Read Online Funeral Games by Christian Cameron, Cameron - Free Book Online Page B

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