by Paul Kearney
“We need to get more of the Hounds out there, quartering the ground, or some of the Kufr cavalry.”
“Oh, I agree, but the Kerusia must stop talking first.”
Rictus sank back against the heavy leather wall of the tent. The wine had lit up his insides and fogged his mind. He was nodding where he sat. He fell asleep with the clay winecup still clenched in his fist, the endless sound of the voices beating about under the flickering glare of the golden lamps, and the strange perfumes of the Kufr filling his head with dreams.
THIRTEEN
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
“He has made good time,” Vorus said, reading the end of the despatch. “I had thought we might catch him still on the western bank of the Bekai, but he is across with all his baggage.”
“Arkamenes’s troops have learned how to march,” Proxis agreed grudgingly. “But it is no matter. We have the numbers, and the ground is adequate.”
“The ground,” Vorus mused, “is bad for cavalry; too many ditches. And it’s wet. The Macht will like this ground, Proxis. It will give them something to stick their heels in.” He slapped shut the despatch scroll.
“There are ten thousand Macht, I hear. Even ten thousand cannot prevail against the force we have brought into the west.”
As one, the pair of them turned and looked eastwards, back at the looming wall of the Magron Mountains. Memories. Fighting to force double-axled wagons through the drifts, whole companies roped together, heaving them onwards by main force. Kefren huddled in windbreaks of flesh as the snow whirled around them. The bodies of those left behind, stark against the snow in their wake, waymarkers of carrion.
“I never thought he had it in him,” Vorus admitted.
“Yes. He is his father’s son after all. We can be thankful for that, at least.”
They turned back to the warmth, the sunlit world of the lowlands and the rivers to the west. Wide and green, it now had carved across it brown scars of churned-up mud where the columns of the army had marched past. Too large to keep in one formation, the levy of the Great King had been split up into four separate entities, each pasangs long, each with its own flanking forces, vanguards and rearguards. The baggage train was back in a fortified camp five pasangs in the rear, a stockade larger than most cities which housed several thousand wagons, and another small army to guard them. This was campaigning on a scale no one had seen before. It was nothing less than a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the entire region, for foraging parties were systematically stripping it bare. They could reap three harvests a year here. In Pleninash, such was the bounty of the soil and the clement generosity of the climate; but to sow one had to plant, and to plant one must have seed. When the war was done and the battle won, there would be famine this winter, here in the breadbasket of the Middle Empire. That was the price paid to stymie one man’s ambition.
They fell into step together, the worn, athletic Macht general and the squat Juthan with the bloodshot eyes. Waiting for them at the base of the slope were a knot of Kefren horsemen, Honai cavalry of the Royal Guard. Beyond them a Juthan Legion stood patiently in the mud, five thousand of the grey-skinned creatures with the round shields and heavy halberds of their race. Many had been squatting upon their hams, talking quietly. They rose now as Vorus and Proxis came closer, a quiet mass of flesh and bronze, their banners limp above their heads. About their faces the river-flies buzzed in clouds, new-hatched by the spring warmth.
Juthan grooms stood in the middle of the magnificent Honai cavalry grasping the halters of two less grand mounts. Vorus could ride a horse, but for him the animal was a means of locomotion, no more. He had Niseians on his estates back in Ashur, but would sooner ride something a little nearer the ground. Proxis habitually rode a mule, its grey pelt the same colour as his own. The magnificent Honai looked faintly offended at their proximity to such poor equine flesh, but then they looked faintly offended by most things, Vorus thought.
Screens of light cavalry were operating on every front of the army, gathering what information they could and sending it back to the high command in an unending stream of mud-slathered couriers.. Looking south, Vorus could see some now, a pennanted column of them, as gaily dressed as if going to a fair. All the Kefren loved finery, and war called out the dandy in them in a way that even court ceremonial could not quite match. Even the Juthan legions were in gaudy liveries of the various Kefren lords, and the mighty Qaf had painted their faces with all the barbaric enthusiasm of children. Added to this, the various provincial factions called up to the standards wore versions of their national costumes. The Medisai trimmed their harness with feathers from the parrots of the Pan-jir River valley, the Arakosans preferred the white fur of mountain-leopards. The Asurians of the heartland made no bones about it, and had all their wargear inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli dredged from the bed of the Oskus. If one of their nobles went down in the mud a prince’s ransom in bullion and gems would fall with him. Vorus did not approve. In Anurman’s day such extravagance was saved for the court. On the hunt, and in war, his soldiers had left their armour unadorned.
