by Paul Kearney
“Make a space there,” Astianos said, shoving the man sleeping next to him. “I’ve drunk enough water to float my back teeth. I’ll have a slug of that, centurion, if you’re willing.” Rictus tossed him the skin and squatted cross-legged before Gasca. He wore the Curse of God over a Kufr chiton, and was barefoot.
“Jason told me you had come through it,” he said.
“Strawhead luck,” Gasca replied. They watched one another, not quite sure what to say. At last Rictus spoke. “This is a long way from the Machran Road.”
“I never thought I’d miss snow,” Gasca admitted.
“Did you piss yourself this time?”
Gasca grinned. “Me and every other one of these bastards here.” They smiled at each other, but the smiles did not take.
“I just wanted to be a spearman, like you,” Rictus said at last. “That’s all.”
Gasca gestured to the black cuirass that fitted Rictus’s torso like a second skin. “You were born for that, and for what you’re doing now. It’s plain to me. I don’t mind it at all.”
Rictus stared at him. He seemed in need of something, some word, a kind of forgiveness perhaps. “They’re going to make me a skirmisher again, my own mora of lights. I don’t suppose you’d want to come and—”
Gasca shook his head. “My place is here, with this crowd. I belong here, Rictus, holding a spear and following the man in front. It’s all I want.”
Rictus nodded. He looked very young in the failing light, though as the dusk grew about them all and the campfires took life from the dark, it was possible to see the lines and bones graven in his face.
“Have a drink, centurion. Antimone’s tits, what is this we have here? A love affair? Take it somewheres else.” Astianos grinned, and thumped the wineskin against Rictus’s shoulder.
“What’s going to happen?” Gasca asked him. “What did the Kerusia decide?”
Rictus wiped his mouth. Around him, even in the gathering dark, he was suddenly aware of men pausing in their conversations, cocking an ear to listen.
“We have to stay together,” he said. He raised his voice as he said it, and like a stone dropped in a pond, he felt the ripples of his words grip men further and further away across the square as they listened in. I should stand up and shout, he thought. But then it would be a speech, and they’d not listen anymore.
“If we break up, they’ll cut us to pieces. Together we are an army, a Macht army. On the Kunaksa we beat their best, all by ourselves. If we stay together, hold to the colour, then we can do it again. And we’ll have to, if we’re to make it all the way back. We’re marching home by the shortest route, across Pleninash and Kerkh and Hafdaran, through the Korash Mountains, across Askanon and Gansakr, until we find ourselves back on the shores of the sea, at Sinon. That’s what we’re doing. And we’ll march as an army, the whole fucking way. All of us.”
PART THREE
THE MARCH TO THE SEA
NINETEEN
THE GENERAL’S KUFR
Three pasangs long, the column stretched straight as the Imperial Road would allow across the soggy lowlands of the plain. Up front, a mora of light-armed troops spread out on a kind of shapeless crescent before the head of the main body, a thousand men with javelins and light spears and a weird confection of shields. None wore scarlet; none in the entire column wore scarlet any more, for those chitons had been too soaked in the mud and gore of past battles to be of further use. They wore instead the felt tunics of Asurian peasants, or cut-down linen robes looted from some Kufr’s household. But upon these rags rested the bronze of their fathers, and on the shoulders of that armour they leaned the long spears their race had carried from time immemorial.
The column was composed almost entirely of marching men, until one came to the latter third.
Here, light wagons and single-axle carts trooped, drawn by mules and horses and asses and oxen and any beast which could shoulder a yoke. There were some two hundred of these vehicles, and perhaps a thousand men walked among them, leaning their shoulders against the wheels when the animals up front faltered in their relentless haulage. Behind this cumbersome train there marched a further two thousand spearmen. These two morai, like the two in the van, did not keep their heavy shields in the wagon-beds, but wore them on their shoulders. And periodically they would halt, about-turn, and present a bristling, impenetrable front to whatever or whoever might be approaching the army from the rear. Thus the Macht marched, away from the Bekai River, and into the heart of the Pleninash lowlands.
