'I have seen this same thing in Ataelus,' Tameax said. 'Why do the Greeks think so differently?'
'I wish I had Philokles here to tell you,' Melitta answered, and found her eyes filling with tears. 'He was my teacher, in a kind of learning called 'logic'.' She sat up. 'He spoke at length with Kam Baqca, a whole winter.' She felt it important that he see that the greatest baqca of the current age had approved of the Greek thinking. 'You understand what the Greeks call mathematics?'
'Understand? No. But I know to what you refer.' He smiled at her. 'Did you really kill six Sauromatae?'
She nodded.
He shrugged. 'I will tell the spirits. Some spirits object to you, as an alien. Others call you the daughter of Srayanka. Others say you will kill the people.' He laughed, and he had a clear laugh. 'Spirits are all a little mad – how can they be otherwise, when they are already dead?'
'I met one in the smoke,' Melitta said. Samahe had advised her to keep this to herself.
He leaned forward. 'Yes?'
'A skeleton,' she said.
'Bah – most of them have but naked bones, until you clothe them with your own dreams. Who was he?' The baqca was intensely interested, quivering like an Aegyptian cat watching a mouse in a grain sack.
'I didn't ask.' She shifted uncertainly on the cushions. 'He annoyed me and I threatened him.'
Tameax laughed his clear, silvery laugh. 'You may be Sakje,' he said. He rocked back on his heels and poured herb tea from a kettle on his tripod. 'Nihmu is avoiding me. She is not recovering her powers. Why would she, who had so much power, pretend? All here honour her.'
Melitta felt that she was on dangerous ground. 'She seeks more than honour,' she allowed. 'I'm not sure that I understand her.'
'You treat me as an equal,' Tameax said.
Melitta met his eye. 'How should I treat you?'
Tameax shook his head. 'The people have two ways to deal with me,' he said. 'Some deny that I have power, insisting that I am too young, that I have not given my manhood for power, that I cannot be real. Others treat me as an object of fear. No one treats me as an equal. Yet you, a queen, speak to me as if I am your brother.'
Melitta shrugged.
'Will you treat all the people this way, even when you are the war queen of the Assagatje?' he asked. 'The scar on your cheek says that you could be a hard queen to follow.'
'What is your place in all this?' she shot back.
He nodded, pinching his lips. 'If you become queen, I will become your baqca.' He handed her a cup of tea. 'I seek to know what kind of queen you might be. Ataelus will follow you whatever I say, and my loyalty to him is depthless. So I will not leave your side. I come with Ataelus, his horse and his bow – part of his equipage.' He used the Sakje word that meant the same as the Greek panoply – all the war things. 'You do not fear me, or despise me. This will mean much to me.' He nodded. 'Why will you ride against Marthax, and not to the tribes that will support you?'
Melitta raised her head and looked away from the intensity of his blue eyes, at the hangings behind his head. She thought for a time that seemed to her long. 'There are many reasons, all true, and yet some are more true than others,' she said.
He nodded.
'If I ride to Parshtaevalt or Urvara, I will build an army. In answer, Marthax will also build an army. When armies are built, they fight. Once that battle is fought, it will no longer matter whether I win or I lose, because the people will have split.'
Tameax fingered his wispy black beard. He was remarkably handsome. The remarkable part is that he was a baqca, and they were usually ugly men, or mad ones. He was strictly sane, and had the straight nose and blue eyes of the Medes and the Persians. 'This seems true to me. Did you dream it?'
'No,' she said. She shrugged, wondering why she was being so honest. She'd considered her strategy again and again, and it had occurred to her to tell the people that she had dreamed it, but his eyes disarmed her.
The shadow of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. 'Perhaps I will,' he said. In another man, it would have been an admission of the falsity of his dreams, but that was not how it came from him. 'But there is more.'
'You are – very like my tutor.' She sat up fully and crossed her legs. Then she picked up her tea cup – a beautiful thing of pottery, unlike any other cup she had ever handled. 'If I go to Parshtaevalt, he will advise me. And Urvara – she will advise me. And each will have their own needs and desires and they will quarrel, and I will lose by it. And each will expect my mother – always my mother. When I go straight to Marthax and…' She paused, having almost revealed her entire plan. Not even to this handsome young man. She took a breath. 'When I win him over, I will be queen. By my own hands.'
Tameax nodded. 'Would you take me as a lover, Queen of the Assagatje?'
Melitta felt herself blush. 'No,' she said with real regret. 'Not if you are to be my baqca.'
Now it was his turn to flush – clearly, it was not the answer he expected. 'Maidens seldom refuse me,' he said.
She shrugged, smiling at him. 'Many of your maidens are not queens, I expect,' she said.
'We will see,' he answered. 'I am a patient man. And to be honest, right now we sit in my yurt on a field of new snow, far from our lands, the enemy of every man and horse in the vale of the Tanais, and part of my mind imagines what it might be to be baqca of a queen, but the other says that we will never be anything but a band of brigands, and that you dream big dreams for nothing.'
'This from a baqca?' she asked. She rose to her feet. 'Is the cup from Qin?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said. 'I had four, and now I have but two.'
'Perhaps we will go there one day.' She touched his hand in giving him the cup. 'Nihmu went with Leon.'
'I have been to the grass that laps on the shores of Qin,' he said. 'I would like to go again. Indeed, it was that trip that made me baqca.' He put the cup reverentially into a small lacquer box and then he took her hand. 'You see deeply,' he said.
She took her hand out of his and stepped away. 'You say that to every spear-maiden who comes to this tent,' she said.
His eyes sparkled. 'I do too.'
'Keep it for them and be my friend,' she said.
'The cycle will bring what it brings,' he said.
11
The days after the feast of Aphrodite were full of work. Satyrus heard the views of each of his officers and then made his own decisions, and it was a week after the mad symposium that he briefed them all on how he saw the winter.
'I am going to take the Golden Lotus to Alexandria,' he said. 'My people deserve to know that I am alive. Further, I need money in quantity and counsel. If I'm lucky, Diodorus will be home for the winter. We need our hired Macedonians – as marines first, and then as the core of our army.'
Theron nodded. None of the other officers had any comment to make.
'Theron will go to Lysimachos as my ambassador in the Herakles.' Satyrus was satisfied with the condition of the Herakles. 'We need to choose a crew from our own sailors, Abraham's and any of the captives who will take service with us for the Hornet.'
Diokles nodded. 'Most of them still come around to the warehouse every morning,' he said. 'You paid them. They're like stray cats when you give them a bowl of milk.'
Theron shook his head. 'You threatened to kill them all!' he protested.
Diokles grinned. 'He's got quite the reputation now,' the Tyrian said.
'Daedalus should be here,' Theron said.
