When she awoke, she had lost years of her life, and she was a child in her mother's felt yurt, camping on the sea of grass. Gryphons and eagles warred with stags and leopards on the worked felt hangings, and pine resin scented the air. A brazier of worked bronze hung from the central poles over the hearth, and the air was warm, like summer. She was wrapped in fur. The woman by the brazier, in her white deerskin coat, was her mother.
In one great rush, all her life came back to her, a single cascade of memory, so that her mother died and she gave birth in a single instant, and she wept for her distant son and her dead mother with the same tears.
'So,' Nihmu said. She was sitting on her knees, wearing a robe of white deerskin worked in red and blue patterns with dyed hair, with rows of golden plaques at the seams and golden cones with dyed deer-hair tufts tinkling as she raised her arm to feed hot wine to Melitta. 'So – you are back to us.'
Melitta drank the wine, smiled at Nihmu and was gone again. When next she awoke, Nihmu was kneeling by her, arranging crisp wool blankets and a clean fur. 'Hush, child,' she said.
Melitta sat up so suddenly that her head spun, and she lay back on her side. 'I'm awake!' she said.
'Yes,' Nihmu said. She was speaking Sakje. They both were. Melitta got her head up again. 'I almost died, didn't I?'
'Some of the people think that you did die.' Nihmu frowned. 'I find the people – different. But it is I who am different.'
'You seem the same to me,' Melitta said.
Her appetite returned like her memories, and she ate and ate. It was two days before her fingers explored the stiffness of her face. She felt a chill despite the fur robe that wrapped her.
'Aunt Nihmu?' she asked. 'How bad is my face?'
'Were you planning to be a Greek matron?' Nihmu asked. 'If so, I suspect you'd have some difficulty.'
Coenus pushed through the flap of the yurt. 'I will go and sacrifice – something. By Hermes and all the gods, Melitta – I'm sorry to have lost you. It must have been brutal!'
'Brutal?' Melitta was fingering her cheek. 'That's exactly what it was,' she said. She sat up. 'I felt that I was being tested,' she said.
'Perhaps you were,' Nihmu agreed. 'She's worried about the scar.'
Coenus kissed her. 'No man worthy of the name will think less of you for the scar,' he said.
Melitta frowned. 'That bad?' she asked. She could see in their eyes that it was bad. 'May I have a mirror?' she asked.
'How did you get it?' Nihmu asked her. She took a mirror out of her sleeve, as if she'd been waiting for this moment.
'Did my good horse make it? The one with the gryphon brand?' Melitta asked.
Coenus nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'Quite a horse.'
'I killed the last owner. He was trying to put an arrow on his bow when I jumped him.' She looked away. 'His arrow scratched me.'
'It was poisoned,' Nihmu said.
'I think it saved me,' Melitta admitted. 'I was in a haze – almost living in the spirit land. I might not have made it in this world.'
Coenus made the face he always made at barbarian notions of reality. 'It almost killed you, girl.' His protestation sounded odd, and Melitta realized that he too was speaking in Sakje.
Samahe came in through the tent flap. 'Now we shall rejoice,' she said. She came and folded herself into the space between Nihmu and the bed of furs. She took both of Melitta's hands in hers, and Melitta had another moment of memory, because Samahe's hands were the same rough and smooth that her mother's had been, ridges of callus and muscle and the backs as soft as any woman's. She saw the mirror and shrugged. 'You look like a woman who is ready to be a war queen,' Samahe said. 'Not like some soft Greek girl. Take the mirror and look. Then put it away. There is much to do.'
Melitta picked up the mirror – a Greek one, with a bronze and ivory handle and a silver reflector. The image was true, even in the firelight of the yurt. The same slightly upturned nose, the same black hair. And on the left side of her face, a black line like a tattoo, jagged like a lightning bolt, from the corner of her left eye to her chin.
No person with great beauty ever fully values it, the sheer attraction, the pleasure of it, until it is lost. Only then did Melitta admit to herself that she had been beautiful. The kind of girl for which fashionable Alexandria boys wrote poems.
