The Ten Thousand (27 page)

“Well, there’s the
invite,” he said. “Shall we take him up on it?”

“It’s that, or
charge his lines,” Castus retorted. His seamed old face appeared to have
withered in the space of a day, like an apple in an oven, but his eyes Were as
fierce and clear as always. “Can we trust these bastards?”

“We trust them or
fight them,” Phiron said simply.

“Let’s move,
before it gets too dark to see where the fuck we’re going,” Orsos rasped.

Thirteen of them
walked out from the Macht phalanx. They had left off their armour and weaponry
and walked in the cool lightness of their sweat-sodden chitons, with short
swords in their belts. Many of them bore crudely bound wounds. All were
plastered with dried blood and shreds of flesh and bone, and their legs were
caked black with filth to the knees. They looked more like defeated slaves than
the generals of an army. There was an uneasy murmur in the ranks as they picked
their way down the broken hillside to the tents below. The Kufr army had drawn
back somewhat for the night and had lit campfires, breaking their lines and
laying out pickets every hundred paces. As the light faded and the stars began
springing out above the black heights of the Magron, these campfires described
an arc some eight pasangs long. In the centre of the arc the Macht army stood
by its arms in fireless darkness, the wounded shivering as the heat of the day
evaporated and a coolness poured down out of the mountains in the east.

There were horses
hobbled by the meeting-tent, but apart from that the plain seemed wholly
deserted now, the Juthan having given up their corpse-gathering for the night.
The thirteen Macht officers paused at the lightless bulk of the tents until a
flap was lifted to let light spill out from within. They entered in single
file, Rictus at the rear, his hand on the hilt of his cheap sword.

“Up on the hill,
the wounded are dying for want of a cup of water, and this twisted bastard has
set us out a
feast?”
Teremon whispered, venom in the underscored rasp of
his voice.

“Behave yourself
tonight and the wounded may drink before morning,” Phiron told him. “This is
the Great King we deal with now, not some usurper with ideas above his station.
Brothers, we must be humble—do you hear me now? We stand in a foreign land, not
as some conquering army, but as interlopers.”

“Interlopers, my
arse,” Orsos said.

The tent within
which they stood was as tall as a great tree, and had been floored with planks
of cedar. It was hung with lamps up and down, all burning sweet oil. On a low
table to one side a vast array of breads, meats, fruit, preserves, and wines
had been set out, as well as a great earthenware bowl full of clear water, as
big as a centos. The generals eyed it with some anger, licking their cracked
lips, but not one made a move towards it. They stood in two rows behind Phiron.

Opposite them were
some of the low-caste
hufsan,
Royal attendants in the livery of the
King, and in the darker corners of the tent a trio of towering Honai, unarmed
save for stabbing short-swords—this being the only form of weapon permitted at
a parley, and more a ceremonial badge than a useful adjunct to a fight.

“So where is the
renegade?” old Argus asked.

“And the King,”
Mynon added.

Jason stood, head
cocked to one side in that way of his, listening. He was about to speak when a
flap in the far side of the tent was lifted and Vorus entered. He was wearing
his black armour and his helm sat in the crook of one arm.

“There’s more
behind him,” Jason hissed, and started to draw his sword.

“Peace, brothers,”
Vorus said, holding up one hand. But the Macht generals were all drawing their
weapons now, except for Phiron, who stepped forward with both hands up and
empty, palm out.

“Listen to him,”
he said loudly. “Sheathe your swords, damn it all. Think of the men on the
hill, for Phobos’s sake. Stand down.”

The men behind him
paused, and one after another the twelve blades were slid back in their
scabbards. Vorus nodded. He stepped forward. “Phiron of Idrios,” he said. “You
have led your men well, and they have acquitted themselves honourably. I salute
you, one man to another, one general to another.” He held out his free hand,
and after a moment’s hesitation, Phiron took it in the warrior grip. The
tension in the tent sank swiftly. Pasion, just behind Phiron, shook his head
and began to smile.

Vorus brought up
his helm, that bowl of iron, and smashed it into Phiron’s face, breaking bone.

