The Ten Thousand (16 page)

“General Vorus of
the Macht,” he was announced. Always, of the Macht. It was that epithet that
made heads swivel in the Court, that silenced the bullshit tapestries of
conversation weaving their delicate ways about the King’s ears. Vorus knew this
Great King to speak to, but his father he had known better. Anurman had been a
soldier, a hunter, a gardener. He had loved everything which nature had created,
had planted bulbs with his bare hands, and with his bare hands had slain
several assassins who had hoped to end his line. A plain Kufr, one of courage
and honesty and humour, Vorus had learned generalship at his side. At first a
novelty— the Macht renegade—he had progressed to errand-runner, and thence to
warleader. But first, foremost, and forever, he had been a friend.

That was the pity
of it—that Anurman’s heirs were wood from some different tree. But Vorus served
the son because of love for the dead father. It was why he was here now,
sweating under the undulating air stirred by half a thousand fan-bearers.
Because he owed it to the man he had known.

“You may advance,”
the outer chamberlain said with the great stately patronising chill of his
caste. “Keep your eyes down, and always—”

“I know this
dance,” Vorus said and strode forward, scarlet cloak wrapped about his left
arm, black cuirass sucking light from the hall.

The usual crowds,
a long, useless length of them clad in the raiment that ten thousand villages
toiled every year to produce. The Great King had entire towns devoted to the
production of his slippers. One might laugh and disbelieve, until one saw it.
Half a world given over to the luxuries of a few thousand; it was monstrous,
until you realised that they were well paid and lived in peace. That was a good
thing, was it not? To live in peace, even if that peace were servitude, and at
the whim of the next high-caste Kefren higher in the preening order.

A phalanx of court
officials stood on either side of the throne, and two Honai in full armour but
for their shields. Vorus halted, and then went to his knees. He lowered himself
further, until his forehead kissed the cool marble of the floor, then regained
his feet with a swiftness that belied his years. The prostration was performed
by those not kin to the King, or outside his favour. In the old days Vorus had
performed a bow, no more, and then Anurman would stride forward and take him by
the hand and look him in the eye.

“Great King, here
stands General Vorus of the Macht, commander of the city garrison, who served
under your blessed father and won high renown at the battles of Carchanis and
Qafdir.” The High Chamberlain rolled out the words with a fine, ringing relish,
so that all in the hall could hear them. He met Vorus’s eye as he spoke, and
the two shared an imperceptible nod. Old Xarnes had been Anurman’s High
Chamberlain too, and had a fine sense of loyalty.

“He seeks an
audience.”

“I know who he is.
He may speak, Xarnes.”

Vorus raised his head.
“My lord, I have received a message from the west. It might be better if its
content were divulged in a more private setting.”

“We are among our
kin here, General, and our friends. You may speak freely.” Ashurnan leaned one
elbow on his throne and sat forward with a smile on his face. Taller and paler
than his father had been, he had the gold skin of the highest castes, the
violet eyes of the nobility. And his father’s smile and easy manner. Vorus
stepped forward a pace and lowered his voice.

“Your brother
Arkamenes has raised the standard of rebellion against you. He has suborned
Governor Gushrun of Artaka, raised an army of Macht, and is leading them east.
He left Tanis the better part of a month ago; they will be in Jutha by now. If
he is not hindered, he will be before the walls of this city in six weeks. He
means to take the throne.”

Ashurnan blinked,
the smile freezing upon his face. “How do you know this before I?”

“Your father had
me install trustworthy men in most of the major provinces. They reported to me
alone, and some still do.”

Ashurnan collected
himself with admirable speed, but not before a flicker of the anger shone
through. “What of our Royal spies in Artaka? There has been no word of this
from them.”

“My lord, they are
either dead or have been bought by your brother. It is by the merest chance
that we have this information in such a timely fashion. We must begin mustering
the Royal Levy at once if we are to meet the traitor in battle.”

