by Paul Kearney
And people, people everywhere.
The sound of the city’s agony carried up into the hills. A dull roar, a swallowing up of all individual voice, so that it seemed the sound was not made by men and women and children, but was the torment of the city itself. It rose with the smoke, which now began to smart Rictus’s eyes. Plumes of black rose in ribands and banners within the circuit of the walls. Crowds clogged the streets, and in the midst of the roar one could now make out the clangour of metal on metal. At every gate, mobs of men were pressing inwards with spears held aloft, bearing the hollow-bowled shields of the Macht warrior class. There were devices on those shields, a city badge.
Rictus looked to his side in the gathering darkness, at Remion. His captors had retrieved their cached panoplies on the way here. White on scarlet, there was painted upon Remion’s shield the sigil gabios, first letter of his city’s name. Almost all the shields below had such devices.
“Isca dies at last,” Remion said. “Well, it has been a long time coming, and you folk have been a long time asking for it.”
“You thought you were better than us,” Broken-nose sneered. “The mighty Iscans, peerless among all the Macht. Now we will fuck your women and slaughter your old and make slaves of your vaunted warriors. What have you to say to that, Iscan?” He punched Rictus in the side of the head.
Rictus staggered, straightened, and slowly rose to his feet. He stared at the death of his city, the red bloom of its fall now beginning to light the darkening sky. Such things happened perhaps once in a generation. He had merely been unlucky, he and all his comrades.
“I say,” he said quietly, “that it took not one, nor two, but three cities in alliance to bring us to this. Without the men of Bas Mathon, and Caralis, you would have been chased clear off the field.”
“Bastard!” and Broken-nose raised his spear. Remion took one step forward, so that he was between them. His eyes did not shift from the sights in the valley below. “The boy speaks the truth,” he said. “The Iscans bested us. Had it not been for the arrival of our allies, it would be Gan Burian burning now.”
Ogio, he of the swollen, punctured face, spoke up. “The Iscans began it. They reap what they have sown.”
“Yes,” Remion said. “They have earned this.” He turned to regard Rictus squarely. “You Iscans put yourselves apart, drilled like mercenaries, made war in the same way others planted the vine and the olive. You made it your business, and became better at it than we. But you forgot something.” Remion leaned closer, so that Rictus was washed by the garlic of his breath. “We are all the same, in the end, all of us. In this world, there are the Kufr, and the Macht. You and I are of the same blood, with the same iron in our veins. We are brothers in our flesh. But forgetting this, you chose to take war—which is a natural thing—to an unnatural end. You sought to enslave my city.”
He straightened. “The extinction of a city is a sin in the eyes of God. A blasphemy. We will be forgiven for it only because it was forced upon us. Look upon Isca, boy. This is God’s punishment for your crime. For seeking to make slaves of your own people.”
Up into the sky the red light of the sack reached, vying with the sunset, merging with it so that it seemed to be all one, the burning city, the dying day, the loom of the white mountains all around, stark peaks blackening with shadow. The end of the world, it seemed. And for Rictus, it was. The end of the life he had known before. For a moment, he was a boy indeed, and he had to blink his stinging eyes to keep the tears from falling.
Broken-nose hoisted his shield up so that the hollow of it rested on his shoulder. “I’m off. If we don’t shift ourselves the prettiest women will all be taken.” He grinned, for a moment becoming almost a likeable man, someone who would stand by his friends, share his wine. “Come, Remion; leave that big ox harnessed here for the wolves. What say you to a scarlet night? We’ll drink each cup to the lees, and rest our heads on something softer than this frozen ground.”
Remion smiled. “You go on, you and Ogio. I will catch you up presently. I have one last business to attend to.”
“You want help?” Ogio asked. His misshapen face leered with hatred as he peered at Rictus.
“Go get the carnifex to look at that hole,” Remion said. “I can attend to this on my own.”
