The Ten Thousand

by Paul Kearney

  Hurth stepped forward and slapped the skin our of the Macht’s hand, snarling. All about them work on the dockyard stopped. Macht and Juthan all paused to view the little incident. Others of the Macht came crowding forward, and some bore knives. Others were untangling slings from their belts, eyes hot and bright. A splash of shouting in their language, and in the middle the Juthan standing like stone, as if waiting.

  “That’s enough, Hurth. Leave him. He—he meant no harm, I think.”

  Hurth drew his sword and backed away. “Insolence,” he said. “But there are too many of them. We should leave, lady.”

  They retreated from the wharf, pursued by catcalls and whistles. A half-cobble soared through the air to land at their feet. Tiryn jumped, and the Macht about the ships laughed. All save the one with the waterskin. He bent to retrieve it, and watched their hasty departure with thoughtful eyes.

  Twelve men stood on a bare hill, every one in black armour with a red chiton underneath. Above them, the sky was blinding blue, and around them a host of untold thousands went about its business, covering the land about like some windswept plague of legend. Off to the west, the glitter of a great river could be made out. There the land was green and there were trees worthy of the name, but here the dust tumbled in ochre clouds before the wind, and only thorn and greasewood and creosote shrubs fought their way out of the cracked dirt.

  “From Tanis to Geminestra is four hundred pasangs, give or take,” Phiron said. He knelt beside the map, scanning the calfskin as a man might search a foreign horizon. In his hand a length of withered stick served as a pointer. “It’s desert, scrub land—rather like the plains about Gast back home.”

  “Only a little warmer,” Jason said, and there was a rattle of laughter about the map-table. Phiron waved the flies from before his face. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose, more glistening along his cheekbones.

  “Fuck this heat,” someone murmured venomously.

  “I second that. We will march at night. I have already discussed this with our principal. We will lie up in the heat of the day. By all accounts, the Gadinai Desert is not to be trifled with.”

  “Four hundred pasangs,” Orsos the Bull said. “Ten days’ march, if all goes well.” He had shaved his head, and the scalp was burnt pink. His face shone as if oiled.

  “Fifteen,” Phiron corrected. When the centurions stared at him he raised both hands palm upwards, like a stallkeeper accepting a bad bargain. “The Kufr cannot march as fast as we can, it seems.”

  “You march slower, you eat and drink more,” Jason said. “This is their country; what makes them so bad at walking across it?”

  “They are not us,” Phiron said simply.

  He looked up from the map, eyes screwed narrow against the glare. One hand eased the rub of his cuirass against his collarbone. “We will start out tonight. Pasion, you have the manifest. We will be in the middle of the column—”

  “Eating his Royal Highness’s dust,” Orsos growled.

  “Indeed. But the main part of the Kufr forces will be in our rear. We keep our own baggage train with us, in our midst. Brothers, whether we are part of this Kufr host or not, I intend to proceed as if were on our own. Skirmishers out to the flanks, heavy infantry in hollow square. Baggage animals in the centre.”

  “We need to sweat,” Mynon said, blackbird eyes darting over the map. “The men are out of shape after the voyage, and they need to get the last of our employer’s wine out of their guts.”

  “Agreed,” Phiron said “Pasion? You are close-mouthed this morning.”

  “You keep your mouth shut and less flies get in it,” Pasion retorted. He was rubbing the side of his jaw, like a man with toothache. “I was just thinking. So, we’ve divided the army into ten battalions, morai, with ten generals to command them; but we’ve only enough spearmen for nine. We should perhaps think of making up those numbers out of the skirmishers.”

  “What, kit out the old men and boys with panoplies? I’d rather be under strength,” Orsos snorted.

  “There’s likely enough lads among them,” Pasion said, glaring at the Bull. “We have the gear; it’s weighing down the wagons as we speak. Better it sits on a man’s back than in a wagon-bed.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” Phiron said quickly, smothering the birth of the quarrel. “Brothers, to your morai. Brief your centurions, and have all ready. Pasion will inspect each centon’s baggage this evening. Let your men sleep this afternoon. Any questions?”