“I see them as a dark line on the horizon, no more,” the Juthan, Proxis, said, frowning. “They collected themselves as if they have a purpose.”
“Of course they do,” Vorus told him. “They are marching home.”
“We slaughtered their high command, and yet...”
“The Macht vote on things,” said Vorus. He smiled a little. “They vote, and create new things out of that collective will. It is not a good way to run an army, and yet here we are and there go they, marching as though nothing had happened. They have another leader, Proxis, someone they all respected before we slaughtered their generals. He must be a good man to have wrought such wonders out of them at Kunaksa. I wonder if I know him.”
The two generals were ahead of the main body some pasang or so, seated on their long-suffering mounts. Behind them, Kaik rose above the Bekai River on its ancient mound, the gates of the city wide open, lines of Kefren troops streaming past it, crossing the river by the two undefended bridges.
“They stripped Kaik bare,” Proxis said, a hard gleam in his eye. “Food, water, wine, horses, oxen, and hundreds of my people to be taken along as slaves, beasts of burden. But then that is what we have always been.”
Vorus looked at his companion and nodded. “Yes, you have. But I hear tell that in Jutha now the people are arming, and it’s not to fight the Macht.”
Proxis allowed himself a small, humourless smile. “I have heard that also.”
“These fine fellows we’re after, if we let them they’ll tear up half the Empire in their wake.”
“Perhaps the Empire’s day has come and gone,” Proxis said and looked away, not able to meet Vorus’s eyes.
“If it has, then so has ours,” Vorus said angrily, and he kicked his horse forward.
The Great King took up residence in the Governor’s Palace of Kaik. His immense baggage train was moved forward from the east bank of the river, and for the space of a day the unfortunate inhabitants of the city watched as the endless line of wagons and carts and pack mules entered their gates. They were to have the honour and blessing of the King’s presence among them for some time to come, as he had designated Kaik his forward headquarters. What crumbs the Macht had left them were now ferreted out by the stewards of the Royal Household. Skeining out across the bountiful lowlands of Pleninash, the foraging parties went in their columned thousands, more troops set to gathering supplies than marched behind Vorus in pursuit of the enemy. These were the realities of warfare. Even the diminished host the Great King still held to his standards represented another three or four cities of hungry mouths set down in the middle of the region. And more troops were arriving by the week: levies come late to the campaign, summoned from every crevice of the Empire which would produce and arm warriors.
“I want reports from Vorus every day,” Ashurnan said. The fanbearers wafted perfume into his face. Lately, the very hall in which he sat had been used as a meeting-place by the generals of the Macht. It had been scrubbed clean by Juthan slaves and sluiced down with well-water, but still the Great King could not get out of his mind the picture of those creatures sitting up and down the long table before him. He ordered the table taken out and burnt.
“They have made of Kaik a sewer,” he said to himself. And when old Xarnes leaned closer to catch his words he waved a hand. “No matter. General Berosh, we are certain that the messengers went off before the Macht took possession of the city?”
Berosh, the new commander of h
is majesty’s bodyguard, bowed by way of affirmation. “They and their escorts were on the road before the battle on the hills had ended, my lord. They are well on their way.”
“So much the better.” Ten heads, ten dead men’s faces pickled in jars, to be shown around the Empire like so many signposts of warning. That, at least, had gone to plan.
“A pity we could not have been so quick with the gold,” he said, and Berosh bowed again.
“When the Asurian Horse has refitted and rested they are to join Vorus. We need cavalry to keep pace with these animals. We must get ahead of them, pen them in.” Ashurnan thumped his fist down on the elbow of his throne. “They must be rounded up and destroyed to the last man.”
“All possible steps are being taken, my lord,” Berosh said, inclining his head.
