by Paul Kearney
Up in the swallow’s eyrie of one of these there was an upstairs room. A man might spit through the gapped planks of the floor there onto the heads of the drinkers below, but somehow the place stood, stubborn and askew and seething with all manner of babel that wine could conjure out of men’s mouths. It was a place where conversations could be had in shouts, and still no one an armspan away would make sense of them.
“When is Phiron to return?” one of the men asked. This was Orsos of Gast, whose face had writ across it the dregs of every crime known to man. He was known as the Bull to friends and enemies alike. Now his deep-set eyes glinted with suspicion. “I have a firm offer from Akanos, me and my centon. Time is money, Pasion. Promises never fattened a purse.”
The cursebearer named Pasion cast his gaze down the long, wine-stained table. Twenty centurions sat there in the faded red chitons of mercenaries. Any one of them alone would have made a formidable foe; gathered together they were a fearsome assemblage indeed. A jug of water sat untouched on the tabletop. Pasion knew better than to buy them wine before the talking was done.
“He is in Sinon,” Pasion said casually, “Putting the final touches to our arrangements. With fair winds and good weather, he’ll be here in a week at the outside. What’s the matter, Orsos; do you have trouble holding your men to the colour?”
“Not since I stopped shitting yellow,” the Bull said, and about the length of the table there were grunts of humour.
“Then have some patience. Pity of the goddess, this is the biggest fee you’ll ever earn and you’re havering over the matter of a few days here and there. If this thing comes off, we will all of us be rich as kings.”
Greed warmed the air of the room a little. The men leaned forward or back as the mood took them, chairs creaking under a bulk of scarred muscle. From below, the raucous slatternly din of the wine-shop rose up through the floorboards.
“Quite a little army your Phiron is digging up, Pasion,” another of the men said. This fellow was lean as whipcord, with one long brow of black across his forehead, and eyes under it that made a blackbird’s seem dull. He had a trimmed goat’s-beard, and a moist lip. No father would trust his daughter to that face.
“I hear that this is only the tip of the spear, this host of ours gathered here. There’s more down in Idrios, and others in Hal Goshen. We’ve near two thousand men in the colour, here in Machran, and that’s the biggest crowd of hired spears I’ve ever heard tell of. What employer is this that can hire such myriads and keep them kicking their heels for weeks as though money were barley-grain to him?”
“Our employer’s name is not to be spoken,” Pasion snapped. “Not yet. That is one of the terms of the contract. You took the retainer, Mynon, so you will abide by it.”
“If you do not mean to take Machran itself I would do something to reassure the Kerusia of it,” another man said, a dark-skinned, hazel-eyed fellow with the voice of a singer. “They’re more jittery than a bride on her wedding night, and wonder if we have designs on their virtue. There’s talk of a League being gathered of the hinterland cities: Ponds, Avennos and the like. They don’t like to see so many of our kind gathered together for so long in one place.”
“Agreed, Jason,” Pasion said. “I will talk to them. Brothers, you must keep your men outside the walls, and in camp. We cannot afford friction with the Kerusia, or any others of the city councils.”
A rumble went down the table. Discontent, impatience. The room crackled with pent-up irritability.
“I’ve had my centon here the better part of a month,” an older man said, his beard white as pissed-upon snow and his eyes as cold as those of a dead fish. This was Castus of Goron, perhaps the wickedest of them all. “I’ve lost eleven men: two maimed in brawls, one who’s gotten himself hung by the magistrates, and eight who took off out of boredom. Most of us here can say the same to some degree. It’s not lambs we lead, Pasion. My spears are losing their temper. Where in Phobos’s Face are you taking us anyway, if we’re not to annoy Machran itself? The capital can muster some eight thousand aichme, given time. If we’re to strike, it must be very soon, before these farmers get themselves together.” There was a murmur of agreement.
Pasion smashed his fist down on the planks of the table.
