The Ten Thousand (4 page)

The Machran road
was not busy, but those who had need to travel it at this time of year tended
to draw together somewhat. In the evenings it made for an easier bivouac, and
there were informal arrangements. Men gathered firewood, women fetched water.
Children got under the feet of all, and were cuffed promiscuously by their
elders. It was safer to sleep as part of a large camp, for the footpads and
bandits in this part of the hills were renowned. As a fully armed soldier,
Gasca had at first been avoided, then courted, and now was welcomed in the
company of travellers. He had a fine voice, a pleasant manner, and if he was
not the most comely of fellows, he had still the good-natured forbearance of
youth to recommend him.

All Machran bound,
the company was a varied lot. Two merchants led, with plodding donkeys laden
with all manner of sacks and bags. Haughty fellows, they refused to divulge the
contents, but it was easy enough to smell the juniper berries and half-cured
hides once the fire began to warm them. A pair of young couples followed, the
men as possessive as stags around their new wives, the girls flirtatious as
only married women can be. Then came a grey-haired matron with the bark of a
drillmaster, who herded round her skirts a half dozen ragged urchins, orphans
running from some war in the far north. She was taking them to sell in the
capital, and looked after them with the close attentiveness a man might show to
a good hunting dog. One of the girls, she had already offered to Gasca, but he
did not like his meat so tender, and besides, he had no money to spare for such
indulgences. The children seemed to sense the essential charity in his nature,
and when night fell one or two of them would invariably wriggle under his cloak
and sleep curled against him. He did not mind, for they were good warmth, and
if they were crawling with vermin, well, so was he.

Five days, this
serried company had travelled in each other’s ambit, and they had become
comrades of the road, sharing food and stories and sometimes going so far as to
venture a little personal history about the campfires. The two merchants had
unbent somewhat, and over execrable wine had let slip brawny yarns of the
battles they had fought in their youth. The young husbands, once they had torn
themselves from their bedrolls and wiped the sweat from their brows, confided
to the company that they were brothers, married to sisters, and apprenticed to
a famous armourer in Machran, Ferrious of Afteni by name, who would teach them
his secrets and make of them rich men, artists as much as artisans.

The pimping
matron, while picking lice from the hair of one of her charges, extolled the
virtues of a certain green-walled house in the Street of the Loom-Makers, where
a man might indulge any craving his appetite could muster, and for a very
reasonable fee.

“And you, soldier,”
one of the merchants said to Gasca over the fire. “What takes you to Machran?
Are you to offer your spear for hire?”

Gasca squeezed
himself some wine. It was black root-spirit he guessed, cut with goat’s blood
and honey. He had drunk worse, but could not quite remember when.

“I go to take up
the red cloak,” he admitted, wiping his mouth, and tossing the flaccid wineskin
to one of the wan young husbands.

“I thought so. You
bear a blank shield. So you’ll paint some mercenary sigil on it and wear
scarlet. Under what commander?”

Gasca smiled. “Whatever
one will have me.”

“You’ll be a
younger son, I’ll bet.”

“I have two elder
brothers, the apples of my father’s eyes. For me it was the red cloak or a
goatkeeper’s hut. And my fingers are too big to fit round a goat’s tits.”

The men around the
fire laughed, but there was a furtiveness to their regard of him. Though young,
Gasca was as broad as any two of them put together, and the glued linen cuirass
he wore was stained with old blood. It had been his father’s, as had the rest
of the panoply he carried. Stealing them had been no easy thing, and one of his
favoured elder brothers had taken a few knocks before Gasca had finally made it
clear of his father’s land. These weapons and armour he bore were all he owned
in the world, an inheritance he had felt to be his due.

One of the young
husbands spoke up. His wife had joined him at the fire, a lazy cat’s-smile on
her face. “I hear tell there’s a great company being gathered,” he said. “Not
just in Machran, but in cities across all the mountains. There’s a captain name
of Phiron, comes from Idrios; he’s hiring fighting men by the hundred. And he’s
a cursebearer, too.”

“Where did you
hear this?” his wife asked him.

