Paul Kearney - The ten thousand

“Who’s here-any centurions?”

“Dinon, and Navarnus of the Owls.”

“All right-you hold here with them. I’m taking a centon forward.”

“Rictus-”

“Do as I say.”

Rictus gathered up perhaps a hundred men, and these he led forward into the caterwauling fury of the Qaf. They advanced step by step, spears out on all sides, stabbing like men possessed at the monsters that towered over them. One of the Qaf launched itself into their midst, its great weight bowling half a dozen men through the air. The men of the inner ranks drew their knives and swords and fell upon it like vultures, hacking the beast to pieces even as it struggled to regain its feet again.

The Qaf fell back. Across the gutted wreck of the camp, other formations of Macht were following Rictus’s example, and moving forward to engage the largest crowds of the enemy. The Macht made of themselves bigger monsters than those they faced, monsters with a hundred heads and a hundred keen spearpoints all in a body, all moving as one. As the Qaf split up, so they became easier to kill, one by one, until some kind of tipping point was reached. A collective howl went up from the beasts. They backed away from the thick formations of spearmen, roaring and spitting hatred. The Macht were able to look up and see them streaming back up the mountainsides, scrabbling up the rock-strewn heights at incredible speed, quadrupeds now, their long arms hauling them forward.

They took the storm with them, it seemed. As the last of them disappeared into the folds and rock-fields of the summits above, so the wind fell, and soon after the snow drifted down in a heavy silence, the thick flakes intent now, it seemed, on burying the dead.

“It’s quiet,” Jason said. “Am I dead, then?”

“If you are, you’re in bad company,” Rictus told him.

Jason opened his eyes. Tiryn, as always, Rictus, and Mynon-all looking at him as though he were some form of freak. He was warm. He could smell woodsmoke, feel the heat of flames. He had almost forgotten what it was like.

Then the pain came, flooding his extremities, an exquisite rush of returning sensation. His lips drew back from his teeth. “I heard tell hell was a warm place,” he said.

“We’ll get you to it, soon enough,” Mynon said, grinning.

“You look old, Mynon. Is that grey I see in your beard?”

“No more than is in your own, Jason.”

“What happened?” The pictures trickled back into place now. He was alive-he was alive. And the wind had dropped.

“I thought it was time we got out of these mountains,” Rictus said. “We’re on the road again, making good time, or as good as you can get in this fucking place.”

“Ah, Rictus, wake me up when we get to where there are grapes on the vine and apples on the tree.”

“I will, Jason, you have my word on that. And it will not be so long now.” Rictus tried to smile, but the gesture did not take. He had dried blood on his face, a great brown splash of it. His eyes seemed to look beyond Jason, into some unseeable distance. Mynon’s eyes were the same.

When they left, Tiryn propped Jason up beside the fire so that he could look upon its wondrous heat and beyond it, the blinding white mantle of the world, dotted with the black, insignificant dots of moving men, pasangs away.

“What are they up to, so far from camp?” he asked Tiryn irritably.

“They’re scouting a way out of the mountains. When the snow lifted, some of those furthest up the hills swore they could see green lands beyond, out to the west.”

“How bad was it, Tiryn?”

“I thought you were dead,” she said, touching his face.

“No, no, damn it-the army.”

“Bad. I saw men weep. The sick, the wounded, they were all slaughtered, and hundreds more died in their blankets, or unarmed. Rictus brought them together. They stood with him and fought the Qaf to a standstill.”

“So, another victory, I take it,” Jason said, his mouth a bitter line.

“Another cairn. They built it yesterday, and then Rictus moved us on, up the valley. It’s warmer-can’t you feel it? Even here, spring has come, Jason. I can smell it. In the lowlands, it is full summer. When we leave these mountains, it will not be long before you have your grapes and your apples. I too promise you that.”

“I love you,” Jason said, not looking at her.

“What?”

“Help me up; don’t just stare at me like a pole-axed calf. I want to stand up, to smell this new air of yours.”

He was stronger-he felt it in his bones. He was over the worst of it now. His breathing would never be what it was, but he was alive. And he had this woman standing beside him, this fine woman who was not even human. And he did not care a damn.

“When we get clear of the mountains we’ll find somewhere, you and I,” he said to Tiryn. “Somewhere there is no snow, and there are no armies. A quiet place.”

“Grapes and apples,” Tiryn said, her arm about his shoulders.

“Hearth and home.”

They came down out of the high places at last, a meandering column of ragged, limping men, their beards long and tangled, their faces blackened by wind and cold. They drew in their midst thirty or forty battered carts, taking turns to haul and push them bumping over the rocks. In these were piled shields and helms and the cooking pots they had not cooked with for many days, and in the beds of the carts lay the gold of Tanis, or as much of it as had survived. Knowing it was within the vehicles, the men manhandled them along without complaint. Now that it seemed they might survive after all, it had taken on a new importance.

They marched with their spears in hand. Their armour they had abandoned up in the mountains, except for those among them who wore the Curse of God. As they descended the air grew warm about them, and they cast off the rags they had bound about their bodies, unstrapped the filthy bindings from their feet and marched barefoot, feeling the new grass between their toes. Their eyes glittered, sunken in fleshless faces. Some wept silently as they marched, not believing what they saw.

The land swelled out before them, a green and blue immensity running up to the horizon. Here and there the gleam of a river caught the sun, and there were trees, crops, orchards, and pasture-land with animals moving across it in herds. Nearer at hand a large town or city sprawled in the foothills below, the smoke rising from it in a thousand threads of grey. It was unwalled, the houses built of pale stone, roofed with clay tiles such as the Macht used themselves in the Harukush.

“That is Kumir,” Rictus said, pointing. “We’ll form up before the city and send an embassy, ask for supplies. This is rich country here, and it’s easy going all the way to the sea.”

“How much farther to the sea?” Whistler asked, scratching his scarred pate.

“A man marching light could make it in two weeks, I reckon.”

“Aristos must be close, by now,” Whistler said. “If he’s still alive.”

“I think he is,” Rictus told him. “His kind always are.”

He had been here before them, him and Gominos. The town elders came out to talk to Tiryn and Jason and Rictus with several hundred of their young men armed at their backs. They saw on the hill above their settlement a fearsome army, five thousand men or more, all standing in rank with faces lean and hungry as wolves, a rancid smell about them, and filth crusting every facet of their appearance except their spearpoints. These glittered painfully bright in the early summer sun. It was an army of vagabonds, but vagabonds who knew discipline, and were the more frightening for it.

The town’s Headman was an old Kefre, his golden skin faded, but his eyes still the startling violet of the Kefren high castes. He came forward leaning on a black staff and flanked by two others scarcely less infirm than he.