Outside the little circle, two men remained mounted. One of them was fair-haired, the other dark. The dark warrior addressed the other, the leader of the expedition.
‘Brother of mine, let us find the village.’
The fair-haired horseman gazed at the child his blood brother held before him on the neck of his powerful black horse. The child was pale and stared about him with large frightened eyes. A good-looking little boy.
His blood brother’s long raven hair glistened in the sun, almost as sleek as the flanks of his black mount.
The village could not be far from where the boy had been wandering. They would take a few of the young men and male children away with them while the villagers protested powerlessly. And these would be trained as warriors – not as slaves, but as adopted members of the clan. Two of the horsemen resting under the wagons had been taken from Slav villages in this way when they were young. A strange people, he thought: they had no god of war, yet once trained they made brave and excellent fighters. No doubt the little boy in front of him would be a credit to the clan one day.
That hot afternoon, however, he did not want to raid a village. ‘I came for another purpose,’ he said softly.
The dark horseman inclined his head. ‘Your grandfather did not live to be old,’ he replied gravely. ‘Not for nothing was he called The Deer.’
These were the highest compliments among the horsemen of the steppe. Among them, an old man was without honour – brave men died in battle before they grew old.
It had been a little while before, as the sun reached its zenith that day, that the fair-haired warrior had stood on the top of the solitary kurgan that lay in the steppe nearby, and plunged a long sword into it. For this was the tomb of his grandfather, killed in a skirmish in this half-forgotten place; forgotten, that is, except by his family who would return every few years to honour him in this remote corner of the steppe. The sword stood there now, its crossed handle just visible from the wagons, a gleaming iron reminder of a noble warrior clan.
Kiy stared at the horseman. He had never seen such men before, but he had heard of them. The man on the black horse, he guessed, was a Scythian.
‘If a Scythian catches you,’ his father had once told him, ‘he’ll skin you alive and use your skin for horse-trappings.’ Kiy looked at the reins anxiously. His first sight of the dark warrior’s cold eyes had made him expect the worst and now he supposed they were discussing how to cut him up. He was trembling. And yet, as he stared up at the fair-haired horseman, he wondered if there might be hope. For, despite his terror, he was also thinking that this was the most splendid figure he had ever encountered in his life.
Unlike his Scythian blood brother, the tall fair horseman had his hair cut short. The features of his handsome, oval face were regular, refined, almost delicate; his expression was open and pleasant. But when his pale blue eyes flashed in anger, he was truly terrible – more frightening even than the dark Scythian in front of him. So fearsome was the gaze of the men of his tribe that it was remarked upon by several authors in antiquity.
For he was an Alan – the greatest of all the Sarmatian tribes – and the mighty clan to which he belonged one of the proudest of all, who called themselves the ‘pale’ or ‘radiant’ ones.
Since time out of mind, horsemen had come from the east, from Asian lands that lay beyond that huge crescent of mountain chains that bordered the mighty Eurasian plain to the south. Through the passes above India and Persia they had ridden, through the shimmering haze of the foothills, streaming down on to the vast plain. From the desert they had come, round the Caspian Sea, over the River Volga, and thence to the rich steppe north of the Black Sea, to the lands of the Dniepr River and the Don. They had even penetrated to the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkan Mountains above Greece.
First, in distant antiquity, came the Cimmerians, iron-age horsemen. Next, about 600 BC, the Scythians – an Indo-European people with a mixture of Mongol race, who spoke an Iranian tongue. Then, around 200 BC, and mightier yet, another Iranian-speaking people – the Sarmatians – had swept over the land, reducing the Scythians to a small area and dominating them.
They came from the east, these warrior clans with their noble princes. They gave an Iranian name – Don, meaning water – to the Rivers Don, Dniepr, and even the more westerly Danube. They were nomadic warrior lords of all the steppe.
From the Black Sea to the forest’s edge, the Slavs feared and admired the radiant Alans. Some Slav tribes worked for them; others paid tribute. Widely indeed did they roam: as they proclaimed in their heroic folk tales, they rode the wide prairies from the land of the warm sun to the land of the sunset.
The Alan glanced up at the sky. The afternoon was still hot, but in a little while the men under the wagons would finish their sleep and it would be time to move.
‘We return today,’ he said quietly. ‘You have the boy.’
Kiy could not take his eyes off the tall warrior. Unlike his Scythian blood brother, the Alan used stirrups. He wore soft leather shoes and billowing silk trousers. By his side hung a long sword and a lasso – a favourite weapon of his people – and a dagger with a ring on top was fastened to his leg. His coat of mail and pointed helmet were strapped to a pack on the ground near the wagons, together with two of the long spears which the Alans used to mount their devastating charges. The cloth doublet he wore was sewn with little open triangles of gold; around his neck was a golden torc of golden wires with ends fashioned as golden dragons. Over his shoulders was a long cloak made of wool and held with a huge pin richly studded with oriental gems. And that was all his personal ornament.
The Scythian was differently dressed. Kiy felt his back scratched by the gold and silver ornaments sewn on to the Scythian’s leather jerkin. On the dark arm that held him was a bracelet carved with fantastic gods and animals. Kiy did not know that this wonderful work was Greek: all he knew was that it hurt his eyes as it flashed in the sun. At the Scythian’s side hung a scimitar, its handle carved with Greek designs.
But even more splendid and more enthralling to the trembling child were their horses. Though he could only partly see the jet black horse beneath him, he could sense the huge power of the animal as he sat astride its neck. And as for the horse upon which the Alan sat – it might have been, for all he knew, a god.
It was silver grey, with a black mane, a black stripe down its back, and a black tail. The Alans called this noble colouring ‘hoarfrost’. As he watched this graceful animal move, it seemed to Kiy that the horse stalked over the ground as though it barely deigned to touch it. Such a creature, he thought, would not gallop: it would fly.
And indeed he was right: for there was no fleeter mount in all the Alan’s tribe. He called this noble animal Trajan, after the Roman emperor whose heroic reputation had spread round the shores of the Black Sea and who had been adopted as a minor god even by the far-flung Sarmatians. Three times in battle Trajan had saved the Alan’s life by his extraordinary sureness of foot. Once, when he had been wounded, it was the horse who had got away from his captors and come to search for him. It was as a compliment to the Alan and his horse that men said of him: ‘He loves Trajan more than his wife.’
Trajan was still now; but the faint breeze on the steppe caught the small golden discs that hung from his bridle and made them twinkle. On each disc was incised the tamga – the emblem of the clan of which the horse, like his master, was considered a member. The tamga of the clan was a three-pronged trident – a sacred sign that hung over the hearth in the clan’s ancestral tower, hundreds of miles away to the east.