Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  They sailed north for an hour in the battle formation. That did not go so well.

  Satyrus sighed, and they landed for the night. Helios got men together from every ship and went over the signals again. Panther stood and declaimed about diekplous to a circle of pirate captains and Diokles gave prizes to rowers nominated by their captains – prizes of a gold daric each, twenty days’ pay.

  Satyrus roamed among the fires, eating garlic sausage and listening to the men. Most were quite happy. He shook his head. Into the darkness, to Herakles, or perhaps to the shade of his father, he said, ‘I have so much to learn.’

  The night was silent.

  Another day and they made Dioskurias, where he bought every head of cattle in the market and emptied the grain warehouses to feed his fleet – and laughed to hear that his sister was operating on the Hypanis River with an army. And Eumeles was at sea with his fleet, lying off Olbia.

  An Olbian merchant told him that Eumeles had heard that the army of Olbia had marched, and had put all his troops on shipboard to seize the rival city while she was denuded of troops.

  ‘Our Eumenes has marched on Pantecapaeum,’ the man said. ‘Eumeles is in for a rude awakening.’

  ‘Two days,’ Satyrus said. His heart was nearly bursting. His sister was still holding out, and his delays had not ruined them, and Eumeles was off Olbia. ‘Two days, and we’ll have him.’

  But merchants are not always right. The next morning, Satyrus had been less than an hour at sea when his lookouts spotted the lead ships. After he’d heard twenty counted, Satyrus felt his fingers turn cold and his stomach began to flip.

  Eumeles wasn’t at Olbia. Eumeles and his fleet were right there, waiting at Gorgippia.

  20

  Melitta had saddle sores because her legs were always wet. Her body ached all day and she slept badly at night, and she wondered if she was really fit to lead the Sakje. None of her riders ever complained.

  They rode south and west, across the rising ridges that would eventu ally be the Caucasus. In the valleys, they visited the farms, riding up in a swirl of horses and angry cattle. Closer in to Tanais, they were seldom the first Sakje party – often they found the farmstead deserted, or found the families on the road, their belongings on their backs.

  But soon enough they were the first hint that the farmers had that their world was on fire. Melitta got to know the whole routine, the whole exhausting duty that brought her as close to cynicism as anything she’d encountered. The initial hostility, the slavish courtesy, the hidden anger, the acceptance, the obedience and exaggerated reverence for her person were all stages she saw enacted, day after day, as her party cleared the southern valleys ahead of Upazan’s expected invasion.

  By the time her saddle sores had festered into angry red weals with disgusting yellow-pus centres, she’d cleared the high ground as far east as her mother’s writ had ever run in the south, and she was heading down the Hypanis from the east – a neat reversal of her winter trek the other way. Gaweint, her best outrider, brought her daily news from Ataelus, who was operating one valley farther north.

  Melitta had begun to worry that she was costing her farmers a season of sowing and reaping for nothing. What if Upazan didn’t come? What a fool she would look! And how her farmers would loathe her.

  Being queen of the Assagatje had never been so unappealing. The more so as the old people called her ‘Srayanka’ to her face, never ‘Melitta’ or even ‘Lady’. Sometimes she could overlook it – an old woman in a highland village near the headwaters of the Hypanis was nearly blind, and she touched Melitta’s face and called her fellowpeasants to come and see the Lady Srayanka, back from the dead. But others were not so innocent. They simply wished her to be her mother. The power of their wishes was enough to make her conform, but inside she squirmed.

  As she rode west, downstream on the Hypanis, her party began to collect other parties – a war band of Grass Cats, another of Standing Horses, each of whom had completed their sweep south.

  The day after they met up with Buirtevaert, a young sub-chief of the Standing Horses who greeted her by her own name and raised her spirits, she found herself at the head of a long column of Sakje as she rode around the last bend in the road to Gardan’s farm.

  Outriders had warned Gardan, and he was mounted in his own farmyard with his family all on shaggy ponies behind him. He had a heavy wagon pulled by his oxen, and she could see his small forge and his anvil roped to the back of the wagon, right on the back axle. She rode up and he saluted like a Sakje.