Phiron staggered,
and Vorus struck again, still gripping the other man’s hand in a white-knuckled
fist. As Phiron crumpled, Vorus shouted out in the Kufr language. All around
the walls of the tent, hitherto unseen flaps were lifted, and pouring into the
space around the Macht there filed fully-armed Honai of the Great King’s
bodyguard.

Vorus released
Phiron’s hand, and the Macht general crumpled to the planked floor, his face a
broken mire of blood. Vorus stepped back, donning the gore-flecked helm, and
shouted in Kufr once again. The Honai moved in.

Pasion had leapt
forward, sword in hand. He bounded across Phiron’s body with a full-throated
roar and stabbed out at Vorus. The blade struck the renegade’s black cuirass and
scored harmlessly off to the side. Vorus’s own blade came up from his waist and
transfixed Pasion through the ribs, hilt-deep.

Rictus did not see
much more. He and Jason were at the rear of the Macht. As Rictus started
instinctively to advance, Jason thumped him backwards to the wall of the tent. “Cut
it open!” And then he turned to clash aside the thrust spear of a Honai
guardsman.

Rictus scored his
blade down the tent-leather, admitting a bloom of cold air from the night
outside. He turned once, to look back at the one-sided melee that was now
raging in the tent. The Macht had come together in a tight knot of blades and
were beating down the spears of the Honai. Vorus had disappeared. Phiron and
Pasion lay dead, and as Rictus watched, Teremon followed them, his one eye not
quick enough to catch the spearhead that look him on his blind side. Orsus’s
bull-roar tilled the air as the shaven-headed general hinged forward, stabbing
the Honai below the corselet and opening his bowels. This Kufr’s fall entangled
the legs of two more, and the Macht blades licked out at once, opening their
throats and groins. The air was full of blood; the tall Honai with their raging
eyes seemed like some smith-made automatons set whirring into clockwork life,
jabbing down with their spears and butting into the Macht with the bowls of
their shields.

Then Rictus was
through the opening he had made. The night was dazzlingly dark about him, full
of feet running, plashing through the mud, Kufr voices calling to one another,
screams echoing out of the tent. He stood one moment, and then turned back and
was about to push his way back inside when Jason burst through the rent,
dragging Mynon with him. “Get his other arm. Up the hill, now.
Move!”

Mynon had taken a
blow to the head. He was supporting his weight with all the craft of someone
very drunk. They dragged and carried him away from the tents, the breath sawing
in their lungs, their brains white with the enormity of it all. Rictus felt as
though his mind had been locked down in some box, and his body carried on its
necessary work without it.

“Down,” Jason
said. And all three of them lay flat in the mud. Kufr with torches ran back and
forth across the plain and clustered around the tents like fireflies. The three
Macht lay not thirty paces from the nearest, but so slathered were they with
mud that only their eyes gleamed clean of it. These they shut when the Kufr torchbearers
looked their way.

“Is this all?”
Jason asked hoarsely. “That cunting renegade. I will have his life, before this
is over.” He rested his forehead in the clammy ground and his body shook in
silent spasm for a few seconds. When he raised his head again his features were
a mask of mud and hatred.

Mynon’s eyelids
fluttered. He groaned loudly, and Rictus placed a hand over his mouth. The
dark-browed man glared at him, then collected himself. He levered Rictus’s palm
gently from his face. “Who is this? Rictus?—and Jason.”

“Quiet,” Jason
whispered.

A chariot trundled
forward and about it gathered a body of Kufr cavalry, well-armoured Kefren of
the bodyguard. In the chariot were a
bufsan
driver and a tall Kufr with
a snow-white komis about his face. Juthan warriors lined up and held their
torches above their heads, making an avenue of torchlight leading up to the
chariot. Up this avenue came a file of Honai, some bloodied and limping. Each
of them bore something dangling from one hand. Vorus was at their rear, his
black armour gleaming.

The Honai lifted
up their burdens. First the Juthan and then the mounted bodyguards gave a great
shout and clashed their spears against shields and breastplates. Ten severed
heads, held up dripping in the torchlight to stripe the arms of their bearers.
The leaders of the Ten Thousand, their features frozen in death, eyes blank and
glazed.

