by Paul Kearney
Beside Rictus’s father lay Vasio, his bald pate the only part of him which was not burnt black; he must have been wearing his old iron helm, but it was gone now. And Lorynx, his father’s favourite hound; he lay at his master’s feet with his flesh carved to ribbons and the fur seared from his skin. They had all died shoulder to shoulder. Scanning the ground about the house in the bright moonlight, Rictus counted eight separate gouts of blood that had blackened the beaten earth of the yard and now were beginning to glister with frost. A good accounting.
His eyes stung. The burning had kept the vorine from the bodies, but they would soon regain their courage. Things must be done right; his father would have it no other way. Rictus dropped his broken spear and with one hand he ripped the neck of his looted chiton. Eyes open wide he stared up at Phobos and Haukos and began to croon the low, slow lament for the dead, the Paean, part of the ancient heritage of the Macht as a single people. Men sang it on the death of their kin and they sang it going into battle, the beat of it keeping their feet in step with one another. Rictus had sung it only that morning, heart bursting with pride as the Iscan phalanx had advanced to its doom.
He gathered the bodies together, fighting the urge to retch as the blackened flesh came off in his hands, the white bone laid bare as a carved joint. Zori he found beside the central hearth of the longhouse, beneath a pile of smouldering thatch. She had dressed in her best for the end, and had not been touched by the invaders. Asking her forgiveness, Rictus slipped her pride and joy, her sea-coral pendant, from about her neck before replacing what remained of her veil upon her face. He would have need of it, he told her. She had never denied him anything, and had been his mother in all things but blood.
There were enough red embers to light the pyre. Rictus piled up broken timber, hay, his father’s favourite chair, all on top of the bodies of his family, and above them he laid the dog, that he might watch his master’s door in the life to come. A flask of barley-spirit he broke over the pyre and it went up with a white flare of hungry flame. He sang the Paean again, louder this time, to be heard by his mother’s spirit so that she might be there to welcome her husband. He stood by the bonfire of his past for a long time, not flinching as the flesh within it popped and shrank in the heat. He stood watching, dry-eyed, until the flames began to sink. Then he lay down beside it with his truncheon of a spear to hand. And, mercifully, he slept at last.
THREE
THE COMPANY OF THE ROAD
Gasca hitched his cloak higher about his shoulders and set one flap to cover his right ear so that the snow might not find so easy a passage. It was a good cloak, goat’s leather rimmed with dogskin, but it had been his older brother’s before this, and that big bastard had given it much hard wear. Besides which, there was no cloak made that would keep out the bitterness of this evening’s wind. But a people who had made their home in the highland valleys of the Harukush had grown up with it. So Gasca shrugged off the discomfort, as a man ought, and kept his head up, using his spear as a staff to pick his way along the treacherous gravelled slush that was the road, his left arm fighting to keep his bronze-faced shield from flapping up like an old man’s hat.
The Machran road was not busy, but those who had need to travel it at this time of year tended to draw together somewhat. In the evenings it made for an easier bivouac, and there were informal arrangements. Men gathered firewood, women fetched water. Children got under the feet of all, and were cuffed promiscuously by their elders. It was safer to sleep as part of a large camp, for the footpads and bandits in this part of the hills were renowned. As a fully armed soldier, Gasca had at first been avoided, then courted, and now was welcomed in the company of travellers. He had a fine voice, a pleasant manner, and if he was not the most comely of fellows, he had still the good-natured forbearance of youth to recommend him.
