they sang as they came.
The Maeotae farmers came out to line the roads to greet them. The roads were swampy, and women cursed the cold mud on their legs, but they cheered as Ataelus rode by.
Ataelus dismounted by Melitta and embraced her. 'You remember Temerix?' he asked.
Temerix was the same – a figure of menace. He was older but no smaller. He had a new scar on his face. 'I hear you cut a path to us,' the smith said. 'I was behind you two days – they were too thick, and I had to ride away.' He laughed, and it was a fell sound. 'But I raised the northern valleys,' he said. He pointed at the men behind him. 'Upazan's tax collectors won't be riding home.'
'And – Lu?' Melitta asked. Lu was another fixture from her childhood – her nurse, her confidante. Temerix's wife from far to the east.
'Lu sends her love,' Temerix said. 'Love' sounded odd in his mouth. But he smiled, and years fled from his face. 'By all the gods, Srayanka's daughter, we will have good times now.'
Melitta hugged Ataelus again. 'I worried you were gone so long,' she said.
'Upazan's men were already in the high ground when I found the smith,' he said. 'They thought that we had fled! Hah! The ground is strewn with corpses.' He looked to the side. 'Coenus is wounded.'
'That is hard news. He is – the captain of my guard.' She almost said the man I trust the most.
'He is forming the men of the upper Tanais into a militia,' Ataelus said in Sakje. 'The wound is not so bad.'
Melitta chewed on her hair. 'We have a secure base, and grain,' she said. 'As soon as the ground is dry, let us ride up the valley and see what Upazan has.' In private, she worried that Ataelus, Temerix and Coenus had shown her power to Upazan too early. Ten days of spring breezes. Ten days of watching farmers scratch their heads, of watching the more daring lead their oxen into the fields and all but vanish in the rich, black mud, the great beasts scarcely able to walk for the clods adhering like melted cheese to their hooves.
Even when many of the farmers began to plough in earnest, breaking the new soil once, and then again, and a third and even a fourth time before planting their seed, still she waited, because Ataelus was tireless, and Samahe rode the hills with her maidens, and spring came slowly there.
In the valleys, girls danced the spring dances under the trees, and seeds were planted that needed no dirt to grow, and laughter filled the air as the first green shoots leaped from the ground as an answer to Demeter's prayer and Persephone's return. Melitta, who had not thought about sex in five months, felt the pangs of interest, first in one boy, then in another, until the urge of spring was so powerful that she took refuge in being the queen. She began to dress the part, and she put her bodyguard and Urvara, who was in most ways her first minister, between her yearnings and her body.
Even with the knights of her bodyguard, she was short and direct, and she did not encourage discussion.
And then came a day, when the first roses were budding, when the Athenaea had been celebrated, that Ataelus and Samahe pronounced that the ground was hard. Melitta rose to her feet and flicked her riding whip. 'Send for my horses,' she said.
The army was away that day.
They rode with spare horses to hand, a vanguard commanded by Temerix well in advance against ambush and a rearguard trailing well behind the main body against disaster. They took no wagons, and they rode two hundred stades a day or more – even over the high ground.
Melitta made time to ride with the maidens – young women, all painfully younger than she was herself, and she was angered at the loss of youth and freedom. At first they were quiet and foolishly respectful, and then they were boastful and foolishly loud, bragging of the men they would kill and the others they would bed, or playing at sex among themselves, and she resented them.
She also resented Nihmu, who since Coenus's absence had withdrawn more and more into the spirit world, taking smoke every day or more, and speaking of her dreams as if they were the premonitions of her youth. Her assumption of the mantle of a baqca angered some and pleased others, as the tides of tribal politics ran, but Tameax avoided her and refused to lend her a drum or speak her rituals with her.
She confronted Nihmu in the fake privacy of her smoke tent, forcing herself through the deep, rich fumes to speak her mind. 'I need you as a counsellor,' Melitta said. 'I have a baqca.'
Nihmu gave a dreamy smile. 'I will never again lie with a man,' she said, 'and then I will recover all my powers.'
Melitta wriggled out of the tent, enraged, as if the smoke had fed her anger as wood feeds a fire.
Ataelus was gone from dawn until dark, hunting the high ridges. Samahe rode with him. Coenus was still ahead, training farmers in his beloved valley – where he had built the temple to Artemis. Urvara, Parshtaevalt and Graethe each had their own clans and their own factions.
Melitta stopped wanting to weep. She stopped wanting to cry, to fuck, to have friends. In a matter of days, in the same way that she had made herself hard in order to survive, she made herself into the queen – silent, careful and exact. She became the woman she remembered standing silently by her bed in the firelight of the hall – hair wrapped in gold braid-cases, body hidden by the white doeskin jacket with its gold plates and careful caribou-hair embroidery.
Sometimes, while holding her, her mother had wept. Those tears had always puzzled Melitta when she felt them on her cheeks when she was six years old. But now, standing alone, her hair in the same gold braid-cases and her breasts held in the same caribou coat, she felt the same emptiness – she knew it was the same.
'I miss my son,' she said to the wind.
'Where is Satyrus?' she asked the newborn sun.
'Is this all there is?' she asked the new flowers. And the army moved north. At the Temple of Artemis, she allowed herself the luxury of hugging Coenus.
'My apologies, lady,' he said with a deep bow. His left arm was in a sling. 'I took a wound in the first fighting and I thought I might as well recuperate here.'
Melitta had to admit, despite her annoyance with him, that his farmers looked dangerous. They were the only armoured infantry of her whole army, five hundred men in scale armour or heavy leather, with bows and spears and crescent-shaped shields like Thracians. 'You are making them into Greeks,' she accused.
'I'd kill for half a hundred hoplites,' Coenus allowed.
'You are the captain of my guard,' she said, pointedly.
'I am,' he allowed. 'I apologize, lady.'
'Very well,' she said. 'You have trained them. Now let us march. And you can return to your duties.'
He nodded brusquely and took his place, and his men joined the column, kissing their wives, embracing their children and marching away to the north. And that night she pounced on him in the relative privacy of her tent.
'Have you seen Nihmu?' she asked.
'She no longer… has need of me,' Coenus said. He narrowed his eyes. 'Not that you have done anything to help her.'
'I?' Melitta asked. 'I can't even get her to talk. The moment the army halts, she is off her horse, taking smoke. She all but lives in the spirit world.'
Coenus shook his head. 'That is her choice. She wants back the powers that – that I'm unsure she ever had. I can't stomach it. I rode away to leave her.' He raised his head, and Melitta could see the tears. 'I'm sorry, Melitta. I can't watch her kill herself. Send me away again.'
She shook herself. 'You left me because of Nihmu?' she asked sharply. 'Coenus, I am twenty years old, commanding an army of strangers in a land that is often foreign to me.'
'Could have fooled me,' Coenus said. 'They love you.'
'They have no idea who I am. I'm not sure that I know who I am. I will soon be what they make me – the virgin goddess. Artemis come to life. My mother.' She shook with fury. 'And you rode away to avoid the consequences of seducing Nihmu from her husband!'
Coenus stood up. 'I don't have to listen to this,' he said. 'And I didn't seduce her from my friend. Much the opposite.'
'Listen to me! I need you, damn it. But you – you led her astray. Admit it!' Melitta didn't like that Coenus was human – and she didn't like the look on his face now.
'I led her astray?' Coenus spat.
