Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Jason went up and down the front rank of his centon in full armour, his iron helm with its transverse crest bumping at his hip. “Stand still, you bastards,” he said in a low snarl. “Show them who you are. Buridan, kick those fucking skirmishers into line.”

They were led off the quays by Orsos’s Dolphins, a disreputable crew even by the standards of mercenaries. In some moment of grim gaiety, these had slathered their armour in black paint found in the hold of their ship, and so it was as though a whole centon of cursebearers led the army from the waterside into the teeming vast-ness of the city that awaited them. Pasion was up in the van, conversing with great reserve with a pair of Kufr guides, each inclining gracefully to hear his words in the hubbub of the crowd. Even at a distance, it was possible to see that he was fighting not to recoil as the fragrant, golden faces leaned closer to his own, the violet eyes in them gleaming bright as some stone found in the desert.

Rictus stayed with the ships along with all the other skirmishers. The off-loading of the Macht gear and animals was going to last some time. There was some shouting and weapons were brandished as a huge crowd of Juthan dockworkers swarmed up to the gangplanks, pushing wheeled cranes in their midst as though they were siege engines brought to the walls of a hostile fortress. The skirmishers closed ranks and spat abuse at the line of grey-skinned Juthan, who stood impassive, yellow eyes blinking balefully. Only when a centurion came striding down the waterfront, swearing at them for fools, did the skirmishers relent and let the brawny Juthan clamber over their ships and begin the hot and heavy work of winching the army’s stores ashore.

“They smell different,” one of Rictus’s comrades said, upper lip rising over his teeth. “Do you get it too? Like a beach in the summer when the tide has left weed on the strand.”

“That’s the port you smell,” Rictus told him. But he was not sure that the fellow was wrong. Jostled beyond irritation on the crowded deck, he climbed up the mainmast shrouds until he was fifty feet above the wharf. From here the press and din and heat of the city seemed no less overpowering. The great harbours of Tanis were crammed with ships-not just the Macht fleet, but half a thousand other vessels, all edging to the docks for off-loading or loading. And the streets leading up from the waterfront were a jammed chaos of pedestrians, carts, handcarts, wagons, and pack-animals. Only the thoroughfare up which the Macht army now marched seemed free of congestion, the inhabitants of the city making way for the river of bronze and scarlet as it wound its way inland to where the white towers gleamed. Suddenly, the world had become a place immense beyond Rictus’s imaginings, and the army that had appeared huge and fearsome in its multitudes back in the Harukush was now swallowed up by Tanis as a bullfrog will snap up a gnat.

Sweating like a horse, Pasion nonetheless felt the cool relief wash over him as he recognised Phiron standing at the summit of the street, waiting for the glittering river of men to trudge their way up to him. Phiron was grinning, that handsome face of his burnt dark, the grey eyes flashing bright in the shadow of it. He fell into step beside Pasion and the murmur went back down the gasping column. The men lifted their heads somewhat, eyes flickering in the T-shaped slots of their helmets, crests bobbing and feet tramping up and down. They began to keep time, and the cadence grew as the hob-nailed sandals on their feet punished the cobbles.

Pasion had always resented Phiron a little for his good looks, his aristocratic ways, his easy grasp of larger things; but he was glad to see him now. The two men gripped each other’s forearms without breaking stride. “Where are they taking us?” Pasion asked, nodding to the pair of Kefren striding easily ahead.

“Out to the Desert Wall; the Kerkh-Gadush they call it. It’s a fair tramp, and you and I cannot go all the way. We’re wanted in the Aadan, the High City. Our principal awaits us there, no doubt growing mighty impatient. I want ten centurions too, to make a bit of a show. Make sure one of them is Jason of Ferai; I need an educated man there.”

Pasion smiled without humour. “He’s ten paces behind you, Dogshead banner and all. What about Orsos?”

“No, for God’s sake. I want quick-witted fellows who know how to keep their tongue behind their teeth. Mynon-we’ll take him. Pick out the rest, Pasion. There’s not a moment to lose.”

Phiron and Pasion stood aside and let the men march past them. They snagged Jason and Mynon, called them out of the endless files. Marios of Karinth, a hardened killer who nonetheless had the bland face of a baker. Durik of Neslar, black-bearded and broken-nosed, a veteran with a love of music. Pomero of Arienus, red-haired, his freckled face peeling in the beat of the foreign sun. Five others; the younger, the comelier, the more presentable of the army’s centurions. Phiron called them all out of the marching files, bade them smarten themselves up with a curtness he had not possessed six months before, and then led them up the man-made tell of Tanis’s upper city.

Every centurion he had chosen bore the Curse of God black and lightless on his back.

Twelve men walked up the echoing length of that great space, that towering weight of marble and gold leaf and limestone arrayed in odd and improbable swirling balconies and galleries clear up to its roof, the vaulted pillars wrought in unsettling sinuous curves which did not ought to lie within the art of the mason. They did not look up, but in their close and fearsome helms kept their eyes facing front. They bore swords, but had left their real weapons behind. In the legendary black God-given armour of the Macht they strode onwards, scarlet cloaks wrapped around their left forearms, scarlet transverse crests nodding to their shoulders. They came to a halt in one bracing crash of iron on stone and stood like things immutable and unworldly in all that varicoloured, fragranced throng which packed the walls of the hall, silenced by curiosity and a little fear.

Tiryn watched from one side of the dais. Phiron she had seen up close-and now she watched him bow and doff his helm before Arkamenes and Gushrun and Amasis, all regal as statues in a little tableau they had practised beforehand, Arkamenes sitting upon the throne, Gushrun standing on his right hand with the staff of the governorship in one manicured hand, Amasis on the left, a vision of white linen. Down the hall the two lines of Kefren spearmen stood tall and fearsome in full, shining armour. It was as good a show as she’d seen-even in Ashur the Great King would not do much better, not for the everyday business of meeting his commanders. So what was different?

Tiryn tugged her veil down a little, that she might smell. The Macht stink she caught at once. There was an acrid fullness to it. These things sweated like animals and smelled like animals. Even the incense in the overhead burners could not wipe it out. In her childhood, Tiryn had sat in the stables while the slaves rubbed down horses fresh from the circuit. The smell was like that.

But there was something else. Impossible to define, it might have been something to do with the way these things simply stood, in attitudes of easy attention before the dais, oblivious to the crowds behind them, the great ones they faced, the opulent and crushing grandeur of their surroundings. They seemed more solid than anything else in the hall. Perhaps it was that fabled armour they wore, which reflected no light. Even the tallest of them barely came to the shoulder of the shortest Kefren guard, and yet…

I here was something unsettling about these mercenaries, far beyond the myth and rumour which surrounded their race. Tiryn felt, standing there with one hand holding her veil from her face, that she was in the presence of something wrong, something that did not belong in the world she knew.