The Ten Thousand (3 page)

“Antimone is here,”
he said. “She has put aside her veil.”

Rictus shivered.
The cold from the ground ate into his buttocks. The wound in his side was a half-remembered
throb. He thought of his father, of Vasio, the old steward who had helped them
on the land. Zori, his wife, a nut-brown smiling woman whose breast Rictus had
suckled at after his own mother had died having him. What were they now;
carrion?

“There will be
stragglers by the hundred out in the hills, looting every farmstead they come
across,” Remion said, as if he had caught the drift of the younger man’s
yearning. “And they will be the worst of us, the shirkers who kept to the rear
of the battle line. They catch you, and you will not see morning. They’ll rape
you twice; once with their cocks, and once with an aichme. I’ve seen it. Do not
go back north. Go south, to the capital. Once you’re healed, that broad back of
yours will earn your keep in Machran.”

He rose to his
feet with a low groan and hoisted shield and spear again. “There’s weapons
aplenty lying about the hills, in dead men’s hands. Arm yourself, but take
nothing heavy. No point one man alone lugging a battle line shield about. Look
for javelins, a good knife.” Remion paused, jaw working angrily. “Listen to me.
I’m become someone’s mother. Get yourself away, Iscan. Find yourself a life to
live.”

“It happened to
you,” Rictus said, through chattering teeth.

“What?”

“Your city was
destroyed too. What was its name?”

“You’re a
persistent whelp, I’ll give you that.” Remion lifted his head, peered up at the
first of the stars. “I was of Minerias once. They had a war with Plaetra, and
lost. A bad slaughter. There were not enough men left to man the walls.” He
blinked rapidly, eyes fixed on something beyond the cold starlight.

“I was nine years
old.”

Without another
word, he began to tramp down the hillside towards Isca, spear on one shoulder,
shield on the other, the leather helmet butting against the shield rim with
every step, like a dull and tired bell. Rictus watched him go, following the
dogged shadow he became until he was lost in the press and mob of men about the
gates.

Alone. Cityless.
Ostrakr.
Men who were exiled from their city for a crime sometimes chose
suicide rather than wander the earth without citizenship. To the Macht, the
city was light and life and humanity. Outside, there was only this: the black
pines and the empty sky, the world of the Kufr. A world that was alien.

Rictus beat his
fists on his frozen thighs and lurched to his feet. Searching the sky he found,
as his father had taught him, the bright star that was Gaenion’s Pointer. If he
followed it, he would be going north. Back to his home.

That first night
became an exercise in finding the dead and avoiding the living. As darkness
drew on it became easier to stay clear of the marauding patrols which cast
about the country like hounds on the scent of a hare. Most of them carried lit
torches and were loud as partygoers. Their comings and goings were marked by
the shriek of women, the bubbling death-cries of desperate men, cornered and
finished off as part of the night’s sport. The hills were full of these
torch-bearing revellers, until it seemed to Rictus that there were more of them
on the hunt amid the pine forests and crags around Isca than had faced him in
line upon the battlefield.

The dead were less
easily found. They were stumbled across in the lightless shadow below the
trees. Rictus tripped over a bank of them, and for an instant set his hand on
the cold mask of a man’s face. He sprang away with a cry that set the wound in
his side bleeding again. By and large the dead had been stripped of everything,
sometimes even clothing. They lay pale and hardening in the cold. Out of the
dark, packs of vorine had already begun to gather about them, the grey-maned
scavengers of the hills.

A healthy man, on
his feet, alert and rested, need not fear the vorine, but a man wounded and
reeking of blood, staggering with tiredness—he drew their interest. When they
circled him, green eyes blinking in the dark, they snarled their confidence at
Rictus, and he snarled back at them, as much a beast as they. Stones, sticks,
bravado—he beat them away with these until they went seeking less lively prey.

