by P. K. Lentz
“I can manage that for you,” Arixa said. “Still, I think you should remain Captain for now. They’ll follow me to Roxinaki, but my future past that is uncertain. I have new priorities now which the Dawn may not accept. You advised me of that, Ivar, and you were right.”
“If your future is uncertain, then mine is, too.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“To be honest,” Ivar said, “and you know I am nothing but honest with you... when I thought you were gone, I began to consider for the first time returning to Svialand. It was different without you. Not fun anymore. I can’t imagine the look on some faces back home if I were to show up. Never mind forty days—the Sviar have thought me dead for six years.”
Arixa smiled and sought out Ivar’s hand. “That’s sweet,” she said, clasping it. “I feel much the same. But be warned... I’m still probably not going to have sex with you.”
He snorted and yanked his hand away. “The night is young, princess.”
Princess. The sound of Arixa’s title dragged up thoughts incompatible with the tranquil state of mind one desired inside a cannabis lodge.
She swore. “I haven’t spoken to my father in six years. My last words to him were about...” Ivar knew, and there was no need to remind herself. “Now I’ll ask him to abandon the city. His city, where he has built temples and monuments and gardens and marketplaces, like his father and his grandfather did before him. There’s no chance he’ll agree.”
“Then what?”
Arixa inhaled deeply. It seemed as if the cannabis vapors were having less of an effect on her than they should.
Yet another disturbing thought occurred: what if this new body of hers which resisted injury and disease also resisted more desirable impairments?
“That’s why I say my future is uncertain,” she answered. “I only know what I will not do, which is stand by and watch my vision become reality. I’ll do all I can to stop that, no matter the cost. In that conviction, I won’t waver. But I can’t ask the rest of you to feel the same.”
“Oh, goatshit, Arixa!” Ivar said. The dreamy quality of his voice said the vapors were having the intended effect on him. His hand found hers again and squeezed it. “You better fucking ask me.”
* * *
After the victory celebration of the prior night, most arose late in the morning. Not Arixa, who knew for certain now that her augmentation had not come without a small, if irritating, price.
She had felt no effects at all from the cannabis.
She rather suspected that Fizzbik’s operations had stolen the pleasure of beer from her, too.
That morning, the dead were interred side-by-side in a mass grave along with the few possessions any nomad owned, which were by definition precious, else they would not be carried. Had they been chieftains or individuals of royal blood, like Arixa, their horses would have been killed and buried along with them, but none were. As it stood, today’s burial included the bodies of four horses felled in the battle and another five which the Hellenic tenders had determined must be put down because of their wounds.
Digging graves for horses was a real bitch. At least it wasn’t winter, when the ground became like rock.
Once the bodies were laid out, they were dedicated to all seven gods, with Tabiti the sun-mother above all, for she was Queen. Today’s dead were from many tribes of Scythia, and each tribe venerated its own patron god, as Arixa’s tribe, the ruling Agathyr, venerated Tagimasad.
Three of the injured animals were stallions and thus fit to be sacrificed: one went to Tabiti, one to Tagimasad and one to Aresh. There was no priest present to perform the rites to perfection, but the Dawn, as all rangers of the steppe, simply did its best in the hope that at least one of the gods would deem their efforts good enough.
When the dedications were finished, the earth was mounded over the remains and grave goods in a dome-like kurgan which none in Scythia would dare to desecrate.
Before nightfall, the Dawn settled to sleep so that all might be ready for an early start the following morning on a ride which no part of Arixa looked forward to making.
Nine
Scythia should not have a capital at all.
In ancient times, it had not. The tribes and war bands had simply roamed, as the Dawn and others did today. There had always been villages and fishing towns and farms, most of them ancient and inhabited by sedentary folk not of warrior-stock and whose relation to the nomads was distant, if any existed. But no cities, no walls. Only good campsites which were easily moved in the face of invasion.
Simply put, in the old days there had been nothing in Scythia for invaders to conquer or destroy.
