Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

by Christian Cameron

  Ataelus scratched his chin. ‘You are right. But once he is on the river valley and over the high ground where the last of the sea of grass rolls, every tree will hide one of Temerix’s archers. The valley is full of our dirt people, and they have bows.’

  Melitta rose to her feet. ‘It is true. If Upazan comes down the Tanais – and I pray he does – then every stade will pull him deeper into our nets. You see a war of horses, because you are horsemen, but this will soon be a war of farmers, a war where a flight of arrows flies from a stand of trees – and what can the Sauromatae do? Ride in among the trees?’

  ‘Temerix’s boys would reap them like wheat!’ Gaweint said.

  ‘When do we start?’ Scopasis asked.

  ‘Now,’ Melitta said, and Ataelus gave her a nod. ‘Tonight. We will move tonight while we have the moon, and ambush them as they march in the morning.’

  Melitta lay by Gryphon in the wet grass, cold, miserable and as nervous as she’d ever been, and worried that the enemy might actually hear the beating of her heart. And it wasn’t her first ambush by a long shot. She remembered lying in a hole of her own scraping near Gaza – remembered waiting for the Sauromatae in the snow, just a few valleys away.

  Gryphon’s eyes were open, his ears pricked, intent. Off north, a bird circled.

  Melitta rolled her head in a slow circle, feeling the pain as her head passed the same point – over and over. Then she flexed her fingers in the dead man’s gloves, trying to warm them.

  The wet grass had soaked through every layer she was wearing. How did these people do this, again and again? She wanted to raise her head, wanted to do something. She wondered if her bowstring was wet. She wondered if she looked foolish, lying in long wet grass with her household knights all around her. I’ll bet my mother never worried about looking foolish, she thought.

  She heard them a long way off. Curiously, the first thing she heard was the dogs barking among the wagons, and then she heard the jingle of harnesses – the Sauromatae were great ones for chain-bits and cheekpieces, both of which made noise.

  This was Ataelus’s battle. She was barely a commander – she’d given permission for it and then he’d done all the rest. It stood to reason – this was his ground, where he’d led his band for five years, where he knew every fold and every hill. And the site was magnificent – a gentle bowl with knife-sharp ridges rising high and clear, the last high grass before the trees started at the great bend of the Tanais. The trees provided them with somewhere to run, and the tiny folds of the hills, each a dozen horse-lengths from the next, allowed Ataelus to hide a thousand riders in ground that appeared to be as empty as a tabletop.

  Ataelus’s plan depended on enemy arrogance. He assumed that Upazan would have few outriders, and they would mainly be on the trade road – after all, this was ground that the Sakje hadn’t contested against the Sauromatae in five years. And Ataelus had ordered that when they attacked, they should kill everything – everything. Every animal, every man. This, he said, was not just vengeance. It was the kind of blow they had to deal Upazan to win the war.

  As Melitta listened to the sounds approaching, she wondered about Upazan – the man who had killed her father. Her mother had hated him, but never sworn vengeance. She had described him with contempt and yet some admiration. He was a skilled war leader, but a bad, greedy king, who ruled more by fear than by love.

  While she had the image of her mother’s stories of Upazan in her head, she saw a rider cross her own small ridge. He was no Upazan. He was – she was – a mere scout.

  Not so arrogant. This one is far from the road and right in among us!

  The girl was riding without seeing, letting her horse do the work as the beast picked its way down the slope towards Melitta’s knights. Already, the horse was sniffing the air.

  Melitta got her bow out of the gorytos by her side and thanked Artemis that she had lain on her right side. Gryphon twitched and the Sauromatae horse pricked its ears.

  The girl was lost in a waking dream. A lover? Can anything else cause you to lose yourself so completely? She pitied the girl, even as she rose to her knees.

  The girl turned, mouth open.

  Scopasis’s arrow hit her in the side and Melitta’s in the open mouth, and she fell with a dull thump.

  Her horse stood over her. After a long moment, it began to crop grass.

  Melitta put another arrow on her string. She wasn’t cold any more. She looked right and left. Her household knights were crouched by their horses, bows in their hands. Their damp armour glowed in the orange light.

