Christian Cameron: King of the Bosphorus

Satyrus didn't see Graethe die. The wolf lord went down covered in wounds, and when he fell the men of his household stood over his body and died with him.

Nor did he see Urvara die, almost the last warrior standing as her banner was swamped by enemies determined to ride down the flank and win back the battle. She, too, died on the blade of Upazan's axe, her arms too tired to parry it one last time.

But their warriors didn't break. Some of their horses were up to their hocks in the river, but they fought on, desperate, often out of arrows, sword to sword, axe to axe.

Satyrus heard the shouts of Greeks before he ordered the charge, and he knew that Abraham was leading whatever he could from the camp by the river into Upazan's flank. It had to matter.

Satyrus had put himself at the point of the rhomboid. He smiled, despite the pain in his gut. He heard the fighting, and he knew the shouts were Sauromatae, and he didn't need scouts to find the next fight.

He raised his sword. 'Ready!'

The Olbians shouted his father's name and charged, and then they were into Upazan's men.

Satyrus struck and struck again, neither weak nor godlike, but merely the warrior he'd been trained to be, and his father's sword flashed like fire in the red sunlight and his helmet took a blow here and there, but he fought on, looking for Upazan's golden helmet. That was his goal now.

He had too few men. He could feel it. Just a few hundred more and the Sauromatae would have broken from his impact, but the Olbians were too slow and too few, and although his wedge went deeper and deeper into the horde of Sauromatae, they were not breaking.

He could hear Abraham and Panther now. They were less than a stade away, all but surrounded, and their charge, too, had lost its impetus, so that they were being pressed back to their camp.

Satyrus could see it, as if he was above the battle – could read the sounds, the shouts, the screams. Ataelus's flank had held long enough. Upazan might win here, but he could no longer win the day.

Tired men swung heavily at tired men. The Olbians were better armoured and fresher.

It wasn't quite enough. But for a while, it was better than nothing, and the Olbians were lifted above themselves, possibly just because they were the men of Olbia, who had once been Kineas's men. They pushed forward, even when they should have been stopped.

Satyrus cut a man down – the man had a wolf-tail banner, and Satyrus could only hope it was Upazan's. His sword arm was bloody to the elbow. His shoulder was weak, the muscles burned with the effort of a thousand overhead cuts, and he could barely manage his captured horse.

But he could feel Herakles at his shoulder.

I am going to die well, he thought.

He blocked a blow, catching a heavy axe blade far back in its cut, and his blade slipped down the haft so that the head caught him a weak blow in the left shoulder. Most of it fell on the yoke of his corslet, but the axe blade still sliced his skin. He got his bridle hand up and on the shaft of the axe, and his sword went up and over the haft, only to have his wrist grabbed by the axe-man.

Upazan.

Their eyes came together as they caught each other's attempted death blows – arm to arm, hand to hand.

Upazan rose on his horse's back, trying to use his immense strength to bear Satyrus down.

At a great distance, Satyrus heard Greek singing and wondered what it meant. Then his full attention was on Upazan. He met him, strength for strength, and their horses moved under them, and then Satyrus's arms began to break Upazan's hold. Upazan redoubled his effort, and he gave a great shout as he threw his weight on Satyrus.

Satyrus held him and bore him back.

He lost Upazan's left hand – their horses were pulling apart – and he snapped a short cut with his sword. It went home, cutting deeply into Upazan's left arm just as Upazan rammed a dagger with his own left, so that it cut right into Satyrus's sword arm and he dropped the Aegyptian sword to dangle from its chain around his wrist.

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.

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.