The Ten Thousand (6 page)

Then Rictus had
embedded his eating knife in the goatman’s neck, right up the hilt. The man
wailed, his grasp loosened. He scrabbled at the knife handle and tumbled
backwards. About to follow him, Gasca’s chiton was seized from behind. There
were arms about him, a stink of sweat and cheap scent.

“Easy there,” the
fat merchant said. “Find your feet, lad.”

Recovering
himself, Gasca blinked sweat out of his eyes. On the steps below him his blood
had trickled in a thin stream, now diluted with his urine, steaming, all the
stuff of his insides turned to liquid.

The goatmen backed
down the stairs. Three of them now lay still and dark on the snow, and two more
were grasping their wounds and struggling to keep the blood inside their flesh.

“I believe they’ve
had enough,” Rictus said.

“It was so fast,”
one of the young husbands said behind them. He had been four feet from the
struggle, and it had not touched him, nor had he so much as raised his arm.
Dimly, Gasca had some insight of what real phalanx fighting might be like. The
proximity to violence of some, so close to the spearheads, and yet not part of
the fight.

“Now, after me,”
Rictus said. There was a kind of joy in his face as he started down the stair.

“No, boy!” the fat
merchant shouted, and he seized Rictus’s chiton in much the way he had Gasca’s.
“Let them go. You go down those stairs and they’ll fight you to the death. You
may win, but there’s no need for it, and you’re likely to take a bad hurt
before the last goes down.”

Rictus suddenly
looked very young, like a sullen boy denied the treat he had been promised. He
hesitated, and the look vanished. That calm came across his face again, and a
smile that was not entirely pleasant. He gently lifted the fat merchant’s hand
from his clothing, and then turned to address their enemies.

“Take your wounded
and go,” he called down to the goatmen.

“Come down and
fight us here,” one shouted back in the guttural accents of the high Harukush. “We
will wait for you.”

“You will die, all
of you, if we do,” Rictus said. And he was still smiling.

The goatmen stared
at him. One spat blood onto the snow. Then they began to methodically strip
their dead, whilst one remained at the foot of the stairs, spear at ready.

“You’ve done well,
lads,” the fat merchant said. “Now with a little more help from the goddess, we’ll
be in Machran by nightfall. We’ve nothing left to fear from these ugly wights.”

They stood upon
the wall, watching while the goatmen bundled up the belongings of their dead
comrades. When they were done, the three bodies lay nude in the snow, their
hairy nakedness taking on a bluish tinge already. Then, without ceremony, the
five survivors took off, the leg-hurt one hobbling and hissing in the rear.
They turned a corner of the ruins and disappeared.

“They may hide and
ambush us,” Rictus said. “I would.”

“You and your
friend have put fear in them,” the fat merchant said. “I know these sorts. I
come from Scanion, in the deep mountains. We used to hunt them like they were
boar. Good sport, if you’ve a strong stomach. They’re brave when they’re in
numbers, with an easy kill in sight, but you kill one or two and the rest lose
heart right quick, like vorine. This pack is spent. Though what they’re doing
so close to Machran is anybody’s guess. I’ve never met them so low.” And then, “Boy,
that leg of yours needs attended.”

Gasca took off his
helm and closed his eyes as the cold air cooled the sweat on his head. “You
saved my life between you. I am in your debt now.”

“You saved mine by
standing there,” the fat merchant grunted. “Do not speak of debt to me.”

“Nor me,” Rictus
said. “You took that first javelin on your shield when it was aimed my way.”

Gasca and Rictus
looked at one another. Both their hands rose in the same moment, and in the
next they grasped each other’s wrists in the warrior salute, smiling, seeming
not much more than boys.

“Of course, you
did piss yourself,” Rictus said.

