Thyatis wiped her mouth clean and stoppered up the waterskin again. She squinted north, her hand shading her face, looking at the distant blue mountains. Going north to Mount Ararat and the valley of the Araxes was the second way across the great mountains to the east-they would come into the valley that contained Tauris from the north, rather than from the west on the main road. Fewer Persians, fewer questions, but a long delay. They would be weeks late getting to the city. She looked back at Nikos, who shrugged. He had thought of the same things.
She chewed on the tough meat. It would be a long way to go. She did not think of the dead men she had left behind on the shore, or the stranger in Van who would wait fruitlessly for them.
Thyatis crouched in the thorn bushes, her cloak held over her head to break up her outline. Only feet away, the hard pack of the road slashed across the hillside and then down into the little river valley they had spent the morning climbing up out of. The sun burned against the back of her neck-adding another layer of bronze to her already dusky skin. There was the faintest breath of a breeze and it turned again, bringing the clip-clop of horses to her ear. Nikos had heard it first as they had turned the switchback on the long tawny hill that led up toward the distant line of blue-green pine trees. Looking back, they had seen two riders on the road behind them, more than two miles away. In the still air, the sound of their passing over the ancient arched stone bridge that spanned the stream in the valley had just reached them. The two fugitives had faded off of the road then and now crouched on opposite sides of the track.
Nikos was behind two low trees bent over from the weather, about forty paces up the road, as it turned to double back on itself. Thyatis was lower down, with the steep slope of the hill dropping off behind her. The jingle of riding tackle and the voices of two men reached her. She tested her grip on her shortsword, wishing briefly for a long spear or another bow. No matter now, she thought as the first of the two riders trotted around the lower bend in the road. From their embroidered riding cloaks and swept-back hats, they were Persian dispatch riders. But not in a hurry, she wondered, her eyes bare slits in the frugal shade of her cloak.
They passed her and she slid the cloak off into the brush. She paused, waiting, one hand on the branch of thorn that she would have to push past to reach the road. Behind the screen of trees, Nikos pushed the bowstave away from him and sighted down the length of the black-fletched arrow at the jouncing shape of the rider on the horse with a splash of white on its face. He breathed out with an unheard huh! And the arrow leapt away from him to bury itself in the chest of the leading post rider.
The man was still gaping down at the three-foot shaft protruding from his torso, watching dark blood bubble out of his chest, when Thyatis sprinted up the road behind the second rider. The second man was still asking his friend what was wrong when Thyatis sprang up and snaked an arm around his neck. The bay-colored steed, quite startled, reared with an outraged whinny and the man was thrown back into the air. Thyatis twisted into the angle of the horse as he fell and put her shoulder into it. The post rider flew a dozen feet down the road and smashed into the ground with a cracking sound. Thyatis dodged aside from the horse, which had turned and snapped at her.
The other man had slumped over on his horse and it was prancing in a circle as his dead weight cut at its mouth with the bit. Nikos sidled up it, speaking softly to it. Thyatis circled the nervous bay.
“Nice horsy. Nice horsy. Horse want apple? Nice apple.”
Nikos collared the first one and tugged the bridle out of the dead man’s hand. A good push sent the post rider to the ground in a tumble of limbs. Nikos led the horse away, toward the little straggle of junipers on the side of the road. When he trotted back, Thyatis had calmed the other horse as well. . “Check him,” he said, taking the reins of the horse from her.
Thyatis nodded, she had not forgotten the second post rider. She slipped her shortsword back into its sheath and sidled up to the man lying sprawled in the dust and rocks of the road. He was still alive, though his eyes were glazed over with shock and blood was slowly oozing out of the corner of his mouth. She slapped him lightly on the cheek and his eyes wandered back into focus. She had turned up the hood of her cloak and the sky was bright behind her.
“Soldier, where are you going?” she asked in her poor Persian, voice sweet and deep.
“Ah!” He moaned and tried to turn over. Thyatis held him down, gently. By her guess, his neck was broken and he was bleeding inside. “We’re… to Dogubayazit… to the headman…”
He began coughing and his mouth filled with blood. Thyatis grimaced and drove a thin dagger into his eye-socket. Her sad face was the last thing he saw with one good eye. Afterward she wiped off the knife on his shirt and then, as Nikos was doing just up the road, stripped him of everything but the bloody shirt and his loincloth. They rolled the bodies into a crease in the side of the hill, no more than a place for water to run when it rained. Mounted, they continued on, to the north. Nikos watched the young woman out of the corner of his eye. There were still tiny spots of blood on her cheek, but she had not bothered to wipe them away.
Sun-bright snow gleamed off the top of the mountain, a spearhead of glittering white even at thirty miles distance. Thyatis shaded her eyes, looking across the gulf of the valley of Dogubayazit, through thin air, at the massive pyramid shape of Ararat. It rose, solitary, from the valley floor, first a dun brown on the lower slopes, then banded with the green of pines and spruces, then another band of gray rock, above the trees that ran into a mantle of snow. Clouds clung to the flanks of the mountain and crowned it. The bay post horse whickered at her and she patted its neck. It didn’t like standing in the snow. The horse picked its way down the snowy slope, back to the narrow track that they had followed up the granite slopes of Tend?r?k.
For two days they had ridden higher and higher into the mountains ringing the basin of Lake Thospitis, leaving the tiny mountain villages behind. In the last one they had passed through quickly, for they wore the cloaks and emblems of the Persian dispatch riders. The eyes of the village men had been on them constantly, dark and glittering in the afternoon light. Beyond that village, the road became a trail through flower-strewn alpine meadows and thick stands of spruce. The air was cool and becoming chill as they labored ever higher into the peaks.
Today, though, they had come up the last snowy reach and broken out in the pass under the snowy bulk of the mountain to their left. Lesser peaks fell away to the east, on their right, and Thyatis pointed that way now. Ragged ranges of bare stone and icefields receded before them to the horizon. Beyond the range that they had climbed, a great wall of mountains rose up to the southeast, behind them.
“Persia,” she said. “Beyond those mountains is Tauris.” She turned and pointed northeast; there the wall ended and plunged down into a broad valley, visible even from here, that cut between the blue wall and the pyramid of Ararat to the north. “The valley of the Zangmar; it will lead us into the highlands north of Tauris and then to the city.”
Nikos shivered. The wind bit at his exposed face, and he pulled up the cloth that in lesser elevations he had worn to keep the dust from his nose and mouth. Now it kept his nose from freezing off. Thyatis did not seem to feel it, though, and she rode with her face and hair exposed now that they were beyond the habitations of men. He followed her down the rocky trail that curled off of the pass and plunged into a steep canyon that wound toward the valley below Ararat.