Tim Leach - A Winter War

The laughter faded then, for many of those who watched had taken their turn in the dirt, and the rest knew that their time would come soon enough. The riders looked at the ground, and would not meet their captain’s eye.

‘No one?’ Laimei tossed her head. ‘There is one braver than all of you.’ And she pointed towards Arite, stirred her horse towards her, and said: ‘Perhaps one of you will have found your courage when I return.’

‘You flatter me,’ Arite said, as Laimei rode up beside her. ‘I am no captain for you to impress, or a lover to woo. Just one who has come to look on the warriors and remember her youth.’

‘You are not so old. More gold than silver in your hair, and you are more of a warrior than any of them,’ said Laimei, eyeing the other riders with scorn.

Arite found it impossible not to think of her own memories of the warband. A time in her life that was a rushing, teeming, roiling river – a madness, like the love of youth that one can both long for and never want to feel again. ‘They will have to learn fast, then,’ she said. ‘There are not many left to us.’

‘True. And they are shadows of those who came before them.’

‘Why train them now?’ Arite asked. ‘We are a long way from the raiding season.’

‘There are rumours that came with the last riders before the snows. That the Romans will come across the water in spring.’

‘They say that every winter. Stories to frighten children. But spring always follows winter, and the Romans do not cross the Danu.’

‘Perhaps. But this year is different.’ And Laimei was smiling, then – the brilliant, terrible smile of the fanatic, or of one in love.

‘You think that we could defeat them, if they come?’

‘The stories say our forefathers dug their own graves and threw themselves in, at the very end.’ She gestured with an open palm towards the warband. ‘We shall dig our graves well, at least.’ And as Laimei looked her over with a brisk, warrior’s gaze, Arite had the sense of being evaluated, like a mare outside a horse trader’s tent. ‘Why not join us here? You still know how to hold a spear, I have seen that myself.’

‘I earned my three kills a long time ago.’

‘I do not think it matters anymore.’

‘Yet you were careful enough to avoid your third. The Roman.’

‘Yes, I was,’ Laimei answered. She looked down at the reins in her hands, ran them between her fingers, the way a man may touch his lover’s hair. ‘I would not have my spear taken from me.’

Arite hesitated. ‘Why is it that you stay in the warband?’ she said softly.

Laimei’s horse shifted beneath her – a restless step and turn, answering some hidden thought of his mistress. ‘What other kind of life is there for me?’ said Laimei. ‘One such as yours?’

‘Is that such an ill-seeming thing?’

‘Why would I wish to end up like you?’ she said. ‘Weeping over a dead man, my children butchered. Nothing left to you except tending to broken things like my brother.’ Laimei shook her head. ‘I have no need of broken things.’

Arite could find no answer. She could not seem to find her breath.

Laimei spoke again. ‘I do not say it to wound you. I only answer your question. And you came here with another purpose. To beg Kai’s place for him, is this not so?’

‘It is so.’ Even as Arite said it, the words seemed to come from so far away, as though it were someone else who was speaking.

‘Always the maker of peace, aren’t you? I like you more at war, I think.’ Laimei shook her head, picked restlessly at one of the tassels on her spear. ‘Why do you fight for his life? I already told him no. Why should I answer differently to you?’

‘Give him back his place in the warband. For Tomyris, if not for him.’

A mocking smile, and Laimei said: ‘Bring her to me, if she is the one you care for. I shall care for her as my own. But not him. I have no place for a shamed man.’

Arite spoke once again, and the words came with a cold sensation – a killer’s certainty: ‘Who are you to deny him his place? You who ran from the battle on the ice, when he did not.’

One could not help but admire it, how little Laimei gave away. A certain stillness, the face like a painted mask, the soft and strained sound of gloves tightening around the leather of the reins. But that was all.

‘You must have done,’ said Arite, ‘to live. You lost your horse, and you ran from the battle on another. For all your death-mad boasting, you ran. And if you still have the right to be in the warband after that, then so does he.’

‘You dare say that to me?’ Laimei whispered.

‘Yes, I will say it, even if no other will. Because I am not afraid of you.’

The soft blowing of the wind across the plain. The rattle of armour and spear. The rest of the warband had fallen silent – at that distance none of them could have heard what was spoken, but they did not need to. Every Sarmatian learned to feel when a battle was close.

‘Very well,’ Laimei said. ‘I shall spare what food I can. I shall send for him, at the end of winter when the time is right. And you may tell him that his champion fought well for him.’

‘I will. And I know I will answer for the insult I have given, when the time comes.’

‘Yes,’ Laimei answered simply, ‘you will.’

Kai heard it first as music – the chatter of water in high places, atop hill and crag, as the first springs began to thaw. The world growing louder, sound no longer dulled by the heavy weight of snow, the particular silence of winter.

They had survived the darkest months. Some bargain had been struck by Arite that she would not speak of, and warriors from the warband came from time to time, bringing what food they could spare. The charity given to keep a fighting man alive through to the summer, to last until the killing season.

Now it was almost spring, the time when the Sarmatians heard the plains calling to them, as sure as a sailor hears the whisper of the sea no matter how deep into land he goes, no matter how much he tries to forget. A gentle time for Kai’s people, when there was no war to be fought. A time for the traders and explorers, those wanderers who longed only to see what lay beyond the next turn of the plains. A time to break wild horses by driving them upstream, until, exhausted at last, they would turn back as a man will return to his lover after a quarrel. But this was no time of peace, for lovers from different tribes to make their way across the plains to meet each other at river and grove. It would be a spring of raid and feud, the settling of blood debts.

It was a crisp clear day as Kai rode his horse about the fringes of the camp. The horse moved well beneath him, for throughout the long winter he had spent much time practising alone with his new horse, teaching it the tricks of horsemanship as he knew them, trying to teach it love as well, that love between rider and mount that can save both in the hard times. And as they turned and circled, he heard the footfalls of another rider approaching, the muffled wet sound of hooves through mud and snow.

No warrior from the warband this time, sullenly bringing meat and milk to a shamed man. It was a child, and at first Kai thought it was his own daughter who had come to find him. The girl was near to the same age, and with her face marked with mud and hollowed by hunger it was a simple mistake to make, for winter starvation made all seem kin to one another. But it was not Tomyris – he knew from the horse first, for it bore no markings that he recognised. As she drew closer, he saw the girl’s head marbled with ringworm, the ragged clothes crudely patched and stitched. One of the lost souls of the camp, raised by all mothers and none. And she rode to him and spoke with a foundling’s studied bravery: ‘I was told to bring you with me.’