Satyrus's horse stepped back and a blow hit his side, but Coenus was there. He hit Upazan twice – hard blows to the helmet that rocked the big man in his saddle. And then, as if he'd practised the move all his life, Coenus cut back into another Sauromatae, using the bounce off Upazan's helmet to speed his back cut, and he lost his sword in the man's head – it sheered into the helmet and wouldn't come free.
Satyrus stripped the chain off his right wrist and took the sword in his left. He was backing his horse now – the captured Nisaean responded beautifully, turning on its front legs. Satyrus managed a clumsy parry that saved Coenus from a spear in the side.
It was getting dark. He fought on, determined to save Coenus, who had always been there for him and who had done as much to win this kingdom as any other man.
Coenus took the dead man's spear from his limp fingers – the press was now so tight around Upazan and Satyrus that the dead could not fall to the ground, and a man's knees could be broken by the press of horses.
Upazan was recovering. He had his axe in a short grip, one-handed. He landed a weak blow against an Olbian, who fell backwards across the rump of his horse but could not fall to the ground.
He cut at Satyrus, and Satyrus blocked it.
The sound of the melee had changed. The horses were moving and suddenly Upazan was slipping away, but Satyrus, wounded and without the use of his sword arm, followed him, cutting almost blindly at Sauromatae who were as tired and used up as he was.
'UPAZAN!'
Satyrus stopped and let his sword slump to his left side.
'UPAZAN!'
Now the Sauromatae were giving way. Something had happened. And Satyrus knew that voice.
'UPAZAN!' shouted Leon the Numidian as he burst through a ring of Sauromatae, the only man in the fight with a big round oxhide shield, his spearhead glinting in the red sun, his beard white.
'You!' Upazan growled in recognition. He turned his horse to face his nemesis and lengthened his grip on the axe.
'Remember Mosva?' Leon said.
Upazan swung, the whole weight of his axe up.
Leon pushed in close and the tip of his spear rammed into Upazan's face and out through the helmet. Blood fountained. 'T hat's her spear!' Leon shouted, but Upazan was already dead.
And all around them, the Exiles rode through the Sauromatae like a Sindi farmer's scythe goes through ripe wheat in the last days of summer.
Satyrus sat on his horse and watched the last moments, as the Sauromatae broke or died.
He watched as Diodorus threw his arms around Coenus, and he watched as Leon's horse trampled Upazan's broken body into the hard-packed earth.
It all seemed far away.
After a while, he realized that men were cheering. There was Crax, pointing at him, and there was Abraham of all people, holding his sword in the air like Achilles. And Diodorus, turning his horse and rearing.
And Melitta, and she was crying and smiling at the same time.
He was crying too.
But he was not dead. And neither was she.
He straightened his back.
And slowly, with all the will he could muster, he raised his father's sword over his head, so that it caught the light of the setting sun, and then the sound came at him like a final blow – suddenly the cheers were like a song, and the song was for them. It was everywhere, on and on.
EPILOGUE
It took days to bury the dead, and days more to feel anything but a vacant mourning – pain and numbness, and then aches and raw grief.
Satyrus had lost half his youth in an afternoon, and Melitta had lost more. Urvara was gone, and Graethe, and Memnon, dead in the phalanx, fighting in the front rank – the oldest of his father's men, and perhaps the best.
And there were thousands more dead. Many he did not know. Some, like Lithra, he knew too well. He had the misfortune to find her body himself – a body he had held in his arms.
Ataelus proved too hard to kill. The axe blow that knocked him flat left him unconscious, but within a few days, he rose again.
Later, Satyrus would say that the days after the Battle of Tanais River changed him more than the whole campaign that led to it.
And before he had stopped mourning, while the grief was still a raw thing that could move most of them to tears, he had to be king. Because even while the flies gathered on the dead, so the requests for his attention, his decisions and his judgment began buzzing around his ears.
Four days after the fight, when some of the older veterans had begun to make it a story, and the wound in his belly was still closing without rot, he put on a chiton and rode out of the camp with Melitta. They left all their well-meaning friends behind and rode north along the river to the foot of the kurgan of Kineas.
'Still want to be king?' Melitta asked, and he shook his head.
'I think the price was too high,' he said. 'I feel like – like I used to feel when I spent all my money in the market. On a toy. And then – I wanted to take the toy back.'
Melitta looked up at the kurgan. 'Still going to do it?'
Satyrus nodded. 'You with me?'
'All the way to the top,' Melitta said.
They climbed the kurgan together as the sun set in the west. Below them, the Sakje and the Greeks moved around, making dinner, and the smoke of their fires rose to the heavens.
Satyrus had to stop three times in climbing the mound, and Melitta swore when her arms failed her. She was still that tired, and she had rested just long enough that every muscle ached.
But they got to the top before the rim of the sun settled in the Bay of Salmon. There was a broad stone at the top, and in the centre was a deep cleft.
Satyrus drew the Aegyptian blade and handed it to Melitta.
She held it high, so that the sun caught the blade and made it a tongue of flame. Then she brought it down into the cleft, so that the blade grated as she thrust it to the hilt in the stone.
They stood together until the sun set, and then they walked back down the kurgan to the camp. And the sword held the light for a long time.