In the days that followed, Arite returned again and again to Kai and Tomyris, bringing what food she could. She watched Tomyris’s eyes growing large in her head, impossibly large, as she grew thinner and thinner. With Kai, she saw the hollowing of the ribs, and, worse yet, the breaking of the will. Of what had passed between him and Laimei, he would not speak.
Piece by piece, she traded away the iron that Kai had brought back from the river. She unlinked the mail shirt and traded its rings for haunches of meat and bowls of blood, gave away the iron-headed Roman spear for honey and milk when Tomyris took a winter fever. It was dangerous work, for out in the camp there were battles between the half-starved and the starving. Sometimes it would be just a pair of men, sometimes a sudden brawl involving half a hundred. The captains would come to end the squabbles, but sometimes they were too slow – the flicker flash of a knife, a gurgling whisper, and a corpse was left laid upon the ground when the bands of warriors were separated, its fresh wounds steaming into the air. One less warrior to face the Romans, throat slit for coveting a rotten scrap of meat from another man.
When the last of the iron was gone, and the winter season was still but half spent, a clearer day came. Brilliant light in the sky, falling through the scattered clouds like golden arrowheads, and no murderous wind. A day with all the feeling of an omen about it, and so Arite took her horse from the herd, and ventured further than she had before. Out beyond where the tented wagons huddled together, past the chieftain’s fire.
All about her, the camp was a place of stillness – the occasional scurrying shadow moving from tent to tent. Figures huddled besides cooking fires, shivering hands outstretched to the flames. It was only at one corner of the campground that one always saw movement. Horses and riders, dressed for war. A great circle scratched into the snow, the ground within it marked and cleared, scored deep with the tracks of horses, the imprints of men thrown down, scattered with flecks of horn and wood from where weapon struck armour. And there the riders moving in the same familiar patterns, over and over and again. The mark of madness, or of desperation.
As Arite drew close, a snap of a lance passed through the air, followed by the wet fall of a body into mud as one rider was knocked from his horse by a blunted spear. Fresh red tassels ran from that weapon, for it was Laimei who turned and circled the horse back to where a boy lay in the mud, struggling to stand in the heavy horseman’s armour. With another tap of the lance she put him on his back once more.
‘Stay down,’ she said. ‘You would be dead from that stroke, and dead men do not rise.’ She looked at the other riders in the circle, who hooted and laughed at the boy upon the ground. ‘Who is next?’
The laughter faded then, for many of those who watched had taken their turn in the dirt, and the rest knew that their time would come soon enough. The riders looked at the ground, and would not meet their captain’s eye.
‘No one?’ Laimei tossed her head. ‘There is one braver than all of you.’ And she pointed towards Arite, stirred her horse towards her, and said: ‘Perhaps one of you will have found your courage when I return.’
‘You flatter me,’ Arite said, as Laimei rode up beside her. ‘I am no captain for you to impress, or a lover to woo. Just one who has come to look on the warriors and remember her youth.’
‘You are not so old. More gold than silver in your hair, and you are more of a warrior than any of them,’ said Laimei, eyeing the other riders with scorn.
Arite found it impossible not to think of her own memories of the warband. A time in her life that was a rushing, teeming, roiling river – a madness, like the love of youth that one can both long for and never want to feel again. ‘They will have to learn fast, then,’ she said. ‘There are not many left to us.’
‘True. And they are shadows of those who came before them.’
‘Why train them now?’ Arite asked. ‘We are a long way from the raiding season.’
‘There are rumours that came with the last riders before the snows. That the Romans will come across the water in spring.’
‘They say that every winter. Stories to frighten children. But spring always follows winter, and the Romans do not cross the Danu.’
‘Perhaps. But this year is different.’ And Laimei was smiling, then – the brilliant, terrible smile of the fanatic, or of one in love.
‘You think that we could defeat them, if they come?’
‘The stories say our forefathers dug their own graves and threw themselves in, at the very end.’ She gestured with an open palm towards the warband. ‘We shall dig our graves well, at least.’ And as Laimei looked her over with a brisk, warrior’s gaze, Arite had the sense of being evaluated, like a mare outside a horse trader’s tent. ‘Why not join us here? You still know how to hold a spear, I have seen that myself.’
‘I earned my three kills a long time ago.’
‘I do not think it matters anymore.’
‘Yet you were careful enough to avoid your third. The Roman.’
‘Yes, I was,’ Laimei answered. She looked down at the reins in her hands, ran them between her fingers, the way a man may touch his lover’s hair. ‘I would not have my spear taken from me.’
Arite hesitated. ‘Why is it that you stay in the warband?’ she said softly.
Laimei’s horse shifted beneath her – a restless step and turn, answering some hidden thought of his mistress. ‘What other kind of life is there for me?’ said Laimei. ‘One such as yours?’
‘Is that such an ill-seeming thing?’
‘Why would I wish to end up like you?’ she said. ‘Weeping over a dead man, my children butchered. Nothing left to you except tending to broken things like my brother.’ Laimei shook her head. ‘I have no need of broken things.’
Arite could find no answer. She could not seem to find her breath.
Laimei spoke again. ‘I do not say it to wound you. I only answer your question. And you came here with another purpose. To beg Kai’s place for him, is this not so?’
‘It is so.’ Even as Arite said it, the words seemed to come from so far away, as though it were someone else who was speaking.
‘Always the maker of peace, aren’t you? I like you more at war, I think.’ Laimei shook her head, picked restlessly at one of the tassels on her spear. ‘Why do you fight for his life? I already told him no. Why should I answer differently to you?’
‘Give him back his place in the warband. For Tomyris, if not for him.’
A mocking smile, and Laimei said: ‘Bring her to me, if she is the one you care for. I shall care for her as my own. But not him. I have no place for a shamed man.’
Arite spoke once again, and the words came with a cold sensation – a killer’s certainty: ‘Who are you to deny him his place? You who ran from the battle on the ice, when he did not.’
One could not help but admire it, how little Laimei gave away. A certain stillness, the face like a painted mask, the soft and strained sound of gloves tightening around the leather of the reins. But that was all.
‘You must have done,’ said Arite, ‘to live. You lost your horse, and you ran from the battle on another. For all your death-mad boasting, you ran. And if you still have the right to be in the warband after that, then so does he.’
‘You dare say that to me?’ Laimei whispered.
‘Yes, I will say it, even if no other will. Because I am not afraid of you.’
The soft blowing of the wind across the plain. The rattle of armour and spear. The rest of the warband had fallen silent – at that distance none of them could have heard what was spoken, but they did not need to. Every Sarmatian learned to feel when a battle was close.