The Ten Thousand (29 page)

The Kufr pickets
had been swept away in the first moments, and now the Macht had pushed deep
into the scattered ranks of the King’s army, catching hundreds, thousands of
his troops before they had gathered into formation. The Macht heavy spearmen
stabbed out in the dark at half-guessed masses of milling bodies and kept
advancing. It was not the casualties that mattered but the fact of their
advance, that remorseless tide of flesh and bronze welling up out of the night,
the Paean rising with it, the feet of the infantry keeping time. This was an
army the Kufr had already made a story of. As the morai advanced, so the Great
King’s forces streamed away from the forefront of that line. For pasangs up and
down the hills a panic took root. This—an assault on this scale—could not be
happening in the dark of a moonless night. It was impossible. And so the Kufr
troops assigned mythical properties to the half-seen battle line of the Macht
spearmen, and the song which accompanied their relentless advance.

Only the Honai of
the Great King’s bodyguard stood firm. Ten thousand heavy infantry, superbly
armoured, they moved into rank with a discipline that baffled their fellow
soldiers and took up position like a rock around which the waters of their
lesser brethren whirled and rippled. Midarnes, their general, stood at their
rear, and here Vorus found him standing as stolid as some ancient reared-up
stone.

“Hold them,” Vorus
said. “We must stop them here. Dawn is not far off. When the sun rises, things
shall take a different turn.”

Midarnes was a
nobleman of the old school, as high a caste as one could come at in this Empire
without becoming a king. In the dark his eyes shone pale, looming over Vorus.
He looked down on the Macht renegade without rancour, with even a shade of
respect. “Your people,” he said, “are worthy of the stories.” Then he
straightened. “You had best see to the flanks. Here in the centre, I shall hold
them.”

In songs and
stories, the lines met with a great clash and roar. Sometimes this was true.
But in the dark of that rain-swept night on the hills of Kunaksa, the Macht and
the Great King’s Honai melted together in a wicked hedge of spearpoints lit up
by the kicked sparks of dying campfires, a cataclysm introduced at walking
pace—blind, savage, and bloodier than any legend.

Rictus was in the
front rank. The initial contact was a glimpse of pale gold, and then a massive
impact of some great creature’s shield upon his own. He felt the breath of the
thing on his eyes as they were pinned there, breast to breast, by the weight of
the ranks behind them both. He stabbed out with his spear, as did his opponent,
but they could not stab at each other. They were held there in a vice of flesh
and blood, this thing a foot taller than him, its thighs moving against his own
in a strangely intimate struggle through the muck underfoot. He butted the
thing in the windpipe with his crested helm, and its weight gave a little.
Immediately, the press of the men behind sent him forward. His opponent slid
downwards. There was the smell of blood, the scrape of bronze, and the thing
was at his waist, his knees, and then under his feet. He stamped down on it
with his bare heel, one strike encountering the hard jar of bronze, the second
snapping something of flesh. Then he was propelled along again, and he knew
that the sauroters of those behind him would take care of it. Another face,
another form, impossibly tall, with the same eyes. The panic to be fought,
until he locked down the fact that the aichmes of those behind him were at
work. One of the great eyes went dark, and again, the thing slid down, clunked
earthwards to be kicked and stabbed in the ankle-deep muck, the flesh robbed of
the spirit, the advance continuing. Those in the rear ranks were still singing
the Paean, a hoarse, dry-throated rasp of defiance. Rictus smashed his shield
forward into the line, aware now of the light indomitability of the cuirass he
wore, the different balance of the transverse-crested helm. I lead these men,
he thought calmly. They look to me—to this black armour, this crest.

I must be better
than this, he thought.

And so he used his
gangling strength to butt forward into the enemy line, his feet sinking deep
into the mud, the foreign silt splaying his toes as they took the weight. He
pushed his way into the Honai ranks with no skill or courage, merely a black
determination to see the thing done. And before him, the Honai were shoved
backwards, lowering their shields as their balance went—and into that gap the
aichmes of the Macht stabbed pale and dark, silver and bloody, and a gap was
opened out, and the shield-wall of the Honai was ruptured.