“Taken—yes—taken now. Now that the foe is on the wing.” He stood up, and the whole chamber full of courtiers, slaves, soldiers, and attendants bowed deep. All his life, this had been the protocol, the way things were done, but right now he felt it suffocating him.
His brother’s face, as the blade took him under the chin.
“Clear the room,” he said. “All but Xarnes and Berosh. Now.”
They went out in a hushed queue, even the fanbearers. Ashurnan stripped the heavy robe from his shoulders. In the long linen singlet he wore beneath, he went to one of the great wall-openings, a tall window without glass. There was a breeze up here, and it played cool on the soaked fabric of his undergarment. He pulled off the royal komis and felt the air on his face, breathed deep. Even here, he could smell the foul stench of the lower city.
“Great King,” Xarnes began uncertainly.
“I was too hot, Xarnes, nothing more. Leave me be. There is nothing to fear. Nothing at all.” To Berosh, he spoke over his shoulder. “Have couriers sent to the north-west provinces, all governors. If I find one city which opens its gates to the Macht, I shall raze it. Do you hear me, Berosh?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I shall have no more Kefren cities defiled as they have defiled this one, filling the streets with blood and excrement. I want the streets washed. Turn out the whole population if you have to, but make this place clean again.”
He turned to face them, and closed his eyes, the breeze cooling his back, unwrinkling the sodden linen.
“We must wash them from our world, Berosh. They do not belong here. I do not think they ever have.”
When they camped for the night, the Macht dug a shallow ditch all around their camp. It was not so much a defence as a demarcation. The ten morai laid out their bedrolls in a great hollow square, and in the centre of this were the baggage vehicles and the draught animals, the paychests full of the gold of Tanis, and the Juthan slaves that had been led out of Kaik in chains with sacks and barrels and jars balanced on their heads, the way in which the Kufr had carried their burdens since the world had been created.
The men slept on the ground, wrapped in whatever blankets and hangings they had been able to loot from Kaik. Most had managed to keep hold of their scarlet cloaks also, and so in the evenings there was almost a uniformity about their appearance. The foraging parties usually made it back into camp around dusk, each two or three centons strong, each—if they had been lucky—resembling a rural circus, for the procession of braying, bleating, clucking animals they drew along in their ranks. By the time they returned, the wood-gathering parties would have come in, and the water-haulers. The fires would be lit under the big centoi with the water bubbling within. In all, perhaps a third of the army was scattered across the surrounding countryside by late afternoon of every day, stripping it clean of anything the Macht could possibly make use of. By the time the army were a week out of Kaik this had become routine, and despite the Kufr scouts watching them from the tallest of the surrounding tells, there was as yet no other sign of the Great King’s pursuit.
Tiryn sat near one of the central fires in the midst of the baggage, her Juthan slave heating something in a copper pot over the flames. Jason looked out for them, making sure they had food at the end of each day, and the common soldiery knew better now than to try and molest the general’s Kufr. When he could, he would join them at the fire in the later part of the night, and he and Tiryn would trade words in each other’s tongues, she reaching Asurian and learning Machtic as he did the opposite. It was a little piece of routine which anchored Tiryn to some kind of reality in a bewildering world, and she had come to look forward to those quiet nights by the campfire, even the animals asleep in their rope corrals, Jason and she exchanging quiet words, using their minds for something other than the day to day business of survival.
He was frowning as he arrived this night. He wrapped his cloak about his knees as he took his usual place by the fire, as if to keep out the memories of the day as much as the cool night air. He looked around at the wagons and carts parked in lines, the hobbled horses and mules, the nodding oxen, and the lines of chained Juthan sitting silent and exhausted by their day’s labour.
“They’re damn near as good as mules, these people,” he said to Tiryn, nodding at her personal slave. The Juthan girl sat eyes downcast on the other side of the fire, a hemp slave collar about her broad throat. In her hands the copper pot sat forgotten.
“Her name is Ushdun,” Tiryn said. “She was born in Junnan, in northern Jutha, and was given to an Imperial Tax Collector as part payment for her father’s debt.”
