The Ten Thousand (33 page)

“Why?”

“I do not come
here to discuss my day.”

“I know. You come
here to receive language instruction from animals. Why are you angry?”

He laughed at
that. “Was this why Arkamenes kept you by his side? To needle him out of a dark
mood?”

“Perhaps. You like
to talk to me, Jason. You lead this army. I do not think you can talk to
others.”

“You’ve met
Rictus. No? I talk to him. I talk to my friend Buridan. And I talk to you. I do
not know why. I do not know why I trust you, but it happens that I do.”

He was in all
seriousness, the laughter gone. He stared into the fire and nudged an errant
faggot closer to the flames with his foot.

“We are not one
army, but two,” he said at last. “For now, we are together, because if we split
up, we will no doubt die here. But if the Great King forsakes our pursuit,
there will be factions in our ranks. They will tear us apart.”

“Kill the leaders
of the other factions,” she said. She took the forgotten pot out of the Juthan
girl’s hands and began ladling the lentil stew within onto three earthenware
plates.

“The Macht do not
conduct their affairs in that way,” Jason said. He seemed displeased.

“Are you hungry?”

“I’ll eat.”

He ate with his
fingers, as did the Juthan. Tiryn scooped up her own food with a horn spoon.
The taste took her back to the hearth of her father’s house, in the mountains.
The fire in the centre of the round room, the woodsmoke tainting every
mouthful. She stared at her plate and across her mind a flickering pageant of
childhood images played themselves out, stealing away her appetite.

Jason set down his
empty plate. He lay back in his cloak and stared up at the stars. “I see
Gaenion’s Pointer,” he said. “It shows the way north. Many’s the night march I’ve
made with it to guide me. It seems strange, somehow, that our stars are here,
in this land.”

“Your stars?”
Tiryn asked.

“Gaenion the Smith
made the stars out of Antimone’s tears. When she wept he loved the way his wife’s
light caught in them—his wife is the sun, Araian. So he caught some of Antimone’s
tears, and set them in the heavens in patterns and chains ordained by God
Himself. And there they stick.”

“The stars are the
gems of Bel, thrown into the sky as the god celebrated the killing of the great
Bull, Mot’s beast of the dark,” Tiryn said. “The eyes of the Bull he set in the
sky also, though one was full of blood from the beast’s death-throes. They are
our moons, Firghe and Anande, Wrath and Patience.”

Jason grinned. “Each
to his own gods, I suppose. I don’t know about your Bel, or bull, but I have
heard the beat of Antimone’s Wings upon the battlefield, like some black
flutter in the core of my heart. And then of course there is this.” He cast
aside his cloak, and sitting up, he thumped the black chest of his cuirass, the
Curse of God.

“I do not know how
these things were made if they are not the work of some god, because assuredly,
there is no smith on earth who can fathom their creation.”

Tiryn raised an
eyebrow. “Perhaps there was once.”

“What is the word
for stubborn?”

“Kura.
A
mule is a
Kuru.
I am thinking it a good word for
Macht,
also.”

Jason got to his
feet, and bowed. “Thank you for the wine, the food, and the instruction in
humility, my lady.”

She lowered the
komis from her face, looking up at him as he stood there. She did not want him
to go. “I will see you on the march perhaps, tomorrow?”

“Perhaps.” He
reached out his hand, and for an unthinking second she did the same, her
fingers longer than his, pale in the firelight. They did not touch. She drew
back, startled by the temerity of her own impulse.

“Tomorrow,” he
said. “I wish to learn the words for hearth, home, and happiness, in case I
should ever need them.” Then he turned to go.

“I hope you may
need them, one day,” Tiryn said, watching his cloak-wrapped shape disappear
into the firelight and shadows of the sleeping camp. She did not think he had
heard her.

The next day, a
large tell loomed out of the morning mists before Rictus’s trudging
skirmishers. All about, the flatlands of the Middle Empire croaked and clicked
and buzzed as the sun began to warm the air. A solitary Kufr farmer, leading
his ox out for a morning’s work, saw the Macht appear out of the mists and
fled, leaving his puzzled animal behind. Rictus slapped the beast’s rump as
they passed it, and Whistler grinned. “Rictus, shall I?”