  She turned and looked back up the main ridge, trying to see Ataelus. He had woven himself a hide of grass, where he could sit on sheepskins with a whistle in his mouth. Melitta couldn’t see him. She hoped he could see her.

  The horse started to move and Scopasis flowed forward and caught it before it could climb the little ridge in front of her and alert the enemy. The dead girl’s eyes were wide open. She’d fallen with her head against a small rock, and her blue eyes seemed to watch them with the idiot stare of death.

  Melitta heard the hooves in front of her and a voice called out. Gryphon twitched again – responding, no doubt, to the Sauromatae voices.

  Anything for a few more seconds. Were they close? Far? Had the ambush already failed?

  Childhood came to her aid. ‘Here I am!’ Melitta called in soft Sauromatae. Scopasis flicked her a look – delight in her guile.

  A young warrior came over the ridge that covered their front, his horse lunging forward as the boy leaned on his neck, showing off for his girl.

  This time all of the household were ready, and he was dead before his horse could pull up. The horse itself took a dozen shafts and fell to its knees, then the animal gave a shrill scream – surprise and agony – and went down.

  They froze, as if the horse’s death had cast a spell. Again, Melitta tuned her head, looking for Ataelus, listening for his whistle, and there was nothing. Melitta prayed to the Huntress in her head, begging that the slaughter of children be over. Greeks had a horrible myth, where Apollo and his sister slaughtered the children of a woman who had dared to suggest that her children were as beautiful as Leto’s. It was on a hundred pots, it was pictured in temples, woven into wall-hangings, engraved on armour – a horrible, horrible story.

  Having just killed two children, Melitta loathed it more than ever. Artemis, free me from this burden. Let my next foe be a man, or a woman grown.

  Somewhere below them, a bit made a metallic sound and a man gave an order.

  How close are they? Melitta wondered.

  Her heart pounded against her chest. She wondered how she had managed to be nervous earlier, when the enemy had been out of earshot. Now her hands trembled, and Gryphon kept stirring under her hands.

  In front, she heard a woman’s voice call out ‘I can’t find them!’ in the tones of a mother.

  Artemis! she shrieked in her mind. To kill the mother after the children!

  A man’s voice answered, saying they were ‘up the hill’ and there was some rough laughter, and then—

  Ataelus’s whistle.

  She had Gryphon on his feet and she was in the saddle – no idea how she’d got there, reins in hand and bow. All the knights were up and they surged in one line to the top of their ridge and there was the whole of the Sauromatae host at her feet, a sea of horses on the sea of grass.

  A row of wagons moved in front of her, pulled by oxen just like Sakje wagons.

  Scopasis gave a shrill yell – AIAIAIAIAIA! – and all her knights took it up and they went down the ridge and began killing.

  Melitta shot automatically, intent on clearing the wagons as Ataelus had suggested. She shot the drivers and then she rode in close and killed oxen with her long-handled axe. Scopasis kept her knights close, but they left a trail of corpses behind them, and this was not battle. The men Melitta shot had no weapons and some of the bodies were very small.

  She closed her heart to it. This wa
s life or death for the Sakje. I am the queen of the Assagatje, she said to herself, and shot down another young mother by a wagon. I am Artemis, and you are not my people.

  They ripped through the wagons like a boat cutting through the sea, and to her left and right were the other bands, doing equal execution. Before the sun had risen the width of a finger, the Sauromatae had lost more wealth in people and animals than they could replace in ten years. The Sakje took nothing. They slaughtered. As Ataelus had ordered.

  Beyond the chaos of the massacre, she could see the enemy rallying his warriors. They had not been among the wagons, but now they were coming.

  Ataelus had ridden in a hundred fights, and his guile was a fathomless ocean compared to most men’s. He had prepared ambushes to attack the rescuers, had placed them carefully, and now he released them, so that the first avenging brothers, husbands, sisters, turning to rescue their loved ones, riding blind with hate to the massacre, were caught in the flank and rear, riddled with arrows and driven into the blood-soaked earth to join their families.

  Melitta had stopped killing. She allowed Gryphon to pick his way free of all the death, and she leaned from the saddle only to use her axe on a horse that screamed, over and over again, as it dragged its entrails across the ground.

