Samahe's greatest contribution was the salve she had for riding sores, and the discipline she brought to changes of clothes. Samahe travelled with two pairs of trousers and two coats, and every time they crossed a stream, she stopped, stripped and changed, drying the wet pair on the rump of her packhorse. Melitta learned that women nomades needed to take special care of themselves to avoid the sort of sores she had, and worse. She learned a great deal from travelling with Samahe, and the best of it was that Samahe taught her without comment or superiority.
They found two more of the war parties before they caught Ataelus, and when they found him, he too had been collecting the outriders, so that together they had a polyglot force from all the people of almost a thousand riders.
Melitta embraced Ataelus for almost as long as Samahe did, and before he could tell her his news, she called a council of all the leaders present, and they stood around a fire on the first warm evening while young men and women sketched their patrols in the soft black earth and bragged of their deeds. Thyrsis told his tale well, as usual, and his hair gleamed in the firelight, and Melitta thought he was the handsomest man among the Sakje. And she saw Tameax, who smiled and frowned when he saw her.
Two girls – Grass Cat girls, bent on mischief – had ridden to within sight of the old fort that Crax had once manned on the great inland sea that some called the Kaspian and others the Hyrkanian. There, on the good grass north of the fort, they had counted four thousand riders – or more.
'Counting so many riders is hard,' the eldest girl admitted. 'Always my father asks me to count the stars. Now I know why.'
A clump of boys came forward. They had seen Upazan and his golden helmet, they said. 'Breyat died,' one said. 'He was my friend. We saw them Sauromatae and they saw us, and we ran, and ran, over the grass, but Breyat's horse stumbled and he died.'
There were dozens of such reports and the more recent were the most detailed.
When the last scout, the last far-riding girl, had told her story, Ataelus rose. 'Upazan is coming into the high ground with his whole strength,' Ataelus said. 'Ten thousand warriors, more or less. Five times that number of horses. The grass is green, the ground is hard and now he comes.' Ataelus grinned. 'He is already too late. All the farmers are in the forts. All the grain is stored or burned.' Ataelus bowed to Melitta. 'You have already done well against him, lady. Without a saddle emptied, he must march into a desert.'
'A desert with green grass,' Melitta said.
Ataelus grinned, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. 'Green grass is good for a night or two, eh? But not if you have to sit in one place more than a day. Then the horses eat all the grass. Then you need grain.'
Buirtevaert nodded. 'And if we had ten days without rain,' he said, 'we could burn the grass.'
'Aye!' a dozen voices shouted.
'Aye!' Ataelus said. 'That would be the end of Upazan's campaign. Eight years ago, he gambled everything on catching us unprepared, and he succeeded. Upazan thinks that the Sakje are soft. He hears that we live in the valleys, that we winter in houses. He caught us sleeping by the fire in the year of the flood, and he thinks to do it again.' Ataelus nodded, as if to himself.
'This time, we have all the people on this side of the Borysthenes, and we are one people,' he said.
'We will have a great battle,' Scopasis said.
Thyrsis punched a fist in the air. He and Scopasis were suddenly friends – an unexpected development.
Melitta looked around. They were all so – male. 'I don't want a great battle,' she said. 'I want to bore Upazan to death. I want to worry him like a pack of wolves with a buck in winter. I want to chew on him like worms on a corpse.'
Ataelus grinned. 'That is your father's way!' he said. He turned to the others. 'Many of you are too young to have been at the Ford of the River God. Kineas and Marthax – they pulled in harness, those two, whatever happened afterwards.'
Melitta knew a good political speech when she heard one. Ataelus was wooing the Standing Horses by catering to their version of events.
'Together, they bled the Greeks, killing every straggler, taking their food, burning the grass. When we fought, their horses were like caribou in the last of winter.' Ataelus looked around, and every leader nodded with him. 'Melitta is right. No battle – or only a battle to finish the buck when the wolves have brought him down.'
Buirtevaert raised a hand, but Graethe, his chief, interrupted. 'Ataelus, none here will doubt you – or the lady. But it is only three hundred stades down the Tanais River to the fort. Not much distance to bleed the buck. Not like the great sea of grass.'
Ataelus scratched his chin. 'You are right. But once he is on the river valley and over the high ground where the last of the sea of grass rolls, every tree will hide one of Temerix's archers. The valley is full of our dirt people, and they have bows.'
Melitta rose to her feet. 'It is true. If Upazan comes down the Tanais – and I pray he does – then every stade will pull him deeper into our nets. You see a war of horses, because you are horsemen, but this will soon be a war of farmers, a war where a flight of arrows flies from a stand of trees – and what can the Sauromatae do? Ride in among the trees?'
'Temerix's boys would reap them like wheat!' Gaweint said.
'When do we start?' Scopasis asked.
'Now,' Melitta said, and Ataelus gave her a nod. 'Tonight. We will move tonight while we have the moon, and ambush them as they march in the morning.' Melitta lay by Gryphon in the wet grass, cold, miserable and as nervous as she'd ever been, and worried that the enemy might actually hear the beating of her heart. And it wasn't her first ambush by a long shot. She remembered lying in a hole of her own scraping near Gaza – remembered waiting for the Sauromatae in the snow, just a few valleys away.
Gryphon's eyes were open, his ears pricked, intent. Off north, a bird circled.
Melitta rolled her head in a slow circle, feeling the pain as her head passed the same point – over and over. Then she flexed her fingers in the dead man's gloves, trying to warm them.
The wet grass had soaked through every layer she was wearing. How did these people do this, again and again? She wanted to raise her head, wanted to do something. She wondered if her bowstring was wet. She wondered if she looked foolish, lying in long wet grass with her household knights all around her. I'll bet my mother never worried about looking foolish, she thought.
She heard them a long way off. Curiously, the first thing she heard was the dogs barking among the wagons, and then she heard the jingle of harnesses – the Sauromatae were great ones for chain-bits and cheekpieces, both of which made noise.
This was Ataelus's battle. She was barely a commander – she'd given permission for it and then he'd done all the rest. It stood to reason – this was his ground, where he'd led his band for five years, where he knew every fold and every hill. And the site was magnificent – a gentle bowl with knife-sharp ridges rising high and clear, the last high grass before the trees started at the great bend of the Tanais. The trees provided them with somewhere to run, and the tiny folds of the hills, each a dozen horse-lengths from the next, allowed Ataelus to hide a thousand riders in ground that appeared to be as empty as a tabletop.
Ataelus's plan depended on enemy arrogance. He assumed that Upazan would have few outriders, and they would mainly be on the trade road – after all, this was ground that the Sakje hadn't contested against the Sauromatae in five years. And Ataelus had ordered that when they attacked, they should kill everything – everything. Every animal, every man. This, he said, was not just vengeance. It was the kind of blow they had to deal Upazan to win the war.
As Melitta listened to the sounds approaching, she wondered about Upazan – the man who had killed her father. Her mother had hated him, but never sworn vengeance. She had described him with contempt and yet some admiration. He was a skilled war leader, but a bad, greedy king, who ruled more by fear than by love.
While she had the image of her mother's stories of Upazan in her head, she saw a rider cross her own small ridge. He was no Upazan. He was – she was – a mere scout.
Not so arrogant. This one is far from the road and right in among us!
The girl was riding without seeing, letting her horse do the work as the beast picked its way down the slope towards Melitta's knights. Already, the horse was sniffing the air.
Melitta got her bow out of the gorytos by her side and thanked Artemis that she had lain on her right side. Gryphon twitched and the Sauromatae horse pricked its ears.
