King of the Bosphorus

Eumenes nodded. 'Marthax won't dare murder you with us as bodyguards,' he said.

Melitta couldn't help but feel relieved. 'Let's ride, then!'

They camped that night on the Borysthenes, just twenty stades from the battlefield at the Ford of the River God. There was wood aplenty.

Eumenes watched with Melitta as the camp went dark. Tonight, there was no question of her breaking wood. Her status had changed again with the addition of Urvara.

'How do you come to be here?' she asked him in Greek.

Eumenes snuggled deeper into his cloak. 'I was wounded in the summer fighting and Diodorus sent me back to Alexandria with his dispatches. It was all luck – I arrived to find you and Coenus two weeks gone, and a letter from Lykeles asking me to come to Olbia if I was available. I was – so I followed you out.'

Coenus appeared as if cued by his name. He had killed a buck and the dead animal was roped to the rump of his horse. 'What did Lykeles need?'

Eumenes grinned. 'Me. He's been archon three times, as has Clio. And Urvara wanted me home.' He smiled. 'I doubt I'll campaign again, Coenus. I'm archon of Olbia.'

Coenus grinned back and embraced the younger man. 'Your father's dream,' he said.

'My father was a traitor,' Eumenes said. There was little bitterness in the statement, just cold fact.

Coenus shrugged. 'He sought power and failed.' Coenus shook his head. 'The wheel turns, eh?'

Eumenes shook his head. 'Not far from here, Kineas taught me to fall off a horse without hurting myself.'

'We should ride to the battlefield tomorrow,' Coenus said. 'We should make a sacrifice.'

Eumenes brightened. 'That is a noble idea,' he said.

'I'm a noble man,' Coenus answered. He laughed.

Melitta watched them with pleasure. 'He's still here, for you, isn't he?' she asked Coenus.

But Eumenes answered. 'Every day. He formed us – really, he formed all of us. I hear him in your voice – sometimes in Urvara's. He made her the lady of the Grass Cats, just by refusing to accept her contenders. He made me a troop commander. He made Petrocolus the head of the Kaloi in Olbia. His hand is still on every part of our lives.'

Melitta felt tears fill her eyes. 'That. I know all that. But it is in the way you mock each other – and yourselves.'

Coenus nodded. 'Odd, as we seldom teased him. But true, nonetheless. You are wise.'

'I'm working on it,' Melitta said. Over dinner they agreed to go together to the battlefield and offer sacrifices at the shrine and the trophy, despite the weather. Tameax felt that such respect for the past would please the spirits, and Coenus insisted the Greek gods and heroes would have the same opinion.

The next day they were up early, the wet yurts stripped off their poles in the dark and made into ungainly bundles. Horses struggled to drag the travois made of tent poles, and Coenus led a party of hunters away upstream before the last animal was packed. He returned in the first light of dawn with another buck on a spare horse, and with a pair of goats in baskets from the Sindi village at the river bend.

'There wasn't a village there twenty years ago,' he said to Eumenes, who was adjusting his girth next to Melitta in the early light.

Eumenes yawned and shook his head. 'No. In another generation, this valley will be full.'

'The Sindi must be breeding like rabbits,' Coenus said.

Urvara laughed bitterly. 'Perhaps,' she said. 'But many of those "Sindi" are my people, settling down to farm the soil. Sky people making themselves dirt people.' She sighed. 'It has always happened, but never in such numbers.'

It was mid-morning when they arrived at the shrine. Melitta had heard all her life about the great battle at the ford, but now Eumenes and Samahe, Urvara and Ataelus, Nihmu and Coenus rode her through it as if she had been a participant.

'Here, Kam Baqca rode to glory!' Samahe said, and Nihmu wept. Melitta noticed that Tameax writhed at the mere mention of the great shaman. Samahe didn't notice, or didn't care. 'She and her knights were like an arrow of gold, and they cut the Macedonians the way that an arrow enters a caribou, and the beast runs on, seeming to be alive, when really it is already dead.'

And later, Coenus showed them on a field of snow how the last charge of the Greeks and the Sakje had folded the Macedonian flank, so that when Srayanka cut her way through the ford she met Kineas in the middle of the field.

'We penned them against the river, and killed them until the sun slunk away to avoid the smell of death,' Ataelus sang. It was a Sakje epic. Most of the other warriors knew it, and they sang it as the sun rose.

'Bah!' Coenus said. 'Philokles must have stood just here.' His voice cracked a little. 'Really, honey bee, your father always said that Philokles won the battle. He and his young men held one of the Macedonian taxeis for an hour – maybe more. With their bare hands.'

At the trophy, raised by the old shrine to the River God, Olbia had built a marble altar with a relief of a man on horseback and another of a set of arms and a shield with the star of Macedon. Coenus smiled. 'Nice,' he said.

Eumenes nodded back, overcome with emotion. 'Lykeles ordered it built. I've never seen it before. It is well done.'

Then they all dismounted. Even Scopasis, who did nothing willingly, slid off his horse. They ringed the Greek altar, and Tameax killed one goat, and Coenus killed the other, and the blood steamed like a new-lit fire that breeds more smoke than flame, rising to heaven in the crisp morning air.

Coenus made a fire and they roasted the meat, burned the bones and the hide, and then, after Eumenes poured libations, Coenus handed cooked meat to every man and woman. 'Eat and drink,' he said. 'Remember those who died here, and those who stood their ground. Remember Satrax, king of the Assagatje, who died for his victory, and Kam Baqca, and remember Ajax and Nicomedes.'

The older Sakje cried, and so did the Greeks, while the younger ones looked on, wondering to see so many hard men and women weeping.

'I lost my father here,' Urvara said.

Tameax cleared his throat. 'As did Nihmu,' he said.

Nihmu was being held by Coenus.

'As did I,' Eumenes said. 'Although he fought on the other side.' He poured more wine in the snow. 'Gods, I beg forgiveness for the shade of my father.' And he wept as well.

They were gathered like that when they heard hoofbeats. Warriors scattered – no one had kept a watch, their emotions were so high – and knights ran for their warhorses like ants from a shattered anthill.

Urvara watched the oncoming riders without fear. 'It was wise to come here,' she said. 'This is sacred ground, and it reminds men of who you are.' She pointed at the riders coming over the river. 'That is Parshtaevalt, and his banner of the Cruel Hand.' She looked at Melitta. 'Whether you wanted us or not, lady, we'll all go together to see Marthax.'

And minutes later, Parshtaevalt embraced Melitta. Then he knelt, as Sakje never do, and placed his hands between hers. 'I am your man, for ever, as I was your mother's,' he said. He looked at the remnants of the sacrifice and shook his head. He looked at Coenus. 'Did you save any for me? I fought here, too.'

Coenus laughed. 'Do you still eat whole horses?' he asked.

The lord of the Cruel Hands laughed like a boy. 'This one taught me my Greek,' he said, pointing at Coenus, 'when Kineax was too busy making calf-eyes at your mother!'

Eumenes took meat from the altar and brought it to Parshtaevalt, and he ate it and drank some wine. Then he looked around at all of them, and his own knights. 'Can you feel the thing?' he asked, in Greek.

Eumenes was next to Melitta. 'I feel it,' he said.

Coenus embraced him. 'I feel it,' he said. 'If only Diodorus were here.'

'Crax,' Ataelus said. 'Sitalkes.'