The Ten Thousand (42 page)

She helped Jason
down into the snow. He reached back into the wagon-bed and slid out his spear,
leaned on it like an old man. Tiryn took his other arm. “What in hell is going
on?” he wondered. “An attack?”

Something huge
reared up out of the snow, barely twenty paces from them. It was taller than
the spear Jason held. Two lights burned in its head, bright as frost. It opened
a red maw and roared at them. They had a brief impression of a huge bulk,
white-furred, and then it bowled away through the snow, man-like, bipedal, but
using its great arms to gather speed, chopping through the drifts like a
wind-driven boat.

“Qaf,” Tiryn said.
“It is the Qaf. Oh, Bel, be merciful. We must hide, Jason.”

“What—and miss all
the fun?”

“You can scarcely
stand.”

The camp was in
chaos. In the gaps between curtains of driven snow they saw men coming together
in knots and crowds, spears facing outwards. The Qaf came up to these and
launched themselves on the spearpoints, white and unreal as ghosts, bellowing
like maddened bulls. Tiryn saw one of the Macht picked up and flung thirty feet
through the air, another lifted and torn to pieces between two of the giant
creatures. Centurions were shouting orders, half heard in the storm. Throngs of
men waded through the snow to the wagons to fetch their shields and armour. The
Qaf launched into these and scattered them. A wagon was overturned, crashing
onto its side. The wheels were ripped off and flung through the air. The
roaring of the Qaf hurt the ears.

“Let’s find a hole
to hide in,” Jason said. “These bastards are too big for me.”

“Back in the
wagon.”

“No—out in the
snow. Come on, Tiryn.” With surprising strength he struggled through the
drifts, out from the camp. Tiryn bore half his weight, his spear the other.

“Down—down,” he
hissed, and they collapsed into the snow. Half a dozen of the great beasts
chopped past them. Their eyes were blue, and lit up like winter stars, deep-set
in massively built skulls. Wide nostrils in the middle of their faces, not much
more than holes, and fanged mouths from which the hot breath issued in smoking
clouds. Their white fur was caked in rime and ice, as though this were part of
their physiology. They were mere beasts, but they walked upright for the most
part, and they had hands like those of men, pink-skinned, black-nailed, and as
wide as shovels.

Tiryn and Jason
lay in the drift, half-buried, the cold sinking through their layered clothing,
smarting the exposed flesh of their faces.

“Are they just
beasts, or do they have minds?” Jason asked, shivering.

“They can speak,
after a fashion. They keep to themselves, in the high mountains. I heard tell
there were some brought all the way to Ashur, but they did not do well in the
heat.”

The sounds of
battle now carried clearly over the wind. Men had congregated together and were
fighting back with the long spears. The smaller groups were overwhelmed, but
where the Macht could present a united front of bristling aichmes they held
their ground, stabbing out at the Qaf with the courage of desperation. The
great creatures coursed throughout the camp, killing men who were floundering
through the snow to join their comrades, tossing them up into the air as a dog
would fling a rat. They killed the surviving draught animals with great blows
of their fists, smashed the wagons to matchwood, and stamped the life out of
the sick and wounded as they lay helpless in the snow.

Jason and Tiryn
crawled into a snowdrift, tunnelling into it like moles and excavating a white
cave for themselves. There they lay, spent, their noses touching. Jason smiled
at her. “I did not think it would end like this, buried in a snowdrift.” His
lips were blue.

“It has not yet
ended,” she said.

“Wake me up when
it does,” Jason said. He was drifting off. He had stopped shivering. Tiryn drew
him close to her, wrapped her limbs around him. The flesh of his face felt like
cold wax. “Do not sleep,” she said brokenly. “Stay with me, Jason.” But there
was no reply.

“Hold fast!”
Rictus shouted. “Spears up. Forget about the damn shields. Skewer these
bastards!”