'I have a feeling that my future as a valuable hetaira has taken a death-blow,' she said, to mask her inner scream. She looked like something that had been dead.
'How many men did you kill?' a new voice asked, and a small man pushed into the lodge. Everyone shuffled to make room around the fire and the brazier as Ataelus sat cross-legged, his fierce face unusually happy. 'You came back to us!' he said.
Melitta took his hands and kissed him on the cheek. 'Ah! Now I think I will live. My mother's best warrior.'
'You are like your mother born again,' Samahe said.
'Six,' Melitta said. 'At least six. I tried to let one live, but the gods took his life anyway.'
'Aiyee!' Ataelus shouted. 'Six Sauromatae!' He leaned back and laughed so hard that he had to cross his hands on his stomach. 'Six, and took their horses and arms and brought them here! I have singers already singing it, lady.' He leaned close. 'I ask you – I have to ask you. You are here to raise the tribes?'
Melitta thought of her new face. 'Yes,' she said.
'Good,' Ataelus said. 'My name is not enough. You – and Nihmu, and even Coenus, back from the time of Kineax – together, we will raise the tribes. You must grow well, so that we can ride. We will ride far.'
Samahe nodded. 'Too long, we have been outlaws on our own grass.'
'This winter, we take it all back,' Ataelus said. 'Upazan killed your father. Somehow he must die, despite the prophecy. Perhaps you will kill him.'
'Prophecy?' Melitta asked.
Nihmu looked at the ground. 'Upazan may not die by a man's blade,' she said.
Melitta was going to say something derisive about superstition, but she knew that this was the wrong place. These are my people now, she thought.
'We start with Marthax,' Melitta said.
All the heads in the lodge turned to her. Ataelus shook his head. 'I hear the voice of the Lady Srayanka – but I had thought to win over Parshtaevalt of the Cruel Hands first, and then the Grass Cats. Urvara is close to Olbia. She will be your friend.'
Melitta sat up straight. She looked at Nihmu. 'The eagles are flown, Ataelus. When Marthax submits, all the tribes will come over, and we will not have civil war.' She used the Greek word for internal strife, because Sakje lacked a way to express it. 'It is the prophecy – which many should know. And should be in your song.'
Ataelus nodded and scratched his chin. 'I will not treat you like a girl in council again. Marthax? He is old. His sons are all dead.' Ataelus rocked back and forth. 'Perhaps it could be done.'
Nihmu spoke up. 'When I was a prophet, I sang it,' she said. 'But Melitta, I didn't say that it had to be Marthax first.'
'Melitta,' Ataelus said, and shook his head. 'Such a kindly name.'
'Srayanka chose that name,' Samahe said, with a dark look at her husband.
'The people have chosen another. Just as Srayanka was "Cruel Hands" at war.' Ataelus shrugged. 'The people make names. I have one. You have one. She is a warrior – she came in with her kills and her spoil, and she was named.'
Samahe frowned.
'What is my war name, Uncle?' Melitta asked Ataelus.
'Srakorlax,' Ataelus said. 'The scent of death.' It was two weeks before she was ready to ride, and she still had spells of dizziness. But every day they came to her yurt, and in those two weeks, she felt herself change, as if her mind was moving to meet the new face that had been cut into her old face.
She had imagined, when leaving Alexandria, that she would have to prove herself to the Sakje – that she would have to win Ataelus, and then, with him at her back, impress the other Sakje.
It wasn't like that at all. Instead, they were instantly her people. As if she had been awaited. Perhaps she had. And perhaps the gods had given her the trial so that she and her scar could ride into their camps and lead them. But she sensed who they needed her to be, and every day she allowed herself to become that person.
After all, the person they needed was her mother. And she remembered her mother well.
So they sat in her yurt, and planned.
'What of the Sauromatae?' she asked.
'We leave them to their stolen land,' Ataelus said. 'For now. First we ride west. Then, when we are strong, we ride back east.'
'My brother intends to be king of the Bosporus,' Melitta said. 'He intends to make war on Eumeles.'