The other two Burians looked at one another and shrugged. They set off, sandals pattering on the cold ground, Rictus’s helm dangling from one of their belts. Down the hillside, following the hardened mud of the road, into the roar and glow of the valley below where they would find recompense for their long day’s trouble.
With a sigh, Remion set down the heavy bronze-faced shield, then laid his spear on the ground. His helm, a light, leather bowl, he left dangling at his waist. From the look of it, he had eaten broth out of it that morning. He took his knife and thumbed the edge.
Rictus raised his head, exposing his throat.
“Don’t be a damned fool,” Remion snapped. He cut the bindings from Rictus’s wrists, and slid the spear-shaft free of his elbows. Rictus gasped with pain. His hands flooded with fire. He sat back on the ground, air whistling through his teeth, white agony, a feeling to match the sights of the evening.
They sat side by side, the grizzled veteran and the big-boned youth, and watched the dramas below.
“I remember Arienus, when it went up, twenty, twenty-five years ago,” Remion said. “I was a fighting man then, selling my spear for a living, with mercenary scarlet on my back instead of farmer’s felt. I got two women out of the sack and some coin, a horse, and a mule. I thought I had climbed the pig’s back.” He smiled, Isca’s burning lit tiny yellow worms in his eyes.
“I married one of the girls; the other I gave to my brother. The horse bought me citizenship and a taenon of hill-land. I became a Burian, put aside the red cloak. I had—I had a son, daughters. The blessings of life. I had heart’s desire.”
He turned to Rictus, his face as hard and set as something hewn out of stone. “My son died at the Hienian River battle, four years back. You killed him, you Iscans.” He looked back at Isca below. It seemed that the spread of the fires was being stymied. Beetled crowds packed the streets still, but now there were chains of men and women leading from the city wells, passing buckets and cauldrons from hand to hand, fighting the flames. Only up around the citadel did it seem that fighting went on. But still, from the houses in the untouched districts, the screams and shouts rose, wails of women outraged, children terrified, men dying in fury and fear that they might not see what was to become of those they loved.
“I fought today because if I had not I would have lost the right to be a citizen of Gan Burian,” Remion said. “We are Macht, all of us. In the world beyond the mountains I have heard that the Kufr tell tales of our savagery, our prowess on the battlefield. But among ourselves, we are only men. And if we cannot treat one another as men, then we are no better than Kufr ourselves.”
Rictus was clenching and unclenching his bulbous fists. He could not say why, but Remion made him feel ashamed, like a child admonished by a patient father.
“Am I your slave?” he asked.
Remion glared at him. “Are you cloth-eared, or merely stupid? Take yourself away from here. In a few days’ time Isca will be no more. We will raze the walls and sow the ground with salt. You are ostrakr, boy; cityless. You must find yourself another way to get on in the world.”
The wind picked up. It battered the pines about their heads and made the branches thrash like black wings grasping at the sunset. Remion looked up.
“Antimone is here,” he said. “She has put aside her veil.”
Rictus shivered. The cold from the ground ate into his buttocks. The wound in his side was a half-remembered throb. He thought of his father, of Vasio, the old steward who had helped them on the land. Zori, his wife, a nut-brown smiling woman whose breast Rictus had suckled at after his own mother had died having him. What were they now; carrion?
“There will be stragglers by the hundred ou
t in the hills, looting every farmstead they come across,” Remion said, as if he had caught the drift of the younger man’s yearning. “And they will be the worst of us, the shirkers who kept to the rear of the battle line. They catch you, and you will not see morning. They’ll rape you twice; once with their cocks, and once with an aichme. I’ve seen it. Do not go back north. Go south, to the capital. Once you’re healed, that broad back of yours will earn your keep in Machran.”
He rose to his feet with a low groan and hoisted shield and spear again. “There’s weapons aplenty lying about the hills, in dead men’s hands. Arm yourself, but take nothing heavy. No point one man alone lugging a battle line shield about. Look for javelins, a good knife.” Remion paused, jaw working angrily. “Listen to me. I’m become someone’s mother. Get yourself away, Iscan. Find yourself a life to live.”