Hundreds of men
had come together now and were fighting in a great circular bristling mass,
four and five men deep. About them the Qaf raged like some manifestation of the
storm, charging into the spears in ones and twos, sometimes penetrating far
enough to grab a man off his feet, more often pierced through and through,
bellowing in rage as they died with the spear-points thrust in their eyes. They
had no discipline, no fighting system, just the raw fury of animals, and they
failed to combine their attacks. Had they done so, the line of Macht would have
quickly been overwhelmed. Rictus stood back from the front ranks and watched
the Qaf range through the camp beyond. There were not so many of them as he had
thought. A few hundred, perhaps. Out in the shifting snow, he could see other
formations of the Macht fighting as these were, gathering together shoulder to
shoulder and setting their heels in the ground.

Whistler joined
him. “They’re backing off a little. They’re not much more than animals, after
all.”

“Who’s here—any
centurions?”

“Dinon, and
Navarnus of the Owls.”

“All right—you
hold here with them. I’m taking a centon forward.”

“Rictus—”

“Do as I say.”

Rictus gathered up
perhaps a hundred men, and these he led forward into the caterwauling fury of
the Qaf. They advanced step by step, spears out on all sides, stabbing like men
possessed at the monsters that towered over them. One of the Qaf launched
itself into their midst, its great weight bowling half a dozen men through the
air. The men of the inner ranks drew their knives and swords and fell upon it
like vultures, hacking the beast to pieces even as it struggled to regain its
feet again.

The Qaf fell back.
Across the gutted wreck of the camp, other formations of Macht were following
Rictus’s example, and moving forward to engage the largest crowds of the enemy.
The Macht made of themselves bigger monsters than those they faced, monsters
with a hundred heads and a hundred keen spearpoints all in a body, all moving
as one. As the Qaf split up, so they became easier to kill, one by one, until
some kind of tipping point was reached. A collective howl went up from the
beasts. They backed away from the thick formations of spearmen, roaring and
spitting hatred. The Macht were able to look up and see them streaming back up
the mountainsides, scrabbling up the rock-strewn heights at incredible speed,
quadrupeds now, their long arms hauling them forward.

They took the
storm with them, it seemed. As the last of them disappeared into the folds and
rock-fields of the summits above, so the wind fell, and soon after the snow
drifted down in a heavy silence, the thick flakes intent now, it seemed, on
burying the dead.

“It’s quiet,”
Jason said. “Am I dead, then?”

“If you are, you’re
in bad company,” Rictus told him.

Jason opened his
eyes. Tiryn, as always, Rictus, and Mynon—all looking at him as though he were
some form of freak. He was warm. He could smell woodsmoke, feel the heat of
flames. He had almost forgotten what it was like.

Then the pain
came, flooding his extremities, an exquisite rush of returning sensation. His
lips drew back from his teeth. “I heard tell hell was a warm place,” he said.

“We’ll get you to
it, soon enough,” Mynon said, grinning.

“You look old,
Mynon. Is that grey I see in your beard?”

“No more than is
in your own, Jason.”

“What happened?”
The pictures trickled back into place now. He was alive—he was alive. And the
wind had dropped.

“I thought it was
time we got out of these mountains,” Rictus said. “We’re on the road again,
making good time, or as good as you can get in this fucking place.”

“Ah, Rictus, wake
me up when we get to where there are grapes on the vine and apples on the tree.”

“I will, Jason,
you have my word on that. And it will not be so long now.” Rictus tried to
smile, but the gesture did not take. He had dried blood on his face, a great
brown splash of it. His eyes seemed to look beyond Jason, into some unseeable
distance. Mynon’s eyes were the same.

When they left,
Tiryn propped Jason up beside the fire so that he could look upon its wondrous
heat and beyond it, the blinding white mantle of the world, dotted with the
black, insignificant dots of moving men, pasangs away.

“What are they up
to, so far from camp?” he asked Tiryn irritably.

“They’re scouting
a way out of the mountains. When the snow lifted, some of those furthest up the
hills swore they could see green lands beyond, out to the west.”

“How bad was it,
Tiryn?”

“I thought you
were dead,” she said, touching his face.

“No, no, damn
it—the army.”

“Bad. I saw men
weep. The sick, the wounded, they were all slaughtered, and hundreds more died
in their blankets, or unarmed. Rictus brought them together. They stood with
him and fought the Qaf to a standstill.”

