King of the Bosphorus

8

Against Coenus's judgment, she didn't hide her identity.

The first night, they stopped at a byre, a small stone cottage with fields that stretched away from the track. The people were Maeotae, dark-haired, cheerful, with a yard full of freckled girls in good wool smocks, and two young boys who were sword-fighting with sticks.

Dinner was mutton, served with barley soup on fine Athenian plates. And good Greek wine.

The farmer was Gardan, and his wife was Methene. They eyed the travellers with some suspicion, and spoke quietly at their own end of the great table that dominated the house's one big room.

After dinner – delicious, and doubly so for the cold rain that blew against the door – Gardan moved to their end of the table, the end closest to the hearth, for he was a hospitable man. 'What news, then?' he asked. He was speaking to Coenus.

'We come from Alexandria,' Melitta said.

The farmer gave her a startled look, as if he hadn't expected her to speak. But he smiled. 'As far as that?' he said, but he wasn't very interested.

Coenus sipped his wine. 'Do you care for news from the Inner Sea?' he asked.

The farmer shook his head. 'Not really,' he said. 'Nothing to do with folks hereabouts.' He glanced at their bows, stowed snugly in a hutch by the door. 'Not so many Sakje folk on the roads any more,' he said. And let that sit.

'That's what they said at the Temple of Herakles,' Melitta said.

'Temple has no love for the tyrant,' the farmer said. He looked from under shaggy brows, and the comment was muttered out into the air, as if he could disclaim it, if he needed to.

'Who is this tyrant?' Nihmu asked.

Melitta was disturbed to realize that Nihmu's leg was pressed close to Coenus's under the table.

'Eumeles of Pantecapaeum. He claims all these lands, but mostly, it's Upazan of the Sauromatae who sends his raiders to collect what they call "tax".' The farmer shrugged.

'He's no proper tyrant,' Methene said. 'We used to have law.'

'Tish, woman. Not the place.' The farmer gave his wife a mild look and turned back to his guests.

'You will have law again,' Melitta said.

The farmer nodded, as if this was a commonplace, but his wife looked at Melitta and then put her weaving back on the loom. 'Husband,' she said, standing, 'she's a Twin.'

Coenus stood up. 'We don't want trouble.'

Gardan went to his wife. Only when he stood between her and the strangers did he turn. Their children clustered around them, aware that something dangerous had just been said.

'Is that true?' Gardan asked.

'Yes,' Melitta said, ignoring Coenus. 'I am Srayanka's daughter, Melitta of Tanais.'

'By the Ploughman,' Gardan said.

'I knew you in the yard,' Methene said. She shrugged. 'But my eyes is old, and I thought again.' She looked at the three of them, all on their feet. 'You have nothing to worry about in this house,' she said. 'We've sheltered Temerix and his foreign lady many times, and their band, too.'

'Temerix?' Coenus said. 'Temerix the smith?'

Gardan relaxed a little. 'The same,' he said.

'I thought he was dead,' Coenus said.

'Not last summer, anyway,' Gardan said. 'You really a Twin, lady? You three going to raise the Sakje?'

'Yes,' Melitta said.

'Only we ain't seen a Sakje in four years,' he said. 'Word is that the Sauromatae have wiped them off the plains. Leastwise, round here.'

Melitta looked at Coenus, and then at Nihmu.

'If you make war on the tyrant…' Gardan said, and paused. 'He's a hard master, and no friend to the farmers,' Gardan said. He raised his cup. 'But we do well enough. Lady, if you plan to make a war in the Tanais, be sure. Be fucking sure. Because the farm folk will rise for your name alone.' He nodded, emphasizing his words. 'Name alone. I will myself. But if you fail – by the Ploughman, he'll make us slaves on our own farms. What he wants, the bastard. Sorry, wife.'

But Methene nodded. 'Truth, guests. If you have some wild plan to raise us to make war – pass us by.'

Melitta went to bed in a pallet of river rushes on the floor, having refused to move the farmer and his wife off their bed. She had much to think on. The issue of her identity arose again at the ferry over the Hypanis River the next day, where it flowed across the soggy autumn fields near the great cairn at Lahrys. Melitta could remember her first crossing here, with Upazan's horsemen behind her.

Coenus looked at it. 'This is what – the Hypanis?' he asked.

She nodded.

