The Ten Thousand

by Paul Kearney

  The Macht stood as if thunderstruck by the sight of Tiryn standing all in veiled black before the bonfire, the hem of her robe flapping in the wind. “Antimone,” someone murmured, and the name went through the assembled men swifter than rumour. Those nearest to her backed away a little. Some made the warding sign against bad luck, joining thumb and forefinger before spitting through it.

  “Let’s count these things before the sun catches us at it,” Mochran said, weary and old-looking. “Gominos, you count for Rictus and I’ll count for Aristos. You know the drill.”

  The click and clatter of the stones through the hands of the two men. Once the pebbles were counted they were tossed into the darkness beyond the firelight. Every time a hundred was reached, both Gominos and Mochran kept that stone and set it aside. It was cold, standing outside the light of the fire, but the Macht wrapped themselves in their scarlet cloaks and remained there, quiet, watching, many following the count with their lips moving.

  At last the two cloaks were empty again. Mochran and Gominos lifted them from the ground and raised them up to show there were no more stones upon them, then donned them, shivering. Mynon stepped forward. “Well?”

  “Three thousand, six hundred and seventeen,” Gominos said, frowning.

  Mochran grinned. “Four thousand, two hundred and sixty-three. Brothers, we have a new warleader, Rictus of Isca.”

  The Macht seemed little interested. It was the middle of the night, and the fires were burning low. The morai began to disperse to their bivouacs. Aristos smiled at Rictus, a bitterness twisting his mouth. “Who’d have thought a strawhead would prove so popular?” Rictus looked at him, but said nothing. He felt nothing but weary, and the realisation of what had just happened was sinking in.

  “Come to my wagon,” Tiryn said, touching him on the arm. “Jason would be glad of it.”

  Rictus shook his head. “Tonight I must be here. Some will want to talk to me, and others I must talk to. I will come see him tomorrow.”

  Tiryn walked away without another word. Tall beyond humanity, clad in black, she did indeed seem a visitation from another world.

  “Get some sleep,” Mochran said. “The dark hours are not a time to be making decisions. Best left for the morning.” He paused, then added, “Rictus, sleep tonight among your own mora, among men you trust.”

  “Have we fallen that far, Mochran?”

  “Aristos was right; we’re not an army any more, not right now. It may be you can change that, but in any case, be careful. Aristos does not take this kind of defeat well. He may try something before morning.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THINNING RANKS

  The sun rose, a grey light behind the mountains, no more. Snow was drifting down in shifts and shreds, whirling in flecks and flocks about the encampments, settling on men’s eyelashes and in their beards as they lay shivering in half-sleep beside the butt-end of smouldering logs. In the baggage lines, the oxen and mules stood apathetic and head-down.

  “How much of a head start does he have?” Rictus asked, rubbing grime out of his eyes.

  “They were in at the baggage well before dawn,” Mynon told him. “So I hear at any rate. They took a dozen mule-carts, no more.”

  “Travelling light,” Mochran said, then bent over to cough and hawk and spit a green gobbet out onto the ground. “He’s had two turns’ march perhaps, and no wagons or wounded to slow him down.”

  “Why did no one tell me?” Rictus was bright-eyed with anger now.

  “The men let him go. What were they going to do, start fighting in the camp, kill their own?”

  “Just him and Gominos, then.”

  “Yes, and we’re well rid of them,” Mochran snapped. “They left the gold, which is something—too heavy for them, I suppose. But they took more than enough supplies to get them through the mountains.”

  “They left the rest of us short, then.”

  Mynon sighed, cradling his injured arm under his cloak. “Yes, they did.”

  Rictus peered west, along the winding valleys and looming white-tipped mountains. Two whole morai, some seventeen hundred men, had left camp in the middle of the night and no one had seen fit to wake the new warleader, that young fool who had thought he could lead them.

  “If we’re not an army, then what are we?” he said. Mynon and Mochran looked at him glumly.

  “All right. Pack up. We’d best get on the road ourselves and make some distance today.”