“So, another
victory, I take it,” Jason said, his mouth a bitter line.

“Another cairn.
They built it yesterday, and then Rictus moved us on, up the valley. It’s
warmer—can’t you feel it? Even here, spring has come, Jason. I can smell it. In
the lowlands, it is full summer. When we leave these mountains, it will not be
long before you have your grapes and your apples. I too promise you that.”

“I love you,”
Jason said, not looking at her.

“What?”

“Help me up; don’t
just stare at me like a pole-axed calf. I want to stand up, to smell this new
air of yours.”

He was stronger—he
felt it in his bones. He was over the worst of it now. His breathing would
never be what it was, but he was alive. And he had this woman standing beside
him, this fine woman who was not even human. And he did not care a damn.

“When we get clear
of the mountains we’ll find somewhere, you and I,” he said to Tiryn. “Somewhere
there is no snow, and there are no armies. A quiet place.”

“Grapes and
apples,” Tiryn said, her arm about his shoulders.

“Hearth and home.”

They came down out
of the high places at last, a meandering column of ragged, limping men, their
beards long and tangled, their faces blackened by wind and cold. They drew in
their midst thirty or forty battered carts, taking turns to haul and push them
bumping over the rocks. In these were piled shields and helms and the cooking
pots they had not cooked with for many days, and in the beds of the carts lay
the gold of Tanis, or as much of it as had survived. Knowing it was within the
vehicles, the men manhandled them along without complaint. Now that it seemed
they might survive after all, it had taken on a new importance.

They marched with
their spears in hand. Their armour they had abandoned up in the mountains,
except for those among them who wore the Curse of God. As they descended the
air grew warm about them, and they cast off the rags they had bound about their
bodies, unstrapped the filthy bindings from their feet and marched barefoot,
feeling the new grass between their toes. Their eyes glittered, sunken in
fleshless faces. Some wept silently as they marched, not believing what they
saw.

The land swelled
out before them, a green and blue immensity running up to the horizon. Here and
there the gleam of a river caught the sun, and there were trees, crops,
orchards, and pasture-land with animals moving across it in herds. Nearer at
hand a large town or city sprawled in the foothills below, the smoke rising
from it in a thousand threads of grey. It was unwalled, the houses built of
pale stone, roofed with clay tiles such as the Macht used themselves in the
Harukush.

“That is Kumir,”
Rictus said, pointing. “We’ll form up before the city and send an embassy, ask
for supplies. This is rich country here, and it’s easy going all the way to the
sea.”

“How much farther
to the sea?” Whistler asked, scratching his scarred pate.

“A man marching
light could make it in two weeks, I reckon.”

“Aristos must be
close, by now,” Whistler said. “If he’s still alive.”

“I think he is,”
Rictus told him. “His kind always are.”

He had been here
before them, him and Gominos. The town elders came out to talk to Tiryn and
Jason and Rictus with several hundred of their young men armed at their backs.
They saw on the hill above their settlement a fearsome army, five thousand men
or more, all standing in rank with faces lean and hungry as wolves, a rancid
smell about them, and filth crusting every facet of their appearance except
their spearpoints. These glittered painfully bright in the early summer sun. It
was an army of vagabonds, but vagabonds who knew discipline, and were the more
frightening for it.

The town’s Headman
was an old Kefre, his golden skin faded, but his eyes still the startling
violet of the Kefren high castes. He came forward leaning on a black staff and
flanked by two others scarcely less infirm than he.

“You are Macht,”
he said in Asurian.

“We are.”

“We have seen the
likes of you before. Nine days ago your people came through here, a thousand of
them. They stole our cattle and looted our farms and slew our folk out of hand.
Are you here now to finish what they began?”

“Aristos,” Rictus
said through clenched teeth.

It was Jason who
spoke up in the Headman’s own language. “We need food, draught animals, and
wagons. Give us those, and I swear we shall harm none of you.”

“How can I believe
you?”

Tiryn stepped
forward, dropping her veil. “You may believe him. These are not like the ones
who came before. They are men of honour.”