Chapter Twenty-Two: Ticks

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Our small scouting party of six rode down from the highlands following the river's course in the early morning. At times we passed the small encampments of other clans who came forth to greet us with timid smiles, offering cups of kumis and gifts of flowers. For most of the day, we trekked through dry summer fields, which opened gradually onto a lush lowland plain. Here, we cut inland and ascended a steep hill, winding our way above the valley floor. 

"Why are we going this way?" I asked Aric as we left the riverside behind. He ignored me and nudged his horse along faster. We pulled up our horses on a hillcrest above a settlement straddling a narrow, shallow stretch of the Lykus River. Below in the valley, I could make out the edges of farm fields as we climbed the hill. It was no nomad camp of white felt-houses and wagons; this was a proper village. A dozen or so huts of wattle, turf, fieldstone, and fresh thatch were hemmed in with willow wickets and bramble. Wattle fences, ditches, and dry-stone walls crisscrossed the pastures. In the pens were pigs, sheep, and a few cows. Beyond, a patchwork of fields shimmered gold in the afternoon sun with nearly-ripe wheat and barley. From the mucky pens and slick, black pathways between the houses, the wind wafted the scents of excrement and urine, thick and pungent. 

"What tribe lives there?" I tried again. "It does not look like a Skythai camp or village."

"Hellenes. From Emporion Hygris," Aric offered grudgingly.

"They're far from home."

"They are. New settlers."

"This far north?" I'd never heard of a colony beyond the shore.

He grunted.

"And we're not permitted to pass there?" The Paralatai Warband should have access to all of the lands under Ariapaithi's domain, including the colonies of the Hellenes who resided and traded in Skythia at the king's pleasure. If they chose, the Skythai had the power to dislodge the foreigners at any time, and the Hellenes knew it.

"We made two hard raids against them last year. That ditch-and-bank around the homes is new. They've fortified it since."

"So, they defy you?" I asked, stunned. "Why have you not ousted them?"

Aric explained that he never imagined the colony would survive after punishing raids, a harsh winter, and the lingering drought. But I saw crops ready to harvest and new cottages under construction. Two big storage barns. Grain pits. The plantings were vast. They would have enough surplus to last another year—or export.

"They must have support from someone powerful." He shaded his eye and squinted down at the makeshift huts being replaced with permanent cottages and barns, walls and fences, irrigation and fortifications. "Which likely means my brother." 

"I see." So this was the real reason for his reticence. 

"What do you see?" he asked pointedly, turning to face me. "Does your sight reveal anything when you look upon this place?"

His question filled my chest with a burning flutter, like a lamp flame near a drafty door. But I was reluctant to answer, knowing the misery my dark instincts could bring. "You are Warden of the East March," I said instead. "Have they any covenant with the king or with you, whose province this is to govern?" 

He turned away without an answer. 

"Then, they are no longer colonists. They are invaders." 

He shot a disturbed look my way but still said nothing. I thought perhaps I'd misspoken. Then he drew a deep breath and sighed. "I'd not thought of it like that. But this land was grazed by a productive household of some fourteen Skolotoi and their small flock of sheep, cattle, and horses. It was a good pasture, and they never disturbed the dead. They were pushed off last spring, returning from their winter camps to find their pastures under the plow. Now, look at it." 

"The dead?"

"That hill amid the barley was once a barrow, long ago." Aric pointed to a shallow mound amid the nearly ripe grain. "As was that one, beside the road. These farmers have no idea they are sowing in a graveyard. Or they don't care. The bones of our ancestors are now plowed under to grow crops on which to feed foreigners."

My breath came faster, harder as I looked down over the muddy section of river, snaking across the naked steppe. Something was so incongruous about the sight of those rude houses piled upon one another amid the pristine plain. In my mind's eye, I could envision crops stretched over the whole of the steppe from horizon to horizon, with nowhere left to graze. It was like a nightmare that I knew to be an illusion, yet it felt like a warning.

"But," he continued, "these men are cursed already. They've disturbed the dead where they sleep."

"Those crops look ripe enough to me,” I shot back. “And I've never seen the dead rise and defend themselves—that duty is left to the living."

"Their presence here angers you?" Aric said, raising his eyebrow at me.

