A hundred capes wriggled and the sand seemed to roll like the sea as the toxotai strung their bows lying flat. Even the desert generated too much moisture to leave a bow strung overnight.
To Bion, it seemed as if the galloping horses were right on top of them, and still Idomeneus didn’t call and the trumpet didn’t sound. Louder and louder – impossibly loud. And terrifying.
‘Stand up!’ the Cretan called.
Eumenes was right in front of her, two horse-lengths away, and even as she stood, his horse passed between her and Argon, his head turned to watch the rear and his cloak streaming behind him.
She put a heavy arrow on her bow as she noted that there were dozens – no, hundreds – of horses, but only a few of them had riders.
They stole a horse herd, she thought. It made her smile – such a Sakje thing.
The riderless horses raised quite a dust cloud. She wrapped her linen wimple over her mouth and tilted her straw hat down to block the sun. Now she could see almost a stade, and there were two big bodies of cavalry.
The enemy. This was different from anything she’d ever done – different from fighting pirates. She found that she was grinning like a fool. She looked around – she could hit at this range, but she wasn’t sure she was allowed to shoot.
Just half a stade away were hundreds of enemy cavalry. And they were coming fast.
A heavy Cretan arrow leaped into the air – Argon, damn him – and it swept high before stooping like a hawk and falling just short of the lead company.
‘You fucking idiot! Do you want to eat horseshit tonight, you useless turd?’ Idomeneus was not yelling – but he was right there. ‘Wait for the trumpet!’ More quietly, ‘Ares, what a fuck-face.’
The enemy were so close that they must see the archers – but they continued to canter along, making the earth rumble. Melitta was shaking the way she had before telling Aunt Sappho that she’d lain with Xeno – where was Xeno, anyway? And whose plan was this?
The trumpet rang.
Bion loosed without thought, then watched as another arrow was dragged from the quiver and nocked, red fletch upward – bow up, full draw, four fingers over the mass of horsemen, loose, third arrow…
The lead company burst under the volleys of arrows. The first arrows hit them in a tight clump, most of them falling from high and hitting the unprotected hindquarters of the horses, so that the animals screamed and fell, or rolled, or stood and fought the air, bellowing their agony with noises that made Melitta’s Sakje stomach roll over with discomfort that killing mere men never caused her. The effect on the company to her front was total – where there had been a hundred cavalrymen, there was a dust cloud and the screams of the dying. Nothing came out of the cloud but a single riderless horse and even as she watched, the third volley of arrows vanished into the rising sand to a thin chorus of new screams.
The second and third enemy companies didn’t hesitate. They swept wide, going for the flanks of the archers, having changed from pursuers to desperate men within three flights of arrows. The men on Bion’s side of the engagement had long beards and Persian dress, they rode good horses and moved fast. Their captain wore rippling golden scale mail and had a henna-dyed beard. Bion shot him from the saddle – a pretty shot even at close range – before he could react to the new threat coming at his own flank: serried troops of the Exiles coming over the low sand and mud ridges to the north and south.
Leaderless, his men were still focused on the archers flaying their front when the Exiles ripped into their flanks, heralded by a point-blank volley of heavy javelins that could knock a horse flat.
Even so, determined men – bearded easterners who had grown up fighting Sakje on the frontier and knew a disaster when they saw one – didn’t hesitate. One group went straight for Melitta. She nodded, even as she fitted another arrow to the string – fingers suddenly clumsy, a spasm of fear even while part of her mind was above the whole battle, thinking things through Their leader knew he’d be safer going through the ambush than turning tail. A good leader.
They were going to make it to her position and she couldn’t stop them and nobody else could either.
She loosed – hit or miss, she didn’t know, because she threw herself flat and rolled in a ball as the Medes went over her, their sabres reaching for her. That was her moment of fear – blind and waiting to be pinned to the ground like a pig in the agora, but then they were past and Argon was making a shrill whistling noise. She looked around – dust, no more – and ran to the Cretan, who lay in his too-shallow pit with blood under his elbows and his back arched in pain.
His throat was cut – just barely cut, the extreme reach of a Mede’s sword – and he gave up as she watched, his body ceasing to struggle, his rump sinking into the hole he had dug for himself. His head turned and he saw her. His mouth moved – no sound. She never knew what he tried to say because a blow to her side suddenly knocked her flat.
Her left arm and side rang with pain but she wasn’t dead. Her hair was full of sand. She spat – got a foot under her.
The Mede had a sword like a Sakje akinakes, long and narrow, and he got a hand on the javelin he’d thrown at her while she rose to her feet.
He hesitated when he saw her trousered legs, and she got her sword out from under her arm before he could finish her off. She didn’t hesitate – she put a hand up against the heavy javelin, missed her grab and stepped in anyway, swung the sword with the whole weight of her body behind it. He got his akinakes up to parry but her blow sheered down the blade and cut into his fingers and hand from brutal momentum.
He froze in pain.
She swung hard, cutting so deep into his neck that her sword stuck, and he flopped in the bloody sand, still alive, arms reaching for her. He got a hand on her leg and she kicked, slammed her fist into his face – blood from the neck wound splashing over both of them – got the sword free from his muscle and bone and cut again and again and again and again until the sword flew from her fingers from exhaustion to land a horse-length away in the sand.
She knelt by the body, empty of anything. Later she got up and fetched her weapons, drank some water and walked off down the line to where the other survivors gathered around Idomeneus.
‘Argon’s dead,’ she said.
Carlus rode by her. ‘I can’t find her!’ he roared, and a dozen hippeis rode back the way she had come into the battle haze. The archers watched wearily, uncaring as to what the fuss was. Melitta didn’t care much herself, so she walked boldly across the sand to Diodorus.
‘I’m right here,’ she said.
Diodorus looked down at her and his dust-caked face creased in a smile. ‘You look like your father sometimes,’ he said. He pointed at Andronicus and gave him some visual cue that caused the Gaul to blow a complex trumpet call, and all the Exiles began to rally. Several Exiles waved at her, and Eumenes pointed her out to Crax and Carlus, who shook their heads.
Carlus rode over. ‘You scared me, missy!’
Melitta spurned the hand he offered her to mount. ‘Bodies to loot,’ she said. ‘And I suspect there are horses for everyone, Big Guy. And if you call me missy again in public, I’ll gut you.’
Carlus grinned as if he’d just won a contest, but his voice sounded gruff. ‘You and what army, archer?’ He spat. And worked to hide his grin.
Melitta walked off into the sand, and she made herself pull rings from fingers. There was some good armour and a lot of decent swords – not that she needed either. After the first minutes, she couldn’t bear the sounds the wounded horses made, and the sight of the men – in particular, the sight of men she liked ignoring other men dying in agony at their feet while they stripped their bodies – sickened her. So she pulled a handsome saddle blanket from the corpse of a horse and a rider fallen together, and she took the bridle and bit from henna-beard, who she’d dropped herself, and then she walked all the way to the horse herd, well clear of the carnage, and cut out a pretty mare, tall and dark with four white feet. She put the tack on, dealt with the mare’s unease with the smells and the whole situation, and got herself mounted, kit bundle, bow and all. And she had a few gold darics to wow the boys in camp.