Coenus shook his head. 'Why do the Assagatje give the same name to every river? Tanais – or Hypanis. There's one by Olbia.'

She shrugged. 'And this is the Hypanis of the east. Don't be so Greek.' She looked around. 'Philokles cut their rope. I hope they don't remember!'

But they did remember. The ferryman knew her as soon as he saw her, and shook his fist at Coenus. 'There's new law here!' he yelled. 'Rope-cutters! Worse than thieves!'

Melitta pushed her horse forward. 'I am Melitta,' she said. 'Queen of the Eastern Assagatje.' It made her choke a little just to say it. 'This is my river – my ford. You pay your taxes to my people.'

'Not any more, barbarian!' the ferryman shouted, pushing his boat off into the stream. 'This is all the land of the king of the Bosporus. No barbarian rides here but the king's man – Upazan!' But the man was clearly afraid.

Coenus restrained her – she was about to ride into the river.

'Forget him,' Coenus said. 'I wish you'd let us ride on. He'll tell all the world.'

'Good,' Nihmu said. She smiled a strange, faraway smile. 'Eumeles will spend the winter gnawing on the ends of these rumours.'

Coenus pointed at the swollen river. 'Eumeles' rage won't help us cross the Hypanis.'

Nihmu shrugged. 'Let's stay on the south bank until she's a little stream in the foothills of the mountains,' she said. 'I was a little girl here, before the Great War. I know the paths.'

Coenus pulled his cloak tighter. Then he dismounted, opened his bedroll and donned a second cloak. 'It must be old age,' he said. 'But I'm cold just thinking about the foothills of the Caucasus.' He smiled at both of them. 'I'd like to find Temerix.'

Nihmu nodded. 'I, too. But he could be anywhere in these hills.'

They rode east for two days, through fields shorn of their wheat and then across scraggly fields of barley that gave way to smaller plots and bigger patches of woods between narrow villages where highland peasants raised oats and sheep. After the second night, Nihmu refused to sleep in another peasant hut – the last one had held more insects than food. But the people knew Temerix, and they were hardy folk – a bow and an axe in every hut. They disdained the valley farmers and their slavish obedience to the tyrant, but none knew where to find Temerix.

'He comes and goes, like,' said an old Maeotae, braver than the rest.

'Bah, dirt people,' Nihmu said with all the contempt of the sky people.

'You've lived in a house for ten years,' Coenus said.

'A house with a breeze and a bath,' Nihmu said, 'and still I've wished every night for stars. Alexandria – oh, the haze in the sky. Tonight, I will feast my eyes on the whole of the sky god's road!'

Coenus hunched in his cloak. 'Tonight, I'll freeze,' he said. The two women wore trousers and heavy coats. Coenus, the most aristocratic Hellene Melitta had ever known, was wearing a chiton and a chlamys and no trousers at all. High Thracian boots were his only concession to riding.

'You should wear trousers,' Nihmu said. Not for the first time.

'When Zeus Soter comes down from Olympus and shows me how to put them on,' Coenus answered.

'Blasphemy!' Melitta said, because an argument with her child's grandfather passed the time.

Coenus shook his head. 'It would be blasphemy if I claimed not to believe in Zeus,' he said. 'It would be hubris if I refused to obey his bidding to wear trousers. As it is, I'm secure in the knowledge that should I run across a Megaran ephor in this gods-forsaken wilderness of peasants, wolves and winter, I will still look like a civilized man.

Melitta had to laugh, because Coenus, despite his manners and his accent, was the best of hunting companions, a man with a hard-won knowledge of the plants and animals of the wilderness, a man who rode from dawn until dusk without complaint. Coenus was a good rider, even by Sakje standards.

He just wouldn't wear trousers.

'My mother used to say that my father wore trousers,' Melitta said.

'Your father was in love with your mother,' Coenus said. 'Love makes people do strange things.' He shrugged, as if acknowledging that he was doing a strange thing that moment.

'You would be more comfortable,' Nihmu said.

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 leg 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 her, 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.

She got the bed roll on to the back of her horse with an effort of will, surprised and dismayed at the loss of strength from just two days without food or much rest. The wound on her face felt odd, and she was light-headed, and all her dreams had been full of colour.

She wondered at the possibility that she might die out here, alone. It made her laugh. The sheer unlikelihood of her survival cheered her – long odds had an appeal of their own.

