Coenus rubbed his chin. 'Eumenes – how powerful is Olbia these days?'
Eumenes spread his hands. 'I've been archon for a winter,' he said. 'I imagine we can marshal three thousand hoplites and as many psiloi.'
'And for ships?' Coenus asked.
'Eumeles has forbidden us to have a fleet,' Eumenes said. 'So – nothing but a dozen merchant triremes that could be refitted for war.'
Coenus nodded. 'Let me put an idea in your ear,' he said. 'We both know that Satyrus will not sit idle. He'll raise a fleet.'
Nihmu agreed. 'He loves the sea.'
Parshtaevalt made a motion of disgust. 'But it is true,' he said. 'My daughter and her war party found him far down the Bay of Trout, with a ship.' He smiled. 'He made a spear-girl pregnant.'
Melitta blushed for her brother. 'Yes, he loves the sea,' she said. 'Coenus, what is on your mind?'
Coenus laughed. 'Listen to me, the great strategos. Nonetheless – as soon as Eumeles hears of Satyrus's fleet, he'll have to go and face it.'
Urvara nodded. 'Fleets are like armies that way,' she said.
Coenus shrugged. 'So you take every man in Olbia and make a grab for Pantecapaeum,' he said.
Urvara gasped at the boldness, and Eumenes clasped his former phylarch's hand. 'You are a great man, and when Melitta makes you the strategos of all her armies, I hope you remember the little people.' He laughed. 'The risk would be immense,' he said. 'But the gain…'
'By all the gods,' Ataelus said in Greek. He laughed. 'Imagine Eumeles for waking up – for finding no kingdom he is having?' The Sakje chief roared. 'Maybe I'm for staying here, sailing on a ship for Pantecapaeum.' His face grew still. In Sakje, he said. 'But no – I will go where I may find the man himself.'
'Eumeles?' Melitta asked.
'I will kill him,' Ataelus said. 'I was there when he betrayed your mother.'
'I know,' Melitta said. 'But your arrow will have to race mine.' The first two days away from the Borysthenes were the worst, because the weather away from the great river was colder and harsher, and the animals suffered. After the second night, she rode out with Scopasis in the morning and saw rows of dead horses, older beasts who had perished at their pickets in the freezing rain, and others too sluggish to move with them.
The people were pragmatists. They butchered the dying horses and carried the meat, steaming, on the rumps of their horses. Then they moved on, at times riding with their heads down, directly into the ferocious winds of the central plains.
'Fucking wind comes from Hyrkania!' Parshtaevalt yelled.
'Bactria!' Nihmu called back.
Melitta felt dwarfed by the size of her responsibilities – and by the stature of her 'subjects'. Every one of her chiefs had served her mother and father – had ridden east to fight Iskander, had ridden at the Ford of the River God. And she – half their age, veteran of one great battle – was expected to lead them.
On the third day, Marthax's war leaders joined them. She had left them at his camp, with a promise of future obedience, but she had never expected them to come so swiftly. Graethe, now chief of the Standing Horses, rode to her and made the sign of submission, and she took his hands between hers – warm hands – and he swore by the three great Sakje gods to be her man.
'The baqca says that you ride straight to war,' he said. His beard was full of snow, but under the snow there was as much white as black. She could remember him as Marthax's emissary to her mother – a loud young man, capable of violence.
'The baqca is correct,' she said. 'I go to drive Upazan from the Tanais.'
'Good!' Graethe said. 'You promised Marthax a kurgan.'
'We will build to the skies,' she promised. 'When Upazan is driven from the mouth of the Tanais.'
'We have brought him,' Graethe said. He pointed at a travois, dragged by two tired horses.
She looked at the frozen blood on the hides, but there was nothing to be seen of the dead king except a corpse-shaped bundle of furs.
They rode east, across the rising ground, and back to the coast at Hygreis, the first town of Srayanka's eastern kingdom that had been.
