Paul Kearney: The ten thousand

“I wish you were a mute,” his fat colleague murmured.

The goatmen sidled up to the wall-bottom, watching out for missiles. When it appeared the defenders had none they grew more brazen, edged closer. Two spoke together and pointed up at Gasca, in full panoply, as stark and fearsome as some statue of warfare incarnate.

“If I had some rag of red about my shoulders they’d walk away,” he muttered to Rictus. There was no response from the Iscan. Despite the cold, Gasca was sweating, and the heavy shield dragged at his left bicep. Wolves he had killed, and other men he had broken down in brawls, but this was the first time he had ever hoped to plunge a spearhead into someone’s heart.

He jumped, as beside him Rictus shouted with sudden venom. “Are you afraid? Why be afraid?” For a second, fury flooded his limbs as he thought the Iscan was talking to him; then he realised that Rictus was shouting at the goatmen below. He turned his head, and saw through the confined eye-spaces of his helm that Rictus was red-faced, angry. More than angry. He was feral, hate shining out of his eyes. Gasca shifted away from him out of sheer instinct, as a man will give space to a vicious dog.

“Is it too much, to fight men face to face, who have weapons in their hands? Can you not do that? Or will we send out children with sticks, and let them taste your valour? Come-you know me. You know where I hail from. Come up here and taste my spear again!” Now Gasca was thrust aside, and Rictus stood alone at the top of the steps. There was spittle on his lips. He opened out his arms as if to pray.

The javelin came searing up from the men below. Gasca, by some grace, saw it coming, even with his circumscribed vision, and managed to lift his shield crab-wise. It clicked off the rim of the bronze, pocking it.

“What in the gods are you doing?” he shouted at Rictus. He had half a mind to shove this madman down the steps.

“Now keep your shield up,” Rictus said, and his face was rational again.

A flurry of javelins. They came arcing in: one, two, three. Two bounced off Gasca’s shield. The third struck the ground between his feet, making him flinch. His panoply seemed impossibly heavy. He wanted to rip off the damned helm and see what was going on. His eye-slots seemed absurdly small.

But now Rictus was smiling. In his hand he held two javelins. The tips were bent a little; soft mountain-iron.

“Well thrown. Now have them back.” His arm swooped in a blur. He had looped the middle-strings of the weapon about his first two fingers and as he loosed it the javelin spun, whining. It transfixed one of the goatmen below, entering under his beard and emerging from his nape for half a foot. The man crumpled, and his comrades scattered around him as though his bloody end were contagious.

The second sped into them three seconds later. This one missed a man’s head by a handspan but struck the fellow next to him just above the knee. He yelped, dropped his spear, and grasped his spitted limb with both hands, mouth wide and wet.

“Even odds now,” Rictus said, perfectly calm.

“Boy, the goddess has you under her wings,” the fat merchant said behind them.

“Isca trained me well. They’ll rush the stairs now. We stop the rush, and they’ll break. Then we go after them. Agreed?” The men around him mumbled assent.

“They come,” Gasca said, and raised his spear to his shoulder.

The rank smell rose before them as they scrabbled up the snow-covered stone of the stairway. Jabbing with their spears, snarling, they did not seem like men at all. Gasca crouched and took the impact of one blow on his shield. It jolted him, but the heavy wood and bronze shrugged off the spearpoint. His mouth was a slot of spittle as he breathed in and out, and all fear left him; there was no time for it. He felt his own spear quiver in his hand as he grasped it at the balance point and poked downwards. The goatmen were trying to come to grips with the defenders, get under the spearheads. One got a fist about Gasca’s spearpoint but he ripped it back through the man’s hand, the keen aichme shearing off fingers as it came free of his grasp. The man shrieked. Then Rictus stabbed out with his own weapon, transfixing the fellow through the mouth, the shriek transforming horribly into a gargle. He toppled backwards. Behind him, two of his fellows roared and swore as his carcass rolled down the stairs and took their legs out from under them. A tumble of foul-smelling flesh encased in fur, flashing eyes, a snap as a spear-shaft broke under them. They rolled clear to the ground below, and bounced to their feet again as enraged as before.

Three remained on the stair. One had eyes that were different colours. Gasca was able to see this, notice it, store it away. He had never known that his own senses could be so keen. Two spearpoints jutted up. One came below the rim of the shield, scoring the metal. Gasca felt a sting in his thigh, no more. He thrust his own spear down at them and felt it go into something soft. Recovering the thrust, he felt warm liquid trickling down the side of his leg. Thrust, recover, catch another point on the shield. A goatman came up bellowing, dropped his spear and sought to grasp Gasca’s shield in his fists and pull it away. Gasca felt his balance go, and fear so intense flooded him as he felt himself fall that he urinated hotly where he stood.

Then Rictus had embedded his eating knife in the goatman’s neck, right up the hilt. The man wailed, his grasp loosened. He scrabbled at the knife handle and tumbled backwards. About to follow him, Gasca’s chiton was seized from behind. There were arms about him, a stink of sweat and cheap scent.

“Easy there,” the fat merchant said. “Find your feet, lad.”

Recovering himself, Gasca blinked sweat out of his eyes. On the steps below him his blood had trickled in a thin stream, now diluted with his urine, steaming, all the stuff of his insides turned to liquid.

The goatmen backed down the stairs. Three of them now lay still and dark on the snow, and two more were grasping their wounds and struggling to keep the blood inside their flesh.

“I believe they’ve had enough,” Rictus said.

“It was so fast,” one of the young husbands said behind them. He had been four feet from the struggle, and it had not touched him, nor had he so much as raised his arm. Dimly, Gasca had some insight of what real phalanx fighting might be like. The proximity to violence of some, so close to the spearheads, and yet not part of the fight.

“Now, after me,” Rictus said. There was a kind of joy in his face as he started down the stair.

“No, boy!” the fat merchant shouted, and he seized Rictus’s chiton in much the way he had Gasca’s. “Let them go. You go down those stairs and they’ll fight you to the death. You may win, but there’s no need for it, and you’re likely to take a bad hurt before the last goes down.”

Rictus suddenly looked very young, like a sullen boy denied the treat he had been promised. He hesitated, and the look vanished. That calm came across his face again, and a smile that was not entirely pleasant. He gently lifted the fat merchant’s hand from his clothing, and then turned to address their enemies.

“Take your wounded and go,” he called down to the goatmen.

“Come down and fight us here,” one shouted back in the guttural accents of the high Harukush. “We will wait for you.”

“You will die, all of you, if we do,” Rictus said. And he was still smiling.

The goatmen stared at him. One spat blood onto the snow. Then they began to methodically strip their dead, whilst one remained at the foot of the stairs, spear at ready.

“You’ve done well, lads,” the fat merchant said. “Now with a little more help from the goddess, we’ll be in Machran by nightfall. We’ve nothing left to fear from these ugly wights.”