The Ten Thousand (26 page)

“It shall be done,
my lord. I shall send word to the cavalry. It is rumoured that Arkamenes
travelled with a fortune in bullion also, half the treasury of Tanis to pay
these mercenaries with.”

“Secure it. The
day is far from over.”

The Great King
rode sedately up the hillside that he had so recently charged down, surrounded
by hundreds of heavy cavalry, Kefren who had pledged their loyalty to him in
blood. He warmed to them now as he had not before, for they had followed him
down into the great gamble, not knowing it would pay off. He felt slightly
dazed, dazed by the victory, by the aftermath of the violence still singing in
his ears and shaking in his muscles. Today, he thought, I proved myself my
father’s son. I have earned my throne at last. And he gave thanks to God, there
in the midst of that vast slaughterhouse, for the way the morning had passed.

“It’s twelve
pasangs to the river, and five back to the baggage train,” Phiron said.

“The baggage is
gone,” Pasion growled. “We need not trouble ourselves over it. All we have left
in this world are the spears in our hands and the bronze on our backs.”

“Then we are still
rich men,” old Castus said. “I’d as soon die with wargear on my back as staring
up the arse of an ox. What’s the plan, Phiron? Do we stand here and let them
come to us, or do we charge down into them and try and make a story out of it?”

Thirteen men, all
in the Curse of God except for the youngest among them. Rictus had unstrapped a
battered bronze cuirass from a corpse and now wore full panoply for the first
time since the day he had fought in the ranks of the Iscan phalanx. Jason had
insisted he be admitted to the Kerusia, as his skirmishers had rearmed
themselves similarly, and now constituted a Macht mora. Rictus had not become a
centurion; he had become a notional general of several hundred men. For all
that, he was entirely ignored by the true veterans of the Ten Thousand who
despised him for a strawhead upstart, Iscan or no. He held his tongue as the
older men debated.

The Macht had come
together again on the ridge-crest of Kunaksa and now their centons were facing
out in all directions. In the hollow heart of the formation several hundred
lightly wounded were strapping themselves up as best they could, helped by
those of the skirmishers who were too young or too old to bear the weight of a
full panoply. A few hundred paces away, the Kufr lines were extending to east
and west, a shallow crescent of troops thickening moment by moment. On the
plain below the great hunt went on, Kefren horsemen riding down and
slaughtering the last of Arkamenes’s army before they could come to the Bekai
bridges. There were so many figures on the move that the plain seemed to be
crawling with life for pasangs to the west, as though someone had tipped up a
termite mound and let the occupants spill out in their busy, frantic tens of
thousands.

Phiron wiped the
sweat from his face. What remained of the water had been given to the wounded,
and his tongue was rasping against his teeth like something foreign in his
mouth. “We go to them,” he said tersely. “Otherwise they wait for thirst to do
half their work for them.”

“What way?” Pomero
asked.

“Not to the river;
they’ll be expecting that. We hit them here, as hard as we can, and beat them
back off the heights. Their cavalry is still busy down on the plain, so we
stick to the hills. We head north, parallel to the river. There are big cities
up there, on the river. One called Carchanis maybe eight, ten days’ march from
here. We get there, take that city and hold it, regroup and resupply. Then—”

“Then?” Orsos
demanded.

“Then we decide
what to do next.”

“If we get to
decide how to die in the next two hours we’ll be lucky,” Mynon snapped, black
eyes flashing. “Ten days’ march? And we eat and drink what on the way? And won’t
the Great King have something to say about us tramping off through his Empire?”

“Mynon’s right,”
Pasion said quietly, kneading his jaw. “We fight and die here and now, or we
sue for terms. Ashurnan knows we’ll take ten times our number with us when we
go down; he may be amenable to some kind of compromise. Otherwise his army
could well be wrecked by our last stand.”

“You think he
cares?” Teremon spoke up. An older man, a close friend of both Castus and
Orsos, he had taken an arrow in the face during the morning’s fighting and now
a bloody rag was stuffed in the socket where his left eye had been. “He can
call up a million spears against us if he wants; the whole Empire sits around
us. What does he care if he loses another ten thousand, another fifty thousand,
so long as he sees the end of us?”

