him.
The hoof beats stopped suddenly, and she heard a splash.
‘By the Maiden!’ Coenus said. His voice sounded as loud as a trumpet.
Melitta looked upstream, and saw a horse thrashing in the deep water of the next long pool above the ford.
‘The bank collapsed under him,’ Philokles said. ‘Stay still!’
The horse thrashed again, and then the rider emerged on the bank, just a few horse-lengths away. He was cursing in fluent Greek. He was an officer – his breastplate showed fine workmanship.
‘Dhat you, Lucius?’ called a voice from where they’d come. A voice that couldn’t be more than ten horse- lengths away, and sounded as if it had a horrendous cold.
‘Yes!’ Lucius shouted, his voice betraying his annoyance. ‘My fucking horse put me in the drink.’ He stood on the bank and wrung out his cloak. ‘That you, Stratokles?’
‘Yes!’ The man addressed as Stratokles was closer. ‘More tracks!’ He emerged as he was calling out, walking into the grey light and the rain just as Lucius came up the bank to meet him. They were perhaps three horse- lengths away, and a long peal of thunder rolled across the hilltops and echoed from the valleys.
Only the overhang of the bank and the thin greenery of a single bush stood between Melitta and her pursuers.
Thunder barked overhead, and a lightning flash followed close, the bang almost intimate.
‘Fuck Eumeles, and fuck this. What tracks?’ Lucius demanded. ‘No one’s paying me enough to do this shit. If Zeus throws one of those bolts at me-’
‘Look!’ Stratokles said. His voice was thick, and even without moving her head, Melitta could see that he was the man with a wound on his face.
‘Whatever. One horse. Maybe two. We’re looking for six men – isn’t that right? And a pair of children?’
Lightning struck again, just as close, and a gust of wind tore through the trees.
‘They aren’t moving in this crap. I can’t move in this crap.’ Lucius looked around. ‘There are bandits here, and I don’t really want to find them. They’ll fight back! And this storm is going to flood this stream. Let’s get moving.’
‘The peasants said-’ Stratokles began.
‘Screw the peasants, my lord! Listen, that fool you caught last night – he’d say anything. You wouldn’t let that creepy Sicilian torture him – well, good on you, lord, but sometimes it is the way. We asked the question ten times before he answered. If he’d known, he’d have told us right away.’ Lucius snorted. ‘Give me a hand up.’
There was a squelching noise.
‘Anything down there?’ came a call from up the hill. Melitta could hear the jangling of bridles and all the music of a troop of horses.
The rain came down, heavier than ever, and Stratokles pulled his wool cloak up over his head. ‘Fuck the weather,’ he said. ‘We’ll never get a scent. And I’m not all that sure we saw a hoof print. Everything fills with water as soon as – bah. To Hades with it. Let’s go back.’
‘Let’s find a rich peasant and kick him out of his house,’ Lucius said.
‘Ndothing down here!’ Stratokles called. ‘Sound the rally.’ He put a hand to his nose and shook his head.
Then Melitta could hear the sound of a horn being blown, three calls repeated over and over. She clung to her patch of bank and shivered, moving as little as possible. She couldn’t feel her leg.
Time passed. She had time to wonder if she could do any lasting harm to her leg by leaving it numb, and to watch a fish swimming in the current and wonder if she could become a fish, and she had time to wonder how Coenus was doing, and then Philokles’ hands reached down, grabbed her shoulders and lifted her clear of the stream.
‘Sometimes the gods are with us,’ he said. ‘Where’s your brother?’
‘Somewhere in the water,’ she managed to choke out, and then she collapsed against Bion, who nuzzled her.
Theron dragged Satyrus out of the water where he had taken cover in a bed of reeds, downstream at the bend. He couldn’t walk.
‘We can’t build a fire,’ Theron said.
Philokles grabbed her shoulder. ‘Walk,’ he ordered.
Melitta hated to be weak, but she couldn’t make her limbs move. ‘Can’t,’ she said. Satyrus just shook his head.
‘Crawl then,’ Coenus said. ‘It’ll get you warm.’
So they did. It was a new low, crawling through the wet woods, feet filthy, hair sodden, but it soon restored enough warmth for them to stand, then walk. Satyrus used one of the Sauromatae ponies to keep him erect for a while, and they walked on. Melitta had lost one of her Sakje boots, so sodden that it lost all shape and fell off her foot. After another stade, she found that she was dragging it by the laces – she was so tired that she hadn’t noticed until it got caught in some undergrowth.
‘How are you?’ she asked her brother.
‘Fine,’ he said, and gave her a smile. That smile was worth a great deal. She drew some energy from it.
‘I thought you were dead!’ she whispered fiercely.
‘Me too!’ he said back, and they both smiled, and then it was better.
But Coenus was worse. He began to cough, and to tremble. Immersion was the last thing he’d needed, and now he was gaining in heat what the rest of them lost, and starting to mumble.
‘We need to get him into a bed,’ Theron said. ‘I could use one, too.’
Philokles nodded. They went over the top of the ridge, and then down towards the cook fires of another village.
‘They didn’t follow us over the ridge,’ Theron offered as an opinion.
Philokles shrugged. ‘I’m about to risk our lives on it,’ he said.
They came down on to the muddy road just short of a small plank bridge. Theron went across first, looking at the ground and then at the far tree line before motioning the rest of them to follow him.
The village was so small that they were through it while Coenus was still muttering an internal debate as to whether to steal the town’s single horse. A wealthy peasant watched them ride by from the shelter of his stone house. No one spoke to them.
Theron turned aside and asked the wealthy peasant for lodging. The man went inside and they heard him drop the bar on his door.
‘Every one of these bastards will remember us,’ Philokles spat. ‘Peasants. Like helots. Sell you for a drachma.’
Theron wolfed down warm bread stolen from a farmyard, passing pieces to the children and to Coenus, who ate it ravenously. Other than the bread, they gained nothing from the town. Just beyond was the next river, and the ferry, and then they had to stop and wait for half an hour in the endless rain while Philokles checked it out.
Sure enough, there was a party of cavalry keeping watch on the ferry. Philokles spotted them when their sentry got restless and dismounted in the trees to relieve himself.
‘Now what?’ Melitta asked.
‘We’re already wet,’ Philokles said. ‘We ride upstream and cross with the horses.’
It took them the rest of the day, and they made camp in a tiny clearing between two stones with ancient carving, just at nightfall. Their fire was weak and wet, and smoked constantly, so that it was difficult to sit close enough to get warm, and they had nothing to eat but the last of the bread.
It was the longest night Melitta could remember. Thunder came, and lightning, and whenever it flashed, she woke – if she was sleeping at all – to find her brother’s eyes locked on hers. The night stretched on and on – long enough for her to have an ugly dream about her mother, and another about Coenus, caught by wolves and eaten, and then the sky was grey in the east and the ground was pale enough to see to walk.
‘Nothing to keep us here,’ Philokles said.
Theron sat on his haunches, his fingers clenched until the knuckles were white on his walking stick. ‘We need food.’
‘Any ideas?’ Philokles asked. ‘If not, keep walking.’
When the sun was high in the sky, somewhere beyond the endless grey clouds, they reached another swollen