Vorus felt the
balance of the thing shift, even in the dark, even in the epicentre of that
great, flailing cauldron of violence. The lines of Kefren spearmen before him
seemed to shudder, like a horse twitching off a fly. And then there was a
sullen, agonising falling back. It scarcely seemed possible that the tall
Kefren of the Honai could be physically pushed back by the Macht, but this was
happening. They were not retreating; they were being killed up at the front of
the line faster than they could be replaced, and they were being physically
shoved backwards.

They will break,
Vorus realised. He was not entirely, intellectually surprised, but he was still
shocked. After all these years in the east, he had thought the Honai of the
Great King unbeatable. He had forgotten too much about his own heritage.

The line broke.
Not the wholesale rout of the day before, but a bitter, sullen retreat. It was
like watching a flock of starlings, at one moment so black and dense as to fill
the sky, the next, a scattered shifting cloud opening up into something else.
The Honai did not turn their backs on the enemy, but fell back step by step,
and as they retreated so their formation was scrambled. No longer a battle
line, it was fast becoming a mere dense crowd of individuals.

Vorus reached up
and took Midarnes by the upper arm. “Withdraw. Pull back your companies and
reform.”

Midarnes looked
down at him, and actually smiled. “Never.” Then he raised his voice and shouted
in the Kefren of the Court. “To me! Rally to me!” He raised his spear and smote
it upon the brazen face of his shield. Around him, the Honai began to coalesce
in a formless crowd. Further away, the Macht were still pushing them back,
wedges of their troops battering through the ranks and stepping over the dead.
And all this in a darkness lit only by the hellish glow of a few neglected
campfires, and the rain silvering down to hiss in meeting with the sparks
flying up, as though fire and water were at war also.

Jason stepped out
of the front rank. There was a gap opening up before his men, a space. He held
his spear up horizontal above his head and shouted until he thought the veins
in his throat would burst. “Hold! Hold here!” He jogged up the line. The Kefren
were streaming backwards, beaten for the moment, and the front ranks of the
Macht stood on hummocked mounds of their dead.

A transverse
crest. He grabbed the man’s shoulder. Who was it? It did not matter. “Wheel
left—pass it on. All morai to wheel left starting with Mynon on the extreme
right. Pass it down the line!”

The minutes
passed. He looked up at the sky, but saw only blank darkness, felt the rain on
his eyes and licked it off his lips, his mouth and throat heaving-dry. He had
gone past exhaustion. He must stay upright now, keep moving. If he stopped or
so much as laid down his shield, he would never be able to lift it again.

At last the
movement, and the Paean out on the right, a thousand tortured voices. Thank the
goddess the line was short, five morai long, six hundred paces. And behind it,
what was left of the wounded, and the rear companies. The Macht were in an
immense square, ragged, incomplete, but compact. Cohesion, Jason thought, that’s
the thing. Mynon will keep the right-hand lines together. Phobos, we’re too
slow!

The Macht line
wheeled westwards, pivoting on Buridan’s mora. The movement was ragged,
hesitant, performed by exhausted men in the dark, but they kept shoulder to
shoulder with one another, the formations drawing together and gaining cohesion
from the human contact of those to each side, those in front, those behind. The
men in the front rank had the hardest task. Jason was able to watch them by the
stuttered illumination of a few still-burning fires. They looked like ghosts
walking past the flames, men already dead and in the hell of all lost souls.
The Macht did not have a god of war; they had Antimone to watch over them
instead. For though they gloried in combat, they knew the price it exacted. A
true man did not need help from the gods to kill—that was in him from birth—in
all of them. He needed their help to face what came afterwards. He needed the
pity and compassion of the Veiled Goddess. And she was here tonight, Jason was
sure. If he shut his eyes he thought he might even be able to hear the beat of
her black wings.

