by Paul Kearney
“Proxis,” he said.
“Aye.” The old Juthan stepped forward. He was somewhat drunk, but steady as an oak, and his yellow eyes were as shrewd as one sober.
“You know what to do with these?”
“I know,” Proxis said, heavily.
“Then see to it. I am going up the hill to meet with our officers.” Vorus strode away from the circle of torchlight, out into the stinking darkness of the Kunaksa heights, where the Kufr army waited around its campfires for the bloody work yet to come.
The heads were to be transported to Kaik, just across the plain, where they would be embalmed, and then a powerful escort would take them through the rebel provinces of Istar, Jutha, and Artaka under a green branch, to declare that Arkamenes was dead and the invincible Macht had been destroyed. A special wagon was already being constructed to display them to best advantage on their travels. It was a calculated barbarism. Vorus saw the purpose behind it, and approved of it. But for all that, it turned something in his stomach.
**
The army was restless about its fires, the Honai sitting on the bowls of their shields, their eyes catching the firelight like the polished bulbs of brass lamps. In the hufsan lines, the mountain folk were singing their dark croon of lament for the dead, celebrating and remembering those of their kin who had fallen during the day. The Juthan sat in quiet circles, their halberds on their knees, talking in their sonorous tongue. Farther back, on the less broken ground to the south, the cavalry were quartered. These had seen the brunt of the day’s fighting, and up and down the horse-lines the Arakosans and the Asurians were tending their animals. They took their mounts down to the river to drink in shifts of a thousand, and many of the Arakosans did not come back from these trips. Vorus suspected that they were deserting in large numbers, for their assault on the Macht flank had broken them, and hundreds had no horse to ride at all. They had been in the centre of the day’s carnage, and seemed haunted by it. None of the rest of the troops who remained on the hills had yet fought the Macht, and the Arakosans were telling gloomy tales of slaughter to visitors from other quarters of the camp who came to find out how exactly these creatures made war. All of the army had seen the left wing disintegrate under the Macht assault, and had heard the Paean sung in great and bloody splendour. That part of the battle was already becoming a kind of legend.
In the morning, Vorus promised himself, we will make another.
“They’ll attack at dawn,” Jason said, the cracked mud falling from his face as it dried. He buckled on the Curse of God without looking at his fingers, staring out at the Kufr campfires burning in their sleepless arc across the hills.
“Mynon, we need new mora commanders. Get the senior centurion in each and bring him here. Buridan will do for mine. I know Mochran and Phinero will do too. Get them here fast; we don’t have time to fuck about.”
Mynon seemed about to say something; his keen eyes were almost buried by the frowning bridge of his brows. Then he nodded and trotted off.
“You, Rictus, take one of these,” Jason said, gesturing to the neat lines of black armour upon the ground.
Rictus stood looking down on them, priceless relics with no one to claim them.
“They should have been worn,” he said.
“Then they’d be in Kufr hands by now. It was a sound decision. Take one for Antimone’s sake. For the sake of those that wore them. They do not bite.”
All around the pair the Macht had gathered a little closer to watch and listen. Bad news was the easiest thing in the world to disseminate about an army. It flew on the swiftest of wings. Antimone saw to that; it was part of her curse. This news had travelled through the centons like a wildfire. Their leaders were dead, some of the ablest and most popular men in the army. There had not been a panic, but the ranks had broken all the same. The army had begun to revert to is constituent parts, the centons clustering together, the line abandoned, the men talking in quiet groups among themselves. They did not even have the communal centoi to gather around any more, nor any wood to burn. They stood in the darkness, separate entities whose loyalties now took little reckoning of any overall command. They were on the edge of disintegration, and Jason knew it.
“Take one, Rictus,” he repeated, more gently now. The big, blood-masked strawhead stood looking down on the dead generals’ cuirasses as though they were the naked wife of a friend.
“I have no right to it,” Rictus said. Tears had cut white streaks down his face and in the light of the two moons he looked like some warpainted savage from the Inner Mountains.
“You have every right. I intend to mark out the new morai commanders with these. It will give them authority in the eyes of the men. Now take one and fucking put it on.” Jason’s voice cracked on the last words. Around them, the men of his old centon stood murmuring. Finally Gasca spoke up. “Take it Rictus. You’re as good as any of those as wore it before.” And there was a rumbling of assent from the Dogsheads around him. Whistler raised a spear. “Take it lad. You earned it fair, coming back alive from those murderous bastards.”
So Rictus bent and grasped the shoulder-flaps of the nearest cuirass. He did not know whose it was; Antimone’s Gift was the same for every owner, and could not be modified or customised in any way. Whatever material it was made of shrugged off violence and age and the tools of men. It remained inviolate and anonymous.
And it was light—so light that Rictus was startled. He straightened more quickly than he had intended as it came up in his hands, hardly heavier than a winter cloak. The two moulded plates of it cinched together under the left arm with strange little black clasps, and then the shoulder flaps, the wings they were called, were tugged down into place and clicked into others of these fastenings on the breast. Rictus tugged at the neck of the armour where it cut into the flesh of his neck, and Jason pulled his hand away.
