Horses of Heaven, page 1
Other Books by Gillian Bradshaw
Hawk of May
Kingdom of Summer
In Winter's Shadow
The Bearkeeper's Daughter
The Beacon at Alexandria
Imperial Purple
TO MY FATHER
I wish I could make you “a monument more lasting than bronze.”
Instead, this, as much as it is, and such as it is, is yours,
together with (what may be more lasting) my love.
PREFACE
This is a fantasy set in a real time and place. The time, 172 of the Seleucid Era, is the nice round date of 140 B.C.; the place is Central Asia. The Hellenistic Greek kingdom of Bactria flourished in what is now Afghanistan from the conquest of Alexander the Great until approximately that date. Its history, however, is a patchwork of ignorance and controversy, and very often all that is known of a Bactrian ruler is his name. Antimachos the God, Heliokles the Just, Demetrios the Invincible—we know they existed because they struck coins, but what they did that was godlike, just, or invincible, no one can say. I am not a historian, and this book owes more to imagination than to learning. I could even have set this story in an imaginary world—but I find real worlds more surprising and more interesting.
I’ve been asked to provide a guide to the pronunciation of the characters’ names. This is a bit awkward. If I were reading a passage in Greek and I came across the name Eukleides, for example, I would do my best to pronounce it in the way modem scholarship has taught me, which involves at least two sounds with no good English equivalent. But to use that pronunciation in English speech would be irritating and pretentious, and I’d content myself by saying something like “You-clay-dees’’—unless I were discussing the most famous bearer of that name, in which case I’d call him Euclid. As for the non-Greek names, I’m not really sure how their owners would have pronounced them. They are all genuine names, borrowed from the sources, but the Greeks, Indians and Chinese who wrote some of my sources probably couldn’t pronounce Iranian names either. As for the Zoroastrian holy book, the Avesta, which I used for most of the Iranian women’s names, as far as I can make out it’s a Gordian knot of linguistic difficulties — and I’m a classicist, not an orientalist. Here, however, is a quick, very rough guide to pronunciation, using the Anglicized pronunciation mentioned above.
There are no silent vowels: Inisme and Amage are approximately “Ee-niz-mee” and “A-maggee,” Choriene is “Khoree-aynee.” (If you can’t aspirate the ch, pronounce it as in “character,” never as in “charge.”)
Au, ai, oi and ei are pronounced, respectively, “ow,” “eye,” “oi” (as in “coin”) and “ei” (as in “vein”). Mauakes is “Mow-akes”; Armaiti, “Ar-mighty”; Heliokleia, “He-li-o-klay-a.” Eu is also a diphthong. The English pronunciation as “you” (as in “eucharist” and “euthanasia”) is inaccurate, but too well established to differ with. In any other combination of vowels, each should be pronounced separately—Theodota, Anti-ochis, Go-ar.
Itaz is “Ee-taz,” not “Eye-taz,” and that goes for all other words with i in them. Y ought properly to sound like long French u, but “eye” will do for it—Tomyris, Tistrya.
There is really nothing more to add, except my thanks to the Department of Coins and Medals of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for permitting me to examine their collection of Bactrian coins for so frivolous a purpose as this novel.
CHAPTER
I
first heard of Queen Heliokleia when I was eighteen: my father returned from Eskati that spring and told me that he had proposed me as one of her attendants.
Father had gone down to Eskati, the king’s city on the Jaxartes, which is ten or twelve days’ ride from our family estates by the Terek River, very early in the spring. Our family is noble, one of the seventy great families of the kingdom of Ferghana, and Father had gone to take his rightful part in the spring meeting of the tribal council. After the council meeting, he stayed in Eskati to keep an eye on events there and to do some business, and sent my two elder brothers back and forth in relays carrying news, orders, and requests for money or things to trade. It wasn’t until late in the season that he rode through the gate in the mud brick wall of our village and dismounted in the yard before our house.
