Tim Leach - A Winter War

Lucius did not speak for a time. Then he said: ‘You think I may do this? I have told you before, I am no great man of my people. A soldier only, not a prince.’

‘They might listen to one come back from the dead. Do your people not think that a fortunate thing?’

The Roman shook his head, skin pale in the soft light of the fire. ‘You do not know what you ask of me. It is as Bahadur said. You do not know what Rome is. You might as well ask me to debate with a god and bend him to my will.’

‘Our stories are full of such things. I am sure that yours are too.’ Kai leaned forward then, put his hand to Lucius’s arm. A gentle touch. ‘I ask you to try,’ he said. ‘Will you?’

An ache around Arite’s heart, then, as she remembered Bahadur. For it was Bahadur who had taught him that art, to ask a man to be brave and see him do it. She saw the Roman’s gaze drift towards the circle of horses close by, his eyes growing soft as he looked upon them. As though he hoped to hear them speak, and offer their counsel.

‘Do horses give omens, amongst your people?’ Arite said.

‘No. But I like to watch them, nonetheless. I have never seen horses such as the ones your people raise.’

‘You would like to be one of them, I think.’

He seemed almost surprised. ‘Of course. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes. But I did not think to hear a Roman speak so.’

‘Most would not.’

‘Perhaps you are not a very good Roman.’

He laughed. ‘You would not be the first to say so.’ The smile fell away from his lips then. ‘I do not wish to see your people destroyed,’ Lucius said softly, ‘and so I shall try. There is little enough to lose.’ He tried to speak lightly, yet his voice broke as he spoke, a child caught in a lie.

‘I think that you are many things, Lucius,’ said Arite, ‘but a liar is not one of them.’

A flush at his cheeks, a rueful grin once more upon his lips. ‘Yes. There is much to lose. My life, and yours. But get me back across the river, and I shall try.’ The Roman stood, suddenly restless. ‘We should let the fire die down. I will stand first watch, take a horse and make sure we are alone out here.’

‘You are certain?’ said Kai.

‘I do not think I can sleep. And, besides, I have some words to practise, haven’t I? I have never had to bargain with a god before.’

‘Tomyris?’ Kai said, and a soft, whistling snore answered him. He stifled his laughter with his hand, squeezed his daughter close, then laid her down beside the dying fire.

It should have been the simplest thing, to turn from him and lie down alone in the darkness. Always before she had found courage. Taking the front rank in a charge with the odds against them, the taste of bile hot in her mouth. Burying one child after another as the winter fever cut her family to pieces in a handful of days. Losing Bahadur, and then finding him again, only to lose him once more. Always, there had been courage.

He looked at her. Reached out a single open hand. It still seemed so innocent a thing, that longing for touch, to be held, and she took his hand in hers without thinking.

She closed her eyes, and felt his lips upon her palm, and felt her courage fade away.

On the sixth day riding back towards the Danu, Kai saw the shadows in the sky. Distant shapes, arcing and wheeling, the lazy, looping circles of crows who know there is no rush to feed, no contest for the food. Ripe plenty for all.

They had ridden past the ford in the forest, only a few marks remaining of the battle Kai had fought there. A little blood still painted upon the leaves, fragments of sword and spear on the bank, the marks upon the ground of horse and man. They were back into the open country, the great Danu a few days’ ride to their west, when they saw the carrion signal up in the air, black birds above a copse of trees. An ill omen, that in other times they would have ridden around. But an answer, too, to a question that Kai could not ignore.

Across the fields of wildflowers and tall grass, into the copse itself, until, through the thinning trees, Kai caught some glimpse of what waited for them – ropes and stakes, the wet and shining sight of bodies stripped of skin. He told Tomyris to wait at the edge of the trees. She was a war child of the steppe and no stranger to killing, but even so, he knew that there was something out there that she must not see.

He thought to ask Arite to stay away, too, but before he could speak she shook her head. ‘I have to know if he is there,’ she said, her face like a gravemask of wax and clay. For that was the fear that remained unspoken, that they would find Laimei and Bahadur dead, carved into gifts for the gods.

And when they came through the trees and into a clearing, at first Kai did believe it to be his sister and her warband who lay dead there. The corpses scalped and mutilated, pinned out and opened up for the birds to feast upon. Eyeless, skin lifted from the faces, the mouths black with blood where the tongues had been bitten through. And Kai’s eyes were hunting around the dead like the carrion crows that danced and pecked from corpse to corpse, looking for some mark of the people he might recognise, the intimate secrets written on the flesh that he knew. The scar on his sister’s hip from where a horse had once thrown her, the finger Saratos had lost to frostbite many winters before, the tattoo of a bear and a deer that looped around Bahadur’s shoulder.

No sign that he could see on the ruined bodies. Too many to be his sister and her warriors. Looking closer still he saw the trophies of fur each man wore on his hip, the mark of the howling wolf stamped into their war gear.

‘The warband who hunted you?’ Lucius asked. For he had seen the signs too.

‘Never saw them clear enough to say for certain. But they bear the markings of the Wolves, and they are about the right number. It must be them.’

‘Who has killed them?’ said Lucius.

Kai pointed to the edge of the clearing where a barrow rose, branded with the remnants of a fire, what seemed at first a blackened sword thrust into it. A branch whittled into the shape of a sword, for those who left it there would not have been able to spare the iron, not in the way their ancestors had once marked their graves.

‘Dig into that,’ said Kai, ‘and you will find friends of mine. Or those who used to be my friends.’ He looked once more around the dead. ‘This is my sister’s work.’

Arite’s eyes had not left the barrow. ‘You think Bahadur…’

‘No. This was after they came back from the river. She would not go hunting until she had seen him to the water.’

Lucius paced about the clearing. ‘This is a good campground. A little cover from the trees at their back, a river not far off. Hard to ambush, if Laimei was coming from the Danubius.’

‘ If she came from there. She must have cut wide, scouted them at night.’ Kai knelt down, traced the imprint of a hoof marked in the ground beneath a tree at the edge of the clearing. ‘Rode in through the trees, the same way we came. And with the numbers this warband had, they would not have thought she would dare hunt them.’

Lucius looked once more upon the ruined dead. ‘Is this the custom of your people?’ He hesitated. ‘Or of your sister?’

‘Sometimes, when vengeance demands it. And no. The Cruel Spear they may call her, but she never killed in this way before.’ Kai kept his eyes to the dead, and not the living. He could feel Arite and Lucius looking at him, waiting. ‘I was not here, so she did it to them instead.’ The bile rose in his throat, hot and sharp, before he swallowed it away. ‘I always wondered before, with each man she killed or maimed, if she thought of me as she did it. Bahadur always said I was being foolish.’