“Leave it. The
foragers will pick it up. Cormos—take your centon out on the right, but stay
linked.”

“Look,” Whistler
said, swinging his pelta from his back to his left arm.

A city reared up
before them, afloat on a white sea of mist. Steep-sided as a spearhead, it was
a vast black shadow on the edge of their world, coming to life as they watched
with the flicker of a hundred, two hundred, a thousand lamps. The inhabitants
were rising with the sun.

“Ab-Mirza,” Rictus
said. “So Jason says. All centons at the double—pass it down the line. They’ll
open the gates at sunrise—we must secure them.”

They ran at a fast
jog through the mist, javelins in their shield-fist, short spears in the other.
They were nearly all barefoot, for sandals could not compete with the sucking
ooze of the farmlands they had passed through. Nine hundred-odd men, their eyes
as bright and eager as those of a hunting wolf, no formation to their number, a
mere fast-moving, shapeless darkness in the mist.

Another astonished
farmer. Someone speared him and he splashed to the ground with a sharp cry.
Rictus bared his teeth. No point shouting back at the pack behind him. Leading
these men, one took the rough along with the smooth.

They passed
clusters of farm buildings, mud walled and thatched with reeds. A line of stout
palms planted along an irrigation ditch. Mud walls, knee-high, chest-high. They
poured over them with scarcely a pause, the clay brick crumbling under their
feet and elbows and scrabbling fingers.

And at last, the
great smell of the city itself, to be sensed with the nose, and felt as a
shadow upon the mist around them. They were at the walls, fired brick, slimy,
veined with ivy. “Follow them round—this way. On me, brothers,” Rictus panted.
He heard the slap of their feet behind them, the sound women made when washing
clothes on the stones of a river.

And here was the
gate—a tall barricade of wood, reinforced with green bronze. It was closing in
their faces. Rictus screamed something—he knew not what—and sprinted forward.
His men roared out a wordless howl of anger and sped up with him. They crashed
into the gate at full tilt, heads knocking against the wood with a ripple of
cracks.

“Push, you
bastards!” Rictus yelled, and they set their shoulders to it.

He backed out of
the ranks of his struggling men, made for the dark, thinning gap, and squeezed
through there. On the other side were a crowd of Kufr, tall, angular shapes,
grunting and shouting. He stabbed the short spear into their bodies, hardly
aiming the head of it. Behind him, more of his men were squeezing through the
gap. Whistler was beside him, using a javelin as a spear. A sharp point keened
off Rictus’s armour, the blow hardly felt. Then another. Someone was loosing
arrows into the press, careless of who they hit.

The gates were
opening now, and on the far side of them the Macht were a great mass of
shouting men, shields held up over their heads, spearheads lancing out below,
going for the bellies and groins of the Kufr. They poured into the city, the
momentum on their side now, the gates all the way open, that torrent of muscle
scraping them across the flags of the gatehouse floor. The Kufr fell back.
There was torchlight here, mixed up and competing with the mist-bound glow of
the rising sun. The morning was fighting its way into life. Rictus’s men were
through the gatehouse and in the streets. Buildings reared up all around like
red cliffs, Kufr running everywhere, showers of arrows hissing through the air,
men going down with the feathered shafts skewering them. The Kufr were up on
the rooftops, archers bobbing up to loose their shafts, others beside them
hurling down bricks and stones and all manner of other debris. A dozen Macht
were down now, and the cobbled brick of the roadway was puddled with their
blood. The rest of the mora, still pushing and pulsing through the gates, set
up a great shout as they saw their fallen comrades and lunged forward. The knot
around the gatehouse broke up. The Macht leapt over their own dead and wounded
and streamed up every street, cutting down all who stood in their way, kicking
in doors and hauling out Kufr women, cutting their throats or stabbing them
through the heart, the eyes. They pounded up the internal stairways to come out
on the rooftops, and on the flat hard-packed earth above they slew their
attackers without mercy, throwing them down to the street. Rictus saw two of
his men catch a tall Kefren woman, pinion her arms and violate her with a
javelin, laughing with a fierce, insane hatred as they did so.