Then Arixa’s great-great-grandfather, Arix, having made himself chief-of-chiefs during the war against the Arameans, had turned a town on the north edge of the Bleak Sea into the year-round headquarters of his tribe, the Agathyr. By the time of his death, all the tribes of Scythia had called Arix their Shath, or king, and his town, Roxinaki, had swelled into a capital.
After two generations marked by two long and mostly peaceful reigns, the kingship of all Scythia had fallen to Orik Agathyrsi, whose reign was presently in its thirty-fifth year.
By three concurrent wives from three different tribes, Shath Orik had sired eighteen children, the fourth of which, and the first female, had been named Arixa, after her ancestor the first Shath.
The Dawn approached Roxinaki from the north, as all riders must, for the city sat on a peninsula ringed on all other sides by the Bleak Sea. Mounting a rise in the grasslands, Arixa caught first sight of it. Like no mere town did, the capital actually glimmered in sunlight, for the domed roofs of many of its temples and towers were gilded. It made a breathtaking sight, one had to admit, even if one thought, as Arixa did, that such display of stationary wealth flew in the face of Scythia’s nomadic traditions.
She had grown up in the shadows of those temples and towers, being woken each morning by the sun glinting from them into her chamber window. She had been educated by tutors in the grottoes of the walled Agathyr Palace.
At some point, early in adolescence, Arixa could not recall exactly when, that very education had begun to turn her against the very idea of city life. The more she learned of the past, the more she identified with it. It didn’t help any that the relative who oversaw her training in blade and bow and horse, the Shath’s brother-in-law Matas, felt similarly.
Back then, Matas had captained the Shath’s Guard, the elite war-band responsible for guarding the peninsula around Roxinaki. By the time Arixa was sixteen and had exceeded her brothers in all the skills and knowledge of warfare, Matas had recommended Arixa to her father Orik as the next captain of this Guard.
Shath Orik had agreed, promising her the appointment.
Instead, three years later, Orik removed the aging Matas as Captain and gave the honor to his third son, Arixa’s elder half-brother Skulis.
The same month, full of anger and spite, Arixa had left Roxinaki forever, not caring whether she ever saw its gilded spires again. Matas had accompanied her, followed by his son Plin. Since then, Arixa’s life had been the steppe and the Dawn, the war band she had built herself—well, with the help of Matas and a shipwrecked Norther—out of nothing except her skill and her name.
In passing south over the isthmus, the only approach to Roxinaki, the Dawn naturally encountered riders of the Shath’s Guard. As their beloved former captain, Matas was met with great respect and a large number of embraces. Arixa had dreaded seeing Skulis among them, but she quickly learned that her half-brother was in the capital.
According to the warriors of the Guard, Skulis spent most of his time there, information which did not sit well with Arixa. Or her uncle, for that matter. A Captain’s place was with his band.
Now the Dawn approached the city that glittered on the edge of the Bleak Sea. Ivar, and some of the Scythians, had never seen the sight in their lives, and Arixa took a mild delight in the awe and interest which lit their eyes.
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br /> Although her long-ago departure had left her with no taste for Roxinaki, even Arixa could not help but feel a certain fondness on seeing the familiar sight. Her childhood there had been a happy one. And even if she dreaded her reunion with Orik, sweeter reunions also awaited. There was her mother, Patia, and seven full and half-sisters. Most of the latter had been hardly more than babies when she left, but there was one half-sister, five years her junior, whom she truly missed.
Leimya.
How that girl had idolized Arixa, wanting to be just like her. Tragically, her health had never allowed it. When she exerted herself even moderately, much less in the way that a warrior must, Leimya’s breath had always fled her small frame, leaving her crumpled in a noisy heap on the ground, panting for air. She could ride, and she could shoot a bow, but she could never do both simultaneously.
The prospect of seeing Leimya was a happy one to Arixa, but she tempered her expectations. She got little news from Roxinaki, and what news did reach her never concerned young female royals. For all she knew, Leimya’s ailment had eventually killed her.