  Suddenly Ataelus was at her shoulder. She glared at him, for a moment hating this jolly small Sakje the way she’d never hated Upazan or even Eumeles.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Time to withdraw,’ he said. That was all.

  ‘We’re winning!’ she said, disgusted. Disgusted in a dozen different ways. Perfectly aware that Philokles would say that there was no real difference between this and her private war against the Sauromatae in the winter valleys. None at all.

  Ataelus shrugged. ‘Always leave an ambush while you are winning,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll write that down, shall I?’ she said.

  She rode back among her knights, wishing again that she had a trumpeter. ‘Withdraw!’ she yelled, and Scopasis came up by her side.

  ‘Here they come!’ Gaweint roared, and shot his bow.

  Angered, Melitta glanced at Scopasis. His axe was in his hand, red to his elbow, and with it he tried to parry a lance-point that appeared out of the fog of her anger and slammed into the side of her head, twisting her helmet.

  Gryphon reared, punching with his hooves, and another blow rang on her back, and then she lashed out with her whip, the only weapon in her hand, and she felt it connect and then she was down, all the breath torn from her body, mouth full of bloody grass. She rolled over – blue sky – and her head rang with pain.

  Above her towered a man in a golden helmet, his lance cocked up overarm, and he rammed it down into her gut. The scale coat held the point, even though the blow made her puke and choke, and she managed to roll on her right elbow and pushed, not a thought in her head, pushed, and she was on her knees. She had her akinakes in her hand and she plunged it into the horse’s guts and entrails blew out over her face and the horse bounded away. She kept the blade in her hand and ripped the animal from girth to cock, and it stumbled two leaping steps and collapsed, its last effort tearing the weapon from her grasp.

  The melee was all around her. She wiped her face, the bronze and silver scales of her hauberk ripping the ordure from her cheeks as she wrestled with her helmet. The chin strap was broken and the helmet was on sideways, which had saved her life from the last blow but now limited her vision too much. It came off and her braided hair fell free.

  Golden-helmet was on his feet, limping, and he had a sword and an axe.

  She threw her helmet at him – a last act of defiance. He was big, middle-aged, scarred under that magnificent helmet.

  ‘Upazan,’ she said. He was much easier to hate up close.

  He hesitated on hearing his name. Then he smiled.

  Hands grabbed her under her arms, heedless of the scales of her armour coat, and suddenly she was being borne away through the press. Her knights closed in around her, and then she was on Gryphon.

  ‘Oh, my lady, I failed you,’ Scopasis cried, and she thought his heart would burst before her, he looked so abject.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said, and touched his cheek. ‘You saved my life. Twice. Ten times.’ She looked around – Gaweint was there, and she didn’t see anyone missing. ‘I’m alive. You’re all alive. That was Upazan.’

  ‘Upazan!’ Gaweint said, turning in the saddle. ‘Uh! I am cursed! Upazan unhorsed, and we missed him?’

  ‘Hush,’ Agreint said. ‘He cannot be killed by sword or spear. It is prophesied!’

  A dozen young men competed to tell each other that they feared no prophecy.

  ‘Well, he can’t be killed by a thrown helmet,’ Melitta said. ‘I tried that.’

  An hour later, Upazan tried to rush their retreat with a sudden charge across the last fields of the sea of grass. Instead of turning to fight, Ataelus’s rearguard – Buirtevaert’s men – made for the forest edge. Then a sudden shower of Sindi arrows fell like deadly hail on Upazan’s knights, reaping their unarmoured horses. Ten went down in tumbling heaps and the charge swerved and became a flight.

  Ataelus grinned like the very image of death, but he forbade any warrior from a counter-charge.

  He turned to Melitta and Scopasis. They were the last three mounted warriors on the road. All around them, Temerix’s Sindi were shooting from cover. Melitta could see Upazan in the setting sun, his helmet flaming gold – but he was falling back. He had only a thousand warriors – more joined him every second. He’d hoped to surprise Ataelus with a sudden charge, and instead, he’d been galled.

  ‘We could have had him,’ Scopasis spat.

