Funeral Games (8 page)

‘Maybe not,’ the old soldier said.

None of them spoke for a long time. After a while the sun tried to rise on a grey day, and then it began to rain.

Coenus’s head came up. ‘Rain,’ he said. ‘Cover our tracks - cover our scent.’ He looked at Philokles and drew a deep breath, although they could see that it hurt him. ‘Now you have a chance.’

Philokles stood on the road in the rain for as long as it takes a good smith to shoe a horse. Then he said, ‘We need to get off the road.’

Coenus nodded. ‘Cross-country until you have to cross the river,’ he agreed.

Theron shook his head. ‘We must be ahead of the news - no one else could have swum the river.’

Coenus’s eyes came up. He was having trouble breathing and his eyes were dull, but he got his head up and he pointed his walking staff at Theron. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Eumeles needs these children
dead
. His whole fucking attack on our town is for
nothing
if the children live. He’ll be across this morning, if he has to swim himself. He’ll flood this side of the river with soldiers - men he trusts.’

Theron swished his walking staff in irritation. ‘This is
not
the sort of expedition I signed on for.’

But then he saw something in Philokles that changed his mind. Melitta saw him start.
He doesn’t want to end up like the farmer.
She’d never seen Philokles the tutor - Philokles the drunk - like this.

He was scary.

He looked them over and gave a smile - a half-smile, almost of contempt. ‘Cross-country it is. Follow me.’

They walked all day, leading their horses. The rain continued, and they crossed muddy fields and walked through dripping woods. Melitta was tired in an hour, and exhausted before they sat under an oak and ate more garlic sausage. Coenus could barely walk. Her brother met her eye and shook his head, but they were too tired to talk. After they had eaten the sausage, they walked again. As darkness began to settle, Philokles and Theron began to take turns carrying Coenus, and then they stopped in a stand of ash and cut poles and made a stretcher out of his
chlamys
and walked on again, carrying him between them. None of the horses was fit to ride.

In the evening, they came to a village. Theron went in alone, and came out dejected. ‘Men were here this morning,’ he said. ‘They took all the horses and killed some men.’ He shrugged. ‘I took this,’ he said, and held out a clay pot the size of his hand. ‘I tried to pay, but everyone ran off.’

They made a camp above the town. None of them had a fire kit, and everything was wet through, and Theron couldn’t get a fire started. He looked at Philokles. ‘You’re the old soldier,’ he said.

‘I get fire started by telling a slave to light one,’ Philokles shot back.

‘Fine pair of bandits you two will make,’ Coenus muttered. He sat in the dark, shredding bark between his fingers for a long time - so long that Melitta fell asleep, and she awoke to the warm kiss of golden fire on her face.

‘He did it with a stick!’ Satyrus said with delight. They gazed at the fire for a while, listening to their bellies rumble, and then they were asleep.

 

In the morning, they cut north again at Coenus’s urging, into wilder country farther from the river and the shore of the Euxine. Bion had recovered and Philokles and Theron got Coenus up on her, and they made better time. Theron ran down a rabbit and they stopped in the hollow of a hilltop and made fire - quickly, because Coenus had shown them how to wrap coals and embers in wet leaves to carry with them. Rabbit soup in Theron’s clay pot - nothing to eat it with, so that Melitta burned her lips drinking it straight from the pot - and roast rabbit cooked on a green branch used as a spit. Melitta grew used to taking direction from Coenus as he lay on a pile of cut boughs, protected from the rain only by their one spare cloak, which had belonged to one of the dead Sauromatae.

After the meal they were all better, even Coenus. They slept a little, collected embers and walked on. That night they slept in deep woods, soaked to the skin but warmed by a big fire. In the morning, Coenus was well enough to look over the horses and frown.

‘The two steppe ponies are well enough. And Bion is healthy. But we’re killing the other two - they’re too well bred for this life. We should kill them for meat or trade them to a farmer.’

‘For meat!’ Satyrus asked, his eyes wide. ‘Our horses? Hermes!’

Coenus grunted and sat, suddenly and without ceremony. ‘Son, there are
no rules
now. We can’t get attached to anything. Including each other.’ He looked at Philokles. ‘I’m slowing you, brother.’

