Tim Leach - A Winter War

At some unspoken signal, as he came closer, the warband parted into two lines. A space opening between them, a channel wide enough for a single rider to pass through. Wide enough for the swords to swing and cut.

He was close enough to truly see them now. He tried to make them meet his gaze – they owed him that much, at least. Tamura was staring at the ground, hard-faced and sullen, some light lost from her eyes. Kai could not recall ever having seen Saratos without a smile, but there was no sign of it now as the old man looked straight through him.

Kai pulled the last branch of truce from his spear, the leaves flaking away beneath his fingers, and cast it to the ground. For there was no need to make them break taboo. He could spare them that, at least.

He passed close between them – close enough to smell the sweat of their horses, the stink of leather, the sour scent of men and women too long in the saddle. One of their horses snorted, and his horse’s mane danced from the passage of the breath, so close were they. The rattle and clink of armour like a prisoner’s chains around him, and he listened for the whisper of a sword leaving a scabbard, the sound of a spear cutting air.

He was past the first riders, and the second, and the third, until he was in the middle of the column, surrounded on all sides.

No stroke of sword or spear. No knife opening the thigh, or finding its place beneath rib or shoulder. They simply turned from him, one after another. The companions he had led, and fought for, the broken people that he had made whole once more, turning their horses to put their backs to him until only Laimei, at the back of the line, remained to face him.

A craving then for knife and blade, to scream like a madman and beg for the killing, to raise his spear and force them to it. For one always fears to die, until there is a glimpse of the broken life that lies ahead.

He made himself sit tall in the saddle, to pause and fix his gaze on each of them in turn as he passed. For even if they meant to abandon him, he would not cast them aside. And had one of them turned back, they would have seen Kai looking upon them with pride, and love. But none did.

And so he came, at last, to Laimei.

‘You understand now?’ she said.

He did not answer at first. Then: ‘I understand.’

‘What our father felt, when you would not kill him. You understand it now?’

‘I do.’

‘Perhaps it is that you do, at last.’

‘You brought Bahadur across the water,’ said Kai. ‘No other could have done that.’

‘And you brought Lucius to this place.’ She looked away, towards the Sarmatians gathered upon the plain. ‘You have done what you must, for the peace?’

‘I have.’ He hesitated. ‘I did not know that it mattered to you. Whether our people lived or died.’

‘How little you know me. After all of this. I almost pity you.’ She fixed her eyes on him once more. ‘Yet you broke your pledge. Abandoned your warriors. Once again, you could not do what was demanded of you.’

‘No, I could not.’

She leaned forward over the saddle, and said: ‘So I give you the choice that you would not give our father.’

Kai said nothing. He listened to the wind.

‘A hero’s death I offer,’ she said. ‘A good death upon my spear. I could not before – not for love of you, but for our people. I can do it now.’

He traced a finger across the haft of the spear. No trace of the truce leaves remained. ‘You had to turn my people against me?’ he said.

‘That was not my work, but their choice. You abandoned them. What did you think that they would do?’

‘I am a shamed man once again, it seems.’

She shrugged. ‘It may be the Romans will find some use for you. They have always been great keepers of slaves and dogs, so I have heard. But you have no place amongst your own people.’

‘I know.’

‘I would not want to live so.’

‘I know that, too.’

‘And so what is your choice?’

‘You have taught me much,’ Kai said slowly. ‘And I know, that from you, this is a kindness.’ He looked to the west, thinking of the river beyond it, the people he had left behind. ‘But I choose to live.’

There was pity in her voice, when she answered him. ‘You shall regret this,’ she said.

‘That may be so. But in twenty-five years, I will ride once more with my daughter on the plain. I would not have her become as you are.’

A moment when there was something almost like pain upon her face. It had been so long since he had seen that. Then the lines of the face hardening, sharpening, twisting. Almost like a spell being cast, as though she had made a bargain with a sorcerer, to change the face that she hated, the face that reminded her of Kai. And at last, it was as though they looked nothing alike.

No great distance, to ride back to the encampment. Yet a journey taken alone always seems to be twice as far, and this was a kind of loneliness that he had not known before. The final bonds that held him to his people were cut at last. He had proved himself to be not of their kind, and so he did not ride back towards them, those who had been his kin and his people. He went to the Romans gathered at the edge of the plain, Lucius and his cavalry.

Some of the Romans were stifling laughter – amused, perhaps, by what must have seemed a barbarian’s practice. But others were solemn, though they could not have understood what they had seen. They knew it for a warrior’s ritual. And when he was amongst them once more, Lucius rode to him and laid his hands on the horns of Kai’s saddle. Leaning forward, speaking softly, he said: ‘You have paid more than I have, I think, for this victory.’

‘It may be so,’ said Kai. And it frightened him, how empty the words sounded, the need in his voice that he heard when he spoke again. ‘You will keep your promise? Twenty-five years, and I shall see my daughter again?’

‘I will keep my promise,’ the Roman said.

‘You hold my life with that oath, Lucius.’

A little dip of the Roman’s shoulders, then, a weight settling upon him. ‘Live, Kai,’ he said. ‘We go from this place soon. A great journey for your people. There will be a place of honour for you at the end of that journey. I will do all that I can to make it so.’

Looking back across the plain, its tall grass dancing in the wind and the first wildflowers of spring a brilliant scattering blue, Kai said: ‘It is a beautiful land, is it not?’

‘It is.’

‘It will be worth those years, to see this place again.’

‘It will.’

But for all those fine words, he could only think of the omen he had felt when he left the winter encampment. The whisper of a god, telling him that he would die in the west.

And he said to himself, in a whisper of his own that was spoken not like a prayer but a prophecy: ‘Then I shall have to prove a god wrong.’

This is a work of fiction. Relatively little is known for certain about the Sarmatians, a primarily nomadic people with no written record of their own left behind and a minimal archaeological footprint. What we do know of them is pieced together from written Greek and Roman sources such as Strabo, Cassius Dio, Ovid, and Herodotus, as well as the archaeological finds that survive (mostly from grave sites). So what we have is limited in scope and unreliable in nature – frustrating for the historian, but exciting for the novelist (and, I hope, the reader).

We do know that there was a war with the Roman Empire in AD 175 or so, a battle upon the frozen Danube, and eventually a peace settlement which sent thousands of Sarmatian heavy cavalry to the north of Britain. Much more than that remains mysterious, but the Sarmatians are pleasingly connected to many myths, ranging from that of the Amazon warrior women to that of our own King Arthur.