The Ten Thousand (12 page)

At his throat, he
fingered the coral pendant he had taken off Zori’s corpse. It had come from
here, from the depths of the sea. In Machran it would have bought him a week’s
worth of whores, or a good knife, but he had held onto it. It was the only
thing he had left of that quiet glen where his father had brought him up to be
a man.

The wind stayed
fair for the south, and before it the fleet coursed along at the clip of a
trotting horse. Aboard all the ships, the mariners repaired the storm-damage
with the phlegm of those accustomed to the vagaries of the sea, and the
mercenaries washed their filthy scarlet chitons in salt water so that they
chafed at thigh and neck and bicep.

In the evening,
for the first time, the captains allowed fires to be lit in the sand-filled
hearths amidships. Over them the scattered companies of the Macht set the
rust-streaked centoi of the communal messes, and they threw into these whatever
they could hunt up from the holds of their ships. The centons gathered about
each fire-frapped cauldron as darkness drew in on the face of the waters, and
the sailors looked on from their stations in the bow and around the
steering-oars. They had eaten their fill of biscuit and cold salt pork earlier
in the day and now watched with some interest as their red-clad passengers went
through the ritual of the evening meal as thought they were all safe and sound
on land. Myrtaios had raised some concern at all the bodies on deck, protesting
that it made the vessel top-heavy, but Pasion had overridden him. It was a
comfort to those who found the face of the sea a dangerous, inimical place, and
besides, the men were as gaunt as beggars after puking their guts up for the
better part of a week.

There were two
centons on Pasion’s ship: Jason of Ferai’s Dogsheads, and Mynon’s Blackbirds.
The raised platform at the rear of the vessel— they called it a steerdeck, the
mariners, every object on board, it seemed, had a name in a language of their
own—was a fine place to lean and look down on the two hundred or so men below
who crammed the vessel amidships with the centos in their own midst, a
bubbling, steaming darkness that had fire licking about it.

The cooks had
finished ladling out the inevitable boiled stew, and the men had eaten at least
half of it. Mynon and Jason joined Pasion on the steerdeck and surveyed the
packed space below.

“Lean and hungry,”
Mynon said.

“Better that than
fat and bored,” Pasion retorted.

Jason smiled. It
was an old exchange, a ritual almost. “Tell me,” he said. “How many have we
lost, Pasion?”

The cursebearer
frowned. “Hard to tell in all truth, Jason. Even the sailors can’t be sure.”

“Pasion—”

“All right. As of
now, it looks as though at least a dozen ships went down in the storm.”

“Goddess,”
Mynon swore, genuinely shocked. “Men or mules?”

“The big
freighters, for the most part—in a bad sea, Myrtaios tells me, the side-hatches
can be smashed open. But we figure at least three of the troop-carriers.”

“Six centons,”
Jason said tonelessly. “The bulk of six hundred men.
Fuck.”

“Why this voyage?”
Mynon demanded. “We could have made the crossing at Sinon and barely had time
to puke over the side. Instead we’re here ploughing along the sea-lanes of the
world, and we’re hundreds of men the poorer for it.”

“Tanis is the only
port where we can get ashore in strength without fighting a war to do it. You’ve
seen ship-borne assaults before, Mynon; men floundering ashore, drowning in
their armour, picked off in the shallows. Believe me, Phiron knows what he is
doing. Besides—” Here Pasion paused, as if he had been about to say too much.
At last he went on. “If we make landfall in Artaka, then our journey will be
shortened somewhat, and we’ll avoid the Korash Mountains, a hard bitch to get
through by all accounts.”

“The Korash
Mountains? Where in the hell of the world is Phiron taking us?” Mynon demanded,
dark monobrow thunderous above his black-beaded eyes. “I thought he was on
another ship. Is he with the fleet at all?”

“He went on ahead,”
Pasion said hoarsely. “There were problems in Sinon. He was worrying about our
logistics, and so went on ahead in a fast galley. He’ll be at Tanis waiting for
us.”

Jason shook his
head. “Pasion, we’re dancing in the dark here. Enough of the secrets. We’re out
at sea with nowhere to desert to, so be clear with us now. This is not a bundle
of centons any more. When we get off these bastard ships, we’ll be all in it
together, with just the Kufr to rub up against. This is us, here. This is all
we have.”

