breakwater that had turned a chain of tiny islands into an impregnable defence against the Euxine’s occasional winter storms.
The Lady Srayanka, the mother of the twins, was not a Greek woman. Her name appeared on no dedications. No founding stone had her initials, and none of her weapons were dedicated at the altar of Nike, but her hand was visible all along the river. As ruler – queen, some said – of all the Eastern Assagatje, it was her word that kept the settlement free from the predations of the tribes of the sea of grass, and her warriors that made the town independent of the labyrinthine politics of the nascent kingdom of the Bosporus to the west. In her name, the Sindi and the Maeotae farmers lived in safety along the river valley. Her horsemen and the hippeis of the town kept the bandits away from the high ground between the Tanais and the distant Rha, so that merchants like Leon could bring their precious cargoes from the Hyrkanian Sea far to the east – and farther, from Seres itself, and Qin.
Satyrus was her son, and Melitta her daughter. They walked through their town, hand in hand, to the stables built in their father’s name, in the hippodrome where their father’s friend Coenus still drilled the remainder of the men who had followed their father east in his fabled war with Alexander. Most of them were away in the south with Diodorus, on campaign, as mercenaries.
‘How’s your head now?’ Melitta asked.
Satyrus blinked. ‘For some reason,’ he said slowly, ‘it’s worse in the sun.’
They entered the hippodrome – a building that was new and well-built and out of all proportion to the number of cavalrymen that the town actually supported. Satyrus gritted his teeth against the ache in his head as they crossed the sand, and squeezed his sister’s hand until she grunted in pain.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
They passed the line of columns at the edge of the stables – wooden columns, but carefully painted to look like marble – and the smell of horses enveloped them.
Pelton, an old freed slave of Leon’s, greeted them. ‘The gods prosper you, twins,’ he said. ‘Master Philokles took a mule. That new feller – too big for a mule – he took a horse.’
Twins was something like a title in Tanais. Melitta nodded. ‘I’ll take Bion,’ she said. Bion was a Sakje charger, bigger than a Greek pony, like a warhorse scaled for a tall girl. She called the beast ‘Bion’ because the gelding was her life. Happy or sad, angry or elated, she dealt with the rigours of life by riding. Twice now, she had gone with her mother to the summer pasture of the Assagatje, riding with the maidens while her brother learned philosophy and law in faraway Athens. Her horse was her answer to most things.
Satyrus walked down the line of stalls until he reached the end, where his father’s charger cropped barley straw with the contentment of a retired warhorse. ‘Care to go for a ride?’ he asked the giant. Thalassa was a mare – but a mare of heroic proportions. She raised her head and nuzzled him for a treat until he produced a carrot. Then she chewed the delicacy with a finicky patience, tossing her head.
‘You want to go?’ he asked again. ‘I think the answer is yes.’
The former slave laughed. ‘When has the answer ever been no? Eh? Tell me that!’ He stepped in and put a bridle on the old mare in a single motion, his lower hand putting the bit into her mouth without so much as a jingle of the bronze against her teeth.
Melitta put her palms flat on her horse’s back and sprang on to her in one go. ‘Pelton, do you ever wonder why you were a slave?’ she asked.
Pelton looked at her for the time it took an insect to cross a leaf. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Will of the gods, mostly, I expect.’ He plucked a piece of grass and put it in his mouth.
‘Could happen to anyone, couldn’t it?’
‘Sister!’ Satyrus didn’t always appreciate his sister’s approach to the world – a blunt approach, to say the least.
She looked down at him from her horse. ‘Well, Leon owned him. And Leon was a slave. So Leon should know better.’
‘Better than what?’ Satyrus asked. He liked to think that he was already a man – a man who understood things. One of the things he understood was that you didn’t tease slaves about their slavery.
‘Better than to own people,’ she said.
