particular choices, for scent and depth of dreams – and the smoke would fill the tent, and people would sit and dream, or walk the spirit ways.
As a child, Melitta had thought nothing of the smoke, because every Sakje took smoke, her mother included. But after exposure to Alexandria, to the Aegyptian temples of Hathor and Bast, she saw the smoke with two sets of eyes. Greek Melitta saw it as a drug, little different from the poppy that both healed and destroyed, that gave beautiful dreams and nightmares, that both aided the physician and was the physician's despair. Indeed, watching three prostitutes share poppy by turning it to smoke in the night market of Alexandria had opened her eyes. To what the smoke might contain.
Yet in her heart, she was still a Sakje girl, and she did not doubt that the visions and pathways of the smoke were true ones, even if she understood the agency of the smoke better than others. So she lay curled on the floor of Nihmu's smoke tent, sometimes raising the flap to draw a breath of fresh, sweet air, but mostly breathing deep of the pungent stuff, like burning pine boughs but somehow more deep.
For a long time, the smoke only reduced her pain, but then… she was standing on the sea of grass in summer, and a red wind played among the ripe seed heads of the grass, so that ripples moved and swayed – the time of year when the Sakje said that the grass was alive.
And she saw Samahe's yurt standing exactly where it stood in the waking world, but there were no other yurts and no horses, only the single structure. And in the centre of Samahe's yurt there stood a tree, and that tree filled the yurt and rose through the smoke hole and away into the heavens.
And at the base of the tree stood a dead man, his bone arms crossed over the white ribs of his chest, his bony rump leaning on the tree, so that even in death he conveyed both impatience and arrogance.
It was not Melitta's habit to be afraid, in the world of waking or in the spirit world, and she walked up to the dead man. 'Why do you wait, dead man?' she asked.
The skull of the dead man laughed, a hollow sound. 'For you,' he said.
'Do I know you?' she asked, and then, feeling a prick of fear, 'Did I kill you?'
'Do my bones still bear the meat and gristle of life, girl? Your dead still seek the tree, and their bones still seek to lose the meat of life. They would make a worse sight than me.'
Melitta found a skull impossible to read.
'What do you want? This is my dream!' she insisted.
'You have walked far from the people, that you can argue with a spirit guide. Do you still speak the tongue of the people in your head? Because all I hear from you is Greek.' The skull smiled – but the skull always smiled.
'I speak Sakje!' she insisted, but even as she said the words, they came from her mouth in Greek, and she watched them form into Greek letters and float towards the skeleton and the tree. A bony hand rose and waved them away, as if they were insects in high summer.
'Not really,' the skeleton said. 'You know the words, but not the way.'
'Am I supposed to climb the tree?' Melitta asked.
'You? All I see here is a Greek girl who can kill men.' The skull's hollow laughter rang out.
Melitta stepped up closer to the self-professed spirit guide. 'My father was a Greek man, and he climbed the tree. I wonder if you are a guide. Not all spirits in the world of dreams are beneficent.'
The skeleton shook with the force of its laughter, and her dream rang with it, like a gale on the plains. 'Get hence, usurper!' he roared. 'I came to warn you, but you have failed the test.'
Melitta didn't flinch. 'I need no more tests,' she said. 'Be gone, spirit, before I break your bones.'
She awoke with a foul taste in her mouth and a pounding in her head, as if her temples were the tight- stretched skin of a drum and the drummer's sticks beat her head in time to the pulsing of her heart.
Nihmu was weeping.
Melitta curled around her and stroked her forehead. 'What's wrong, Auntie?'
Nihmu rose suddenly, throwing Melitta back against the leather cushions on the floor. 'Nothing!' she said. 'There is nothing wrong. I saw many spirit guides, and I have received much news. I must think.'
Melitta's head hurt too much to ask further questions. She let Nihmu go, and then she breathed deeply of the fresh, cold air outside the tent. Her headache was banished in minutes and she knelt in the new snow outside, collecting the cushions, stripping the brazier and dumping the coals to hiss and steam in the snow. Then she knocked down the hide tent and folded it quickly, before it grew too cold and stiff.
