by Paul Kearney
“Thank you, captain,” Pasion said. “I am obliged to you, and your crew.”
Myrtaios laughed. “You keep your thanks, sell-spear, and make sure my fee stays in the hold where it belongs. Now that’s ballast I’d be happy to carry more often.” He raised his hands as though he were cupping a woman’s breasts. “All those lovely little round bags a’ clinking together, like the gold was talking to you through the leather. You live long enough to need a return trip, and I’m your man!” He stumped off along the deck, laughing with his head back. Pasion belched, put his palm across his mouth, and lurched towards the windward rail.
During the day the wind dropped an octave, and what rags of cloud remained about the sky went with it, off into the west. The fleet bowled along in an almost stately fashion, and as the ships began to behave more like sensible means of transport and less like contrivances of torture, so the men below began to make their way up on deck. Rictus and Gasca climbed up the hatch-ladders and staggered forward to the bows. Here, the salt spray was refreshing as rain, and there was a warmth in the sun which seemed a new and strange thing. They almost fancied they could smell some new scent in the air, as though the senses changed along with the world’s geography.
“We’re running south,” Rictus said. “See the sun setting on our right? The Harukush are behind our heads, and before us—”
“Aye—what’s that out before us, I wonder?” Gasca said. He had a light in his eye which had not been there since they had left Machran, and Rictus was glad to see it.
“The Sea,” Rictus told him. “This is the Tanean we’re floating upon. In the legends, it is said that it was created by Antimone’s salt tears, as she wept to be exiled from heaven. And then the smith-god Gaenion, in pity, reared up the land of Artaka on its far shores and filled it full of spices and fragrances and flowers to comfort her.”
“That’s where we’re going, it seems,” Gasca said. He grinned crookedly. “This land of spices and flowers you speak of—if it’s so damn nice then why did God let the Kufr have it and stick us with the black mountains of the Kush?”
“I think God has other plans for the Macht,” Rictus said.
“I think God has it in for us,” Gasca told him. “He gave us the shithole of the world to fight over, by all accounts, and the best bits He saved up for the damned Kufr. Perhaps our legends have it all wrong and we’re the pimple on this world’s arse, stuck out in the snow-covered rocks, whilst the rest of the crowd have it easy with all the flowers and the spices and such. Ever think of that, philosopher?”
Rictus smiled, but said nothing. He leaned on the wooden bulwark at the bow and watched the bowsprit as it reared up and down, like a willing horse at the canter. He watched the waves come rolling in to be smashed aside by the ship’s stem, and savoured the sight, the smell, the clean salt water on his skin. There was a presentiment upon him, a knowledge that he must remember this time on the wide waters of the world. A gift of the goddess perhaps. Always, her gifts were double-edged. This one gave him a keen delight in the living movement of the ship, and the massive turning of the waters below it. He knew now to make a memory of this, for when it was gone, he would not see it again.
At his throat, he fingered the coral pendant he had taken off Zori’s corpse. It had come from here, from the depths of the sea. In Machran it would have bought him a week’s worth of whores, or a good knife, but he had held onto it. It was the only thing he had left of that quiet glen where his father had brought him up to be a man.
The wind stayed fair for the south, and before it the fleet coursed along at the clip of a trotting horse. Aboard all the ships, the mariners repaired the storm-damage with the phlegm of those accustomed to the vagaries of the sea, and the mercenaries washed their filthy scarlet chitons in salt water so that they chafed at thigh and neck and bicep.
In the evening, for the first time, the captains allowed fires to be lit in the sand-filled hearths amidships. Over them the scattered companies of the Macht set the rust-streaked centoi of the communal messes, and they threw into these whatever they could hunt up from the holds of their ships. The centons gathered about each fire-frapped cauldron as darkness drew in on the face of the waters, and the sailors looked on from their stations in the bow and around the steering-oars. They had eaten their fill of biscuit and cold salt pork earlier in the day and now watched with some interest as their red-clad passengers went through the ritual of the evening meal as thought they were all safe and sound on land. Myrtaios had raised some concern at all the bodies on deck, protesting that it made the vessel top-heavy, but Pasion had overridden him. It was a comfort to those who found the face of the sea a dangerous, inimical place, and besides, the men were as gaunt as beggars after puking their guts up for the better part of a week.
