Paul Kearney: The ten thousand

With a sigh, Remion set down the heavy bronze-faced shield, then laid his spear on the ground. His helm, a light, leather bowl, he left dangling at his waist. From the look of it, he had eaten broth out of it that morning. He took his knife and thumbed the edge.

Rictus raised his head, exposing his throat.

“Don’t be a damned fool,” Remion snapped. He cut the bindings from Rictus’s wrists, and slid the spear-shaft free of his elbows. Rictus gasped with pain. His hands flooded with fire. He sat back on the ground, air whistling through his teeth, white agony, a feeling to match the sights of the evening.

They sat side by side, the grizzled veteran and the big-boned youth, and watched the dramas below.

“I remember Arienus, when it went up, twenty, twenty-five years ago,” Remion said. “I was a fighting man then, selling my spear for a living, with mercenary scarlet on my back instead of farmer’s felt. I got two women out of the sack and some coin, a horse, and a mule. I thought I had climbed the pig’s back.” He smiled, Isca’s burning lit tiny yellow worms in his eyes.

“I married one of the girls; the other I gave to my brother. The horse bought me citizenship and a taenon of hill-land. I became a Burian, put aside the red cloak. I had-I had a son, daughters. The blessings of life. I had heart’s desire.”

He turned to Rictus, his face as hard and set as something hewn out of stone. “My son died at the Hienian River battle, four years back. You killed him, you Iscans.” He looked back at Isca below. It seemed that the spread of the fires was being stymied. Beetled crowds packed the streets still, but now there were chains of men and women leading from the city wells, passing buckets and cauldrons from hand to hand, fighting the flames. Only up around the citadel did it seem that fighting went on. But still, from the houses in the untouched districts, the screams and shouts rose, wails of women outraged, children terrified, men dying in fury and fear that they might not see what was to become of those they loved.

“I fought today because if I had not I would have lost the right to be a citizen of Gan Burian,” Remion said. “We are Macht, all of us. In the world beyond the mountains I have heard that the Kufr tell tales of our savagery, our prowess on the battlefield. But among ourselves, we are only men. And if we cannot treat one another as men, then we are no better than Kufr ourselves.”

Rictus was clenching and unclenching his bulbous fists. He could not say why, but Remion made him feel ashamed, like a child admonished by a patient father.

“Am I your slave?” he asked.

Remion glared at him. “Are you cloth-eared, or merely stupid? Take yourself away from here. In a few days’ time Isca will be no more. We will raze the walls and sow the ground with salt. You are ostrakr, boy; cityless. You must find yourself another way to get on in the world.”

The wind picked up. It battered the pines about their heads and made the branches thrash like black wings grasping at the sunset. Remion looked up.

“Antimone is here,” he said. “She has put aside her veil.”

Rictus shivered. The cold from the ground ate into his buttocks. The wound in his side was a half-remembered throb. He thought of his father, of Vasio, the old steward who had helped them on the land. Zori, his wife, a nut-brown smiling woman whose breast Rictus had suckled at after his own mother had died having him. What were they now; carrion?

“There will be stragglers by the hundred out in the hills, looting every farmstead they come across,” Remion said, as if he had caught the drift of the younger man’s yearning. “And they will be the worst of us, the shirkers who kept to the rear of the battle line. They catch you, and you will not see morning. They’ll rape you twice; once with their cocks, and once with an aichme. I’ve seen it. Do not go back north. Go south, to the capital. Once you’re healed, that broad back of yours will earn your keep in Machran.”

He rose to his feet with a low groan and hoisted shield and spear again. “There’s weapons aplenty lying about the hills, in dead men’s hands. Arm yourself, but take nothing heavy. No point one man alone lugging a battle line shield about. Look for javelins, a good knife.” Remion paused, jaw working angrily. “Listen to me. I’m become someone’s mother. Get yourself away, Iscan. Find yourself a life to live.”

“It happened to you,” Rictus said, through chattering teeth.

“What?”

“Your city was destroyed too. What was its name?”

“You’re a persistent whelp, I’ll give you that.” Remion lifted his head, peered up at the first of the stars. “I was of Minerias once. They had a war with Plaetra, and lost. A bad slaughter. There were not enough men left to man the walls.” He blinked rapidly, eyes fixed on something beyond the cold starlight.

“I was nine years old.”

Without another word, he began to tramp down the hillside towards Isca, spear on one shoulder, shield on the other, the leather helmet butting against the shield rim with every step, like a dull and tired bell. Rictus watched him go, following the dogged shadow he became until he was lost in the press and mob of men about the gates.

Alone. Cityless. Ostrakr. Men who were exiled from their city for a crime sometimes chose suicide rather than wander the earth without citizenship. To the Macht, the city was light and life and humanity. Outside, there was only this: the black pines and the empty sky, the world of the Kufr. A world that was alien.

Rictus beat his fists on his frozen thighs and lurched to his feet. Searching the sky he found, as his father had taught him, the bright star that was Gaenion’s Pointer. If he followed it, he would be going north. Back to his home.

That first night became an exercise in finding the dead and avoiding the living. As darkness drew on it became easier to stay clear of the marauding patrols which cast about the country like hounds on the scent of a hare. Most of them carried lit torches and were loud as partygoers. Their comings and goings were marked by the shriek of women, the bubbling death-cries of desperate men, cornered and finished off as part of the night’s sport. The hills were full of these torch-bearing revellers, until it seemed to Rictus that there were more of them on the hunt amid the pine forests and crags around Isca than had faced him in line upon the battlefield.

The dead were less easily found. They were stumbled across in the lightless shadow below the trees. Rictus tripped over a bank of them, and for an instant set his hand on the cold mask of a man’s face. He sprang away with a cry that set the wound in his side bleeding again. By and large the dead had been stripped of everything, sometimes even clothing. They lay pale and hardening in the cold. Out of the dark, packs of vorine had already begun to gather about them, the grey-maned scavengers of the hills.

A healthy man, on his feet, alert and rested, need not fear the vorine, but a man wounded and reeking of blood, staggering with tiredness-he drew their interest. When they circled him, green eyes blinking in the dark, they snarled their confidence at Rictus, and he snarled back at them, as much a beast as they. Stones, sticks, bravado-he beat them away with these until they went seeking less lively prey.

He stripped a corpse of a long-sleeved chiton, not minding the blood that stiffened it. The dead man lay on top of a broken spear, an aichme with some three feet of shaft still set in it. With these on his back and in his fist, Rictus shivered less. The vorine could smell the bronze, and left him alone. The torchlit patrols inspired anger now as well as fear, and in his head Rictus fantasised about surprising them at their barbarous work, the stump of spear working scarlet wonders in his hand. The fantasy hovered in his mind for pasangs, until he saw it for what it was; a glimmer from the far side of Antimone’s Veil. He put it out of his head then, and concentrated on the track before him, that paleness under the stars that ran between the midnight dark of the trees.