The Ten Thousand

by Paul Kearney

  A gap opened up between the fleeing Kufr and the remorseless, ordered ranks of the Macht. The order to halt was ferried down the line by men whose throats could barely sustain speech. And the phalanx halted, the men breathing hard, many bending to vomit. Up through the opening files came light-armed skirmishers with skins of water hanging from their shoulders. These were passed up and down the line. Gasca managed a few swallows before passing it on, and closed his eyes as the stale, warm liquid set his tongue to moving in his mouth again.

  Now the centurions left the ranks and came to the fore. Jason was up front with them, gesticulating, his black armour all ashine with blood, half his helm-crest hacked away. The Kufr left wing was a mob of retreating figures running downhill in their thousands, cavalry mixed in with infantry, officers beating their men with the flat of their swords. The ground they left behind them was littered with cast away shields and weaponry, and straggling wounded by the hundred were dragging themselves at their rear, limping on spear-shafts or crawling on hands and knees, crying out to their fellows not to leave them behind. A few centons of Macht skirmishers went chasing after them, hurling javelins into their spines or finishing off the wounded where they crawled and screamed on the ground. A centurion called them back, cursing them for ill-disciplined fools, and they came trotting up the slope again shame-faced and with arms bloody to the elbows. A few had severed heads hanging from their belts. Gasca wondered where Rictus was, and if he had been anywhere near the meat of the fighting. He would have a story to tell him tonight, by Antimone’s Veil.

  A trembling took him, and he had to clench his teeth tight against the sob which ballooned in his chest. A whimper made it out his mouth, and another. He disguised it with a fit of coughing, but then felt a thump on the back of his cuirass. Old Demotes, his white beard dyed rust-red as it trailed out the bottom of his helm. “It’s all right, lad. It’s the Goddess. She must have her say. Let her out, and you’ll be better off.”

  “Back in line—back in line you fuckers!” someone was shouting. It was Orsos, running up and down the relaxed ranks with his helm off and his spear resting on his shoulder. His shaven head gleamed white with sweat in the sunlight and there was spittle flying from his mouth. “Jason! Jason—we’ve cavalry coming up on our right and rear, maybe ten morai of them. Wheel your men about to the right. We’re taking the rest into the Kufr centre. Do you hear me, Jason?”

  * * *

  The cavalry came on in a wave, tall horses bearing shrieking Kufr with luminous eyes and billowing, multi-coloured robes. They had scimitars, javelins, and a few stabbing spears. Their line extended two pasangs to left and right. Had the ground been firmer, they would have made it into a gallop, so frenziedly were the riders beating their wild-eyed and snorting mounts. But here the earth had been churned into a mire by the infantry battle, and the hillside was strewn with dead and dying of both sides and bristling with spent arrows, like the hair on a man’s forearm when the cold hits it. So they advanced at a fast trot, some horses tripping up and toppling even at that. There were thousands—Rictus had not believed there could be so many of the beasts in the world. The ground shook under their hooves, and the blood rippled in its muddy craters.

  They rode down their own wounded. At a hundred paces the skirmishers threw their first volley of javelins. There were perhaps three morai of light troops out here on the Macht right, and for the moment they were entirely unsupported. The heavy troops were at the top of the hill with their backs to the cavalry.

  A second volley. Fifty paces. There would not be time for a third. “Spears!” Rictus shouted. “Close up, close up!”

  They had not been drilled for this, unlike their heavier brethren. They did not come together in a solid line, but in clumps and knots of men and boys, pelta shields on their left arms, single-headed spears thrusting out on the right. Rictus felt a moment of pure, almost incapacitating terror. He had never been charged by cavalry before; none of them had.

  The big horses struck home. Some, confined by their fellows on right and left, charged straight into the spears. Most streamed to left or right of the broken, scattered line, their riders hacking at the heads of the skirmishers as they passed by. Rictus and his comrades were islands in a raging sea of horseflesh and hacking steel. They stabbed out at the bellies of the animals and in moments had a bank of the injured beasts thrashing around them, riders pinned beneath their carcasses or finished off before they could rise out of the mud. But more and more cavalry kept streaming past, turning and coming back again, hooves hammering the ground into a bloody morass, bogging themselves down. There was no fluidity to the fight; the cavalry did not charge and counter-charge. They slogged through the light troops of the Macht in bursts of pure mass and muscle, and bore down the defenders by numbers and bulk.

  Rictus’s half-centon was now facing out on all directions, surrounded. In their midst a dozen dead and dying horses made a sort of bulwark. Thrusting his spear at a passing rider, Rictus leaned his foot on the equine carcass before him and felt the warmth and heartbeat of the animal as it lay dying in the bloody mud, not comprehending why it should have to endure the agony of such an end. He killed it with a spear-thrust to the brain, unable to listen to its screaming gurgles. When the Kufr went down they screamed no less piteously, but that afforded his conscience no trouble at all.