Pasion bent his
head. Below, in the waist of the ship, the men had begun to sing. Some old song
of the mountains. His tongue probed the aching, rotten teeth that had kept him
up at nights more times than he cared to remember. He thought of them as his
conscience, or at least some joke of Antimone’s, set in his skull to keep him
from sleeping sound with so much on his mind.

“I had only the
one despatch from Phiron,” he said at last. What was the name of that song?
Even he, a lowlander, knew the tune. “He had met with our principal at last. He
thought the arrangements for our reception in Tanis were not all they might
have been, hence his early departure from Sinon. That’s all I know, brothers.”

“No,” Jason said. “There’s
more. We’re to be fighting in the Empire, that much has been plain—but who is
this principal of yours? What’s the mission, Pasion? We’ve come far enough to
know.”

Pasion told them.

Land came into
sight three days later. So said the sailors at the mastheads. For the men on
deck there was the merest hint of a darker line on the hem of the sky, and with
it, some intensification of the smells on the air. They had not known that land
could be smelled as though it were a meal preparing, or a fart let go in a
corner. They smelled land, and packed the decks of the fleet as though by their
presence there they could make it approach the more quickly. When it did, they
found it to be a mustard-pale shore clinging to the hem of the world, a line of
sand, it appeared. For men bred to mountains, it seemed a strange and unseemly
thing that a whole new world could be opening up on the horizon before them and
yet seem as flat as a man’s hand for as far as the eye could see. Flat and
brown, with no hint of spice or flower to redeem it.

The Great
Continent. So it had been known, time out of mind. The Macht had never
forgotten their attempt to conquer it any less than the Kufr had. As the Macht
fleet came in close to the land, sails reefed and sweeps striking out on the
smaller ships, so they found that the very colour of the water under them had
changed, becoming brown as an old man’s piss. Birds began to circle the fleet
and cluster about the tallest of the yards, shitting white drops on all those
below. The Macht mercenaries hunted out their armour and weaponry, and
burnished the salt-rust off it, determined to present a fearsome, gleaming
front upon landing. And Myrtaios took on board a Kufr pilot to steer the ships
of the fleet through the sandbanks and eddying channels of the mighty Artan
River, upon whose delta Tanis stood, one of the great and ancient cities of the
world. This Kufr stood on the quarterdeck between the twin steering-oars and
barked orders in good Machtic to left and right, whilst behind him the better
part of a hundred ships followed meekly in line, afraid of grounding their
bottoms on the pale sand and yellow rocks of Artaka. Even Jason, standing at
the break of the quarterdeck with his black cuirass on his back and iron helm
hanging like a pot at his hip, felt the history behind the prosaic moment. He
had seen Kufr before, a few, but then he was accounted an educated man. For
most of the centons the shape standing immensely, unfeasibly tall at the stern
was like some picture brought bright and colourful out of myth. They gaped at
it; the golden skin, the weird eyes, the face with human features that were in
no way human. And the thing did not even sweat under their regard.

“Perhaps they don’t
sweat,” Mynon said, looking on with scarcely more discretion than the newest fish
in his centon.

“Ah, don’t tell me
you’ve not seen one before.”

“Upon my heart,
Jason, I have not. We’re not all well-travelled scroll-scratchers like you.”

And so Tanis
opened out before them. The pilot brought them through a broad estuary where
the sea turned brown, and on either side the banks began to encroach on the
water, narrowing pasang by pasang. Ahead, a tall gleam of white appeared on the
brim of the world, and as the day wore on—the long, wearisome day for those who
had donned full panoply—so this white grew and lengthened and in some places
soared, until there was presented to the men of the ships a sight they had not
quite bargained on. They had seen Machran, and thus flattered themselves that
they knew what a great city looked like, but what bulked taller on their
horizon moment by moment was something else. It was like comparing the
mud-forts of children to the project of an engineer.

