‘Yes,’ Arite said simply. For though she remembered little of the battles she had fought in or the three men she had killed to free herself from the warband, she remembered that feeling of courage – a kind of stillness, it seemed to her. She bore the scars on her cheeks as marks of bravery, for it was cowards or the careless who were wounded in the back. And she had been told by others that she had killed well.
‘You miss the fighting?’
‘No,’ said Arite, for that had been true for as long as she could remember. Then that pain again, the hot sharp touch at the heart, as she remembered how little was left to her. ‘At least, I did not. Now I do not know.’
A pause. Then, hesitantly: ‘Good fighter. Bahadur.’
‘He was. Not as good as you.’
‘No. But who is?’
A point of light at the front of the column drew Arite’s eye – the bright winter sun playing off Kai’s armour. She had always liked to tease Bahadur, to tell her husband he was a fool for letting a handsome man like Kai into his tent, and there was a shadow lifted from Kai now that he wore the captain’s mark. About the fires at night, she had heard the whispers spoken by the men and women that he led. That he was touched by one god or another, a man who had risen from the dead on the battlefield to lead them to safety. That he was a man who could not be killed. She had heard those whispers, and she knew they would not last.
‘The others do not know, do they?’ she said. ‘About Kai, and his father. Your father.’
‘No.’
‘Will you tell them?’
A pause. ‘No.’
‘Will you make peace with him?’
Another snort. ‘No.’ Laimei tossed her head, like a dog seeking to calm itself. She stirred her horse forward, but turned back as she went to speak once more. ‘Watch him,’ she said.
‘I will. I understand.’
‘No. You don’t. He does not matter.’ Laimei looked at her brother, and Arite wished that the Cruel Spear was wearing her helm. Then she would not have to see the way she stared at Kai. ‘For Tomyris,’ said Laimei. ‘Watch him for her sake. She loves him, and so he must live. For now, at least.’
She liked to come at him unexpectedly. From behind a horse, her body hidden by its legs. From the shadows beyond the campfire, always waiting for the time when the wine and koumiss had flowed freely, when his head began to droop with drink and tiredness.
Then Kai’s daughter would move from the shadows and pounce on him like a mountain cat, arms wrapping up close about his leg or waist. Or, if she caught him sitting, she would loop her arms about his neck and hook her heels about his body like a wrestler. She was already practising the warrior’s art, the way all the children fought and brawled with one another. Or perhaps it was that she had grown tired of seeing him ride away all those years, seeing him choose when he would come back to her. She would fight on her own terms now, it seemed. She was the one to choose.
And always he would roar until she shrieked, stumble and stagger like an ogre lamed by the quick sword of a hero. He would prise her loose and spin her in his arms, but always be sure to carry her away to some quiet corner of a tent, a warm place beside the fire where they might talk softly and freely. For always he knew that she only hunted him when she wished to speak. Often, it was the child’s talk – of hunger, of stories, questions of the past. But sometimes they spoke of other things.
Perhaps it was the sixth night they had travelled together, curled up close to the fire and staring at one another in silence. For he felt no need to talk – for him, it was enough to see her, to hold her close, to know that as long as she lived his life held purpose and meaning. But at last, she spoke.
‘The other children talk,’ she said.
‘Of what?’
‘Of you.’
‘I am sure they do.’ He hesitated, feeling once more the catch about the heart that always comes with shame. ‘Are they cruel to you, my love?’
‘No. Only one or two.’ She made to speak again, then turned her head away, scratched restlessly at her scalp.
‘Do not pick like that little one, you shall hurt yourself.’ His hands fell to her hair, shifting and parting and stroking, as he might have calmed a frightened horse after a storm upon the plains. ‘They are cruel to me, though?’ he said.
She nodded, but did not answer.
‘Why do they not speak more loudly then, and tell the others?’
‘They are frightened of her.’
‘As well they should be.’ Kai chuckled to himself. ‘But you are not, are you?’
‘I am not a fool, like them. She would not hurt me.’
‘No, she would not. She loves you, as I do.’
‘Would she hurt you?’
He scratched at his beard, and thought it over. ‘I do not know. If she thought that I had earned it.’ He shrugged. ‘She saved my life. So it seems she does not wish me harmed.’
‘She will teach me to fight. She promised me that.’
‘Not for a long time, child.’
A forbidden and shameful thought came to him then. If it were the end of their people, she would not have to fight. She might remain a true child, untouched by the killing, all the way up to the end. For that was the sweet sadness of the Sarmatian mother and father – to raise every child a killer.
She nestled closer to him, a lazy smile on her face.
‘What is it that makes you smile, my love?’
‘I like my father being a captain,’ she said, as haughty as any princess of the plains.
He laughed then, but there was a catch in his throat as he did.
‘When will we find the others?’ she asked.
‘Soon.’
‘What shall we do then?’
‘I do not know,’ he said, even as his fingers touched the captain’s mark on his armour, and felt a piece of it flake away under his nails.
It was on the next day that Kai saw it – once more, the smoke rising into the air. But it was not the black smoke of a burning village that rose on the horizon, nor the sign of some little band of travellers, but many twisting strands of grey smoke all joining together. Soon they could smell the scent of cooking fires, the rich tang of hemp. All the signs of a great gathering ahead of them, such as was rarely seen upon the plains.
The songs were echoing freely amongst his company, then. Not the kind of music that had so often been their trail companion – the sweet soft death songs of those in a battle against hopeless odds, the keening chords of those mourning for the lost. He listened to them sing out the bawdy tunes of drink and lovemaking, the hard proud stories of long-lost heroes. For though they rode in the twilight of their people, they knew too what those fires meant, that the night had not yet fallen fully.
And when the ground turned once more, and they saw what lay before them, a great, ragged cheer broke from both companies of riders. For it was not the ordered camp of the Romans, nor one of the distant townships of which their traders spoke, where the Naristi and the Buri gathered to trade wine and silk for horses. It was a careless and wandering encampment of the Sarmatians, the horses and caravans scattered across the plain and gathered by the banks of a river, the great mountains looming high above them and guarding against the killing wind. The old winter campground of their people – abandoned long before when their grandmothers had sought to build villages and learn the art of the plough, but alive once more, out there upon the horizon. For it seemed that all the tribes had been driven eastwards by the Romans, leaving their burned homes behind them.
An order and discipline was there, but paired with the art of the steppe, like a twisted tree that has curved its shape against the wind. A greater gathering than any that had been seen for generations, for already at a distance they could see the different banners that marked the people of all Five Clans – it seemed that most of their people had fled to this place on the eastern borderlands. Old barrows ringed the camp, burial grounds from the old times, from when their first people had crossed the mountains and come to this place from Scythia and the great Sea of Grass that lay beyond. They would have the counsel of the dead as well as the living, to decide what must be done next, and how their people might survive.