followed. Behind him, the traveller heard the thin brigand also descending. The stallion bared its teeth and screamed an angry challenge. Let him even try to come close.
When the trio reached the bottom, they conferred for a moment.
‘Ready?’ he asked mockingly.
‘You whoreson,’ snarled the leader. ‘Will you be so arrogant when I cut your balls off and stuff them down your neck?’
‘At least you’d be able to find mine. I doubt that any of you scumbags have any.’
The big man’s face twisted with fury. Screaming at the top of his voice, he charged, pelte and club at the ready.
The traveller took a couple of steps forward. Placing his left leg behind the shield, he braced himself. He tightened his grip on his sica. This has to be quick or the others will be on me as well.
Fortunately, the thug was as unskilled as he was confident. Driving his shield into his opponent’s, he swung a wicked blow at his head. The traveller, rocking back slightly from the impact of the strike, ducked his head out of the way. Reaching around with his sica, he sliced the big man’s left hamstring in two. A piercing scream rent the air, and the bandit collapsed in a heap. He had enough sense to raise his pelte, but the traveller smashed it out of the way with his shield and skewered him through the neck. The thug died choking on his own blood.
He tugged the blade free and kicked the corpse on to its back. ‘Who’s next?’
The leader hissed an order at the skinny man before he and the cap-wearing bandit split up. Like crabs, they scuttled out to either side of their victim.
The stallion trumpeted another challenge, and the traveller sensed it rear up on its hind legs. He stepped forward, out of its way. An instant later, there was a strangled cry, the dull thump, thump of hooves striking bone, and then the noise of a body hitting the ground. ‘My horse might be lame, but he still has quite a temper,’ he said mildly. ‘Your friend’s brains are probably decorating the road. Am I right?’
The two remaining brigands exchanged a shocked look. ‘Don’t even think of running away!’ warned the leader. ‘Oeagrus was my sister’s son. I want vengeance for his death.’
Unobtrusively, the traveller lowered his shield a fraction, exposing his neck. Let that tempt one of them.
The man in the fox-skin cap clenched his jaw. ‘Fuck whether the beast gets hit,’ he said, hurling his javelin.
The traveller didn’t move from the spear’s path. He simply raised his shield, letting it smack directly into the layered wood and leather. Its sharp iron head punched two fingers’ depth out through the inner surface, but did not injure him. Swinging back his left arm, he threw the now useless item at the thug, who scrambled away to avoid being hit. What he wasn’t expecting was for the traveller to be only a few steps behind his flying shield. When the bandit thrust his second javelin at his opponent, it was parried savagely out of the way.
Using his momentum to keep moving forward, the traveller punched his opponent in the face with his left fist. The man’s head cracked back with the force of the blow, and he barely saw the sica as it came swinging back around to hack deep into the flesh where his neck met his torso. Spraying blood everywhere, and looking faintly surprised, he fell sideways into the road. Keeping time with the slowing beats of his heart, a crimson tide flooded the ground around him. Three down, but the last is the most deadly.
The traveller turned swiftly, expecting the leader’s attempt to stab him in the back. The move saved him from serious injury, and the javelin skidded off the rings of his mail shirt and into thin air, causing the man to overreach and stumble. A massive backhand to the face sent him sprawling backwards on to his arse, losing his weapon in the process.
He stared up at the traveller, frank terror in his eyes. ‘I have a wife. A f-family to f-feed,’ he stammered.
‘You should have thought of that before you ambushed me,’ came the growled reply.
The bandit screamed as the sica slid into his belly, slicing his guts to ribbons. Sobbing with pain, he waited for the death blow. But it did not fall. He lay there, helpless, already passing in and out of consciousness.
A few moments later, he opened his eyes. His killer was watching him impassively. ‘Don’t leave me to die,’ he begged. ‘Even Kotys wouldn’t do this to a man.’
‘Kotys?’ There was no response, so he kicked his victim. ‘You were going to cut my balls off and feed them to me, remember?’
He swallowed down his agony. ‘P-please.’
‘Very well.’ The sica rose high in the air.
