The Ten Thousand

by Paul Kearney

  The Ten Thousand

  The Macht Book 1

  Paul Kearney

  For John McLaughlin and Charlotte Bruton

  Grateful acknowledgements to:

  Mark Newton, Christian Dunn, Patrick St Denis, Darren Turpin and James Kearney. And Marie of course, as always.

  PART ONE

  ANTIMONE’S PITY

  ONE

  THE MEANING OF DEFEAT

  By the sea, Rictus had been born, and now it was by the sea that he would die.

  He had thrown away his shield and sat on a tussock of yellow marram grass, with the cold grey sand between his toes and a blinding white lace of foam from the incoming tide blazing bright as snow in his eyes.

  If he lifted his head there was real snow to be seen also, on the shoulders of Mount Panjaeos to the west. Eternal snow, in whose drifts the god Gaenion had his forge, and had hammered out the hearts of stars.

  As good a place as any to make an end.

  He felt the blood ooze from his side, a slow promise, a sneer. It made him smile. I know that, he thought. I know these things. The point has been made. A spearhead from Gan Burian has made it.

  He still had his sword, such as it was, a cheap, soft-iron bargain he’d picked up more out of a sense of decorum than anything else. Like all men, he knew his real weapon was the spear. The sword was for defeat, for the black end when one could no longer deny it.

  And he still had a spear, Eight feet tall, the old, dark wood of the shaft scored now with new scars of white. It had been his father’s.

  My father. Whose home, whose life I have now thrown onto the scales.

  Again, he smiled under the heavy helmet of bronze. But it was not a smile. It was the final baring of teeth that the bayed animal must show.

  And so they found him, three winded foot-soldiers of Gan Burian who had also cast aside their shields, but to aid pursuit, not flight. These too had their spears, every point bloodied, and in their eyes there was that glaze which comes to men from wine, and sex, and killing. They gave a shout as they sighted him, this bowed figure by the shore of the sea, his tunic bloody at the side. And now they darted a change of course as swiftly as fish in shoal, teeth bared. Happy. As happy as man can be. For what can make man happier than the annihilation of his enemy when all is at risk: his woman, his child, the place he calls a home? The men of Gan Burian had defended their city from attack in a wrenched, bowel-draining fight which had lasted all of the morning. They had won. They had won, and now, how bright the sky seemed, and how good did the fine salt air off the sea taste in their mouths. The sweetest of all dishes. And now, they would savour a little more of it.

  Rictus saw them come, their feet raising little surfs of sand as they bounded across the dunes towards him. He stood up, ignoring the pain as he had been taught. He filled his lungs with that good, cold air, that salt, that slake of earth. Closing his eyes, he smiled a third time; for himself. For the memory of the sea, for the smell.

  Lord, in thy glory and thy goodness, send worthy men to kill me.

  He leaned on the spear a little, digging the spiked butt into the sand, sinking it past the gleam of the bronze. He waited, not even bothering to touch the leather scabbard wherein lay his contemptible little sword. Past his head there broke a black and white formation, a piping squadron of birds. Oyster catchers, frightened off the flats of sand by the men who approached. He was as aware of their wingbeats as he was of the slow pulse in his side. Death’s abacus, the beads knocking home ever slower. A moment of strange bliss, of knowing that all things were the same, or at least could be the same. The drunken clarity of pain, and fearlessness. It was something—it truly was something—not to be afraid, at this moment.

  And they were here, right before him. He was startled, as he had not been startled all day, not even when the shield-lines met. He had been prepared for that crash all his life, had expected it, had wanted it to be even grander than it had been. This was different. It was seeing other ordinary men with his murder in their eyes. Not anonymous, but as personal as could be. It shook him a little, and that uncertainty translated into a white-cold flood of adrenaline through each of his nerves. He stood, blinked, forgot the pain and pulse of his life-blood as it trickled out ol him. He was the beast at bay, about to snarl at the hunters.

  They spread about him; ordinary men who had killed their fellows and found it quite good. A sport almost. They had come uncertain and apprehensive to battle, and had prevailed. With the breaking of their enemy’s line they had found themselves heroes, part of what might one day be history. Later they would reform into their phalanxes and would make the light-hearted march to the city of their foes, and would there become conquerors. This—this killing—was no more than a garnish on the dish.

