The Ten Thousand (28 page)

In the morning,
Vorus promised himself, we will make another.

“They’ll attack at
dawn,” Jason said, the cracked mud falling from his face as it dried. He
buckled on the Curse of God without looking at his fingers, staring out at the
Kufr campfires burning in their sleepless arc across the hills.

“Mynon, we need
new mora commanders. Get the senior centurion in each and bring him here.
Buridan will do for mine. I know Mochran and Phinero will do too. Get them here
fast; we don’t have time to fuck about.”

Mynon seemed about
to say something; his keen eyes were almost buried by the frowning bridge of
his brows. Then he nodded and trotted off.

“You, Rictus, take
one of these,” Jason said, gesturing to the neat lines of black armour upon the
ground.

Rictus stood
looking down on them, priceless relics with no one to claim them.

“They should have
been worn,” he said.

“Then they’d be in
Kufr hands by now. It was a sound decision. Take one for Antimone’s sake. For
the sake of those that wore them. They do not bite.”

All around the
pair the Macht had gathered a little closer to watch and listen. Bad news was
the easiest thing in the world to disseminate about an army. It flew on the
swiftest of wings. Antimone saw to that; it was part of her curse. This news
had travelled through the centons like a wildfire. Their leaders were dead,
some of the ablest and most popular men in the army. There had not been a
panic, but the ranks had broken all the same. The army had begun to revert to
is constituent parts, the centons clustering together, the line abandoned, the
men talking in quiet groups among themselves. They did not even have the
communal centoi to gather around any more, nor any wood to burn. They stood in
the darkness, separate entities whose loyalties now took little reckoning of
any overall command. They were on the edge of disintegration, and Jason knew
it.

“Take one, Rictus,”
he repeated, more gently now. The big, blood-masked strawhead stood looking
down on the dead generals’ cuirasses as though they were the naked wife of a
friend.

“I have no right
to it,” Rictus said. Tears had cut white streaks down his face and in the light
of the two moons he looked like some warpainted savage from the Inner
Mountains.

“You have every
right. I intend to mark out the new morai commanders with these. It will give
them authority in the eyes of the men. Now take one and fucking
put it on
.”
Jason’s voice cracked on the last words. Around them, the men of his old centon
stood murmuring. Finally Gasca spoke up. “Take it Rictus. You’re as good as any
of those as wore it before.” And there was a rumbling of assent from the
Dogsheads around him. Whistler raised a spear. “Take it lad. You earned it
fair, coming back alive from those murderous bastards.”

So Rictus bent and
grasped the shoulder-flaps of the nearest cuirass. He did not know whose it
was; Antimone’s Gift was the same for every owner, and could not be modified or
customised in any way. Whatever material it was made of shrugged off violence
and age and the tools of men. It remained inviolate and anonymous.

And it was
light—so light that Rictus was startled. He straightened more quickly than he
had intended as it came up in his hands, hardly heavier than a winter cloak.
The two moulded plates of it cinched together under the left arm with strange
little black clasps, and then the shoulder flaps, the
wings
they were
called, were tugged down into place and clicked into others of these fastenings
on the breast. Rictus tugged at the neck of the armour where it cut into the
flesh of his neck, and Jason pulled his hand away.

“Wait a moment.”

As the cuirass
took warmth from his body, so it seemed to ease upon his bones. Rictus looked
up, astonished, and Jason smiled. “They mould to the form they find within
them. Something inside them shifts and melts and then hardens again. Give it a
while, and you’ll barely know you wear it.”

I am a
Cursebearer, Rictus thought. It may be that I will be one for only a few hours,
but I will die with Antimone’s Gift upon my back, fighting fearful odds, in the
company of my peers. Father, you could have wished nothing better for me.

“Don’t forget the
helm,” Jason added, gesturing to the line of transverse-crested helmets the
generals had left behind. “We must all of us look the part if we’re to play
this thing out to the end.”

The centurions
Jason and Mynon had picked to be the new generals of the army trickled in,
grim, blasted looks upon their faces. As they did, Jason handed each one of
them a black cuirass, and they hesitated as Rictus had before donning them.

