Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

“It’s their country,” old Demotes said, a wizened vision of white beard and blackened face, blue eyes bright and out of place in the middle of it. “They’re bred to it, like we’re bred to the mountains. Besides, it’s not so bad. At home, in the winter, my knees lock up after a march and I’m rubbing on them like a boy who’s just found out how to work his piss-tube until I can stand up again.”

“I saw you grab that Kufr girl, Gasca, how’d that work out?” Astianos said. “Me, by the time I got to anything with a slot between its legs, it was dead. And I draw the line at carrion.”

Gasca marched on, saying nothing.

“He’s shy,” Astianos said, slapping him on the back. “It was his first time, and so fucking a Kufr doesn’t count. He’s a virgin yet.”

Gasca’s broad face remained impassive. The sun had burnt his blond hair white and his skin was dark as boot-leather, the freckles about his nose and cheeks a black tattoo. He had indeed grabbed that girl, to keep her from the others. She had seemed pretty to him, the first Kufr he had ever regarded in that way. In the chaos of the sacked city he had hauled her into a quiet alleyway and stripped her. The excitement of the city’s fall had invaded his brain, and he had drunk some grain-spirit that Astianos had ferreted out of a tall-sided house. He had run his filthy hands up and down her skin, had poked and prodded her. But her eyes had halted him. They were dark and hopeless. She was weeping silently, just like a real woman. So he let her go. Oddly enough, he felt no less of a man for not raping her. He felt only relief, that he had come out of Ab-Mirza the same man who had gone in. His friends would not understand that, but Rictus would. He knewRictus would. So he bore the good-natured chaffing of his fellows with a slight smile, no more. Had he but known it, the last of the boy had left him. He marched along now with a veteran’s face, his smile that of a full-grown man who knows his own mind.

They were all of them thinner than they had been, all scarred in some place or other, all sun-blackened and with bird’s-feet fans of white skin at the outer corners of their eyes. Their nails were broken and ingrained with dirt, their feet bare, the soles as tough as any leather. Their bodies were as worn and lean as a man’s can be, and the muscles of their very faces could be seen cording and bunching at jaw and temple every time they opened their mouths. They were soldiers, creatures of appetite and routine with a core of indefinable restlessness at their heart. They were callous, brutal, sentimental, sardonic. They were selfish and selfless. They would knife a man over a copper obol, and would share with him the last of their water. They would trample a masterpiece of art in the dirt and be brought to tears by a veteran’s voice raised in song. They were the dregs of the earth. They were Macht.

Four days, the army marched at the punishing pace Jason set for it. Broken wagons and played-out beasts littered the Imperial Road behind them, and foraging parties gathered fodder for the animals, wood, and water-nothing more. As the days went on, so the scarlet memory of Ab-Mirza receded, and the brawling in the ranks sank to a more normal level. The last powdery, rat-gnawed remnants at the bottom of the wagons were scooped out and set to boil in the centoi, and what meat remained was chopped up, green and slimy, to bubble with them. For the first time, men began to drop out of the column to void their bowels outside the time allotted at rest stops. A week passed, and even though the pace of the march slackened somewhat, the wagons began to fill with those whose bowels had flushed away their strength. And those who marched on, supporting their sick comrades, grew ever leaner.

“Enough,” Buridan told Jason. “They know. They’re not sure they know why, but they know.”

“What do they know?” Jason asked him.

“That you are in command.”

“Send out full foraging columns, Jason,” Mynon said. “Phobos’s sake, the men have to eat.”

“There’s a city called Hadith, another three days’ march to the north-west. We get there, and we can restock our supplies.” To answer the other men’s looks, Jason said, “We will encamp outside the city, and send a delegation to speak with its governor. He will have heard of Ab-Mirza. We will make its fate work for us.”

It was two more days before Jason could bring himself to visit Tiryn again. He found her in her wagon, a lamp lit and drawing smokily, almost out of oil. Her Juthan slave was asleep in her blankets under the vehicle’s axle. Tiryn sat in the guttering lamplight, staring at the flame as though it were saying something of import to her. She looked up once as the wagon creaked under Jason’s weight, then hack at the lamp-flame, tugging her komis closer about her face.

“The conqueror comes,” she said in a low voice. “Have I taught you the word for murder, Jason? It is jurud. It is a word you should know.”

Jason stared at her, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “It was not meant to have happened in that way.”

“It is war. I should have expected nothing more. In war, what’s a city, here or there?”

“Tiryn-”

“Did you sate some appetite at Ab-Mirza? Your men did. Now they know that Kufr women are very like the Macht in some respects. We have holes in all the right places.”

“I shall need your help in the days to come, Tiryn.”

“My help? What amusement can I afford you that the Kufr of Ab-Mirza could not?”

“Enough! I need you to speak for us, for the Macht. I need you to talk to your people. I do not want any more cities to burn.”

She looked at him, eyes blazing. “I should help you now?”

“You will be helping your own folk too.”

“Betraying them, you mean.”

“When I found you, your own people had made quite a mess of you themselves,” Jason said, angry now. “Since you’ve been with us, there’s not a hand been laid near you. I would kill the man who tried.”

That cooled the air between them. She tugged her komis away from her mouth. He saw the dark lips move. “Why?” they said, though they made no sound.

“I ask myself that too,” Jason said, more softly now. “I have seen cities burn before. I know what it means. I think I am like Rictus now; I have seen enough of it. I am sick of it, Tiryn. I believe I am sick of soldiering.” He leaned back against the side of the wagon and exhaled, a long sigh. He stared up at the stars overhead. “Hearth, and home,” he said.

“Orthos,” Tiryn said. “Amathon. Now you know the words for them.”

Jason smiled. “I give you my own word,” he said. “Help us make our way home, and I shall try to get us there without the burning of cities, the deaths of the innocent.”

The lamp winked out with a tiny hiss, leaving them in the dark under the stars. Jason leaned forward and touched his mouth against hers, just for a moment, a dizzying second. She sat like some fine-boned statue of marble, fists suddenly clenched in the blanket that covered her lap. Slowly, she replaced the folds of the linen komis about her face, and then sat as unmoving as before. Jason opened his hand, as though he were about to make her a gift. Then he turned and clambered down from the wagon without another word.

The gates of Hadith were shut, and the walls were lined with defiant citizenry. Jason strode up to the kiln-fired brick of the battlements with only a single companion, whilst half a pasang behind him the Macht stood in line of battle. He waved a green branch as he approached, remembering the last time he had tried to negotiate with Kufr. The sweat dripped down his face.

“Drop your veil,” he said to his companion. “Let them see what you are.”