Further to the
right, the Macht morai struck those Honai who were struggling to reform about
Midarnes. There was a bitter fight and the front ranks of Mochran’s mora were
actually driven in, but then the centons to right and left piled into the Honai
flanks, leaving the line to lunge forward. The Honai broke, a small knot of
them fighting to the end about their standard, the rest driven beyond their
capacity to endure and in danger of being cut off. They threw away their
shields and ran down the hillside. Midarnes disappeared under a pile of bodies,
and on the Kunaksa ridge, the Macht dressed their lines yet again and continued
the advance. None of them were singing now. Their tongues had swollen in their
mouths. They were things of unsparing sinew and bone, barely able to conjecture
an end to the night or the possibility of rest.

There was one new
thing about their travail though: for the first time since the battle had
begun, they were marching downhill, towards the river. This realisation gave
them some heart. They stepped out, centurions forward of the main line. The
ridge-crest was theirs, and they looked down on the fire-dotted plain that led
to the Bekai River, now some ten pasangs away. They fixed their minds on that
thought, the possibility of water, of something like sanctuary, and they
marched on.

Many thousands of
Kefren and Juthan troops were now in flight across the Bekai plain, but most
had fled eastwards, towards the Magron Mountains and their own baggage camps
pasangs behind the Kunaksa Hills. It was in this direction that Vorus had gone,
striving in vain to rally the second-line Kefren units. In the dark, it was impossible.
They would run now until they thought pursuit had stopped, until their own
tents brought them to a halt. The Macht army had completely routed the main
body of the Great King’s forces, and had all but annihilated his Household
troops, the best there was. There was nothing left for it but to wait for the
panic to subside and then begin picking up the pieces. As Vorus kicked his
tired horse into a lumbering canter, he pulled a fold of his cloak about his
head and wore it like a scarlet komis. In the midst of that great, maddened,
frantic crowd of armed Kufr, it was not good to have a Macht face.

But where was
Ashurnan? That question brought cold sweat to his spine. The Great King had
decided to rest for a few hours in the enemy’s captured baggage camp. It lay
now square in the path of the Macht advance. Vorus reined in. It was no good;
there was no one to send who would get through alive.

He spun the horse
on its haunches and took off back the way he had come. Someone has to get
through, he thought. And who better to try than one of the Macht?

Behind him, the
paling sky in the east broke open pink and bloody with the day’s dawn, the
Magron Mountains standing like black titans on the edge of the world. A wind
from the west picked up and began to shunt aside the heavy cloud of the night.
In the gathering light the Macht army marched stumbling down off the bloody,
muck-churned heights of the Kunaksa and began to plash wearily through the wet
lowland below. Before them the stragglers of the Kefren army scattered like
quail before a fox, no longer a coherent whole, but a beaten remnant. Some ran
for the Bekai bridges, some scattered to north and south, parallel to the
river-line. From the tented square of the Macht camp, they flooded out like
cockroaches from under an upturned stone, abandoning their loot, their women,
their arms. From a distance the Macht formation looked as disciplined and
indomitable as it had the day before, going up the hill. It came down from the
heights in silence, no voice left able to raise the Paean. At a distance it was
impossible to see the staggering weariness of the spearmen, the broken shafts
of their weapons held up for want of anything better, the crowds of wounded
being dragged along in the middle of the morai, rags stuffed in their mouths to
stop their screams. They had taken thirteen and a half thousand men up the hill
the morning before, and now some ten thousand were marching back down. Many of
those would not see another morning.

Ashurnan watched
them come, sat on his tired horse to the south of the camp. About him a motley
crowd of aides, bodyguards, and sundry officers had gathered, all mounted, all
shattered by the sight of the advancing phalanx, the disappearance of their own
mighty army. It did not seem real. The half-light of the gathering dawn made it
into some nightmare from which they must try and waken.

Ashurnan leaned in
the saddle and grasped old Xarnes’s arm. The elderly Chamberlain had begun to
slide from the back of his horse.

“My lord, you
should not—”

“And let you fall?
I think not, Xarnes.” Ashurnan smiled, but his face was empty as that of a
glass-bound fish. He looked at his feet, at his brother’s mud-spattered
slippers, then up again at the advancing army.