“Calling up more
levies takes time,” Pasion said patiently. “For now, the only army in the
Empire that the Great King can rely on stands opposite us, on these hills. Don’t
forget that Jutha, and Istar and Artaka are still in rebellion. He’ll have to
send troops to recall them to the fold. No, Teremon, he cannot afford to see
this army of his wrecked upon these hills. I say we send him an embassy under a
green branch, and see if we can come to some arrangement. Who knows, he may
need Macht spears as his brother did. We fight for pay, not for any cause. He
must learn of this, and quickly. If the fighting starts again, then the moment
is lost. We will leave our bones here, and the Kufr will pick Antimone’s Gift
off our bodies.”

There was an angry
murmur at this. The thought of the black armours falling into Kufr hands was
unthinkable, impious; there were scores of them in the ranks of the army.

“All right then,”
Phiron said. He seemed shrunken, as if the turn of events had done something to
his insides. “We’ll send out an ambassador. Someone who can speak their damned
language.” There was a pause. “That’s—”

“Me, you fucks,”
Jason said. “Yes, I know. I’ll do it. And I’ll take the strawhead here with me.”

The heat of the
afternoon was an enervating oven which must be struggled against physically.
The corpses had already begun to add something to the brew, and their luckier
comrades had to piss and shit somewhere. So for pasangs all around, the stink
on the unmoving air was a thing that hung heavy in the stomach. It was as if
the bloodletting had fouled some essential balance in the earth itself, and now
the face of Kuf was revolted by it. The Macht had a name for this miasma, as
they had for most things connected with warfare:
the soup,
they called
it. By naming it, joking about it, they made it more bearable. For the carrion
birds circling and the black flies laying their eggs in the eyes of the dead it
was a field of bounty, and their claims upon it would soon make of this place a
plague-pit.

Jason and Rictus
strode forth unarmed under the withered stick that was the nearest they could
come to a green-leafed bough upon the field. They walked out across the
sucking, steaming morass of mud and carrion which occupied the space between
the armies and planted themselves there whilst the sweat stung hot in their
eyes and the stink of the place seemed fair to choke them.

“Why me?” Rictus
asked as they watched the Kufr lines and saw figures run back and forth behind
them.

“I might ask the
same myself,” Jason said equably. “Phiron speaks Asurian better than I, and
Kefren too. My guess is, he’s so indispensable to the army’s survival he’s
counted himself out of gambles such as this. As for you, I picked you as a
companion for several reasons. You’re not stupid, you know how to listen, and
you’re a big bastard who might be able to look one of these gangling fucks in
the eye. Now shut up and prove me right on all counts.”

Their presence in
the field between the armies had set individual horsemen to the gallop behind
the Kufr phalanx. There were more horsemen there now; fine looking fellows in
all the finery the Empire could provide. Jason stared at them and said; “I
believe the King is there. No standard or chariot, but that’s his bodyguard, or
I’m a blind man.”

“What happens if
all this is moonlight?” Rictus asked. “What if they’re just set on finishing it
today?”

Jason looked at
him, cocking his head to one side. “We die fighting.”

Strangely, Rictus
smiled.

The Kufr ranks
broke open, and someone came walking out across the mud to meet them. He wore
black armour, and as he drew close, they could see that he was Macht, clad in
the Curse of God. Jason’s mouth opened in astonishment.

“What are your
names?” the strange Macht asked. He was middle-aged, spare and lean and
bearded. He bore no weapon, and stared upon them with a barely restrained
hunger of curiosity. Jason and Rictus stared back at him with something of the
same expression on their faces.

“Jason of Ferai;
Rictus of Isca,” Jason said, collecting himself.

The man smiled. “My
name is Vorus. I am general of the army behind me.”

This fell into
silence, Jason and Rictus too thunderstruck to reply. Vorus looked them up and
down, not without kindness. “You wish to negotiate on behalf of Phiron, I take
it. Well, I am authorised likewise on behalf of the Great King. You may speak
to me freely.”

