Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Another stir in the crowded hall as Phiron spoke up in good Kefren, the language of Kings. He had worked hard on his accent and sounded foreign but not boorish. It was remarkable to hear this thing speak up in the cultured tongue of the nobility, that which they spoke in the very throne-hall of Ashur itself.

“My lord, I bring to you the flower of our people, the finest warriors we possess. I bring before you one hundred centons of Macht spearmen to swell the ranks of your armies, to aid you in the time ahead. My lord, we are yours, here and now. We will not quit your service until you stand supreme in the Empire, and are crowned Great King in the holy halls of Ashur. This we have all sworn.” Here, Phiron bowed deep, and after an awkward, ugly little pause, so did the other Macht standing behind them, faces unreadable behind their helmets.

Arkamenes stood up, smiling. “My dear friends,” he began, stretching out his arms in the gesture which was his wont upon making a speech.

Tiryn edged away. Beside her, some of Arkamenes’s higher-caste concubines stepped aside to let her pass, as one would make way for a malodorous beggar. She was the favourite, but when it came to it, he would breed with them. One could not have a true heir with low-caste blood in him. Tiryn lifted her head and thanked God for the kohl and stibium she had applied about her eyes that morning. They felt like armour to her now as she made her way through the crowd. The other concubines would have bowed to her, had Arkamenes’s eyes been upon them. Now they barely gave her room to scrape past them. The closer he came to power, the less he would look for his little low-caste whore, the hufsa from the Magron Mountains. Would he miss her? Probably not. He talked to her in the night because it did not matter what one said to a hufsa. One might as well confide in a stone.

And yet, she thought, I walk here in silk and linen with gold upon my forehead and wrists and ankles, a bodyguard five steps behind, and a maid behind that. Mother, I did well.

She remembered the white mountains, and the blue sky beyond. From there, one looked down on the brown and green plains below with the glitter of the rivers and thought of them as another world, a place to provide a sorry backdrop to the real existence of snow and stone. And yet those endless, horizon-spanning river-plains with their black soils and thrice-yearly harvest were the powerhouse of the world, and demanded tribute from those who lived on their borders. And so Tiryn had been sent, in lieu of a son for the army. One serviced the Empire in whatever way one could.

And now it had been so long that the mountains were mere distant pictures in her head. I have become spoiled, she thought. Too long in palaces. I was born in a place where people worshipped God out of doors, stood before fallen rocks on the heads of mountains and looked up and spoke their mind to him. Now He is hedged about with ceremony and sanctuary, candlelight and gold. One whispers to Him in the shadows.

One begins to doubt if He is there to listen.

Momentarily, she hated herself. This soft, well-clad creature with painted eyes and pointed nails, who now doubted all the good things her parents had fought to make her learn. Why? Because she had seen something of the world and had begun to count herself wise.

Her mother had sliced off a fingertip the day the Tax collectors had taken Tiryn away. Wordless, white-faced, and without complaint, she had lopped it off with the best of her cooking knives, making of Tiryn’s going a bereavement. Tiryn had understood and had not wept upon leaving, so shocked was she by the knowledge that this was for real and forever, not some temporary exile. But she had cried herself to sleep later that night, after the Tax collectors had taken it in turns to rape her.

Leaving the hall, staring down a pair of sentries in order to leave by one of the bewilderingly situated side doors, she found herself walking downhill because it was the easiest way to go. The heat of the day was beginning to fade a little, and it was becoming colder. Many of the local folk were clad in wrapped burnooses, which made Tiryn smile unwillingly, remembering childhoods deep with snow, and frozen lambs set in the ash of the fire to bring back some warmth of life. This winter, as they called it, was as warm as an upland spring. Artaka claimed to be the oldest place in the world, and Tanis its oldest city. Tiryn could believe that, but she still felt that slight scorn the mountain-dweller harbours towards the lowlander. Higher the land, lower the caste, the old saying went. That also was true. The tall, golden-skinned Kefren from the humid and fertile river-plains; these had been rulers of the world time out of mind. They utilised the other races and castes as a carpenter will reach into his box of tools. It had always been this way, and most thought it always would. But for Tiryn, looking on that small group of black-armoured soldiers in the great hall of Tanis today, there had been a jolt of some strange emotion she could not quite bring to register. These things; these men. They had never been anything to do with that box of tools. They did not show deference; they did not care about caste. They were ignorant, and Tiryn sensed that in their ignorance they would be full of hate. But all the same-all the same-how good it was to see the mighty Kefren stand unassured for once, and somehow in awe of the fierce creature they had invited over their doorstep.

Rictus had always liked climbing, whether it was trees or hills, and thus he was quite at home in the rigging of the ship. He sat in the Top of the mainmast, a narrow platform of heavy, salt-scarred wood some six feet across, and listened with a smile to one of the crew tell a story of a certain lady’s house in Kupr, the forested island of many springs in the northern Tanean which Macht navies had plundered time out of mind for the excellence of its timber, their own homegrown stuff being too gnarled and hard to work for proper masts and spars. This certain lady had entertained two sea-captains in the one evening, and had kept them amused in turn, going from room to room in her spacious apartments until one had followed her and found her in the arms of his brother. Neither had been much fazed by this (both being very drunk), and the two of them had married her, all three living in serene contentment for the rest of their lives. When one brother was at sea the other would be on land, and so the lady was kept occupied and the brothers had a fine housekeeper to come home to. But that’s folk on Kupr, the sailor finished with a wink and a grin.

The ship below them looked like a gralloched deer. Every hatch was gaping, and in some places the planking of the deck had been levered up so that the stores in the hold might be off-loaded more quickly. Rictus lay on the wood of the Top and looked down on the avid activity below. He was hungry and thirsty, as were almost all those detailed to remain with the ships, but the heat of the day was fading at last, and all along the dozen crescents of sea-leaning buildings and warehouses and other edifices which formed this part of the harbour the lamps were being lit, both onshore and in the ships which were moored nearby and along the wharves. Never in his life before had he seen anything resembling the marvel of such a sight, such a high and multi-layered snowstorm of lights. He lay there staring at it, thinking about this Great Continent, this vast beast upon whose hide he now looked in the darkening of a foreign evening.

“Who’s that asleep in the Top?” a voice snapped out below.

“That’ll be the Iscan, Rictus.”

“Get him the fuck down. There’s work here that needs another back.”

As Phobos rose in the sky and Haukos trailed after him, so Rictus laboured on the wharves amid crowds of his own people and a dwindled gang of Juthan. Most of these had left with the coming on of dusk, and hence the Macht must sweat now to get their own stores ashore. The two races worked together without any communication other than grunts, nods, and arm-waving, but managed to get the job done with little more than the usual profanity.