Arite and Lucius on the other side of the circle – Kai did not know if it was chance that brought them there, or if they too had been summoned as witnesses. But Arite did not seem to see him, her gaze fixed on the boy beside his bloodied father, her face corpse grey.
He had no sense of moving, but he was at her side then, his hand to the crook of her arm.
‘Can you help me away from here?’ he said.
She nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can do that.’
To the horses – restless beneath them, as they rode in the close fashion, side by side. The way that a father teaches a son to ride, a daughter guiding her ailing mother on one last journey across the plains towards a burial ground. And lovers too, sometimes.
Soon they were back to the tented wagon, moving inside, the sunlight dimmed by the thick felt that surrounded them. Kai and Arite huddled up together, for comfort as much as warmth, and the Roman sat apart, quite still. Kai could not shake the image of him as a sort of honour guard, a charm or protection of some kind. A man from another world, who might protect them from the cruelty of their own.
‘Where is Tomyris?’ Kai asked, for he could think of nothing else to say.
‘Laimei sent for her,’ Arite said, ‘to practise with horse and spear.’ Her voice lowered. ‘I suppose she did not want the child to see it.’
Silence once more. The aching kind of silence, a longing for words that cannot be spoken.
But then there was a voice – the Roman, speaking slowly and carefully in their tongue, for he had learned much over the winter. ‘Who were they?’ he said. ‘That man and boy.’
‘A father,’ answered Kai. ‘And a son.’
An unspoken question, heavy in the air.
‘When a man grows too old to fight,’ Arite said, ‘what does he do? In Rome?’
‘Retires to his farmlands. Plays at politics, or…’ Lucius hesitated, and mimed writing in the air, for there was no word for it in the Sarmatian tongue.
‘Your chieftains do that, the ones with gold. And what do others do, those who do not have gold?’
‘Their families take care of them.’
‘Those without families?’
A pause. ‘They beg. Or starve.’
Arite nodded slowly. ‘The steppe is no place for those who cannot ride. And we can care for the children, but not the old. And we do not care to beg for our lives.’
‘A man hopes to die in war,’ said Kai, ‘or in some chance accident from the gods that might spare him the shame of growing old. If he does not, he is given a different kind of death. At the hands of his eldest son.’
The Roman said nothing at first. Then: ‘It is always so?’
‘There are stories. Of sons who spare their fathers in the myths, like Badan and Badanaquo. But they are just stories that fathers tell to little boys so that they will not be afraid. It is always so.’
‘Why tell me this?’
‘I do not know,’ said Kai. ‘Perhaps I wonder how it seems to a Roman.’
‘I see no father of yours here.’
‘There is not. And he did not die in battle.’
The Roman nodded, as if he understood. ‘That is why she hates you? Because you killed your father?’
A sour twist of the mouth. ‘No,’ Kai said. ‘She hates me because I could not. Because she had to.’
There was silence between them. And in the darkness Kai saw it once more – the armoured figure pushing through the killing circle, his sister taking up the blade that Kai had cast down, the light on the blade, and the blood upon the grass. The first man she had ever killed.
Then the Roman said: ‘A terrible thing, for a child to kill their father.’
Beside him, Kai felt Arite shudder. ‘And what about those who kill their children?’ she said.
It was then, at last, that Kai thought he understood. He turned to the Roman. ‘Get out. Now.’
Lucius crawled past them, out towards the light. And he paused at the entrance of the caravan – perhaps there was something that he too longed to speak. But, it seemed, the Roman could not find the words, and then he was gone from them.
Through the walls of the tented wagon, deadened a little by the fabric, Kai listened to the movement of the camp. The barking sounds of an argument, one of those petty quarrels of starving men. The rasp of a weapon being sharpened, over and over again, as though its bearer hoped that a sharper sword would somehow undo the force of the Legion. One of the gentle, looping songs of their people, where rhythm became ritual and the old stories were told over and over and over again. Somewhere there was weeping – for a moment he thought that it might be Arite, but when he put his hands to her face he found it dry.
‘You saw something out there, I think,’ said Kai. ‘Something worse than I did. A ghost?’
She nodded. ‘Two ghosts.’
‘You can speak to me of this pain. If you want to.’
‘It is shame. Not pain.’
‘Then you may tell me of that instead.’
‘Did talking of your shame help you?’
A pause. ‘Mine was never hidden.’
She spoke then. Not in sadness, but with a kind of still fury. If her words had been the stroke of a sword, it would have been the final, downward cut. ‘Do you know why I sent my son with you?’ she said. ‘He was so young, younger than his years. A gentle boy, who played with those wooden horses you used to carve and shunned the spear. None would have questioned Bahadur if he had kept Chodona behind. And it was I who insisted he must go.’
‘Duty,’ Kai said at once. ‘It was a brave thing, to send him with us. You did your people a great honour.’
‘No. It was not for that. I wanted to believe it was so at the time, but it was not for that.’
It took her a long time to say anything more. Kai remained as still as he could, for perhaps it was only in forgetting that he was there that she might let herself speak the truth.
At last, the words did come.
‘I wanted him to go with his father,’ she said, ‘for I thought it might mean Bahadur would keep both of them safe. He would have his son to protect, and would not take a hero’s risks. I thought they would both come back. That they would run, if they had the chance.’ She reached out her hands to Kai, but closed her eyes as she did so. Perhaps it was to imagine that he was someone else that she could touch.
‘I gambled them both,’ Arite said, ‘and I lost them both.’
Silence, then.
‘You have nothing to say to that?’ she said.
Kai pulled his hands away from her, for he had the old longing now for sword and spear – that close feeling in the chest and touch of heat at the centre of the back. The warrior’s longing to fight, to kill through that pain. To contend with something other than shadows and grief.
The tears did come then, hot and quick as blood from a blade. And they were not her tears, but his.
Afterwards, he would wonder at why it happened. If it was still a ghost she sought in the darkness, or perhaps she simply did not know what else to do. For she took him into her arms then, held him close against her, and she began to kiss those tears away.
15
For a moment, as she woke, Arite could believe it was her husband’s arms that she lay in. That touch of flesh, the feel of a body in the darkness almost familiar. But her hands traced across the shoulder and searched for a scar that was not there, and in the hollow of the neck, the smell of sweat and flesh that was not the one that she loved. For not even in the great stories of gods and heroes was there an unravelling of time, any more than water might flow uphill. The dead remained dead, and what had been done could not be undone.
The light was still strong when she left the tented wagon, but not so strong as she thought it would be, the sun falling from the sky. There was another light close by, from the embers of a fire that should have gone out many hours before. And there, tending those embers, was Lucius.