“Reform the line,”
Jason told them. “We attack them now, under cover of darkness. We break this
army of theirs and make through it for the river.”

“It’s twelve
pasangs, Jason,” Mynon said quietly.

“We take the Bekai
crossings and hold them, and base ourselves in Kaik. There, we resupply. One
more thing: we take back our baggage on the way. I want our bloody pots back.”

“They’ll cut us to
pieces on the plain with their cavalry,” Buridan said, a rumble in his beard.

“Their cavalry did
a lot of fighting today, even the Great King’s bodyguard itself. And no one
takes cavalry into battle in the dark. We have three or four hours until dawn;
we must use that time.”

“The wounded?” one
of the new generals asked. This was Phinero, whose brother Pomero had died in
the Great King’s tent not two hours before.

“Five morai up
front, one on each flank, four in the rear. The wounded in the middle. Those
who cannot walk must find someone to carry them or take their own lives.”

A pause. No one
dissented. They were all half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion, and did not
expect to live for much longer themselves. “This is how we move out,” Jason
began.

THE SECOND DAY

In the dead hours
of the night the weary Kefren pickets posted along the hills of Kunaksa looked
up to the star-spattered sky. Clouds had come shifting in from the mountains in
the east and were now building up overhead to blot out the welkin. One by one
the moons disappeared: first pink Haukos with his blessings of hope and
compassion, and then leering white-cold Phobos, moon of fear. The night closed
in and the rain began, a steady drizzle that did not put out the campfires of
the army, but which made all those tens of thousands who lay beside them in the
mud edge a little closer to the flames. The spring rains were early. It was a
gift from Bel, the Renewer. Mot, god of death and dry-baked summer soil had
left the world to his rival for a night, and the cold rain pattered bitterly
down to deepen the mud of the war-scarred plain.

The rain brought
Tiryn round, pattering into her open mouth and prickling a chill tattoo on her
skin. Forgetting where she was, she sought for a moment to wipe it out of her
eyes, but then remembered and blinked herself fully awake.

Blurred
torchlight, shadows moving before it, back and forth, as they had moved in her
nightmares. She shivered convulsively for a few moments under the cold,
intimate kisses of the rain, and blinked her vision clear. The hub of the
wagon-wheel had gouged a bruise deep into the small of her back, and her bound
hands were blue and numb, roped to the rim. She was naked. She no longer knew
or cared how many times she had been raped.

The camp was all
astir, not the night-time routine of sentries but full, chaotic, crowded, and
shouted movement. Some new thing had happened, some new chapter in the savagery
of the earth. Tiryn closed her eyes again, meat tied to a wagon-wheel, the mind
within drawing back from the world, gnawing on itself, unable to give up the
obscenities it had seen.

They were five
pasangs from the battle lines here, the humid heat-shimmer of the day before
not even allowing them the chance to spectate. Tiryn had walked out of the
flimsy stockade with only her maid beside her and had watched the great
creeping darknesses of the armies move across the surface of the earth. Faint
on the still air had come the awful roar of their meeting. The Macht were
winning, she had heard, and she watched Arkamenes’s army advance up the
hillside. And she had thought it over, the thing done, the day behind them. My
Prince, she thought, is now a King.

Incredibly swift,
the disintegration of those complacencies. First there were the stragglers, the
cowardly, the broken, the walking wounded. And then had come the great mass of
infantry, the Juthan Legion, the Kefren of the main line. These had poured past
the camp with barely a glance to spare for those inside, too terrified even to
try their hand at the paychests. Because behind them the enemy were snapping
like vorine on the heels of sheep.

The Asurian
cavalry had been first into the camp, tall high-caste Kefren on magnificent
horses, statues of gold and iron and lapis lazuli with bright eyes and bloody
swords. The Juthan bag-gage-bearers had fought them off with whips and sticks
and ladles and any object that came to hand. When none did, they leapt on the
horsemen and used their teeth. They had fought to the end and Tiryn, even in
the grip of her terror, had wondered at their ferocious courage.