“It happened to you,” Rictus said, through chattering teeth.
“What?”
“Your city was destroyed too. What was its name?”
“You’re a persistent whelp, I’ll give you that.” Remion lifted his head, peered up at the first of the stars. “I was of Minerias once. They had a war with Plaetra, and lost. A bad slaughter. There were not enough men left to man the walls.” He blinked rapidly, eyes fixed on something beyond the cold starlight.
“I was nine years old.”
Without another word, he began to tramp down the hillside towards Isca, spear on one shoulder, shield on the other, the leather helmet butting against the shield rim with every step, like a dull and tired bell. Rictus watched him go, following the dogged shadow he became until he was lost in the press and mob of men about the gates.
Alone. Cityless. Ostrakr. Men who were exiled from their city for a crime sometimes chose suicide rather than wander the earth without citizenship. To the Macht, the city was light and life and humanity. Outside, there was only this: the black pines and the empty sky, the world of the Kufr. A world that was alien.
Rictus beat his fists on his frozen thighs and lurched to his feet. Searching the sky he found, as his father had taught him, the bright star that was Gaenion’s Pointer. If he followed it, he would be going north. Back to his home.
That first night became an exercise in finding the dead and avoiding the living. As darkness drew on it became easier to stay clear of the marauding patrols which cast about the country like hounds on the scent of a hare. Most of them carried lit torches and were loud as partygoers. Their comings and goings were marked by the shriek of women, the bubbling death-cries of desperate men, cornered and finished off as part of the night’s sport. The hills were full of these torch-bearing revellers, until it seemed to Rictus that there were more of them on the hunt amid the pine forests and crags around Isca than had faced him in line upon the battlefield.
The dead were less easily found. They were stumbled across in the lightless shadow below the trees. Rictus tripped over a bank of them, and for an instant set his hand on the cold mask of a man’s face. He sprang away with a cry that set the wound in his side bleeding again. By and large the dead had been stripped of everything, sometimes even clothing. They lay pale and hardening in the cold. Out of the dark, packs of vorine had already begun to gather about them, the grey-maned scavengers of the hills.
A healthy man, on his feet, alert and rested, need not fear the vorine, but a man wounded and reeking of blood, staggering with tiredness—he drew their interest. When they circled him, green eyes blinking in the dark, they snarled their confidence at Rictus, and he snarled back at them, as much a beast as they. Stones, sticks, bravado—he beat them away with these until they went seeking less lively prey.
He stripped a corpse of a long-sleeved chiton, not minding the blood that stiffened it. The dead man lay on top of a broken spear, an aichme with some three feet of shaft still set in it. With these on his back and in his fist, Rictus shivered less. The vorine could smell the bronze, and left him alone. The torchlit patrols inspired anger now as well as fear, and in his head Rictus fantasised about surprising them at their barbarous work, the stump of spear working scarlet wonders in his hand. The fantasy hovered in his mind for pasangs, until he saw it for what it was; a glimmer from the far side of Antimone’s Veil. He put it out of his head then, and concentrated on the track before him, that paleness under the stars that ran between the midnight dark of the trees.
One patrol passed him as he lay pressed into the fragrant pine-needles at the side of the track. A dozen men perhaps, they bore the light shields of second-line troops: wicker peltas faced with hide. The mirian sigil was splashed in yellow paint across them. These were men of the coastal city, Bas Mathon. Rictus had been there many times with his father; for all that it was eighty pasangs away to the east. He remembered now the gulls screaming over the wharves, the high-prowed fishing smacks, the baskets of silverfin and horrin, bright as spearheads as they were hauled up on the quays. Summer sunlight, a picture from another age. He silently thanked the goddess for granting him the memory.