"Their presumption angers me. Does it not anger you?" He had to see they were burrowing in deep. There would be no eradicating this parasite from the body of the steppe if they survived another winter. And if Aric did not confront Skyles and these settlers' open defiance, he would forever be diminished in the eyes of his men, his kin, and his people. Even I could see that. If he would seek my counsel in the vapor tents and by the dark of the moon, then I would give it to him now as well, come what may. "What is a settlement, if not a discreet invasion?" I prodded. "They've overrun their own lands. Now they overrun ours. Why should the blood and bones of your fathers nourish these outsiders?" My outrage took me by surprise, but it was too late to tamp it down. 

His eye widened as he regarded me with raised brows and a gaping mouth. "I've never known you to speak this way." Was it amazement or horror that had seized his features? "But it's true. We've let them live here and grow prosperous, and they despise us for it. Insult us at every turn. We don't need their trinkets. Their wine to blunt our minds. Their ravenous cities on our shores. They need us to survive; we don't need them. If they withered and fell into the sea, life here would continue as it always has. How would they fare without us? Especially with Athenai once again on the verge of war. They are unwise to test us."

"You asked about my visions?" I said. "When I look on this place, I see destruction: theirs or ours. You see what the Hellenes bring with them." The audaciousness of my own words stunned me. Perhaps it was not my fight, but when I looked out over that settlement, I felt the threat of the Hellenes viscerally. If he really believed I could divine the future, then this petrified future to which every sign pointed—of walls and wheat fields, of towns and temples, divvying up and trampling over these pastures, of wives locked inside their husband's homes—must never come to pass. We must stop it.

"Then we must destroy them," he said with grim finality.

Destroy? "I never said that! Not everything must come to battle. Not yet. Let both parties speak first."

"That time is passed. They struck the first blow."

"Perhaps, but is now the right time to strike back?"

"When will be better? You say you see only destruction for our people. Will you let this plague spread over us? Or, when you find ticks gorging upon you, do you pick them off and crush them?"

I began to regret speaking my thoughts so freely to him. Had I just sparked a war in the dry tinder of Aric's tempestuous heart?

He combed his fingers through his beard as he watched a shepherd below herding a flock of sheep into one of the pens near the muck-filled byre. "Truly, there is wisdom in your words. It was the same with the Persai when my great-grandfather ruled. They wished to raid us, rape us, and erase us from this land. They came suddenly, like an eclipse. The Hellenes come subtly, like nightfall. They would both plunge this country into a darkness and destroy us." He clenched his jaw and nodded solemnly to himself. "If we cannot hold back the darkness, we will light such fires that the gods themselves will think it day. Let us speak more on this."

We camped below the farther crest of the hill. The hour had grown late, and the ride back to camp would be too far in the dark. I sat near the light of the hearth, enjoying the sweet burning-grass scent of dung fire as I attempted to repair a tear in the seam of my linen tunic. Sewing had never been my best skill, but I was doing a decent job of it, considering how little practice I had. I held the seam up to the light, admiring my handiwork, and gave it a good tug to test its hold. 

Aric came and sat close beside me. I could see by the deep crease between his brows that he was still troubled. I set aside my sewing and fetched my wineskin, which I'd filled with mead. The pained look in his eye called for something sweet. He sat in silence beside the hearth, and I added more fuel to the fire. 

"What will you do?" I asked after a while, wondering if I had made a mistake in speaking so freely. If I had pushed him too far. 

"I don't yet know." He took the skin, gripping it in both hands close to his chest, but didn't drink.

"Can a treaty be made?" 

"We have a treaty. The settlers broke it in coming here. Only Ariapaithi or I can grant lands in the East March. Skyles had no right to offer them those tracts, yet they refuse to leave. There is no peace where covenants are not kept. We've traded honestly with the Hellenes, honored them as guests in our lands, and not begrudged them their cities and even parcels of farmland to sustain them," his voice rose in frustration. "But it's never enough. You're right. We've been hospitable. Yet, they denigrate us endlessly on our own soil, disrespecting our ways and dishonoring our fathers. They take more than they are owed, usurping our pastures and pushing our people aside. And they breed like rats, so there is no end of them in sight," his fingers clenched around the goatskin as if he were trying to crush it. "Am I wrong?"

Something about the sight of all those fences and walls crossing the open steppelands had cast a shadow in my mind that I could not shake. Discordant and unnatural, they foretold something ugly and ominous to come. 