All of these things, she realized in putting them away, were Samahe's, not Nihmu's. She took them back to Samahe's yurt.
The Sakje woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her lodge, working by the light of two Greek lamps. She was weaving thongs through small bronze scales, repairing an armour shirt.
This was work that Melitta knew well from her youth, and she sat down with the other woman and began to cut a leather thong from a patch of caribou hide, holding the tough hide in her teeth and cutting with a sharp knife. They worked in silence because both women had their mouths full. After some time, Samahe spat out the last of her thong. 'You took smoke?' she asked.
Melitta gave a wry smile. 'It took me, more like.' She started a new thong, cutting the edge of the hide carefully. A skilled man, or woman, could make a single thong many horse-lengths long, all a single thickness. Melitta wasn't that good, but she was pleased to see that her thong was not like a child's, full of knots and bumps. She still had skill.
Samahe nodded. 'I don't like the smoke any more,' she said. 'When I was a maiden, the smoke was good. Now it brings me only dreams of all the men I have killed.' She shrugged. 'The last few years, I have killed many and many.' She did not say this with the pride of a warrior, but merely with weariness.
'I met a guide,' Melitta said. 'Or a demon. He barred me from the tree and mocked me as a Greek.'
Samahe's eyes met hers. 'I wouldn't share that with other people,' she said.
Melitta shrugged. 'It makes no sense,' she said. 'My father was Greek. By all accounts, he seldom even accepted that he was baqca. Yet no spirit guide ever blocked him from the tree!'
'That is Greek talk,' Samahe said. 'The spirits do as they do, and it is not for us to question.'
'Bah,' Melitta said. 'That is tyranny. It is illogical.' Even as she spoke the Greek word, she understood how deep this conflict would run, and it made her angry. 'I am Sakje!' she said.
Samahe looked up from her work. 'I don't doubt it, lady. Do not let any other of the people doubt it, either.' She chewed on the thong for a dozen heartbeats, softening the stuff. Then she leaned forward. 'And Nihmu?' she asked.
'I couldn't say,' Melitta answered. 'She mentioned many spirit guides.'
Samahe shook her head. 'Why must she be baqca?' she asked. 'She cursed the gift when she had it, and rejoiced when it left her. Where is her mate? Why has she returned?'
Melitta was used to the gossip of women. She enjoyed it when it was well meant, and she judged Samahe's comments as kindly. 'Her mate is captive to Eumeles at Pantecapaeum.' She took the hide from her mouth. 'But it is many years and she has no child, and in Alexandria, we wondered if the lack of a child was weighing on her.'
And then, unbidden, thoughts of what she had seen between Nihmu and Coenus on the trail came to her, and she frowned.
Samahe shook her head. 'I don't think she should have returned,' she said. The next day, Melitta sat in another yurt with Tameax, the youngest baqca she had ever met. Nihmu had refused to come.
'You are no older than I am,' Melitta said, after clasping his hand and sitting down. She saw that he had a fine drum – indeed, it looked to her to be Kam Baqca's drum, an artefact from her youth, with tiny iron charms hanging all around the rim. He tapped it idly with a long bone as he looked at her.
'I am older than you by a number of cycles,' he said with a smile. 'But I won't expect you to believe it.'
'Really?' she asked.
'I have not always been a man. At least, I think I can remember being a fish.' He shrugged and smiled.
Melitta laughed. 'Most men claim to have been some great and noble animal, like an eagle or a bear.'
'Most men are liars,' he said.
'Perhaps, by claiming to have been a small thing, you seek to disarm me into believing other things,' Melitta drawled. He had deep cushions, leather ones filled with horsehair, and she allowed herself to slip back on to them. In a curious way, it was like debating with Philokles.
'You are not like a Sakje,' he said. 'Your brain runs like a river that has many channels.'
'I have been in many places,' Melitta said. 'Yet I am a Sakje.'