All Machran bound, the company was a varied lot. Two merchants led, with plodding donkeys laden with all manner of sacks and bags. Haughty fellows, they refused to divulge the contents, but it was easy enough to smell the juniper berries and half-cured hides once the fire began to warm them. A pair of young couples followed, the men as possessive as stags around their new wives, the girls flirtatious as only married women can be. Then came a grey-haired matron with the bark of a drillmaster, who herded round her skirts a half dozen ragged urchins, orphans running from some war in the far north. She was taking them to sell in the capital, and looked after them with the close attentiveness a man might show to a good hunting dog. One of the girls, she had already offered to Gasca, but he did not like his meat so tender, and besides, he had no money to spare for such indulgences. The children seemed to sense the essential charity in his nature, and when night fell one or two of them would invariably wriggle under his cloak and sleep curled against him. He did not mind, for they were good warmth, and if they were crawling with vermin, well, so was he.
Five days, this serried company had travelled in each other’s ambit, and they had become comrades of the road, sharing food and stories and sometimes going so far as to venture a little personal history about the campfires. The two merchants had unbent somewhat, and over execrable wine had let slip brawny yarns of the battles they had fought in their youth. The young husbands, once they had torn themselves from their bedrolls and wiped the sweat from their brows, confided to the company that they were brothers, married to sisters, and apprenticed to a famous armourer in Machran, Ferrious of Afteni by name, who would teach them his secrets and make of them rich men, artists as much as artisans.
The pimping matron, while picking lice from the hair of one of her charges, extolled the virtues of a certain green-walled house in the Street of the Loom-Makers, where a man might indulge any craving his appetite could muster, and for a very reasonable fee.
“And you, soldier,” one of the merchants said to Gasca over the fire. “What takes you to Machran? Are you to offer your spear for hire?”
Gasca squeezed himself some wine. It was black root-spirit he guessed, cut with goat’s blood and honey. He had drunk worse, but could not quite remember when.
“I go to take up the red cloak,” he admitted, wiping his mouth, and tossing the flaccid wineskin to one of the wan young husbands.
“I thought so. You bear a blank shield. So you’ll paint some mercenary sigil on it and wear scarlet. Under what commander?”
Gasca smiled. “Whatever one will have me.”
“You’ll be a younger son, I’ll bet.”
“I have two elder brothers, the apples of my father’s eyes. For me it was the red cloak or a goatkeeper’s hut. And my fingers are too big to fit round a goat’s tits.”
The men around the fire laughed, but there was a furtiveness to their regard of him. Though young, Gasca was as broad as any two of them put together, and the glued linen cuirass he wore was stained with old blood. It had been his father’s, as had the rest of the panoply he carried. Stealing them had been no easy thing, and one of his favoured elder brothers had taken a few knocks before Gasca had finally made it clear of his father’s land. These weapons and armour he bore were all he owned in the world, an inheritance he had felt to be his due.
One of the young husbands spoke up. His wife had joined him at the fire, a lazy cat’s-smile on her face. “I hear tell there’s a great company being gathered,” he said. “Not just in Machran, but in cities across all the mountains. There’s a captain name of Phiron, comes from Idrios; he’s hiring fighting men by the hundred. And he’s a cursebearer, too.”
“Where did you hear this?” his wife asked him.
“In a tavern in Arienus.”
“And what tavern was this?”
Gasca’s mind wandered as the squabble grew apace on the far side of the campfire. His own city, Gosthere, where he had the right to vote in assembly, was a mere stockaded town at the headwaters of the Gerionin River, two hundred and fifty pasangs back in the mountains. As much as anything else, he was going to Machran because he wanted to see a real city. Something built of
stone, with paved streets that had no shit streaming down the middle of them. In his haversack he had a copy of Tynon’s Constitution, which described the great cities of the Macht as if they were all set up in marble, peopled with statues and ruled by stately debate in well-conducted assemblies—not the knockabout mob-gatherings they had been back in Gosthere. That was something he wished to see, and if it did not exist in Machran, it likely never had anywhere.
To serve under a cursebearer—now that too would be something. Gasca had never so much as seen one before. Gosthere’s nobility did not run to such glories. He wondered if the stories about the black armour were true.
I am young, Gasca thought. I have taken my man and my wolf. I have a full panoply. I do not want to own the world; I merely want to see it. I want to drink it by the bucketful and savour every swallow.