The Great King sat
back in his throne, his face blank. Only his fingers moved, gripping the arms
of the massive, ornate chair until the blood showed blue about his knuckles. “You
are quite sure about this, General? You are happy to stake your life on the
word of this source of yours?”

Vorus’s voice was harsh
as that of an old crow. “Very happy, my lord.” He lifted his head, defying
protocol, and looked the king in the eye. “I served your father all my life. I
serve his son now with the same measure of devotion. If I am wrong in this,
then you may have that life, gladly given.”

Ashurnan held his
eyes as one man to another, rank, protocol set aside; he was setting Vorus on
the scales of his reckonings, wondering if the son could truly inherit the
loyalty that had been freely given to the father. Vorus knew this and stood
very still, face set.

“Loyalty must be
earned, if it is to be worth anything,” the king said to Vorus. It was as
though all others in the hall had disappeared and it was only the pair of them,
equals, circling each other’s intentions and memories and wondering how they
would dictate the future entanglement of their lives.

“Trust is worth
something also, my lord,” Vorus said hoarsely. “Your father taught me that.”

The moment broke.
Ashurnan stood up. All down the gleaming length of the hall the talk stilled,
and the brilliant creatures of the court bowed deep.

“Xarnes, summon my
generals, and some scribes—good ones who write fast and clear. General Vorus,
we will adjourn to the ante-room. Your second in the Garrison is Proxis, is it
not?”

“Yes, lord.” An
old friend, and the only Juthan general in the Empire, Proxis would be drunk by
now, it being mid-morning.

“Hand over your
command to him. I have other uses for you now. Xarnes! I want runners, and the
fastest despatch-riders in the city. Hunt them up. We must make use of our
time.”

Robes hissing on
the floor, Ashurnan turned on his heel, beckoning them after him with just that
abrupt, impatient jerk of his hand that his father had used. Vorus found
himself smiling and wondering if there was not some of the old man’s wood in
the son after all.

Before noon, the
riders began leaving the gates of the city with courier pennants flapping from
their spines. These bobbing flags of silk opened up the roadways and sent all
other traffic into the ditches as the couriers sped at full, frantic gallop
down the good paved roads of Asuria, the heartland of the Empire. They went
east, to Arakosia, south to Medis and Kandasar, north to the fastnesses of the
Adranos Mountains, and westwards—by far the largest number went westwards.
These riders galloped to Hamadan, the king’s summer-capital in the heights of
the Magron Mountains, and past that, the Asurian Gates, the narrow series of
defiles that led out to the vastness of Pleninash beyond, and the Land of the
Rivers with its many cities, lush farmland, and teeming millions of subjects
and province governors, each of whom were mighty as kings in their own right.
All the messages the couriers carried were the same. Raise your armies and
stockpile supplies. The Great King calls you all to war.

PHOBOS’S DANCE

THE ABEKAI CROSSING

In the morning,
the line of infantry stood in place as though they had been planted there.
Three pasangs long, they had stood-to in the dark before dawn and now had their
shields at their knees and were donning helms. Up and down the line
water-carriers waddled, giving each warrior a glug from the bulging skins.
Behind the line, cavalry moved casually in loose formation and in the
centre-rear the baggage train sat like a lumpen mole on the plain, several
hundred handcarts and wagons full of gear and rations that were manned by a
bewildering crowd of non-combatants.

To the front of
the line the Abekai River foamed between its banks, raised by spring meltwater.
This was a ford, or had been. After that there had been a bridge, but the
Asurian engineers were now busy levering the last of its masonry into the
river. So it was a ford again, and the only crossing-point for four hundred
pasangs. The line of Kufr infantry were quite happy to stand before the ruined
bridge and wait. They had reinforcements coming it was rumoured, the Great King
himself perhaps. In the meantime, let the feared spearmen of the Macht grow
fins, or chance the rocky riverbed in rushing water up to their chests. Either
way, the Great King’s levy would be pleased to receive them, should they be
insane enough to try crossing.

