give?'
Melitta wondered. Scopasis was no ordinary killer. Two days had sufficed to teach her that.
No time to consider him now. 'Stay here,' she said to the boy. The last thing she needed in a parley with the biggest clan on the steppes was one of their own angry exiles at her side.
She collected Nihmu and Coenus, Ataelus and Samahe by catching their eyes, each in turn, and then she cantered Gryphon down the hill, snow flying around her, until she reached the tall blonde woman who sat under the Grass Cat banner in a scarlet cloak of Greek wool, trimmed in ermine. She looked like a queen. At her side sat a man who could rival Coenus for his Hellenic stubbornness, in a Thracian cloak and wool chiton, boots and no trousers.
Urvara didn't hesitate, but pushed her horse forward and embraced Melitta as soon as she picked her out – and then the queenly woman embraced Nihmu with the same savagery.
'Eumenes!' Melitta said. Eumenes was a fixture of her childhood – and her adolescence. 'Aren't you supposed to be in the field with Diodorus?' Only after she said the words did she realize that she hadn't spoken Greek for a month.
Eumenes laughed. 'I might ask you the same! I feel like a slave sent to fetch the master's truant boy from the agora. Sappho sent me!'
Urvara looked at them both. 'There will be time for this later. Melitta, none here will stand against your claim. I will put my hands in yours this minute – but why would you not come to me?'
Melitta took both of Urvara's hands – hard and soft, like Samahe's and her mother's. 'I do not want war with Marthax,' Melitta said. 'I want him to give me his title without war.' Melitta shrugged. 'He hates you.'
Urvara shook her head. 'Bah – Marthax and I have cooperated well enough for ten years, although there is little love between us.'
Melitta brushed snow from her hood. 'If I arrive at his camp with a thousand horses, he will have no choice but to fight. If I arrive with fifty horses, he will talk.'
Urvara shook her head. 'No, my dear. I'm sorry – but no. He'll just kill you and hide the body. He is not the man he once was.'
'And yet you say you cooperate,' Melitta shot back.
'He cooperates with me because he needs my warriors. My tribe has grown – thanks to my Eumenes and his Olbians, we are rich, we have children and we grow.' She reached out a hand, and Eumenes took it.
Melitta shook her head in frustration. 'So?'
Ataelus shrugged. 'For riding,' he said in his usual broken Greek. 'For snowing.' Ataelus pointed at Urvara's escort, fifty knights in full armour. 'Not enough for making war, but enough for making peace,' he said, his pronunciation of eirene almost comical.
Eumenes nodded. 'Marthax won't dare murder you with us as bodyguards,' he said.
Melitta couldn't help but feel relieved. 'Let's ride, then!'
They camped that night on the Borysthenes, just twenty stades from the battlefield at the Ford of the River God. There was wood aplenty.
Eumenes watched with Melitta as the camp went dark. Tonight, there was no question of her breaking wood. Her status had changed again with the addition of Urvara.
'How do you come to be here?' she asked him in Greek.
Eumenes snuggled deeper into his cloak. 'I was wounded in the summer fighting and Diodorus sent me back to Alexandria with his dispatches. It was all luck – I arrived to find you and Coenus two weeks gone, and a letter from Lykeles asking me to come to Olbia if I was available. I was – so I followed you out.'
Coenus appeared as if cued by his name. He had killed a buck and the dead animal was roped to the rump of his horse. 'What did Lykeles need?'
Eumenes grinned. 'Me. He's been archon three times, as has Clio. And Urvara wanted me home.' He smiled. 'I doubt I'll campaign again, Coenus. I'm archon of Olbia.'
Coenus grinned back and embraced the younger man. 'Your father's dream,' he said.
'My father was a traitor,' Eumenes said. There was little bitterness in the statement, just cold fact.
Coenus shrugged. 'He sought power and failed.' Coenus shook his head. 'The wheel turns, eh?'
Eumenes shook his head. 'Not far from here, Kineas taught me to fall off a horse without hurting myself.'
'We should ride to the battlefield tomorrow,' Coenus said. 'We should make a sacrifice.'
Eumenes brightened. 'That is a noble idea,' he said.
'I'm a noble man,' Coenus answered. He laughed.
Melitta watched them with pleasure. 'He's still here, for you, isn't he?' she asked Coenus.
But Eumenes answered. 'Every day. He formed us – really, he formed all of us. I hear him in your voice – sometimes in Urvara's. He made her the lady of the Grass Cats, just by refusing to accept her contenders. He made me a troop commander. He made Petrocolus the head of the Kaloi in Olbia. His hand is still on every part of our lives.'
Melitta felt tears fill her eyes. 'That. I know all that. But it is in the way you mock each other – and yourselves.'
Coenus nodded. 'Odd, as we seldom teased him. But true, nonetheless. You are wise.'
'I'm working on it,' Melitta said. Over dinner they agreed to go together to the battlefield and offer sacrifices at the shrine and the trophy, despite the weather. Tameax felt that such respect for the past would please the spirits, and Coenus insisted the Greek gods and heroes would have the same opinion.
The next day they were up early, the wet yurts stripped off their poles in the dark and made into ungainly bundles. Horses struggled to drag the travois made of tent poles, and Coenus led a party of hunters away upstream before the last animal was packed. He returned in the first light of dawn with another buck on a spare horse, and with a pair of goats in baskets from the Sindi village at the river bend.
'There wasn't a village there twenty years ago,' he said to Eumenes, who was adjusting his girth next to Melitta in the early light.
Eumenes yawned and shook his head. 'No. In another generation, this valley will be full.'
'The Sindi must be breeding like rabbits,' Coenus said.
Urvara laughed bitterly. 'Perhaps,' she said. 'But many of those 'Sindi' are my people, settling down to farm the soil. Sky people making themselves dirt people.' She sighed. 'It has always happened, but never in such numbers.'
It was mid-morning when they arrived at the shrine. Melitta had heard all her life about the great battle at the ford, but now Eumenes and Samahe, Urvara and Ataelus, Nihmu and Coenus rode her through it as if she had been a participant.
'Here, Kam Baqca rode to glory!' Samahe said, and Nihmu wept. Melitta noticed that Tameax writhed at the mere mention of the great shaman. Samahe didn't notice, or didn't care. 'She and her knights were like an arrow of gold, and they cut the Macedonians the way that an arrow enters a caribou, and the beast runs on, seeming to be alive, when really it is already dead.'
And later, Coenus showed them on a field of snow how the last charge of the Greeks and the Sakje had folded the Macedonian flank, so that when Srayanka cut her way through the ford she met Kineas in the middle of the field.
'We penned them against the river, and killed them until the sun slunk away to avoid the smell of death,' Ataelus sang. It was a Sakje epic. Most of the other warriors knew it, and they sang it as the sun rose.
'Bah!' Coenus said. 'Philokles must have stood just here.' His voice cracked a little. 'Really, honey bee, your father always said that Philokles won the battle. He and his young men held one of the Macedonian taxeis for an hour – maybe more. With their bare hands.'
At the trophy, raised by the old shrine to the River God, Olbia had built a marble altar with a relief of a man on horseback and another of a set of arms and a shield with the star of Macedon. Coenus smiled. 'Nice,' he said.
Eumenes nodded back, overcome with emotion. 'Lykeles ordered it built. I've never seen it before. It is well done.'
Then they all dismounted. Even Scopasis, who did nothing willingly, slid off his horse. They ringed the Greek altar, and Tameax killed one goat, and Coenus killed the other, and the blood steamed like a new-lit fire that breeds