“And that bitch; that goatherder she-pig—she was there, wasn’t she?”
“Woman, I tell you I was there for the turn of a water-clock, no more.”
Gasca lay back in his cloak, tugging the folds about him and staring up at the stars. Scudding past the moons there were rags and glimmers of cloud. It would be very cold tonight. As children, he and his brothers had buried embers under their bedrolls on such nights, up in the high grazing. They would chaff each other for hours to the clink of the goat-bells, and Felix, their father’s hound, would always lie next to Gasca. When he growled in the dark they would all be up on their feet in a moment, shuddering with cold, reaching for their boy’s spears. Gasca had been thirteen when he had killed his first wolf. Like all the men of his city, he had chiselled out one of its teeth. As he lay now, far from home, he reached up to his neck and touched it, warm from his flesh. For a moment he felt a pang of loss, remembering his brothers when they had all been boys together, before the complications of manhood. Then he grunted, rolled himself tighter in his cloak, and closed his eyes.
When morning came he found that two of the urchin-children had wormed under his cloak in the night and were spliced to him like wasps to a honeycomb. In the warmth under the cloak all his vermin and theirs had come alive, and he itched damnably. Even so, he was reluctant to rise, for the cloak and the ground around it had a light skiff of snow upon it that had frozen hard, and the sunrise just topping the mountains had kindled from it a hundred million jagged points of rose-coloured light. Even the log-butts from the fire had frost on them. When Gasca blinked, he could feel his eyebrows crackle.
The children squealed as he threw aside the cloak and rose to his feet, stamping his sandals into the stone-hard ground and stretching his limbs to the mountains. He strode out to the roadside and pissed there, standing in an acrid cloud of his own making and blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Looking up and down, he saw the road was empty in both directions. To the south it disappeared between the shoulders of two steep white hills, on one of which there loomed the rocky ruins of a city. That was Memnos. They had hoped to see it this morning when they woke. Machran now lay a mere thirty pasangs away, an easy day’s march. Tonight they would sleep under a roof, those who could afford it. Gasca had promised himself a good meal, and wine worthy of the name. He spat the taste of last night’s out onto the road, grimacing.
Something moved in the treeline. The original builders of the road had hewn back the woods on either side for a bowshot, and though those who maintained it now had not done so well, there were still a good hundred paces of open ground before the tangled scrub and dwarf-pine of the thickets began. In the dawn-light Gasca’s piss-stream dried up as he saw the pale blur of a face move in there. He turned at once and dashed back to the campsite, booting aside one of the yawning urchins. His spear was slick with frost and he cursed as it slipped in his fingers.
By the time he had turned back to the woods the figure was visible. A man walking towards the road with his arms held out from his sides, and in one fist a single-headed spear. The man thrust this point-first into the ground for lack of a sauroter, and then came on with both palms open in the universal gesture. I mean no harm. Gasca’s breathing steadied. He strode forward. Others from the company were blinking their way out of their bedrolls, throwing aside furs and trying to make sense of the morning. One of the younger children was crying hopelessly, blue with cold.
Gasca stood between the approaching figure and the waking camp, and planted the sauroter of his own spear in the roadside. He wished now he had clapped on his father’s helm.
“What’s your business? State it quickly. I have good men at my back,” he said loudly, hoping those good men were out of their blankets. He scanned the treeline, but nothing else moved there. For the moment, at least, this fellow was alone. But that meant nothing. He might have twenty comrades stowed back in the trees, waiting to see the company’s headcount.
The man was tall, as tall as Gasca, though nothing like as broad. In fact he had a gaunt, hungry look. His chiton was worn and stained, ripped open at the neck in the grief-mark, and he had a blanket slung bagwise about his torso. There was a knife at his waist, hanging from a string. A scar marred the middle of his lower lip.
“I mean no harm. I hoped to share your fire,” the man said.