"No." I exhaled slowly. "If you give this settlement leave, others will take it as a sign. It will become a great invasion."

"That is what my heart tells me. These Hellenes do not respect us—do not show us courtesy or civility in our own land. There is no peace where there is no trust. They will never look on us as their equals, worthy of their regard. Why allow those who despise us to profit from us? We must fire a warning shot: they need not admire us, but they will obey us." 

"You think it calls for something more than a raid?" I asked, already knowing the answer. 

"Skythia has borders made not of walls, but of words, not of stone but of men. It relies upon covenants, oaths sworn in earnest, and the laws that bind them." 

He spoke of the world I had come to love—the intangible world I had seen the good men around me try to speak into being and keep alive with their sweat and blood. 

"But no one honors promises, or keeps his word, or tells the fucking truth anymore." He sounded more weary than angry in acknowledging this. "And so it must be like this now. Suspicion, mistrust, a fence, a wall, and a guard on the wall, and soon the whole land is divided." 

"Dishonorable people need walls between them," I agreed. 

"We have never had such need before. The eyes of the gods bound us to our words, and honor bound us to each other. There was a time when all a man had was his oath. It was all he was worth. Today he thinks he's worth more unhindered by it."

"If that's so, who needs such untrustworthy men?" 

"I agree," he said reluctantly. "Next year, they'll only encroach further.”

"They are well dug-in. How will you move them now?"

"I fear we've waited too long." He pulled up a plug of grass and tossed it into the fire. "We haven't the men or time to starve them out. We're spread too thin out here, and their crops are lush. It would take a coordinated effort of several tribes' warbands. They know this. Which is why they're so brazen." He drank a deep draught of mead.

"Then you have your answer." I'd never seen them fight, and I struggled to imagine how Hellenes fought and rode in battle, draped and swaddled in their blankets. 

"But these aren't the Mard-Khwaar," he said. "They're just farmers."

"Then all the more shameful that they've made such fools of the Skythai,” I said, already growing weary of this conversation. I failed to apprehend the reason for his misgivings. A man who did not scruple to raid his neighbors and put his loyal brothers to death for their crimes was suddenly squeamish about evicting foreign invaders from his own tribe's land? "This isn't my country. But, for what it's worth, it feels like my home. And if someone came into my home uninvited, helped themselves to my property without offering thanks—while insulting me and dishonoring my ancestors, no less!—I would not sit idly by."

He rubbed his tired face with an open hand. "Then war."

War. There was resignation in his voice as he said it. Yet, spoken aloud, the word had such momentum to it. Like a sorcerer's spell, it had power all its own, and the world bent around it. "Do you have a plan?" I asked, feeling the pull of that momentum.

"That's why I've come to you," he leaned forward eagerly, his elbows braced on his knees, the wineskin clasped in both hands.

"Me? What do I know of war?" I took the skin from him and drank. 

"What will happen if I pursue this?" 

I shook my head. "I can't tell you what will be, only what could be." I wouldn't even try to foretell the future or pretend that I could. But I had a knack for seeing paths laid out before me, and often they were paths no one else had thought to look for. I could tell him about any number of these, but I dare not tell him which one to take. As far as I knew, there were no sure paths, only better choices. I suffered the curse of choices.

"That's all I ask. What have you seen—do you see?"

Had I really seen anything at all? I didn't know how to make him understand that my spells didn't show me the kinds of signs he sought. I merely related what I saw; it was up to him to interpret those signs correctly. I had only told him what I believed to be the truth, and now he would use those words to start a war with one of the colonies—perhaps among all the Hellenes. I might still be able to stop it, but to what end? To keep my own hands clean? Cruel though it be, we had a chance to kill a rival in its cradle. "I see that you have chosen the right course. This is as it must be. But more than that, I cannot say."

"Can't you cast some rods or search the flight of birds and give me something? There was the eagle—was it a sign? I could make an incense tent, and you could fall into a trance…?" 

"You know that's not the way my sight works. Impressions come to me of their own volition. I cannot summon them." There had to be something I could offer to placate him for the moment. "I see things as they were, as they are, and as they might be," I repeated the words a fortuneteller in the streets of Bastarnia once said to me when I paid her a bronze coin. "The future holds three paths: I see what can happen and what should happen. Not what will happen."

