The Ten Thousand (38 page)

“Astianos!” but
Astianos had already been subbed through and through, and as Gasca en mi lied
there a trio of snarling Kufr thrust their spears at him. He beat off the
first, killed the second with a thrust to the throat, but the third caught hint
in the instant before he could recover, spearing him right through his father’s
cuirass, the point breaking off in his flesh. He fell sideways, baffled at the
turn of things, his feet scrabbling in the stones. Two more spears came down,
transfixing him, fastening him to the earth, he squirmed there, his helm coming
off, the upland air cooling his face. Confused, he thought for a moment that he
was back with his brothers again, up in the high pastures, and they had bested
him at some game. Then the last spearhead came down and, feeling the blow, he
remembered where he was.

We have them,
Vorus thought. It’s working.

He had seen the
left wing of the Macht army shudder as the Asurians charged them from the rear.
They were engulfed now, that fearsome beast of bronze and iron. He watched,
more intent than he had ever been in his life before, as the Macht line was
chopped to pieces. The cavalry burst through it, hacking bloody gaps in the
ranks of the spearmen. In the front the Kufr infantry, emboldened by the sudden
apparition of the Asurians, pressed forwards.

Vorus turned to
his nearest courier. This one was a
hufsan,
and he was looking up at the
ruin of the Macht army like one who has been granted a glimpse of a miracle.

“Go to Archon
Distartes. Tell him to send in the reserves—to send in everything.”

“Yes, lord.” The
hufsan’s
teeth were a white flash in his face as he took off, the dun pony’s
hooves twinkling under him.

The Macht on the
right were no longer a line, but bristling knots of infantry, fighting back to
back. They could not run, for there was nowhere to run to. They died where they
stood, fighting as long as their feet could bear them.

I have beaten
them, Vorus thought. He watched the Macht dying up on the hill and knew it to
be true. Many of them were now fighting with their swords, their spears
shattered or lost. He saw a Cursebearer go down, the black armour standing out
in that mass of bronze. And for a second he had to bow his head and choke back
a kind of grief.

On the left, the
Macht morai were creating a terrible slaughter among the Kufr pushing up the
hill. Most likely, they were not even aware of the disaster unfolding on their
flank. It was time Proxis moved in to finish it. His legions were standing out
on the Macht right flank, facing empty air. Once they wheeled in as the
Asurians had done, the Ten Thousand would be no more. That story would be ended
at last.

Except that the
Juthan were not moving. They stood in rank, all twelve thousand of them, and
watched the battle lines struggling on the rocky hillside to their right, as
stolid and unmoving as mourners at a funeral.

A chill went down
Vorus’s spine. Proxis, no, do not do this to me now.

He leaned in the
saddle and physically grabbed the courier nearest to him, not taking his eyes
off the ranks of the Juthan some pasang and a half away. “You must go to—” He
released him again.

“ They’re moving,
General,” someone said beside him. “The Juthan are moving off.”

“Slow, as always,”
another of his aides said with the hauteur of the high-caste Kefren.

And yes, they were
moving at last. Twelve thousand of them, and with them his friend of twenty
years.

“Where are they
going?” the aide asked, puzzled, not yet realising.

Twenty years,
Vorus thought. What was it to you, Proxis—something to be endured? Maybe that
was why you drank, to keep the knowledge that you would one day do this toward
the back of your mind.

For the Juthan
were marching away, legion by legion. They were leaving the battlefield to turn
south, marching in perfect ranks. Vorus saw a figure lead them away, seated on
a mule.

“Where are they
going?” his aide repeated, wild-eyed.

“They’re going
home,” Vorus said. “Where else?” And you timed it well, Proxis, he thought. You
left it until the perfect moment.

He bowed his head,
leaning on his horse’s neck, smelling the salt sweat of the patient beast under
him. I have lived too long, he thought. “General.”

He straightened,
looked up the hill at the battle once more, that all-encompassing roar of
madness and slaughter which meant nothing to him now. More Macht troops had
come up to hammer the Asurians from the rear, light-armed by the look of them.
That corner of the battlefield was as confused and murderous as anything at
Kunaksa. There, the Arakosan cavalry had been fought to a standstill by
skirmishers too. He wondered if it was the same commander. Someone capable, at
any rate.

