The girl was lost in a waking dream. A lover? Can anything else cause you to lose yourself so completely? She pitied the girl, even as she rose to her knees.
The girl turned, mouth open.
Scopasis's arrow hit her in the side and Melitta's in the open mouth, and she fell with a dull thump.
Her horse stood over her. After a long moment, it began to crop grass.
Melitta put another arrow on her string. She wasn't cold any more. She looked right and left. Her household knights were crouched by their horses, bows in their hands. Their damp armour glowed in the orange light.
She turned and looked back up the main ridge, trying to see Ataelus. He had woven himself a hide of grass, where he could sit on sheepskins with a whistle in his mouth. Melitta couldn't see him. She hoped he could see her.
The horse started to move and Scopasis flowed forward and caught it before it could climb the little ridge in front of her and alert the enemy. The dead girl's eyes were wide open. She'd fallen with her head against a small rock, and her blue eyes seemed to watch them with the idiot stare of death.
Melitta heard the hooves in front of her and a voice called out. Gryphon twitched again – responding, no doubt, to the Sauromatae voices.
Anything for a few more seconds. Were they close? Far? Had the ambush already failed?
Childhood came to her aid. 'Here I am!' Melitta called in soft Sauromatae. Scopasis flicked her a look – delight in her guile.
A young warrior came over the ridge that covered their front, his horse lunging forward as the boy leaned on his neck, showing off for his girl.
This time all of the household were ready, and he was dead before his horse could pull up. The horse itself took a dozen shafts and fell to its knees, then the animal gave a shrill scream – surprise and agony – and went down.
They froze, as if the horse's death had cast a spell. Again, Melitta tuned her head, looking for Ataelus, listening for his whistle, and there was nothing. Melitta prayed to the Huntress in her head, begging that the slaughter of children be over. Greeks had a horrible myth, where Apollo and his sister slaughtered the children of a woman who had dared to suggest that her children were as beautiful as Leto's. It was on a hundred pots, it was pictured in temples, woven into wall-hangings, engraved on armour – a horrible, horrible story.
Having just killed two children, Melitta loathed it more than ever. Artemis, free me from this burden. Let my next foe be a man, or a woman grown.
Somewhere below them, a bit made a metallic sound and a man gave an order.
How close are they? Melitta wondered.
Her heart pounded against her chest. She wondered how she had managed to be nervous earlier, when the enemy had been out of earshot. Now her hands trembled, and Gryphon kept stirring under her hands.
In front, she heard a woman's voice call out 'I can't find them!' in the tones of a mother.
Artemis! she shrieked in her mind. To kill the mother after the children!
A man's voice answered, saying they were 'up the hill' and there was some rough laughter, and then-
Ataelus's whistle.
She had Gryphon on his feet and she was in the saddle – no idea how she'd got there, reins in hand and bow. All the knights were up and they surged in one line to the top of their ridge and there was the whole of the Sauromatae host at her feet, a sea of horses on the sea of grass.
A row of wagons moved in front of her, pulled by oxen just like Sakje wagons.
Scopasis gave a shrill yell – AIAIAIAIAIA! – and all her knights took it up and they went down the ridge and began killing.
Melitta shot automatically, intent on clearing the wagons as Ataelus had suggested. She shot the drivers and then she rode in close and killed oxen with her long-handled axe. Scopasis kept her knights close, but they left a trail of corpses behind them, and this was not battle. The men Melitta shot had no weapons and some of the bodies were very small.
She closed her heart to it. This was life or death for the Sakje. I am the queen of the Assagatje, she said to herself, and shot down another young mother by a wagon. I am Artemis, and you are not my people.
They ripped through the wagons like a boat cutting through the sea, and to her left and right were the other bands, doing equal execution. Before the sun had risen the width of a finger, the Sauromatae had lost more wealth in people and animals than they could replace in ten years. The Sakje took nothing. They slaughtered. As Ataelus had ordered.
Beyond the chaos of the massacre, she could see the enemy rallying his warriors. They had not been among the wagons, but now they were coming.
Ataelus had ridden in a hundred fights, and his guile was a fathomless ocean compared to most men's. He had prepared ambushes to attack the rescuers, had placed them carefully, and now he released them, so that the first avenging brothers, husbands, sisters, turning to rescue their loved ones, riding blind with hate to the massacre, were caught in the flank and rear, riddled with arrows and driven into the blood-soaked earth to join their families.
Melitta had stopped killing. She allowed Gryphon to pick his way free of all the death, and she leaned from the saddle only to use her axe on a horse that screamed, over and over again, as it dragged its entrails across the ground.
Suddenly Ataelus was at her shoulder. She glared at him, for a moment hating this jolly small Sakje the way she'd never hated Upazan or even Eumeles.
He raised an eyebrow. 'Time to withdraw,' he said. That was all.
'We're winning!' she said, disgusted. Disgusted in a dozen different ways. Perfectly aware that Philokles would say that there was no real difference between this and her private war against the Sauromatae in the winter valleys. None at all.
Ataelus shrugged. 'Always leave an ambush while you are winning,' he said.
'I'll write that down, shall I?' she said.
She rode back among her knights, wishing again that she had a trumpeter. 'Withdraw!' she yelled, and Scopasis came up by her side.
'Here they come!' Gaweint roared, and shot his bow.
Angered, Melitta glanced at Scopasis. His axe was in his hand, red to his elbow, and with it he tried to parry a lance-point that appeared out of the fog of her anger and slammed into the side of her head, twisting her helmet.
Gryphon reared, punching with his hooves, and another blow rang on her back, and then she lashed out with her whip, the only weapon in her hand, and she felt it connect and then she was down, all the breath torn from her body, mouth full of bloody grass. She rolled over – blue sky – and her head rang with pain.
Above her towered a man in a golden helmet, his lance cocked up overarm, and he rammed it down into her gut. The scale coat held the point, even though the blow made her puke and choke, and she managed to roll on her right elbow and pushed, not a thought in her head, pushed, and she was on her knees. She had her akinakes in her hand and she plunged it into the horse's guts and entrails blew out over her face and the horse bounded away. She kept the blade in her hand and ripped the animal from girth to cock, and it stumbled two leaping steps and collapsed, its last effort tearing the weapon from her grasp.
The melee was all around her. She wiped her face, the bronze and silver scales of her hauberk ripping the ordure from her cheeks as she wrestled with her helmet. The chin strap was broken and the helmet was on sideways, which had saved her life from the last blow but now limited her vision too much. It came off and her braided hair fell free.
Golden-helmet was on his feet, limping, and he had a sword and an axe.
She threw her helmet at him – a last act of defiance. He was big, middle-aged, scarred under that magnificent helmet.
'Upazan,' she said. He was much easier to hate up close.
He hesitated on hearing his name. Then he smiled.
Hands grabbed her under her arms, heedless of the scales of her armour coat, and suddenly she was being borne away through the press. Her knights closed in around her, and then she was on Gryphon.
'Oh, my lady, I failed you,' Scopasis cried, and she thought his heart would burst before her, he looked so