There were two centons on Pasion’s ship: Jason of Ferai’s Dogsheads, and Mynon’s Blackbirds. The raised platform at the rear of the vessel— they called it a steerdeck, the mariners, every object on board, it seemed, had a name in a language of their own—was a fine place to lean and look down on the two hundred or so men below who crammed the vessel amidships with the centos in their own midst, a bubbling, steaming darkness that had fire licking about it.
The cooks had finished ladling out the inevitable boiled stew, and the men had eaten at least half of it. Mynon and Jason joined Pasion on the steerdeck and surveyed the packed space below.
“Lean and hungry,” Mynon said.
“Better that than fat and bored,” Pasion retorted.
Jason smiled. It was an old exchange, a ritual almost. “Tell me,” he said. “How many have we lost, Pasion?”
The cursebearer frowned. “Hard to tell in all truth, Jason. Even the sailors can’t be sure.”
“Pasion—”
“All right. As of now, it looks as though at least a dozen ships went down in the storm.”
“Goddess,” Mynon swore, genuinely shocked. “Men or mules?”
“The big freighters, for the most part—in a bad sea, Myrtaios tells me, the side-hatches can be smashed open. But we figure at least three of the troop-carriers.”
“Six centons,” Jason said tonelessly. “The bulk of six hundred men. Fuck.”
“Why this voyage?” Mynon demanded. “We could have made the crossing at Sinon and barely had time to puke over the side. Instead we’re here ploughing along the sea-lanes of the world, and we’re hundreds of men the poorer for it.”
“Tanis is the only port where we can get ashore in strength without fighting a war to do it. You’ve seen ship-borne assaults before, Mynon; men floundering ashore, drowning in their armour, picked off in the shallows. Believe me, Phiron knows what he is doing. Besides—” Here Pasion paused, as if he had been about to say too much. At last he went on. “If we make landfall in Artaka, then our journey will be shortened somewhat, and we’ll avoid the Korash Mountains, a hard bitch to get through by all accounts.”
“The Korash Mountains? Where in the hell of the world is Phiron taking us?” Mynon demanded, dark monobrow thunderous above his black-beaded eyes. “I thought he was on another ship. Is he with the fleet at all?”
“He went on ahead,” Pasion said hoarsely. “There were problems in Sinon. He was worrying about our logistics, and so went on ahead in a fast galley. He’ll be at Tanis waiting for us.”
Jason shook his head. “Pasion, we’re dancing in the dark here. Enough of the secrets. We’re out at sea with nowhere to desert to, so be clear with us now. This is not a bundle of centons any more. When we get off these bastard ships, we’ll be all in it together, with just the Kufr to rub up against. This is us, here. This is all we have.”
Pasion bent his head. Below, in the waist of the ship, the men had begun to sing. Some old song of the mountains. His tongue probed the aching, rotten teeth that had kept him up at nights more times than he cared to remember. He thought of them as his conscience, or at least some joke of Antimone’s, set in his skull to keep him from sleeping sound with so much on his min
d.
“I had only the one despatch from Phiron,” he said at last. What was the name of that song? Even he, a lowlander, knew the tune. “He had met with our principal at last. He thought the arrangements for our reception in Tanis were not all they might have been, hence his early departure from Sinon. That’s all I know, brothers.”
“No,” Jason said. “There’s more. We’re to be fighting in the Empire, that much has been plain—but who is this principal of yours? What’s the mission, Pasion? We’ve come far enough to know.”
Pasion told them.
