The Ten Thousand (35 page)

“It’s their
country,” old Demotes said, a wizened vision of white beard and blackened face,
blue eyes bright and out of place in the middle of it. “They’re bred to it,
like we’re bred to the mountains. Besides, it’s not so bad. At home, in the
winter, my knees lock up after a march and I’m rubbing on them like a boy who’s
just found out how to work his piss-tube until I can stand up again.”

“I saw you grab
that Kufr girl, Gasca, how’d that work out?” Astianos said. “Me, by the time I
got to anything with a slot between its legs, it was dead. And I draw the line
at carrion.”

Gasca marched on,
saying nothing.

“He’s shy,”
Astianos said, slapping him on the back. “It was his first time, and so fucking
a Kufr doesn’t count. He’s a virgin yet.”

Gasca’s broad face
remained impassive. The sun had burnt his blond hair white and his skin was
dark as boot-leather, the freckles about his nose and cheeks a black tattoo. He
had indeed grabbed that girl, to keep her from the others. She had seemed
pretty to him, the first Kufr he had ever regarded in that way. In the chaos of
the sacked city he had hauled her into a quiet alleyway and stripped her. The
excitement of the city’s fall had invaded his brain, and he had drunk some
grain-spirit that Astianos had ferreted out of a tall-sided house. He had run
his filthy hands up and down her skin, had poked and prodded her. But her eyes
had halted him. They were dark and hopeless. She was weeping silently, just
like a real woman. So he let her go. Oddly enough, he felt no less of a man for
not raping her. He felt only relief, that he had come out of Ab-Mirza the same
man who had gone in. His friends would not understand that, but Rictus would.
He knewRictus would. So he bore the good-natured chaffing of his fellows with a
slight smile, no more. Had he but known it, the last of the boy had left him.
He marched along now with a veteran’s face, his smile that of a full-grown man
who knows his own mind.

They were all of
them thinner than they had been, all scarred in some place or other, all
sun-blackened and with bird’s-feet fans of white skin at the outer corners of
their eyes. Their nails were broken and ingrained with dirt, their feet bare,
the soles as tough as any leather. Their bodies were as worn and lean as a man’s
can be, and the muscles of their very faces could be seen cording and bunching
at jaw and temple every time they opened their mouths. They were soldiers,
creatures of appetite and routine with a core of indefinable restlessness at
their heart. They were callous, brutal, sentimental, sardonic. They were
selfish and selfless. They would knife a man over a copper obol, and would
share with him the last of their water. They would trample a masterpiece of art
in the dirt and be brought to tears by a veteran’s voice raised in song. They
were the dregs of the earth. They were Macht.

Four days, the
army marched at the punishing pace Jason set for it. Broken wagons and played-out
beasts littered the Imperial Road behind them, and foraging parties gathered
fodder for the animals, wood, and water—nothing more. As the days went on, so
the scarlet memory of Ab-Mirza receded, and the brawling in the ranks sank to a
more normal level. The last powdery, rat-gnawed remnants at the bottom of the
wagons were scooped out and set to boil in the centoi, and what meat remained
was chopped up, green and slimy, to bubble with them. For the first time, men
began to drop out of the column to void their bowels outside the time allotted
at rest stops. A week passed, and even though the pace of the march slackened
somewhat, the wagons began to fill with those whose bowels had flushed away
their strength. And those who marched on, supporting their sick comrades, grew
ever leaner.

“Enough,” Buridan
told Jason. “They know. They’re not sure they know why, but they know.”

“What do they
know?” Jason asked him.

“That you are in
command.”

“Send out full
foraging columns, Jason,” Mynon said. “Phobos’s sake, the men have to eat.”

“There’s a city
called Hadith, another three days’ march to the north-west. We get there, and
we can restock our supplies.” To answer the other men’s looks, Jason said, “We
will encamp outside the city, and send a delegation to speak with its governor.
He will have heard of Ab-Mirza. We will make its fate work for us.”