  The sun climbed higher on that endless morning. It topped the hills upon which the Great King’s armies now struggled and came bursting over the battle, setting alight a million tiny shards of reflected light, caught on helmets, spearpoints, and sword-blades, on the sweat of men’s flesh and in the madness of their eyes. The Kufr cavalry fought in a cloud of their mounts’ steam and the sun caught it and made wands and bars of restless light that speared through the carnage in a bitter kind of beauty. The Arakosan horsemen had been brought to a bloody halt by the amorphous ranks of the Macht skirmishers, and now some eight or nine thousand soldiers were embroiled in a charnel-house of blood and muck and animals screaming out on the Kefren left wing. For perhaps two square pasangs the tortured, sucking ooze that was the earth could not be seen below the maddened press of men and animals contending there. All thoughts of higher tactics were lost as the base struggle went on. But though the skirmishers were being steadily destroyed, they had protected the flank of the heavy infantry. The Macht spearmen were wheeling left on the crest of the hill, by morai, and were now advancing once more, their ranks thinner now, but as ordered as they had been at the beginning of the day. Before them, the Kefren centre was pulling back, threatened now by the Ten Thousand to the south and the advancing Juthan Legion to the west. The Kefren right wing was being hurled forward, courier after courier urging the Great King’s generals there to advance at the double, to support the King’s position on the right. A line of troops four pasangs long thus began to wheel inwards to try and catch the echeloned regiments of Arkamenes’s army before they could close the pincers of their formations. More cavalry led the way, this time the heavy lancers of the Asurian heartland with their blue and gold enamelled armour. These burst forward out of the Kefren line with all the dash and brilliance of a kingfisher’s strike, and began thundering down the slope towards the contingents from Tanis and Istar below, five thousand strong, fresh and unblooded.

  “We should move back,” Vorus said to Ashurnan. He had taken off his helm the better to dictate to the battle-scribes and now his gaze swivelled back and forth between the advancing Macht on their left and the Juthan legion to their front. The Kefren left wing had been beaten up so badly it was beyond rallying; the plain behind the hill was black with fugitives for two pasangs, thousands of troops throwing down their weapons and their honour in a bid to escape the Macht killing-machine. What had once been their centre was now a flank. Forty thousand men, blown away like dead leaves in autumn. He would not have believed it had he not witnessed it with his own eyes.

  “We should perhaps have hired some of these fellows ourselves,” Ashurnan said. There was a smile on h
is face, and though fear had paled the gold of his shining skin, the humour in his tone was genuine. “No matter. We shall just have to do the thing with what remains.”

  “My lord, you must pull further back from the front line,” Vorus grated.

  “Look down there, General, to the right of their Juthan troops. You see the horsetail standard? That is my brother. I have a hankering to meet with him. It has been a long time since we looked into one another’s eyes.”

  The Macht had started up the Paean again, and their line was lengthening as mora after mora came up to right and left. Their discipline was incredible. Just over a pasang separated the spearheads of their front rank from the Great King’s chariot.

  “Bring me my horse,” Ashurnan said. He was not watching the Macht, but the horsetail standard that bobbed above the press of advancing men on the slopes below. “Vorus, I want you to hold on here. Retreat if you must, but slow your countrymen down. Buy me time.”

  For what? Vorus wondered, thoroughly alarmed now. The Great King had climbed out of his chariot and was mounting a tall Niseian. An aide brought him his cedar-wood lance. Prancing with impatience around them were the great horses of his bodyguard cavalry, and in their midst the standard-bearer with the winged symbol of the Asurian kings upon a twelve-foot staff.

  “I go to greet my brother,” Ashurnan said; he smiled again as he said it. His father’s smile. The protests died in Vorus’s throat.

  He bowed. “I will hold them, my lord, or I will die trying.”

  Ashurnan leaned in the saddle and grasped Vorus’s shoulder. “Do not die. I have too few friends already.” Then he straightened, raised his hand, and around him the great mass of cavalry, a thousand at least, began to move, the Kefren nobility following their king down the hillside and into the maw of war.

  The battle lines had veered round. Both the rebel right and the Great King’s right were advancing, as though following agreed-upon steps in some cataclysmic dance. Arkamenes’s centre was now almost upon the Royal line at the crest of the hill. The Great King led his thousand-strong bodyguard of heavy cavalry straight into this, the roar of that meeting coming even to the Macht spearmen two pasangs to the south. The rebel advance halted, recoiling from the impact of these, the finest cavalry of the Empire, whilst another three pasangs to the north the Asurian cavalry had also made contact with the rebel left. The entire field was now a milling scrum of troops, and where the fighting was heaviest the earth beneath their feet was tormented into a calf-deep morass of sucking mud in which the wounded were trampled and suffocated beneath the feet of those still fighting.