Land came into sight three days later. So said the sailors at the mastheads. For the men on deck there was the merest hint of a darker line on the hem of the sky, and with it, some intensification of the smells on the air. They had not known that land could be smelled as though it were a meal preparing, or a fart let go in a corner. They smelled land, and packed the decks of the fleet as though by their presence there they could make it approach the more quickly. When it did, they found it to be a mustard-pale shore clinging to the hem of the world, a line of sand, it appeared. For men bred to mountains, it seemed a strange and unseemly thing that a whole new world could be opening up on the horizon before them and yet seem as flat as a man’s hand for as far as the eye could see. Flat and brown, with no hint of spice or flower to redeem it.
The Great Continent. So it had been known, time out of mind. The Macht had never forgotten their attempt to conquer it any less than the Kufr had. As the Macht fleet came in close to the land, sails reefed and sweeps striking out on the smaller ships, so they found that the very colour of the water under them had changed, becoming brown as an old man’s piss. Birds began to circle the fleet and cluster about the tallest of the yards, shitting white drops on all those below. The Macht mercenaries hunted out their armour and weaponry, and burnished the salt-rust off it, determined to present a fearsome, gleaming front upon landing. And Myrtaios took on board a Kufr pilot to steer the ships of the fleet through the sandbanks and eddying channels of the mighty Artan River, upon whose delta Tanis stood, one of the great and ancient cities of the world. This Kufr stood on the quarterdeck between the twin steering-oars and barked orders in good Machtic to left and right, whilst behind him the better part of a hundred ships followed meekly in line, afraid of grounding their bottoms on the pale sand and yellow rocks of Artaka. Even Jason, standing at the break of the quarterdeck with his black cuirass on his back and iron helm hanging like a pot at his hip, felt the history behind the prosaic moment. He had seen Kufr before, a few, but then he was accounted an educated man. For most of the centons the shape standing immensely, unfeasibly tall at the stern was like some picture brought bright and colourful out of myth. They gaped at it; the golden skin, the weird eyes, the face with human features that were in no way human. And the thing did not even sweat under their regard.
“Perhaps they don’t sweat,” Mynon said, looking on with scarcely more discretion than the newest fish in his centon.
“Ah, don’t tell me you’ve not seen one before.”
“Upon my heart, Jason, I have not. We’re not all well-travelled scroll-scratchers like you.”
And so Tanis opened out before them. The pilot brought them through a broad estuary where the sea turned brown, and on either side the banks began to encroach on the water, narrowing pasang by pasang. Ahead, a tall gleam of white appeared on the brim of the world, and as the day wore on—the long, wearisome day for those who had donned full panoply—so this white grew and lengthened and in some places soared, until there was presented to the men of the ships a sight they had not quite bargained on. They had seen Machran, and thus flattered themselves that they knew what a great city looked like, but what bulked taller on their horizon moment by moment was something else. It was like comparing the mud-forts of children to the project of an engineer.
Tanis. They built with limestone here, a white stone which time pocked and darkened. But still, the passage of the years could not dim the illusion. This was a white city, a gleaming jewel. It reared out of the dun delta which surrounded it. In its midst two dozen towers, and fifty towers within towers, and interlaced battlements, all vast in conception, unreal to see, reared up and up into the clear blue sky, a dream of architects. A marvel. The farther the fleet slipped up the delta of the river, so the higher the buildings became. Men on the ships craned their necks, striving to see the summits of towers which were still pasangs away.
“Our Mother’s God,” Mynon said. His little rat-face was ill-suited to awe, but it was filled to the brim now. His face screwed up, and the awe moved on into baffled resentment. He stared up at the white towers of Tanis like a man whose wife has just betrayed him. “Pasion—I, I—”
“I know,” Pasion said.
“Quite a little mission,” Jason said. And even he, the urbane man of letters, had trouble keeping his teeth together. “Pasion—”
“I know,” Pasion said. His face was as set as some statue hewn from stone. “Ready your cantons to disembark. Leave nothing behind. We will assemble on the quays in full wargear. If we must fight our way off the ships, then so be it. Brothers, see to your men.”
Up the backstays of the leading ship went pennants of coloured linen. The following vessels of the fleet modified their courses, taking in sail and coming forward up the channel, line upon line of them. On every deck the Macht stood in assembled companies with their weapons to hand. And still the shore glided closer and the immense towering heights of Tanis loomed.
