Paul Kearney: The ten thousand

“I buried it.”

“So no Kufr would ever find it.”

“So no Kufr would ever find it.”

The Great King’s eyes flashed. “A traitor, at the end.”

“No lord. A loyal servant, come to the end of his usefulness.”

“They want me to burn you alive, here on the battlements of Edom like a common criminal.”

Vorus’s face stiffened slightly. “So be it.”

Ashurnan watched him for a long moment. “I do not think my father would do such a thing, not to his friend.”

“Your father would have done whatever he thought necessary, and he would have regretted the necessity later, in private. But he would have done it.”

Ashurnan reached under his robe and produced a long-bladed knife. He tossed it onto the floor before Vorus with a dull clang. “I am not my father,” he said simply.

Vorus stared at the knife. Tears welled up in his eyes. He looked at Ashurnan and smiled. “Thank you, my lord,” he whispered.

The Great King bowed deep before his servant, then snapped, “Guards!”

The door scraped open again behind him.

“Goodbye, Vorus.”

The Macht general bowed wordlessly and Ashurnan left the cell, the door grating shut behind him, the key turning in the lock.

Vorus picked up the knife, tested the edge. He looked up one last time at the square of blue sky high above his head.

“Proxis,” he said, “I wish you well.”

Then he thrust the keen point of the weapon deep, deep into his heart.

Tiryn raised her head, listening. The wind had dropped a little, she thought. After three days of hearing it shriek in the same monotonous note, she was sure of it. Something else, though- something different over the wind.

Jason grasped her hand. She saw his eyes glitter, awake at once. “You hear that?” he asked.

A man screamed, quite close by, and there was a great animal bellow.

“Phobos!” Jason exclaimed. “Help me up.”

“No-stay down. You’re not fit to go outside.”

“Shut up, woman, and help me.”

Shouting all around them now, men casting orders into the storm, metal clashing. Tiryn unloosed the end-flap of the canopy and at once it flew up and flapped madly, scattering snow, beating against the frame. Freezing, snow-thick air struck her face, a physical blow. The blizzard was still upon them, snowflakes hard as gravel, the drifts halfway up the wheels of the wagon. She dropped down into them. Before her men were charging, black against the snow, disappearing and reappearing as the blizzard blasted about them. A line of white mounds close by; those were the mules.

She helped Jason down into the snow. He reached back into the wagon-bed and slid out his spear, leaned on it like an old man. Tiryn took his other arm. “What in hell is going on?” he wondered. “An attack?”

Something huge reared up out of the snow, barely twenty paces from them. It was taller than the spear Jason held. Two lights burned in its head, bright as frost. It opened a red maw and roared at them. They had a brief impression of a huge bulk, white-furred, and then it bowled away through the snow, man-like, bipedal, but using its great arms to gather speed, chopping through the drifts like a wind-driven boat.

“Qaf,” Tiryn said. “It is the Qaf. Oh, Bel, be merciful. We must hide, Jason.”

“What-and miss all the fun?”

“You can scarcely stand.”

The camp was in chaos. In the gaps between curtains of driven snow they saw men coming together in knots and crowds, spears facing outwards. The Qaf came up to these and launched themselves on the spearpoints, white and unreal as ghosts, bellowing like maddened bulls. Tiryn saw one of the Macht picked up and flung thirty feet through the air, another lifted and torn to pieces between two of the giant creatures. Centurions were shouting orders, half heard in the storm. Throngs of men waded through the snow to the wagons to fetch their shields and armour. The Qaf launched into these and scattered them. A wagon was overturned, crashing onto its side. The wheels were ripped off and flung through the air. The roaring of the Qaf hurt the ears.

“Let’s find a hole to hide in,” Jason said. “These bastards are too big for me.”

“Back in the wagon.”

“No-out in the snow. Come on, Tiryn.” With surprising strength he struggled through the drifts, out from the camp. Tiryn bore half his weight, his spear the other.

“Down-down,” he hissed, and they collapsed into the snow. Half a dozen of the great beasts chopped past them. Their eyes were blue, and lit up like winter stars, deep-set in massively built skulls. Wide nostrils in the middle of their faces, not much more than holes, and fanged mouths from which the hot breath issued in smoking clouds. Their white fur was caked in rime and ice, as though this were part of their physiology. They were mere beasts, but they walked upright for the most part, and they had hands like those of men, pink-skinned, black-nailed, and as wide as shovels.

Tiryn and Jason lay in the drift, half-buried, the cold sinking through their layered clothing, smarting the exposed flesh of their faces.

“Are they just beasts, or do they have minds?” Jason asked, shivering.

“They can speak, after a fashion. They keep to themselves, in the high mountains. I heard tell there were some brought all the way to Ashur, but they did not do well in the heat.”

The sounds of battle now carried clearly over the wind. Men had congregated together and were fighting back with the long spears. The smaller groups were overwhelmed, but where the Macht could present a united front of bristling aichmes they held their ground, stabbing out at the Qaf with the courage of desperation. The great creatures coursed throughout the camp, killing men who were floundering through the snow to join their comrades, tossing them up into the air as a dog would fling a rat. They killed the surviving draught animals with great blows of their fists, smashed the wagons to matchwood, and stamped the life out of the sick and wounded as they lay helpless in the snow.

Jason and Tiryn crawled into a snowdrift, tunnelling into it like moles and excavating a white cave for themselves. There they lay, spent, their noses touching. Jason smiled at her. “I did not think it would end like this, buried in a snowdrift.” His lips were blue.

“It has not yet ended,” she said.

“Wake me up when it does,” Jason said. He was drifting off. He had stopped shivering. Tiryn drew him close to her, wrapped her limbs around him. The flesh of his face felt like cold wax. “Do not sleep,” she said brokenly. “Stay with me, Jason.” But there was no reply.

“Hold fast!” Rictus shouted. “Spears up. Forget about the damn shields. Skewer these bastards!”

Hundreds of men had come together now and were fighting in a great circular bristling mass, four and five men deep. About them the Qaf raged like some manifestation of the storm, charging into the spears in ones and twos, sometimes penetrating far enough to grab a man off his feet, more often pierced through and through, bellowing in rage as they died with the spear-points thrust in their eyes. They had no discipline, no fighting system, just the raw fury of animals, and they failed to combine their attacks. Had they done so, the line of Macht would have quickly been overwhelmed. Rictus stood back from the front ranks and watched the Qaf range through the camp beyond. There were not so many of them as he had thought. A few hundred, perhaps. Out in the shifting snow, he could see other formations of the Macht fighting as these were, gathering together shoulder to shoulder and setting their heels in the ground.

Whistler joined him. “They’re backing off a little. They’re not much more than animals, after all.”