Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

“And meanwhile, our old friend starvation marches alongside us. How are the stores?”

“Aristos took more than his share when he left. The army has been on half-rations for days now. As things go, we’ll be all out in three more days. After that, it’s just the pack animals, and whatever we can grub out of the ground. No one has seen a lick of game since we got high up, not so much as a bird. This is a desert, Jason.”

“We’ll march hungry,” Jason said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “It’s been done before.”

“We’ll march hungry,” Rictus agreed, tonelessly.

Jason watched him by the low flicker of the lamplight, his bowl forgotten in his lap. “Not much fun, is it, Rictus, that lonely space above the snowline?”

“It’s not something I’ve ever wanted.”

“And yet I hear you are good at it. Mynon and Mochran have been to visit. Between them they’ve forty years on you, and yet they’re happy as fresh fish to leave the decisions your way.”

Rictus did not reply.

“I left you Aristos and his snot-nosed friends as morai commanders,” Jason said. “That is on me. I should have looked harder for leaders.”

“What’s done is done.”

“I hear your friend Gasca died.”

“At Irunshahr, yes.”

“That, too, was my fault.”

“No! It was Aristos. He-”

“It was my fault, Rictus. I am not the strategist Phiron was. Give me a centon or a mora, and I am a happy man. But an army like this-I did not see it. I am sorry.”

“These things happen,” Rictus said.

“This is your army now. You will lead it home.”

“And you?”

Jason stared at Tiryn, and she back at him. “I have what I want, right here. I am done with armies, done with war.”

“I-I don’t-”

“What was your father’s name?”

The question threw Rictus completely. It was a moment before he could reply. “He was called Aritus.”

“He must have been a good man, to raise such a son.”

The next morning the snow grew thinner, hard flakes that struck exposed flesh with the heft of sand. The army staggered on through it, the morai hunched up around narrow-waisted gaps in the rocks, stringing out where the ground opened. The Imperial Road had long ago disappeared; the stone-paved companion that had led their feet all the way from Kunaksa had become a wide dirt track with stone waymarkers every pasang, then a mere half-guessed trail, and finally nothing more than a memory buried in snow.

A river crossed their path, a wide, wild, foaming wall of water racing down from the heights above and widening out as it crossed the valley floor. The men waded across it, shouting with the cold, leaning on their spears and manhandling the wagons and carts through the waist-deep torrent. One cart full of wounded hit an unseen stone and tilted over, the mule screaming in its harness as it went with it. Fifty men splashed and waded at once to right it again, but by the time they had done so the dozen wounded inside had been carried off by the roaring water, mere black dots hurtling downstream to be smashed to pieces against the rocks. The army went into camp that night shuddering and soaked, the water freezing their cloaks to the hardness of armour. They stripped off their clothes and rolled naked in the snow, pummelled each other until the blood showed pink under the skin, slapped life back into each other’s flesh, and laughed while they did it, still able to see the absurd side of things.

Another morning, and with sunrise the men rising from their bivouacs found that some of their comrades did not rise with them, but lay in their midst stiffened and cold, their faces as peaceful as if they were asleep after a long day’s journey. The centurions did a headcount and reported to Rictus, as they did every morning. He received their news with a grim face. Over three dozen men had frozen to death during the night, and many more had woken to find their feet mere useless frozen blocks.

The firewood was ended, and so the men chewed strips of raw mule and oxen. The hearts and livers of the animals were saved for those of the sick and wounded who remained alive, and Rictus authorised an issue of wine, the last of the barrels still remaining. There was enough to give every man a large mouthful, and then the barrels were broken up and the staves loaded onto the wagons to burn later in the day. The army built cairns over its dead, and marched on. Rictus thought that it had been easier to march into battle at Kunaksa.

Four more days passed, and then a shouting at the forefront of the column brought Rictus running up at a shambling lope, a ragged figure bound about with torn strips of cloth and blanketing, his feet wrapped in the scarlet remains of a dead man’s cloak. Frostbite glowed in white patches upon the backs of his hands and on his face, but that was no matter. Every man in the army was now so afflicted, and many kept shuffling with the column though their flesh had rotted black upon their limbs.

Young Phinero joined Rictus, still fit and hale. The pair passed Mynon, head down and trudging, and Mochran, snow-blind, being led along by one of his centurions.

Gasping, they made their way to where Whistler and the last of Phiron’s Hounds stood on a higher slope overlooking the meanderings of the valley floor. There had been an avalanche here at some time in the past, and all around boulders lay like a god’s abandoned playthings, some as big as a good-sized house, split into leaning pieces by the violence of their fall. The wind was bitter here, winnowing the air and raising scuds of snow from the surfaces of the stone. Rictus fought for air. Hunger had stolen his stamina and now a half-pasang run left him panting like an old man. Even the Curse of God felt heavy on his back.

“What do you make of this, Rictus?” Whistler asked. He held up an iron aichme, snapped off the spear-shaft. Beside him, his men were rifling through the snow and exclaiming as they came upon other relics. One slipped and cursed as his feet skidded along the smooth convex face of a shield.

“This is new,” Phinero said, tugging his cloak from around his face. “Look, Rictus, a sauroter. They make them like this in Machran. I see the maker’s mark. Ferrious of Afteni.”

“Keep looking,” Rictus said. “Fan out. Whistler, run down and halt the column.”

Their feet stumbled over a hoard of weapons and other equipment buried under the snow. Some of the aichmes had blood frozen upon them. They worked their way upslope, until they came upon a rocky knoll set upon the mountainside, too rounded to be a thing of nature. Rictus began to pull away at the stones which surfaced it, wincing as they sliced into his cold hands.

And there, as he tugged away a rock the size of his head, a face staring out.

“Phobos! Phinero, look here!”

They tugged away more stones, and the men cried out as they discovered other bodies piled up beneath them.

“A burial cairn,” Rictus said heavily.

“I know this face-I know this face!” one of the Hounds shouted. “This is Creanus of Gleyr, Gominos’s mora.”

Rictus and Phinero looked at one another. “There’s been a fight here,” Phinero said.

“But who were they fighting?”

“They got the best of it, or they wouldn’t have stayed around to cover their dead.” The bodies were stripped of all clothing, blue and naked save where the deep gashes and bruises of their wounds discoloured the skin. Their mound was taller than Rictus.

“He lost a lot of men,” Rictus said. “This was no skirmish. There’s two hundred dead in here, or more.”

Phinero was staring up at the snow-wrapped heights of the mountains, the wind blowing white banners from their summits. Not so much as a bird stirred in that savage sky. “What in hell did this?”