Philokles shrugged. ‘Yes, you are. On the other hand, without your knowledge of hunting and living rough, the children might already be dead - or I’d be driven to taking chances.’ He looked down the hill. ‘As it is, we’ve made time. We’re only a day or so from the ford at Thatis.’

Coenus smiled grimly. ‘I’ll try and stay useful, then.’

Philokles grunted. ‘See that you do. Otherwise - well, I suppose you’d make a good roast.’

Theron turned away from Philokles’ laughter and Coenus’s grunts. ‘You Spartan
bastard
!’ Coenus spat. ‘You make it all hurt more!’

‘They’re
joking
,’ Satyrus said.

Theron shook his head. ‘They’re - not like anyone I’ve ever known,’ he said. ‘I thought that I was tough.’

T
he plain of Thatis was an endless succession of rich brown streams, swollen with the rain. Maeotae farmers tilled the mud in silence, and only a handful even raised their eyes to watch them if they were forced to come into a village. It was all so dull that they were almost captured owing to simple inattention. They were walking along the wooded edge of a field of wheat when Coenus raised his head.

‘I smell horses,’ he said.

‘Ares!’ Philokles whispered.

Just across the hedge, in the next field, were a dozen horsemen, led by a tall man in a red cloak with a livid scar on his face. Two dismounted soldiers were beating a peasant. Scar-face watched with an impatience that carried over a stade of broken ground.

Melitta’s heart went from a dead stop to a gallop.

‘Just keep walking,’ Philokles said.

Theron didn’t know much about horses, and he walked off, but Satyrus jumped in front of Coenus’s mount and got his hands on Bion’s nose. ‘There, honey,’ he said in Sakje. ‘There, there, my darling.’ He looked up at Coenus, who gave him a nod.

They walked along the edge of the field until they came to a path going off up the ridge, deeper into the woods.

‘What were they doing?’ Melitta asked.

‘Nothing good,’ Philokles spat. ‘Keep moving.’ He grunted. ‘Thank the gods they missed us.’

They climbed the ridge, apparently without being spotted, but when they reached the open meadow at the top, they could see horsemen across the meadow, working the field carefully despite the pouring rain. Another group of horsemen was in the trees below them - they saw the second group as soon as they stopped.

‘Think they’ve seen us?’ Philokles asked.

Coenus shook his head, his lips almost white. ‘We must be leaving tracks. Or some poor peasant saw us and talked. But they don’t know where we are - not exactly. If they did, they’d be on us.’

They watched for another minute from the cover of the trees. Melitta could see six of the enemy horsemen, all big men on chargers - Greeks, not Sauromatae. The lead man had a face with a red wound across it, and it looked as if his nose had been cut off. Even a hundred horse-lengths away, it looked horrible.

‘Off the trail and up the next ridge,’ Coenus said. ‘Fast as we can. We’re heartbeats from being caught. If they see us, we’re done.’

Up until then, Melitta had thought that the going couldn’t get any harder - constant rain, endless trudging along, no food to speak of.

None of it had prepared her for walking across country instead of walking on trails. Every branch caught at her. Every weed, every plant growing from the forest floor tore at her leggings and her tunic. Her boots filled with things that cut her feet, and Philokles wouldn’t stop. They came to a stream, swollen from days of rain, and no one offered her a hand - the water came up to her belly, and proved to her that she hadn’t actually
been
wet until then.

‘Don’t move,’ Philokles said.

She was halfway up the muddy bank, one sodden boot on a rock and the other still in the stream, when the order came.

Satyrus was in the stream.

Without turning her head, she could see that well upstream, half a stade or more, a man on a horse had just emerged from the thick brush of the valley and was looking right at them.

‘Do not move,’ Philokles said, quite clearly, at her side.

He was moving.

So was Satyrus. Without a splash, her brother lowered himself into the water and vanished.

Melitta turned her head, as the Sakje taught, because nothing gives the human form away to a pursuer like the face. She pressed herself into the bank and tried to ignore the cold of the water on her left leg. It would be worse for Satyrus, who was now fully immersed.

She could feel the enemy’s hoof beats through the earth. He was riding along the verge of the stream.

Beside her, Philokles began to pray quietly, first to Artemis and Hera, and then to all the gods. She joined him.

The hoof beats stopped suddenly, and she heard a splash.

‘By the Maiden!’ Coenus said. His voice sounded as loud as a trumpet.