Satyrus rolled his eyes. He led Thalassa out of the stable, her heavy hooves ringing on the cobblestone floor and sending pings of echo off the whitewashed walls to penetrate his brain and increase his headache. He led her around to the mounting step and climbed on to her, sitting well back, as a boy can on a big horse. He adjusted his gorytos and then leaned over to his sister. He could see Philokles down by the gate, arguing with Theron. ‘It’s not nice to talk to slaves about slavery.’
‘Why not?’ Melitta asked. ‘Pelton was a slave. Who else would I ask? You?’›
Satyrus made the sound that brothers make all over the world, and tapped Thalassa’s sides with his bare heels, and the mare surged into motion. Satyrus could feel her power – even at the age of seventeen, she was a big animal with power and spirit, the veteran of a dozen battles. When he was on her back, he could imagine that he was his father at the Jaxartes River, about to crush Alexander.
Pelton emerged from the stable with a scruffy straw hat clutched in his fist. ‘This’ll help, male twin.’ Satyrus wheeled the mare in a neat curve and snatched the hat and pulled it on. The shade of the broad brim was like a healing balm.
‘All the gods bless you, Pelton!’ Satyrus said.
‘And you, twins!’ the former slave called.
‘My sister means no harm,’ Satyrus said.
Pelton smiled. ‘Hope she never has to find out for herself,’ he said, before he went back into the stables.
Theron and Philokles were arguing about the nature of the soul as Satyrus and Melitta passed the bronze equestrian statue of their father that stood at the edge of the agora, his hand raised, pointing east, as if he had just ridden from the hippodrome. There was another statue to him in Olbia, where he already had semi-divine status as a hero who had overthrown the tyrant, and the Sakje still sacrificed horses to him at the kurgan on the coast.
In Athens, on the other hand, many men spoke ill of their father, and a year ago Satyrus had attended the legal proceedings that had finally revoked his father’s conviction for treason, making Satyrus a citizen and returning his grandfather’s fortune. Which had only served to prove what every twelve-year-old knows by heart: the world is far more complicated than it appeared when you were ten.
‘Surely Plato argues the point convincingly,’ Theron began, as if he’d already made this argument and was still awaiting some acknowledgement.
Philokles had a leather bag over his shoulder. He tapped his mule into motion. Theron was mounted on a tall horse, one of the town’s cavalry chargers, and he towered over the Spartan, but he had to thump the horse’s sides to get him into motion. In a few surges of the charger’s hindquarters it was clear that the Corinthian wasn’t much of a rider.
Melitta was looking at the eastern horizon as if following her dead father’s hand. The town sat on a bluff, and she could see a parasang, thirty full stades, or more in the early afternoon sun. ‘Is that smoke?’ she asked.
Philokles looked under his hand, and so did Satyrus.
‘I expect they’re clearing new fields,’ Satyrus said. He regretted his tone almost at once – hectoring his sister with a display of knowledge when he didn’t actually know what he was talking about. I must outgrow that, he thought.
She glanced at him and gave him half a smile, as if she could hear every word of his interior dialogue. ‘Leon’s still away,’ she said, indicating the empty wharves as they rode through the gates.
‘Leon the Numidian is our richest citizen,’ Philokles said to Theron, who was more interested in mastering his horse than in the town’s social life. ‘Married to a barbarian. Wonderful horseman. A well-rounded man, for all that he started life as a slave.’
‘Even in Corinth I’ve heard of your Leon,’ Theron said. ‘Whoa!’
‘It will do you no good to lose your temper at a horse,’ Melitta said. She laid a hand on Theron’s bridle and stroked his gelding’s neck and the horse calmed. ‘That’s quite a squadron for this time of year,’ she said, pointing out to sea.
Satyrus looked. At first he saw nothing, but after a moment he could see a line of sails just nicking the edge of the world, three or four hours out in the bay. ‘Triremes,’ he said, because the sails were matching sizes. Closer in, a pentekonter raced for the beach under full oars.
‘Is that mama’s boat?’ Satyrus asked. He was relieved to see it.