I heard the noise of his arrival—the dogs barking, the horses whinnying, and people shouting and laughing—but I didn’t go to greet him immediately; I was helping in the foaling sheds, and, as Father himself always said, you should look after horses first, and men afterward, or you and the men will both regret it. It was late in the season for a foaling, but the little colt was born without trouble, and the groom and I were standing about grinning as we watched the mare lick it clean when my brother Havani dashed into the shed.
“Tomyris!” he bellowed. “Father wants you!”
The mare snorted and laid her ears back, and I grabbed Havani’s arm and hauled him out of the shed. “Don’t you know better than to shout like that in a foaling shed?” I yelled at him. “Merciful Anahita!” Then I hugged him, because he’d been down at Eskati with Father and I hadn’t seen him since his last errand home. Of my two brothers, he was the nearest to me in age, and we’d always been very fond of each other.
“Watch out!” he said indignantly. “You’ve got mare’s blood on my coat now. Come on, stop worrying about livestock and hurry up; there’s big news from the city.”
At that I looked at Havani in some alarm. This was in the spring of the thirty-second year of King Mauakes’ Era—the hundred and seventy-second of the Seleucid Era to you, Greek readers—the year after the Tochari first invaded, and the whole kingdom of Ferghana was as restless as a horse herd with a tiger prowling just upwind. My father and brothers had joined in the war the summer before to turn back the invasion; two of my cousins and half a dozen of my family’s tenants had died in that battle, and we were all horribly aware that it was only the beginning. We had met only one tribe, the smallest tribe, of a great confederacy of the nomads. They had all lost their grazing lands in the north to another confederacy, and now they were all looking for new lands to replace them. The council meeting my father had attended had been largely concerned with how we could defend ourselves against the rest of the invaders.
“Have the Tochari come back already?” I asked Havani.
“Not yet,” he said impatiently. “Father will tell you the news. But hurry up!”
I washed off my hands at the cistern in the yard, then hurried with Havani into the house.
Father was sitting on a leather cushion in the reception room, washing the dust out of his throat with a cup of wine, while my mother stood at the door giving orders to the servants. Father grinned and beckoned me over when I came in, and when I knelt down beside him, he gave me a rough hug. “Tomyris,” he said, giving my braid a tug, “we may have made your fortune.”
My mother left the door, came over, and settled gracefully opposite my father, giving me a particular, gratified, expectant smile. I gulped. This didn’t have the look of a piece of news about affairs of state. I wondered if they’d arranged a marriage for me. I wondered, with a nervous thrill, who it could be.
“You know that our king decided to make an alliance with the Yavanas of Bactria, to protect us against the Tochari,” my father said briskly, beginning to explain. (In my native tongue we always use “Yavana,” the old eastern word, for the people who call themselves “Hellenes” or “Greeks.”)
I nodded. That had been the chief result of the council meeting, and my father had sent us news of it weeks before. Like most people in the valley, I hated the idea of the Bactrian alliance, though I reluctantly accepted the necessity of it. “Never trust a sunny day in winter or the oath of a Yavana,” goes the saying, but we would have to trust Yavana oaths now. The Greeks of Bactria, I know, find our suspicion unreasonable and ridiculous. “After all,” they say, “King Alexander the Great, who founded our kingdom, founded your capital city as well. We ruled you for generations; some of us still make our homes in Ferghana. We built canals and irrigation systems which enriched your land, and paved roads to help you travel; we taught you how to raise the vine, how to use money, how to write. Before us you were just a confederacy of warring clans, scarcely more civilized than the nomads of the steppes. Your king uses a Greek system of administration to this day, uses Ferghanan Greeks to run it, and your coins bear counterfeited images of our kings. Since we were willing to do you the favor of agreeing to an alliance, why should you be stupid enough to oppose it?”
