King of the Bosphorus

EPILOGUE

It took days to bury the dead, and days more to feel anything but a vacant mourning – pain and numbness, and then aches and raw grief.

Satyrus had lost half his youth in an afternoon, and Melitta had lost more. Urvara was gone, and Graethe, and Memnon, dead in the phalanx, fighting in the front rank – the oldest of his father's men, and perhaps the best.

And there were thousands more dead. Many he did not know. Some, like Lithra, he knew too well. He had the misfortune to find her body himself – a body he had held in his arms.

Ataelus proved too hard to kill. The axe blow that knocked him flat left him unconscious, but within a few days, he rose again.

Later, Satyrus would say that the days after the Battle of Tanais River changed him more than the whole campaign that led to it.

And before he had stopped mourning, while the grief was still a raw thing that could move most of them to tears, he had to be king. Because even while the flies gathered on the dead, so the requests for his attention, his decisions and his judgment began buzzing around his ears.

Four days after the fight, when some of the older veterans had begun to make it a story, and the wound in his belly was still closing without rot, he put on a chiton and rode out of the camp with Melitta. They left all their well-meaning friends behind and rode north along the river to the foot of the kurgan of Kineas.

'Still want to be king?' Melitta asked, and he shook his head.

'I think the price was too high,' he said. 'I feel like – like I used to feel when I spent all my money in the market. On a toy. And then – I wanted to take the toy back.'

Melitta looked up at the kurgan. 'Still going to do it?'

Satyrus nodded. 'You with me?'

'All the way to the top,' Melitta said.

They climbed the kurgan together as the sun set in the west. Below them, the Sakje and the Greeks moved around, making dinner, and the smoke of their fires rose to the heavens.

Satyrus had to stop three times in climbing the mound, and Melitta swore when her arms failed her. She was still that tired, and she had rested just long enough that every muscle ached.

But they got to the top before the rim of the sun settled in the Bay of Salmon. There was a broad stone at the top, and in the centre was a deep cleft.

Satyrus drew the Aegyptian blade and handed it to Melitta.

She held it high, so that the sun caught the blade and made it a tongue of flame. Then she brought it down into the cleft, so that the blade grated as she thrust it to the hilt in the stone.

They stood together until the sun set, and then they walked back down the kurgan to the camp. And the sword held the light for a long time.