Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

Proxis, may I be forgiven, I wish you well. Take your people to freedom.

Aloud, he said, “Signal general retreat. We will pull back along the Imperial Road.” He grasped the shoulder of his weeping aide. He was not much more than a boy. “Phelos, try and get through to Tessarnes. Tell him to break off, to get away as many of his men as he can.”

The Kefre wiped his nose on the back of his gold-skinned hand. “Yes, sir. Where will I find you when I return?”

“Tell Tessarnes to take command, Phelos. I am stepping down. I have failed.”

“My lord! General!”

“Go now. And try to stay alive.” He clapped the boy on the shoulder. Was I ever that young? he wondered. As Phelos sped off the standard-bearer at Vorus’s side was waving his banner to the rear. A formality. The army was already in full retreat.

It is stubbornness, Vorus realised. That is what sets us apart. We Macht will fight on when there is no hope of victory. We are stubborn bastards, worse than mules. It is not even a matter of courage.

He looked up at the chaos on the hill. The Macht morai that had wheeled north were the only intact troops on the field. Everything else was just a mass of struggling men and Kufr and horses, all lines lost, all order destroyed. In some places they were packed together like a crowd in a theatre; in others the masses were opening out in flight, in death, a collapse of the bonds that held armies together. As the Kufr companies streamed down off the hill they left behind a heaped and tangled line of bodies, like seaweed thrown up on a beach by a spring tide. On the left, the Macht had died where they stood, falling in line.

Stubbornness.

Vorus raised a hand and saluted them, his countrymen. Then he turned his horse’s head and set off down the Imperial Road to the east, one more fleeing figure in a sea of them.

The snow had started up again, flying in flurries about the camp and greying out the world. The only colour was in the heart of the campfires, a thousand of them dotted for taenons about the floor of the valley, motes of yellow light with the darkening mountains looming on all sides around them, like titans peering down upon the concerns of ants. No ditch had been dug, and there was no order to the scattered bivouacs. The encampment of the Macht no longer seemed that of an army, but was a disorderly conglomeration of individuals. Most centons stayed together and a few of the morai, but by and large it seemed the higher organisation of the army had been abandoned.

“How is he?” Rictus asked, ducking his head under the flap of the wagon-canopy. The wind was getting up, and though there was not much of a chill in it for those bred to the mountains, it made the leather snap and shudder like a snared bird.

“He’s asleep,” Tiryn told him. “I got some soup down him this morning, but nothing since. I need more water.”

“I’ll get it for you.” Rictus made to leave, but Tiryn’s cold fingers fastened on his wrist. “What is happening out there, Rictus?”

The Iscan’s face did not change. “They’re talking, still talking.”

“Then you should be out there talking with them.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Men look to you; many of them. You can’t let Aristos have his way.”

Rictus stared at her, his eyes the colour of the snow-darkened sky behind him. “I’ll get you the water,” he repeated, and was gone.

Tiryn tied down the canopy once more, and inside the wagon there was only the flickering glow of a single clay lamp. Beside it, wrapped in his red cloak and every other blanket that Tiryn possessed, lay Jason.

She smoothed the dark hair away from his forehead. The sound of his breathing filled the wagon, a harsh, stertorous battle of sound. A spearhead had gone in over the lip of his cuirass, just at the collarbone, and had angled down into the lung.

The breathing paused a second. Jason opened his eyes. His voice was a zephyr. She had to lean close to hear. “Rictus was here,” he croaked.

“He’s fetching water.”

Jason licked his cracked lips. “Cold,” he said.

“We’re in the mountains now, the Irun Gates.”

“Cold,” he said again, closing his eyes.

She lay full length beside him, tugging him close, sharing what warmth she had. On the other side of his body his cuirass was propped upright, black and ominous. He could not settle without it near him. She hated the very look of it; that untouchable blackness, giving nothing, marked by nothing. It was as though his grave-marker already stood beside him in the back of the wagon, watching him fight for his life with cold indifference.

How many days since the battle? Four, five? Latterly they had all seemed the same. She had watched the Asurian cavalry strike home with unadulterated horror; it had seemed that the battle was lost, and the army destroyed. They had fought through the baggage carts, the Asurians and Aristos’s men, whilst Rictus and the light troops had run up the hill to aid the main battle line. She was still not sure how the thing had turned around, but the men were talking of the Juthan deserting the field. They had been saved by the intervention of Antimone herself, many said. As it was, the victory was bitter enough. Over two thousand dead, and hundreds wounded. Tiryn had picked her way up the hill before Irunshahr, stepping in scarlet puddles, on the entrails of men and horses. She had climbed to the hill-crest to find Jason, for he had been on the left, where disaster had fallen. She had never walked upon a battlefield before, had never seen the ground hidden by stark and crawling bodies, Macht and Kefren moaning next to each other, horses screaming and trying to stand on the splintered bones of their legs. She had not known it would be like this, such a concentrated entanglement of lacerated flesh. In the end it was Rictus who found him, who had him borne down to the wagons on a litter made from spears. The only thing that warmed her was their automatic assumption that Jason should be with her. “Look after him,” Rictus had said, his eyes as cold as the mountains.

With the rout of the Kufr army, the governor of Irunshahr had come to their camp under a green branch, to ask for clemency. He did not know just how badly the army had been hurt, but he could see the last of his hopes disappearing along the Imperial Road to the east in a broken panic. He went on his knees before those blood-slathered, bronze-clad men, and begged for the life of his city. Had he but known, he could have kept his gates closed with impunity. The Macht were in no condition to assault the walls, and did not have the stomach for it either. Rictus and Aristos made a good two-man act, the big Iscan as taciturn as a marble pillar, Aristos as arrogant as a Kefren prince. Thus the army had been supplied, after a fashion.

“Buridan,” Jason said. “Where is Buridan?”

“He is dead,” Tiryn told him. “Remember?”

Jason’s eyes opened. For a moment they were clear, though whatever he was seeing it was not in the gloom of the wagon-bed. He smiled a little, a bitter smile, not looking at her. “Phiron would have done it better. He tells me so.” His eyes rolled in his head, “I hear the wings. She is close now.” He drifted off again.

The lamp went out, and there was just the dark in the wagon, the rasp of Jason’s breathing, the thumping of her own heart. Outside, the wind hurled itself up and down the valley. Here, in the Korash, summer had not yet been thought of. Even spring was a starveling urchin of a thing, barely enough to set the grass growing. Tiryn’s Juthan slave, Ushdun, had run off along with the rest of her fellows in the aftermath of the battle. Somehow they had known about the Juthan betrayal, and somehow they had known the perfect moment to escape, when all was in chaos and the fighting just ended. Tiryn had brought Jason back to her wagon to find it ransacked. The Macht walking wounded who had been set to look over the Juthan had instead joined the fight against the Asurians. There were no more slaves with the army. She was, Tiryn realised, the only Kufr in the camp. The thought startled her.