He stripped a
corpse of a long-sleeved chiton, not minding the blood that stiffened it. The
dead man lay on top of a broken spear, an aichme with some three feet of shaft
still set in it. With these on his back and in his fist, Rictus shivered less. The
vorine could smell the bronze, and left him alone. The torchlit patrols
inspired anger now as well as fear, and in his head Rictus fantasised about
surprising them at their barbarous work, the stump of spear working scarlet
wonders in his hand. The fantasy hovered in his mind for pasangs, until he saw
it for what it was; a glimmer from the far side of Antimone’s Veil. He put it
out of his head then, and concentrated on the track before him, that paleness
under the stars that ran between the midnight dark of the trees.

One patrol passed
him as he lay pressed into the fragrant pine-needles at the side of the track.
A dozen men perhaps, they bore the light shields of second-line troops: wicker
peltas faced with hide. The
mirian
sigil was splashed in yellow paint
across them. These were men of the coastal city, Bas Mathon. Rictus had been
there many times with his father; for all that it was eighty pasangs away to
the east. He remembered now the gulls screaming over the wharves, the
high-prowed fishing smacks, the baskets of silverfin and horrin, bright as
spearheads as they were hauled up on the quays. Summer sunlight, a picture from
another age. He silently thanked the goddess for granting him the memory.

The men were
drinking barley-spirit from leather skins, pressing the bulging bags until the
liquid squirted high in the air, and then fighting and laughing like children
to have their mouth under as it descended. In their midst two women limped
barefoot and naked, heads down and hands bound before them. From the bruises
which marked them, they had been captured quite early in the day. One had blood
painted all down her inner thighs, and breasts that had only begun to bud.
Hardly a woman at all.

They passed by
like some twisted revel of the wine-god, lacking only pipe-song to complete the
image. Rictus lay a long time in the dark when they had gone, letting the
shadow bleed back into his eyes after the dazzling torchlight, seeing beyond
the darkness the hopeless face of the young girl, eyes blank as those of a slaughtered
lamb. Her name was Edrin. She came from the farm next to his father’s. He had
played with her as a child, he five years older, carrying her on his back.

It was the middle
part of the night before Rictus stood once more at the lip of his father’s
glen.
Artdunnon,
this place was called; the quiet water. It was brighter
now. Rictus looked up to see that both moons were rising above the trees. Great
Phobos, the Moon of Fear, and fiery Haukos, Moon of Hope. He bowed to them, as
all men must, and then set off down the hillside to where the river glittered
amid the pastures in the bottom of the glen.

He could not so
much as stub a toe on this track, even in the dark, so well did he know it. The
smells of wild garlic from the edge of the woods, the thyme in the rocks, the
good loam underfoot; all these were as familiar to him as the beat of his own
heart. He allowed himself to hope for the first time since the battle line had
broken that morning. Perhaps this place had been passed by. Perhaps his life was
not yet shipwrecked beyond hope. Something could be salvaged. Something—

The smell told
him. Acrid and strange, it drifted all through the valley bottom. There had
been a burning here. It was not woodsmoke, but heavier, blacker. Rictus’s pace
slowed. He stopped altogether for a few seconds, then forced himself on. Above
him the cold face of Phobos rose higher in the night sky, as if wishing to
light his way.

Rictus had been a
late child, his father already a grey-templed veteran when he had sired him—
much like Remion, now he came to think of it. His mother had been a wild
hill-girl from one of the goatherder tribes further north. She had been given
to his father by a hill-chief in payment for service in war, and he had made of
her not a slave, but a wife, because he had been that kind of man.

Perhaps the
mountain-blood, the nomad-spirit, was too fine and bright to be chained to a
life of the soil. There had been children—two girls—but both had died of the
river-fever before they had so much as cut a tooth. Over the years, Rictus had
wondered about these pair, these dead siblings who had not even had a chance to
acquire personality. He would have liked sisters, company of his own age
growing up.

But it was as
well, now, that they had died when they did.

Rictus had come
along a scant six months after their deaths, a brawny red-faced fighting child
with a thick shock of bronze-coloured hair and his mother’s grey eyes. He had
not been born here at the farm. His father had taken his pregnant young wife to
the coast, to one of the fishing villages south of Bas Mathon. He would have no
more children carried off by river-fever. There, in the clean salt air, Rictus
had entered the world with the waves of the Machtic Sea crashing fifty paces
away.