‘Who in all the gods’ name are you?’ he managed to whisper.
‘Just a weary traveller with a lame horse.’
The blade scythed down, and the brigand’s eyes went wide for the last time.
Ariadne scraped back her hair and carefully pushed a couple of bone pins into her long black tresses, fastening them into place. Sitting on a three-legged stool by a low wooden table, she angled the bronze mirror that sat there so that it caught the watery light entering through the hut’s open doorway. The shaped piece of red-gold metal was her sole luxury, and using it occasionally served to remind her of who she was. This was one of those days. To the vast majority of the people in the settlement, she was not a woman, a relation or a friend. She was a priestess of Dionysus, and revered as such. Most of the time, Ariadne was content with this prestige. After her harsh upbringing, her elevated position was better than she’d have ever dreamed possible. But it didn’t mean that she didn’t have needs or desires. What’s wrong with wanting a man? A husband? Her lips pursed. Currently, the only person showing interest in her was Kotys, the king of the Maedi tribe. Unsurprisingly, his interest had put paid to any other potential suitors. Those who crossed Kotys tended to end up dead — or so the rumour went. Not that there had been any before that, she reflected bitterly. Men with the courage to court a priestess were rare beasts indeed.
Ariadne did not want or appreciate Kotys’ lecherous advances, but felt powerless to stop them. He hadn’t yet tried to become physical, but she was sure that was because of her vaunted status — and the venomous snake that she kept in a basket by her bedding. Her situation was complicated by the fact that she had to remain in the village. She had been sent here by the high priests in Kabyle, Thrace’s only city, which lay far to the north-east. Extraordinary circumstances notwithstanding, hers was an appointment for life. If she returned to Kabyle, Ariadne could expect to be performing menial duties in the main temple there for the rest of her days.
There was no question either of returning to her family. While she loved her mother, and prayed for her every day, Ariadne harboured two feelings for her father. Hate was the first, and loathing was the second. Her emotions stemmed from her brutal childhood. Ariadne’s existence had consisted of beatings, humiliation and worse, all at the hands of her father. A warrior of the Odrysai tribe, he had despised her because she — his only child — was not male. During the long years of misery, her sole means of escape had been praying to Dionysus, the god of intoxication and ritual ecstasy. It was only when communing with him that she’d felt some inner peace, a state of affairs that still prevailed. To this day, Ariadne believed that Dionysus had helped her to survive the unending abuse.
Other than through marriage, the concept of escaping her father had never entered Ariadne’s mind. There had been simply nowhere for her to go. Then, on her thirteenth birthday, things had changed utterly. In a remarkable intervention, Ariadne’s downtrodden mother had persuaded her father to allow her to attend the Dionysian temple in Kabyle as a prospective candidate for the priesthood. Once there, her burning determination had impressed the priests and allowed her to remain. More than a decade later, she still had no desire to return home. Unless, of course, it were to kill her father, which would be a pointless exercise. While Ariadne’s position as a priestess elevated her above that of ordinary women, a patricide could expect but one fate.
No, her best option was to weather out Kotys’ attentions — Dionysus, let some doe-eyed beauty catch his eye soon — and establish herself here. It had been a mere six months since she’d arrived at this, the main Maedi settlement. Not long at all. Ariadne’s chin lifted. There was another option of course. If Kotys were deposed, a better man could take his place. She’d been here long enough to sense the seething discontent with his rule. Rhesus, the previous king, and Andriscus, his son, weren’t especially missed, but Sitalkes, the noble who might have replaced them, had been a popular figure. They were careful not to do it within earshot of Kotys’ bodyguards, but plenty of warriors spoke nostalgically of Sitalkes and his two sons, of whom one had been killed in battle against the Romans and the other had gone to serve the conquerors as a mercenary, and never returned.
If only someone would step forward and harness the simmering rage against Kotys, thought Ariadne. A short, sharp fight and the bastard would be gone for ever. Not for the first time, she cursed the fact that she’d been born a woman. No one would follow me. She studied the familiar reflection in the bronze mirror before her. A heart-shaped
