She wondered at the possibility that she might die out here, alone. It made her laugh. The sheer unlikelihood of her survival cheered her – long odds had an appeal of their own.
An unshod horse hoof struck a rock, somewhere upstream, clear as the noise of a temple gong.
This time, she didn't hesitate. Her choices were clear – even stark. She was up on Gryphon in a heartbeat, and she didn't even untether her other horse. She rode downstream, moving from one stand of trees to the next in the new moonlight, her bow strung and in her hand, an arrow nocked and three more clutched along her bow.
'All or nothing,' she said aloud. There were three of them again, riding single file on the far bank. They were bickering. Words and pieces of words came to her on the still air – the older man wanted to stop for the night.
The stream hid the sounds of her horse's hooves, and when she was just a few dozen horse-lengths from them she half-rose and let her mount go, galloping across the moonlit river meadow. One hole, and she was dead.
She swept alongside them, just the thin rivulet of the stream and its steep banks between her bow and their soft skin, and she shot the last man first. No following the flight of the arrow in the dark. She drew and shot again, and again, and again, and then her last arrow was gone.
One man was whispering, perhaps grumbling to his gods, but he was face up in the long grass, and all three horses were standing in the new moonlight, as if waiting for their new owner to come and take them.
She left the horses and rode on, cantering through the dark along the stream in the weak moonlight, confident in her mount and still terrified, still amazed at her own boldness and the totality of its result. She rode almost two stades downstream, but she was alone in the valley.
Then she rode back. Two of her victims were still alive – the elder she had shot three times and he still tried to shoot her as she rode up, but his left arm couldn't support this bow and he fell to his knees.
She rode up, a javelin pointed at his face, a white circle in the moonlight.
'Who are you?' he asked.
She couldn't think of anything to say – exhaustion robbed her of speech – so she killed him.
The other wounded man watched her with open, glittering eyes as she searched their bodies and their kit – a good hide tent on a packhorse and a bronze kettle. She collected the horses and rode back.
'I have to kill you,' she said to the young man, after some thought. But even as she spoke to him, she realized that she couldn't kill him. She had, quite simply, had enough.
He nodded, though, and turned his face away.
When she had mounted, she shook her head, wondering if the borders of the waking world and the sleeping world had drifted, because she felt as if she could see the dead men following at her horse's tail – quite a few dead men, for a girl her age. The shock robbed her of speech for a moment and made her neck hairs quiver. She rode back to the boy with the arrow in his chest. The ghosts were terrifying apparitions – as if they were being tormented by some mad god.
'I've changed my mind,' she said to the wounded boy. 'If you live, you live.' She put a heavy wool blanket of Greek weaving over him, and then another.
He grunted.
She watched him for a moment, and knew her sudden burst of mercy was for nothing. He coughed blood, cursed her and died. She watched as his shade dragged itself from his corpse like some slithering maggot leaving the skin of a dead thing and joined the grim troupe at her tail.
'Artemis, stand with me,' she said, and slitted her eyes to avoid seeing the apparitions. Then, ever practical, she stripped the blankets back off him, rolled them tight and rode back to her camp, mind blank. There, she made a big fire for the first time in three nights, killed the smallest horse and gorged herself on half-cooked horsemeat before falling into a dream-haunted sleep that made her moan and toss. Twice she awoke, to relieve herself and to shiver in fear at the killing and the blood and what she had so easily become. Both times, she went back to sleep, and the third time she awoke it was day, and the ghosts were gone, and no new pursuers were on her trail.
She bathed in the icy stream and washed the blood off her hands and the pus off her cheek. The water was as much of a shock as the ghosts, and she wondered how bad her fever was. Then she warmed herself by the fire and put on the fresh, dry wool shirt of one of the dead men.
Her cheek smelled bad. She couldn't get away from it – she smelled like death. Perhaps the man's arrowpoint had been poisoned. Perhaps she was already dead – that might be why she could see the dead so clearly.
She didn't remember packing up her camp or riding – only that sunset came and found her still mounted, moving directly away from it, following the shadows of the trees as they pointed north and east.
But suddenly, as if by magic, she was sitting on a bluff, looking down at an immense sheet of water – ten stades across. She laughed, because she knew this place – indeed, the last rays of the sun shone on the distant Temple of Artemis on the far bank, impossibly remote from her and yet painfully close. Coenus had built the temple of white marble with the spoils of his campaigns.
She was on the Tanais, in country she knew. She just couldn't make her mind work.
She rode east all night, on the firm high ground above the river. She rode, not so much because she feared pursuit as because she feared to get off her horse.
Finally, in the first faint grey light of not-dawn, she dismounted and squatted to piss, her back against a birch tree, her reins in her hand like some hero in a Sakje tale, and she understood, as if it was the most profound thing of her life, that she was living in a Sakje tale – as if Coenus and her father had lived in the Iliad. She saw it as clearly as she saw the salmon running in the winter river at her feet.
To no one in particular, or perhaps to the gods – perhaps to the dozens of ghosts who screamed in silent torment at the edge of her vision, she spoke. 'If I live,' she said, 'this feat of arms – this endless butchery of men and horse – will live for ever among the people.' She shrugged. Then she smiled and her face hurt. 'I smell of death,' she said suddenly, to the ghosts.
They never answered her, but they followed, and as the sun climbed the sky she saw that they came closer and closer, and she cursed them. 'Coenus must have killed a hundred men!' she said. 'Haunt him!'
And later, as she crossed a feeder stream running white and cold down the hillside above her, she addressed Nihmu. 'Why are you lying with him?' she asked, but received no answer.
She's not here, silly, she reminded herself, unsure whether that was good or bad.
That night, she made no fire and she lacked the strength to cook the horsemeat or even to unpack the animals. She pulled her riding horse down to the ground with her, drew the dead man's furs over her head against the horse and slept fitfully. She was awakened when her horse, annoyed, pushed itself to its feet, dumping her on the ground and letting in the icy air.
She tried to lie still – perhaps even to accept death. Death was very, very close; she could smell his carrion breath. The moon had set and it was utterly black. Her heart roared and pounded, and she waited for him to take her.
Her horse farted.
She laughed, and forced herself to her feet. With the patience of the survivor, she rolled the furs in a bundle and got them tied with thongs, and then slung them over her riding horse. She was unsurprised to find that all the horses were still gathered around her. She picked up the lead rein and mounted Gryphon, then rode away into the utter dark.
She slept while riding, the horses finding their own way, and awoke to pale grey light and the sound of her own horse whinnying and another horse answering from her right. She froze. Half asleep, half in the world of dreams, she raised her head and saw a figure from her childhood sitting on a shaggy pony – Samahe, 'The Black-Haired One'.