“I’ve seen enough,”
Jason said. “We go now, while they’re having their party. Up the hill.”

The three of them
began crawling up the muddy slope in the darkness, whilst behind them the Kufr
shouted and cheered their King and the heads of the ten generals were set upon
poles as trophies.

“Is that all?”
Ashurnan asked. “Did we get them all, Vorus?”

The Macht general
had a face like some grey mask carved out of stone. “I believe one or two
escaped. But we got Phiron, and Pasion, all the senior officers of experience.
The Macht are lead-erless now. We must attack them at dawn, a full assault.”

The Great King
stared at the pole-mounted heads that snarled at him in the torchlight. Bred to
war though they were, his chariot horses stamped and snorted uneasily under the
regard of those dead eyes. “You know what to do with these,” he said briskly. “I
will return to the camp. Take them at dawn, Vorus, and wipe them out. If any
are alive by the moons of tomorrow, I want them in capture yokes.”

“Yes, lord.”

Ashurnan regarded
his general more closely, dropping his komis from his mouth. “Would you rather
some other officer undertook this mission? I would understand. They are your
people, after all.”

Vorus drew himself
up, anger sparking out of his eyes. “I serve the Great King. I do his bidding,
whatsoever it might be. I have served the Great King for twenty years, and
never yet have I begged off a mission or disobeyed a command. I will continue
to serve the Great King until the day of my death.”

Ashurnan smiled. “I
do not doubt it, my friend. Send word of events to me. Midarnes, you will place
the Household troops under Vorus’s command, and obey his orders as though they
were my own. I go now, General, to see what remains of my brother’s baggage
train and the riches he brought from Tanis. Should you need me, seek me there.”
He raised a hand and the charioteer slapped the reins on the horses’ rumps. The
vehicle moved away, and with it a great cloud of Honai cavalry, their hooves
thumping out a triumphant tattoo on the ground. Vorus stood and watched them go
for a long while, the Juthan and Kefren guards standing around him in the
torchlight, the dead eyes of the Macht watching all.

“Proxis,” he said.

“Aye.” The old
Juthan stepped forward. He was somewhat drunk, but steady as an oak, and his
yellow eyes were as shrewd as one sober.

“You know what to
do with these?”

“I know,” Proxis
said, heavily.

“Then see to it. I
am going up the hill to meet with our officers.” Vorus strode away from the
circle of torchlight, out into the stinking darkness of the Kunaksa heights,
where the Kufr army waited around its campfires for the bloody work yet to
come.

The heads were to
be transported to Kaik, just across the plain, where they would be embalmed,
and then a powerful escort would take them through the rebel provinces of
Istar, Jutha, and Artaka under a green branch, to declare that Arkamenes was
dead and the invincible Macht had been destroyed. A special wagon was already
being constructed to display them to best advantage on their travels. It was a
calculated barbarism. Vorus saw the purpose behind it, and approved of it. But
for all that, it turned something in his stomach.

**

The army was
restless about its fires, the Honai sitting on the bowls of their shields,
their eyes catching the firelight like the polished bulbs of brass lamps. In
the
hufsan
lines, the mountain folk were singing their dark croon of
lament for the dead, celebrating and remembering those of their kin who had
fallen during the day. The Juthan sat in quiet circles, their halberds on their
knees, talking in their sonorous tongue. Farther back, on the less broken
ground to the south, the cavalry were quartered. These had seen the brunt of
the day’s fighting, and up and down the horse-lines the Arakosans and the
Asurians were tending their animals. They took their mounts down to the river
to drink in shifts of a thousand, and many of the Arakosans did not come back
from these trips. Vorus suspected that they were deserting in large numbers,
for their assault on the Macht flank had broken them, and hundreds had no horse
to ride at all. They had been in the centre of the day’s carnage, and seemed
haunted by it. None of the rest of the troops who remained on the hills had yet
fought the Macht, and the Arakosans were telling gloomy tales of slaughter to
visitors from other quarters of the camp who came to find out how exactly these
creatures made war. All of the army had seen the left wing disintegrate under
the Macht assault, and had heard the Paean sung in great and bloody splendour.
That part of the battle was already becoming a kind of legend.