Yes, the Greeks ruled us for some forty years, and we did benefit by it. But they also drove all our nobility into exile and treated the rest of us like slaves. Think a moment, Yavanas of Bactria: think about your own subjects, the native Bactrians. Do you treat them like equals? Of course you don’t: you hold them as tenants on your estates and slaves in your houses, to till the land for you and serve you. Would you be content if the positions were reversed? I know, you’ll say, “The Bactrians are used to it; they had the same treatment from the Persians before us, and they know nothing else. They don’t complain.” That’s true enough. But when you conquered us, you treated us, the Sakas of Ferghana, as though we were Bactrians—and we were a free people, who had no master on earth, not even a king. It was bitter to us to be subjected suddenly to foreign overlords, forbidden to bear arms and required to pay taxes. If the first Yavana king had been an ordinary man, we might have rebelled again and again, until all the valley was watered with blood. And even though he was touched by th e gods, and knew how to make the yoke easy, still, all the while the Greeks ruled us, we longed for freedom. It was our king. King Mauakes, who regained it for us, and he only kept it by his own strength and cunning. The Yavanas of Bactria, and their rival dynasty in India, tried to overthrow him by force, and they suborned the Yavanas who lived in Ferghana to try by treachery. The Bactrian Eukratid dynasty was particularly well versed in treachery: they owed their royalty to it. Most families in the valley had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins, dead in Yavana wars. Naturally we were afraid to make peace with enemies so powerful and so treacherous. When King Mauakes summoned the tribal council and announced what he meant to do, one councillor after another rose to speak against the plan. No one spoke for it but the king. But when the king blandly rejected all their arguments and asked them to vote, they all voted in favor—so great was the king’s authority. Envoys had duly been sent south to the city of Bactra, where the Bactrian king Heliokles resided, and we had all waited to hear his terms.
“King Heliokles has agreed to the alliance,” my father went on, matter-of-factly. Well, that was no surprise: the Tochari threatened him as much as they did us. “What’s more, to bind the kingdoms together more closely, he has offered our king his sister Heliokleia in marriage. King Mauakes has accepted the proposal, and because of the threat of invasion, the marriage is to take place as soon as possible; the new queen may already be on her way from Bactra.”
I stared at my father, appalled. I hadn’t liked the idea of the Bactrian alliance, and I liked the thought of a Bactrian queen even less. We Sakas are not like the Persians or the Parthians, who keep their women locked up at home: Saka women ride about the land like men, and our queens are accustomed to holding real power. No one in the valley would want a Bactrian Yavana woman as queen.
“The king agreed to this?” I exclaimed. “What about his grandson? I thought his grandson was his heir!” King Mauakes had designated his eldest son Goar as his heir long before. When Goar died in the battle against the Tochari, Mauakes had accepted Goar’s son instead. The little boy was then seven, and had been named Mauakes after his grandfather.
My father shrugged. “So he is. The Yavanas have agreed that our king may make whatever arrangements he wishes about the succession, and this marriage won’t affect that. But I haven’t come to the point yet, Tomyris. King Mauakes wishes to appoint four young women, virgins chosen from the noblest families of the kingdom, to attend on the new queen when she arrives. Your uncle Kanit and I managed to suggest you as one of them, and the king has asked us to present you to him so that he can see if you’re suitable. Think, girl!” My father grew warm. “Think what it means if he appoints you! Honor, riches—and, when it comes to that, a splendid marriage as well, since at the court you’ll have the finest young noblemen in the kingdom coming and going all around you! So I’ve come home in a great hurry to fetch you, and if you like we can set out for Eskati tomorrow.”
I was first horrified, then terrified, then furious. I glared at my father, outraged that he should think attending a Yavana queen conferred honor on anyone. Unreasonable, I know: whatever else they were, the kings of Bactria were favored by the gods with glory and splendor far greater than the rulers of our own kingdom. Our king would feel flattered to marry a Bactrian princess, and I should have felt flattered at the thought of attending her. The only way I can explain what I felt instead is to say that I was afraid for my own honor, which sounds unnatural now that I write it, as I must, in Greek. (How I wish that Sakan were a written language! The thoughts of the Greeks are mapped out with royal roads, but our own beliefs are like the paths taken by birds across the sky, and leave no tracks.) The Yavanas are never much concerned with honor; and the Parthians and Persians, who adore it, don’t admit that women have it, except in the matter of not sleeping with any man but their lawful husband. My own people view things differently. If you take service with a lord or lady, your honor is bound up to theirs, as you must be faithful and obedient. What would a Eukratid queen expect me to do? What if she commanded me to do something wrong? I wouldn’t obey; I would certainly be faithful to my own people and my own customs—and that would make me a traitor to her. But I couldn’t put this fear into cold words, not immediately. Instead my anger centered on another side of the prospect which, in my youth and inexperience, I disliked almost as much. Was I supposed to mince about a palace, worrying about my lady’s clothes and the style of her hair, scolding slave girls if the bath water was cold? My parents named me Tomyris after the famous queen of the Massagetai who led her people to victory against the King of Persia: that was my kind of queen.