  ‘Lady – we are ready to ride.’ He bowed and looked at her from under his brows, which were just as bushy as she had remembered. ‘So you came back.’

  She grinned. There was something about Gardan that was hard not to like. ‘I did,’ she said.

  Buirtevaert rode up and waved his whip. ‘You know this dirt man?’ he asked in Sakje.

  Gardan laughed. His Sakje was better than Melitta’s. ‘Greetings, sky-rider,’ he said. ‘I am guest-friends with the lady.’

  Buirtevaert was not without courtesy, even after a spring spent herding dirt people. He saluted with his whip. ‘And you are a smith – dirt man, I mean no insult. The lady’s friends are mine. Is your family ready?’

  ‘As you see us,’ Gardan answered. He turned to Melitta. ‘Do you remember what I told you? When I guested you?’

  ‘“Be sure,”’ Melitta answered. ‘I’ve never forgotten it.’

  ‘Be fucking sure,’ Gardan said. ‘We’re going to lose a whole season, lady. People will starve.’

  ‘You have your grain store?’ Melitta asked.

  Gardan shrugged. ‘Every grain that I could get in the wagon.’

  ‘And you destroyed the rest?’ Melitta asked. She had not picked up the now-familiar smell of dry grain being burned.

  Gardan’s eyes flicked away. ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  She rode closer, until they were eye to eye. ‘Gardan – you ask me to be sure. This is war – I can’t be sure. But I’m doing my best. And I know that my duty – my first duty – is to protect my farmers. But if you leave a store of grain in the ground for Upazan, you aren’t helping me be sure. You think he won’t find your grain, with dogs and horses and men?’

  Gardan’s wife, Methene, glared at her husband. ‘I told you,’ she said.

  Gardan shrugged. ‘People will starve,’ he said. ‘Twenty years I built this farm.’ He had tears in his eyes. ‘I’d rather fight for it than leave it to the wolves,’ he said.

  Melitta nodded. ‘Where’s the grain, Gardan?’

  He hung his head. Accepting her authority. ‘Buried in the old well. Come.’

  She shook her head. ‘No – go and burn it yourself. Hurry.’ She didn’t have to order him to hurry. As far as she knew, Upazan was still twenty days’ ride to the east. But she had ten more farms to visit, or twenty – more families to send to join the river of refugees heading north and west to Tanais.

  They left to the smell she had missed, the smell of burning grain. Gardan bowed his head to hide his tears. The children looked at her as if she was a goddess – inscrutable, good and evil all at once. Protector and oppressor. It was a great deal of meaning to be carried in a child’s gaze, but she’d seen it so many times now that she didn’t need their hushed, embarrassed words to confirm their stares.

  Dawn, and she made herself roll from her blankets and furs. Spring was fully upon them, and the trees had leaves, but mornings were still cold, and the ground was no mattress, no soft couch. Her hips ached, and her back hurt, and her neck had developed its own special torment that lasted all day. She had to exercise her fingers to get them to behave. She sat by the fire her knights had made and drank two cups of hot liquid before she could face the ritual of lancing the sores on her thighs, dressing them with linen that had once been clean and relieving herself – all in private.

  ‘I miss other girls,’ she said to the morning. Her fingers were cold right through as she sat on a downed tree, but she stuck to
her task, braiding her hair. She’d have liked help, but asking any of her knights was an invitation to mischief. Every one of them was in love with her, the useless bastards. She made a face. The only warrior woman for a hundred stades? The untouchable queen? Of course they loved her. Hence, she had no one to braid her hair.

  Mother, how did you deal with the worship and the love and the foolishness? I need a trumpeter – a girl to be my companion. How do I go about finding one? Any girl she got would have lovers and favourites and clan-friends, all of whom would involve her in a new web of obligations. Better to braid my own hair, she thought.

  She heard the hoof beats far off down the valley, even as her thoughts continued questing for an answer to the companionship problem. She looked north and east. There was the rider – a single figure moving fast.

  She got up off her log, already annoyed that one of her bandages was slipping, angry at another day of facing the minor pain in her legs. I used to love riding, she thought. ‘Scopasis!’ she called.

