Across the fields of wildflowers and tall grass, into the copse itself, until, through the thinning trees, Kai caught some glimpse of what waited for them – ropes and stakes, the wet and shining sight of bodies stripped of skin. He told Tomyris to wait at the edge of the trees. She was a war child of the steppe and no stranger to killing, but even so, he knew that there was something out there that she must not see.
He thought to ask Arite to stay away, too, but before he could speak she shook her head. ‘I have to know if he is there,’ she said, her face like a gravemask of wax and clay. For that was the fear that remained unspoken, that they would find Laimei and Bahadur dead, carved into gifts for the gods.
And when they came through the trees and into a clearing, at first Kai did believe it to be his sister and her warband who lay dead there. The corpses scalped and mutilated, pinned out and opened up for the birds to feast upon. Eyeless, skin lifted from the faces, the mouths black with blood where the tongues had been bitten through. And Kai’s eyes were hunting around the dead like the carrion crows that danced and pecked from corpse to corpse, looking for some mark of the people he might recognise, the intimate secrets written on the flesh that he knew. The scar on his sister’s hip from where a horse had once thrown her, the finger Saratos had lost to frostbite many winters before, the tattoo of a bear and a deer that looped around Bahadur’s shoulder.
No sign that he could see on the ruined bodies. Too many to be his sister and her warriors. Looking closer still he saw the trophies of fur each man wore on his hip, the mark of the howling wolf stamped into their war gear.
‘The warband who hunted you?’ Lucius asked. For he had seen the signs too.
‘Never saw them clear enough to say for certain. But they bear the markings of the Wolves, and they are about the right number. It must be them.’
‘Who has killed them?’ said Lucius.
Kai pointed to the edge of the clearing where a barrow rose, branded with the remnants of a fire, what seemed at first a blackened sword thrust into it. A branch whittled into the shape of a sword, for those who left it there would not have been able to spare the iron, not in the way their ancestors had once marked their graves.
‘Dig into that,’ said Kai, ‘and you will find friends of mine. Or those who used to be my friends.’ He looked once more around the dead. ‘This is my sister’s work.’
Arite’s eyes had not left the barrow. ‘You think Bahadur…’
‘No. This was after they came back from the river. She would not go hunting until she had seen him to the water.’
Lucius paced about the clearing. ‘This is a good campground. A little cover from the trees at their back, a river not far off. Hard to ambush, if Laimei was coming from the Danubius.’
‘If she came from there. She must have cut wide, scouted them at night.’ Kai knelt down, traced the imprint of a hoof marked in the ground beneath a tree at the edge of the clearing. ‘Rode in through the trees, the same way we came. And with the numbers this warband had, they would not have thought she would dare hunt them.’
Lucius looked once more upon the ruined dead. ‘Is this the custom of your people?’ He hesitated. ‘Or of your sister?’
‘Sometimes, when vengeance demands it. And no. The Cruel Spear they may call her, but she never killed in this way before.’ Kai kept his eyes to the dead, and not the living. He could feel Arite and Lucius looking at him, waiting. ‘I was not here, so she did it to them instead.’ The bile rose in his throat, hot and sharp, before he swallowed it away. ‘I always wondered before, with each man she killed or maimed, if she thought of me as she did it. Bahadur always said I was being foolish.’
A hand upon his shoulder – Lucius, not Arite. For he saw that she had turned away already, back towards where Tomyris waited, kicking a crow from a corpse as she went.
‘At least she still lives,’ said Lucius.
‘Yes,’ Kai answered. ‘And now there is but one warband out there that wishes me dead, rather than two.’
For the rest of the day they rode faster than they should have, pushing on into twilight and leaving their horses weary and gasping before they fell from the saddle, hoping to be tired enough to fall into a dreamless sleep. But it was no use. In the darkness before sleep and in the shifting landscape of his dreams, like one in a fever, he saw the same visions over and over again.
It would have meant nothing to Laimei – she had that warrior’s gift granted to one in a hundred, where killing brought only stillness, and peace. It was the others he saw in his dreams. Tamura, hands shaking as she lowered the knife to the scalp of a man pleading for his life, making the clumsy torturer’s cuts. Saratos, his careless smile washed from his face by blood, turning his deaf ear towards the screaming captive on the ground. All of the riders he had led from the river and across the plain, the lost, the faithful, and the innocent, being fashioned into murderers.
In the following days, as they travelled back towards the river, they could feel that the Sarmatians were close. Everywhere, there were signs of the great army that was gathering once more. Fires on the horizon, shadows moving across the plain, the great furrows of herd and warband carved across the earth.
A single patrol would have been enough to undo them, for them to be hunted as deserters, remnants of a broken clan. But always the shadows moved on, the fires remained distant. Whether it was luck or fate, they could not say. Perhaps a dark blessing granted by the butchered warband, for the slow death was said to give a message to the gods – perhaps Laimei had wished for that, as she put those men to knife and fire.
Soon enough, they heard the whisper of water calling to them – the great wide water of the Danu, the river at the edge of the world. Kai and the others tied their horses at the last patch of cover, crawled to the river edge like supplicants before an altar. Passing through the reeds until they reached the bank, to look upon the death of their people.
Great machines of war lined up along the banks, the ballistae and catapults that could rain fire and tear a warband to pieces from a thousand feet away. The countless warriors of the Legion, armoured in iron and bearing their great red shields, the eagles high above them all, their watchful golden gods of war. And in the water, the host of narrow, flat-hulled ships that would bring that death across the water.
Kai looked on it for as long as he could, the old fear biting at his throat, until he pressed his face into the mud, so he would not have to see it any more.
They beat up and down the riverbank for half a day, until they found a trader – a little hawk-faced man, his boat loaded down with trinkets of east and west. Half mad at least: when he saw them he snatched up some charm from his wares and cursed them in a mix of half a dozen languages. Lucius spoke to him in the Roman tongue, the words of a conqueror, and he grew calm at once. And after a little bargaining (the trader looking on Tomyris with hungry eyes, but settling for a silver-patterned scabbard), they were upon the water.
When it had been stilled by ice in the winter, it had been a battleground, a place for heroes to do the work of horse and spear. Now it was a border between worlds, a burial ground. The water flowed dark beneath them, yet within it Kai almost thought he could see the hands of the vengeful dead reaching up, fleshless lips calling him a traitor and a coward. For he had lived when they had died, his cowardice proved in every breath that he took, each beating of his heart.
Close to the other bank, and the alarm calls were sounding, archers and spearmen gathering at the bank, calling for watch words and pass signs that none of them knew. There was almost nothing of Rome left in Lucius after the long winter, for he was heavy-bearded and clad in the furs and leathers of the Sarmatians. The trader cursed and shrieked for mercy. The arrowheads glinted in the low light of the sun.