"Any man can do that," he rocked back, sighing in exasperation. "I need answers." His frustration with me was mounting, though he remained composed. He grabbed the skin from me and drank his fill, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Then I'm no good to you," I said pettishly, though, in truth, I was relieved. Perhaps Aric began to see reason. I had wasted my coin that day on fruitless answers as well. "If any man can do what I do, some other man should. I don't have the experience of your vazarka. You should have them give you war counsel."

 "You twist my words. I only wish to learn my fate," he pulled at his beard the way he did when he became agitated. "Something portentous comes. Our fates lie in these hours ahead." His voice faded to a whisper, "I can feel it."

His impassioned plea burned away the fog of my foolishness, and I saw him clearly for a brief moment. He hadn't come for counsel—he came for comfort. He was frightened, not of the battle but of forces beyond the reach of his weapons. Unlike clashes with swords and arrows, that was a struggle I knew something of. I took the tunic I had been sewing in hand. It was threadbare in places, the fine weave of the light cloth exposed along the shoulders and elbows. 

"Fate is a strange thing," I said. "The Bastarnai believe that your fate is continually woven as if on a great loom, bound by the strands of people, places, deeds, and events in your life. As each of these move across the warp of time, they become interwoven with one another, until their pattern becomes inextricable, as it is here." I stretched the cloth before the firelight and exposed the pattern of the weave to him. "Fate is like this." 

"Then, there are no choices? We are but threads being pulled along by another's hand?" he frowned deeply, his hands going slack.

"I used to think so. When I was young, I didn't understand it listening to stories about the unseen beings who spin and weave our lives. But I've thought of it often as I've grown older, and it finally feels clear. Your fate is determined by the time and place of your birth, the people who surround you, and the choices you—and they—make. But not all of these things are fixed. The quality of any fabric rests in the quality of its threads and the skill of its weaver. Your cloth is still being made. It cannot be unwoven, but it can be altered from this point onward. You cannot reset the loom—that was done at the beginning of time. But I believe you can alter some of your life's design. Change the people and places who become bound up with your life's cloth. Unbind some of them if you wish. Some change is within our reach. But we must choose it carefully; cut or pull or change one thread, and it will forever change the tapestry's design."  

"So we may still have a say in our fate?" he asked, urgently meeting my eye.

"Of course. We must." 

"Then, the gods have not decided everything?"

"We have our will, don't we?"

"But will they give me victory over my rivals or scorn me in favor of another?”

"That I can't say."

He rubbed his face in both his hands. "Would you? Scorn me?"

I placed my hand on his arm. "Never."

His face smoothed over as worry faded from him. "And would you follow me? Into battle?"

Did he really doubt me still? "I would." 

"You hesitate." He jabbed absently at the fire with an iron.

I wished I could say I wasn't afraid. That I was eager. But that would be a lie. "I—I just hope I am ready. That I acquit myself well." 

"I've seen you trained and tested. You have mastered the skill for battle. Have you mastered the will? Because a warrior cannot fear death."

"How? How do you not fear it?"

"Well, it's one thing to say and another to do. But I think of it this way: we lose nothing but this here when we die. Time owes us nothing. The old and the young lose but the same thing: this moment. The past is gone; the future belongs to no man. Tomorrow does not yet exist. And one cannot lose what he does not possess. If I die now, I have lost only this. That is all I have earned thus far. Seldom has it served a man to hide away and hoard his hours out of fear."

One cannot lose what he does not possess. Such a Skythai thing to say. Also jarringly true. "What is it like, really? Battle, I mean." I knew the raids I'd seen were tame compared to actual war. 

"There are no gentle battles. No friendly fights. No kind ways to wage war. You can only end it quickly. Brutally if you must. The short war is the most humane, like the quick death. A lingering conflict, mild or brutal, is torture to body and soul. Most battle is faster than you'd think once it's upon you. It's over before it really begins. It comes like a summer storm. There is a thunder of hooves, a shower of arrows, a flash of spear tips and swords, and it is done. It rumbles over you with thunder and lightning. You're soaked in a downpour, but you feel each raindrop, cold and hard. It nearly drowns you. And then it's gone, quick as it came. And the sky clears the next moment. But the earth is muddy where it was just firm. And it was so sudden, you wonder to yourself if what just happened was real. But you still hear the thunder in your ears. You feel the static still in your blood. And you realize how pitiless gods and nature actually are."

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Chapter Twenty-Three: Battle

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