Tim Leach - A Winter War

The circle broke into laughter at the thought, and they were turning to each other, sharing memories of their own, singing scraps of the songs they had heard from Bahadur, long ago. Children around the fire – that is how they seemed in that moment, wanting to believe in heroes and in fate.

So he did not tell them the rest – that Bahadur had snatched the bird and smashed its neck against the saddle, bitten into it at once. For they had wandered north starving, bellies hollow with hunger, for the crops had failed and the herd was blighted with plague, and the dead of the clan were countless. He did not tell them how he and Bahadur had taken their bows and shot down every bird they could, while they sat there dumb upon their perches and waited for their lives to be taken. The men returned to their clan, sacks filled with wet treasure. Some of their people had lived.

He did not say how they had returned there again, a year later, and found the forest empty and still. It had been a blessing of nature. Now, it would always be known as a place where no birds sang.

Kai spoke, to drive away that memory. ‘He brought the bird back as a gift to his wife, Arite. I never heard a voice so sweet as his. And none of us shall hear it sing again.’

‘He was a fine man,’ said Saratos. ‘You are certain that he is dead?’

Once again, Kai could see the man falling from the saddle, pierced by the spear, into the arms of the Romans.

‘Yes, he is dead. And his last son too, Chodona.’

Another voice from the darkness: ‘The son met his death well?’

Kai heard once more that piercing shriek from the battlefield, the panicked cry for mercy. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A brave death.’

‘His wife still lives?’

‘Aye. Arite. Brave and beautiful.’ A lump grew in Kai’s throat. ‘May she find another man as good as him.’

The silence thickened then, grew heavy. At last, it bore fruit with words.

‘How did he die?’ Gaevani said. ‘Bahadur, I mean.’

‘I saw him struck down myself. Speared from his horse.’ Kai heard his voice crack, as he spoke the next words. ‘He had come back to rescue me. That was his mistake.’ And Kai tossed his head, as though hoping he might shake away the memory. There was a great longing for sleep, though he knew the memories would find him there. That the dead would, too.

Tamura spoke once more. ‘You said he was a second father to you, and so you were a second son to him.’

‘Kind words. I thank you for them.’

Another voice asked: ‘Your own father, he died in battle? Tell us a story of him?’

From the corner of his eye, Kai saw Gaevani smile sourly.

‘That is a story for another time,’ Kai said.

And on the ground nearby, Laimei shifted. He had thought her asleep, and perhaps she had been for a time. But at that moment her eyes were open, and glittering in the dark. If she could speak, and if she chose to, he knew whose story she would tell.

‘Come,’ said Kai. ‘We have buried enough of the dead. Tomorrow we may make Iolas, if we ride hard enough. Sleep now. Think of those you love.’

‘And what if those we love are dead?’ said Gaevani.

‘Think of them even so. You shall still see them soon enough. But not tonight.’

Once more in Iolas, the waiting at the edge of the village, a ritual akin to worshipping the sun. The women and children gathering and looking towards the west, waiting for the warband to return. And once more, the sun fell from the sky, and the warriors did not return.

This time it was Arite who lingered after the others had gone, waiting until she stood alone. Let Tomyris roam free a little longer, she thought; let her watch the stars and feel the cold night air on her skin. And the dream, the dream of those they loved returning – that could stand to live a little longer, too.

As she stood there, a memory came unbidden to her – a memory of the last time she had seen her husband and her son. Once more, all about her she heard the calling of men and women on the march to war, preparing for the great gathering by the Danu, to face the Romans on the ice. Once more, she saw her son, Chodona, the last child left to her, the others gathered to the gods by sword and fever.

He had been so small standing beside his horse – he should have been heading to tend the herd, not joining the warband, yet he was smiling at her, brave and proud and brilliant, so eager to go towards a war that he knew nothing of. And in her memory, she saw Bahadur before her, his temples touched with grey and his beard silvered, but still the beautiful singer and warrior she had loved for twenty years. No laughter or song from him then, for his voice was raised against her. She heard him saying, again and again, that Chodona must stay behind, that he was too young to go to the war. And again and again, her hand cutting at the air like a blade in front of her, she told Bahadur that their son must go.

At last, it was over. She had got her wish, as she always did in the end. He had taken one of her hands in both of his, raising it to his lips. Then he called to the boy, and for a moment they were all together in an embrace. Then they broke apart, and the memory broke with it.

Waiting at the edge of the village, the cold wind did not cut her as deep as the shame of that memory, the shame of sending her son away. She offered a prayer to the gods, as she did every night. Her life for theirs. Let the fever take her, let her starve to nothing that winter, if only her son and her husband came back from the ice.

Arite had heard many stories of the way in which thoughts might be made flesh by the whim of a god, unspoken prayers answered at once. And so it was, just as she was about to turn away and return to her hut, that she thought the gods were listening to her. For she heard a dog barking, somewhere out beyond the village, out where the half-feral packs roamed as sentries.

Alone, it was a sound that was as much a comfort as the singer’s voice around a night fire, the whoops and hollers of a hunting party returning home to safety. For a single voice meant a dog calling to one it knew, an old master returning home. And so perhaps it was that the warband was there, out in the dark, pressing on to reach them, not willing to wait another night out upon the steppe.

Then another dog cried out. Another, and another, and another, until all of them were rising with one voice. Dozens howling together at the western border of the village, the voices rising to a crescendo and then softening as they moved away, moved beyond the borders of the village and out into the night. And there was only one thing that might mean. Enemies at the border. Raiders, coming in from the darkness.

Arite felt it then. The coldness that finds the palms of the hands first, then dances around the heart. The warrior’s coldness, before the killing begins. And there was another sound. Echoing above the sounds of the village coming to life, of panicked cries and barked, contradictory orders, there was a sound that stilled all others. From somewhere near the centre of the village, the sounding of a Sarmatian war horn.

It was a quavering, uncertain tone – blown by one long unpractised, yet who still half-remembered the war calls of old. And Arite knew it too, the sound that had been the music of her youth, the call to arm and mount that every Sarmatian knew from the first time they could ride.

The fear was gone, banished by those three notes of the horn. Arite was hurrying to the horses and found Tomyris there already, for she had been raised for this moment, when death rode across the steppe and came for them.

The horses knew it too, were already giving the little snorts and stamps that a cavalry horse makes before the battle. They were old, too old for war, cut and scarred and limping like many of the women in the village. But even so, they too remembered the sound of the horns from their youth.