Ataelus nodded. 'He will make war to win his father's portion, as you will make war to win your mother's. This is just as it should be – and you will be strong allies. But his road and ours are not the same. Marthax has taken the people too close to the cities, and the result is not good. I ask that you take the people back to the grass.'
'Is that all you ask?' Melitta said.
The others, warriors and friends, fell silent.
Ataelus gave a half-smile. 'Too long, I have been the only voice to command.'
Melitta shook her head. 'No. I speak no hidden censure, Ataelus. I have been gone for years. What else do you ask? What else do the people need?'
'If we go back to the grass, as it was in Satrax's time, all will be well,' Ataelus said.
'It may be that the wine cannot be put back in the flask,' Samahe said to her husband. 'The people like living closer to the settlements. What woman wears hides when she can have cloth? What man wears iron when the settlements sell fine bronze armour? Good Greek helmets?'
Ataelus made a face. 'It is true,' he said ruefully.
Nihmu sat forward. 'Now that you can speak, it is time that you rejoined the worlds of the people – both worlds. Will you come into the smoke with me?'
Samahe frowned. 'It is too soon.'
Nihmu shook her head. 'It is not too soon. The lady almost lost herself in the spirit world coming here. This is because she has been too far from the spirits for too long.'
Melitta had always enjoyed the smoke, although she seldom, if ever, had the kind of revelations that the baqcas like her father and Nihmu derived from it. 'I will come with you,' she said.
Samahe frowned again. 'Nihmu, are you baqca? I thought that your powers left you.'
Coenus put a hand on Nihmu's shoulder, but she shook it off. 'I am baqca!' she said with too much emphasis.
'Perhaps you should go and speak with Tameax,' Samahe said.
'He is?' Nihmu asked, haughtily.
'He is my baqca,' Ataelus said, looking elsewhere. 'He is young, but he does not lack power. He might guide you.'
'I need no guidance, much less from a man,' Nihmu shot back. 'My prophecies are known in every tent on the plains.'
'It is true,' Samahe said. 'But you were a virgin girl when you spoke those words, and your father spoke through your lips. Or so the people say.'
Melitta sensed pressures that she did not yet understand, a fracture among her closest friends. 'Let us sit in the smoke,' she said. 'Then let us see your baqca. We will need the omens tested before we ride.' She hardened her voice. 'But before the midwinter feast, I want to find Marthax.' Sakje people took smoke by erecting small tents of hide, shaped like the pyramids of Aegypt, the seams sealed with good pine pitch from the northern forests. Then they lit small braziers – ornate works of bronze and brass, many made by Greek smiths in the towns, with refined charcoal made by the Sindi charcoal-burners in the valleys. When the brazier was hot, the Sakje would throw handfuls of seeds – mostly from the wild hemp, but some from other plants; every man and woman had her own particular choices, for scent and depth of dreams – and the smoke would fill the tent, and people would sit and dream, or walk the spirit ways.
As a child, Melitta had thought nothing of the smoke, because every Sakje took smoke, her mother included. But after exposure to Alexandria, to the Aegyptian temples of Hathor and Bast, she saw the smoke with two sets of eyes. Greek Melitta saw it as a drug, little different from the poppy that both healed and destroyed, that gave beautiful dreams and nightmares, that both aided the physician and was the physician's despair. Indeed, watching three prostitutes share poppy by turning it to smoke in the night market of Alexandria had opened her eyes. To what the smoke might contain.
Yet in her heart, she was still a Sakje girl, and she did not doubt that the visions and pathways of the smoke were true ones, even if she understood the agency of the smoke better than others. So she lay curled on the floor of Nihmu's smoke tent, sometimes raising the flap to draw a breath of fresh, sweet air, but mostly breathing deep of the pungent stuff, like burning pine boughs but somehow more deep.
For a long time, the smoke only reduced her pain, but then… she was standing on the sea of grass in summer, and a red wind played among the ripe seed heads of the grass, so that ripples moved and swayed – the time of year when the Sakje said that the grass was alive.
And she saw Samahe's yurt standing exactly where it stood in the waking world, but there were no other yurts and no horses, only the single structure. And in the centre of Samahe's yurt there stood a tree, and that tree filled the yurt and rose through the smoke hole and away into the heavens.
