The Ten Thousand (13 page)

The centurions
went bare-headed, the better to shout and be recognised by those they were
shouting at. As ship after ship came in, and more and more men filed off them
to stand in rigid rows upon the quays, so the crowds who had gathered to watch
grew noisier and more packed. Lines of Kufr spearmen kept them back from the
ranks of the Macht, but under their tall helms their eyes were as wide as those
of the straining hordes behind them.

Jason went up and
down the front rank of his centon in full armour, his iron helm with its
transverse crest bumping at his hip. “Stand still, you bastards,” he said in a
low snarl. “Show them who you are. Buridan, kick those fucking skirmishers into
line.”

They were led off
the quays by Orsos’s Dolphins, a disreputable crew even by the standards of
mercenaries. In some moment of grim gaiety, these had slathered their armour in
black paint found in the hold of their ship, and so it was as though a whole
centon of cursebearers led the army from the waterside into the teeming
vast-ness of the city that awaited them. Pasion was up in the van, conversing
with great reserve with a pair of Kufr guides, each inclining gracefully to
hear his words in the hubbub of the crowd. Even at a distance, it was possible
to see that he was fighting not to recoil as the fragrant, golden faces leaned
closer to his own, the violet eyes in them gleaming bright as some stone found
in the desert.

Rictus stayed with
the ships along with all the other skirmishers. The off-loading of the Macht
gear and animals was going to last some time. There was some shouting and
weapons were brandished as a huge crowd of Juthan dockworkers swarmed up to the
gangplanks, pushing wheeled cranes in their midst as though they were siege
engines brought to the walls of a hostile fortress. The skirmishers closed
ranks and spat abuse at the line of grey-skinned Juthan, who stood impassive,
yellow eyes blinking balefully. Only when a centurion came striding down the
waterfront, swearing at them for fools, did the skirmishers relent and let the
brawny Juthan clamber over their ships and begin the hot and heavy work of
winching the army’s stores ashore.

“They smell
different,” one of Rictus’s comrades said, upper lip rising over his teeth. “Do
you get it too? Like a beach in the summer when the tide has left weed on the
strand.”

“That’s the port
you smell,” Rictus told him. But he was not sure that the fellow was wrong.
Jostled beyond irritation on the crowded deck, he climbed up the mainmast
shrouds until he was fifty feet above the wharf. From here the press and din
and heat of the city seemed no less overpowering. The great harbours of Tanis
were crammed with ships—not just the Macht fleet, but half a thousand other
vessels, all edging to the docks for off-loading or loading. And the streets
leading up from the waterfront were a jammed chaos of pedestrians, carts,
handcarts, wagons, and pack-animals. Only the thoroughfare up which the Macht
army now marched seemed free of congestion, the inhabitants of the city making
way for the river of bronze and scarlet as it wound its way inland to where the
white towers gleamed. Suddenly, the world had become a place immense beyond
Rictus’s imaginings, and the army that had appeared huge and fearsome in its
multitudes back in the Harukush was now swallowed up by Tanis as a bullfrog
will snap up a gnat.

Sweating like a
horse, Pasion nonetheless felt the cool relief wash over him as he recognised
Phiron standing at the summit of the street, waiting for the glittering river
of men to trudge their way up to him. Phiron was grinning, that handsome face
of his burnt dark, the grey eyes flashing bright in the shadow of it. He fell
into step beside Pasion and the murmur went back down the gasping column. The
men lifted their heads somewhat, eyes flickering in the T-shaped slots of their
helmets, crests bobbing and feet tramping up and down. They began to keep time,
and the cadence grew as the hob-nailed sandals on their feet punished the
cobbles.

Pasion had always
resented Phiron a little for his good looks, his aristocratic ways, his easy
grasp of larger things; but he was glad to see him now. The two men gripped
each other’s forearms without breaking stride. “Where are they taking us?”
Pasion asked, nodding to the pair of Kefren striding easily ahead.

“Out to the Desert
Wall; the
Kerkh-Gadush
they call it. It’s a fair tramp, and you and I
cannot go all the way. We’re wanted in the Aadan, the High City. Our principal
awaits us there, no doubt growing mighty impatient. I want ten centurions too,
to make a bit of a show. Make sure one of them is Jason of Ferai; I need an
educated man there.”