The men were drinking barley-spirit from leather skins, pressing the bulging bags until the liquid squirted high in the air, and then fighting and laughing like children to have their mouth under as it descended. In their midst two women limped barefoot and naked, heads down and hands bound before them. From the bruises which marked them, they had been captured quite early in the day. One had blood painted all down her inner thighs, and breasts that had only begun to bud. Hardly a woman at all.
They passed by like some twisted revel of the wine-god, lacking only pipe-song to complete the image. Rictus lay a long time in the dark when they had gone, letting the shadow bleed back into his eyes after the dazzling torchlight, seeing beyond the darkness the hopeless face of the young girl, eyes blank as those of a slaughtered lamb. Her name was Edrin. She came from the farm next to his father’s. He had played with her as a child, he five years older, carrying her on his back.
It was the middle part of the night before Rictus stood once more at the lip of his father’s glen. Artdunnon, this place was called; the quiet water. It was brighter now. Rictus looked up to see that both moons were rising above the trees. Great Phobos, the Moon of Fear, and fiery Haukos, Moon of Hope. He bowed to them, as all men must, and then set off down the hillside to where the river glittered amid the pastures in the bottom of the glen.
He could not so much as stub a toe on this track, even in the dark, so well did he know it. The smells of wild garlic from the edge of the woods, the thyme in the rocks, the good loam underfoot; all these were as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart. He allowed himself to hope for the first time since the battle line had broken that morning. Perhaps this place had been passed by. Perhaps his life was not yet shipwrecked beyond hope. Something could be salvaged. Something—
The smell told him. Acrid and strange, it drifted all through the valley bottom. There had been a burning here. It was not woodsmoke, but heavier, blacker. Rictus’s pace slowed. He stopped altogether for a few seconds, then forced himself on. Above him the cold face of Phobos rose higher in the night sky, as if wishing to light his way.
Rictus had been a late child, his father already a grey-templed veteran when he had sired him— much like Remion, now he came to think of it. His mother had been a wild hill-girl from one of the goatherder tribes further north. She had been given to his father by a hill-chief in payment for service in war, and he had made of her not a slave, but a wife, because he had been that kind of man.
Perhaps the mountain-blood, the nomad-spirit, was too fine and bright to be chained to a life of the soil. There had been children—two girls—but both had died of the river-fever before they had so much as cut a tooth. Over the years, Rictus had wondered about these pair, these dead siblings who had not even had a chance to acquire personality. He would have liked sisters, company of his own age growing up.
But it was as well, now, that they had died when they did.
Rictus had come along a scant six months after their deaths, a brawny red-faced
fighting child with a thick shock of bronze-coloured hair and his mother’s grey eyes. He had not been born here at the farm. His father had taken his pregnant young wife to the coast, to one of the fishing villages south of Bas Mathon. He would have no more children carried off by river-fever. There, in the clean salt air, Rictus had entered the world with the waves of the Machtic Sea crashing fifty paces away.
Whatever strength his mother had given to him had been taken out of herself; she had delivered him squatting over a blanket with Zori clucking beside her, and then Rictus’s father had carried her to his rented bed so she could bleed to death in comfort. Her ashes had been brought back from the shores of the sea and scattered in the woods overlooking the farm, as those of her dead babes had been before her. Rictus had never been told her name. He wondered if she watched him now. He wondered if his father walked beside her, his arms filled with his smiling daughters.
They had burned the farm, driven off the stock. The longhouse was a gutted, smoking ruin open to the sky. Rictus shuffled to the main door, and as he had expected, most of the bodies lay there. They had fought until the burning thatch came down around them. His father he recognised by the two missing fingers on his spear-hand. He used to call them war’s dowry. Were it not for that old wound he would have been in the battle line today beside his son, fighting for his city as every free citizen must. The council had exempted him, because he had given such good service in the past. He had been a rimarch, a file-closer, in his younger days. In the phalanx the best men were placed at the front and the rear of the files, to keep the fainter hearts in the line and lead them into the othismos, the hand-to-hand cataclysm that was the heart of all civilized warfare.