MACHRAN

There was a legend
that the Macht had once been ruled by a single King, a mighty soldier, a just
ruler, an architect of ambition and vision. He had gathered together all the
scattered cities of his empire and connected them with a series of great roads,
hewn with titanic labour out of the very faces of the mountains. Bas Mathon on
the coast, he had linked to Gan Cras in the very heart of the Harukush range.
Thousands of pasangs of highway he had carved across the northern world, the
better to speed the passage of his messengers, his governors, his armies. But
they also sped the feet of his enemies. An unruly, restless and stiff-necked
people, the Macht had overthrown him, broken down his palace at Machran, and
splintered his empire into a hundred, two hundred different vying polities. The
cities had elected their own rulers, one by one. They had forged alliances and
broken them, and they had bludgeoned their own passage through history,
heedless of any larger call on their allegiances. The empire of the Macht was
no more; the idea of a single King ruling all the great cities of the Harukush
came to seem fantastic, then risible; a tale to he scoffed at in taverns. But
the roads still stood. Some fell into disrepair, but the most important ones
survived, and men still walked them to trade their wares and make their wars
and indulge the lust of their wanderings. The King who had made them became a
figure of myth, and in time even his name was forgotten, and the stones he had
set up to commemorate it were worn smooth by the wind and rain of centuries.

The greatest of
these roads led to the city of Machran, which had once been the capital of this
vanished empire. Even today, it was the most populous and formidable of all the
Macht city-states, and almost alone out of all others it had never fallen to
siege or assault. What central institutions the Macht as a people possessed
were housed in Machran, and competing cities might send embassies there for
mediation, or to hire mercenary spearmen to bolster their flagging battle
lines. For Machran attracted the shiftless, the penniless, the adventurous, and
the downright criminal in ways no other city could, and these men put up their
services for sale at the great hiring fairs held thrice yearly. In Machran, it
was said, everything was for sale, and a man might find himself bought and sold
there before he knew it.

The road which
Gasca and his companions had tramped for so many days came to an end at the
grey walls of the city. Once faced with white marble, the battlements had been
battered by the centuries and the greedy hands of men. Now most of the good
marble had gone except for yellowing pockets here and there, lonely teeth in a
blackened mouth. For all that, the walls were impressive, perhaps five times a
tall man’s height, the gatehouse in which the road ended twice that. Gasca
could glimpse the wood and iron scaffolds of ancient war machines atop the
wall-towers. Ballistas and mangonels and other engines which were but
half-known names to him. The flitting sunlight snapped in spikes off the bronze
of helms and spearheads as sentries paced the catwalks.

The road broadened
into a muddy field before the towering gatehouse, the stone flags of it lost in
ankle-deep mud and the droppings of every animal tamed by man. Carts, wagons,
and pack mules stood surrounded by a jabbering crowd of men, women, and
children who glared and talked and gesticulated and seemed on the point of some
communal violence while the bored guards in the gateway waved them through,
beating the slower beasts of burden with the flat of their spearheads. Gasca,
Rictus, and their company were swallowed up in this crowd, repaying thumps and
shoves with interest until they had passed through the dark echo of the
gatehouse itself. On the other side the city reared up over them, as sudden and
startling to witness as a precipice. They stumbled out of the way of the
entering hordes and gathered themselves together, a final headcount. Gasca bent
his head back and gaped without shame, a perfect picture of the country boy in
town for the day—if one ignored the armour on his back and the weapons he bore.

Well, he thought,
there is, at least, no shit rolling down the middle of the street.

The company was
scattering. The procuress actually kissed Gasca on the mouth, then cackled and
strode off, the urchin children now secured to her waist with thin lengths of
cord. These were so cowed by the sight of the great city however that they
clung to her side. She was taking them to the slave-market in the Goshen
Quarter. One child turned and waved at Gasca as he went, huge frightened eyes
in a filthy face.

The young husbands
shook his hand one after the other in the finger-grip of the artisan. Their
wives had donned veils, the informality of the road abandoned, and they were as
demure as matrons now. No more squealing in the blankets by a campfire for
them.

The thin merchant
spoke briefly to his colleague and departed without a word for the men who had
bled for him. He was perhaps still bemoaning his lost ass.

“Ungrateful sod,”
Rictus said mildly.

“You boys will
stay with me until you can shift for yourselves,” the fat merchant said. “I
will hear of nothing else. On the Street of Lamps, in the Round Hill Quarter,
you must go to the Beggar’s Purse, nigh the amphion, the speaker’s place, and
tell them that you are guests of Zeno of Scanion. You tell them that, and you’ll
save yourself an obol or two. I will meet you there later and we shall wet our
throats in memory of the Defence of Memnos.” He grinned.

