And then, despite her misgivings, Srayanka walked down the beach and up the boarding plank into the boat.
They took two days to sail to the gap in the long sandbanks that defined the Bay of Salmon, and another day to make their way through the passages between the temporary islands to the Euxine. Once they were clear of the last treacherous mudbank, they coasted along the shore, camping in the open for the night and then rowing slowly along the beach before Heron’s city of Pantecapaeum, looking for the rendezvous.
It was one of those days people remember when they remember being happy – the sky as deep and blue as it could be, the spring sun lighting the green grass as it rolled away to the horizon, the sea a perfect azure reflecting the bowl of heaven, and the crisp golden beach neatly contrasting the black mud of the fields to the south and west. In autumn, they would be full of grain – the grain that made the Euxine rich.
Srayanka sat in the stern of the open boat with a handful of her best warriors and Ataelus, a Sakje tribesman from the east who had been her husband’s scout. He was more than a scout now – his clan numbered in excess of six hundred riders.
A mixture of Greeks and local Maeotae – farmers, like the Sindi further west – rowed the boat. Srayanka smiled to watch them row together, because the mixture of the three races represented her not-quite-a-kingdom on the Tanais River. Today, she was going to land near Pantecapaeum to seal her status with a treaty – a Greek concept, but well within her understanding – that would ensure the safety of her shipping and her farmers and her children.
It was all very different from the way of her childhood, she thought, as her face warmed in the sun. As a spear-maiden, she had ridden the sea of grass. When angered, she had made war. When her enemies were stronger than she, she had ridden away into the grass and vanished. Kineas and his dream of a kingdom on the Euxine had changed all that. Now she had thousands of farmers to protect and hundreds of Greek colonists and traders. Hostages. She could no longer ride away.
Well up the beach, as far as a good horse would go in two hundred heartbeats, she could see the man with whom she had come to treat – Heron, the tyrant of Pantecapaeum. Like Ataelus, Heron had been one of her husband’s men a dozen years ago. Not one of her favourites, but the bonds held. Heron intended to make himself the king of the Euxine, and much as that thought offended her, acknowledging him would cost her no horses, as the old Sakje saying went.
She chuckled.
Ataelus gave her one of his broad smiles. It was easy – and foolish – to take those smiles for a lack of ready wit. Ataelus was just one of those men who found much to smile at. ‘For being happy?’ Ataelus asked. Fifteen years of living around Greeks and his Greek had never improved.
‘We’re going to make Heron the ghan of the Inner Sea,’ she said in Sakje. In that language, her contempt was obvious – that she, who openly wore the sword of Cyrus and might end her days as queen of all the Sakje on the sea of grass, should bend the knee to some Greek boy with a mere city at his beck and call.
‘For calling him Eumeles,’ Ataelus said with a shrug – in Greek. ‘Eumeles, not Heron.’
Srayanka watched the beach grow nearer and shook her head. ‘I can’t bring myself to like him,’ she said.
Ataelus shrugged, the most Greek thing he did. He was wearing a heavy over-robe of Qin silk worked in gold. Under it he had a harness of bronze and horn scales. Despite his small stature, he looked like what he was – a cheerful warlord. ‘Want to change your mind?’ he asked, finally speaking in Sakje.
She shook her head. She could see Heron – Eumeles – standing a little in front of his guard, two dozen mercenaries. He was showy, dressed in purple and gold, with red sandals and a fancy sword. Another man stood just behind him – a stranger, but his position said he was almost as important as Heron. The second man was not remarkable in his dress, in his size, in any way. He had nondescript hair and was of middling height. But the fact that he stood so near Heron caused her to narrow her eyes.
‘Who is he?’ she asked in Sakje. No need to go into details with Ataelus.
Ataelus moved his chin the breadth of a finger, but the gesture said that he, too, had never seen the man before.
Srayanka smiled at her captain – nothing so grand as a navarch, as the Greeks called their boat commanders. ‘Put us ashore here,’ she said. ‘We’ll walk a little.’
Ataelus grinned at her caution.
The bow of the open boat hissed and grumbled as he passed over the waves in the shallow water and then made a firm crunch as they ran up the sand. The men in the bow jumped free of the boat and dragged the light hull up the beach an armspan, and then the rest of the rowers were out, and the keel was dragged free of the water. Only then did the Sakje – none of them remotely resembling a sailor – jump down on to the sand. Two of Srayanka’s warriors touched the sand and then their brows.
Srayanka watched Heron, just a few dozen horse-lengths away. ‘Relaunch the boat,’ she said in Greek. ‘Ready to sail in a moment.’
Ataelus raised an eyebrow.
‘Humour an old woman,’ Srayanka said. She checked her gorytos, the bow case that every warrior wore all the time, her fingers touching the bow and the arrows, the knife strapped to the back of the case, and the sword of Cyrus at her waist.
All the Sakje mimicked her. The warriors looked at her and at Ataelus.
‘I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this done.’ For my children, she thought. She liked her life – she had no real need to be queen of all the Sakje, nor even to displace her former enemy Marthax. She wanted to enjoy the rest of her life. One bend of her knee, and all she had worked for was safe.
She did not want to bend her knee. Oh, husband of my heart. We defeated Iskander, and now I bend the knee to a fool.
Walking in sand was messy and undignified, and she wished she’d overcome her fears and her contempt and landed the boat at Heron’s feet. Eumeles’ feet, she thought. The scarecrow. The useless boy. A nonentity who pretended to be her husband’s heir.
And then she was there – a horse-length from the tall, thin man in the purple cloak. She bowed to him.
‘She is beautiful,’ the man behind Heron said. His accent was Athenian, and she thought of Kineas. He seemed startled by her.
‘All yours,’ Heron said. He turned his back and vanished through his guards.
Betrayal. She knew it in an instant.
She got her akinakes – the sword of Cyrus, as long as her arm and wickedly sharp – in her hand before the guards could cross the sand. What a fool, to use that gesture to warn me of his betrayal, she thought, and the cool jade of the sword of Cyrus steadied her. She grabbed the first heavy spear thrust at her and jerked it, and then reached over the man’s big, round shield to sink the point into his neck.
A blow in her side, but the armour under her robe turned the point, and she spun, but they had already closed around her and they weren’t taking chances. She went down almost to the ground and swung her short sword up under a shield and the man screamed as he went down and she was into his place – a blow against her back, and another, and pain so sharp. She felt her vision tunnel and the strength going from her legs, but the other man was there, and she fell at him. She had lost control of her muscles before her sword slashed across the bridge of his nose and his blood fountained across her back. She saw their feet – some bare and some heavily sandalled.
‘Fucking whore!’ the Athenian screamed.
She smiled, even though dark was coming down and she knew just what that meant.
The solid sound of an arrow going home in flesh – the complex sound of the head punching through the guard’s white leather thorax – would have made her smile again, except that she was too far down the dark path for that. Ataelus, she thought. Alive, and hence shooting. Save my children, Ataelus.