‘I tried to change his mind,’ Coenus said.
‘Why?’ Melitta asked. ‘He’s the wise one. My brother’s the fool. This is not our war.’
‘That’s why we’re all going?’ Coenus asked.
‘I know,’ Melitta said, raising her axe to salute Maeton. ‘Philokles would tell me that if I go, I’m as responsible as Satyrus. And I am. But my heart tells me that we should sit home and prepare to trounce the winner.’
‘Hence you take a tithe of your strength,’ Coenus said.
‘A tithe would be too much. I take a token of our strength, and that is too much to lose.’ She shrugged. In armour, it scarcely showed. ‘All told, I’ll take a thousand warriors, and I’ll leave half of them at Heraklea. And Parshevaelt — he’s staying. I need someone here I can trust.’ She smiled. ‘On the other hand, I’ve invited all the Sarmatian chiefs to accompany me.’ She laughed. ‘All our friends want to come. But as queen, they’re just the ones I want to stay home. All our foes desire that we fail. So naturally, they’re the ones I want where I can see them.’
Coenus looked at her knights. ‘These men alone could turn a battle.’
Melitta nodded, and her face was the face of Smells like Death. ‘That’s why I keep them around. Let’s ride.’
Coenus fell in with Scopasis, and behind them, the chosen men and women of the Assagetae, the Keepers of the Western Door, the Royal Scythians, and their remounts and slaves and wagons joined the column, and the rest of the Assagetae cheered them until their dust cloud rolled out of sight. And then they went back to the grass.
19
When he awoke, Satyrus’s first thought was I am not dead.
It was an altogether pleasant thought. And before an hour had passed, Anaxagoras had unrolled the bandage on his leg and shown him the flesh — the lines of red were gone, no longer lines of death reaching for his groin and heart.
He was weak, but he was a veteran of many wounds and he knew the drill — he began to eat anything he could lay hands on.
They let him rest for three days.
His friends were out all the time — riding. Mostly, Satyrus saw the farmer, Belial. He sensed that there were daughters hiding up in the rafters, and that the whole house was afraid of them. But he ate, and watched.
The third day of rest, he was alert enough to figure out that his friends were patrolling. Jubal came back with a twisted leg — a bad fall from his horse.
‘Men trying to kill you, eh?’ he said, and grinned.
Satyrus shook his head. Even here — three thousand stades from Tanais. ‘Who are they?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know. Big bunch — a dozen or more. We hit their camp, only caught three of them.’ He shrugged. ‘Rest were off east. Setting an ambush?’
Satyrus hadn’t seen Charmides in days. ‘And Charmides?’
‘Apollodorus sent him east for Seleucus. He’s supposed to be at Zeugma. Apollodorus is afraid he’s already passed us.’ Jubal rubbed his beard.
The horses were stirring outside.
‘Uh-oh,’ Jubal said. He got a bow from his case and went to the window. As soon as he looked out, he popped back. ‘Party of men.’
Satyrus was flat on his back, too weak to pull a woman’s bow.
Above him, a small girl, no more than seven or eight, waved a hand.
‘We hide,’ he said.
Sophokles was still hobbling from the arrow he’d taken in the fight five days earlier — the luck of the gods that the arrow had been a whistler, or he’d be dead instead of bruised. He dismounted with a curse, having covered all the ground from the mountains to the Euphrates and missed his quarry.
He wanted a good night’s sleep and a chance to regroup. Seleucus was less than a day away to the east and Sophokles didn’t fancy the odds of tracking his quarry amidst the biggest army in Asia.
He dismounted with a curse, and was immediately on his guard. The farmer’s body language gave him away. He was hiding something.
Of course, that could be food or horses or a beautiful daughter. All of which Sophokles would be happy to take. ‘We mean no harm,’ he said, raising his hand.
The farmer nodded. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked. He had two slaves with him — big men, but not trained to arms.
‘Feed us, give us all your horses, and stay out of our way,’ Sophokles said. ‘And we’ll be gone tomorrow.’
The farmer’s eyes were everywhere. ‘You could go in the barn, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Are you a fool?’ Sophokles was in pain, and tired of peasants. ‘I don’t ask you to suppose anything. I’ll have the house.’ He tossed his reins to one of his men. ‘Clear the house. Don’t touch his family. Slaves are fair game.’
There were stools on the lower exedra, and Sophokles lowered himself on one. ‘A cup of wine might improve my mood,’ he said to the farmer.
The man’s wife brought it herself. She’d mixed herbs in it. Sophokles had a moment to picture himself poisoned by a farmer’s-wife in Phrygia, and the thought made him smile. He drank it off.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Honey?’ he asked.
She nodded, her eyes huge.
Telon, his lieutenant — an intelligent man, for an oaf — jogged up from around the stone house. ‘There’s horses in the barn,’ he said. ‘War horses.’
Sophokles reached out to grab the farmer’s wife, but she was faster than he expected — her fist held an iron poker, and it clipped his shoulder and his head, and he was down.
Telon killed her — cut her nearly in half with a big kopis.
Sophokles felt distinctly queasy — something in his gut, and the blow to his head. He threw up and felt better. Telon was pushing at the barred door of the barn and shouting for help, and his men were trying to get in one of the windows.
Sophokles got to his blanket-roll, and it took all his will to untie the leather thongs that held it shut.
The bitch poisoned me.
His brain was processing very slowly. He got the knots open — the blanket unrolled of its own accord. He got a hand into the leather wallet at the heart of the bundle — found the flask. Got it to his lips.
No time to measure. Only his vomit reaction had kept him alive this long. He took a sip, swallowed it …
Vomited, and vomited again. His men were calling out.
By all the gods, that had been close. One of his eyes was gummed shut from blood.
They’d killed the farmer and one of his slaves.
He took a breath and then another.
Looked up. Heard the hoof beats — saw the dust cloud.
Shook his head in weary disbelief.
‘Mount up!’ he croaked, and stumbled towards his horse, abandoning his blanket roll.
Telon, at least, had the wits to listen. He abandoned the barred door and leaped for his horse. Seeing the two of them mounted, the rest ran for their horses. The last man was shot dead trying to get a leg over, but the rest of them were away.
Satyrus found the act of climbing down from the hiding hole in the rafters to be as much adventure as he could handle, but worth it, because the big ginger-haired man holding the ladder proved to be Crax. Behind him was Charmides, and half a dozen troopers Satyrus had known since childhood.
‘Did you get them?’ Satyrus asked.
‘Got one,’ Crax said. ‘They killed the staff.’
Out on the exedra, the daughters had begun to wail. Charmides went that way, and Satyrus dragged himself along, supported by Crax.
‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Satyrus said.
Crax laughed. ‘Tell that to my hips on a cold morning,’ he said.
The two daughters were eight and twelve, and their parents and most of their slaves were dead. The casual side-product of war.
‘They died for me,’ Satyrus said wearily.
Jubal nodded. ‘They’ll be related to someone round here.’ He went over to the girls and put his arms around them, and they threw themselves on his neck.
Satyrus found himself standing on someone’s blanket roll. It was vaguely familiar, and he assumed it was Jubal’s. Despite the pain of his wound, or because of it, he subsided to the planks of the porch and began to roll it up.