Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

All this Gasca and Rictus found out within minutes of joining the food-queue, for their fellow mercenaries became more congenial with the toothsome smell of the day’s main meal eddying about them. They were handed square wooden plates and had a nameless stew ladled within, then grasped the butt of hard bread shoved into their free hand. Spearmen and skirmishers mingled indiscriminately as the meal was distributed, rank set aside. Last to be fed was the centurion himself. This was to make sure that there had been enough for every man. If the cooks ran short, it would be Jason standing there with an empty plate, and there was no excuse acceptable for that, short of an act of Cod.

But Jason was late. The evening of the short day had begun to swoop in before he appeared in their midst, and the wind had begun flapping at the dying flames under the centos. Men gathered around that ruddy wind-bitten light, and when Rictus felt a soft touch on his face he looked up to see that snow was falling, fat flakes spinning out of the dark in the grip of the wind.

Jason stood at the centos scooping cold stew out of his trencher. His second, Buridan, handed him a wineskin and he squirted the black army wine down his throat. He wiped his mouth, looking round at the assembled soldiers. There must have been seven score of them squatting about him, cloaks pulled up against the snow, buttocks stone-cold from the bare ground beneath them. They watched him without a word, spearman and skirmisher alike. The crackling firelight played on the faces of the nearest, but outside it dozens more were standing in darkness. Up and down the Marshalling Yards other centons were gathering in like fashion, like winter moths drawn to the flame-light of the cooking fires.

“Four sennights we’ve been here, or a little more,” Jason said. He had raised his voice so that it carried to those peering in at the rear. “We have waited, and grown soft in the waiting. You’re all poor now, money squandered in the stews of Machran. You’ve drunk each cup to its lees and grown to know the face and arse of every whore in the city. That time is at an end. My brothers, at dawn tomorrow we march out, every company of us. We make for Hal Goshen, on the coast, two hundred pasangs by road. We will cover that distance in six days. At the Goshen there will be ships waiting for us-”

A low murmur ran through the centon, and died away just as quickly when Jason held up his hand. “There will be ships waiting for us, and these ships will take us to our destination.”

“And where might that be?” someone shouted out of the darkness of the rear ranks.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Jason said, his voice mild, but his eyes flashing.

“We should vote on this. I never volunteered for no sea voyage,” someone else said.

“We voted to take up Pasion’s contract. We took his money, and we will see it through. Unless, that is, you have the means to repay your retainer, and you wish to leave my centon.” Jason left the last words hanging in the air. No one else spoke up.

“Very well. Assembly is a turn earlier in the morning. You will all be packed and ready to march out. Burn what you cannot take with you-only wargear will be carried on the wagons. And brothers, anyone too drunk or poxed to march in the morning will be dismissed from the company, on the spot.” He paused. The snow whirled around his head, spotting his dark hair white. He looked up at the sky, blinking as snowflakes settled on his eyes.

“I don’t care it if it’s waist-deep. We march in the morning. File leaders, on me. All others dismissed.”

The tight-packed crowd of men broke apart. There was little talk. They walked back to the company lines in the guttering glare of torchlight, spearmen and skirmishers mingled. Buridan called away some two dozen of the light troops to the rear of the lines, where the wagons stood like patient beasts. They hauled out harness from the wagon-beds and filed off after him to the city itself, where all the centon’s draught animals had been quartered this last month.

Gasca was limping as he and Rictus regained the shelter of their shack. Inside, one of the other spearmen had lit an oil lamp and the wick smoked busily, catching at their throats. “How is the leg?” Rictus asked.

Gasca took off his cloak, laid it on the earth floor, and sat gingerly down upon it, breath hissing out through his teeth. “That drill today opened it up a little. I’ll be fine. I’ll strap it up.”

“Let me have a look at it.” Rictus lifted up Gasca’s chiton. The red dye had leached out of it and streaked all his lower limbs. It was hard to tell what was blood and what was not. He touched the black-stitched wound in Gasca’s thigh, feeling the heat of it. Some of Zeno’s stitches had popped free and the whole purple line of it was swollen. Rictus leaned close, sniffing.

“It smells all right. Hold still. This’ll hurt.”

He made two fists and pressed the knuckles in on either side of the wound, squeezing it. Gasca uttered one strangled yelp, and then at the amused looks of the other spearmen in the shack he clenched shut his teeth until they creaked.

The wound popped, and out spat a yellow gush of pus. Rictus kept pressing until the pus ended and clean blood began.

“Where’s your old chiton? Give it here.” He ripped off a strip and bound it about Gasca’s leg, knotting it loose enough that a man might slide two fingers underneath. His father had taught him that, the day the boar had ducked under the aichme. One had to let the blood keep flowing.

Rictus wiped his sticky hands on his chiton and sat back. “Now you can march with the best of them.”

Gasca did not meet his eyes. His gaze flicked over the other men in the hut. More and more were coming in, and the shadowed space was becoming crowded and raucous. The other soldiers had leather bags into which they were stuffing their belongings with careless enthusiasm, high-spirited and talkative, throwing memories back and forth, insults, requests to borrow kit. No one spared a glance for the two youths in the corner.

Finally Gasca levered himself to his feet, spurning Rictus’s hand but offering a smile. “This is life now, I suppose. Best to get used to it.”

He looked around himself at the squalid hut, at the crowd of profane, battle-scarred, foul-smelling men that filled it.

“This is life,” Rictus agreed, “and tomorrow we march out to see a little more of it.”

The port of Sinon was a relic. For those who had a smattering of education, an inkling of history, it was proof positive that in some legends there were kernels of truth. The city was as ancient as any Macht polity in the fastnesses of the Harukush, but it lay across the sea from the Macht lands. It had been founded on the coast of that vast, endless continent whereon lived the teeming masses and untold races of the Kufr. Men called those places The Far Side Of The Sea, but while to the south the Sinonian Sea opened out into the vast Tanean, here the straits that separated the Harukush landmass from that of the Great Continent were only thirty pasangs wide. Once, the Macht had crossed these straits eastwards, in fleets of oared galleys, and had taken warfare and conquest to the lands of the Kufr on the eastern shore. Gansakr and Askanon had fallen to them, broad, hilly lands with fertile pastures and rich orchards that made a mockery of their own stony soil. It was said the Macht hosts had pressed even as far as the Korash Mountains, more than seven hundred pasangs to the south and east. There, they had been confronted by armies so vast that there was no hope of victory against them. They had been beaten back, and had retreated to the coast of the Sinonian once more, like a tide tugged by the two moons of Kuf. The city of Sinon had been a fortress then, built to retain a fingerhold on the coast of the Great Continent. Exhausted by years of bloody slaughter, Macht and Kufr had signed a treaty. The Macht had sworn never again to cross the Straits in panoply of war, and the Kufr had conceded the port-fortress of Sinon to them, as a gateway through which embassies and merchants and commerce might come and go. The Kufr warleader who had signed that treaty had been named Asur. He had founded a line of kings, had built an empire. His descendants now ruled the world, and called themselves Great King, King of Kings. And the Asurian Empire had endured over the centuries, until it had become part of the fabric of Kuf itself, its greatness ordained by God, and destined to endure forever. So said the Kufr legends.