  He was standing in the middle of her knights. He had grown in stature so that the tall, handsome man before her, so sure of himself, so genuinely sure of himself, didn’t even look the same as the outlaw boy she’d met four months ago. ‘Lady?’ he asked.

  ‘Rider coming in,’ she said. ‘Any more tea?’

  He handed her his own cup, full to the brim, and then he turned and looked at the distant stand of trees where their northern vedette sat on his horse. ‘Scylax has him,’ Scopasis said.

  Melitta walked over to the Standing Horses’ fire and nodded to Buirtevaert, who smiled. He had a long braid that he wore on the side of his face, wrapped in gold wire and braided with gold bells. The love-lock said that he was married. ‘What’s her name?’ Melitta asked.

  ‘Daen,’ he said, his face breaking into a smile that raised her opinion of him still higher. One day, may a man light up like that at the thought of me. So far, Buirtevaert was a competent and obedient sub-chief, one of the few men his age not made foolish by her presence.

  ‘I look forward to meeting her,’ Melitta said.

  ‘Porridge, lady?’ he asked. The Standing Horses had a huge copper cauldron in which they made all their meals. This morning’s grain had no doubt been put straight in over last night’s deer-meat stew.

  When I was in Alexandria I longed for the plains. Now I long for Alexandria. Where is my son? What kind of mother am I?

  ‘You are sad,’ Buirtevaert said. ‘Do you have a man you miss?’ He looked away, as if just asking such a thing was outside the bounds of courtesy. ‘I am sorry, lady.’

  ‘Do you know that I have a son?’ Melitta asked. ‘He’ll be eight months old in a few days.’ She shook her head. ‘My man – is dead.’

  Buirtevaert shook his head. ‘I had heard that you were widowed,’ he said. ‘To be young and alone in spring . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It is like all the songs . . .’ He trailed off, embarrassed. Most of those songs were about randy widows.

  She had to smile at his confusion. Her position as lady seemed to have added twenty years to her age. Young people amused her. Perhaps she was becoming her mother.

  ‘Lady!’

  Melitta turned to see her knights mounting. Scopasis was pointing at the approaching rider. At this distance, Melitta knew her as Samahe.

  ‘News!’ Scopasis called. He trotted up with Melitta’s riding horse, and she made herself mount. All her sores cracked open together, and she felt the blood and pus creep into the dirty linen – already cold where the outside air crept under her coat.

  Samahe came up and hugged her. She returned the embrace with interest. ‘I was just wishing for a girl,’ she said. ‘And here you are.’

  Samahe smiled. ‘You need a trumpeter,’ she said laughing. ‘Maybe a lover.’

  ‘A girl?’ Melitta asked. In Alexandria she knew lots of girls who lay with girls. The whole idea made her laugh. She slapped her thigh and cursed at the pain.

  Samahe laughed too. But then she was serious. ‘A girl in your bed means no talk and no babies,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I’ve never done it myself.’ She rolled her eyes, suggesting that perhaps she had. ‘Listen – I am not here for bed-talk. Ataelus thinks Urvara’s seen Upazan’s advance scouts – yesterday, and far from here. North and east and east again.’

  ‘How old is this news?’ Melitta said, suddenly all business.

  ‘Three, perhaps four days.’ Samahe looked around. ‘You have a fair force. Ataelus asks you to come north to him. If you come, you must come now and ride hard.’

  Melitta gestured to Scopasis and to Buirtevaert to join her. ‘We’ve cleared the valley to the ferry. Not much else to be done.’ She looked at her commanders. ‘Can we move back north and find Ataelus?’

  ‘With Samahe to guide us?’ Buirtevaert asked. ‘Let’s be on our way!’

  Scopasis nodded. ‘I long to put my sword against this Upazan’s throat,’ he said.

  Melitta nodded, feeling the new crusts of the sores on her thighs. ‘Me too,’ she said.

  Five days in the saddle – five nights with a warm companion who braided her hair and talked, sometimes, of things other than how many men she might kill, or how many horses such and such a man took in such and such a raid. Of babies and harmless gossip about who had whom in her blankets.