And at the base of the tree stood a dead man, his bone arms crossed over the white ribs of his chest, his bony rump leaning on the tree, so that even in death he conveyed both impatience and arrogance.
It was not Melitta's habit to be afraid, in the world of waking or in the spirit world, and she walked up to the dead man. 'Why do you wait, dead man?' she asked.
The skull of the dead man laughed, a hollow sound. 'For you,' he said.
'Do I know you?' she asked, and then, feeling a prick of fear, 'Did I kill you?'
'Do my bones still bear the meat and gristle of life, girl? Your dead still seek the tree, and their bones still seek to lose the meat of life. They would make a worse sight than me.'
Melitta found a skull impossible to read.
'What do you want? This is my dream!' she insisted.
'You have walked far from the people, that you can argue with a spirit guide. Do you still speak the tongue of the people in your head? Because all I hear from you is Greek.' The skull smiled – but the skull always smiled.
'I speak Sakje!' she insisted, but even as she said the words, they came from her mouth in Greek, and she watched them form into Greek letters and float towards the skeleton and the tree. A bony hand rose and waved them away, as if they were insects in high summer.
'Not really,' the skeleton said. 'You know the words, but not the way.'
'Am I supposed to climb the tree?' Melitta asked.
'You? All I see here is a Greek girl who can kill men.' The skull's hollow laughter rang out.
Melitta stepped up closer to the self-professed spirit guide. 'My father was a Greek man, and he climbed the tree. I wonder if you are a guide. Not all spirits in the world of dreams are beneficent.'
The skeleton shook with the force of its laughter, and her dream rang with it, like a gale on the plains. 'Get hence, usurper!' he roared. 'I came to warn you, but you have failed the test.'
Melitta didn't flinch. 'I need no more tests,' she said. 'Be gone, spirit, before I break your bones.'
She awoke with a foul taste in her mouth and a pounding in her head, as if her temples were the tight-stretched skin of a drum and the drummer's sticks beat her head in time to the pulsing of her heart.
Nihmu was weeping.
Melitta curled around her and stroked her forehead. 'What's wrong, Auntie?'
Nihmu rose suddenly, throwing Melitta back against the leather cushions on the floor. 'Nothing!' she said. 'There is nothing wrong. I saw many spirit guides, and I have received much news. I must think.'
Melitta's head hurt too much to ask further questions. She let Nihmu go, and then she breathed deeply of the fresh, cold air outside the tent. Her headache was banished in minutes and she knelt in the new snow outside, collecting the cushions, stripping the brazier and dumping the coals to hiss and steam in the snow. Then she knocked down the hide tent and folded it quickly, before it grew too cold and stiff.
All of these things, she realized in putting them away, were Samahe's, not Nihmu's. She took them back to Samahe's yurt.
The Sakje woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her lodge, working by the light of two Greek lamps. She was weaving thongs through small bronze scales, repairing an armour shirt.
This was work that Melitta knew well from her youth, and she sat down with the other woman and began to cut a leather thong from a patch of caribou hide, holding the tough hide in her teeth and cutting with a sharp knife. They worked in silence because both women had their mouths full. After some time, Samahe spat out the last of her thong. 'You took smoke?' she asked.
Melitta gave a wry smile. 'It took me, more like.' She started a new thong, cutting the edge of the hide carefully. A skilled man, or woman, could make a single thong many horse-lengths long, all a single thickness. Melitta wasn't that good, but she was pleased to see that her thong was not like a child's, full of knots and bumps. She still had skill.
Samahe nodded. 'I don't like the smoke any more,' she said. 'When I was a maiden, the smoke was good. Now it brings me only dreams of all the men I have killed.' She shrugged. 'The last few years, I have killed many and many.' She did not say this with the pride of a warrior, but merely with weariness.
'I met a guide,' Melitta said. 'Or a demon. He barred me from the tree and mocked me as a Greek.'
Samahe's eyes met hers. 'I wouldn't share that with other people,' she said.