“In a tavern in
Arienus.”

“And what tavern
was this?”

Gasca’s mind
wandered as the squabble grew apace on the far side of the campfire. His own
city, Gosthere, where he had the right to vote in assembly, was a mere
stockaded town at the headwaters of the Gerionin River, two hundred and fifty
pasangs back in the mountains. As much as anything else, he was going to
Machran because he wanted to see a real city. Something built of stone, with
paved streets that had no shit streaming down the middle of them. In his
haversack he had a copy of Tynon’s
Constitution,
which described the
great cities of the Macht as if they were all set up in marble, peopled with
statues and ruled by stately debate in well-conducted assemblies—not the
knockabout mob-gatherings they had been back in Gosthere. That was something he
wished to see, and if it did not exist in Machran, it likely never had
anywhere.

To serve under a
cursebearer—now that too would be something. Gasca had never so much as seen
one before. Gosthere’s nobility did not run to such glories. He wondered if the
stories about the black armour were true.

I am young, Gasca
thought. I have taken my man and my wolf. I have a full panoply. I do not want
to own the world; I merely want to see it. I want to drink it by the bucketful
and savour every swallow.

“And that bitch;
that goatherder she-pig—she was there, wasn’t she?”

“Woman, I tell you
I was there for the turn of a water-clock, no more.”

Gasca lay back in
his cloak, tugging the folds about him and staring up at the stars. Scudding
past the moons there were rags and glimmers of cloud. It would be very cold
tonight. As children, he and his brothers had buried embers under their
bedrolls on such nights, up in the high grazing. They would chaff each other
for hours to the clink of the goat-bells, and Felix, their father’s hound,
would always lie next to Gasca. When he growled in the dark they would all be
up on their feet in a moment, shuddering with cold, reaching for their boy’s
spears. Gasca had been thirteen when he had killed his first wolf. Like all the
men of his city, he had chiselled out one of its teeth. As he lay now, far from
home, he reached up to his neck and touched it, warm from his flesh. For a
moment he felt a pang of loss, remembering his brothers when they had all been
boys together, before the complications of manhood. Then he grunted, rolled
himself tighter in his cloak, and closed his eyes.

When morning came
he found that two of the urchin-children had wormed under his cloak in the
night and were spliced to him like wasps to a honeycomb. In the warmth under
the cloak all his vermin and theirs had come alive, and he itched damnably.
Even so, he was reluctant to rise, for the cloak and the ground around it had a
light skiff of snow upon it that had frozen hard, and the sunrise just topping
the mountains had kindled from it a hundred million jagged points of
rose-coloured light. Even the log-butts from the fire had frost on them. When
Gasca blinked, he could feel his eyebrows crackle.

The children
squealed as he threw aside the cloak and rose to his feet, stamping his sandals
into the stone-hard ground and stretching his limbs to the mountains. He strode
out to the roadside and pissed there, standing in an acrid cloud of his own
making and blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Looking up and down, he saw the
road was empty in both directions. To the south it disappeared between the
shoulders of two steep white hills, on one of which there loomed the rocky
ruins of a city. That was Memnos. They had hoped to see it this morning when
they woke. Machran now lay a mere thirty pasangs away, an easy day’s march.
Tonight they would sleep under a roof, those who could afford it. Gasca had
promised himself a good meal, and wine worthy of the name. He spat the taste of
last night’s out onto the road, grimacing.

Something moved in
the treeline. The original builders of the road had hewn back the woods on
either side for a bowshot, and though those who maintained it now had not done
so well, there were still a good hundred paces of open ground before the tangled
scrub and dwarf-pine of the thickets began. In the dawn-light Gasca’s
piss-stream dried up as he saw the pale blur of a face move in there. He turned
at once and dashed back to the campsite, booting aside one of the yawning
urchins. His spear was slick with frost and he cursed as it slipped in his
fingers.