Tanis. They built
with limestone here, a white stone which time pocked and darkened. But still,
the passage of the years could not dim the illusion. This was a white city, a
gleaming jewel. It reared out of the dun delta which surrounded it. In its
midst two dozen towers, and fifty towers within towers, and interlaced
battlements, all vast in conception, unreal to see, reared up and up into the
clear blue sky, a dream of architects. A marvel. The farther the fleet slipped
up the delta of the river, so the higher the buildings became. Men on the ships
craned their necks, striving to see the summits of towers which were still
pasangs away.

“Our Mother’s God,”
Mynon said. His little rat-face was ill-suited to awe, but it was filled to the
brim now. His face screwed up, and the awe moved on into baffled resentment. He
stared up at the white towers of Tanis like a man whose wife has just betrayed
him. “Pasion—I, I—”

“I know,” Pasion
said.

“Quite a little
mission,” Jason said. And even he, the urbane man of letters, had trouble
keeping his teeth together. “
Pasion—
”

“I
know,
”
Pasion said. His face was as set as some statue hewn from stone. “Ready your
cantons to disembark. Leave nothing behind. We will assemble on the quays in
full wargear. If we must fight our way off the ships, then so be it. Brothers,
see to your men.”

Up the backstays
of the leading ship went pennants of coloured linen. The following vessels of
the fleet modified their courses, taking in sail and coming forward up the
channel, line upon line of them. On every deck the Macht stood in assembled
companies with their weapons to hand. And still the shore glided closer and the
immense towering heights of Tanis loomed.

The messenger
flung himself down at the lip of the dais. Prostrate, he babbled, “Great One,
they have arrived. The ships are sailing into the harbours now, in lines as
endless as the sea. Hundreds, Great One, and on the decks of every one the
warriors of the Macht stand in armour in their thousands, their spearheads
bright as stars. It is a sight glorious and fearsome, like some picture of
legend—”

“Yes, yes,”
Arkamenes said. “Get out. I have eyes in my head.”

He stood up,
swaying slightly as he took the weight of the Royal Robes. Amasis drew near a
step and raised the space where an eyebrow should have been. “Shall I—”

“God, no. Thank
you, Amasis. A king must needs have strong thighs it seems.”

“Those robes would
pay for a second army by themselves,” Amasis murmured. Turning to look down the
length of the audience chamber, he said, “Do you think we put on a brave enough
show?”

There were fully
two thousand people in the hall, and the heat was stifling despite the best
efforts of the fanbearers posted in lines along the galleries above.

“Where is Gushrun?”

“He stepped out.
Even the Governor of Artaka has to piss now and then, it seems.”

Arkamenes smiled.
As he had risen from the throne, so the occupants of the hall had bowed
themselves before him, and all talk had stilled. There was a clear way down the
middle of that vast, echoing chamber, and posted along both sides of it, in a
fence of flesh, were two hundred of the highest-caste Kefren of the Bodyguard,
the
Honai.
Armoured in corselets of iron scales, they had been chosen
for their height, their strength, their ferocity. The tall, plumed helms they
wore made them stand out head and shoulders above anyone else in the crowd—in
any crowd.

Arkamenes went to
the window at the rear of his throne. It was two spear-lengths in height, and
had been glazed with true glass, every finger’s length of it. Through the
blurred brightness, he could look down on the wide triple harbours of Tanis
below. He could see the fleet make landfall, and watch the beetling crowds on
the wharves, kept back by more of his own spearmen so that the fearsome Macht
might once more walk the earth of the Great Continent.

“Have his officers
brought to me at once,” he told Amasis. “Let them come here on foot, armed or
unarmed as they choose. But make haste. This crowd will start fainting anytime
soon. And Amasis?”

“Yes, lord?”

“Find out where
Phiron is.”

The heat of the
land was something they had not expected, not in winter. As they followed the
men in front in endless file down the gangways, Rictus and Gasca pursed their
lips and looked at one another in silent surmise. This was winter? They felt as
though they had come to some place beyond the natural run of the seasons. And
as Gasca stood on the quay with his armour on his back, the helm close upon the
bones of his face and his spear becoming slick in his grip, he wondered if
Rictus might not have some truth in his tales. For this heat could not be
right, not at this time of the year. Perhaps there were flowers here indeed,
and spices too, whatever they might be.