Melitta didn't flinch. 'I need no more tests,' she said. 'Be gone, spirit, before I break your bones.'
She awoke with a foul taste in her mouth and a pounding in her head, as if her temples were the tight-stretched skin of a drum and the drummer's sticks beat her head in time to the pulsing of her heart.
Nihmu was weeping.
Melitta curled around her and stroked her forehead. 'What's wrong, Auntie?'
Nihmu rose suddenly, throwing Melitta back against the leather cushions on the floor. 'Nothing!' she said. 'There is nothing wrong. I saw many spirit guides, and I have received much news. I must think.'
Melitta's head hurt too much to ask further questions. She let Nihmu go, and then she breathed deeply of the fresh, cold air outside the tent. Her headache was banished in minutes and she knelt in the new snow outside, collecting the cushions, stripping the brazier and dumping the coals to hiss and steam in the snow. Then she knocked down the hide tent and folded it quickly, before it grew too cold and stiff.
All of these things, she realized in putting them away, were Samahe's, not Nihmu's. She took them back to Samahe's yurt.
The Sakje woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her lodge, working by the light of two Greek lamps. She was weaving thongs through small bronze scales, repairing an armour shirt.
This was work that Melitta knew well from her youth, and she sat down with the other woman and began to cut a leather thong from a patch of caribou hide, holding the tough hide in her teeth and cutting with a sharp knife. They worked in silence because both women had their mouths full. After some time, Samahe spat out the last of her thong. 'You took smoke?' she asked.
Melitta gave a wry smile. 'It took me, more like.' She started a new thong, cutting the edge of the hide carefully. A skilled man, or woman, could make a single thong many horse-lengths long, all a single thickness. Melitta wasn't that good, but she was pleased to see that her thong was not like a child's, full of knots and bumps. She still had skill.
Samahe nodded. 'I don't like the smoke any more,' she said. 'When I was a maiden, the smoke was good. Now it brings me only dreams of all the men I have killed.' She shrugged. 'The last few years, I have killed many and many.' She did not say this with the pride of a warrior, but merely with weariness.
'I met a guide,' Melitta said. 'Or a demon. He barred me from the tree and mocked me as a Greek.'
Samahe's eyes met hers. 'I wouldn't share that with other people,' she said.
Melitta shrugged. 'It makes no sense,' she said. 'My father was Greek. By all accounts, he seldom even accepted that he was baqca. Yet no spirit guide ever blocked him from the tree!'
'That is Greek talk,' Samahe said. 'The spirits do as they do, and it is not for us to question.'
'Bah,' Melitta said. 'That is tyranny. It is illogical.' Even as she spoke the Greek word, she understood how deep this conflict would run, and it made her angry. 'I am Sakje!' she said.
Samahe looked up from her work. 'I don't doubt it, lady. Do not let any other of the people doubt it, either.' She chewed on the thong for a dozen heartbeats, softening the stuff. Then she leaned forward. 'And Nihmu?' she asked.
'I couldn't say,' Melitta answered. 'She mentioned many spirit guides.'
Samahe shook her head. 'Why must she be baqca?' she asked. 'She cursed the gift when she had it, and rejoiced when it left her. Where is her mate? Why has she returned?'
Melitta was used to the gossip of women. She enjoyed it when it was well meant, and she judged Samahe's comments as kindly. 'Her mate is captive to Eumeles at Pantecapaeum.' She took the hide from her mouth. 'But it is many years and she has no child, and in Alexandria, we wondered if the lack of a child was weighing on her.'
And then, unbidden, thoughts of what she had seen between Nihmu and Coenus on the trail came to her, and she frowned.
Samahe shook her head. 'I don't think she should have returned,' she said. The next day, Melitta sat in another yurt with Tameax, the youngest baqca she had ever met. Nihmu had refused to come.
'You are no older than I am,' Melitta said, after clasping his hand and sitting down. She saw that he had a fine drum – indeed, it looked to her to be Kam Baqca's drum, an artefact from her youth, with tiny iron charms hanging all around the rim. He tapped it idly with a long bone as he looked at her.
'I am older than you by a number of cycles,' he said with a smile. 'But I won't expect you to believe it.'
'Really?' she asked.
'I have not always been a man. At least, I think I can remember being a fish.' He shrugged and smiled.
Melitta laughed. 'Most men claim to have been some great and noble animal, like an eagle or a bear.'
'Most men are liars,' he said.
'Perhaps, by claiming to have been a small thing, you seek to disarm me into believing other things,' Melitta drawled. He had deep cushions, leather ones filled with horsehair, and she allowed herself to slip back on to them. In a curious way, it was like debating with Philokles.
'You are not like a Sakje,' he said. 'Your brain runs like a river that has many channels.'
'I have been in many places,' Melitta said. 'Yet I am a Sakje.'
'I have seen this same thing in Ataelus,' Tameax said. 'Why do the Greeks think so differently?'
'I wish I had Philokles here to tell you,' Melitta answered, and found her eyes filling with tears. 'He was my teacher, in a kind of learning called "logic".' She sat up. 'He spoke at length with Kam Baqca, a whole winter.' She felt it important that he see that the greatest baqca of the current age had approved of the Greek thinking. 'You understand what the Greeks call mathematics?'
'Understand? No. But I know to what you refer.' He smiled at her. 'Did you really kill six Sauromatae?'
She nodded.
He shrugged. 'I will tell the spirits. Some spirits object to you, as an alien. Others call you the daughter of Srayanka. Others say you will kill the people.' He laughed, and he had a clear laugh. 'Spirits are all a little mad – how can they be otherwise, when they are already dead?'
'I met one in the smoke,' Melitta said. Samahe had advised her to keep this to herself.
He leaned forward. 'Yes?'
'A skeleton,' she said.
'Bah – most of them have but naked bones, until you clothe them with your own dreams. Who was he?' The baqca was intensely interested, quivering like an Aegyptian cat watching a mouse in a grain sack.
'I didn't ask.' She shifted uncertainly on the cushions. 'He annoyed me and I threatened him.'
Tameax laughed his clear, silvery laugh. 'You may be Sakje,' he said. He rocked back on his heels and poured herb tea from a kettle on his tripod. 'Nihmu is avoiding me. She is not recovering her powers. Why would she, who had so much power, pretend? All here honour her.'
Melitta felt that she was on dangerous ground. 'She seeks more than honour,' she allowed. 'I'm not sure that I understand her.'
'You treat me as an equal,' Tameax said.
Melitta met his eye. 'How should I treat you?'
Tameax shook his head. 'The people have two ways to deal with me,' he said. 'Some deny that I have power, insisting that I am too young, that I have not given my manhood for power, that I cannot be real. Others treat me as an object of fear. No one treats me as an equal. Yet you, a queen, speak to me as if I am your brother.'
Melitta shrugged.
'Will you treat all the people this way, even when you are the war queen of the Assagatje?' he asked. 'The scar on your cheek says that you could be a hard queen to follow.'
'What is your place in all this?' she shot back.
He nodded, pinching his lips. 'If you become queen, I will become your baqca.' He handed her a cup of tea. 'I seek to know what kind of queen you might be. Ataelus will follow you whatever I say, and my loyalty to him is depthless. So I will not leave your side. I come with Ataelus, his horse and his bow – part of his equipage.' He used the Sakje word that meant the same as the Greek panoply – all the war things. 'You do not fear me, or despise me. This will mean much to me.' He nodded. 'Why will you ride against Marthax, and not to the tribes that will support you?'