  There were many. Phiron could feel them hanging before him in the air, dancing in the heat-shimmer above the hill upon which they stood. Finally, inevitably, it was Orsos who spoke up. Despite his years, the mass of kneaded flesh which formed his face made him look like some huge, brutish child.

  “You put this whole deal together, Phiron, and for that we all here give you credit”—a collective murmur of assent, but grudgingly given. Phiron raised an eyebrow, and moved his feet like a man about to receive a blow—”but you’re not to forget that this here is now a Kerusia, an Army Council. The men elected ten of us out of a hundred centurions, but no one elected you—or Pasion there, if you come to it. We know you’re the only one among us speaks Kufr, and so there’s no thought of pushing you out of the way; but when it comes to decisions made for the army, we make them together now.”

  “You’re not a king, brother.” This was white-bearded Castus. Old as he was, he had the blackest heart of any of them. The scar that ran into his beard turned his smile into a leer. “You know these foreigners, it’s true, but me, or Argus here, or Teremon, we all have more campaigns under our belt than you.”

  “And in battle, Castus, shall we take a vote on it every time I want a centon to hoist their shields?” Phiron asked lightly, but there was a wire in his voice.

  “Don’t be stiff-necked. We’ll be working with these here Kufr when the time comes, so it makes sense you give the orders. Yonder would-be King will be sending you couriers by the dozen once the fur begins to fly. But for other things, for the ways we march and the places we stop, you come to us, this here Kerusia, and we puts a vote on it. Fair’s fair.”

  “All right.” Phiron bent his head a little. Castus, Orsos, Argus, and Teremon. The most experienced centurions in the army, a little quartet of killers. The younger generals— Pomero, Durik, Marios, and Jason—these formed another group. They even stood a little apart from the rest. And the crowd-pleasers, the talkers: Mynon and Gelipos. These would watch the way the wind blew, and make their votes the deciders.

  “Anything else?” The ten generals looked at each other, nodded, shrugged. Pomero cracked his knuckles with a show of nonchalance. Argus spat into the dust and rubbed the liquid into a little turd with his foot.

  “Very well then, brothers. Let us go about our business.” And as the knot of men broke up, “Jason, stay a moment.”

  Three remained. Phiron, Pasion, Jason. The tell upon which they stood was no more than three spear-lengths high, and looked to have been made by man; there were ancient clay bricks peeping through the dirt at their feet. It made a fine vantage-point to survey the encampments of the army. They had not erected tents, but each centon had marked out its bivouac with cairns of heaped stones. The men had laid their bedrolls on the rolling dust of the plain in neat rows, two paces per man, and the company wagon in the middle. All told, the Macht camp was two pasangs long and somewhat wider. Not even Phiron had ever been part of so large an army before, or seen it spread out before him as it was here on the sere plain that bordered the Gadinai Desert.

  But that was not the whole. The Macht lines were drawn some six pasangs from the eastern walls of Tanis, but between them and the walls was an even larger encampment. This was less ordered, a hiving, chaotic and many-tented city of some tens of thousands. A haze of dust hung over it, along with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires, and out upon its western borders great herds of animals darkened the earth. These were the beasts and soldiers of Arkamenes himself, his own household and
the troops which Gushrun of Artaka had granted him. There were perhaps thirty thousand of them all told, and that did not take into account the camp-followers. Their camp was closer to the river, where there was still some grass. In the spring, all this would be a lush plain and there would be reed-beds down by the Artan, for the river flooded twice a year, swelled by some unknown source far back in the uncounted wildernesses of the interior. For now, the Macht were using a series of ancient wells out here on the plain and getting used to the sensation of sand in their teeth.

  “If yonder host is ready to move at nightfall, then I’m a lady’s maid,” Pasion grunted, still kneading his jaw. “What is it, Phiron? There’s a lot to do.”

  “Our elders in the Kerusia made a good point, Pasion, about talking to the Kufr. It had occurred to me also. To that end, I have something here.” Phiron had bent and was rolling up his calfskin map. It was a gift from Arkamenes, and detailed the lands from Tanis to the Magron Mountains. Sometimes he wished he had never seen it. Four hundred pasangs on that calfskin was no more than a handspan. He thrust it into the oxhide bag he had been carrying on his back for twenty years, and dug out something else instead. “Jason, for you. Pasion, you may use it too if you’ve a mind to.”