It was our deeds marked us out in those days, Vorus thought, not some brooch or robe or crown. But even Anurman might have donned his finest, were he to go out and meet a Macht army in battle. Such events seemed a part of myth rather than historical reality.
Another courier came galloping up, the muck flying from his horse’s feet like a flock of startled birds and the ranks of the Juthan making an avenue for him. He threw up an arm in salute, a hufsan from the mountains with the dark eyes of his caste. He was grinning, face alight with the joy of his position, the armies massing on the plain, the good horse under him. Simple folk, the hufsan Kefren, and the most vicious warriors in the army, bar the Honai.
“General! I find you! I bring a message from the Archon Midarnes.” The hufsan proffered a leather despatch-case, spattered with mud from his passage. Vorus took it with a nod, breaking the seal. Midarnes was up front some five pasangs, feeling out the terrain with his soldiers’ feet, and claiming space should the army need to shake out into battle line. Dominating the ground, the manuals of Vorus’s youth had called it. For the earth upon which they fought would have its say in their lives and deaths as surely as any tactic of the enemy.
Vorus paused for a second as he realised his hands were trembling. He clenched his jaw, the muscles jumping under his face, and read the scroll.
To Vorus of the Macht, officer commanding the armies of his excellent majesty Ashurnan, King of Kings, Great Kings, Lord of—
He skipped the pleasantries. Midarnes was commander of the Household Guard, and sometimes he let protocol get in the way of haste, for all that he was a capable fellow.
The vanguard of the traitor’s army has been sighted ten pasangs east of the Bekai River. I hold high ground two pasangs to their front, and have put all my forces into line of battle. There is good space here for the rest of the army to deploy to my right and left. The Macht are out on the enemy right, the traitor and his Bodyguard in the centre. They, too, are deploying into line. I shall hold this position until further orders.
Vorus swore under his breath, though he kept his face blank, aware of the Honai guards watching, Proxis’s eyes upon him. He passed the scroll to the Juthan. “Things move fast, my friend.” He looked up at the sky, squinting into the sun and gauging how long it had to meet the flat river-plain of the western horizon.
Proxis, too, uttered some profanities in his own, dark tongue. “This is the King’s work. If we don’t move fast he’ll be up there alone. He has his father’s courage, but as for judgement—”
“Mount up. We must get to Midarnes.”
“It’s too late in the day for battle, surely.”
“Phiron of Idrios commands the Macht, a canny bastard if ever there was one. We must gather up the army at once, and concentrate on Midarnes. Courier—courier, there! Proxis, have you ink and quill?”
Ashurnan had left all his finery behind on the back
of another tall Kefre who might have been his twin. This officer, lucky or luckless according to opinion, now stood in the royal chariot, his head shaded by the royal parasol-bearers and the Great King’s standard waving slightly with its long plumes above his head. Ashurnan himself had taken two close companions for a horseback tour of his mustering army. They were coming up into line by their thousands, and he galloped along their front on his grey gelding in the brilliant robes of a staff officer, no more, whilst a gleaming white komis kept most of his face covered, and soon became black with the tiny flies hatching out of the river-mud. He had mud on his arms and legs also, thrown up by the exuberant passage of his horse. Beneath the komis he was grinning like a child, so happy to be young, and a king, and well-mounted to the front of a mighty army that would halt or move or march into battle at his will. He raised his eyes to the sky as his horse sped over the tightly-packed earth of the Middle Empire—his empire—and he gave thanks to the Creator Himself for all this, for the breath of Kuf that had given life to them all, for the ability to be glad at this time, to find worth in the great issues and bloody struggles of the world. For if a man could not savour such a dish, then he was no man at all.
