There was a commotion at the edge of the darkness beyond the fire. Hoof beats, and shouting.
'We will talk of this later,' Melitta said.
'Where is the lady?' a rider asked, and more hoof beats in the dark.
Melitta raised her voice. 'Here!' she shouted, and even as she called, Coenus drew his sword and stepped between her and the rider.
'You trust too easily,' Coenus said.
The rider stayed clear of the sword. 'I am your sworn man,' he said. 'Lady, the camp at Tanais is under attack – Eumeles' men are landing from ships!'
'What is this?' she asked.
'A taxeis of Eumeles' foot soldiers landed from ships,' he said. 'We surprised them on the beach and killed dozens, but they drove us back into the fort.'
Melitta shook her head to clear it. 'Get me my chiefs,' she said.
Coenus sheathed his sword. 'Artemis stand with us. They can't have enough men to take the fort – we left half a thousand farmers to hold it.'
Parshtaevalt came up first, tying his sash. 'The farmers won't hold unless they know we are coming,' he said. 'The dirt people don't expect to fight alone – and who can blame them?'
'How close are we to Upazan?' Melitta asked Ataelus when he came.
He looked at Samahe. She shrugged. 'We haven't found a single rider in the high ground,' she said.
Ataelus shrugged. 'I think it was a mistake to attack his riders at the end of winter,' he admitted. 'But they were under my hand, and I took them.'
'So Upazan has slipped away,' Melitta said.
'Back to the sea of grass north of the Hyrkanian Sea,' Coenus said. 'To raise his own army, I suspect.'
All of the tribal leaders nodded.
'And he'll return when he wants, on his own terms,' Urvara said. 'While we have to fight to defend the farmers, he'll hit us as he likes.'
'And Eumeles can play the same game with his ships. If we rush to every town he threatens, he'll sail away.' Coenus smacked his open palm with his fist.
Graethe scratched at his moustache. 'What do we do, then? You Greeks are good at this sort of war – many fields, and many foes. Me, I want to ride, to feel a foe under my iron.'
Melitta poked the fire with a stick and then recalled her pose as the unflappable queen. 'We will have to relieve the fort at Tanais,' she said. 'How many soldiers were there?' she asked the Sindi rider.
He shook his head. 'Many,' he said.
'A thousand?' Coenus asked. 'How many ships?'
'Many,' the boy said. 'I was sent to find the queen, and no one told me to count the ships.'
'Let's say he sent half his fleet – forty ships. At most, one taxeis of pikemen – perhaps with the best of the oarsmen as peltastai.' Coenus spat on the grass. 'I'm tired of being cold all the time,' he said, as if this was germane.
Parshtaevalt laughed. 'You are unchanged by the passing of years,' he said.
'How could Eumeles be on us so fast?' Urvara asked.
Melitta shook her head. 'It takes too long to move troops – and ships,' she said. 'This is some planned movement that we have interrupted.'
'What if the rest of his army is coming behind?' Graethe said.
'We must relieve the fort,' Melitta said again. 'If we fail to save these farmers, the others will never trust us again.'
And just like that, her notion carried. The chiefs walked off into the dark to ready their warriors to turn around in the morning.
'Why are you so angry?' Coenus asked. 'They obey – better than they obeyed Satrax, as I remember.'
'There is more to life than being obeyed,' she said.
She heard Scopasis laugh, close at hand. 'People laugh,' she said. 'I seldom laugh any more. My mother never laughed, and now I know why.'
'Then perhaps you know why I, an aristocrat, refuse to command,' Coenus said.
'I need you,' she admitted, looking up at him. '
I'll see what I can do with Nihmu,' he answered. The next morning, they rode back south, and the ground it had taken them seven days to cover was dryer, the mud hardened to dirt, and by the evening of the fourth day, their outriders were skirmishing with foragers from the enemy camp. The Sakje went right in among them, killing the mercenaries and driving the survivors back over the damp ground into their camp.
Melitta went with Temerix, despite the advice of her chiefs. Coenus forced her to take Scopasis as a bodyguard, and together they rode with Temerix's warband on their stout ponies. Then they took their bows, slung their axes and moved forward carefully, staying in the trees on the high ridges. Below, in the valley's fields and meadows, she could see the horsemen moving, cutting off parties of Greek soldiers and shooting them full of arrows. There were burning farmhouses throughout the Tanais Valley. The sight sickened her, as if her valley had a deadly disease that had transmitted itself to her blood.
Four hours they walked the ridges, and never saw an enemy except in the valley below, and Temerix grunted every time he saw a devastated farmstead. And while they never saw an enemy, Temerix's men found dozens of farmfolk, Sindi and Maeotae, living in small caves or dirt hollows where they'd fled the depredations of the enemy.
Melitta wanted to weep at every group of them. They reached out to touch her, and she smiled for them instead, and told them that it would be all right.
And then they moved on – closer and closer to the enemy camp. By afternoon, the camp was visible, just a few stades from her mother's city on the bluff. They were camped at the foot of her father's kurgan, in a big rectangle of earth and wood stakes.
She lay with the Sindi smith, on earth still wet enough to soak through her clothes and armour, and watched the gates of the camp. There were two, and both were guarded. Parties of the enemy were coming down both roads to get in their camp as quickly as possible.
Temerix nodded. 'Now we fight,' he said.
Unlike her other chiefs, he didn't ask her permission. He spoke in Sindi, and men jumped to do his bidding. He turned to her. 'Go to kill Greeks,' he said. 'You?'
She got to her feet, adjusted her gorytos and her akinakes, and nodded. 'Me too,' she said.
Temerix's eyes flicked over to Scopasis and back to her. 'Loose five arrows and run,' he said. 'Understand?'
Scopasis nodded.
Melitta nodded. It was not her first ambush, but Temerix had no way of knowing that.
'I shoot first arrow,' Temerix said. And then he was off, running down the hillside.
The Sindi were fast on rough ground – as fast as horsemen, or even faster, at least for short bursts. And their progress was eerie – almost inhuman, as she had to watch them carefully not to lose them in the scrub and tree cover of the hillside. Their ragged cloaks and dun colours vanished against the valley's spring green.
The soldiers on the road were too fixated on the horsemen behind them. They were well formed, and they held together, but they had no flank guards and no advance party – just sixty men under a senior file-leader, moving at a jog back along the road, with another twenty light-armed men – peltastai, probably rowers from the fleet, armed only with javelins and knives.
Temerix had chosen to catch them on the same stretch of road where Melitta had had her first taste of combat, all those years before. Where her brother had saved Coenus. Where Theron had proven to be a friend. It seemed odd, to be fighting on the same ground again, as if her life was going around some sort of loop.
She put herself behind an oak so big that she and Scopasis wouldn't have been able to encircle it with their arms. She could hear the Greeks on the road.
'Give me a hand up,' she said quietly.
Scopasis frowned, but then he made a stirrup and she stepped up into his hands, on to his shoulder and up into the tree's first big joint. Her guess was that the Greeks saw nothing but the mounted Sakje pursuing them.