“Wait a moment.”
As the cuirass took warmth from his body, so it seemed to ease upon his bones. Rictus looked up, astonished, and Jason smiled. “They mould to the form they find within them. Something inside them shifts and melts and then hardens again. Give it a while, and you’ll barely know you wear it.”
I am a Cursebearer, Rictus thought. It may be that I will be one for only a few hours, but I will die with Antimone’s Gift upon my back, fighting fearful odds, in the company of my peers. Father, you could have wished nothing better for me.
“Don’t forget the helm,” Jason added, gesturing to the line of transverse-crested helmets the generals had left behind. “We must all of us look the part if we’re to play this thing out to the end.”
The centurions Jason and Mynon had picked to be the new generals of the army trickled in, grim, blasted looks upon their faces. As they did, Jason handed each one of them a black cuirass, and they hesitated as Rictus had before donning them.
“Reform the line,” Jason told them. “We attack them now, under cover of darkness. We break this army of theirs and make through it for the river.”
“It’s twelve pasangs, Jason,” Mynon said quietly.
“We take the Bekai crossings and hold them, and base ourselves in Kaik. There, we resupply. One more thing: we take back our baggage on the way. I want our bloody pots back.”
“They’ll cut us to pieces on the plain with their cavalry,” Buridan said, a rumble in his beard.
“Their cavalry did a lot of fighting today, even the Great King’s bodyguard itself. And no one takes cavalry into battle in the dark. We have three or four hours until dawn; we must use that time.”
“The wounded?” one of the new generals asked. This was Phinero, whose brother Pomero had died in the Great King’s tent not two hours before.
“Five morai up front, one on each flank, four in the rear. The wounded in the middle. Those who cannot walk must find someone to carry them or take their own lives.”
A pause. No one dissented. They were all half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion, and did not expect to live for much longer themselves.
“This is how we move out,” Jason began.
SEVENTEEN
THE SECOND DAY
In the dead hours of the night the weary Kefren pickets posted along the hills of Kunaksa looked up to the star-spattered sky. Clouds had come shifting in from the mountains in the east and were now building up overhead to blot out the welkin. One by one the moons disappeared: first pink Haukos with his blessings of hope and compassion, and then leering white-cold Phobos, moon of fear. The night closed in and the rain began, a steady drizzle that did not put out the campfires of the army, but which made all those tens of thousands who lay beside them in the mud edge a little closer to the flames. The spring rains were early. It was a gift from Bel, the Renewer. Mot, god of death and dry-baked summer soil had left the world to his rival for a night, and the cold rain pattered bitterly down to deepen the mud of the war-scarred plain.
The rain brought Tiryn round, pattering into her open mouth and prickling a chill tattoo on her skin. Forgetting where she was, she sought for a moment to wipe it out of her eyes, but then remembered and blinked herself fully awake.
Blurred torchlight, shadows moving before it, back and forth, as they had moved in her nightmares. She shivered convulsively for a few moments under the cold, intimate kisses of the rain, and blinked her vision clear. The hub of the wagon-wheel had gouged a bruise deep into the small of her back, and her bound hands were blue and numb, roped to the rim. She was naked. She no longer knew or cared how many times she had been raped.
The camp was all astir, not the night-time routine of sentries but full, chaotic, crowded, and shouted movement. Some new thing had happened, some new chapter in the savagery of the earth. Tiryn closed her eyes again, meat tied to a wagon-wheel, the mind within drawing back from the world, gnawing on itself, unable to give up the obscenities it had seen.
They were five pasangs from the battle lines here, the humid heat-shimmer of the day before not even allowing them the chance to spectate. Tiryn had walked out of the flimsy stockade with only her maid beside her and had watched the great creeping darknesses of the armies move across the surface of the earth. Faint on the still air had come the awful roar of their meeting. The Macht were winning, she had heard, and she watched Arkamenes’s army advance up the hillside. And she had thought it over, the thing done, the day behind them. My Prince, she thought, is now a King.
Incredibly swift, the disintegration of those complacencies. First there were the stragglers, the cowardly, the broken, the walking wounded. And then had come the great mass of infantry, the Juthan Legion, the Kefren of the main line. These had poured past the camp with barely a glance to spare for those inside, too terrified even to try their hand at the paychests. Because behind them the enemy were snapping like vorine on the heels of sheep.
The Asurian cavalry had been first into the camp, tall high-caste Kefren on magnificent horses, statues of gold and iron and lapis lazuli with bright eyes and bloody swords. The Juthan bag-gage-bearers had fought them off with whips and sticks and ladles and any object that came to hand. When none did, they leapt on the horsemen and used their teeth. They had fought to the end and Tiryn, even in the grip of her terror, had wondered at their ferocious courage.
Her bodyguard, Hurth, had never thought much of her; she had known that. High caste as he was, he thought it demeaning to watch over a little hufsa whore. But he had tried to get her out of the camp, and when they had been caught, it was with his own life that he had bought her the time to run away. This had shocked her, that he had done such a thing. She and her remaining maid had gone to ground after it, too cowed to try again. They had been like rabbits, cowering in knowledge of their own end and unable to do anything about it.
