Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Perhaps two hundred men held around Rictus in a body; all that he could gather out of his mora. These were mainly veterans who had been close to him at the Kunaksa, older men with more level heads, but even they were eager to be off and join their comrades. He could feel it. Some fool had knocked a cresset into a stable, and half a street was burning. Rictus found himself frozen, staring at the flames, remembering Isca, the sound of the city’s torture roaring up into the pine-shrouded hills.

Up the steep city streets more troops were advancing, hundreds of heavy spearmen, a curse-bearer at the head. He doffed his helm and became Aristos, lithe, olive-skinned, his face alight with happiness. “Well, lads,” he shouted, “Let’s finish what Rictus has begun. Remember my uncle Argus-remember Phiron! Teach these kutr their names!”

Vorus was woken by an orderly, a young hufsan with a set face. “General, I was told to wake you. Outside, there is something you must see.”

Mystified, Vorus threw a blanket about his shoulders and padded barefoot out of the tent. Dawn was almost upon them, and the great camp around him was stirring, the smell of woodsmoke and horseshit mingling on the air.

“General Proxis is on the mound, sir,” the hufsan said.

Vorus laboured up the slope of the small tell, all that was left of some indescribably ancient city. There was a lookout post at the top, this being the highest point for miles around. Proxis stood there now, along with three other Juthan of the Legion.

“Proxis.”

“Look west, General. What do you see?

A glow on the brim of the sky, red in the white mist-sea which blanketed the plain. Vorus’s face hardened.

“They’re burning a city,” he said. “Where would that be?”

“Ab-Mirza. It’s sixty pasangs from here; two days’ march.”

“I know it. The King’s messenger got through, then; they must have made a fight of it.”

“That, or the Macht are simply setting an example.”

“I don’t think they would,” Vorus said quietly. “What purpose could it serve? No; there’s been a fight in that city, Proxis.”

“And the city has lost. The Governor of Ab-Mirza has brought ruin down on himself. And his people.”

“Would you suggest we order all governors to throw open the gates of their cities to these brigands?” Vorus asked, angry now. “The King was right. We must make them fight every step of the way.”

“Then they’ll be treading on Kufr bodies every step of the way,” Proxis retorted. Vorus turned from the silent spectacle on the horizon. Up here, on the tell, they were above the mist, and below they could hear but not see the army about them. As though it were a mere phantom.

“Proxis,” he said quietly. “My friend, what is the trouble?” He knew it went beyond this morning’s revelation. The three Juthan behind Proxis stared rigidly out to the west, but there was something there between the four of them, something Vorus felt had excluded him.

“Proxis?”

“Nothing. I do not like to see a city burn, that’s all.” Proxis was stone cold sober, with not a breath of wine about him, which meant he had not drunk the night before either. Vorus had known this Juthan for two decades, and he could not remember the last time Proxis had gone to bed without at least a cupful of something, if the cupful could be found.

“Join me in my tent. We’ll have some wine, warm our livers.”

“I have things to do,” Proxis said with a shake of his head.

“It’s not like you to turn down a drink, Proxis.”

The Juthan stared at him. He came up to Vorus’s chin, but was half as broad again about the shoulders. His yellow eyes had veins of blood shot through them, and in the dawn light his skin looked dark as charcoal. “Perhaps I will swear off wine. As a slave I drank every gut-rotting brew I could pour in my mouth,” he said. “Enough for two lifetimes.”

“You are not a slave now,” Vorus said hotly.

“We are all slaves, Vorus. Even you.”

He turned and left the summit of the tell and the three other Juthan followed him, silent and sombre as all their race. But now there was something missing-a certain regard for the general they passed by on their way down the hill. A deference which Vorus had scarcely remarked before, and only knew of now it was gone.

“Damn him,” Vorus whispered. “Twenty years too late, he becomes proud. Damn him.”

He looked back at Ab-Mirza’s ghost, burning in the mist of the far away horizon. We’ll be treading on bodies now, all right, he thought. Every step of the way.

A campfire, and about it, eleven men who wore Antimone’s Gift.

“Why should we not?” Aristos demanded, eyes blazing. “We have the spears to take what we want, when we want it. This Great King of theirs is hiding off behind the eastern horizon somewhere. Why should we not rape his Empire as we march through it? Let us send him a message on the wind and make him smell the stink of his burning cities. Why should we not?”

Several of the other generals thumped their fists on their thighs in agreement. Jason noted their faces. Gominos the stout, Grast the ugly, Hephr the snide and Dinon the ass-licker. Thus had he labelled them in his mind. Then Mynon spoke up, bird-eyed Mynon, always drifting with the wind.

“Aristos may have a point to make, Jason. What does it gain us to negotiate with the Kufr, when we find their gates closed to us anyway?”

Jason was about to reply when Rictus spoke up. The boy’s eyes were like two windows of white glass in his darkly tanned face. The fury could be smelled off him. But he kept his voice even.

“Every time we sack a city, a little of the men’s discipline goes. Every time we let ourselves loose on the innocent and the unarmed, we poison a little of the soldier in us. We make ourselves into brigands and rapists and murderers. If we are to make it to the sea, then we must be soldiers before all else. We must have discipline, and the men must obey their officers. If that goes, that obedience, then we are finished. And we deserve to be finished, for we will be nothing more than criminals.”

Aristos snorted with laughter. “Well, listen to this, a strawhead with a sense of honour! Where did you pick that up, Rictus? Did your father tell you tales of bravery whilst fucking his sheep?”

They saw a blur, a shadow leap across the campfire. Then Aristos was on his back with Rictus atop him, a knife at the prone man’s throat, drawing blood. The other men about the fire froze for a second. Then Gominos drew his sword.

“Hold!” Jason bellowed. He strode forward and grasped Rictus’s shoulder. “Off him, boy- that’s an order. Rictus!”

Rictus rose and thrust his knife back in his belt. He looked down on Aristos and said quietly,

“You ever mention my father again to me, and I will kill you.”

The knot of men opened up. Aristos rose, hand clenched on his own sword-hilt. The younger generals drew closer to him. “You had best leash this dog of yours, Jason,” Aristos spat, a mite unsteadily. “He is like to get a whipping if he keeps snapping at his betters.”

“Shut your mouth, you damn fool,” Buridan growled, more bear-like than ever in the firelight.

“Enough,” Jason snapped. “Aristos, do you contest my authority?”

“I say we vote for warleader again.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that some members of this Kerusia are not fit to command a mora.”

“I agree. But we are not going to start swapping generals right now, with the Great King on our tails and the supply-carts half-empty.”

“I say we put it to the vote, here and now!”