Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Tiryn did as she was told. Her skin, normally the colour of a hazelnut shell, was pale now. She was trembling with fear, eyes wide and fixed on the spears and javelins and bows in the hands of the defenders. Jason took her hand. It was cool in his, fine-boned and slender. She tugged it away, some colour coming back to her face. “Keep your word,” she said quietly. “That is all I ask.”

“If they do not open their gates, we will march away. I swear it.”

She turned and looked down on him, managed to smile. “Very well then.”

The Macht general and the Kufr woman stood under the loom of the city walls, and Tiryn called out in her clear, carrying voice. She asked for food, for wagons, for draught animals. And in return she promised the defenders that the Macht would leave their city be, and would march off with the following dawn. If the requested supplies were not forthcoming by dusk, she said, the city would be assaulted, and would suffer the fate of Ab-Mirza.

An hour later, the gates were opened, and the folk of Hadith began hauling out the contents of their granaries and their stables and their byres. The Macht stood like an army cast in bronze, motionless. As night fell, they moved in to collect their spoils, and by dawn they were gone, a mere shadow on the western road, the dust rising in a cloud to mark their passage. The gates of Hadith were opened again, and the more valiant of its citizens went out to inspect the beaten earth of the Macht camp. As they stood there, marvelling, they saw in the east another dust-cloud, hanging high in the still air and moving westwards in the wake of the Macht. A great army was on the road.

“The land is rising,” Rictus said. He leaned on his spear and stared westwards, into the endless shimmering haze, the blue of distance. He stamped one heel into the ground. “It’s drier here, better going for man and beast. Could be the lowlands are coming to an end at last.”

“Those hills on your left are Jutha,” Jason told him, consulting the calfskin of Phiron’s map. “The province capital, Junnan, is three hundred pasangs to our south-west.” He raised his head, staring westwards with Rictus, a look not unlike hunger on his face. “From here, it’s two hundred pasangs to the mountains. Five or six days’ march, if the weather holds. Think of that, Rictus, mountains again.”

“How high are these mountains?” Rictus asked, ever practical. He was looking at Tiryn, kneeling on the short-cropped turf of the hillside and running her hand across it as a farmer will feel the ears of his crop.

“Not so high as the Magron,” she said. She stood up, taller than either of them. “The Korash are much colder though, and there is only the one pass through them which is fit for the passage of armies: the Irun Gates. It is defended by two fortress-cities. On the eastern side, Irunshahr, on the western, Kumir. And it is said the Qaf live in the mountains between the two.”

“Beyond the mountains is the land of Askanon,” Jason told them, still staring westwards. “Beyond it, Gansakr, and then the sea.”

Rictus had turned and was now looking back the way they had come. Below them the camp of the army sprawled in its rough square, the grey ribbons of a thousand campfires rising up from it in the still air. They led the oxen out to graze, and he could hear the armourers at work in the smithies, hammering upon their field-anvils. At this distance, the measured strokes could almost be the tolling of bells.

He looked farther along the horizon and there it was still, the yellow cloud on the air that was the army of the Great King in pursuit, as dogged as a sniffing hound.

“When we fight them again,” he said, “we shall hold the high ground.”

Jason rolled up his map. “Indeed. And we must fight them this side of the mountains. We must break that army before we enter the Irun Gates.”

“Another battle?” Tiryn asked.

“Another battle,” Jason told her. “The last, perhaps, if we do it right.”

“I’ll take the men ahead a ways, and see what these hill-villages have in their larders,” Rictus said. He bent and picked up his pelta, slinging the light shield across his back. He nodded at Jason once and then set off at a swift jog. Further along the slope his mora awaited him, some eight hundred men scattered across the grass enjoying the cooler air, most lying on their backs asleep. As he approached they began to rise, the movement rippling out across the hillside. All of them had the iktos sigil painted across their shields, the badge of Isca.

“He’s so young, to lead so many men,” Tiryn said.

“He’s not so young as he once was.” Jason set a hand in the small of her back, and set it travelling upwards, feeling the flesh of her through the silk. It came to rest on her nape, slid under the fabric, and brushed the tiny hairs there, as silken as the robe she wore. Her skin goosepimpled under his fingers.

“If you want me, why not have me?” Tiryn asked him, standing very still.

“I will not take what is not freely given.”

“It’s been taken before, many times.”

“That makes no difference.” Jason slid his hand away, brought it up and grasped her chin through the thin material of the komis. “I want what is in here,” he said, shaking her head gently. “Here.” He set his hand gently on the warmth of one breast, and felt the thudding of her heart within, the heat of her. She moved infinitesimally closer, pushing her breast into his palm so that he could feel the nipple through the fine stuff of her robe.

“You are Macht,” she said. “I am Kufr.”

“I don’t care, Tiryn.”

She bent her head, and after a moment’s hesitation she kissed him through the veil. “Others will.”

“I don’t care,” he repeated.

“Let it be so then,” she said. “For a while. Until we come to the shores of the sea.” Her hand came up and caressed his face, touching lightly on old scars.

“Until then,” he agreed, and kissed her again.

Within the yellow cloud to the east, Vorus rode his old mare deep in thought, his eyes narrowed against the dust. Inside the smoking fume of their passage he felt detached from the army he led, and let the mare pick her way in the wake of the vanguard with little more than a nudge of his heels every now and again to keep her on her way. The scouts told him he was three days’ march behind his quarry, and no matter how hard he pushed the troops, it seemed that gap never narrowed. He was leading a dust-caked, phantom army of trudging ghosts, chasing something even more phantasmal than themselves. Chasing an idea perhaps, a marching symbol which with every step it took, broke open new thoughts among the people it passed, among the people who had merely heard of it, and sowed garbled stories of its journey. He was chasing down a myth.

So it seemed, every evening, when he read the letters sent at horse-killing pace by Ashurnan to plague the few moments of rest he allowed himself after the army had bedded down for the night. The Great King had kept fifty thousand soldiers as his bodyguard, hoarding the new levies which were still arriving in Pleninash and encamping them around Kaik as if the Macht could somehow still surprise him there. He had lost something: a kind of courage perhaps. Even through the long-winded flowery language of the scribes, Vorus could read it. Ashurnan wanted this thing done and over with and forgotten. He wanted to forget, perhaps, the carnage of Kunaksa. His brother’s death. Why else send the corpse of Arkamenes back to Ashur for a Royal funeral? Vorus would have fed it to the jackals.

But there were still enough here to do the job. The column in which Vorus rode was twelve pasangs long. The van of it went into camp two hours before the rearguard every night. And he still had the Asurian cavalry, six thousand of them. Every day they rode out on the flanks and to the front, not so eager as they had been once, nor so brilliantly turned out, either. Many were now mounted on local scrub ponies, for the tall Niseians had died by the hundred at Kunaksa. But they were still the best he had.