  “You think the Kufr are still after us?” Mochran asked. He looked back east, but the air was a veil of blowing snow and there was nothing to see.

  “I think they are.”

  “If the Juthan are up in arms against them, maybe they’ve enough in their pot to go around,” Mynon said, rasping his fingers through his beard. It was coming out black and silver.

  “Maybe. We’ll keep a rearguard all the same, and march like soldiers.”

  Mynon walked away with something like a sneer on his face. Mochran stood a moment longer, looking up at the blank sky, the first gleam of the sun vanishing as he watched, swallowed up.

  “It’s not the Kufr we have to worry about now, Rictus. It’s these mountains.”

  They made only a few pasangs before the snow thickened and the wind picked up to howl about the surrounding peaks. Phinero’s mora, at the front of the column, broke track for the rest, stamping through the deepening snow using their spears as staffs and sending the more swift-footed among them forward to make sure of the way ahead. Now and then they came across evidence of Aristos’s passage before them: a discarded pair of sandals, turds by the wayside. But soon the snow covered these and any other signs there might have been, and the main column of the army marched in a world of its own, a world defined by the whirling snow, the grey-glimpsed flanks of the rocky valley ahead, the labouring back of the man in front, muffled to the eyes.

  The men fell out in the middle of the day to eat hard bread and stale cheese. Many of them cut strips off the hems of their cloaks and bound up their numb feet with them, others using emptied grain sacks from the baggage train. They were not equipped for cold weather, but they were Macht and were used to the mountains, familiar with the sleep of a man who was overtaken by the cold, and with the white hardness of frozen flesh that must be thawed before it turned black.

  It had been a long time, however, since they had felt the bite of frost on their faces, or marched through snow; it seemed like a re-education in a past life to them. The deserts of Artaka, the steaming lowlands of Pleninash, seemed now like a brilliantly coloured dream half-remembered before waking. The snowstorms that raged about their faces, the half-felt loom of the encroaching mountains: these were reality. They were all that had ever been real.

  That night, forage though they might across the lower slopes of the mountains and across the twisted valleys and re-entrants with their foaming white rivers, they could not gather up enough firewood to do more than heat their evening meal. The men gathered around the communal centoi with the snow plastering their backs, and took turns coming up to the heat to thaw out their feet and hands, the firelight playing on their peeling faces. They cupped the stew-bowls in their hands to savour the warmth before gulping down the thin broth within, clenching their teeth on their shivers and exchanging catcalls and insults with their comrades. Then they went to their bivouacs, laid their blankets on the snow, and lay belly to back in long rows with their heads covered, their frozen feet drawn up under the ragged hems of their cloaks.

  Five days went by in this manner, the snow never quite thick enough to warrant a halt in their march, but never letting up enough to glimpse the sun. They climbed higher into the mountains and began to feel the air thinning about them as the earth under their feet rose to meet the sky. Only at night did the cloud clear somewhat, and the men lying there in the drifts could look up past the grey frame of their own breath to see the stars blaze out white and pitiless, as bright as they had ever been in the high places of the Harukush, Gaenion’s Pointer sh
owing the way home lay. In the morning they would have to break themselves out of their brittle blankets like men smashing glass, their beards frosted white so that they were an army of old men. When the first of the wounded died, they would have burned them with their dwindling store of firewood, but Rictus forbade it. The dead were buried under cairns of stone instead, the wood saved to keep life in the living.

  Just over six thousand men laboured like this through the high passes of the Korash Mountains, in the eleventh year of the reign of the Great King Ashurnan, in the year of the Juthan Rebellion, the year after the death of the pretender Arkamenes at the Battle of Kunaksa. The Macht army, which had shaken the Asurian Empire to its foundation, disappeared into the rocky roof of the world as though it had never been. But its passage did not go unremarked; in the snow-covered hollows of the mountains, there were watchers who noted its progress.