He shouted orders,
but they went unheard. The men were slipping out of his command, scattering
into the maze of streets, pursuing any Kufr who dared show their face. And
still, on the farther rooftops, the inhabitants of the city were popping up to
shoot arrows and fling spears and stones, and carts were being wheeled across
the roadways to bar the passage of the invaders. There seemed to be no soldiery
resisting the Macht; it was the population itself. Rictus’s mora was being
soaked into the city. It was disappearing in chaos and murder before his eyes.

He grabbed a young
Macht by the scruff and clouted aside the knife which was raised in his face. “Get
out of here, back to the army. Find Jason and tell him to bring up some of the
other morai. Tell him we’re fighting in the streets, and like to be swamped if
he does not hurry. Do you understand? Repeat it to me.” The boy did so, sour
and resentful.

“What’s your name?”

“Lomnos.”

“Lomnos, if Jason
does not get this message, I will come looking for you—you understand?”

The boy nodded,
snarling, and then ran back the way he had come.

“Whistler, is that
you? Not the head again.” Whistler’s bald pate had yet another slice out of it.
He raised his hand and touched the blood. “Never felt it—I don’t feel nothing
there no more—lucky for me, eh? Rictus, we’ve got to rein in these stupid
fuckers before they burn the place down around us.”

“I know.
Discipline is all to hell. Do what you can. I’ll try to get to the head of
them.” Rictus took off up the steep city street at a run, grabbing men here and
there, any face he recognised, any name he could shout out. Called like this,
the men remembered their duty and followed him up the hill, but hundreds of
Rictus’s mora were scattering through the city, killing and looting as they
went, beyond the reach of their centurions. The bodies began to pile up in the
streets.

The boy Lomnos
panted out his message with the spittle spraying from his lips. Jason set a
hand on his shoulder. He looked around, saw Aristos in the midst of the marching
column, and called him over.

“Take your mora
into the city, at the double. Rictus may need help.” Aristos grinned, face
flushing with pleasure. He turned to go.

“And Aristos—keep
them in hand!”

The lead mora
broke into a run, clapping on their helms and sliding their shields from back
to shoulder with the neck-strap. Jason looked round again, saw Buridan two
hundred paces away. He pointed to the city and pumped his fist up and down.
Buridan nodded, and shouted at his men. Immediately, this second mora began to
pick up their pace as well. Two thousand men, sweating and gasping in their
armour, now streaming towards the open gates of Ab-Mirza at a run.

“Shields!” Jason
cried. The centurions around him took it up, and the five middle morai of the
column immediately broke ranks and made for the baggage train, where their
shields were stored on the wagons. Morai took it in turns to provide the
shield-bearing rear and van guards, because to march all day with the shield
was punishing. It would thus be some time before Jason could send more
fully-armed morai into the city. For the moment, whatever was happening in
there was the concern of Rictus and Aristos and Buridan alone.

Perhaps two
hundred men held around Rictus in a body; all that he could gather out of his
mora. These were mainly veterans who had been close to him at the Kunaksa,
older men with more level heads, but even they were eager to be off and join
their comrades. He could feel it. Some fool had knocked a cresset into a
stable, and half a street was burning. Rictus found himself frozen, staring at
the flames, remembering Isca, the sound of the city’s torture roaring up into
the pine-shrouded hills.

Up the steep city
streets more troops were advancing, hundreds of heavy spearmen, a curse-bearer
at the head. He doffed his helm and became Aristos, lithe, olive-skinned, his
face alight with happiness. “Well, lads,” he shouted, “Let’s finish what Rictus
has begun. Remember my uncle Argus—remember Phiron! Teach these kutr their
names!”

Vorus was woken by
an orderly, a young
hufsan
with a set face. “General, I was told to wake
you. Outside, there is something you must see.”

Mystified, Vorus
threw a blanket about his shoulders and padded barefoot out of the tent. Dawn
was almost upon them, and the great camp around him was stirring, the smell of
woodsmoke and horseshit mingling on the air.

“General Proxis is
on the mound, sir,” the
hufsan
said.

Vorus laboured up
the slope of the small tell, all that was left of some indescribably ancient
city. There was a lookout post at the top, this being the highest point for
miles around. Proxis stood there now, along with three other Juthan of the
Legion.