“How could you suggest me for a royal attendant?” I demanded. “What sort of company would I be for a Bactrian queen? This Yavana woman probably doesn’t even know how to ride a horse! Yavana girls wear dresses all the time, and paint their faces, and giggle, and read poetry, and cover their heads in public. I’d go out of my mind, locked up in a palace trying to please a queen like that!”
My father looked hurt, and my mother was annoyed. “It wouldn’t hurt you to wear a dress occasionally,” she said, looking pointedly at my trousers. I was wearing some of my brother’s castoffs, very worn, muddy and bloodstained from the foaling, with only a short man’s tunic instead of the long feminine one I was supposed to have.
“I was working,” I told her sullenly.
“But you should have changed to greet your father on his return home. You’re eighteen now, and a noblewoman: you should have more care for your dignity. As for this Yavana giggling—the lady will be a queen, not a merchant’s daughter.”
“Well, that’s worse, isn’t it?” I said sharply, coming to the real problem. “Yavana queens do nothing but plot and poison people.”
“This one won’t have any chance to do that here,” said my father confidently. “The king will see to that.”
“Then she won’t be a proper queen at all: she’ll be a prisoner and I’ll be one of her keepers. No thank you!”
“Tomyris,” said my father, in his no-nonsense-now tone, “you’ve no business refusing the arrangements your mother and I make for your benefit. Your mother is right: we’ve let you run wild here for too long. You need to spend more time with girls of your own class, and learn something of the world. In a few years it will be time for you to marry, and you need to know how a lady should behave.”
“What have I done that’s unladylike?” I protested. “Most men prefer a wife who can manage a farm, and are delighted if she’s skilled with livestock. They can be sure their estates are well looked after if they have to go off and fight.”
“There’s more to being a lady than handling livestock,” said my mother drily. “If you attended a council meeting, looking and talking as you do, you’d disgrace the whole family. A bit of experience in a palace would be good for you. And it’s a great honor to be a royal attendant. If the king accepts you, it will benefit us all.”
Of course, it would do the whole family good to have a royal attendant at the court, someone with access to the rulers, who could put in a good word for the rest of us if there were any offices going vacant or honors about to be disposed. I could see that, but still, I was appalled at the thought of living in a palace waiting on a Yavana queen.
“I’m not the right sort of person,” I said.
“You speak Greek,” my mother replied at once. “And you can read.”
So I could; so, obviously, I can. The ability is rare in a Saka, and needs some explaining. My family was related to Lord Kanit, who was the high priest of the Sun and King Mauakes’ favorite cousin. It wasn’t a close relationship—he married my mother’s father’s sister—but it was enough for Uncle Kanit to take an interest in us, and to visit us whenever he was up our end of the valley. Once, when I was twelve, Kanit brought his Yavana secretary along with him on a visit. I was always a curious child, and was intrigued by the mysterious marks the secretary made on his wax tablets, so I asked him to explain them to me. The secretary was a nice old man, amused by the attention of this gawky girl, and he showed me the letters and taught me to write my name. As soon as I’d scrawled it out I rushed off to show it to the adults and be admired for my cleverness. They admired it too much: to my horror, I found Kanit suggesting that I come down to his own estates during the winter, when there was time for study, and there continue to learn how to read and write. “We don’t have enough Sakas who can read,” he said. “It’s not good that we have to depend on the Yavanas for it: a Yavana will cheat whenever he can. If Tomyris learns she can supervise her husband’s men when she’s married.”