It was two more
days before Jason could bring himself to visit Tiryn again. He found her in her
wagon, a lamp lit and drawing smokily, almost out of oil. Her Juthan slave was
asleep in her blankets under the vehicle’s axle. Tiryn sat in the guttering
lamplight, staring at the flame as though it were saying something of import to
her. She looked up once as the wagon creaked under Jason’s weight, then hack at
the lamp-flame, tugging her komis closer about her face.

“The conqueror
comes,” she said in a low voice. “Have I taught you the word for murder, Jason?
It is
jurud.
It is a word you should know.”

Jason stared at
her, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching. “I’m sorry,” he said at
last. “It was not meant to have happened in that way.”

“It is war. I
should have expected nothing more. In war, what’s a city, here or there?”

“Tiryn—”

“Did you sate some
appetite at Ab-Mirza? Your men did. Now they know that Kufr women are very like
the Macht in some respects. We have holes in all the right places.”

“I shall need your
help in the days to come, Tiryn.”

“My help? What
amusement can I afford you that the Kufr of Ab-Mirza could not?”

“Enough! I need
you to speak for us, for the Macht. I need you to talk to your people. I do not
want any more cities to burn.”

She looked at him,
eyes blazing. “I should help you now?”

“You will be
helping your own folk too.”

“Betraying them,
you mean.”

“When I found you,
your own people had made quite a mess of you themselves,” Jason said, angry
now. “Since you’ve been with us, there’s not a hand been laid near you. I would
kill the man who tried.”

That cooled the
air between them. She tugged her komis away from her mouth. He saw the dark
lips move. “Why?” they said, though they made no sound.

“I ask myself that
too,” Jason said, more softly now. “I have seen cities burn before. I know what
it means. I think I am like Rictus now; I have seen enough of it. I am sick of
it, Tiryn. I believe I am sick of soldiering.” He leaned back against the side
of the wagon and exhaled, a long sigh. He stared up at the stars overhead. “Hearth,
and home,” he said.

“Orthos
,”
Tiryn said. “
Amathon
. Now you know the words for them.”

Jason smiled. “I
give you my own word,” he said. “Help us make our way home, and I shall try to
get us there without the burning of cities, the deaths of the innocent.”

The lamp winked
out with a tiny hiss, leaving them in the dark under the stars. Jason leaned
forward and touched his mouth against hers, just for a moment, a dizzying
second. She sat like some fine-boned statue of marble, fists suddenly clenched
in the blanket that covered her lap. Slowly, she replaced the folds of the
linen komis about her face, and then sat as unmoving as before. Jason opened
his hand, as though he were about to make her a gift. Then he turned and
clambered down from the wagon without another word.

The gates of
Hadith were shut, and the walls were lined with defiant citizenry. Jason strode
up to the kiln-fired brick of the battlements with only a single companion,
whilst half a pasang behind him the Macht stood in line of battle. He waved a
green branch as he approached, remembering the last time he had tried to
negotiate with Kufr. The sweat dripped down his face.

“Drop your veil,”
he said to his companion. “Let them see what you are.”

Tiryn did as she
was told. Her skin, normally the colour of a hazelnut shell, was pale now. She
was trembling with fear, eyes wide and fixed on the spears and javelins and bows
in the hands of the defenders. Jason took her hand. It was cool in his,
fine-boned and slender. She tugged it away, some colour coming back to her
face. “Keep your word,” she said quietly. “That is all I ask.”

“If they do not
open their gates, we will march away. I swear it.”

She turned and
looked down on him, managed to smile. “Very well then.”

The Macht general
and the Kufr woman stood under the loom of the city walls, and Tiryn called out
in her clear, carrying voice. She asked for food, for wagons, for draught
animals. And in return she promised the defenders that the Macht would leave
their city be, and would march off with the following dawn. If the requested
supplies were not forthcoming by dusk, she said, the city would be assaulted,
and would suffer the fate of Ab-Mirza.

An hour later, the
gates were opened, and the folk of Hadith began hauling out the contents of
their granaries and their stables and their byres. The Macht stood like an army
cast in bronze, motionless. As night fell, they moved in to collect their
spoils, and by dawn they were gone, a mere shadow on the western road, the dust
rising in a cloud to mark their passage. The gates of Hadith were opened again,
and the more valiant of its citizens went out to inspect the beaten earth of the
Macht camp. As they stood there, marvelling, they saw in the east another
dust-cloud, hanging high in the still air and moving westwards in the wake of
the Macht. A great army was on the road.