By the time he had
turned back to the woods the figure was visible. A man walking towards the road
with his arms held out from his sides, and in one fist a single-headed spear.
The man thrust this point-first into the ground for lack of a sauroter, and
then came on with both palms open in the universal gesture.
I mean no harm.
Gasca’s
breathing steadied. He strode forward. Others from the company were blinking
their way out of their bedrolls, throwing aside furs and trying to make sense
of the morning. One of the younger children was crying hopelessly, blue with
cold.

Gasca stood
between the approaching figure and the waking camp, and planted the sauroter of
his own spear in the roadside. He wished now he had clapped on his father’s
helm.

“What’s your
business? State it quickly. I have good men at my back,” he said loudly, hoping
those good men were out of their blankets. He scanned the treeline, but nothing
else moved there. For the moment, at least, this fellow was alone. But that
meant nothing. He might have twenty comrades stowed back in the trees, waiting
to see the company’s headcount.

The man was tall,
as tall as Gasca, though nothing like as broad. In fact he had a gaunt, hungry
look. His chiton was worn and stained, ripped open at the neck in the
grief-mark, and he had a blanket slung bagwise about his torso. There was a
knife at his waist, hanging from a string. A scar marred the middle of his
lower lip.

“I mean no harm. I
hoped to share your fire,” the man said.

The two merchants
and the young husbands joined Gasca at the roadside, wielding clubs and knives.
“Shall we kill him?” one of the husbands asked eagerly.

“He’s not robbed
us yet. Let him speak,” Gasca said.

He was young, this
fellow. Now that they all had a chance to see him up close they realised that
he was not much more than an overgrown boy. Until one looked in his eyes. He
stared at Gasca, and in his hooded gaze there was utter indifference.

I could kill him
right here and now, Gasca thought, and he would not raise so much as a finger.

“What’s your name?”
he asked, more gently than he had meant to.

“Rictus.”

“Of what city?”

The thin man
hesitated. “I was of Isca,” he said at last, “When Isca still stood.” His eyes
hardened. “I seek only to travel with you to Machran. I have no ill intent. And
I am alone.” He raised his hands, empty.

“Come on to the
fire,” Gasca said. “If we can raise a flame.”

“Isca?” one of the
merchants said. “What happened to Isca?”

The man named
Rictus turned his head. He had eyes like grey shards of iron, cold as the sea. “Isca
is no more.”

“Really? Gods
above. Come, boy—come sit and tell us more.”

The strangeness
had been broken. A threatening shape walking out of the woods had become a
tired young man, who spoke civilly. They gathered around him, glad perhaps of
some new story; news that was not shopworn, but fresh and raw. Gasca drew away,
still watching this gaunt apparition. The man Rictus did not move. Something
flickered in his eyes; pain. He was regretting this already, Gasca realised. He
spoke again. “Let me go back for my spear.”

They tensed. He
looked at Gasca.

“Go get it,” Gasca
said, and shrugged.

Some humanity in
the eyes at last. The man nodded, and went back the way he had come.

“You think he’s
not a ruse, a roadsman?” one of the young husbands asked.

Gasca was about to
answer, but it was the fat merchant who spoke first.

“Look in his
face—he tells the truth. I’ve seen eyes like that before.” The merchant’s face
tightened. For a second it was possible to see the soldier he might have been
in younger days.

“We’ve nothing to
fear from this lad. He’s already made his gift to the goddess.”

They got the fire
going again, digging out of its black carcass a single red mote of living heat.
This they conjured into a blaze, and with the addition of copper cauldrons they
had boiling water soon after, and set the barley to swell in it. The campsite
regained some of its usual cheer, though the newcomer, Rictus, had an armspan
of cold air between himself and the rest. This was remedied when one of the
urchins edged close, and finally sat defiantly within the crook of his arm.
Rictus appeared startled, then pleased, then grim as a blacksmith’s washbowl.
By his posture, one might think he had a spear-staff for a spine. And he was so
cold that the warmth of the child next to him finally set him to shivering,
with ground teeth.

The fatter of the
merchants, the one Gasca now knew to be a true man, threw the wineskin to
Rictus.

“Drink, for the
gods, for all of us. Have a drink, lad. Pour a libation if you will. Ease that
look in your eyes.”