  Rictus brought a hot jar of army stew to Tiryn’s wagon every night, usually accompanied by Whistler and one or two others from his old centon. Whistler had been a teamster in a former life, and now had taken it upon himself to see to Tiryn’s wagon and the poor beasts that drew it, rubbing them down every evening and checking the vehicle for the day’s wear and tear. When the wagons broke down, throwing a wheel or cracking an axle, they were at once hacked up for firewood, for there was no decent timber to repair them, and the field-forges could not be got hot enough to work the iron wheel-rims and yoke-fittings. The army’s wake was a littered trail of abandoned gear, and many of the men had thrown away their shields to ease their travels.

  Some oil yet remained to light Tiryn’s sole lamp. Rictus produced the earthenware jar from under his cloak. Too hot to touch when he had first taken it, the clay was now only lukewarm. Tiryn spooned the stew into a pair of bowls. Jason was sitting up now, and though his face was white and wasted, his eyes were clear. The fever that had consumed him was broken at last, having feasted on his flesh since the Irunshahr battle. Rictus could have made thumb and forefinger meet around his once brawny forearm. As Jason spooned stew into his mouth, the utensil shook in his hand as if even that were too much for his stripped muscles. He saw the look in Rictus’s eyes and grinned, his face momentarily becoming a hairy skull.

  “Don’t you be wearing that long face for me. I’m alive, aren’t I?”

  “I thank the gods you are.”

  “Thank Tiryn. Without her I’d be buried under a pile of rocks in our rear.” His free hand went out and clenched the Kufr woman’s fingers. Tiryn smiled. She was beautiful. Rictus wondered why he had never noticed it before. For a second he envied Jason that look in her eyes. No woman had ever looked at him in such a way.

  “You are a lucky man, Jason.”

  “I’ve been luckier,” Jason told him, around a mouthful of stew. “Phobos! Are we down to mule already?”

  “When the animals die, we carve them up at once. I’m trying to save the beans until there’s nothing else.”

  “How goes our merry march, lad? Longer than expected, I take it.”

  “The weather has slowed us down, and there are so many westward-heading valleys that it takes time for the scouts to let us know which ones are not dead-ends. We’re feeling our way forward pace by pace.”

  “And meanwhile, our old friend starvation marches alongside us. How are the stores?”

  “Aristos took more than his share when he left. The army has been on half-rations for days now. As things go, we’ll be all out in three more days. After that, it’s just the pack animals, and whatever we can grub out of the ground. No one has seen a lick of game since we got high up, not so much as a bird. This is a desert, Jason.”

  “We’ll march hungry,” Jason said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “It’s been done before.”

  “We’ll march hungry,” Rictus agreed, tonelessly.

  Jason watched him by the low flicker of the lamplight, his bowl forgotten in his lap. “Not much fun, is it, Rictus, that lonely space above the snowline?”

  “It’s not something I’ve ever wanted.”

  “And yet I hear you are good at it. Mynon and Mochran have been to visit. Between them they’ve forty years on you, and yet they’re happy as fresh fish to leave the decisions your way.”

  Rictus did not reply.

  “I left you Aristos and his snot-nosed friends as morai commanders,” Jason said. “That is on me. I should have looked harder for leaders.”

  “What’s done is done.”

  “I hear your friend Gasca died.”

  “At Irunshahr, yes.”

  “That, too, was my fault.”

  “No! It was Aristos. He—”

  “It was my fault, Rictus. I am not the strategist Phiron was. Give me a centon or a mora, and I am a happy man. But an army like this—I did not see it. I am sorry.”

  “These things happen,” Rictus said.

  “This is your army now. You will lead it home.”

  “And you?”

  Jason stared at Tiryn, and she back at him. “I have what I want, right here. I am done with armies, done with war.”

  “I—I don’t—”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  The question threw Rictus completely. It was a moment before he could reply. “He was called Aritus.”

  “He must have been a good man, to raise such a son.”