Pasion smiled
without humour. “He’s ten paces behind you, Dogshead banner and all. What about
Orsos?”

“No, for God’s
sake. I want quick-witted fellows who know how to keep their tongue behind
their teeth. Mynon—we’ll take him. Pick out the rest, Pasion. There’s not a
moment to lose.”

Phiron and Pasion
stood aside and let the men march past them. They snagged Jason and Mynon,
called them out of the endless files. Marios of Karinth, a hardened killer who
nonetheless had the bland face of a baker. Durik of Neslar, black-bearded and
broken-nosed, a veteran with a love of music. Pomero of Arienus, red-haired,
his freckled face peeling in the beat of the foreign sun. Five others; the
younger, the comelier, the more presentable of the army’s centurions. Phiron
called them all out of the marching files, bade them smarten themselves up with
a curtness he had not possessed six months before, and then led them up the
man-made tell of Tanis’s upper city.

Every centurion he
had chosen bore the Curse of God black and lightless on his back.

RULERS OF THE WORLD

Twelve men walked
up the echoing length of that great space, that towering weight of marble and
gold leaf and limestone arrayed in odd and improbable swirling balconies and
galleries clear up to its roof, the vaulted pillars wrought in unsettling
sinuous curves which did not ought to lie within the art of the mason. They did
not look up, but in their close and fearsome helms kept their eyes facing
front. They bore swords, but had left their real weapons behind. In the
legendary black God-given armour of the Macht they strode onwards, scarlet cloaks
wrapped around their left forearms, scarlet transverse crests nodding to their
shoulders. They came to a halt in one bracing crash of iron on stone and stood
like things immutable and unworldly in all that varicoloured, fragranced throng
which packed the walls of the hall, silenced by curiosity and a little fear.

Tiryn watched from
one side of the dais. Phiron she had seen up close—and now she watched him bow
and doff his helm before Arkamenes and Gushrun and Amasis, all regal as statues
in a little tableau they had practised beforehand, Arkamenes sitting upon the
throne, Gushrun standing on his right hand with the staff of the governorship
in one manicured hand, Amasis on the left, a vision of white linen. Down the
hall the two lines of Kefren spearmen stood tall and fearsome in full, shining
armour. It was as good a show as she’d seen—even in Ashur the Great King would
not do much better, not for the everyday business of meeting his commanders. So
what was different?

Tiryn tugged her
veil down a little, that she might smell. The Macht stink she caught at once.
There was an acrid fullness to it. These things sweated like animals and
smelled like animals. Even the incense in the overhead burners could not wipe
it out. In her childhood, Tiryn had sat in the stables while the slaves rubbed
down horses fresh from the circuit. The smell was like that.

But there was
something else. Impossible to define, it might have been something to do with
the way these things simply stood, in attitudes of easy attention before the
dais, oblivious to the crowds behind them, the great ones they faced, the
opulent and crushing grandeur of their surroundings. They seemed more solid
than anything else in the hall. Perhaps it was that fabled armour they wore,
which reflected no light. Even the tallest of them barely came to the shoulder
of the shortest Kefren guard, and yet…

I here was
something unsettling about these mercenaries, far beyond the myth and rumour
which surrounded their race. Tiryn felt, standing there with one hand holding
her veil from her face, that she was in the presence of something
wrong
,
something that did not belong in the world she knew.

Another stir in
the crowded hall as Phiron spoke up in good Kefren, the language of Kings. He
had worked hard on his accent and sounded foreign but not boorish. It was
remarkable to hear this thing speak up in the cultured tongue of the nobility,
that which they spoke in the very throne-hall of Ashur itself.

“My lord, I bring
to you the flower of our people, the finest warriors we possess. I bring before
you one hundred centons of Macht spearmen to swell the ranks of your armies, to
aid you in the time ahead. My lord, we are yours, here and now. We will not quit
your service until you stand supreme in the Empire, and are crowned Great King
in the holy halls of Ashur. This we have all sworn.” Here, Phiron bowed deep,
and after an awkward, ugly little pause, so did the other Macht standing behind
them, faces unreadable behind their helmets.