“Zeno of Scanion,”
Gasca said, smiling, “it shall be so.”

“Ah! Till later
then. Be careful, boys. No goat-men here, but plenty of jackals. One hand to
your money and the other on a good knife.”

Zeno—now they knew
his name at least—left them with a wink and a wave. He was bowed under a heavy
pack, for the goatmen, though they had slaughtered the donkeys, had not had the
time to loot all the merchants’ wares.

Staring, Rictus
and Gasca moved aside to let the torrent of humanity move past and around them.
On all sides, like white cliffs, buildings rose faced with marble. The streets
were shadowed by them, made into narrow channels through which the people of
the city flowed and whirled and turned. Rictus and Gasca were like twigs in a
millrace, snagged for a moment by their own irresolution while the current
broke around them.

“That’s the
Empirion,” Gasca said, pointing. “I’ve heard of it. Gestrakos himself lectured
there, back before my city had even been founded.” This was a white dome, the
sun blazing off it and the golden statue that surmounted it. The structure
looked like some lost element of a dream brought to earth; it did not seem that
its foundations could be planted on the same ground that bore their feet.

Handcarts rattled
by them in convoy, bearing all manner of foodstuffs. Boys hauled them, while
their fathers or elder brothers walked alongside, quirting the fingers of the
avaricious with olive-wood wands. Machran had a vast hinterland about it, some
of the richest soils in the Macht. It was famed for its olives, its figs, and
its wine. The only place in the Harukush where the stuff did not have to be
sweetened with pine resin, it was said.

“All these people.
There’s the whole Gosthere Assembly here in this one street. But I see no
scarlet cloaks,” Gasca said. “Where might all the mercenaries be found?”

“We should ask, I
suppose,” Rictus said. But he stood motionless, strangely intimidated by the
great city, the teeming crowds who afforded him not so much as a greeting or a
glance, but who all, it seemed, had somewhere important to be.

“What say you we
wander and let our feet have their say?”

“A fine idea,”
Gasca said sourly, “for those not bowed under the weight of a panoply and
carrying thread stitched in their leg.”

“Give me your
shield then. We’ll hobble at any pace you care to set.”

“A lame soldier,”
Gasca said, handing over his father’s shield. “What a prize I’ll be for some
centurion to sign up.”

“It’s a good gash.
It’ll heal quick. Here; look at mine.” Rictus lifted up the hem of his filthy
chiton so that Gasca could see the purple scar on his ribs. It was oozing clear
fluid and looked only half-healed.

“How long have you
had that?” Gasca asked, shocked.

“Long enough to
grow tired of it. Come; let’s find someone who knows about the hiring of
soldiers. This place is making me weary already.”

They forged a pass
through the press, twigs in the millrace. Rictus led the way, using the blunt
bowl of the shield to shove the unwary out of his path. It helped that both of
them were tall, raw-boned men of the inner mountains. Here, the Macht as a
people were shorter and darker of hair and skin. The women were very pretty
though, and they did not veil their faces in public as many of the mountain
folk did, but strode about the streets as freely as any man, sometimes showing
their arms and legs as well. In among the foot-walkers and cart-haulers there
were also closed boxes with curtained windows, carried by men on poles. Rictus
wondered what they contained, until he saw one curtain twitched aside and a fat
white-faced woman shouted abuse at her bearers, her thick fingers alight with
rings. He broke into a laugh, for he had never seen anyone borne about in a box
before.

It was Gasca who
had the best view about them, he being taller than almost every other head in
the street. He tugged Rictus to a halt in the middle of a broad, column-lined
thoroughfare. On either side of them there was a clangour of metal on metal,
for amid the columns were scores of one-man shops, each with a blackened smith
hammering out metal on small anvils before which they knelt cross-legged. These
were not farriers, or armourers, but silversmiths, and their hammers tapped out
intricate designs on argent sheets which were to become some fripperies to
ornament a rich man’s house.