The Household troops, the Honai, were ten thousand strong in themselves, and in eight ranks they had a frontage of some thirteen hundred paces. Unlike the other Kefren contingents, they did not rely on the horse or the bow, but on the spear. Like the Macht, they were close-quarter killers, trained to prevail in the most demanding mode of warfare known.
They were magnificent. Ashurnan had never seen them gathered all together before, and now it seemed that there could not be a force in the world to contend with them. All through the passage of the mountains, they had hid their wargear under leather campaign casings, but these were discarded now, and the effect made Ashurnan rein in his horse and stare, Great King though he was. Their arms and armour were gilded and inlaid with every precious metal and gem known to exist; the sun caught these now and made their line a scintillating blur of varicoloured light. They did not seem things made of flesh at all.
And more troops were coming up minute by minute, thousands of them. Kefren from Asuria, hufsan from the mountains, Qaf from the north, Juthan Legions marching in dour ranks, and files of brightly clad cavalry from the Oskus valley. A world in arms, it seemed; an army which could no more be fought than could the passage of the moons.
Ashurnan wheeled his horse and stared back down the long slope towards the river valley of the Bekai. Far in the distance, the tall hill of Kaik could be made out, a shadowed hummock on the edge of the plain, and beyond it the westering sun had begun to lengthen the shadows. Closer to hand there was the enemy, a line of armoured troops with the sun behind them, who had come here to kill him and take his throne.
Arkamenes is there, he thought. My brother sits his horse somewhere in that line, and watches, and wonders where I am.
In the harem there had been many wives, and many children, all sired by great Anurman. The boys had been taken away soon after birth, so that the court might not poison their upbringing. They had been reared as sons of simple fathers, and hence had been taught those things the Kefren still held essential to hold true the course of life: to wield the bow, to ride a horse, to speak the truth. Such things were their heritage, and no matter how depraved and indolent the ruler of the Empire might become, he had the knowledge of those values buried in his soul, to reproach him when he fell short. Such simple things.
To tell the truth.
At age thirteen, Ashurnan had been brought back to Ashur, and told of his true parentage by matter-of-fact tutors his mighty father had hired to complete his education. Illiterate as the hufsan couple who had fostered him, he had been thrown into a world of palace protocol, vicious conspiracy, simmering feuds, and poison—the weapon of choice for wives, concubines, eunuchs, and courtiers. No bows or horses here, and precious little of the truth, either. That was the palace.
The Great King stood above it all, or at least Anurman had, and at his shoulders he had two creatures he trusted. The Macht, Vorus, and the Juthan, Proxis. These two were faithful as dogs, and were treated like dogs by the Kefren nobility, outraged beyond fury by the Great King’s reliance on them. All this, Ashurnan had known, had seen at first hand and heard at second whilst growing into his manhood within the confines of the ziggurat. His father had been a distant, stern figurehead, hardly connected to him at all, but Vorus had looked in on him from time to time, to make reports he supposed. He had hated Vorus, knowing that Anurman, his own father, loved this alien Macht as though he were his son. He would see the two of them together at state occasions, Vorus elevated to commander of Ashur’s very garrison, made greater than the highest-caste Kefre of the Great King’s own blood. He had hated Vorus for his patience, for his honesty, for his loyalty. The very qualities any King needs in a friend.
Arkamenes, my brother. Ashurnan reined in and sat his horse a hundred paces forward of his Household’s line, the foremost man in the army. His companions he waved back as they approached, to remonstrate with him about security, no doubt. He sat there and watched the ranks of the enemy thicken, a hedge of spears and shields, a mass of pushing and jostling and stumbling people all intent on finding some patch of earth upon which they could stand and muster their courage. These were Kefren opposite. He saw the banners of Tanis, of Artaka there, and with a tightening of his mouth he beheld the sigils of Istar, and his cousin Honuran.