“Phobos
,”
Jason said under his breath. “We wish to discuss terms under which we may leave
the Empire in peace.” Still staring he added, “Our employer is dead, and now we
just want to get home. Vorus you say—Vorus of where?”

“Son, I left the
Harukush long before you hefted your first spear,” Vorus said. And more
formally, “My King has divined your intention beforehand. We have no wish to
see further bloodshed—the issues which set us at each other’s spearpoints have
already been decided. Now it only remains to see how this army of yours can be
repatriated as quickly and easily as possible. To that end, we wish to invite
the entire Kerusia of your generals to a meeting tonight, down on the plain,
where terms for your departure from the Empire shall be discussed. Would that
be acceptable to your commander, you think?”

“I believe it
would,” Jason said, and he could not help the smile that broke about his face. “I
take it all parties shall be unarmed, and that the space where the meeting
takes place be equidistant from both army’s lines?”

“Of course. We
will prepare a suitable venue at once. The Great King will attend, with myself
and two or three others. There will be slaves also, of course. You may bring
your senior officers only; there is no need for a large crowd at an event such
as this. Things become too easily misunderstood. What say you?”

“I think I may say
on behalf of Phiron that we can attend as you suggest. Might I request in the
interim, as a gesture of good faith, that water could be brought to us here by
your—your people? We have wounded in our ranks who would bless your Great King’s
name for a single sip.”

Vorus’s face
clouded. “I am afraid that’s out of the question. We remain enemies in name at
least, until your generals agree to some arrangement tonight.” His jaw worked,
and he looked away for a second. “I am sorry.”

Jason stiffened
but his tone remained perfectly civil. “I quite understand. We will rejoin our
comrades now.”

He turned away,
exasperation and relief warring on his face. Rictus paused a moment. He stared
Vorus in the eye, that Iscan arrogance coming out once more. Vorus met him look
for look a long moment, and then moved with an odd jerkiness, walking back to
his own lines. He moved with the stiff onerous gait of a man ashamed of what he
has just done.

THE MEN ON THE HILL

Many of the
wounded died during the day, and the healthy were reduced to dipping their
helmets in some of the less noisome puddles which dotted the hillside, drinking
down mud and blood as much as any water. They threw it up again directly, until
Phiron forbade the practice.

The Great King’s
army continued to follow its own evolutions, with regiments marching here and
there in the shimmering heat, and pack-trains of laden mules bringing up
supplies from the baggage-camp to the east. From the ridge-crest it was
possible to see through the heat-haze to the bright glimmer of the Bekai River
twelve pasangs away, but beyond a certain shadow upon the earth about the mound
of Kaik, it was impossible to tell what had transpired there. Arkamenes’s army
seemed to have vanished from the face of the world, leaving behind only
corpses, a windfall of carrion scattered across the earth for as far as a keen
eye could see. Juthan soldiers were methodically clearing the plain, stripping
and looting the dead, piling up the bodies into pyres. The work went on all
day, until the light began to fail and the shattering heat at last eased a
little. On the ridge-line of Kunaksa, the Macht stood in stubborn ranks,
shields at their knees, helms at their belts, and their throats as parched as
burnt bread. They had piled up all of their own dead that they could come at,
though there was nothing to burn them with. Every spearhead and belt-buckle
that could be gleaned from the battlefield had been gathered. The corpses now
lay stacked, almost three thousand of them in several long mounds. Ravens and
vultures were already clustered on these knolls of rotting flesh, heedless of any
outraged shout or thrown stone. And the
soup
thickened about the hills
as evening drew on and the blood congealed in gobbets about the very stones
half-buried in the ground.

The Great King’s
standard was set up on the plain some pasang and a half from the Macht lines,
and about it hundreds of Kufr had erected a tented compound, labouring through
the heat of the day until it seemed that a veritable village had sprung up in
the space of a few hours. As the light failed, a trio of Kefren horsemen rode
up to the Macht lines under a green branch and gestured with it to the tents
below. Phiron shouted assent at them in their own language and they galloped
off again, komis held close to their noses.