He found Srayanka’s wagon first. He heard her laughter, and he rested his hand on the wheel, wondering — he had never sought her out since the night by the river, and now he felt foolish, like a suitor waiting in the rain.
More laughter carried through the felt of the tent on the wagon bed. Kineas heard Parshtaevalt’s deeper laugh, and he pulled himself up on the step and called ‘hello!’ in Greek.
Parshtaevalt’s hand opened the flap. The tent was lit by a brazier and dense with smoke from the seeds and the stems — the pine-pitch scent flowed past him into the night.
‘Hah!’ called Parshtaevalt. He put a hand on Kineas’s neck and hugged him, then pulled him through the door to the bench that ran the length of the wagon — seat by day, bed by night. The wagon was full of people, stifling with wet wool and smoke. Hands reached out and pushed him — prodded him — until he sank into a warm space between two bodies. One of them was Srayanka, and before he was on the bench, one of her hands had snaked into his tunic and her mouth closed over his. He kissed her so deeply that he breathed from her lungs, and she from his, and the fire in his skin burned his tunic dry as she curled around him on the bench. It was dark in the wagon — the red coals in the brazier threw no real light — and despite his knowledge that Hirene was under his left hand, he felt as if they were alone, and every breath of the air intensified his desire.
‘You came,’ she said around his kiss, as if she didn’t believe it.
He had come looking for something. His hand was under her tunic, tracing the line where the soft ivory of her breast met the lusher skin of her nipple, and she sank her teeth into his arm, and he gasped, taking a deeper breath of the smoke off the brazier…
The worm was close, the mandibles of its mouth chewing away at everything in its path, and his gorge rose as it ate Leucon’s face off his skull…
‘Ataelus!’ Kineas cried. He pushed her away. He wondered if he was going mad.
She grabbed his hand and he resisted, but she was strong, and she pulled him, pushed him, and suddenly he was falling — it was wet, and he was slumped at the wheel hub. She jumped down on the wet grass beside him.
‘You are easy for the smoke,’ she said. She admonished him with a finger. ‘Breathe deep. Go under wagon and breathe.’
‘Stay with me,’ he said, but she shook her head.
‘Too much, too fast. You breathe. I find Ataelax. He with Samahe. Do what we should do, but for Sastar Baqca and the king.’ And she was gone.
His head was clear when she came back, with Ataelus behind her like a spare horse.
Kineas didn’t feel like a commander and he knew he didn’t look like one, but he pulled Ataelus close. ‘I sent Heron — the hipparch from Pantecapaeum — downriver this morning to scout for fords.’
‘No ford downriver,’ Ataelus answered. There was another man with him — no, a woman. She had her arms crossed over her chest and anger dripped off her with the rainwater. ‘This Samahe — wife for me.’ He grinned. ‘Twenty horse wife!’
Kineas shook his hand, which was inane. ‘I need to know where Heron is and what he found.’
Ataelus frowned and looked at Kineas from under his brows. ‘You ask me to ride off in the rain — now? For this Heron?’
Kineas said, ‘Yes.’
Ataelus took a deep breath. ‘For you?’ he asked.
‘For me,’ Kineas said. He lacked the language to explain just why he was so worried, suddenly, about his missing hipparch — but he was.
When he was gone, Samahe protesting volubly after him, Kineas sat on the dry ground under her wagon. Srayanka sat against his back. They were silent for a long time. Finally, she said, ‘If we win — when we win. You bring me twenty of horses?’
‘Is that your price?’ he asked.
She laughed — a low, rich laugh. ‘I am beyond price,’ she said in Sakje, leaning around to look at him. ‘I want you like a mare in heat wants a stallion, and I would go with you for a handful of grass, like a priestess. That is one woman I am.’ She threw back her head, and her profile was strong against the light of the nearest fire. ‘But I am Ghan of the Cruel Hands, and there is no bride price to buy me.’ She shrugged. ‘The king would make me queen — and that would make Cruel Hands rich. I am woman, and I am Ghan.’ She looked into his eyes. Hers were picked out with reflected campfires. ‘But if we win this battle,’ she said again. ‘If we are free of the Sastar Baqca — will you ask me to wife?’
Kineas pushed his back into hers. ‘If we live — I will ask you to wife.’ He kissed her, felt the movement of her eyelashes against his cheeks. ‘I know Baqca. What is Sastar?’
She wriggled slightly in his arms. ‘What is the thing — the word you say when man rule over other men and will not hear them? Rule alone? No voice but that man?’
‘Tyrant,’ Kineas answered, after a moment.
‘ Tyrant ’ she echoed. ‘Sastar is like tyrant. Sastar Baqca — the baqca that allows no other voice.’ She turned and put her arms behind his head. ‘No more Greek and Sakje.’
‘No,’ said Kineas. Death seemed far away, and everything seemed possible. ‘I will marry you.’ He kissed her again.
She grinned even through the kiss, pulled away and looked at him. ‘Truly?’ she asked. She smiled, kissed him and then pushed him away. ‘Bring me Zopryon’s head as my price, then.’ She leaped to her feet.
Kineas got to his, still holding her hand. Their eyes were locked. She gave his hand a gentle pressure — and then she was stepping away.
The rain sobered him, and in moments it all came rushing back — the battle, plans, worries. Where in Hades is Heron? And the plain fact — this is foolishness — I’ll be dead. But he forced a laugh and said, ‘It’s a high price.’
She slipped out from under the wagon and turned. ‘It will make a good song,’ she said with a smile. ‘You know — they already sing of us?’
Kineas didn’t know. ‘Really?’ he called after her.
She paused in the rain on the step up to the wagon. ‘We may live for ever, in a song.’
He stopped at the king’s laager to report, then walked, drenched, down the hill to issue his last orders at the campfires. The night was half spent when he pushed through the curtain into his wagon. He had the energy to strip his tunic, to hang his sodden cloak from the ridgepole, and then he lay down on the bed. He lay awake for a time, and again he wondered if the gods had sent madness to him. He didn’t want to close his eyes. And then he did.
The worm was moving, a thousand legs pushing its obscene bulk across the wet grass to the river, a dozen obscene mouths chewing at anything that came under their jaws — dead horses, dead men, grass.
He circled above the worm, seeing it with two visions — as the worm was, the monster, and as the men and horses and wagons that composed the worm, like reading a scroll and understanding the whole of it at the same time, or like seeing every stone in a mosaic and seeing the whole design.
He pushed against the dream, and the owl turned away from the worm and flew south — the first time he had been in control in a dream. The owl beat its wings, and the stades flew by — grey and indistinct in the constant rain — but he saw horsemen moving on the west bank of the river, a dozen parties pushing south.
Then he let his dream self have its head and turn north, back to the worm on the sea of grass. It was horrible, but the horror had a familiarity to it — because he himself had been the legs of the worm, and the mouth. He knew the smell.
His dream self turned east, over the river, which had a dull glow in the dream rain, and then he was descending, and there was the tree — no longer a tower of green-black majesty. The tree was dying. The cedar bark was hard under his talons, the leaves and needles fallen away in swathes like sick animal loses hair, exposing bare wood and rotten bark, and the top had already cracked and fallen away. He landed, grasping a solid branch, and it, too, cracked, and he was falling… from his horse, an arrow in his throat, choking on the hard pain and the rush of blood — bitter copper and salt in his mouth, in his nose, and in his last moments of life he tried to see, tried to remember if the battle was won, but it all went away beyond his eyes leaving only her voice singing, and he couldn’t remember her name — he listened to her…
‘Dawn, somewhere above the rain,’ said a voice. A hand, pulling at his shoulder. ‘Good news for you. Get