BROTHERS IN ARMS

“The land is
rising,” Rictus said. He leaned on his spear and stared westwards, into the
endless shimmering haze, the blue of distance. He stamped one heel into the
ground. “It’s drier here, better going for man and beast. Could be the lowlands
are coming to an end at last.”

“Those hills on
your left are Jutha,” Jason told him, consulting the calfskin of Phiron’s map. “The
province capital, Junnan, is three hundred pasangs to our south-west.” He
raised his head, staring westwards with Rictus, a look not unlike hunger on his
face. “From here, it’s two hundred pasangs to the mountains. Five or six days’
march, if the weather holds. Think of that, Rictus, mountains again.”

“How high are
these mountains?” Rictus asked, ever practical. He was looking at Tiryn,
kneeling on the short-cropped turf of the hillside and running her hand across
it as a farmer will feel the ears of his crop.

“Not so high as
the Magron,” she said. She stood up, taller than either of them. “The Korash
are much colder though, and there is only the one pass through them which is
fit for the passage of armies: the Irun Gates. It is defended by two
fortress-cities. On the eastern side, Irunshahr, on the western, Kumir. And it
is said the Qaf live in the mountains between the two.”

“Beyond the
mountains is the land of Askanon,” Jason told them, still staring westwards. “Beyond
it, Gansakr, and then the sea.”

Rictus had turned
and was now looking back the way they had come. Below them the camp of the army
sprawled in its rough square, the grey ribbons of a thousand campfires rising
up from it in the still air. They led the oxen out to graze, and he could hear
the armourers at work in the smithies, hammering upon their field-anvils. At
this distance, the measured strokes could almost be the tolling of bells.

He looked farther
along the horizon and there it was still, the yellow cloud on the air that was
the army of the Great King in pursuit, as dogged as a sniffing hound.

“When we fight
them again,” he said, “we shall hold the high ground.”

Jason rolled up
his map. “Indeed. And we must fight them this side of the mountains. We must
break that army before we enter the Irun Gates.”

“Another battle?”
Tiryn asked.

“Another battle,”
Jason told her. “The last, perhaps, if we do it right.”

“I’ll take the men
ahead a ways, and see what these hill-villages have in their larders,” Rictus
said. He bent and picked up his pelta, slinging the light shield across his
back. He nodded at Jason once and then set off at a swift jog. Further along
the slope his mora awaited him, some eight hundred men scattered across the
grass enjoying the cooler air, most lying on their backs asleep. As he
approached they began to rise, the movement rippling out across the hillside.
All of them had the
iktos
sigil painted across their shields, the badge
of Isca.

“He’s so young, to
lead so many men,” Tiryn said.

“He’s not so young
as he once was.” Jason set a hand in the small of her back, and set it
travelling upwards, feeling the flesh of her through the silk. It came to rest
on her nape, slid under the fabric, and brushed the tiny hairs there, as silken
as the robe she wore. Her skin goosepimpled under his fingers.

“If you want me,
why not have me?” Tiryn asked him, standing very still.

“I will not take
what is not freely given.”

“It’s been taken
before, many times.”

“That makes no
difference.” Jason slid his hand away, brought it up and grasped her chin
through the thin material of the komis. “I want what is in here,” he said,
shaking her head gently. “Here.” He set his hand gently on the warmth of one
breast, and felt the thudding of her heart within, the heat of her. She moved
infinitesimally closer, pushing her breast into his palm so that he could feel
the nipple through the fine stuff of her robe.

“You are Macht,”
she said. “I am Kufr.”

“I don’t care,
Tiryn.”

She bent her head,
and after a moment’s hesitation she kissed him through the veil. “Others will.”

“I don’t care,” he
repeated.

“Let it be so
then,” she said. “For a while. Until we come to the shores of the sea.” Her
hand came up and caressed his face, touching lightly on old scars.

“Until then,” he
agreed, and kissed her again.