  Samahe’s greatest contribution was the salve she had for riding sores, and the discipline she brought to changes of clothes. Samahe travelled with two pairs of trousers and two coats, and every time they crossed a stream, she stopped, stripped and changed, drying the wet pair on the rump of her packhorse. Melitta learned that women nomades needed to take special care of themselves to avoid the sort of sores she had, and worse. She learned a great deal from travelling with Samahe, and the best of it was that Samahe taught her without comment or superiority.

  They found two more of the war parties before they caught Ataelus, and when they found him, he too had been collecting the outriders, so that together they had a polyglot force from all the people of almost a thousand riders.

  Melitta embraced Ataelus for almost as long as Samahe did, and before he could tell her his news, she called a council of all the leaders present, and they stood around a fire on the first warm evening while young men and women sketched their patrols in the soft black earth and bragged of their deeds. Thyrsis told his tale well, as usual, and his hair gleamed in the firelight, and Melitta thought he was the handsomest man among the Sakje. And she saw Tameax, who smiled and frowned when he saw her.

  Two girls – Grass Cat girls, bent on mischief – had ridden to within sight of the old fort that Crax had once manned on the great inland sea that some called the Kaspian and others the Hyrkanian. There, on the good grass north of the fort, they had counted four thousand riders – or more.

  ‘Counting so many riders is hard,’ the eldest girl admitted. ‘Always my father asks me to count the stars. Now I know why.’

  A clump of boys came forward. They had seen Upazan and his golden helmet, they said. ‘Breyat died,’ one said. ‘He was my friend. We saw them Sauromatae and they saw us, and we ran, and ran, over the grass, but Breyat’s horse stumbled and he died.’

  There were dozens of such reports and the more recent were the most detailed.

  When the last scout, the last far-riding girl, had told her story, Ataelus rose. ‘Upazan is coming into the high ground with his whole strength,’ Ataelus said. ‘Ten thousand warriors, more or less. Five times that number of horses. The grass is green, the ground is hard and now he comes.’ Ataelus grinned. ‘He is already too late. All the farmers are in the forts. All the grain is stored or burned.’ Ataelus bowed to Melitta. ‘You have already done well against him, lady. Without a saddle emptied, he must march into a desert.’

  ‘A desert with green grass,’ Melitta said.

  Ataelus grinned, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. ‘Green grass is good for a night or two, eh? But not if you have to sit in one place more than a day. Then the horses eat all the grass. Then yo
u need grain.’

  Buirtevaert nodded. ‘And if we had ten days without rain,’ he said, ‘we could burn the grass.’

  ‘Aye!’ a dozen voices shouted.

  ‘Aye!’ Ataelus said. ‘That would be the end of Upazan’s campaign. Eight years ago, he gambled everything on catching us unprepared, and he succeeded. Upazan thinks that the Sakje are soft. He hears that we live in the valleys, that we winter in houses. He caught us sleeping by the fire in the year of the flood, and he thinks to do it again.’ Ataelus nodded, as if to himself.

  ‘This time, we have all the people on this side of the Borysthenes, and we are one people,’ he said.

  ‘We will have a great battle,’ Scopasis said.

  Thyrsis punched a fist in the air. He and Scopasis were suddenly friends – an unexpected development.

  Melitta looked around. They were all so – male. ‘I don’t want a great battle,’ she said. ‘I want to bore Upazan to death. I want to worry him like a pack of wolves with a buck in winter. I want to chew on him like worms on a corpse.’

  Ataelus grinned. ‘That is your father’s way!’ he said. He turned to the others. ‘Many of you are too young to have been at the Ford of the River God. Kineas and Marthax – they pulled in harness, those two, whatever happened afterwards.’

  Melitta knew a good political speech when she heard one. Ataelus was wooing the Standing Horses by catering to their version of events.

  ‘Together, they bled the Greeks, killing every straggler, taking their food, burning the grass. When we fought, their horses were like caribou in the last of winter.’ Ataelus looked around, and every leader nodded with him. ‘Melitta is right. No battle – or only a battle to finish the buck when the wolves have brought him down.’

  Buirtevaert raised a hand, but Graethe, his chief, interrupted. ‘Ataelus, none here will doubt you – or the lady. But it is only three hundred stades down the Tanais River to the fort. Not much distance to bleed the buck. Not like the great sea of grass.’