Melitta shrugged. 'It makes no sense,' she said. 'My father was Greek. By all accounts, he seldom even accepted that he was baqca. Yet no spirit guide ever blocked him from the tree!'
'That is Greek talk,' Samahe said. 'The spirits do as they do, and it is not for us to question.'
'Bah,' Melitta said. 'That is tyranny. It is illogical.' Even as she spoke the Greek word, she understood how deep this conflict would run, and it made her angry. 'I am Sakje!' she said.
Samahe looked up from her work. 'I don't doubt it, lady. Do not let any other of the people doubt it, either.' She chewed on the thong for a dozen heartbeats, softening the stuff. Then she leaned forward. 'And Nihmu?' she asked.
'I couldn't say,' Melitta answered. 'She mentioned many spirit guides.'
Samahe shook her head. 'Why must she be baqca?' she asked. 'She cursed the gift when she had it, and rejoiced when it left her. Where is her mate? Why has she returned?'
Melitta was used to the gossip of women. She enjoyed it when it was well meant, and she judged Samahe's comments as kindly. 'Her mate is captive to Eumeles at Pantecapaeum.' She took the hide from her mouth. 'But it is many years and she has no child, and in Alexandria, we wondered if the lack of a child was weighing on her.'
And then, unbidden, thoughts of what she had seen between Nihmu and Coenus on the trail came to her, and she frowned.
Samahe shook her head. 'I don't think she should have returned,' she said. The next day, Melitta sat in another yurt with Tameax, the youngest baqca she had ever met. Nihmu had refused to come.
'You are no older than I am,' Melitta said, after clasping his hand and sitting down. She saw that he had a fine drum – indeed, it looked to her to be Kam Baqca's drum, an artefact from her youth, with tiny iron charms hanging all around the rim. He tapped it idly with a long bone as he looked at her.
'I am older than you by a number of cycles,' he said with a smile. 'But I won't expect you to believe it.'
'Really?' she asked.
'I have not always been a man. At least, I think I can remember being a fish.' He shrugged and smiled.
Melitta laughed. 'Most men claim to have been some great and noble animal, like an eagle or a bear.'
'Most men are liars,' he said.
'Perhaps, by claiming to have been a small thing, you seek to disarm me into believing other things,' Melitta drawled. He had deep cushions, leather ones filled with horsehair, and she allowed herself to slip back on to them. In a curious way, it was like debating with Philokles.
'You are not like a Sakje,' he said. 'Your brain runs like a river that has many channels.'
'I have been in many places,' Melitta said. 'Yet I am a Sakje.'
'I have seen this same thing in Ataelus,' Tameax said. 'Why do the Greeks think so differently?'
'I wish I had Philokles here to tell you,' Melitta answered, and found her eyes filling with tears. 'He was my teacher, in a kind of learning called "logic".' She sat up. 'He spoke at length with Kam Baqca, a whole winter.' She felt it important that he see that the greatest baqca of the current age had approved of the Greek thinking. 'You understand what the Greeks call mathematics?'
'Understand? No. But I know to what you refer.' He smiled at her. 'Did you really kill six Sauromatae?'
She nodded.
He shrugged. 'I will tell the spirits. Some spirits object to you, as an alien. Others call you the daughter of Srayanka. Others say you will kill the people.' He laughed, and he had a clear laugh. 'Spirits are all a little mad – how can they be otherwise, when they are already dead?'
'I met one in the smoke,' Melitta said. Samahe had advised her to keep this to herself.
He leaned forward. 'Yes?'
'A skeleton,' she said.
'Bah – most of them have but naked bones, until you clothe them with your own dreams. Who was he?' The baqca was intensely interested, quivering like an Aegyptian cat watching a mouse in a grain sack.
'I didn't ask.' She shifted uncertainly on the cushions. 'He annoyed me and I threatened him.'
Tameax laughed his clear, silvery laugh. 'You may be Sakje,' he said. He rocked back on his heels and poured herb tea from a kettle on his tripod. 'Nihmu is avoiding me. She is not recovering her powers. Why would she, who had so much power, pretend? All here honour her.'
Melitta felt that she was on dangerous ground. 'She seeks more than honour,' she allowed. 'I'm not sure that I understand her.'
