There was a moment’s silence, after the words he had spoken. And then they answered him – no wild cheer or animal cry, for even in fervour they kept their discipline. A single roar, a single word sounded out together.
The sound carried deep into the fort. Cutting over the pounding of the blacksmith’s hammer, past the broiling cookfires, passing deep down stairwell and wooden door, to the place where the prisoners were kept. Bound in chains of iron that would have been a fortune out upon the plains, there were fewer now than had been paraded before the Emperor. They had died the way a wild animal will when it is confined. Fed and watered, wanting for nothing, and still they will lie down to die.
A few lifted their heads – there were many who had not the strength or the will to even manage that – but most of those that did gave no sign of understanding the significance of that sound. There was only one amongst them, his body marked with bruises and thin trails of blood, who seemed to understand. For even though they were too far to hear what was chanted, though the distance had rendered it a wordless sound like the calving of ice or the roar of a rockfall on a mountain, it seemed that he knew what it meant.
And Bahadur put his head in his hands, and he wept.
Part 3
AN OATH UPON A SWORD
24
Twilight on the steppe, as Kai returned to the remnants of the winter campground, the place the Five Clans had made their home and their peace for a single season. The earth marked and scored by wheel ruts and footfalls, scratched and scarred like the etchings of a giant upon the ground. Or a city of ghosts, for it was said that there were places in the world where one could see the workings of invisible cities – the grass parting beneath unseen footfalls, squares of scored earth that sprang up overnight, marking some new building of light and air that housed another ghost.
He had pushed harder than he should have that day, leaving his horse filmed with grey sweat and a rattling breathing that he did not like the sound of. But he was too afraid to spend another night alone upon the plains. There was a madness in solitude that every Sarmatian knew of – the herdsman who wandered too far in search of a lost foal, the scout separated from his companions before the cattle raid, the exiled man riding alone across the plain to beg a place from another clan. Whispers in the darkness that could break a mind.
And so he took his place amongst the traces of his people: the footprint of a child in soft ground, the mottled earth where a herd had moved together, the old firepits and the marks of the wagons. In the morning he would follow those trails, try to pick out his clan from the five that drifted back across the steppe. He would have to remember everything he knew of his people, to read the patterns in the earth that only he might know. The wagons driven a careful distance apart between two brothers who had feuded over a woman for three winters past. That cluster of young companions who always travelled together, a sworn brotherhood of seven children who had not yet had their fellowship broken by age. The way Arite always drove her wagon hard and a little apart from the rest of the clan, taking her place on the sunward edge. It would be a hard enough task for a good tracker, and he had never had that gift. Fortune had carried him so far – it would have to carry him a little further now.
He tried to sing to keep himself company, and the wind caught and turned his voice as though in mockery. He fell quiet once more, and in that silence, he felt the dead gather about him.
They had been there after the battle on the ice, watching him as he alone rose from the piles of the fallen. And they were around the campfire that night. Unseen, giving ghostly touches to neck and shoulder – the ancient dead from the barrow mounds and old pyres, and the freshly killed. Always before the presence of such ghosts had been a comfort to him, to be watched over by ancestors and guided by lost heroes. No longer, not when it seemed that the dead so outnumbered the living.
The spring air was warm enough to pass the night without a fire, and he could not be certain that there would not be men following his own trail, the warband that hunted him in the darkness. But with the spirits clustered thick about him, he scavenged the few remnants of wood from the old firepits, pulled what fuel he had from sack and saddlebag, and put a flame upon the plain. Soon he was guarding it against the wind with hands and cloak, the horse lying close beside him, and when the fire had caught fully he looped his arms about her long neck and held her close. A hard night lay ahead.
The horse shook and trembled, for she too was haunted by ghosts of her own kind. Kai looked upon the fire, and tried to remember – Bahadur’s laughter, the pride of seeing how well Tomyris handled a horse, the feel of Arite’s body against his. The taste of wine, the pattern of a braided gold necklace between his fingers, the light of the sunset seeming to set the plains afire. Only fragments remained.
Then a sound from the darkness. He did not trust it at first, for on those nights alone he had heard many things – unseen horses whickering and stamping at the ground, the soft murmur of voices, mocking laughter. They had grown louder each night, until he heard whole conservations between people who were not there, the repeated sounding of his name.
But the sound came again, the rattle of tack and uneven fall of hooves of riders moving in the night. There were shadows at the edge of the plain, coming towards the fire.
Kai should have been on his feet at once, mounted and made ready to fight. More likely foe than friend in such a place at such a time – hunters from the warband that had shadowed Kai’s riders across the plain, or bandits of the Lacringi raiding from the east. Yet Kai kept his place by the fire – he had no will left to fight or to run.
The shadows seemed to hesitate. Three riders that he could see, weighing up the ill omen of greeting a lone traveller upon the plains. He saw them motion to each other, some debate carried out that he could not hear, only see through mime and gesture. They slowly came forward, for it seemed they too were frightened to pass the night without a fire and company.
Not the hunters who had followed him to the west, then. He tried to guess at who they might be – lovers seeking to flee from one tribe to another, deserters from the warband who had not the courage to go back towards the Danu and the Romans beyond it. They would spend a night together at the fire, Kai would help them nurse their shame, and tomorrow they would be gone. He smiled a little at that thought. Once more he would collect the lost and broken and try to make them whole again.
The shadows closer now, the cold feeling of fate sliding across his skin. Kai’s eyes were poor in the darkness, the shapes too indistinct to determine, no sound from them that the air and wind did not swallow. But all at once he was yelling and weeping, calling their names out and running across the plain, bow-legged from a life in the saddle and stumbling like a child, arms outstretched. And the riders came forward to answer him.
Tomyris first, and she was laughing, as though delighted with a trick that he had played upon her. She slid from her saddle and rushed to him, and he took her from her feet, was throwing and catching her as though she were a child half her size, for he would not believe it to be her except by touch and weight. The Roman he took into his arms like a brother, a wrestler’s grip locked about his body that the other man answered in kind. And Arite, her eyes shining in the darkness – a hand reached, clasped, then withdrawn, but no more than that.