“Machran is not our goal,” he said with quiet vehemence. “Nor are any of the other hinterland cities. Hammer that into your heads and those of your men. You’ve taken money from my hand— that makes me your employer as much as anyone else. If you cannot hold to your half of the contract, then refund me your retainers and be off. Go pit your wits in some skirmish up north. I hear Isca has been sacked at last, so there’s not a decent soldier up there to stand in line. Rape some goatherder women if you will, and boast of killing farmers’ sons. Those who stay with me will find real flesh for their spears, a true fight such as we’ve not seen in the Harukush in man’s memory. Brothers, stay to the colour here and I promise you, we shall all become forgers of history.”
The centurions looked at the wine-ringed table-top, frowning. At last Mynon said; “Fine words. Eloquent. I put them in my head and admire them. You always had a way with words, Pasion, even as far back as Ebsus. You could make men believe their own shit didn’t stink, if you had a mind to, but we’ve all grey in our beards here, and rhetoric to us is like a middle-aged wife. You can admire it, flirt with it, but you’re not going to let it fuck with you. Take my advice and speak plain now, or you’re going to start bleeding spears.”
Someone guffawed, and there was a chorus of assent. As Pasion looked down the table he realised that Mynon was right. Mercenaries would put up with many things and, contrary to popular myth, they would not desert the first time their pay was late. Stubborn bastards, proud as princes, and sentimental as women, they could be held to the colour by many things beyond money. Sometimes they would believe in promises, if those promises were grand enough, and if they flattered their own vanity. Mercenaries had their own kind of honour, and a fierce pride in their calling. It was only to be expected. Once a man donned scarlet, he became ostrakr, and abandoned whatever city had spawned him. It had to be so, or else allegiances to different warring cities would tear every centon apart. To replace that allegiance, the mercenary committed himself to his centon and his comrades. They became his city. The centurion was their leader, but could not commit his men to any contract until they had voted for it among themselves. It was the law of the Assembly writ small, and it gave each mercenary company the cohesion and brotherhood that all men craved in their hearts. To become a sellspear, a man might forsake his ancestors, his memories, the very place that gave him birth, but in return he was admitted to this brutal brotherhood and given a new thing to fight for. A city in miniature, clad in bronze, and dedicated to the art of warfare.
“Very well,” Pasion said at last. “You scorn rhetoric, so I will give you fact. More words, but these are set in iron. I will tell you this now, and it will never leave these walls.” He looked the table up and down, checking that he had each of their attentions. Had he been a less restless man, he would have loved the stage, the faces hanging on each word he chose to give and withhold.
“We are not gathered here for some city fight. We are making an army, a full-sized army, and all of it composed of mercenaries. Brothers, we have a journey before us, and its destination lies far, far outside the Harukush.”
There was a pause as this sank in.
“Brothers, we are—”
“Phobos,” Orsos swore loudly. “You mean to take us into the Empire.”
FIVE
TAKING SCARLET
For Jason of Ferai, the morning clatter of the Marshalling Grounds was a piercing agony he could as well have done without. Rasping his tongue across the roof of his mouth he sent one hand out to find the water jug and the other down to his waist, where his money-pouch still hung, as flaccid as an old man’s prick. He poured the contents of the jug over his head in the bed, getting some down his rancid throat and causing his bed-mat
e to squeal and dart upright in outrage.
“It’s only water, my dear. You had worse over you last night.”
The girl rubbed her eyes, a pretty little thing whose name he had not bothered to learn. “It’s dark out yet. You’ve the bed for another turn of the jar if you want it.”
Jason rose and kissed the nape of her neck. “Consider it a bonus. A turn alone.”
She threw his scarlet rag of chiton at him, and stood up, stretching. “Have it your way.”
Jason stood up also, the room doing its morn-ing-after lurch in his eyes. The girl was striking flint on tinder and making a hash of it. He took the stones from her and blew on the spark he clicked out, first time, then lit the olive-lamp from it. The grey almost-light of the pre-dawn receded. It was night in the room again. He pinched the girl’s round white buttock. “Any wine left?”