Arkamenes stood
up, smiling. “My dear friends,” he began, stretching out his arms in the
gesture which was his wont upon making a speech.

Tiryn edged away.
Beside her, some of Arkamenes’s higher-caste concubines stepped aside to let
her pass, as one would make way for a malodorous beggar. She was the favourite,
but when it came to it, he would breed with them. One could not have a true
heir with low-caste blood in him. Tiryn lifted her head and thanked God for the
kohl and stibium she had applied about her eyes that morning. They felt like
armour to her now as she made her way through the crowd. The other concubines
would have bowed to her, had Arkamenes’s eyes been upon them. Now they barely
gave her room to scrape past them. The closer he came to power, the less he
would look for his little low-caste whore, the
hufsa
from the Magron
Mountains. Would he miss her? Probably not. He talked to her in the night
because it did not matter what one said to a
hufsa.
One might as well
confide in a stone.

And yet, she
thought, I walk here in silk and linen with gold upon my forehead and wrists
and ankles, a bodyguard five steps behind, and a maid behind that. Mother, I
did well.

She remembered the
white mountains, and the blue sky beyond. From there, one looked down on the
brown and green plains below with the glitter of the rivers and thought of them
as another world, a place to provide a sorry backdrop to the real existence of
snow and stone. And yet those endless, horizon-spanning river-plains with their
black soils and thrice-yearly harvest were the powerhouse of the world, and
demanded tribute from those who lived on their borders. And so Tiryn had been
sent, in lieu of a son for the army. One serviced the Empire in whatever way
one could.

And now it had
been so long that the mountains were mere distant pictures in her head. I have
become spoiled, she thought. Too long in palaces. I was born in a place where
people worshipped God out of doors, stood before fallen rocks on the heads of
mountains and looked up and spoke their mind to him. Now He is hedged about
with ceremony and sanctuary, candlelight and gold. One whispers to Him in the
shadows.

One begins to
doubt if He is there to listen.

Momentarily, she
hated herself. This soft, well-clad creature with painted eyes and pointed
nails, who now doubted all the good things her parents had fought to make her
learn. Why? Because she had seen something of the world and had begun to count
herself wise.

Her mother had
sliced off a fingertip the day the Tax collectors had taken Tiryn away.
Wordless, white-faced, and without complaint, she had lopped it off with the
best of her cooking knives, making of Tiryn’s going a bereavement. Tiryn had
understood and had not wept upon leaving, so shocked was she by the knowledge
that this was for real and forever, not some temporary exile. But she had cried
herself to sleep later that night, after the Tax collectors had taken it in
turns to rape her.

Leaving the hall,
staring down a pair of sentries in order to leave by one of the bewilderingly
situated side doors, she found herself walking downhill because it was the
easiest way to go. The heat of the day was beginning to fade a little, and it
was becoming colder. Many of the local folk were clad in wrapped burnooses,
which made Tiryn smile unwillingly, remembering childhoods deep with snow, and
frozen lambs set in the ash of the fire to bring back some warmth of life. This
winter, as they called it, was as warm as an upland spring. Artaka claimed to
be the oldest place in the world, and Tanis its oldest city. Tiryn could
believe that, but she still felt that slight scorn the mountain-dweller
harbours towards the lowlander. Higher the land, lower the caste, the old
saying went. That also was true. The tall, golden-skinned Kefren from the humid
and fertile river-plains; these had been rulers of the world time out of mind.
They utilised the other races and castes as a carpenter will reach into his box
of tools. It had always been this way, and most thought it always would. But
for Tiryn, looking on that small group of black-armoured soldiers in the great
hall of Tanis today, there had been a jolt of some strange emotion she could
not quite bring to register. These things; these men. They had never been
anything to do with that box of tools. They did not show deference; they did
not care about caste. They were ignorant, and Tiryn sensed that in their
ignorance they would be full of hate. But all the same—all the same—how good it
was to see the mighty Kefren stand unassured for once, and somehow in awe of
the fierce creature they had invited over their doorstep.