An unshod horse hoof struck a rock, somewhere upstream, clear as the noise of a temple gong.

This time, she didn't hesitate. Her choices were clear – even stark. She was up on Gryphon in a heartbeat, and she didn't even untether her other horse. She rode downstream, moving from one stand of trees to the next in the new moonlight, her bow strung and in her hand, an arrow nocked and three more clutched along her bow.

'All or nothing,' she said aloud. There were three of them again, riding single file on the far bank. They were bickering. Words and pieces of words came to her on the still air – the older man wanted to stop for the night.

The stream hid the sounds of her horse's hooves, and when she was just a few dozen horse-lengths from them she half-rose and let her mount go, galloping across the moonlit river meadow. One hole, and she was dead.

She swept alongside them, just the thin rivulet of the stream and its steep banks between her bow and their soft skin, and she shot the last man first. No following the flight of the arrow in the dark. She drew and shot again, and again, and again, and then her last arrow was gone.

One man was whispering, perhaps grumbling to his gods, but he was face up in the long grass, and all three horses were standing in the new moonlight, as if waiting for their new owner to come and take them.

She left the horses and rode on, cantering through the dark along the stream in the weak moonlight, confident in her mount and still terrified, still amazed at her own boldness and the totality of its result. She rode almost two stades downstream, but she was alone in the valley.

Then she rode back. Two of her victims were still alive – the elder she had shot three times and he still tried to shoot her as she rode up, but his left arm couldn't support this bow and he fell to his knees.

She rode up, a javelin pointed at his face, a white circle in the moonlight.

'Who are you?' he asked.

She couldn't think of anything to say – exhaustion robbed her of speech – so she killed him.

The other wounded man watched her with open, glittering eyes as she searched their bodies and their kit – a good hide tent on a packhorse and a bronze kettle. She collected the horses and rode back.

'I have to kill you,' she said to the young man, after some thought. But even as she spoke to him, she realized that she couldn't kill him. She had, quite simply, had enough.

He nodded, though, and turned his face away.

When she had mounted, she shook her head, wondering if the borders of the waking world and the sleeping world had drifted, because she felt as if she could see the dead men following at her horse's tail – quite a few dead men, for a girl her age. The shock robbed her of speech for a moment and made her neck hairs quiver. She rode back to the boy with the arrow in his chest. The ghosts were terrifying apparitions – as if they were being tormented by some mad god.

'I've changed my mind,' she said to the wounded boy. 'If you live, you live.' She put a heavy wool blanket of Greek weaving over him, and then another.

He grunted.

She watched him for a moment, and knew her sudden burst of mercy was for nothing. He coughed blood, cursed her and died. She watched as his shade dragged itself from his corpse like some slithering maggot leaving the skin of a dead thing and joined the grim troupe at her tail.

'Artemis, stand with me,' she said, and slitted her eyes to avoid seeing the apparitions. Then, ever practical, she stripped the blankets back off him, rolled them tight and rode back to her camp, mind blank. There, she made a big fire for the first time in three nights, killed the smallest horse and gorged herself on half-cooked horsemeat before falling into a dream-haunted sleep that made her moan and toss. Twice she awoke, to relieve herself and to shiver in fear at the killing and the blood and what she had so easily become. Both times, she went back to sleep, and the third time she awoke it was day, and the ghosts were gone, and no new pursuers were on her trail.

She bathed in the icy stream and washed the blood off her hands and the pus off her cheek. The water was as much of a shock as the ghosts, and she wondered how bad her fever was. Then she warmed herself by the fire and put on the fresh, dry wool shirt of one of the dead men.

Her cheek smelled bad. She couldn't get away from it – she smelled like death. Perhaps the man's arrowpoint had been poisoned. Perhaps she was already dead – that might be why she could see the dead so clearly.

She didn't remember packing up her camp or riding – only that sunset came and found her still mounted, moving directly away from it, following the shadows of the trees as they pointed north and east.

But suddenly, as if by magic, she was sitting on a bluff, looking down at an immense sheet of water – ten stades across. She laughed, because she knew this place – indeed, the last rays of the sun shone on the distant Temple of Artemis on the far bank, impossibly remote from her and yet painfully close. Coenus had built the temple of white marble with the spoils of his campaigns.

