from the pool, then the temple slaves pulled him on to the marble and a towel began to rub him vigorously.

‘Did you hear the god?’ the old woman asked.

‘No,’ Satyrus said. Or perhaps I did.

The woman nodded. ‘That’s as well. Your sister did.’ She held something under his nose, something with a strong scent. Like hot metal. ‘You are clean. Do you know how to sacrifice an animal?’

Satyrus, who had sacrificed for his family since he was six, was tempted to make a childish retort, but he bit it back. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Good,’ she said. The slave led him out of the back of the sanctuary, to an altar at the top of wooden steps that led down to the oak woods. His sister was drying her hair.

An attendant – a young priest, he thought – handed him a blade – a narrow blade of stone with a gold-wire handle. ‘It is very sharp,’ he whispered. ‘And as old as the stars.’

Satyrus took it. The kid was tethered to the altar. Satyrus put a hand on the young beast’s head and asked its forgiveness. He raised his eyes to the sky and cut its throat in one pull, stepping clear of the fountain of blood.

The attendants caught the animal and slaughtered it with the precision of long practice.

‘Well done,’ the priestess said. ‘Now go. I will look to your friend.’

Satyrus went down the steps, wiping the blood from his left hand on the grass at the bottom.

Melitta mounted first and tossed her wet hair over her shoulders. Her eyes were sparkling. ‘There are gods!’ she said.

Satyrus got up on the horse he had named Platon for its broad haunches. ‘I know,’ he said.

Philokles had the train of spare horses in motion.

‘Where are we going?’ Satyrus asked Theron.

The athlete shook his head. ‘Philokles got a tip in town,’ he said.

‘We’re going to Bata,’ Philokles said. ‘We’ll be there tonight if we ride hard. There’s a Heraklean merchant in the harbour, if he hasn’t left yet. If he has, we ride for the mountains. We can’t come back here.’

‘What if the marines follow us?’ Satyrus asked as they jogged along, already moving at a trot and screened from the beach by the trees.

‘They’d need horses,’ Philokles said. He smiled grimly. Then he shook his head. ‘Don’t ask,’ he said to Theron.

There was a ship waiting off the beach in Bata, stone anchor deep in the mud and waiting for twenty more jars of Bata’s salmon roe in oil before unfolding his wings for Heraklea. The ship had seemed like a gift from the gods; the more so when they sailed down the coast to Sinope without the sight of a trireme. Satyrus and his sister were too tired to examine the gift, or question it, and the ship ran south with a fair wind and the gentle hand of Moira to guide it.

Five days out of Bata, Melitta had her first sight of Heraklea in the last full light of the sun, and the marble of the public buildings shone like coral in jewellery or well-burnished bronze, pale orange in the setting sun, and gold and bronze sparkled from statuary and adornments. Heraklea was as rich as Sinope or Pantecapaeum or Olbia. Richer than Athens. The tyrant, Dionysius, was not a friend of their mother’s, or their city. But nor was he a friend of Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. He was a friend of his own power, and Philokles said they had no other choices.

‘Tanais might have looked like that in twenty years,’ Melitta said.

‘Tanais is a blackened corpse,’ Satyrus said, his mood dark.

Melitta took his hands, and together they stood against the rail of the merchant ship as she heeled into the evening breeze and thrust her way across the waves to Heraklea. ‘You need to take life for what it is,’ she said. ‘Look!’ She waved her arm like an actor. ‘Beauty! Enjoy it!’

‘You need to stop pretending to be an all-wise priestess,’ he shot back. ‘Our mother is dead and our city is lost. Do you realize that we could be enslaved? That any man on those wharves with the strength to take us could kill us or sell us? We could be pleasuring customers in a brothel before another sun sets. Do you get that?’

She nodded. ‘I get it, brother.’ She looked at Theron and Philokles, who were rolling dice in the cover of an awning. ‘I think they will protect us, and I think the gods will see us right.’

‘The gods help those who help themselves,’ Satyrus said.

‘Then get off your arse and start helping,’ Melitta said. ‘Killing that girl is the best day’s work you ever did. Stop moping like a little boy. You are a king in exile. Start acting like one.’ She looked over the side. ‘You must follow my lead in this. I know what I’m doing.’

Satyrus watched the wharves. Melitta had assumed that the sea would cure him – the sea that he loved, where he went on his summers to sail on Uncle Leon’s ships and learn the ropes. This voyage, he hadn’t even watched the sailors rig the sail.

‘Fine,’ Satyrus said.

The angry silence that followed lasted them until the ship’s side scraped along a stone jetty, and then again until they were standing in the dust and ordure of the Heraklean waterfront.

Philokles had spent some time with the captain of the merchant ship throughout the voyage – keeping him sweet, or so Theron said. As they approached the wharves, Philokles took the man aside on the platform where the steersman conned the ship. When they were done talking, Philokles came down the gangplank with a worried look. Theron was trying to unload the horses with the help of the deck crew. They had kept the three best horses from the farmer, and Melitta’s Bion. The rest of the horses had been sold at Bata, where they had got a good price. Shipping the horses had cost more than shipping the people – but Philokles had told the twins that without horses, they were too vulnerable.

Bion hadn’t liked being swayed aboard in a sling, and now he didn’t like walking down the gangplank, resisting every step, showing his teeth and acting like a mule. Melitta had to coax him on to dry land with a hastily purchased honey and sesame confection.

‘Stupid horse,’ she said fondly.

Satyrus ignored her. He stood with his back against his own horse and his arms crossed.

Philokles tugged at his beard. ‘I have to take a risk,’ he said. He was not quite sober – in fact, he had drunk steadily once they were on board.

Theron shrugged. ‘It’s been all risk since I joined this crew,’ he said. ‘Why do you stay?’ Melitta asked. She was drawing looks from passers-by on the wharves, as a young woman of good family out in the public eye. In fact, she was a young woman of good family who was out in public wearing a short chiton with a scarlet chitoniskos over it and she was wrangling horses. She got a great deal of attention.

Theron smiled. ‘The company’s good,’ he said. ‘And I’m not bored.’ Philokles gave them all a crooked smile. ‘This is not the place to have this conversation,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Satyrus got on to his horse with a wriggle and a push. Melitta did her usual acrobatic vault, and every head on the street turned.

‘You have to stop doing that in public,’ Theron said. ‘Girls don’t ride. They certainly don’t ride astride. They don’t vault on to horses, and they don’t do acrobatics.’

‘Of course they do,’ Melitta said with a toss of her head. ‘I see it on Athenian plates and vases all the time.’

Theron made a choking noise that Satyrus recognized through his sullenness as ill-concealed laughter. ‘Those are flute girls and hetairai!’ he said.

Melitta shrugged. Then she turned her Artemis smile on the people around them, and some of the men smiled back.

‘Where are we going?’ Melitta asked.

‘Leon the Numidian has a factor and warehouses here,’ Philokles said.

‘Uncle Leon?’ Melitta asked. ‘Will he be there?’

‘I doubt it,’ Philokles said. ‘Gods, what a salvation that would be. Zeus Soter, let Leon be there.’