  Rictus knew this. He did not hate these men who had come to kill him, as he was quite certain they did not hate him. They did not know that he was an only son, that he loved his father with a fierce, never-to-be-spoken adulation. That he would die to save the least of his family’s dogs. They did not know that he loved the sight and smell and sound of the sea as another man might love to let gold coin trickle through his fingers. Rictus was a bronze mask to them. He would die, and they would brag to their children of it.

  This is life, the way things work. All these things, Rictus knew. But he had been taught well, so he took his father’s spear in both fists and ignored the pain and started thinking about how to kill these smiling men who had come about him.

  With a short, yipping yell, the first bounced in to attack, a high-coloured face with a black beard framing it, and eyes as bright as frosted stones. He held his spear at the midpoint of the shaft, and thrust it at Rictus’s collarbone.

  Rictus had grasped his own weapon at the balance-point, a short arm’s length from the butt, and thus had a longer reach. Two-handed, he clapped aside the point of his attacker’s spear and then reversed the grip of his own—all in a movement which was as beautiful and fluid as the steps of a dance. As his own spear spun, it made the other two men jump backwards, away from the wicked edge of the aichme, the spearhead. Two-handed again, he lunged with the sauroter, the lizard-sticker they called it, a four-sided spike of bronze which was the aichme’s counterweight. It struck the black-bearded man to the left of his nose, punched through the thin bone there for the depth of a handspan before Rictus jerked it out. The man staggered backwards like a drunkard, blinking slowly. His hand came up to his face, and then he sat down hard on the sand as the blood came spurting from the square-sided hole in it, steam rising in the cold air.

  Another of the three screamed at this, raised his spear over his shoulder and charged. Rictus had time only to throw himself aside and went sprawling, his spear levered out of his grasp as the aichme plunged in sand. As he got up the third man seemed to rouse himself also, and stumped into the fight unwillingly. He was older, a greybeard, but there was a black calm about his eyes. He moved in as though thinking about something else.

  Rictus rolled as the second man’s spear stabbed the sand at his side. He got his arm about it and clamped the spearhead against his injured ribs, the pain scarcely felt. Then he kicked up with both feet and one heel dunted his attacker in the groin. The man’s cheeks filled. Rictus came up off the ground at him, climbing up the spear-shaft, and butted him in the face with all the strength left in his torso. The bronze of his helmet rang, and he was glad of it for the first time that day. The man fell full length on his back and coiled feebly in on himself and the red ruin of his face.

  A moment of triumph, so brief it would not even be recalled later. Then something seized the horsehair crest of Rictus’s helm from behind.

  He had forgotten about the third man, had lost him in his brief, bloody map of things.

>   The crest-box grated against bronze, but the pins held. A foot thumped into the hollow of Rictus’s knee. He tumbled backwards, his helm askew so that he was blinded. His feet furrowed the sand uselessly. Someone stood on his chest, and there was a grating noise, metal on metal, as a spearpoint lifted the chin of his helm, slicing open his lower lip as it did so.

  The older man, the greybeard. He had hair like a sheep’s pelt on his head and his eyes were dark as sloes. He wore the old-fashioned felt tunic of the inner mountains, sleeveless, ending above the knee. His limbs were brown and knotted with blue veins over the bunched muscles. One handed, he raised the aichme of his spear until it rested on Rictus’s throat and pricked blood there.

  When Rictus swallowed the keen spearpoint etched fire on his throat. He felt the blood flowing more freely from his side now, darkening the sand under him. It was trickling down his chin also. He was leaking at the seams. He breathed out, relaxing. It was done. It was over, and he had done something to make them remember him by. He looked up at the washed-pale blue of the sky, the fading of the year’s glory, and the oyster catchers came piping back into it to resume their places on the strand. He followed their flight as far as he could with his eyes.