'You treat me as an equal,' Tameax said.
Melitta met his eye. 'How should I treat you?'
Tameax shook his head. 'The people have two ways to deal with me,' he said. 'Some deny that I have power, insisting that I am too young, that I have not given my manhood for power, that I cannot be real. Others treat me as an object of fear. No one treats me as an equal. Yet you, a queen, speak to me as if I am your brother.'
Melitta shrugged.
'Will you treat all the people this way, even when you are the war queen of the Assagatje?' he asked. 'The scar on your cheek says that you could be a hard queen to follow.'
'What is your place in all this?' she shot back.
He nodded, pinching his lips. 'If you become queen, I will become your baqca.' He handed her a cup of tea. 'I seek to know what kind of queen you might be. Ataelus will follow you whatever I say, and my loyalty to him is depthless. So I will not leave your side. I come with Ataelus, his horse and his bow – part of his equipage.' He used the Sakje word that meant the same as the Greek panoply – all the war things. 'You do not fear me, or despise me. This will mean much to me.' He nodded. 'Why will you ride against Marthax, and not to the tribes that will support you?'
Melitta raised her head and looked away from the intensity of his blue eyes, at the hangings behind his head. She thought for a time that seemed to her long. 'There are many reasons, all true, and yet some are more true than others,' she said.
He nodded.
'If I ride to Parshtaevalt or Urvara, I will build an army. In answer, Marthax will also build an army. When armies are built, they fight. Once that battle is fought, it will no longer matter whether I win or I lose, because the people will have split.'
Tameax fingered his wispy black beard. He was remarkably handsome. The remarkable part is that he was a baqca, and they were usually ugly men, or mad ones. He was strictly sane, and had the straight nose and blue eyes of the Medes and the Persians. 'This seems true to me. Did you dream it?'
'No,' she said. She shrugged, wondering why she was being so honest. She'd considered her strategy again and again, and it had occurred to her to tell the people that she had dreamed it, but his eyes disarmed her.
The shadow of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. 'Perhaps I will,' he said. In another man, it would have been an admission of the falsity of his dreams, but that was not how it came from him. 'But there is more.'
'You are – very like my tutor.' She sat up fully and crossed her legs. Then she picked up her tea cup – a beautiful thing of pottery, unlike any other cup she had ever handled. 'If I go to Parshtaevalt, he will advise me. And Urvara – she will advise me. And each will have their own needs and desires and they will quarrel, and I will lose by it. And each will expect my mother – always my mother. When I go straight to Marthax and…' She paused, having almost revealed her entire plan. Not even to this handsome young man. She took a breath. 'When I win him over, I will be queen. By my own hands.'
Tameax nodded. 'Would you take me as a lover, Queen of the Assagatje?'
Melitta felt herself blush. 'No,' she said with real regret. 'Not if you are to be my baqca.'
Now it was his turn to flush – clearly, it was not the answer he expected. 'Maidens seldom refuse me,' he said.
She shrugged, smiling at him. 'Many of your maidens are not queens, I expect,' she said.
'We will see,' he answered. 'I am a patient man. And to be honest, right now we sit in my yurt on a field of new snow, far from our lands, the enemy of every man and horse in the vale of the Tanais, and part of my mind imagines what it might be to be baqca of a queen, but the other says that we will never be anything but a band of brigands, and that you dream big dreams for nothing.'
'This from a baqca?' she asked. She rose to her feet. 'Is the cup from Qin?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said. 'I had four, and now I have but two.'
'Perhaps we will go there one day.' She touched his hand in giving him the cup. 'Nihmu went with Leon.'
'I have been to the grass that laps on the shores of Qin,' he said. 'I would like to go again. Indeed, it was that trip that made me baqca.' He put the cup reverentially into a small lacquer box and then he took her hand. 'You see deeply,' he said.
She took her hand out of his and stepped away. 'You say that to every spear-maiden who comes to this tent,' she said.
His eyes sparkled. 'I do too.'
'Keep it for them and be my friend,' she said.
'The cycle will bring what it brings,' he said.