The Kufr centre
was collapsing. As the Juthan legions peeled away, abandoning them, so the
Macht on that flank began to advance, finally aware of their brethren’s plight
out on their left. They came down the hillside in a ferocious, perfect line,
tramping across the bodies of the dead and the living alike. The Kufr troops
could not withstand that torrent of professional fury. They retreated,
withdrawing in some order at first, and then casting aside their shields and
running without shame. Behind their running backs, the Macht wheeled right, by
morai, and moved in on the catastrophe that had overtaken the other half of
their army.

Vorus’s young
Kefren aide was weeping in grief and fury. “General—my lord. We should move.
This field is lost.”

“Juthan bastards!”

Vorus sat upon his
horse and stared up the hill at his own people, whom he had tried to destroy.
Around him, the Honai stood uneasily, looking behind them at the pale length of
the Imperial Road. On the slope ahead the lightly armed companies of archers
were already running, their quivers only half-empty.

There is such a
thing, Vorus thought, as a tradition of victory. Perhaps that is what does it.

Proxis, may I be
forgiven, I wish you well. Take your people to freedom.

Aloud, he said, “Signal
general retreat. We will pull back along the Imperial Road.” He grasped the
shoulder of his weeping aide. He was not much more than a boy. “Phelos, try and
get through to Tessarnes. Tell him to break off, to get away as many of his men
as he can.”

The Kefre wiped
his nose on the back of his gold-skinned hand. “Yes, sir. Where will I find you
when I return?”

“Tell Tessarnes to
take command, Phelos. I am stepping down. I have failed.”

“My lord! General!”

“Go now. And try
to stay alive.” He clapped the boy on the shoulder. Was I ever that young? he
wondered. As Phelos sped off the standard-bearer at Vorus’s side was waving his
banner to the rear. A formality. The army was already in full retreat.

It is
stubbornness, Vorus realised. That is what sets us apart. We Macht will fight
on when there is no hope of victory. We are stubborn bastards, worse than
mules. It is not even a matter of courage.

He looked up at
the chaos on the hill. The Macht morai that had wheeled north were the only
intact troops on the field. Everything else was just a mass of struggling men
and Kufr and horses, all lines lost, all order destroyed. In some places they
were packed together like a crowd in a theatre; in others the masses were
opening out in flight, in death, a collapse of the bonds that held armies
together. As the Kufr companies streamed down off the hill they left behind a
heaped and tangled line of bodies, like seaweed thrown up on a beach by a
spring tide. On the left, the Macht had died where they stood, falling in line.

Stubbornness.

Vorus raised a
hand and saluted them, his countrymen. Then he turned his horse’s head and set
off down the Imperial Road to the east, one more fleeing figure in a sea of
them.

COUNTING STONES

The snow had
started up again, flying in flurries about the camp and greying out the world.
The only colour was in the heart of the campfires, a thousand of them dotted
for taenons about the floor of the valley, motes of yellow light with the
darkening mountains looming on all sides around them, like titans peering down
upon the concerns of ants. No ditch had been dug, and there was no order to the
scattered bivouacs. The encampment of the Macht no longer seemed that of an
army, but was a disorderly conglomeration of individuals. Most centons stayed
together and a few of the morai, but by and large it seemed the higher
organisation of the army had been abandoned.

“How is he?”
Rictus asked, ducking his head under the flap of the wagon-canopy. The wind was
getting up, and though there was not much of a chill in it for those bred to
the mountains, it made the leather snap and shudder like a snared bird.

“He’s asleep,”
Tiryn told him. “I got some soup down him this morning, but nothing since. I
need more water.”

“I’ll get it for
you.” Rictus made to leave, but Tiryn’s cold fingers fastened on his wrist. “What
is happening out there, Rictus?”

The Iscan’s face
did not change. “They’re talking, still talking.”

“Then you should
be out there talking with them.”

“I have nothing to
say.”

“Men look to you;
many of them. You can’t let Aristos have his way.”

Rictus stared at
her, his eyes the colour of the snow-darkened sky behind him. “I’ll get you the
water,” he repeated, and was gone.