  The older man did also, the spear is steady in his fist as if it had been planted in stone. Behind him, his two companions were thrashing in the sand, struggling and hooting with sounds that seemed barely those made by men. He glanced at them, and there was naked contempt in his face. Then he stabbed his spear in the sand, bent, his foot pushing the air out of Rictus’s lungs, and yanked the helm clear off the younger man’s head. He looked at him, nodded, then tossed it aside. The sword followed, flicked through the air like a broken child’s plaything.

  “You lie there,” he said. “You try to get up, and I finish you.”

  Rictus nodded, astonished.

  The man poked his finger into the bloody lacerated hole in Rictus’s side, and Rictus stiffened, baring blood-slimed teeth. The man grinned, his own teeth square and yellow, like those of a horse. “No air. No bubbles. You will live, maybe.” His eyes sharpened, danced like black beads. “Maybe.” He see-sawed his bloody hand in the air, then slapped Rictus across the face. A blunt forefinger with a filthy, over-long nail tapped Rictus on the forehead. “Stay here.” Then he straightened, using his spear to ease upright again and grimacing, like a man who has been remonstrating with a child.

  “Ogio! Demas! Are you men or women? You keen like girls.” He spat.

  The hooting noises subsided. The two other men helped each other to their feet and came staggering over, feet dragging in the sand. One of them drew a knife from his belt, a long, wicked, sliver of iron. “I take this one,” he said in a gargled tone that was horrible to hear. He was the one with the hole in his face. It jetted blood with every word as if to lend them emphasis.

  “You tried. You failed. He is mine now,” the older man said coldly.

  “Remion, you see what he has done to me? I am likely to die now.”

  “You will not die, if you keep it clean and don’t stick your fingers in it. I’ve seen men live with worse.” Remion spat again. “Better men than you.”

  “Then kill him yourself!”

  “I’ll do as I please, you rat’s cunt, whatever you say. Now see to Demas. He needs his nose straightened.”

  Some moment had passed, some kind of unspoken compact had been made. There would be no more fighting now. The time which had been— that time of license and slaughter and free-flowing violence—that had gone now, and the normal rules of life which men lived their lives by were slipping back into place. Rictus sat up, feeling it, but hardly able to put the knowledge into rational thought. They would not kill him now, and he would not hurt them either. They were all civilized men again.

  The older man, Remion, was cutting strips off the hem of his tunic, but the felt frayed under his knife. He cursed, then swivelled to regard Rictus. “Off with that shirt, boy, I need something to plug this man’s face.”

  Rictus hesitated, and in that second the eyes of all three of the other men fastened on him. He drew his tunic over his head, gasping at the pain in his side, and tossed it to Remion. All he had on now were his sandals and a linen breechclout. The wind raised gooseflesh off his limbs. He clamped his elbow to his injured side. The blood was slowing. He spat scarlet into the sand.

  Remion ripped the tunic to strips, discarding the blood-soaked part under the armpit. His two companions uttered hoarse, low growling sounds as he saw to their hurts. There was a crack as he levered Demas’s nose back into place, and the man screamed and clouted him on the side of the head. He took it in good part, shoving Demas on his back in the sand and laughing. He slapped Ogio’s hand away from his punctured face and stared intently at the bloody hole, wiping around it.

  “When you get back, have the physician stitch that hole closed. What’s behind it will heal in time by itself. For now, let it bleed free; let it bleed the dirt out. A sauroter spike is a filthy thing to have had in you.” He clapped Ogio on the arm, grinning his yellow grin, then rose and padded over to Rictus. In his hand were the rags of the tunic. He tossed them into Rictus’s lap. “Bind yourself up. You’re likely to bleed to death else.”

  Rictus looked into his dark eyes. “Why do you not kill me?”

  Remion frowned. “Shut your mouth.”

  Rictus wondered if he were to die anyway. On the battlefield his wound had seemed a thing of little account. He could still move, run, thrust a spear and behave as a man ought. But now that the bloodied press of the phalanx had been left behind it all seemed so much worse. He looked at the men he had wounded and felt sick at their blood—he who had been around blood and killing all his life.

  You want to eat; then something must have its throat wrung, his father had said. Nothing can be had for nothing. When life gives you something, something else must be taken in return. That is the merest logic.

  “Why do you not kill me?” Rictus asked again. Bewildered.