  A close-written scroll. Jason opened it in his hands, dragging the spindles apart. “What’s this? I see words here, Machtic script, and then some gibberish opposite.”

  “It’s a word-hoard, a dictionary. Arkamenes’s vizier, Amasis, had a scribe in Tanis write it out plain and fair for me. It tells you Machtic words in Asurian, the common tongue of the Empire, written as they sound in our own script.” Phiron grinned, for Jason’s face had lit up like a boy’s. “We need someone who can understand what these bastards are saying besides myself. We can’t always be relying on interpreters, or the charity of our allies.”

  “The charity of our allies...” Pasion mused on the phrase a moment before continuing. “We’ll need that charity by the ton ere we’re done, Phiron. What food will take us across this desert we can take on our backs, and you say there’s water-holes out there too. But when we get to Geminestra, the bag is empty. I hope our princely employer has some skill with logistics, or we’ll be eating mule before a month is out.”

  “It’s been arranged, Pasion,” Phiron said testily.

  “I’m quartermaster. I like to arrange these things for myself.”

  Phiron tapped a finger on the scroll Jason held. “Then read this. Learn these things. If you cannot speak to the Kufr, how can you tell him what you want?”

  Pasion set his jaw. He smiled a little. “As you say. Jason, I wish you joy of your studies. I go to count up sacks of grain, and hope they have multiplied in my absence.” He turned and descended the hill, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun.

  “He’s a professional, and thus dislikes being brigaded with amateurs,” Phiron said, watching him go. “Can’t say as I blame him. We march on the word of a Kufr, and from now on will eat and drink on his say so.”

  “If we run short, there are always other ways of making up the difference,” Jason said. He rolled up the scroll and set the closer in place. “Thank you for this, Phiron. I’ll put it to good use.”

  “What? No, no. I know what you’re saying, Jason. But we cannot pillage lands we hope to win to our side. Arkamenes will look after us— it’s in his own interest after all. I do not fear being betrayed or neglected, not by him. At least, not while he still lacks a crown.”

  The two men looked at one another, understanding. Jason sighed. “I was happier when I was ignorant—as ignorant as I shall keep my centurions. I never thought being a general would entail so much talk.”

  “It is always the way. He’s offering us help with the baggage, you know.”

  “Help?”

  “Eight hundred Juthan with broad backs. I’ve heard they’re hardy as mules.”

  “I’d keep them out of our lines, for now, Phiron. Our men are not yet used to the Kufr cheek-by-jowl.”

  “As you say. We may be glad of them before long though. We march out tonight, Jason, whatever the Kufr do.”

  “And if they are late?”

  “If they are late, then they can eat our dust.”

  From Tanis, the Gadinai Desert stretched out flat and brown, a parched plain that extended all the way to the Otosh River in the north, broken by wadis and gullies that the flash-floods of the rainy spring carved out deeper every year. To the south, the Gadean Hills stretched in line after line of broken, pale-coloured stone. White cliffs marked them out from afar, and dotted through them were the timeworn quarries from whence the very stuff of Tanis’s mighty walls and towers had been hewn, in block after gargantuan block. Kefren shepherds roamed the hills, tending their goats as they had for time immemorial. Further south, tribes of hill-bandits made their lairs in the maze-like confusion of the bluffs and canyons.

  These watched, amazed, from the highest of the crumbling escarpments, as now a great rash spread over the desert, a river of men, dark under the sun save where the light caught the points of their spears. They raised a dustcloud behind and around them, a tawny, leaning giant, a toiling yellow storm bent on blotting out the western sky. It seemed a nation on the march, a whole people set on migrating to a better place. The sparse inhabitants of the Gadinai drew together, old feuds forgotten, and watched in wonder as the great column poured steadily onward, as unstoppable as the course of the sun. It was as grand as some harbinger of the world’s end, a spectacle even the gods must see from their places amid the stars. So this, then, was the passage of an army.

  NINE

  SERVANT OF KINGS

  The news was brought to Vorus with a quiet tap on the door of his apartments. He grunted out some response, the dreams of the night still fogging his mind, and in came the morning-maid with her head bowed and a sealed scroll of parchment quivering like a bird upon the silver tray she held out.