The end had come, the Asurians had prevailed, and the sack of the baggage camp had begun.
Arkamenes was dead, that much was made clear by the triumphant enemy troops who now began to loot the tents and wagons of the army, searching always and foremost for the paychests containing the gold of Tanis. These found, they had time to attend to lighter matters, and one of these was discovered in Arkamenes’s tent, a curved mountain-knife in her fist. A single wound Tiryn had inflicted, and that only enough to earn her a beating. At first she had been set to one side as the looting went on, and the higher-caste concubines of the harem were ferreted out. But once all these had been claimed they came back for her, killed the Juthan maid who threw herself at them, and began the sport of the evening.
Perhaps her own caste would have been gentler; perhaps not. In any case, Tiryn had ended the long, long day tied to this wagon-wheel, and used by any passing soldier who did not mind the blood, the muck, the bruises, and the shining slime of other Kufr’s leavings which now painted her skin.
Arkamenes is dead, she thought. Why can it not be over? And she prayed to Mot, the dark god, for the blessing of her own release.
One hundred paces away, in the tent that had been his brother’s, the Great King was roused out of sleep by old Xarnes. No ceremony; Honai were lighting the lamps without being given leave to do so, and Xarnes had actually touched the royal shoulder to bring Ashurnan into the present. He sat up at once, still fully dressed, though wearing his brother’s silk slippers.
“What’s happened?” Fear of the event had taken away their fear of him; it must be bad.
“The Macht have attacked, my lord—all along the hills.”
Ashurnan blinked. A Honai held out a goblet of wine and he waved it away, frowning. “How long did I sleep?”
“Three hours, my lord, by the turn of the clock.”
“Any word from Vorus?”
“Nothing as yet.”
“Then how do we know?”
Xarnes hesitated. He looked very old in the gathering lamplight, an elderly man kept from his bed. “Some of the troops up on the Kunaksa have already fled this far.”
There it was, cold water down the spine. Ashurnan rolled out of bed and straightened with the quicksilver poise of a dancer. “Stand-to the bodyguard,” he said. “Couriers to Vorus. Where is Proxis?”
“In the camp, my lord, but we have not yet located him. He was supervising the transport of the paychests across the river until the middle night.”
“Find him, Xarnes.”
“Yes, lord.” The ancient chamberlain bowed and withdrew.
The Honai were watching him. We had victory, Ashurnan thought—we had the glory of it, the thing sitting in our very hands. What in the depths of hell have these animals done to me now? Can they not lie down and die?
* * *
They were dying indeed. They were dying by the hundred, but they were on their feet and advancing over their own dead. In the rain-drenched dark of the starless night they were singing the Paean of their race, and never had it seemed so apposite as now that the battle-hymn of the Macht should also be the song sung in the hour of death.
They advanced on a frontage of some seven hundred paces, a compact mass of interlocked centons and morai. The line was ragged as men tripped in the dark or wove around obstacles half-seen until a boulder barked their shins, but it came together again always, the clash of bronze in the blackness guiding those who lost their way, the mud sucking the sandals off their feet, the rain—the blessed rain—trickling down their bodies so that whole morai raised their heads as one and opened their mouths to let the life of the water spot their tongues. Antimone had fluttered her Veil, men said. She wept above them, and so they had her tears to moisten their mouths here, in the shadow of strange mountains. The rain gave them new strength, new heart. It did not convince them that they would live, but it persuaded them that they could make a good end.
The Kufr pickets had been swept away in the first moments, and now the Macht had pushed deep into the scattered ranks of the King’s army, catching hundreds, thousands of his troops before they had gathered into formation. The Macht heavy spearmen stabbed out in the dark at half-guessed masses of milling bodies and kept advancing. It was not the casualties that mattered but the fact of their advance
, that remorseless tide of flesh and bronze welling up out of the night, the Paean rising with it, the feet of the infantry keeping time. This was an army the Kufr had already made a story of. As the morai advanced, so the Great King’s forces streamed away from the forefront of that line. For pasangs up and down the hills a panic took root. This—an assault on this scale—could not be happening in the dark of a moonless night. It was impossible. And so the Kufr troops assigned mythical properties to the half-seen battle line of the Macht spearmen, and the song which accompanied their relentless advance.
Only the Honai of the Great King’s bodyguard stood firm. Ten thousand heavy infantry, superbly armoured, they moved into rank with a discipline that baffled their fellow soldiers and took up position like a rock around which the waters of their lesser brethren whirled and rippled. Midarnes, their general, stood at their rear, and here Vorus found him standing as stolid as some ancient reared-up stone.
“Hold them,” Vorus said. “We must stop them here. Dawn is not far off. When the sun rises, things shall take a different turn.”
Midarnes was a nobleman of the old school, as high a caste as one could come at in this Empire without becoming a king. In the dark his eyes shone pale, looming over Vorus. He looked down on the Macht renegade without rancour, with even a shade of respect. “Your people,” he said, “are worthy of the stories.” Then he straightened. “You had best see to the flanks. Here in the centre, I shall hold them.”