Whatever strength
his mother had given to him had been taken out of herself; she had delivered
him squatting over a blanket with Zori clucking beside her, and then Rictus’s
father had carried her to his rented bed so she could bleed to death in
comfort. Her ashes had been brought back from the shores of the sea and
scattered in the woods overlooking the farm, as those of her dead babes had
been before her. Rictus had never been told her name. He wondered if she
watched him now. He wondered if his father walked beside her, his arms filled
with his smiling daughters.

They had burned
the farm, driven off the stock. The longhouse was a gutted, smoking ruin open
to the sky. Rictus shuffled to the main door, and as he had expected, most of
the bodies lay there. They had fought until the burning thatch came down around
them. His father he recognised by the two missing fingers on his spear-hand. He
used to call them war’s dowry. Were it not for that old wound he would have
been in the battle line today beside his son, fighting for his city as every
free citizen must. The council had exempted him, because he had given such good
service in the past. He had been a rimarch, a file-closer, in his younger days.
In the phalanx the best men were placed at the front and the rear of the files,
to keep the fainter hearts in the line and lead them into the
othismos,
the hand-to-hand cataclysm that was the heart of all civilized warfare.

Beside Rictus’s
father lay Vasio, his bald pate the only part of him which was not burnt black;
he must have been wearing his old iron helm, but it was gone now. And Lorynx,
his father’s favourite hound; he lay at his master’s feet with his flesh carved
to ribbons and the fur seared from his skin. They had all died shoulder to
shoulder. Scanning the ground about the house in the bright moonlight, Rictus
counted eight separate gouts of blood that had blackened the beaten earth of
the yard and now were beginning to glister with frost. A good accounting.

His eyes stung.
The burning had kept the vorine from the bodies, but they would soon regain
their courage. Things must be done right; his father would have it no other
way. Rictus dropped his broken spear and with one hand he ripped the neck of
his looted chiton. Eyes open wide he stared up at Phobos and Haukos and began
to croon the low, slow lament for the dead, the Paean, part of the ancient
heritage of the Macht as a single people. Men sang it on the death of their kin
and they sang it going into battle, the beat of it keeping their feet in step
with one another. Rictus had sung it only that morning, heart bursting with
pride as the Iscan phalanx had advanced to its doom.

He gathered the
bodies together, fighting the urge to retch as the blackened flesh came off in
his hands, the white bone laid bare as a carved joint. Zori he found beside the
central hearth of the longhouse, beneath a pile of smouldering thatch. She had
dressed in her best for the end, and had not been touched by the invaders.
Asking her forgiveness, Rictus slipped her pride and joy, her sea-coral pendant,
from about her neck before replacing what remained of her veil upon her face.
He would have need of it, he told her. She had never denied him anything, and
had been his mother in all things but blood.

There were enough
red embers to light the pyre. Rictus piled up broken timber, hay, his father’s
favourite chair, all on top of the bodies of his family, and above them he laid
the dog, that he might watch his master’s door in the life to come. A flask of
barley-spirit he broke over the pyre and it went up with a white flare of
hungry flame. He sang the Paean again, louder this time, to be heard by his
mother’s spirit so that she might be there to welcome her husband. He stood by
the bonfire of his past for a long time, not flinching as the flesh within it popped
and shrank in the heat. He stood watching, dry-eyed, until the flames began to
sink. Then he lay down beside it with his truncheon of a spear to hand. And,
mercifully, he slept at last.

THE
COMPANY OF THE ROAD

Gasca hitched his
cloak higher about his shoulders and set one flap to cover his right ear so
that the snow might not find so easy a passage. It was a good cloak, goat’s
leather rimmed with dogskin, but it had been his older brother’s before this,
and that big bastard had given it much hard wear. Besides which, there was no
cloak made that would keep out the bitterness of this evening’s wind. But a
people who had made their home in the highland valleys of the Harukush had
grown up with it. So Gasca shrugged off the discomfort, as a man ought, and
kept his head up, using his spear as a staff to pick his way along the
treacherous gravelled slush that was the road, his left arm fighting to keep
his bronze-faced shield from flapping up like an old man’s hat.