There was a hint of smoke on the cold wind over the strong smell of urine. A clear-eyed blonde woman handed him a gourd of water and he raised it in acknowledgement before he drank. She looked to be fourteen or perhaps fifteen. She had two skulls on the ornate saddle of her horse.
Kineas grinned at her and she returned the grin.
‘We for hitting them at dark,’ Ataelus said. ‘Understand for hitting?’ he smacked his right fist into his left hand.
‘I understand,’ Kineas said.
‘For watching two days, since girls get in fight and Samahe for finding camp.’ Ataelus shrugged.
There was something untold, some story that made Samahe wrinkle her nose and made one of the girls blush and wriggle in her saddle. A story he’d never know, Kineas thought.
‘You knew we were coming?’ Kineas said, suddenly making the connection.
‘Nihmu says for coming, says “protect him king”.’ Ataelus shrugged. ‘Not for needing child for telling for protecting.’
‘You watched us last night?’ Niceas asked.
‘No. For today since sun rose this way.’ Ataelus closed one eye and raised a hand, palm flat, just over the horizon.
Niceas shook his head. ‘They were on us last night. If they watched us meet…’
Kineas took a deep breath, suddenly eager to have it over with. ‘If they intended to ambush us, they’ve had all day to do it.’
The shadows lengthened across the meadows below them, and the air grew frostier as the sun’s rays fell further away. Niceas and Kineas had to work to curb the impatience of their horses. Kineas’s Getae horse was the worst, fretting constantly and jerking his head at any motion, so that Kineas had to dismount and hold his head.
The blonde woman gave him a glance of pity — pity that his horse was so ill-trained.
Twice they heard voices, both times Persian speakers getting water from the Tanais below them. Then, while the sun was just visible, they saw a pair of riders come out of the meadow and ride a short distance up the ridge, from where they had a good view of the eastern road at their feet.
Ataelus grunted in disgust, because by chance or purpose, the new pickets had a much better chance of warning the camp below of his approach than the pair they replaced. He clucked his tongue in his cheek as he watched them, and after a few minutes, he summoned one of the Standing Horse warriors in his band and the two of them rode off down the back of the ridge. Samahe dismounted and lay in the leaf mould, her hand shading her eyes.
Time dragged by. The Sauromatae women were as nervous as kittens, but their horses were calm, munching quietly on anything in reach and otherwise immobile. Niceas drew and resheathed his sword a dozen times. Kineas was busy keeping his under-trained horse from mischief.
He was amazed at their discipline. All over again. He couldn’t have kept a dozen Greek troopers so quiet without the hope of massive gain.
Even as he thought it, he wondered if he was making a poor assumption. Perhaps the Greeks could do as well. Perhaps with training, some rides out with Sakje patrols…
Samahe rose to a crouch and Kineas snapped from his reverie to watch the ground below him. The two mounted pickets were almost invisible, even from above, but little movements in the trees betrayed their position to a careful watcher. But unlike Samahe, Kineas couldn’t see Ataelus or his partner, so the first he knew of their movement was a pair of arrows appearing from the rocks to the right and falling silently on the pickets.
‘Now!’ Samahe said in Sakje, and she vaulted on to her mare and set off down the hillside at a speed that terrified Kineas, who was right behind her and couldn’t, for the sake of honour, go any slower. He reached the valley floor at a gallop, already past his fear because the ride had been so bad in itself, and he readied a javelin as the pair of them raced across the meadow. He could see the camp now, and it seemed to be full of men and horses — dozens of them. A few had bows. One raised his and loosed, but the arrow flew well over Kineas, who ducked down on his horse’s mane and galloped on, straight at the heart of the bandit camp.
Samahe’s horse sidestepped some obstruction in the meadow grass, and on her next rise she shot, her arrow licking across the flowers and the sweet grass to drop one of the few bandits to get mounted. Her second arrow was in the air.
The Sauromatae girls weren’t shooting. They were screaming with all the gusto of the young warrior, screaming away their terror and their exhilaration, and they bore straight at the bandits by the river.
Kineas went through the camp without touching his reins. No one opposed him and he rode past the huddle of bandits at the riverbank and then up a short rise to a clearing in the riverbank woods, where there was an abandoned farmstead and the bandit horse herd. There were ten men in the clearing and despite the screams from the riverside, they seemed surprised when he appeared in their midst, and two of them were down before any got weapons to hand.
Kineas wheeled his horse and extended his arm, using the momentum of the move to twirl the shaft in his fingers so that he changed grips in a single stride of his mount, and a circle of blood drops flew from the point of his rotating javelin.
He felt like a god, at least for a moment.
One of the men had a bow and shot his horse, who crashed to the ground in another stride, and he fell, getting a leg under him and then rolling, javelin lost. He came up against a tree and he rolled to put the bole between him and the archer.
The archer laughed. ‘Try this!’ he called, in Persian. He shot. The arrow hit the tree and shattered, and the man laughed again. He had a black beard and kohl-rimmed eyes like a Bactrian nobleman.
Down by the river, men were dying. Blackbeard drew another arrow. ‘Get horses,’ he called over his shoulder, and two boys sprang to do his bidding.
Kineas pulled his cloak off and whirled it around his arm, moving to his right to a larger tree.
‘Try this, Greek!’ Blackbeard shot again, and his arrow hit the new tree.
Kineas jumped out and retrieved his javelin, avoiding the slashing hooves of his dying Getae mount and leaping behind another tree just as a third arrow skipped along the bark and slapped into the rolled cloak on his arm.
‘Try this, harlot!’ Kineas yelled, and threw his javelin. Then he charged, leaping a downed tree as he ran, heedless of the odds. It was better than letting a master archer take his time, and something had gone wrong in the fight by the river.
His javelin hit the man by the archer’s side, knocking him flat like the deer. The archer turned and ran, and Kineas ran after him. There were men in the clearing and they set themselves to stop him, but none put the archer’s life higher than his own, and Kineas ran through them, downing one with a sword cut as he ran by.
The two boys had grabbed a pair of horses apiece, and Blackbeard took the first he came to, tossed the boy clear of the saddlecloth and vaulted astride, pulling the horse’s head around. At the other side of the clearing, Samahe appeared, shooting as she came, and the other boy went down with an arrow in his guts, screaming. Kineas found himself crossing blades with yet another Persian — another nobleman, from the rags of purple on his cloak. The man had a good sword, and he was aggressive.
Blackbeard pulled his horse around and shot. So did Samahe. Neither hit. Both were moving fast, flat to their horse’s backs, and then Kineas had no attention to spare.
The Persian leaped in and cut hard at his head. Kineas parried and the blades rang together, and the Persian kicked at his shin under the locked iron. Kineas pushed his hooked blade up and over his opponent’s guard and then slipped a foot behind the man’s ankle and pushed, hoping for a throw, and the Persian jumped back, cutting high.
He was a swordsman.
Kineas parried and cut back, a short chop at his opponent’s hand, but the Persian had seen such a move before, and he made a hand-high parry that turned into an overhand cut to the head — and Kineas just managed a parry, taking a blow that was not quite a cut to the shoulder. His left hand closed on his Sakje whip in the sash at his back, and he pulled it clear and changed his stance to lead with his left foot, the whip out as a shield.