eagle to catch a salmon, they were a line of heads swimming for their lives.
Melitta swam like a Nereid, and Bion, though tired, kicked along beneath her. But Coenus struggled just to keep his head above water and his horse wasn’t much better. Without really thinking about the risks, Satyrus released his horse to make its own way and swam across the flow to Coenus, but he mistook the current, spun around and got kicked in the gut. In a heartbeat he was under the muddy brown water, sinking away from the noise, still exhaling. He got a fist tangled in something – hair – and suddenly his whole body jerked as he was towed forward. His eyes saw light and he pulled harder and his head came out of the water and he breathed – ahhh – and he was moving fast, his right hand wrapped in Thalassa’s mane. Her head was up, and despite her wounds and his weight she was powering through the water. He breathed again, choked and sprayed water and snot from his nose.
Thalassa was turning, ignoring his struggles as she swam closer to Coenus. Coenus was coughing, his face out of the water but his horse sinking away under him.
There were arrows falling from the sky. It took Satyrus a few heartbeats to realize that they were being shot at from the bank. He could hear a man shouting in the Sauromatae dialect for volunteers to go into the water and finish them off. He didn’t turn his head to look. His whole concentration was on Coenus. He was close – closer – he reached out a hand and tried to pull the man up, but he was twelve and Coenus was the biggest man he knew.
Then Philokles was up with him, and Theron, swimming alone without a horse, and they cut Coenus free before he drowned himself and his horse. Theron pushed the Megaran’s head and shoulders into Satyrus’s arms and he pulled hard, eliciting a low scream of pain from the big man. And then they were swimming.
Satyrus looked up and found that they were halfway across. But the current had moved them, and they were no longer at the narrows. He set his shoulders and concentrated on keeping Coenus alive.
Time passed slowly. His shoulder hurt, and every other moment he thought that the dying man might drag him into the water. He was afraid for Thalassa, who made harsh noises though her mouth and nostrils, coughs and hacks almost as if the horse was attempting to curse.
There were leaves and logs in the river, deadwood floated away by the spring rains in the high ground to the east, and once a dead sheep, bloated and stinking, passed them as they swam on. The point was so far behind them that even from his perpsective just above the surface, Satyrus could see the Bay of Salmon widening away. They were almost as far from the other shore as they had been when they slipped into the water. Even with the powerful aide of the horse swimming beneath him, even with his arms wrapped around her neck, Satyrus was tired.
Coenus was a dead weight. Satyrus thought that the man’s cold body still had life in it, and he passed several minutes trying to find a sign of breath. He wasn’t sure. When he looked up, the stone farmhouse that marked the end of the Maeotae territory was in sight.
He looked around for Melitta, and she was right there at his side, holding on to Bion with one hand and pushing against Coenus with the other, swimming strongly but with lines on her face like an adult. Their eyes met. She gave a push, probably all she had strength for, and Coenus went a finger-breadth higher on Thalassa’s proud back.
‘Poseidon, Lord of Horses,’ Satyrus said.
She swam more strongly, and Satyrus tried to sing the hymn, and Melitta joined in, two thin voices singing, whole words left out as the singers struggled to breathe, but Thalassa seemed to relish it, and her ears went up, and she moved faster. The stone house on the shore was closer.
‘I think – he’s – dead,’ Lita panted.
Satyrus thought of the dead girl. He shook his head.
Thalassa’s legs kicked hard. They were half a stade from shore, but suddenly she rose out of the water, stumbled, scrambled and pushed, and she was walking. Satyrus could see the drowned meadow beneath her hooves, the mud billowing away from her steps in brown-black clouds. She managed a few long strides and then she slipped and fell and they all went down in a splash, Coenus and Satyrus underneath, but Satyrus had his toes wrapped in her saddlecloth and when she came up in deeper water he was still clinging to her and he had Coenus wedged with desperate strength against her side.
Theron was there, and Philokles, pushing against his sides, and Melitta with an arm around Coenus’s neck, holding his head clear of the water. He wasn’t dead yet, because he was spluttering.
The marshy bank was just a few long strides away. Melitta let go of Coenus and she and Bion were first up on to the bank, followed by two unridden horses. Then Thalassa pushed herself up, one giant lunge to plant her hind feet on the mud and a struggling leap almost straight up, with the weight of a boy and a big man, and she was up, front feet scrambling over the edge. Satyrus lost his seat and slid free to fall on grass, and Coenus fell on top of him in a tangle and moaned.
Philokles and Theron climbed the bank under their own power. Satyrus had been kicked at the end and he lay, just breathing, with waves of pain running from his right thigh to his brain. Theron lay breathing beside him. Philokles dragged himself to his feet. He went to Hermes, the big gelding, and pulled the Sauromatae spear from the horse’s saddlecloth where he had bundled it with the gear of the other men they had killed.
Satyrus rolled over, ignoring the pain, determined not to be afraid this time. He looked for his other horse, and she was gone – lost in the river. So much for dry bowstrings. He pulled his bow out of his gorytos, which was still full of water. All his arrows were soaked and his bow felt odd, whipping in his hand, the bindings wet through.
Strapped to the outside of his gorytos was the short, sharp steel akinakes that Ataelus had given him. He drew it. It was no longer than his forearm, a pitiful weapon against a grown Sauromatae warrior coming up the bank. He stumbled to the edge.
There were four riders in the water, and they had had as hard a swim as he had. They were not armoured. Most had cast their helmets aside and only their heads and the heads of their horses came above the water. The Sauromatae didn’t even seem to know where they were. They let their horses swim them to shore, and the first horse touched the mud at the same spot where Thalassa had touched, scrambled in the shallows and then swam the last few lengths to the bank.
Philokles leaned over the edge and killed the lead man while his horse gathered itself for the scramble up the bank – a single punch of his spear.
The other Sauromatae milled around a few horse-lengths from shore, calling to one and other.
‘Come and die,’ Philokles yelled. ‘Did Upazan send you?’
The barbarian warriors swam their horses back to the drowned meadow and got their legs under them. Then the one with gold in his hair shouted back. ‘Let us ashore and we swear not to harm you!’
They were only a few horse-lengths apart. It was an easy bow shot – but no one had a bow that would function. Satyrus, exhausted, managed a laugh.
‘Did Upazan send you?’ Philokles called again.
‘Yes!’ the barbarian returned.
‘Then you can swim back to him,’ Philokles called. He stepped away from the edge. He sank on his haunches and looked at the children and Theron. ‘We can’t let them up the bank,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on much longer.’
Theron looked around. ‘I can,’ he said. ‘Who has a javelin?’ The water was drying from his body. He looked like a god.
Philokles went to Hermes, moving like an old man, and took a javelin out of the kit strapped to the gelding. He walked with an unaccustomed heaviness.
Theron looked them all over. ‘We won’t get far,’ he said. ‘That house will have to shelter us.’
‘We can only stay a few hours,’ Philokles said. ‘Sooner or later they’ll send a ship.’ He gave the athlete the javelin.
Theron unbound his hair and took the leather thong, wrapped it twice around the spear and made a loop. Then he tied the loop off. He appeared unhurried. He walked to the bank, measuring off his strides, right out to the edge and then back. After three times, he hefted the javelin, well out of sight of the barbarians. ‘I assume that if I kill one, the other two will charge us,’ he said.
Philokles was silent. He took a deep breath and stood, the big spear in his fists. ‘Do the thing,’ he said.
Theron ran three steps, skipped once and threw the javelin. It flew like a thunderbolt and hit one of the barbarians so hard that it went a third of its length through his body before he fell into the water.