“There’s the dregs of the skin, bought and paid for.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.”
“Join me in a snort.”
They sat back down on the bed, naked and companionable, and squirted the black wine into one another’s mouths.
“So when is it to happen?” the girl asked. Her fingers eased the bronze slave-ring about her throat.
“What’s to happen?”
“This war of yours.”
“I wish I knew. What’s the word in the stews?”
The girl yawned. She had good teeth, white as a pup’s. “Oh, Machran is to be attacked by all your companies, and sacked for every obol.”
“Ah, that war. It may wait a long time yet.”
Suddenly earnest, the girl grasped Jason’s nut-brown, corded forearm. “When it comes, I will hide and wait for you, if you like. I would have you as a master.”
Jason smiled and stood up again. “You would, would you? Well, don’t be hiding on my account.” He dug into his pouch and levered out a bronze half-obol, flicked it at her. She caught it in one small, white fist.
“Don’t you know what war is like, little girl?”
She lowered her head, a greasy, raven mane. “It cannot be worse than this.”
Jason lifted her face up, one forefinger under her chin. All humour had fled his face.
“Do not wish to see war. It is the worst of all things, and once seen, it can never be forgotten.”
Buridan was waiting for him, faithful as a hound, and they fell into step together as they made their way to the Mithannon amid gathering groups of red-clad mercenaries who were staggering in streams to the roster-calls. There was a floating mizzle in the air, but it was passing, and Phobos was galloping out of the sky on his black horse, his brother long gone before him.
“Gods, it’s enough to make you wish you were on the march again,” Jason groaned, splashing through unnameable filth in his thick iron-shod sandals and shoving the more incapable of the drunks out of his way. “After this morning, there will be no more city-liberty. I’ll confine them to camp; Pasion’s orders. The citizens are becoming upset.”
“Can’t have that,” Buridan said, face impassive. He was a broad, russet-haired man with a thick beard, known as Bear to his friends. Jason had seen him break a man’s forearm with his hands, as one might snap a stick for kindling. Under the beard, at his collarbone, there was the gall of a long-vanished slave-ring. Not even Jason had ever dared ask him how he had come by his freedom. He was decurion of the centon, Jason’s second. The pair had fought shoulder to shoulder now for going on ten years, and had killed at each other’s side times beyond count. One did not need to share blood to have a brother, Jason knew. Life’s bitterness brought men together in ways not mapped out by the accidents of their birth. And even the blackest-hearted mercenary was nothing if he had no one to look to his back.
They passed through the echoing, dank tunnel of the Mithannon, the gate guards eyeing them with a mixture of hostility and respect, and as they came out from under that vault of stone the sun broke out in the sky above them, clearing the mountains in a white stab of light. At the same moment the roster-drums began to beat, sonorous boomings which seemed to pick up the glowing pulse of last night’s wine in Jason’s temples. One thing to be said for Pasion: once he stopped talking, he was free with his drink. Most of the twenty centurions would be too wretched to lead their centons out of the encampment today. Their hangovers would keep them under the walls. Perhaps that was Pasion’s policy, the canny bastard.
Jason’s troop lines were fifty spearlengths of hand-me-down lean-tos from which the fine fragrance of burning charcoal was already wandering. Before them was a beaten patch of earth, muddy in places, cordoned off from similar spaces by a line of olive-wood posts which had hemp ropes strung between them. Over all there flapped his centon’s banner, a stylised dog’s head embroidered on linen, with further layers of linen glued to the first to stiffen it out. Where the embroidery of the symbol had worn away, the pattern had been completed with the addition of paint. It was an old standard. Dunon of Arkadios had given it to Jason on retiring, and with it a few greybeards who had fought under it time out of mind. They were all gone now, but the Dogsheads were still here under that rag; different faces, same game.