What price bought you? he wondered, for he had loved Honuran, had counted him a true friend. They had stayed together as best they could through the palace upheavals, Ashurnan the serious, Arkamenes the proud, Honuran the trickster. A little triumvirate of resistance, dedicated to foxing their tutors and making some space outside the palace for themselves. They had all lost their virginity on the same whore, had planned it that way so as to avoid the slick and murderous concubines of the palace. They had drunk in wine-shops of the lower-city together, their bodyguards fretting and nervous at every door. They had hunted together, boated down the Oskus, broken horses as a team, been beaten by their tutors with all their rumps bare in the air at the same time. Boyhood, and friendship. One thought it was supposed to mean something. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I was too serious—the Heir of the Great King. Did I wrong you, Arkamenes? It was not through spite, only ham-fistedness.
Friendship. I do not have it. My father was a lucky man. I take his leavings, worthy as they are, and out of them I spin what I can. But I was never one to make great friends, it seems.
The glory had left him now. Ashurnan sat his horse and looked out at the enemy battle line with eyes as cold as glass, noting the depth of rank, the armour, the level of drill. My brother, he thought. I made you ruler of one third of this empire, in fact if not in name—and it was not enough. I did it for love, for boyhood friendship. I was mistaken. I shall kill you now, and weep not one tear when I stare upon your corpse.
He kicked his mount’s ribs savagely, and as the animal reared in fear and startlement he calmed it with kind words, ashamed of himself.
The bow, the horse, the truth. Very well. Even if it is only to please the memory of a dead father, it is good enough.
He stared back down the sloping ground to where his brother might be, then scanned the enemy line, hunting out the legend, the much-vaunted mythical Macht. The familiar half-made ranks of Kefren troops opposite had been a kind of comfort; one saw this calibre of soldiery all over the Empire, and they were faintly risible compared to the stern ranks of the Honai. He had a half-smile on his face as he peered up the enemy line, the anger and betrayal in his heart fuelling a kind of arrogance, the shield which few saw through, and which meant he would never make the friends his father had.
The Macht.
Harder to make out because they were not moving. They stood in patient files on the enemy right, eight ranks of heavy infantry resting their shields on the ground so that they leaned against the right knee. Their bronze was different. Ashurnan could not
quite puzzle it out, until he realised that it was old metal, tarnished and dimmed. These men had carried their harness a long time. It was not a matter of burnishing; it was a matter of years. And there was no decoration to it. They did not take joy in their turn-out. They wore their panoplies with all the pride and elan of labourers set to a day’s heavy shifting. Ashurnan’s mouth began to sneer under the komis as he regarded them, and then his lips straightened. Their formation was perfect, as though someone had gone running along their front with a plumb line. They stood at ease, almost unmoving. They were watching the armies moving into place to their front, but none of the Kefren’s flinching restlessness went through their ranks. They seemed almost bored.
Ashurnan turned his horse around and cantered back to his own lines, his mind brewing all manner of phantasms. To kill his brother—that was the self-evident mission of this campaign. But now there was another filtering into place within his thoughts. These Macht; they could not remain within the bounds of the Empire. They, too, must be utterly destroyed. This legend must be brought to heel here in the mud of the Middle Empire.
The Great King’s levies, drawn by a skein of frantic couriers, drew together on the sloping ground east of the city of Kaik. Here, the land rose out of the floodplain of the Bekai River and crested into a series of low heights that might once have been the foundations of ancient cities, but which now had disappeared utterly and were mere shapeless mounds. The heights had a name though; locally they were known as the Kunaksa, the Goat’s Hills, and goats had indeed grazed there in happier times. Now they provided dry footing for the Great King’s battle line, and a vantage point from where the whole expanse of the plain could be made out right back to the river itself. Below, in the sodden ground of the farmlands, the traitor’s army had finished deploying and now occupied a solid front of some six pasangs. The Macht out on the right made a line of shields just over a pasang and a half long, and curled round their open flank was an amorphous crowd of light infantry, skirmishers with spears and javelins and no armour to speak of. The traitor Arkamenes had set a renegade Juthan legion on the Macht left. There were his personal troops, his Honai, and behind that a mounted Bodyguard of perhaps a thousand heavy cavalry. Further left, there were the levies from Artaka, the Tanis garrison, and more Juthan troops. Between forty and fifty thousand all told. On this wide plain their formations were as perfect as could be imagined. He was short on cavalry and archers, but had a solid wall of heavy infantry to fight with. If their morale held, that line would take a lot to stop.