Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Rictus twisted, eyes wide, and Broken-nose beat the flat of his spear-shaft into his nape. A white detonation. Rictus fell to his knees, opening one up like liver. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t-”

Again, he was beaten. First the spear-shaft, and then a fist clumping again and again into the top of his spine. A childish punching, fuelled by rage more than the knowledge of where a fist does damage. He rode it out, forehead on the sand, blinking furiously and trying to make his thoughts come in some kind of order.

“The bastard begs!”

I didn’t beg, he thought. At least, not for me. For my father, I will beg. For my father.

He twisted his head, still pounded, and caught Remion’s eye.

“Please.”

Remion understood perfectly. Rictus knew that. In these few, bloody minutes he had come to know the older man well.

No, Remion mouthed. His face was grey. In that instant, Rictus knew that he had seen all this before. Every permutation of this stupid little dance had already printed its steps in the older man’s memory. The dance was as old as Hell itself.

Something else his father had said: Do not believe that men reveal themselves only in defeat. Victory tugs the veil aside also.

Goddess of the Veil; bitter, black Antimone, whose real name must never be spoken. Now she smiles. Now she hovers here about these dunes, dark wings flickering.

The black side to life. Pride, hate, fear. Not evil- that is something else. Antimone merely watches what we do to ourselves and each other. Her tears, it is said, water every battlefield, every sundered marriage-bed. She is un-luck, the ruin of life. But only because she is there when it happens.

The deeds, the atrocities-those we do to ourselves.

“We are late to the party, my friends,” Remion said.

Dusk was coming on, and a bitter wind was beating around the pines on the hillsides. Rictus’s arms were numb from the elbow down, and when he looked at his hands he saw they were swollen and blue. He sank to his knees, unable to look at the valley below.

Broken-nose yanked his head up by the hair. “Watch this, boy. See what happens when you go about starting wars. This is how it ends.”

There was a city in the valley, a long, low cluster of stone-built houses with clay-tiled roofs. Rictus had made tiles like that on his father’s farm. One shaped the mud upon the top of one’s thigh.

For perhaps two pasangs, the streets ran in clumps and ribbons, with a scattering of pine-shadowed lots among them. Here and there the marble of a shrine blinked white. The theatre where Rictus had seen Sarenias performed rose inviolate, head and shoulders above the swallow’s-nest alleyways. And surrounding all, the very symbol of the city’s integrity, was an undulating stone wall two spear-lengths high. There were three gates visible from this direction alone, and into each ran the brown mud of a road. A hill rose up at one end of this sprawling metropolis, one flank a sheer crag. Upon this a citadel had been built with a pair of tall towers within. There was a gatehouse, black with age, and the gleam of bronze on the ramparts.

And people, people everywhere.

The sound of the city’s agony carried up into the hills. A dull roar, a swallowing up of all individual voice, so that it seemed the sound was not made by men and women and children, but was the torment of the city itself. It rose with the smoke, which now began to smart Rictus’s eyes. Plumes of black rose in ribands and banners within the circuit of the walls. Crowds clogged the streets, and in the midst of the roar one could now make out the clangour of metal on metal. At every gate, mobs of men were pressing inwards with spears held aloft, bearing the hollow-bowled shields of the Macht warrior class. There were devices on those shields, a city badge.

Rictus looked to his side in the gathering darkness, at Remion. His captors had retrieved their cached panoplies on the way here. White on scarlet, there was painted upon Remion’s shield the sigil gabios, first letter of his city’s name. Almost all the shields below had such devices.

“Isca dies at last,” Remion said. “Well, it has been a long time coming, and you folk have been a long time asking for it.”

“You thought you were better than us,” Broken-nose sneered. “The mighty Iscans, peerless among all the Macht. Now we will fuck your women and slaughter your old and make slaves of your vaunted warriors. What have you to say to that, Iscan?” He punched Rictus in the side of the head.

Rictus staggered, straightened, and slowly rose to his feet. He stared at the death of his city, the red bloom of its fall now beginning to light the darkening sky. Such things happened perhaps once in a generation. He had merely been unlucky, he and all his comrades.

“I say,” he said quietly, “that it took not one, nor two, but three cities in alliance to bring us to this. Without the men of Bas Mathon, and Caralis, you would have been chased clear off the field.”

“Bastard!” and Broken-nose raised his spear. Remion took one step forward, so that he was between them. His eyes did not shift from the sights in the valley below. “The boy speaks the truth,” he said. “The Iscans bested us. Had it not been for the arrival of our allies, it would be Gan Burian burning now.”

Ogio, he of the swollen, punctured face, spoke up. “The Iscans began it. They reap what they have sown.”

“Yes,” Remion said. “They have earned this.” He turned to regard Rictus squarely. “You Iscans put yourselves apart, drilled like mercenaries, made war in the same way others planted the vine and the olive. You made it your business, and became better at it than we. But you forgot something.” Remion leaned closer, so that Rictus was washed by the garlic of his breath. “We are all the same, in the end, all of us. In this world, there are the Kufr, and the Macht. You and I are of the same blood, with the same iron in our veins. We are brothers in our flesh. But forgetting this, you chose to take war-which is a natural thing-to an unnatural end. You sought to enslave my city.”

He straightened. “The extinction of a city is a sin in the eyes of God. A blasphemy. We will be forgiven for it only because it was forced upon us. Look upon Isca, boy. This is God’s punishment for your crime. For seeking to make slaves of your own people.”

Up into the sky the red light of the sack reached, vying with the sunset, merging with it so that it seemed to be all one, the burning city, the dying day, the loom of the white mountains all around, stark peaks blackening with shadow. The end of the world, it seemed. And for Rictus, it was. The end of the life he had known before. For a moment, he was a boy indeed, and he had to blink his stinging eyes to keep the tears from falling.

Broken-nose hoisted his shield up so that the hollow of it rested on his shoulder. “I’m off. If we don’t shift ourselves the prettiest women will all be taken.” He grinned, for a moment becoming almost a likeable man, someone who would stand by his friends, share his wine. “Come, Remion; leave that big ox harnessed here for the wolves. What say you to a scarlet night? We’ll drink each cup to the lees, and rest our heads on something softer than this frozen ground.”

Remion smiled. “You go on, you and Ogio. I will catch you up presently. I have one last business to attend to.”

“You want help?” Ogio asked. His misshapen face leered with hatred as he peered at Rictus.

“Go get the carnifex to look at that hole,” Remion said. “I can attend to this on my own.”

The other two Burians looked at one another and shrugged. They set off, sandals pattering on the cold ground, Rictus’s helm dangling from one of their belts. Down the hillside, following the hardened mud of the road, into the roar and glow of the valley below where they would find recompense for their long day’s trouble.