Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

“So when is it to happen?” the girl asked. Her fingers eased the bronze slave-ring about her throat.

“What’s to happen?”

“This war of yours.”

“I wish I knew. What’s the word in the stews?”

The girl yawned. She had good teeth, white as a pup’s. “Oh, Machran is to be attacked by all your companies, and sacked for every obol.”

“Ah, that war. It may wait a long time yet.”

Suddenly earnest, the girl grasped Jason’s nut-brown, corded forearm. “When it comes, I will hide and wait for you, if you like. I would have you as a master.”

Jason smiled and stood up again. “You would, would you? Well, don’t be hiding on my account.” He dug into his pouch and levered out a bronze half-obol, flicked it at her. She caught it in one small, white fist.

“Don’t you know what war is like, little girl?”

She lowered her head, a greasy, raven mane. “It cannot be worse than this.”

Jason lifted her face up, one forefinger under her chin. All humour had fled his face.

“Do not wish to see war. It is the worst of all things, and once seen, it can never be forgotten.”

Buridan was waiting for him, faithful as a hound, and they fell into step together as they made their way to the Mithannon amid gathering groups of red-clad mercenaries who were staggering in streams to the roster-calls. There was a floating mizzle in the air, but it was passing, and Phobos was galloping out of the sky on his black horse, his brother long gone before him.

“Gods, it’s enough to make you wish you were on the march again,” Jason groaned, splashing through unnameable filth in his thick iron-shod sandals and shoving the more incapable of the drunks out of his way. “After this morning, there will be no more city-liberty. I’ll confine them to camp; Pasion’s orders. The citizens are becoming upset.”

“Can’t have that,” Buridan said, face impassive. He was a broad, russet-haired man with a thick beard, known as Bear to his friends. Jason had seen him break a man’s forearm with his hands, as one might snap a stick for kindling. Under the beard, at his collarbone, there was the gall of a long-vanished slave-ring. Not even Jason had ever dared ask him how he had come by his freedom. He was decurion of the centon, Jason’s second. The pair had fought shoulder to shoulder now for going on ten years, and had killed at each other’s side times beyond count. One did not need to share blood to have a brother, Jason knew. Life’s bitterness brought men together in ways not mapped out by the accidents of their birth. And even the blackest-hearted mercenary was nothing if he had no one to look to his back.

They passed through the echoing, dank tunnel of the Mithannon, the gate guards eyeing them with a mixture of hostility and respect, and as they came out from under that vault of stone the sun broke out in the sky above them, clearing the mountains in a white stab of light. At the same moment the roster-drums began to beat, sonorous boomings which seemed to pick up the glowing pulse of last night’s wine in Jason’s temples. One thing to be said for Pasion: once he stopped talking, he was free with his drink. Most of the twenty centurions would be too wretched to lead their centons out of the encampment today. Their hangovers would keep them under the walls. Perhaps that was Pasion’s policy, the canny bastard.

Jason’s troop lines were fifty spearlengths of hand-me-down lean-tos from which the fine fragrance of burning charcoal was already wandering. Before them was a beaten patch of earth, muddy in places, cordoned off from similar spaces by a line of olive-wood posts which had hemp ropes strung between them. Over all there flapped his centon’s banner, a stylised dog’s head embroidered on linen, with further layers of linen glued to the first to stiffen it out. Where the embroidery of the symbol had worn away, the pattern had been completed with the addition of paint. It was an old standard. Dunon of Arkadios had given it to Jason on retiring, and with it a few greybeards who had fought under it time out of mind. They were all gone now, but the Dogsheads were still here under that rag; different faces, same game.

Below the banner there now stood ten files of yawning, belching, scratching, glowering men, all clad in chitons that had once been bright scarlet, but which now had faded to every shade north of pink. They were a sodden, debauched, sunken-eyed crew, and Jason looked at them with distaste.

“How many?” he asked Buridan.

“Eighty-three by my count. One or two more may still wander in.”

“That’s four down on yesterday.”

“Like I said, they may yet wander in.”

“Another month of this, and we’ll be hard put to it to get together a single file.”

“There’s fresh fish coming in all the time,” Buridan rumbled, and he gestured to where a small knot of men stood unsure to one side, looking around them with eyes wide one second, narrowed the next. Though they bore weapons, none wore scarlet. The red-clad mercenaries filed past them without so much as a glance, though with the inevitable epithets flung out.

“Shitpickers.”

“Goatfuckers.”

“Strawheads.”

“Too damn fresh. I like my fish stinking,” Jason said.

“Like your women,” Buridan said mildly.

“And your mother,” Jason added. The two men grinned at one another.

“You call the roll,” Jason said. “I believe I’ll go check on the fish.”

“We’re short an armourer,” Buridan reminded him.

“Fat chance we’ll get one of those.”

Would-be mercenaries. They came in two distinct categories. There were those with dreams and ideas of their own place in the world. These saw themselves as men amongst men. They craved adventure, the sight of far cities, the clash and clamour of war as the poets sang of it, and that bright panoply the playwrights made of phalanx warfare. Of these hopeful souls, perhaps one in four would last past his first battle. In the othismos there was no room for dreamers. Those who stayed to the colour soon put aside their illusions.

The second category was more useful; and more dangerous. These were those men who had nothing to lose. Men running from the things they had seen and done in their past, or running from those who wished to bring them to account for it. Such fellows made good soldiers, and were generally fatalistic enough to be brave. That, or they no longer valued their own lives. Either way, they were useful to any commander.

One of each, Jason thought, as he approached the two foremost of the fresh fish. Mountain lads, one with the bright, hopeful gaze of the ignorant, the other with old pain etched about his eyes. The bigger one, he of the broad, half-smiling face, had an old-fashioned panoply: cuirass, shield, close-faced helm at his hip, and spear. The other had a torn chiton and not much else.

“Names,” Jason said, rubbing his forehead and cursing Pasion’s cheap wine.

“Gasca of Gosthere.”

“Rictus of-I was of Isca.”

Damn. Iscan training too. What a waste. But without proper gear he was of no use to the centon-no fighting use.

“Famed Isca, breeder of warriors. I hear they’ve levelled the walls now, and all the women are being fucked six ways from yesterday. And what did you do when they were burning your city?” This Jason asked Rictus, sliming the question with a fine-tuned sneer. “Were you herding goats, or clinging to your mother’s knees?”

The boy’s eyes widened, grey as old iron. “I was in the second rank,” he said, his voice quiet, at odds with the anger blazing on his face. “When we were hit in flank and rear I threw down my shield and ran.”

There was a pause, and then Jason nodded. “You did the right thing.” And he saw the surprise on the boy’s face-and something else-gratitude?