  * * *

  The next morning the snow grew thinner, hard flakes that struck exposed flesh with the heft of sand. The army staggered on through it, the morai hunched up around narrow-waisted gaps in the rocks, stringing out where the ground opened. The Imperial Road had long ago disappeared; the stone-paved companion that had led their feet all the way from Kunaksa had become a wide dirt track with stone waymarkers every pasang, then a mere half-guessed trail, and finally nothing more than a memory buried in snow.

  A river crossed their path, a wide, wild, foaming wall of water racing down from the heights above and widening out as it crossed the valley floor. The men waded across it, shouting with the cold, leaning on their spears and manhandling the wagons and carts through the waist-deep torrent. One cart full of wounded hit an unseen stone and tilted over, the mule screaming in its harness as it went with it. Fifty men splashed and waded at once to right it again, but by the time they had done so the dozen wounded inside had been carried off by the roaring water, mere black dots hurtling downstream to be smashed to pieces against the rocks. The army went into camp that night shuddering and soaked, the water freezing their cloaks to the hardness of armour. They stripped off their clothes and rolled naked in the snow, pummelled each other until the blood showed pink under the skin, slapped life back into each other’s flesh, and laughed while they did it, still able to see the absurd side of things.

  Another morning, and with sunrise the men rising from their bivouacs found that some of their comrades did not rise with them, but lay in their midst stiffened and cold, their faces as peaceful as if they were asleep after a long day’s journey. The centurions did a headcount and reported to Rictus, as they did every morning. He received their news with a grim face. Over three dozen men had frozen to death during the night, and many more had woken to find their feet mere useless frozen blocks.

  The firewood was ended, and so the men chewed strips of raw mule and oxen. The hearts and livers of the animals were saved for those of the sick and wounded who remained alive, and Rictus authorised an issue of wine, the last of the barrels still remaining. There was enough to give every man a large mouthful, and then the barrels were broken up and the staves loaded onto the wagons to burn later in the day. The army built cairns over its dead, and marched on. Rictus thought that it had been easier to march into battle at Kunaksa.

  Four more days passed, and then a shouting at the forefront of the column brought Rictus running up at a shambling lope, a ragged figure bound about with torn strips of cloth and blanketing, his feet wrapped in the scarlet remains of a dead man’s cloak. Frostbite glowed in white patches upon the backs of his hands and on his
face, but that was no matter. Every man in the army was now so afflicted, and many kept shuffling with the column though their flesh had rotted black upon their limbs.

  Young Phinero joined Rictus, still fit and hale. The pair passed Mynon, head down and trudging, and Mochran, snow-blind, being led along by one of his centurions.

  Gasping, they made their way to where Whistler and the last of Phiron’s Hounds stood on a higher slope overlooking the meanderings of the valley floor. There had been an avalanche here at some time in the past, and all around boulders lay like a god’s abandoned playthings, some as big as a good-sized house, split into leaning pieces by the violence of their fall. The wind was bitter here, winnowing the air and raising scuds of snow from the surfaces of the stone. Rictus fought for air. Hunger had stolen his stamina and now a half-pasang run left him panting like an old man. Even the Curse of God felt heavy on his back.

  “What do you make of this, Rictus?” Whistler asked. He held up an iron aichme, snapped off the spear-shaft. Beside him, his men were rifling through the snow and exclaiming as they came upon other relics. One slipped and cursed as his feet skidded along the smooth convex face of a shield.

  “This is new,” Phinero said, tugging his cloak from around his face. “Look, Rictus, a sauroter. They make them like this in Machran. I see the maker’s mark. Ferrious of Afteni.”

  “Keep looking,” Rictus said. “Fan out. Whistler, run down and halt the column.”

  Their feet stumbled over a hoard of weapons and other equipment buried under the snow. Some of the aichmes had blood frozen upon them. They worked their way upslope, until they came upon a rocky knoll set upon the mountainside, too rounded to be a thing of nature. Rictus began to pull away at the stones which surfaced it, wincing as they sliced into his cold hands.

  And there, as he tugged away a rock the size of his head, a face staring out.

  “Phobos! Phinero, look here!”

  They tugged away more stones, and the men cried out as they discovered other bodies piled up beneath them.