Her bodyguard,
Hurth, had never thought much of her; she had known that. High caste as he was,
he thought it demeaning to watch over a little
hufsa
whore. But he had
tried to get her out of the camp, and when they had been caught, it was with
his own life that he had bought her the time to run away. This had shocked her,
that he had done such a thing. She and her remaining maid had gone to ground
after it, too cowed to try again. They had been like rabbits, cowering in
knowledge of their own end and unable to do anything about it.

The end had come,
the Asurians had prevailed, and the sack of the baggage camp had begun.

Arkamenes was
dead, that much was made clear by the triumphant enemy troops who now began to
loot the tents and wagons of the army, searching always and foremost for the
paychests containing the gold of Tanis. These found, they had time to attend to
lighter matters, and one of these was discovered in Arkamenes’s tent, a curved
mountain-knife in her fist. A single wound Tiryn had inflicted, and that only
enough to earn her a beating. At first she had been set to one side as the
looting went on, and the higher-caste concubines of the harem were ferreted
out. But once all these had been claimed they came back for her, killed the
Juthan maid who threw herself at them, and began the sport of the evening.

Perhaps her own
caste would have been gentler; perhaps not. In any case, Tiryn had ended the
long, long day tied to this wagon-wheel, and used by any passing soldier who
did not mind the blood, the muck, the bruises, and the shining slime of other
Kufr’s leavings which now painted her skin.

Arkamenes is dead,
she thought. Why can it not be over? And she prayed to Mot, the dark god, for
the blessing of her own release.

One hundred paces
away, in the tent that had been his brother’s, the Great King was roused out of
sleep by old Xarnes. No ceremony; Honai were lighting the lamps without being
given leave to do so, and Xarnes had actually touched the royal shoulder to
bring Ashurnan into the present. He sat up at once, still fully dressed, though
wearing his brother’s silk slippers.

“What’s happened?”
Fear of the event had taken away their fear of him; it must be bad.

“The Macht have
attacked, my lord—all along the hills.”

Ashurnan blinked.
A Honai held out a goblet of wine and he waved it away, frowning. “How long did
I sleep?”

“Three hours, my
lord, by the turn of the clock.”

“Any word from
Vorus?”

“Nothing as yet.”

“Then how do we
know?”

Xarnes hesitated.
He looked very old in the gathering lamplight, an elderly man kept from his
bed. “Some of the troops up on the Kunaksa have already fled this far.”

There it was, cold
water down the spine. Ashurnan rolled out of bed and straightened with the
quicksilver poise of a dancer. “Stand-to the bodyguard,” he said. “Couriers to
Vorus. Where is Proxis?”

“In the camp, my
lord, but we have not yet located him. He was supervising the transport of the
paychests across the river until the middle night.”

“Find him, Xarnes.”

“Yes, lord.” The
ancient chamberlain bowed and withdrew.

The Honai were
watching him. We had victory, Ashurnan thought—we had the glory of it, the
thing sitting in our very hands. What in the depths of hell have these animals
done to me now? Can they not lie down and die?

* *
*

They were dying
indeed. They were dying by the hundred, but they were on their feet and
advancing over their own dead. In the rain-drenched dark of the starless night
they were singing the Paean of their race, and never had it seemed so apposite
as now that the battle-hymn of the Macht should also be the song sung in the
hour of death.

They advanced on a
frontage of some seven hundred paces, a compact mass of interlocked centons and
morai. The line was ragged as men tripped in the dark or wove around obstacles
half-seen until a boulder barked their shins, but it came together again
always, the clash of bronze in the blackness guiding those who lost their way,
the mud sucking the sandals off their feet, the rain—the blessed rain—trickling
down their bodies so that whole morai raised their heads as one and opened
their mouths to let the life of the water spot their tongues. Antimone had
fluttered her Veil, men said. She wept above them, and so they had her tears to
moisten their mouths here, in the shadow of strange mountains. The rain gave
them new strength, new heart. It did not convince them that they would live,
but it persuaded them that they could make a good end.