‘Rest now,’ he said. ‘I will tell the chieftains what you have said. What we have said. Perhaps they shall listen.’
‘Tell only them, Kai,’ said Arite. ‘The camp will tear itself to pieces if they hear that spoken.’
He nodded, and swallowed. ‘Bahadur…’ And the words were there upon his lips, the confession that would release him. But once more Arite’s eyes were on his – already they had that intimacy of lovers, that she could command him to silence without a word being spoken. Bahadur looking at him too, dull eyed and not watchful for a lie.
‘If you go back, you shall not go alone,’ said Kai. ‘And that, I swear.’
No knocking of distant thunder, nor eagle’s call, nor any of the signs that might mark an omen. Yet Kai felt it sure enough, the whisper-soft feeling of a god acknowledging the oath. For he knew that they bound men most surely to those kinds of oaths – those given in haste, and to cover a lie.
Away then, the soft grass falling away beneath his feet, hurrying towards the heart of the campground, towards the chieftain’s fire. Hurrying, to try to seal away the secret in his heart, before his traitor lips might speak it aloud.
There was a river that cut through the campground the way lightning cleaves the night sky – shallow, quick-running, one of the nameless waterways of the steppe. Gift to the living, passageway to the souls of the dead, and at different times one would see it running black with dirt or red with blood, a story told in water.
When at first Arite tried to take Bahadur to that place, he would not go. His clothes were stinking rags, his skin marked with the traveller’s grime, yet still he resisted. But at last he let her lead him there like a stubborn horse, head down and back bowed.
There were many bathing naked there – not lingering long, for the water still ran sharp and cold as whetted iron, but crouching in the free-running water and scrubbing themselves with grit before they leapt out once more, whooping and whistling at the cold air on wet skin. But they fell quiet when they saw Arite and Bahadur come to the side of the bank, moved away and made signs against ill omen.
She cut the clothes from his body, piled them carefully to the side so that not a scrap would be wasted, for it would all be kept for patching and kindling. At last, he was bare-skinned and filthy – shy as well, rolled half to the side and covering his nakedness. She remembered when they had been wed, twenty years before, the longing to see his skin like a kind of madness in the blood. Now she searched for the marks of torture, a wound that she could bind. She found nothing but a few red-raw sores from the journey, and all the signs of a half-starved man.
She did not coax him fully into the water. She filled a wineskin up and poured it over him a handful at a time, watching the water cut runnels through the dirt as he sat and blinked and shivered before her, rubbed at the skin with cloth and a scraper of horn, until he was clean and winter-pale under the midday sun. She took a comb and teased out his matted hair, cut away what seemed irreparably tangled, and, at the last, she marked him with a little oil – another gift from one of Kai’s riders, a shy young woman who had parted with her own private treasure.
All throughout it, she waited for him to speak – a word of kindness, some question of how she had survived the winter. Some fragment of a song that she loved. But he wrapped himself in blankets, watched her with pebble-black eyes, and remained silent.
‘The Roman lands must truly be as beautiful as they say,’ she said. ‘Fields of crops taller than a man on horseback, gold upon every woman’s neck, iron in each man’s hand.’
At this he stirred, and spoke. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’
‘For otherwise, why would you so regret returning here?’
He flinched at that, caught, and for a moment there was something of the man she had known. That fear he had of hurting another.
‘There was nothing beautiful about what I saw there,’ he said. ‘Oh, the sweetest wine I have ever tasted, wonderful foods that I could not name – that is right, your eyes see it well enough, there was no torture for me.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘He did not need that to break me.’
‘How then?’
‘He showed me the end of the world,’ Bahadur said simply, as he might have remarked on a change of the wind, or the look of rain on the horizon. ‘All men must die. Women too. And… and our children. But I saw the end of our people there.’
‘Not yet.’
‘A scattering of years. No more than that.’
‘Always you were a man of the day. Feast or famine, love or grief.’
‘I had lost less, then. And who can throw their life away for nothing? When our people have no future?’
Together, they listened to the river for a time.
‘I hoped,’ he said, ‘that perhaps you would not be here. That you would be at some other sanctuary on the plains. That you would not have to see me, and…’ He hesitated, then spoke again. ‘That I would not have to see you.’
‘That is why you asked for Kai? And not for me?’
He nodded.
‘Perhaps they shall not send you back,’ said Arite. ‘Perhaps they will choose to fight.’
‘Then we shall have to watch each other die.’
‘That was always to be the way of it, we knew that when we made our promises, long ago. There is something more that you do not wish to say.’
His hands drifted to the pile of fresh clothes she had brought – picking at them absently, but he did not seem to know what to do with them. She took them up, and began to dress him as she might have dressed an invalid. But as she tied his jacket around him, for a moment, she let her hand drift to a different kind of touch. Then he took her hand in his, and there was a moment where he held it hard enough to hurt her.
‘I did think of you,’ he said, ‘when I was a prisoner. I thought of why it was that you sent our son to fight with me. Why you insisted he must go.’
She said: ‘There was never anything that I could conceal from you.’
‘Our son should have stayed behind. He should be with us, now. You sent him to be a hostage to my heart. I should not have had to watch him die.’
And he rolled up in the blankets they had brought, and turned to face the water.
She found herself on her feet – no decision to rise, yet there she was. She could not leave him alone there at the water’s edge, and yet she did. Striding away, hands balled into fists, longing for something to fight. A hunger for touch, an ache beneath the skin.
Always before, the crowds of a winter camp had brought her comfort, a great embrace into the people that held her close. But now it was choking, suffocating, the stink of horses like black smoke, every accidental touch of a body against hers as fearful as the touch of a sword.
There were those she knew in the crowd, voices calling and hands reaching. But she kept her head down, leaving them to shout and curse behind her, until she was back at the campfire where Kai and Lucius and Tomyris sat together. A treacherous relief, to see them, and to be free of her husband.
Kai was rising then. She saw his eyes hunting about, in search of Bahadur, and anger there too, at first, when he saw that she was alone. In that moment she hated him, fell upon him with fist and foot, tearing at him with her nails. His hands were about her wrists and he pulled her close, leaned against her like a wrestler trying to recover his strength. She let her weight fall upon him until they were in an embrace – a wonderful, terrible kind of embrace, and she did not know what it would mean.
18
The rumours spread through the camp, as wildfire passes across the steppe in a dry summer. Everywhere he went, Kai heard the people speaking to one another of what the rider from the west might mean. They came to him with wine and iron, smiling like children, expecting him to tell them everything he knew of what Bahadur had said. For his people were not keepers of secrets – one must share everything to live upon the plains, and the silence and the lies sat uneasy upon his lips.