  Ataelus smiled and shook his head. ‘Upazan is not for you,’ he said without looking at the former outlaw. ‘Many men, and not a few women, claim the right to kill him.’ Ataelus watched the Sauromatae king retire with undisguised glee. He rode out on to the grass, and the last light of the sun turned his armour to fire.

  ‘Hah! Upazan, I feel your hate from here, and I laugh at you!’ Ataelus called. ‘You fight like a fool! Your women have more sense!’

  Arrows began to fall near Ataelus.

  Upazan sat alone, out of range, his golden helmet like a beacon, and he said nothing.

  ‘Or are all your women dead?’ Ataelus yelled. ‘Go home, usurper, or we will water the grass with your blood.’

  A man – a man in good armour, well mounted – reacted. He set his horse to a gallop and rode at Ataelus, his voice a scream of rage. He had a long-handled axe over his head, and his face, as he came close, was a mask of grief and rage.

  Temerix stepped out of the woods and shot him. It was a long shot, and a man less desperate would have seen the flight of the shaft.

  ‘That makes me happy,’ Temerix’s grim voice said.

  ‘This is not a war of revenge,’ Melitta said.

  Temerix looked up at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes it is. Revenge. They burned us, and we will bury them. Anything else is foolishness.’

  Ataelus rode his horse back under the trees. He shook his head. ‘Not for revenge?’ he asked. ‘I heard that you swore an oath that made the hills ring. I heard it on the sea of grass. So it must have been quite an oath.’

  Melitta hung her head. ‘I did. So did my brother.’

  ‘Lady, Upazan hunted us like animals. Our women and our children and our animals have been prey for his lance for many years.’ Ataelus’s eyes seemed to glow in the last light.

  ‘We killed their children,’ Melitta said.

  ‘Yes!’ Ataelus said. ‘And now their hate will be a pure thing – a blind thing. Only blind with hate could Upazan be so foolish as to follow us down the Tanais.’

  Melitta took time to sleep. And when the images of the day came back again and again, she rose, collected a wineskin and drank it. She was scarcely the only warrior to behave so, and soon enough, she was asleep.

  PART IV

  TANAIS RIVER

  NORTH EUXINE S
EA

  Eumeles looked out over the morning waves and spat contemplatively into the dark waters.

  ‘Where did my little nemesis get so many ships?’ he asked.

  None of the officers on the stern chose to answer him. Idomenes took a deep breath and said what was on his mind.

  ‘I warned you,’ he said. Go ahead and kill me, you Cretan, Idomenes thought. I said it. I feel better. I hate him, Idomenes realized with a start.

  ‘Yes,’ Eumeles said, looking at the rows of masts on the horizon. ‘Yes, you did. Why is he keeping his ships in column?’

  Aulus, his admiral, bowed his head. ‘He hides his strength. Until he deploys, we cannot count his ships. We’re in formation – he can count ours.’

  ‘Then why are we in formation?’ Eumeles asked with the impatient tone of the superior mind who must do all the thinking.

  Aulus kept his eyes on the deck. ‘His rowers must be better trained, lord. I cannot trust mine to deploy so fast. You saw, lord.’ The man was aggrieved. ‘It took us an hour to form this line.’

  Eumeles continued to watch the oncoming fleet. ‘I suppose it is fruitless for me to ask where he got these ships with their trained oarsmen. Ptolemy must have given him the whole fleet of Aegypt. I have been used as bait.’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. If I survive, I’ll work this out. What can we do? Half our ships are inside the Bay of Salmon, covering Nikephoros. Advise me.’

  The officers all looked at each other.

  Idomenes was in the remarkable position of actually having an answer – and yet, in his head, he’d changed sides. Murdering bastard wants to enslave his own farmers? Too dumb to live, Idomenes thought, but at the same time, he spoke good advice. Perhaps he was so used to being ignored, he didn’t think his advice would be followed. He thought that it was strange how his head could be so divided.

  ‘Run,’ Idomenes said.

  The naval officers all breathed together – relief, because he had stated what they all feared to say.

  Eumeles turned his head slowly, until his mad eyes rested on Idomenes. ‘Go on,’ he said.