The messenger flung himself down at the lip of the dais. Prostrate, he babbled, “Great One, they have arrived. The ships are sailing into the harbours now, in lines as endless as the sea. Hundreds, Great One, and on the decks of every one the warriors of the Macht stand in armour in their thousands, their spearheads bright as stars. It is a sight glorious and fearsome, like some picture of legend—”
“Yes, yes,” Arkamenes said. “Get out. I have eyes in my head.”
He stood up, swaying slightly as he took the weight of the Royal Robes. Amasis drew near a step and raised the space where an eyebrow should have been. “Shall I—”
“God, no. Thank you, Amasis. A king must needs have strong thighs it seems.”
“Those robes would pay for a second army by themselves,” Amasis murmured. Turning to look down the length of the audience chamber, he said, “Do you think we put on a brave enough show?”
There were fully two thousand people in the hall, and the heat was stifling despite the best efforts of the fanbearers posted in lines along the galleries above.
“Where is Gushrun?”
“He stepped out. Even the Governor of Artaka has to piss now and then, it seems.”
Arkamenes smiled. As he had risen from the throne, so the occupants of the hall had bowed themselves before him, and all talk had stilled. There was a clear way down the middle of that vast, echoing chamber, and posted along both sides of it, in a fence of flesh, were two hundred of the highest-caste Kefren of the Bodyguard, the Honai. Armoured in corselets of iron scales, they had been chosen for their height, their strength, their ferocity. The tall, plumed helms they wore made them stand out head and shoulders above anyone else in the crowd—in any crowd.
Arkamenes went to the window at the rear of his throne. It was two spear-lengths in height, and had been glazed with true glass, every finger’s length of it. Through the blurred brightness, he could look down on the wide triple harbours of Tanis below. He could see the fleet make landfall, and watch the beetling crowds on the wharves, kept back by more of his own spearmen so that the fearsome Macht might once more walk the earth of the Great Continent.
“Have his officers brought to me at once,” he told Amasis. “Let them come here on foot, armed or unarmed as they choose. But make haste. This crowd will start fainting anytime soon. And Amasis?”
“Yes, lord?”
“Find out where Phiron is.”
The heat of the land was something they had not expected, not in winter. As they
followed the men in front in endless file down the gangways, Rictus and Gasca pursed their lips and looked at one another in silent surmise. This was winter? They felt as though they had come to some place beyond the natural run of the seasons. And as Gasca stood on the quay with his armour on his back, the helm close upon the bones of his face and his spear becoming slick in his grip, he wondered if Rictus might not have some truth in his tales. For this heat could not be right, not at this time of the year. Perhaps there were flowers here indeed, and spices too, whatever they might be.
The centurions went bare-headed, the better to shout and be recognised by those they were shouting at. As ship after ship came in, and more and more men filed off them to stand in rigid rows upon the quays, so the crowds who had gathered to watch grew noisier and more packed. Lines of Kufr spearmen kept them back from the ranks of the Macht, but under their tall helms their eyes were as wide as those of the straining hordes behind them.
Jason went up and down the front rank of his centon in full armour, his iron helm with its transverse crest bumping at his hip. “Stand still, you bastards,” he said in a low snarl. “Show them who you are. Buridan, kick those fucking skirmishers into line.”
They were led off the quays by Orsos’s Dolphins, a disreputable crew even by the standards of mercenaries. In some moment of grim gaiety, these had slathered their armour in black paint found in the hold of their ship, and so it was as though a whole centon of cursebearers led the army from the waterside into the teeming vast-ness of the city that awaited them. Pasion was up in the van, conversing with great reserve with a pair of Kufr guides, each inclining gracefully to hear his words in the hubbub of the crowd. Even at a distance, it was possible to see that he was fighting not to recoil as the fragrant, golden faces leaned closer to his own, the violet eyes in them gleaming bright as some stone found in the desert.