Tim Leach - A Winter War

The dead lay all about him. The Romans were many. The Sarmatians and their horses, uncountable. And somewhere amongst them was Bahadur.

Kai went to his feet, and gasped at fresh pain. His hand was at his side, searching for shattered armour and open wound, but his fingers remained unmarked, and when he spat upon the ground there was no blood. Three cracked ribs, even spaced and piercing into his side. But it was a pain he knew – kicked by a frightened horse after a raid on the Dacians three summers before, he had known it then, and the familiar pain came to him as a comfort. And so, stumbling forward, one hand to his side, he began to search for Bahadur.

A hopeless task, but he had to try. Bahadur had ridden back for him, and now Kai was filled with the mad longing to find him, to lie there beside him and return to the sleep, to the dream. And why not? The sun was rolling through the sky. It would soon be night, and a killing wind would come with it. He could already feel the cold biting deeper, the short day mostly spent and no shelter that he could reach on foot. He would walk until he could walk no more, until he felt that caressing, seductive sleep that comes to those who wander lost in ice and snow.

But then a sound, close by. A scrape against the ice, the clatter of arms and a whisper of flesh, frighteningly loud in the silence of the battlefield. Something stirred from one of those mounds of corpses, as though the dead themselves were returning to fight once more, and Kai snatched up a spear from the ground to face it.

A monster it seemed, a creature of meat and hoof that bore a human face. Until it shook its shoulders and a corpse tumbled from its neck, and Kai understood the trick his eyes played. A horse – a great Sarmatian horse, its armour half hacked away and the blood black upon its flanks, buried as Kai had been by the dead. As the horse stood he could see the frost blooming from the wide lips as it snorted and gasped, tossing its head like a drunken man. The horse tilted its long head to the side, gazing on him with one familiar eye. His sister’s horse.

The beast looked on Kai – weighing his life, or so it seemed, thinking to finish the feud on behalf of an absent master. It lifted its head and whickered into the air, calling for companions, the warband, the herd. Only the wind answered, and it stared back at Kai once more.

One step after another, Kai moved across the ice. He stooped, let the spear fall to the ground. The horse stepped back at the sound, snapping its head about to watch for enemies on the blind side, and Kai stepped forward again. He was close now – close enough to smell the sour stink of the horse’s breath, close enough to see within the hollow of the blinded eye where sinews and fibres still twitched. He held one hand up by his chin, ready to parry, and laid his other upon the dangling reins.

The horse bared its teeth and flattened its ears, and he heard the scratch of a hoof drawing back across the ice. Kai laid his other hand against the horse’s forehead, let it rest there. He waited, for a time, and was quite certain that, in that moment, the horse and he thought of the same thing. That they both thought of Laimei.

She was dead, then. He only knew at that moment, with his hand upon her horse. He could not imagine her being parted from that great beast any other way.

‘Laimei,’ he said, as though the sounding of her name had the power to bring her back. He had heard of men who might do such a thing, warlocks and sorcerers of the Sea of Grass, masters of the old ways now lost.

Perhaps that was why the horse did not fight him. Perhaps it knew, somewhere deep in that soul of a horse, the soul all Sarmatians knew to be wiser than that of men, that she was dead, and the feud ended.

‘Revenge,’ said Kai. And the horse bared its teeth again, and he thought that it smiled.

Kai picked at the treasures on the ground – a pair of Roman swords, a coat of mail half hacked from its wearer, one of the long thin throwing spears that the Legion favoured. No time to take any more than that, and he tied them to the horse’s side as best he could. The horse stamped at the ice, impatient, but gave no sign of pain at the extra weight.

Had he more time, Kai would have walked with the horse for hours – the long, slow courtship of a rider with a new mount. But there was no more time.

Kai placed both hands on the horns of the saddle, his teeth tight against each other, his eyes half closed. He took a breath in, held it, then leapt upwards, throwing himself into the saddle, gasping at the stabbing pain in his side as he landed.

The horse tossed its head, danced sideways across the ice, and beneath him Kai felt the great muscles of back and flank twitch, ready to buck and rear. If it threw him, he did not know if he would have the strength to mount again. He would lie broken upon the ice until the cold took him.

But at last the beast went still, an uneasy truce between them. Kai stirred the horse forward, and read the tracks as best he could, reading the story written down in ice and snow.

Five days’ ride to the east of the Danu, one might have thought to have found a campground rather than a village. Viewed in the half-light of a falling sun, shadowed by the foothills of the mountains that rose above that place, a traveller would see a collection of rounded huts that might have been tents, the snow that gathered on them making them seem like pale horseskin over a wooden frame, not the mud and reed that they truly were.

But this place was no fleeting campground, a circadian city that would be packed into wagons and placed elsewhere on the steppe at the rise of the next sun. For Iolas was one of the winter villages of the Sarmatians; the ground furrowed into paths between those huts that a generation of footsteps had carved out, where children had wandered and old women tottered. Around the village, where the marshy ground would allow it, there were a few fields cut and marked for the planting. The claylike soil offering little promise – the farmers here were stubborn, it seemed, if not wise. They tried to learn the art of grain and coin, the tricks that had made their neighbours rich, that might feed them every winter without raiding across the Danu. But they had come to it too late. They were no longer a people of plain or city, but lost somewhere between the two.

In the west of the village, there was a gathering. Women and those children too young to yet hold a lance, staring towards the setting sun as though in worship. Even the children were quiet, carved wooden horses and branch-swords hanging limp in their hands.

Amongst the women there was no mark of a chieftain, no sign of rank in the long dresses and tall headscarves. But there was one who seemed to act as a leader of sorts. Like many of them, the woman’s face and hands were marked with little white scars, remnants of wars fought long ago, her braided hair twining gold and silver together. Not the eldest amongst them, for there were many there whose hair was painted fully white and whose skin was deep-furrowed by years spent under the sun. But this woman had chosen, or been chosen, to watch over them. She spoke to many – a touch of the arm here, a whispered word there, a sharp command to a woman who stood with her head bowed in grief, ensuring that all kept their eyes to the west.

The sun fell and kissed the horizon. It was said that a queen from the old times once wished for but another moment of light to look upon her lover, and so the gods always held the sun still before it fell away completely. And the woman who led the village whispered to herself, and asked for another miracle. That they would see silhouettes in the distance, framed against the sun. That they would see the warband riding home.