  The man called Remion glared at him and raised his spear as if to stab. Rictus did not flinch. He was past that, still in the place where his own life did not matter. He looked up with wide eyes. Curiosity, resignation. No fear.

  “I had a son,” Remion said at last, his face bunched as tight as his blue-veined bicep. His eyes were black.

  They broke the fittings off his father’s spear, leaving an arm’s span of splintered wood, and with this they made a yoke, binding Rictus’s hands before him and then sliding the shaft through that space between spine and elbows. Rictus did not resist. He had been brought up to believe in victory and death. He did not know quite what to make of defeat, and thus stood like a pole-axed ox as they bound him—not with spite—but like tired men who are keen to get home. Hurt men. The blood-smell rose even over the stink of shit on Broken-nose’s thighs.

  They picked up the aichme and sauroter. Remi stowed them in the hollow of his tunic. No doubt one day he would burn them out and reset them in virgin wood. Good spear fittings were more valuable than gold. They would see service again. The horsehair-crested helm was claimed by the man with the hole in his face, Ogio. Already, his face was swelling up like an apple, shiny and pink.

  Finally, some of Rictus’s numbness gnawed through.

  “My father lives in the green glen past—”

  “Your father is carrion now, boy,” Remion said. And there was even a kind of pity in his face as he said it.

  Rictus twisted, eyes wide, and Broken-nose beat the flat of his spear-shaft into his nape. A white detonation. Rictus fell to his knees, opening one up like liver. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t—”

  Again, he was beaten. First the spear-shaft, and then a fist clumping again and again into the top of his spine. A childish punching, fuelled by rage more than the knowledge of where a fist does damage. He rode it out, forehead on the sand, blinking furiously and trying to make his thoughts come in some kind of order.

  “The bastard begs!”

/>   I didn’t beg, he thought. At least, not for me. For my father, I will beg. For my father.

  He twisted his head, still pounded, and caught Remion’s eye.

  “Please.”

  Remion understood perfectly. Rictus knew that. In these few, bloody minutes he had come to know the older man well.

  No, Remion mouthed. His face was grey. In that instant, Rictus knew that he had seen all this before. Every permutation of this stupid little dance had already printed its steps in the older man’s memory. The dance was as old as Hell itself.

  Something else his father had said: Do not believe that men reveal themselves only in defeat. Victory tugs the veil aside also.

  Goddess of the Veil; bitter, black Antimone, whose real name must never be spoken. Now she smiles. Now she hovers here about these dunes, dark wings flickering.

  The black side to life. Pride, hate, fear. Not evil— that is something else. Antimone merely watches what we do to ourselves and each other. Her tears, it is said, water every battlefield, every sundered marriage-bed. She is un-luck, the ruin of life. But only because she is there when it happens.

  The deeds, the atrocities—those we do to ourselves.

  TWO

  A LONG DAY’S TROUBLE

  “We are late to the party, my friends,” Remion said.

  Dusk was coming on, and a bitter wind was beating around the pines on the hillsides. Rictus’s arms were numb from the elbow down, and when he looked at his hands he saw they were swollen and blue. He sank to his knees, unable to look at the valley below.

  Broken-nose yanked his head up by the hair. “Watch this, boy. See what happens when you go about starting wars. This is how it ends.”

  There was a city in the valley, a long, low cluster of stone-built houses with clay-tiled roofs. Rictus had made tiles like that on his father’s farm. One shaped the mud upon the top of one’s thigh.

  For perhaps two pasangs, the streets ran in clumps and ribbons, with a scattering of pine-shadowed lots among them. Here and there the marble of a shrine blinked white. The theatre where Rictus had seen Sarenias performed rose inviolate, head and shoulders above the swallow’s-nest alleyways. And surrounding all, the very symbol of the city’s integrity, was an undulating stone wall two spear-lengths high. There were three gates visible from this direction alone, and into each ran the brown mud of a road. A hill rose up at one end of this sprawling metropolis, one flank a sheer crag. Upon this a citadel had been built with a pair of tall towers within. There was a gatehouse, black with age, and the gleam of bronze on the ramparts.