She was on the Tanais, in country she knew. She just couldn't make her mind work.

She rode east all night, on the firm high ground above the river. She rode, not so much because she feared pursuit as because she feared to get off her horse.

Finally, in the first faint grey light of not-dawn, she dismounted and squatted to piss, her back against a birch tree, her reins in her hand like some hero in a Sakje tale, and she understood, as if it was the most profound thing of her life, that she was living in a Sakje tale – as if Coenus and her father had lived in the Iliad. She saw it as clearly as she saw the salmon running in the winter river at her feet.

To no one in particular, or perhaps to the gods – perhaps to the dozens of ghosts who screamed in silent torment at the edge of her vision, she spoke. 'If I live,' she said, 'this feat of arms – this endless butchery of men and horse – will live for ever among the people.' She shrugged. Then she smiled and her face hurt. 'I smell of death,' she said suddenly, to the ghosts.

They never answered her, but they followed, and as the sun climbed the sky she saw that they came closer and closer, and she cursed them. 'Coenus must have killed a hundred men!' she said. 'Haunt him!'

And later, as she crossed a feeder stream running white and cold down the hillside above her, she addressed Nihmu. 'Why are you lying with him?' she asked, but received no answer.

She's not here, silly, she reminded herself, unsure whether that was good or bad.

That night, she made no fire and she lacked the strength to cook the horsemeat or even to unpack the animals. She pulled her riding horse down to the ground with her, drew the dead man's furs over her head against the horse and slept fitfully. She was awakened when her horse, annoyed, pushed itself to its feet, dumping her on the ground and letting in the icy air.

She tried to lie still – perhaps even to accept death. Death was very, very close; she could smell his carrion breath. The moon had set and it was utterly black. Her heart roared and pounded, and she waited for him to take her.

Her horse farted.

She laughed, and forced herself to her feet. With the patience of the survivor, she rolled the furs in a bundle and got them tied with thongs, and then slung them over her riding horse. She was unsurprised to find that all the horses were still gathered around her. She picked up the lead rein and mounted Gryphon, then rode away into the utter dark.

She slept while riding, the horses finding their own way, and awoke to pale grey light and the sound of her own horse whinnying and another horse answering from her right. She froze. Half asleep, half in the world of dreams, she raised her head and saw a figure from her childhood sitting on a shaggy pony – Samahe, 'The Black-Haired One'.

'Oh, Auntie,' she said, and then shook her head. 'Silly me.'

But the image of Samahe didn't waver. Instead, she pushed her mount forward and emerged from the grey light, a bow bent in her hand and the arrow pointed right at Melitta's breasts. 'Who are you?' her aunt asked.

'Oh,' Melitta said. 'Am I dead?'

The arrowhead lowered a fraction. The Sakje woman whistled shrilly between her teeth.

Then Melitta had time to be afraid, because suddenly she was surrounded in the dawn, the first pink light showing her a dozen riders, both men and women, all around her, their breath rising on the frozen air and their horses making the noises of real horses in the world of the sun.

'Sauromatae girl,' said a man at her shoulder. 'I have something nice and round for her!' he said, and gave a cruel laugh.

But the woman shook her head. 'I think I know her. Girl! What's your name?'

Melitta shook her head. 'I smell of death,' she said.

'That's true,' said another Sakje, a bearded man in a red jacket at her elbow. 'She's got five Sauromatae horses and her quiver is empty. How d'you get that cut on your face, girl?'

'Killing,' Melitta said.

'Her Sakje is pure enough,' the older woman said.

'Samahe?' Melitta asked. She was hesitant, because this could still be a dream.

The men and women around her fell back in wonder.

'You know me?' Samahe asked, her voice eager.

'Of course I know you. You are the wife of Ataelus, and I am the daughter of Srayanka. We are cousins.' All this seemed as natural as breathing. 'Am I dead, or do you yet live?'

As soon as she said 'Srayanka', the woman pushed her horse forward and threw her arms, bow and all, around her. And the horsemen began to shout, a long, thin scream – Aiyaiyaiyaiyai!

'Oh, my little honey bee. What – what has happened?' Samahe ran a finger down her face and shook her head.

'I killed some men, and I thought perhaps that I died.' Melitta took a breath. 'I smell like death.'

And with those words, she fell straight from Samahe's arms to the ground, and the world fled away.