Below the banner there now stood ten files of yawning, belching, scratching, glowering men, all clad in chitons that had once been bright scarlet, but which now had faded to every shade north of pink. They were a sodden, debauched, sunken-eyed crew, and Jason looked at them with distaste.
“How many?” he asked Buridan.
“Eighty-three by my count. One or two more may still wander in.”
“That’s four down on yesterday.”
“Like I said, they may yet wander in.”
“Another month of this, and we’ll be hard put to it to get together a single file.”
“There’s fresh fish coming in all the time,” Buridan rumbled, and he gestured to where a small knot of men stood unsure to one side, looking around them with eyes wide one second, narrowed the next. Though they bore weapons, none wore scarlet. The red-clad mercenaries filed past them without so much as a glance, though with the inevitable epithets flung out.
“Shitpickers.”
“Goatfuckers.”
“Strawheads.”
“Too damn fresh. I like my fish stinking,” Jason said.
“Like your women,” Buridan said mildly.
“And your mother,” Jason added. The two men grinned at one another.
“You call the roll,” Jason said. “I believe I’ll go check on the fish.”
“We’re short an armourer,” Buridan reminded him.
“Fat chance we’ll get one of those.”
Would-be mercenaries. They came in two distinct categories. There were those with dreams and ideas of their own place in the world. These saw themselves as men amongst men. They craved adventure, the sight of far cities, the clash and clamour of war as the poets sang of it, and that bright panoply the playwrights made of phalanx warfare. Of these hopeful souls, perhaps one in four would last past his first battle. In the othismos there was no room for dreamers. Those who stayed to the colour soon put aside their illusions.
The second category was more useful; and more dangerous. These were those men who had nothing to lose. Men running from the things they had seen and done in their past, or running from those who wished to bring them to account for it. Such fellows made good soldiers, and were generally fatalistic enough to be brave. That, or they no longer valued their own lives. Either way, they were useful to any commander.
One of each, Jason thought, as he approached the two foremost of the fresh fish. Mountain lads, one with the bright, hopeful gaze of the ignorant, the other with old pain etched about his eyes. The bigger one, he of the broad, half-smiling face, had an old-fashioned panoply: cuirass, shield, close-faced helm at his hip, and spear. The other had a torn chiton and not much else.
“Names,” Jason said, rubbing his forehead and cursing Pasion’s cheap wine.
“Gasca of Gosthere.”
�
��Rictus of—I was of Isca.”
Damn. Iscan training too. What a waste. But without proper gear he was of no use to the centon—no fighting use.
“Famed Isca, breeder of warriors. I hear they’ve levelled the walls now, and all the women are being fucked six ways from yesterday. And what did you do when they were burning your city?” This Jason asked Rictus, sliming the question with a fine-tuned sneer. “Were you herding goats, or clinging to your mother’s knees?”
The boy’s eyes widened, grey as old iron. “I was in the second rank,” he said, his voice quiet, at odds with the anger blazing on his face. “When we were hit in flank and rear I threw down my shield and ran.”
There was a pause, and then Jason nodded. “You did the right thing.” And he saw the surprise on the boy’s face—and something else—gratitude?
Jason looked the two boys—for that is what they were—up and down. He wanted the Iscan. He liked the pride and pain in the boy’s eyes. How to phrase it—they were friends, obviously. The big smiler could go cry to the goddess for all he cared. He might make a good soldier, but the odds were against it.
Ah, he thought, rubbing his aching temples again, let Phobos sort it out.
“All right; I’ll take you both. You, Gasca, report to Buridan the decurion. He’ll set you a file to join. Iscan, you cannot take a place in line of battle, not without a panoply. I’ll rate you camp servant and skirmisher, but as soon as you get some bronze on your back you’ll join your friend. His pay is twelve obols a month. Yours is half that. Do you find this acceptable?”
Rictus nodded without a word, as Jason had known he would.