The Wolves of the North Read Free Page A

under the beech trees, the path narrow. An ideal place for an ambush, Hippothous thought. Surreptitiously, he loosened his sword in its scabbard.
    When they emerged from the tree line it was not yet full dark. A sward ran uphill. It was crowned with a rough palisade pierced by a gate with a rustic-looking tower.
    ‘The palace of the king,’ Hippothous said.
    ‘Golden Mycenae itself, the strong-founded citadel,’ Castricius replied.
    The two men smiled, momentarily united in contempt for this place, if in nothing else except their propensity to violence.
    ‘You can quote Homer.’ Hippothous managed to sound surprised.
    ‘When I was in Albania last year, it was a bad time. There were … few people to talk to, nothing else to read. I have developed a liking for epic poetry,’ Castricius ended defiantly.
    The hall of the King of the Tarpeites was wooden and thatched. Inside, it was dark, lit by smoking torches. There was a distinct smell of close humanity and smoked fish.
    The monarch of all he surveyed sat on a crude wooden imitation of a Roman magistrate’s ivory throne. The imperial bureaucracy had provided the envoys with an interpreter from the Bosporus. It was claimed he could speak eight barbarian languages. His expertise proved unnecessary here. The king spoke Greek, the language of diplomacy throughout the east, if in an uncouth way. He and Ballista exchanged what passed for pleasantries. After a less than dignified interval, the king asked for a present. Expecting it, Ballista handed him a
spatha
with an inlaid hilt and fine sword belt. The king examined the gift with ill-concealed avarice. Seeming satisfied, he called for a feast.
    Hippothous was placed some way down the hall, with Tarpeites on either side. The one on his left launched into an extended discourse on fishing in execrable Greek. There was no better place in the world for fish than Lake Maeotis. Bream; anchovy by the tens of thousand; given the name of the Rhombites, there were turbot of course; and the finest of all, sturgeon. And it was here that the tunny spawned in the spring. Their migration was interesting.
    Despite it all, Hippothous was not unhappy. The last eight months had been hard. Last September, the
familia
had left the Caucasus in a hurry. They had travelled hard down from the mountains to Phasis on the Euxine. There they had chartered a ship to take them to the Kingdom of the Bosporus. As it was late in the season, the owner had charged an outrageous sum of money.
    Wintering at Panticapaeum had not been a pleasure. The sights of the town were soon exhausted: the sword with which long ago the Celtic bodyguard had despatched Mithridates the Great, the famous bronze jar split by the cold, the decrepit palace of the kings, echoing of its past glories, the fire-scorched temple of Apollo on the Acropolis, the equally run-down temples of Demeter, Dionysus and Cybele. There had been nothing that passed for an intellectual life in that degenerate outpost of Hellenism, a
polis
where the citizens dressed like Sarmatian tribesmen and as often as not answered to barbaric names.
    Come midwinter, Hippothous had never seen snow like it. A wall of cloud had come down from the north-west. The air had been clogged with big flakes like feathers. It had lasted for days, settled everywhere, drifting deep enough to smother a dog or a child. When the snow stopped, it got colder; the sky a clear, unearthly yellow; all frighteningly still. Then the sea froze. At first just by the shore, but soon it stretched as far as the eye could see; a vast white plain, with here and there jumbles of blocks forcedup by the pressure. In February, Hippothous had joined Ballista, driving in a carriage across the straits to Phanagoria, the town on the Asian side. Well wrapped, they had watched men dig out fish trapped in the ice. They used a special pronged instrument like a trident. All their winters had to be as bad. Some of the sturgeon they hauled out had been nearly