The Maeotae greeted them with open arms. Her outriders paid hard gold for grain and she camped for two days. The weather was milder on the shores of the Bay of Salmon.
'The world will be mud in ten days. Or less,' Urvara said.
Melitta nodded, sitting her horse on the high dunes north of the town. 'I know, lady. But from here, we could ride the dunes and the hard sand all the way home.'
Urvara laughed. 'Too easily, I forget that you grew up here. With your foreign words and your face, I forget that you really are one of us. Ride the dunes! The sea road. Inland clans like mine forget these things.'
'I am not the first lord of ten thousand horses to launch an early campaign,' Melitta said.
Parshtaevalt laughed. 'No, you are not. In fact, Satrax did the same to the Getae, with your father holding his hand – after the Getae did the same to us. Oh, how they burned us! We fought that whole war before the grain came in.'
Melitta nodded. 'Four days to Tanais.'
Urvara's horse began to shy at the smell on the wind – roast pork. 'Then?'
Parshtaevalt shook his head at Urvara. 'What do you think? Then we fight.'
Melitta shook her head. 'I don't think so. It will take another ten days of sunshine to make the grass dry enough to ride – maybe twenty. We will build a kurgan for Marthax – next to my father's. And a fortified camp – a base. Food, grain, shelter.'
Graethe laughed. 'The Sakje don't need a shelter,' he said. 'We have four thousand riders. Twenty thousand horses. In less than a month our horses will be fat.'
Melitta shook her head. 'This will not be a war like any other the Sakje have fought,' she said. 'I am young, but I remember that in my youth, my mother alone could lead five thousand riders into the field. Now the whole fighting strength of the royal Sakje – the keepers of the western gate – is ten thousand horsemen. How many Sauromatae are there?'
'Too many,' Urvara said. 'I already miss Ataelus.'
'He'll meet us at Tanais,' Melitta said.
Urvara said nothing. Tanais had stood on a bluff above the river. In her youth, Melitta remembered the hippodrome and the temples – a beautiful marble temple in the Ionian style, dedicated to Athena Nike by her father's friends and Uncle Leon, who had paid for most of it. She remembered the buildings laid out in a neat grid, new and clean, and a statue of her father mounted on a horse, cast in bronze, his sword pointing east at the lands where they had fought Iskander.
It was all gone. The pedestal of the statue – a big marble plinth with scenes from the battles in the east carved around the base – still sat alone at the top of the bluff, but mud and snow covered the scars of burning, and the statue itself was now armour and arrowheads and a thousand other bronze implements.
She sat on Gryphon, his feet planted in the midst of the ruin of her childhood, and all the dreams her parents had shared, and she wept. In some complex way, she hadn't quite believed that Tanais was destroyed until she saw it. She realized that she had awakened that morning, eager to ride, expecting – what? Expecting to find the old freedman in the hippodrome? Bion waiting in his stall?
In a way, it made her job easier. She didn't hesitate to order the top of the bluff scraped clean. The plinth from her father's statue went into the wall that her Sakje constructed, aided by the farmers of the surrounding country. They came in with their grain within hours. She had them build her a granary in the Sindi way – they burned a huge fire to thaw the ground, and then dug the dirt out, digging down many times the height of a man and lining the pit with stones. Then they covered it with a thatch roof, supported by beams floated down the river.
As the Sindi and the Maeotae worked, the Sakje built another great fire on the shore. When the embers began to cool, they dug a tomb chamber deep into the dry dirt, and more logs went into a wooden house in the dirt. They laid Marthax in the house and killed a hundred horses in the trench outside. Every man and woman brought a square of turf, and many of the Sindi and the Maeotae came as well, and the kurgan went up and up.
They had been ten days at Tanais when Ataelus rode in with a hundred riders at his back, and four hundred grim-faced men on ponies with bows and axes. They had Sauromatae ponies and Sauromatae coats of hide, and