The two merchants and the young husbands joined Gasca at the roadside, wielding clubs and knives. “Shall we kill him?” one of the husbands asked eagerly.
“He’s not robbed us yet. Let him speak,” Gasca said.
He was young, this fellow. Now that they all had a chance to see him up close they realised that he was not much more than an overgrown boy. Until one looked in his eyes. He stared at Gasca, and in his hooded gaze there was utter indifference.
I could kill him right here and now, Gasca thought, and he would not raise so much as a finger.
“What’s your name?” he asked, more gently than he had meant to.
“Rictus.”
“Of what city?”
The thin man hesitated. “I was of Isca,” he said at last, “When Isca still stood.” His eyes hardened. “I seek only to travel with you to Machran. I have no ill intent. And I am alone.” He raised his hands, empty.
“Come on to the fire,” Gasca said. “If we can raise a flame.”
“Isca?” one of the merchants said. “What happened to Isca?”
The man named Rictus turned his head. He had eyes like grey shards of iron, cold as the sea. “Isca is no more.”
“Really? Gods above. Come, boy—come sit and tell us more.”
The strangeness had been broken. A threatening shape walking out of the woods had become a tired young man, who spoke civilly. They gathered around him, glad perhaps of some new story; news that was not shopworn, but fresh and raw. Gasca drew away, still watching this gaunt apparition. The man Rictus did not move. Something flickered in his eyes; pain. He was regretting this already, Gasca realised. He spoke again. “Let me go back for my spear.”
They tensed. He looked at Gasca.
“Go get it,” Gasca said, and shrugged.
Some humanity in the eyes at last. The man nodded, and went back the way he had come.
“You think he’s not a ruse, a roadsman?” one of the young husbands asked.
Gasca was about to answer, but it was the fat merchant who spoke first.
“Look in his face—he tells the truth. I’ve seen eyes like that before.” The merchant’s face tightened. For a second it was possible to see the soldier he might have been in younger days.
“We’ve nothing to fear from this lad. He’s already made his gift to the goddess.”
They got the fire going again, digging out of its black carcass a single red mote of living heat. This they conjured into a blaze, and with the addition of copper cauldrons they had boiling water soon after, and set the barley to swell in it. The campsite regained some of its usual cheer, though the newcomer, Rictus, had an armspan of cold air between himself and the rest. This was remedied when one of the urchins edged close, and finally sat defiantly within the crook of his arm. Rictus appeared startled, then pleased, then grim as
a blacksmith’s washbowl. By his posture, one might think he had a spear-staff for a spine. And he was so cold that the warmth of the child next to him finally set him to shivering, with ground teeth.
The fatter of the merchants, the one Gasca now knew to be a true man, threw the wineskin to Rictus.
“Drink, for the gods, for all of us. Have a drink, lad. Pour a libation if you will. Ease that look in your eyes.”
Rictus took the skin and drank. He drank as though it were the last thing he would ever do. And while his cheeks were still puffed full of wine, he poured a stream of it from the mouth of the skin so that it might puddle on the ground.
“That’s good wine—” the thinner merchant cried.
“Shut your mouth,” the fatter one told him, and Gasca nodded when he met his eyes. There were proprieties. There was decency. A man could not weigh the price of all things, and yet ignore their value.
Teeth bared for a moment against the vileness of the wine, Rictus looked at Gasca, and jerked his head towards the thickets on the western margins of the road. “Back in there, maybe two pasangs, or one and a half, there are eight men about a dead campfire arguing over the best time to ambush you.”
Silence about their own fire. The procuress asked, “And they’re friends of yours, are they?”
“If they were, would I be here?”
The fat merchant rubbed his fingertips through his beard. “Eight you say? Why did they not attack us before now? Dawn and dusk are the best time for these things.”
“They were quarrelling over who would have the women—these two younger ones. They had a fight over it last night, then got drunk and slept the time away. Now they are arming, meaning to take you sometime today, before you get much closer to Machran.”