At last, Kai said: ‘What do your people think of fear?’
‘All men are afraid,’ Lucius answered. ‘Except for the mad.’
‘Do you think it a shameful thing?’
‘Not of itself. It depends on what it makes you do.’ Lucius hesitated. ‘What it is that you are afraid of?’
‘I am afraid every time I see a Roman. The banners, the weapons, the shields. I see them, and I cannot think.’
‘It has always been this way?’
‘No, only since the battle on the ice. Some curse. Or a message from the gods, that there is no use in fighting your people.’
Lucius did not answer for a time. ‘I told my commander that you had been struck down by the fear of Rome. I did not know that it was true.’ He looked at his hands. ‘And I had wondered why you turned your horse away, when we fought each other.’
Kai closed his eyes. He had hoped that Lucius had forgotten, that the madness of battle and the pain of his wound had driven the memory away. But he had carried that knowledge silently with him all winter, the knowledge that Kai was a coward.
A hand was on his arm then, and Kai flinched at the touch. But once more, the waiting. And when at last he looked at him, Lucius said: ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘I know.’
‘And soon you will be away from here. We go across the water once more.’
‘But that is the worst of it.’ The words were easy now, a wound bleeding freely. ‘I did not know I could be more afraid of anything than the Romans. But now I am more afraid to go back than to stay here.’
‘Your sister? The others?’
‘Yes. I am afraid to see them again.’
‘Little chance of us running into them in open country.’
‘Oh, I think that the gods do not mean to let me loose so easily.’
Lucius said nothing – once more, the waiting. Somewhere close, the sound of drum and horn calling a changing of the guard, and one of the sick men tried to answer it. Eyes mad with fever, and legs withered away to almost nothing, yet still he tried to stand, until an orderly hurried over and ushered him back to the ground.
‘You can stay here,’ said Lucius at last. ‘A hostage. A prisoner. A guest. Whatever you want to call it. I told them that you are a prince amongst your people, a man they should keep alive.’ He glanced around the tent. ‘Here, at least, there are few signs of Rome. I will not make you go back across the water if you have not the heart for it.’
‘Fear is not a shameful thing, only what it makes you do.’ Kai echoed back the words. ‘No. You shall need one of our people with you. And I will not send Bahadur or Arite.’
Lucius nodded. ‘I knew an old centurion,’ he said, ‘discharged to a veteran’s village. Lost his leg to an axe on the banks of the Rhenus. That unseen leg haunted him day and night, he was almost mad with that pain.’
‘And you mean to tell me how he was healed.’
‘They showed it to him in a mirror. All things reversed. He reached out and touched that missing leg, and the pain went away.’
‘A good story,’ said Kai. ‘But I have seen Sarmatians thus afflicted. And our answer is simpler. We put them to death.’
‘That is another way. But why not try the mirror first?’ Lucius hesitated. Then he said: ‘You have crossed the water on a hopeless task already. You were brave then. And I only ask you to do again what you have done before.’
A lightness then, a warmth like wine drunk beside a fire. Kai said: ‘They will most likely kill us, you know.’
‘I know. But I died once already, upon your sister’s spear. I do not wish to do it again, but I will if I have to.’
‘And I rose from the dead once before, after the battle on the ice.’ And Kai felt peace settling upon him then, the feeling of all things in their right place. He stood, suddenly impatient, stirred by that beautiful restlessness that comes before a journey.
‘You are well enough to ride?’ Lucius said. ‘We can wait—’
‘I am ready. What need is there to wait?’ Kai was smiling then – a half-mad smile, perhaps, but one born of courage, nonetheless. And whatever was to come after, he was grateful to have tasted that courage one last time. ‘And so,’ he said, ‘let us do what we have done before, and can do again.’ The smile fell away, then. ‘But first, I must say goodbye.’
Arite had not thought they would live long, when first they were brought to the cages.
It was not because of the paltry food, for they were a people used to hard living. Nor the open air, for the winter was gone, the first warmth of spring already upon them. But the confinement itself – she thought that must be what would kill them.
Yet the Sarmatians had built a world of their own with what little they had been given. The food gifted to those who needed it most, rotten meat and mould-speckled bread tossed from cage to cage. Songs, too, from those who had the strength to sing them, the old stories of their people told over and over and over again. There was even love in that place – chaste courtships between the cages, unspoken for the most part, as women stared silently and men stretched their hands out into the empty air. And all conspired to sleep as well as they could, huddled together for warmth and holding their bindings still and silent. For it was only in dreams that they could roam free once again.
A world they had, and rituals, too. For the chanting that had greeted Arite and Tomyris had been no thing of chance or the moment. Few were the prisoners brought to them now, but each one was greeted in the same way – the rattle of chains shaken into percussion, the rapping of bowls upon the ground. Voices raised against the Emperor who had put them there, every curse that they knew of, the forbidden incantations of magic and witchcraft. All of them sat in circles, bound in iron, praying for the death of a god.
And so when once more she heard the roaring and the calling and the howls of grief, she paid it little mind. It was only when beside her, through the bindings at her wrists, she felt Bahadur tremble, then go still, that she knew who it must be.
But Kai did not come as a prisoner. No rope or iron bound around his hands, and dressed in borrowed Roman clothing – a man ready for a journey, it seemed. She understood then what it was that Kai had come to do. It must have been quite a price in silver that Lucius had paid, to give Kai this farewell.
She tried not to listen as he spoke to his daughter, and only in part to give them privacy. For she had brought five children of her own into the world, buried each of them in turn. Fever, stillbirth, the sword. Her sons and daughters all taken from her, and never again would she know that urgent, complete kind of love. But even as far away in the cage as she could go, she could still hear the little choking sobs, the whispers that passed between father and daughter.
Then the silence, the feet shifting outside the cage. She looked to Bahadur, hoping against hope that he might offer a farewell of his own to Kai. How many times had they sat together beside the fire, trading song and story. How often they had exchanged hot words, only to clasp hands and forgive. And, just for a moment, she thought she saw Bahadur begin to smile at the sight of his friend.
But it was more a baring of his teeth, the way a man may grin at mockery that he cannot answer with a sword. Then Bahadur turned away, and lay upon the floor of his cage.
Kai did not meet her gaze then – his body half turned from her, like a man guarding a wound. She found herself moving in the same way, a mirror to his shame, until there was anger, quick and sharp as battle fury. She leaned forward, her head against the wooden bars. He hesitated for but a moment, before he came close, close enough for them to whisper to each other.