Jason considered this, disgust on his face. “These people give up their children to pay a tax?”
Tiryn’s eyes burned. “It is the way the Empire works. Arkamenes told me it was good for the... the circulation of the population, and it avoided beggaring the smallholders. Most have too many mouths to feed as it is.” Like my father, she thought hut could not say—would never say.
“Then they deserve their Empire,” Jason said with contempt.
“Do you not have slaves in your homeland?”
“Yes, but they’re taken in war, not freely given up by their parents.” He thought again, shrugged a little. “Well, maybe the goatherder tribes—but they’re little better than animals.”
“And are we, then, little better than animals?”
Jason looked at her, head cocked to one side. “Your Machtic is very good now. What say you, we try and get my Asurian up to the same mark?”
“The word for slave is durun. The word for animal is qaf. Have you heard of the Qaf?”
Jason smiled. “I see I am to be educated in several ways tonight. I have heard of them, yes.”
“They are taller than the tallest Kefre, and broader than Juthan. They live far north of here, in the snows of the Korash Mountains. They do not like the heat of the lowlands, but I saw some in Ashur.”
“They sound like fearsome creatures indeed.”
“The word for angry is irghe. You are angry tonight.”
“Did Gasca bring you that jar of wine? I’d have some, if there’s any left.”
She ordered the Juthan to get it out of the wagon. Jason clicked off the clay lid and drank straight from the lip of the jar. He wiped his mouth, nodding. “That’s the right stuff. I was sick of palm wine. It’s a relief to know someone here makes a drink out of the grape.” He caught Tiryn’s eyes still upon him. “Yes, I am angry.”
“Why?”
“I do not come here to discuss my day.”
“I know. You come here to receive language instruction from animals. Why are you angry?”
He laughed at that. “Was this why Arkamenes kept you by his side? To needle him out of a dark mood?”
“Perhaps. You like to talk to me, Jason. You lead this army. I do not think you can talk to others.”
“You’ve met Rictus. No? I talk to him. I talk to my friend Buridan. And I talk to you. I do not know why. I do not know why I trust you, but it happens that I do.”
He was in all seriousness, the laughter gone. He stared into the fire and nudged an errant faggot closer to the flames with his foot.
&n
bsp; “We are not one army, but two,” he said at last. “For now, we are together, because if we split up, we will no doubt die here. But if the Great King forsakes our pursuit, there will be factions in our ranks. They will tear us apart.”
“Kill the leaders of the other factions,” she said. She took the forgotten pot out of the Juthan girl’s hands and began ladling the lentil stew within onto three earthenware plates.
“The Macht do not conduct their affairs in that way,” Jason said. He seemed displeased.
“Are you hungry?”
“I’ll eat.”
He ate with his fingers, as did the Juthan. Tiryn scooped up her own food with a horn spoon. The taste took her back to the hearth of her father’s house, in the mountains. The fire in the centre of the round room, the woodsmoke tainting every mouthful. She stared at her plate and across her mind a flickering pageant of childhood images played themselves out, stealing away her appetite.
Jason set down his empty plate. He lay back in his cloak and stared up at the stars. “I see Gaenion’s Pointer,” he said. “It shows the way north. Many’s the night march I’ve made with it to guide me. It seems strange, somehow, that our stars are here, in this land.”
“Your stars?” Tiryn asked.
“Gaenion the Smith made the stars out of Antimone’s tears. When she wept he loved the way his wife’s light caught in them—his wife is the sun, Araian. So he caught some of Antimone’s tears, and set them in the heavens in patterns and chains ordained by God Himself. And there they stick.”
“The stars are the gems of Bel, thrown into the sky as the god celebrated the killing of the great Bull, Mot’s beast of the dark,” Tiryn said. “The eyes of the Bull he set in the sky also, though one was full of blood from the beast’s death-throes. They are our moons, Firghe and Anande, Wrath and Patience.”