The broad road to Roxinaki (which thankfully was not yet fully stone-paved in the Parthian style) ran through several smaller villages with stretches of farmland in between. Many of the folk came out from their homes and fields to watch the Dawn pass. They waved, threw flowers, offered sweets and drinks (beer was not refused, but had to be drunk quickly on horseback before returning the cup). Men and women begged news of a wider world they would never see.
Folk fawned most over Arixa, for although they never would have known her face, they knew of the Dawn and knew who led it. The war band’s gold banner with its black rising sun emblem gave away Arixa’s identity and lineage to all who saw it.
She met the people’s gifts and greetings sometimes with gracious smiles, sometimes with a regal disregard, depending on whether she felt eagerness or dread to reach Roxinaki. She veered between both, sometimes within minutes.
What pushed her ever onward was her vision of devastation. That fate must not be allowed to befall her people, no matter if they chose to embrace un-Scythian ways.
Thank the gods Roxinaki had no walls. Scythians had not drifted so far from their nomadic heritage that they would ring their permanent encampments of timber and stone with yet more piles of immovable material. Instead, the structures the Dawn passed simply transitioned from felt tents on the outskirts of the city to wood huts further in, then to small multi-story dwellings of brick and finally, in the center, to the grand public constructions of cut stone which Orik and his forefathers had raised.
In a way, the view as one followed the road into the city told the story of Scythia’s drift from the nomadic to the sedentary way of life, from tent to temple, from hard-packed dirt to smooth paving stones.
By the time the Dawn’s mounts’ hooves clapped on such stone, Scythians lined the road one to two bodies deep. Some of the women sang joyful songs of homecoming.
Over those voices and the clatter of hooves, Arixa just barely heard her name called. She looked around for the caller, whose voice was that of a young female.
“Arixa!” she heard twice more before a figure broke through the throng to emerge in the street.
The young woman wore a fine dress of deep green with white sleeves, and her bare legs pumped swiftly under her skirts, sandaled feet slapping the stone. Heedless of all else, Arixa reined her mount, a substitute for wounded Turagetes, and vaulted to the ground, landing in a run.
Ten steps later, she swept up her half-sister Leimya in crushing embrace and planted kisses all over the girl’s cheeks, tasting the salt of tears. Leimya hugged her back just as tightly, but couldn’t return the kisses, for her chest had begun to heave in the way Arixa remembered. Her wide-open mouth struggled to draw loud, wheezing breaths.
Arixa gently settled to the ground with Leimya still in her arms and whispered, “Breathe, little sister! You could have walked. I’m not worth all this!”
Leimya’s eyes, staring up into Arixa’s as they huddled together on the ground, were wide with the extreme effort of breathing, but there was immense joy in them, too. On seeing it, tears came to Arixa’s own eyes.
“You were the first I had hoped to see,” Arixa told Leimya while stroking her long, dark hair. “The gods granted me that.”
Leimya had been but fourteen when Arixa left, but it was a woman of twenty whom Arixa now cradled in her arms.
“S... S... Sss...” Pulling Arixa into a fresh embrace, Leimya managed to finish: “Stay... please... stay!”
“Shhh! Calm yourself. Just breathe.”
Over the course of several breaths, the rasping sound diminished in intensity.
“Will you stay?” Leimya asked breathily. There was hope in her eyes and in her weak smile.
“If I have my way,” Arixa whispered back, her lips by Leimya’s ear, “no one will remain in Roxinaki. You least of all. You must come with me!”
The welcome sight which was her half-sister’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. Arixa set a gentle finger against the parted lips before she could beg explanation.
It was then that Arixa glimpsed shadows a few paces down the road, and she looked up to witness he arrival on foot of a cluster of armed and armored men. In the center of that group, wearing a soft, embroidered tunic and cloak of deep green similar in color to Leimya’s dress, looking on with a face more lined, a full beard gone grayer, eyes just as hard as Arixa remembered, stood Orik of Agathyr, the chief of chiefs and Shath of all Scythia.