Melitta looked upstream, and saw a horse thrashing in the deep water of the next long pool above the ford.

‘The bank collapsed under him,’ Philokles said. ‘Stay still!’

The horse thrashed again, and then the rider emerged on the bank, just a few horse-lengths away. He was cursing in fluent Greek. He was an officer - his breastplate showed fine workmanship.

‘Dhat you, Lucius?’ called a voice from where they’d come. A voice that couldn’t be more than ten horse-lengths away, and sounded as if it had a horrendous cold.

‘Yes!’ Lucius shouted, his voice betraying his annoyance. ‘My fucking horse put me in the drink.’ He stood on the bank and wrung out his cloak. ‘That you, Stratokles?’

‘Yes!’ The man addressed as Stratokles was closer. ‘More tracks!’ He emerged as he was calling out, walking into the grey light and the rain just as Lucius came up the bank to meet him. They were perhaps three horse-lengths away, and a long peal of thunder rolled across the hilltops and echoed from the valleys.

Only the overhang of the bank and the thin greenery of a single bush stood between Melitta and her pursuers.

Thunder barked overhead, and a lightning flash followed close, the
bang
almost intimate.

‘Fuck Eumeles, and fuck this. What tracks?’ Lucius demanded. ‘No one’s paying me enough to do this shit. If Zeus throws one of those bolts at me—’

‘Look!’ Stratokles said. His voice was thick, and even without moving her head, Melitta could see that he was the man with a wound on his face.

‘Whatever. One horse. Maybe two. We’re looking for six men - isn’t that right? And a pair of children?’

Lightning struck again, just as close, and a gust of wind tore through the trees.

‘They aren’t moving in this crap.
I
can’t move in this crap.’ Lucius looked around. ‘There are bandits here, and I don’t really want to find them. They’ll fight back! And this storm is going to flood this stream. Let’s get moving.’

‘The peasants said—’ Stratokles began.

‘Screw the peasants, my lord! Listen, that fool you caught last night - he’d say anything. You wouldn’t let that creepy Sicilian torture him - well, good on you, lord, but sometimes it is the way. We asked the question ten times before he answered. If he’d known, he’d have told us right away.’ Lucius snorted. ‘Give me a hand up.’

There was a squelching noise.

‘Anything down there?’ came a call from up the hill. Melitta could hear the jangling of bridles and all the music of a troop of horses.

The rain came down, heavier than ever, and Stratokles pulled his wool cloak up over his head. ‘Fuck the weather,’ he said. ‘We’ll never get a scent. And I’m not all that sure we saw a hoof print. Everything fills with water as soon as - bah. To Hades with it. Let’s go back.’

‘Let’s find a rich peasant and kick him out of his house,’ Lucius said.

‘Ndothing down here!’ Stratokles called. ‘Sound the rally.’ He put a hand to his nose and shook his head.

Then Melitta could hear the sound of a horn being blown, three calls repeated over and over. She clung to her patch of bank and shivered, moving as little as possible. She couldn’t feel her leg.

Time passed. She had time to wonder if she could do any lasting harm to her leg by leaving it numb, and to watch a fish swimming in the current and wonder if she could become a fish, and she had time to wonder how Coenus was doing, and then Philokles’ hands reached down, grabbed her shoulders and lifted her clear of the stream.

‘Sometimes the gods are with us,’ he said. ‘Where’s your brother?’

‘Somewhere in the water,’ she managed to choke out, and then she collapsed against Bion, who nuzzled her.

Theron dragged Satyrus out of the water where he had taken cover in a bed of reeds, downstream at the bend. He couldn’t walk.

‘We can’t build a fire,’ Theron said.

Philokles grabbed her shoulder. ‘Walk,’ he ordered.

Melitta hated to be weak, but she couldn’t make her limbs move. ‘Can’t,’ she said. Satyrus just shook his head.

‘Crawl then,’ Coenus said. ‘It’ll get you warm.’

So they did. It was a new low, crawling through the wet woods, feet filthy, hair sodden, but it soon restored enough warmth for them to stand, then walk. Satyrus used one of the Sauromatae ponies to keep him erect for a while, and they walked on. Melitta had lost one of her Sakje boots, so sodden that it lost all shape and fell off her foot. After another stade, she found that she was dragging it by the laces - she was so tired that she hadn’t noticed until it got caught in some undergrowth.