The courier had
arrived four days before with the fortuitous elan of some staged play. The
governor of southern Jutha had a sizeable garrison of Kefren to play with, and
as soon as he had dropped the Imperial scroll from his nerveless hands he had
mustered these and set them on the road, no small achievement in the time
allotted to him. These twenty thousand spearmen now stood in eight ranks along the
ruins of the Abekai bridge, and had arrived there a scant two days before the
appearance of Arkamenes’s vanguard.

Out of the desert
these invaders had come, their ranks shimmering in magnified blurs of scarlet
and shine as they tramped amid the heat-haze of the Gadinai. It had been a
spectacle to see, a life’s event. Crowds had ridden out from Tal Byrna to
watch, then had hurried away again. In the van of the enemy host had been the
bronze and scarlet machine of the Macht, and when one saw them move unwearied
into camp in perfect ranks, singing as they came, somehow the thousands of
landlords’ sons on the eastern bank seemed less reassuring.

That first night,
the opposing banks had been dark and bristling, there being no firewood to burn
on this edge of the Gadinai. The Kefren spearmen had stood by the riverbank and
stared out into the darkness opposite and had tried, as all men have always
tried, to look into the hearts of their enemy. A hundred paces away, the
creatures on the western bank had done likewise, Macht and Kefren and Juthan
alike, sidling down to the riverbank in the small hours to try and glean some
wisdom out of the night and perhaps gain some courage. But on either side of
the river, none truly believed that his adversary was doing the same. They
walked back to their fireless camps with hearts as full of ignorance and hatred
and fear as before.

“The skirmishers,
in a mass, in the night,” Phiron was saying. At his shoulders Pasion stood
mute, and Jason listening. “We send them across in morai, and as they gain the
eastern bank, so we feed in the spearmen. We must have space for the phalanx to
shake out and reassemble, lord, else their impact is lost.”

He had been giving
this speech, or variations on it, for an hour now, a good two turns of the
clock. And watching Arkamenes’s golden face, he knew that it was all piss
dropped down a drain.

“My lord, you
perhaps overestimate the capabilities of our race.”

“I do not,”
Arkamenes said with great good humour, speaking for the first time in too long.
He was well wrapped in a scarlet cloak lined with the fur of hares, and the
great tent within which they all spoke was warmed further by a series of
braziers, all burning the black stones that passed for fuel hereabouts. They
did not smell as fine as burning wood, but they did the job well enough, and
were better than the camel-dung that had been their lot in the crossing of the
Gadinai.

“In truth,
General, all I want is to demonstrate the fighting superiority of this race of
yours. Something, I might add, which I have been eager to witness at first
hand. If your soldiers are all that hearsay makes them out to be, then you will
do this thing for me—and you may even call it a demonstration of good faith. I
have been paying your wages now for quite some time. I wish to see this machine
of yours in full flow, as it were. I do not want to see a series of ragged boys
wading through the river to sling stones at the enemy. Do you take my meaning?
Or am I being unclear?”

Phiron bowed. What
this Kufr said was almost just. The crossing of the desert had frayed all their
nerves—especially since the Macht had been always in the van, by virtue of
their faster marching. The Kufr host had been eating their dust for weeks, and
this had not improved cooperation between the races.

We could have been
here two sennights ago if it had not been for you and that ridiculous baggage
train, Phiron thought, but his face remained blank. This, here, was where the
contract cost the lives of his men. It had always been so—it was just a little
more pronounced this time, and on a larger scale.

What fat-headed
fuck sired him? he wondered as he bowed to Arkamenes and promised a heavy
assault in the morning. And he promised himself that in event of disaster, he
would find his way back to this warm tent, and see if he couldn’t make Antimone
weep a little.

They walked away
from the king’s tent in the chill desert night, and Jason explained with
surprising accuracy what had just occurred—this to Pasion, who worked his mouth
and said nothing until Jason was done. Phiron paused and looked up at the
stars, closing his eyes for a moment to Phobos as one should, and nodding at
Haukos for hope. As Pasion began to speak, he cut him off.

“We do it. He’s
paying us, and this is the way he wants it done.”