To Arixa... Father.
Kneeling on the ground with tear-tracks on her cheeks and gently panting Leimya in her arms was not how she had envisioned meeting her father again for the first time in six years. But that was what the gods decided, and so Arixa made the best of it by making her eyes as hard as the Shath’s were as he glared down upon his daughter.
When Leimya made to stand, Arixa was forced to look away and aid her sister, losing the contest of stares.
She shared a last cheek-kiss with Leimya, who kept her head down and stepped away under her own power, aware that the time had come for her to remove herself.
Standing at the center of a crowd which fell utterly silent, Arixa once more met the Shath’s stare. She was taller than her father, but Orik was broad of chest and shoulder and cut an imposing figure even when, as now, he was flanked by fully armed and armored fighters.
Motioning for his guard to stay behind, Orik took five slow strides. At arm’s reach, close enough for Arixa to hear the heavy breaths pass his nostrils, he halted. His head moved subtly while he looked Arixa up and down, his mouth coldly neutral inside his voluminous gray beard.
When Orik met her eyes again, the hardness was gone. In a single, lunging step, he closed the remaining distance to slam his thick arms around her. He put his head alongside hers, and his beard prickled her cheek just the way Arixa remembered it having done when she was a young child.
“My daughter...” Orik said, tenderly. He said it for Arixa’s ears alone, not his people’s. “I am so very proud of you.”
For a moment, Arixa stood numb, wondering what to do. Her every prediction of how this meeting might transpire and how she might feel in its wake crumbled to dust.
Left standing in that dust was a child who had waited long years for her father to squeeze her and tell her he was proud. Arixa’s arms encircled the stout, cloaked frame. Her head sank onto Orik’s shoulder. She drew a shuddering breath and let a weak sob escape before she controlled herself.
When Orik detached, he remained close, locking his left arm with Arixa’s right. He lifted his voice to address the crowd.
“How generous are the gods!” he bellowed. “My beloved first daughter has returned!”
A storm of applause answered. After a few moments, the Shath dispelled it—but not for long. The joyous outcry rose to even greater heights when Orik next declared, “Let tomorrow be a feast day in honor of Arixa and the Dawn!”
Ten
There were many more relations to greet before Arixa had the opportunity to speak privately with the Shath. With Leimya clinging to her and Ivar and Matas a pace behind, she walked in a cluster of bodyguards and siblings toward the palace.
The rest of the Dawn, meanwhile, with its horses and supplies, was shown to a campground within the city where they could erect their tents and live in their preferred manner, unless they had relations of their own in the capital, as some did, with whom they might board.
Near the towering, open gate in the ten-foot wall surrounding Agathyr Palace, she glimpsed the face which, after her father’s, she had been the least eager to see. Near the gate, as if he had been waiting, stood her half-brother Skulis, Captain of the Shath’s Guard.
Skulis looked straight at Arixa. She couldn’t discern his feelings from the look, but it contained no coldness. Rather, like her own, it was uncertain. He held his position some twenty feet from her while Arixa took her gaze from him and continued on the path through the palace gates.
“Why is your hair so short?” Leimya asked.
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s... different.”
“I tell you, I itch a lot less. Maybe you should cut all of yours off.”
Leimya laughed. “Maybe not.”
During their walk here, Orik had refrained from addressing Arixa, which suited her fine. Only on the palace grounds, in the fore courtyard where Arixa had climbed trees as a child, did he finally say, “You must go to your mother. She awaits you in her quarters if you remember where those are.”
“I will,” Arixa said, ignoring the last remark. “But first I would address you on a matter of vast import to the future of Scythia.”
This raised Orik’s brow. “Very well,” he acceded. “But quickly. Don’t keep your mother waiting.”
A few more brief reunions later, Arixa stood in a well-appointed room behind the palace’s throne hall, surrounded by stone and gold and silken finery and heavy furnishings which could not be transported by any number of horses.
