He looked them over and gave a smile – a half-smile, almost of contempt. ‘Cross-country it is. Follow me.’
They walked all day, leading their horses. The rain continued, and they crossed muddy fields and walked through dripping woods. Melitta was tired in an hour, and exhausted before they sat under an oak and ate more garlic sausage. Coenus could barely walk. Her brother met her eye and shook his head, but they were too tired to talk. After they had eaten the sausage, they walked again. As darkness began to settle, Philokles and Theron began to take turns carrying Coenus, and then they stopped in a stand of ash and cut poles and made a stretcher out of his chlamys and walked on again, carrying him between them. None of the horses was fit to ride.
In the evening, they came to a village. Theron went in alone, and came out dejected. ‘Men were here this morning,’ he said. ‘They took all the horses and killed some men.’ He shrugged. ‘I took this,’ he said, and held out a clay pot the size of his hand. ‘I tried to pay, but everyone ran off.’
They made a camp above the town. None of them had a fire kit, and everything was wet through, and Theron couldn’t get a fire started. He looked at Philokles. ‘You’re the old soldier,’ he said.
‘I get fire started by telling a slave to light one,’ Philokles shot back.
‘Fine pair of bandits you two will make,’ Coenus muttered. He sat in the dark, shredding bark between his fingers for a long time – so long that Melitta fell asleep, and she awoke to the warm kiss of golden fire on her face.
‘He did it with a stick!’ Satyrus said with delight. They gazed at the fire for a while, listening to their bellies rumble, and then they were asleep.
In the morning, they cut north again at Coenus’s urging, into wilder country farther from the river and the shore of the Euxine. Bion had recovered and Philokles and Theron got Coenus up on her, and they made better time. Theron ran down a rabbit and they stopped in the hollow of a hilltop and made fire – quickly, because Coenus had shown them how to wrap coals and embers in wet leaves to carry with them. Rabbit soup in Theron’s clay pot – nothing to eat it with, so that Melitta burned her lips drinking it straight from the pot – and roast rabbit cooked on a green branch used as a spit. Melitta grew used to taking direction from Coenus as he lay on a pile of cut boughs, protected from the rain only by their one spare cloak, which had belonged to one of the dead Sauromatae.
After the meal they were all better, even Coenus. They slept a little, collected embers and walked on. That night they slept in deep woods, soaked to the skin but warmed by a big fire. In the morning, Coenus was well enough to look over the horses and frown.
‘The two steppe ponies are well enough. And Bion is healthy. But we’re killing the other two – they’re too well bred for this life. We should kill them for meat or trade them to a farmer.’
‘For meat!’ Satyrus asked, his eyes wide. ‘Our horses? Hermes!’
Coenus grunted and sat, suddenly and without ceremony. ‘Son, there are no rules now. We can’t get attached to anything. Including each other.’ He looked at Philokles. ‘I’m slowing you, brother.’
Philokles shrugged. ‘Yes, you are. On the other hand, without your knowledge of hunting and living rough, the children might already be dead – or I’d be driven to taking chances.’ He looked down the hill. ‘As it is, we’ve made time. We’re only a day or so from the ford at Thatis.’
Coenus smiled grimly. ‘I’ll try and stay useful, then.’
Philokles grunted. ‘See that you do. Otherwise – well, I suppose you’d make a good roast.’
Theron turned away from Philokles’ laughter and Coenus’s grunts. ‘You Spartan bastard!’ Coenus spat. ‘You make it all hurt more!’
‘They’re joking,’ Satyrus said.
Theron shook his head. ‘They’re – not like anyone I’ve ever known,’ he said. ‘I thought that I was tough.’
3
The plain of Thatis was an endless succession of rich brown streams, swollen with the rain. Maeotae farmers tilled the mud in silence, and only a handful even raised their eyes to watch them if they were forced to come into a village. It was all so dull that they were almost captured owing to simple inattention. They were walking along the wooded edge of a field of wheat when Coenus raised his head.
‘I smell horses,’ he said.
‘Ares!’ Philokles whispered.
Just across the hedge, in the next field, were a dozen horsemen, led by a tall man in a red cloak with a livid scar on his face. Two dismounted soldiers were beating a peasant. Scar-face watched with an impatience that carried over a stade of broken ground.
Melitta’s heart went from a dead stop to a gallop.
‘Just keep walking,’ Philokles said.
Theron didn’t know much about horses, and he walked off, but Satyrus jumped in front of Coenus’s mount and got his hands on Bion’s nose. ‘There, honey,’ he said in Sakje. ‘There, there, my darling.’ He looked up at Coenus, who gave him a nod.
They walked along the edge of the field until they came to a path going off up the ridge, deeper into the woods.
‘What were they doing?’ Melitta asked.
‘Nothing good,’ Philokles spat. ‘Keep moving.’ He grunted. ‘Thank the gods they missed us.’
They climbed the ridge, apparently without being spotted, but when they reached the open meadow at the top, they could see horsemen across the meadow, working the field carefully despite the pouring rain. Another group of horsemen was in the trees below them – they saw the second group as soon as they stopped.
‘Think they’ve seen us?’ Philokles asked.
Coenus shook his head, his lips almost white. ‘We must be leaving tracks. Or some poor peasant saw us and talked. But they don’t know where we are – not exactly. If they did, they’d be on us.’
They watched for another minute from the cover of the trees. Melitta could see six of the enemy horsemen, all big men on chargers – Greeks, not Sauromatae. The lead man had a face with a red wound across it, and it looked as if his nose had been cut off. Even a hundred horse-lengths away, it looked horrible.
‘Off the trail and up the next ridge,’ Coenus said. ‘Fast as we can. We’re heartbeats from being caught. If they see us, we’re done.’
Up until then, Melitta had thought that the going couldn’t get any harder – constant rain, endless trudging along, no food to speak of.
None of it had prepared her for walking across country instead of walking on trails. Every branch caught at her. Every weed, every plant growing from the forest floor tore at her leggings and her tunic. Her boots filled with things that cut her feet, and Philokles wouldn’t stop. They came to a stream, swollen from days of rain, and no one offered her a hand – the water came up to her belly, and proved to her that she hadn’t actually been wet until then.
‘Don’t move,’ Philokles said.
She was halfway up the muddy bank, one sodden boot on a rock and the other still in the stream, when the order came.
Satyrus was in the stream.
Without turning her head, she could see that well upstream, half a stade or more, a man on a horse had just emerged from the thick brush of the valley and was looking right at them.
‘Do not move,’ Philokles said, quite clearly, at her side.
He was moving.
So was Satyrus. Without a splash, her brother lowered himself into the water and vanished.
Melitta turned her head, as the Sakje taught, because nothing gives the human form away to a pursuer like the face. She pressed herself into the bank and tried to ignore the cold of the water on her left leg. It would be worse for Satyrus, who was now fully immersed.
She could feel the enemy’s hoof beats through the earth. He was riding along the verge of the stream.
Beside her, Philokles began to pray quietly, first to Artemis and Hera, and then to all the gods. She joined