  He rose in the bed, the silk sheets whispering off his torso to reveal the broad form of an athlete—he had always been vain about his physique—and took the message from the tray. “I’ll eat in the garden, Bisa.”

  “Yes, lord.” The girl, a low-caste hufsa, bowed and left with the soft slap of bare feet on the mosaic floor. From outside, Vorus could hear the birds squabbling in the fountain, and the rill of the water got him thinking on other things. He reached the silver pot out from under the bed and stood pissing into it while breaking the seal of the letter. Astiarnes of Tanis—a good man. He remembered—

  “Phobos!” He puddled the floor before collecting himself, and the parchment flapped in his fingers. “Kyrosh!”

  A tall Kefren with skin the colour of birch-bark glided through the door. He bowed deep, azure eyes gleaming. In his hand he held a wand of ivory. “Lord.”

  “My best, and the Macht cuirass. A closed litter, and the swiftest bearers we know. No, wait; we must put on a show. I must go to the Palace, Kyrosh.”

  “It shall be arranged, my lord. I shall send in the dresser. Might I recommend the Arakosan silk?”

  “No.” Vorus was thinking clearly now. His face had become calm. “My chiton, the scarlet. And the Curse of God. My old gear, Kyrosh.”

  The Kefren blinked, and licked his thin lips. He moved forward a pace. “Lord, for the Palace?”

  “Do as I say. And get that litter.”

  Kyrosh bowed deep and left, face impassive. Once outside the door, his voice could be heard like the crack of a whip. Other doors banged; the household came to life, a well-ordered panic. Vorus seldom rose this early.

  Arkamenes is on the march from Tanis with twenty-five thousand foot and five thousand horse. Artaka has declared for him, and Gushrun is his creature. But that is not all. He has brought an army from over the sea—Ten Thousand Macht heavy spearmen, mercenaries under a general named Phiron. Arkamenes plans to raise up Jutha against the Empire, and carry battle into the Land of the Rivers. He seeks nothing less than the throne itself.

  The letter had been th
ree weeks on the road. They must have killed a dozen horses to get it here so quickly. From old Astiarnes, one spy amid hundreds, thousands, which had been planted down the years in every alleyway and upon every highway of the Empire. But Astiarnes was not from the Royal Corps of Spies. He was retired. In his own youth, Vorus had used to boast sometimes that the Great King had a hand in every pocket. But they had missed this, somehow. A Macht army. Mercy of God.

  The dresser came in, along with the muddled maid bearing bread and honey and a poached egg. Vorus smiled at her bewilderment. “Leave it here, Bisa. This morning, I eat on the wing.”

  This was the finest time of the year to be in Ashur. The Imperial capital lay on both banks of the Oskus River, and the water was full and high, a gleam of blue and silver instead of the midsummer brown. Ashur had been laid out in a grid, maybe four thousand years before. Vorus had studied on it, and believed the city to be twice as old; but always built on the same pattern. Imperial Ashur. Her walls were a hundred and fifty feet high, and sixty pasangs long. In their shadow lived some two million people. Kefren of all castes, Juthan by the scores of thousands, common Asurians, Arakosans, Yue, Irgun, Kerkhai. They were all here.

  Dominating the skyline were what might first appear to be a pair of steep-sided hills in the midst of the city. These were Kefren-made tells, mounds of brick and stone reared up century upon century until they now loomed like mountains over the flat river-plain below. Upon these ziggurats were the Palace of the Kings and the high fane of Bel, as the Kufr chose to call their God. Each was a city within a city, and there were priests and slaves who had been born on both yet had never left either. The brick which supported these phenomena had been faced in dark blue enamel, laced with traceries of gold, and the walls of each were surmounted by battlements topped in silver plate. On the summit of the Temple ziggurat, the face of the Fane itself was covered in plates of solid gold, so that it caught the setting of Araian, the sun. Her beams were snared here at sunset by the grim teeth of the Magron Mountains to the west, but her last light was always caught by the temple walls, a beacon set ablaze by her farewell, a promise of her return. It was for this reason that the Fane ziggurat had been built, with tolerances of a few fingerspans.