Tiryn tied down
the canopy once more, and inside the wagon there was only the flickering glow
of a single clay lamp. Beside it, wrapped in his red cloak and every other
blanket that Tiryn possessed, lay Jason.

She smoothed the
dark hair away from his forehead. The sound of his breathing filled the wagon,
a harsh, stertorous battle of sound. A spearhead had gone in over the lip of
his cuirass, just at the collarbone, and had angled down into the lung.

The breathing
paused a second. Jason opened his eyes. His voice was a zephyr. She had to lean
close to hear. “Rictus was here,” he croaked.

“He’s fetching
water.”

Jason licked his
cracked lips. “Cold,” he said.

“We’re in the
mountains now, the Irun Gates.”

“Cold,” he said
again, closing his eyes.

She lay full
length beside him, tugging him close, sharing what warmth she had. On the other
side of his body his cuirass was propped upright, black and ominous. He could
not settle without it near him. She hated the very look of it; that untouchable
blackness, giving nothing, marked by nothing. It was as though his grave-marker
already stood beside him in the back of the wagon, watching him fight for his
life with cold indifference.

How many days
since the battle? Four, five? Latterly they had all seemed the same. She had
watched the Asurian cavalry strike home with unadulterated horror; it had
seemed that the battle was lost, and the army destroyed. They had fought
through the baggage carts, the Asurians and Aristos’s men, whilst Rictus and
the light troops had run up the hill to aid the main battle line. She was still
not sure how the thing had turned around, but the men were talking of the
Juthan deserting the field. They had been saved by the intervention of Antimone
herself, many said. As it was, the victory was bitter enough. Over two thousand
dead, and hundreds wounded. Tiryn had picked her way up the hill before
Irunshahr, stepping in scarlet puddles, on the entrails of men and horses. She
had climbed to the hill-crest to find Jason, for he had been on the left, where
disaster had fallen. She had never walked upon a battlefield before, had never
seen the ground hidden by stark and crawling bodies, Macht and Kefren moaning
next to each other, horses screaming and trying to stand on the splintered
bones of their legs. She had not known it would be like this, such a
concentrated entanglement of lacerated flesh. In the end it was Rictus who
found him, who had him borne down to the wagons on a litter made from spears.
The only thing that warmed her was their automatic assumption that Jason should
be with her. “
Look after him,
” Rictus had said, his eyes as cold as the
mountains.

With the rout of
the Kufr army, the governor of Irunshahr had come to their camp under a green
branch, to ask for clemency. He did not know just how badly the army had been
hurt, but he could see the last of his hopes disappearing along the Imperial
Road to the east in a broken panic. He went on his knees before those
blood-slathered, bronze-clad men, and begged for the life of his city. Had he
but known, he could have kept his gates closed with impunity. The Macht were in
no condition to assault the walls, and did not have the stomach for it either.
Rictus and Aristos made a good two-man act, the big Iscan as taciturn as a
marble pillar, Aristos as arrogant as a Kefren prince. Thus the army had been
supplied, after a fashion.

“Buridan,” Jason
said. “Where is Buridan?”

“He is dead,”
Tiryn told him. “Remember?”

Jason’s eyes
opened. For a moment they were clear, though whatever he was seeing it was not
in the gloom of the wagon-bed. He smiled a little, a bitter smile, not looking
at her. “Phiron would have done it better. He tells me so.” His eyes rolled in
his head, “I hear the wings. She is close now.” He drifted off again.

The lamp went out,
and there was just the dark in the wagon, the rasp of Jason’s breathing, the
thumping of her own heart. Outside, the wind hurled itself up and down the
valley. Here, in the Korash, summer had not yet been thought of. Even spring was
a starveling urchin of a thing, barely enough to set the grass growing. Tiryn’s
Juthan slave, Ushdun, had run off along with the rest of her fellows in the
aftermath of the battle. Somehow they had known about the Juthan betrayal, and
somehow they had known the perfect moment to escape, when all was in chaos and
the fighting just ended. Tiryn had brought Jason back to her wagon to find it
ransacked. The Macht walking wounded who had been set to look over the Juthan
had instead joined the fight against the Asurians. There were no more slaves
with the army. She was, Tiryn realised, the only Kufr in the camp. The thought
startled her.