  Young Morian had fallen; his neck hacked half-through by a shrieking Kufr horseman. Beside his corpse, Rictus had taken the second blow on his pelta, and the keen blade had sheared off half of it even as he raised his own spear and took his attacker in the armpit, above the leather corselet. The Kufr tilted and slid down the side of his horse, the animal maddened with rage and fear. It reared up and Rictus stabbed it in the belly, a twisted rope of intestine springing out of the hole the aichme made. Then the poor beast lurched away, hooves caught up in its own entrails as it strove to run from the agony, trailing its dying master by one hopelessly entangled stirrup. It careered into two other riders, their mounts already hock deep in the bloody mud. Rictus discarded his shattered shield, staggered forward, and jabbed his spear at these two in turn. He caught one in the thigh, the other about the groin. They shrieked with a sound not remotely human, their eyes bright as some gems dug out of the mountains. Rictus let the flesh-stuck spear go as their horses staggered and tilted and fought the mud. On his hands and knees he crawled over carcasses and through the bloody mire to regain what was left of his centon. Whistler left the ragged ranks to pull him back in, over a rampart of horseflesh. There were spears and shields aplenty about it in the hands of the dead and so Rictus re-armed himself for the third time that morning, his palms sticking to the spear-shaft, some other man’s blood the glue. He looked at Whistler; the older man’s bald head was a cap of blood, his scalp hanging down one ear. But he managed a gap-toothed grin all the same. There was no need to speak.

  At the start of the morning this had been a bare and smooth slope of scrub-peppered earth, wide and open enough to have run footraces upon.

  Now the work of war had transformed it into a swamp within which the corpses piled up in banks and outcrops of carrion like soft, rotting boulder-fields. It was no longer ground for cavalry, but the Arakosans were slogging it out to the end, their horses almost immobilised under them. What bastard brings a horse to war? Rictus wondered, outraged to the brim of his exhausted mind, shattered by the slaughterous waste, the stunning profligacy of the enemy.

  Nevertheless, the Macht had been beaten here. Of the three thousand skirmishers who had held this slope at the start of the morning, there might be a thousand left who were still standing weapon in hand. And these would soon follow their fallen friends into the mud. They knew this, but they fought on because they also knew that behind them, up on the hill, the line of their heavy kindred had its back to them. Should the enemy break through their ranks there would be a slaughter on the hillcrest which would make this one seem trivial by comparison.

  So the skirmishers, who had not been trained or created for this task, stood their ground. Because they were Macht, and it was what they had been ordered to do.

  For Arkamenes the morning had been a marvel of sensation, the ultimate spectacle. Not even the most jaded libertine could fail to have his senses aroused by this, the grandest kind of theatre. I say go, he thought, and they go. They die in thousands, the lines move, the thing is done. I have said it shall be so, and so it becomes.

  He had never been so happy in his life.

  He had seen the Macht march up the hill and had watched them annihilate the Great King’s left wing, an army in itself. The cavalry which had ambushed the Macht had been fought to a standstill by their camp-servants. He could see that struggle still going on, a dark stain on the land some three pasangs to the south. He could also see the Macht battle line reforming on the hilltop. Soon they would advance and take on the Great King’s centre. When that happened he would lead his personal bodyguard up the hill to complete the victory, to be in at the kill.

  It was hot, now that the sun had climbed. He could feel the heat of it even through the fine linen of his komis, and the jewelled breastplates of his bodyguard were too bright to look upon. He held out his hand, and a Kefren attendant placed within it a cool goblet of spring-water.

  The water was never drunk. Halfway to his lips, the goblet stopped, and hung there in the air, his fingers suddenly cold about it. There it was, the Great King’s standard, the holy symbol of Asuria. And it was coming down the hill towards him in the midst of a great cloud of fast-moving cavalry.

  The goblet spun through the air and the tall Niseian half-reared under Arkamenes, catching its master’s shock. He wrestled and beat the animal to quiet, staring. It could not be.

  The enemy cavalry took a loop out to the north a few hundred paces, to avoid striking the ranks of the Juthan Legion now making its dogged way up the hillside. They wheeled back in like fish in shoal, not in ordered ranks, but a crowd of superb horsemen following their leader—and that leader was out in front now with a bright scimitar raised up to catch the flash of the sunlight.

  Arkamenes drew his own sword and waved it forwards. “Go, go go!” he cried to the Kefren horsemen about him, his mind reaching for words but not finding them in its tumult.

  The enemy cavalry struck his own at a gallop, a thunderous crash of flesh and metal; suddenly the war came near and to be smelled and felt and feared. Back, the stationary ranks of the rebel horse were crushed by the impact, some bowled over in the first onset, others smashed onto their haunches, riders pinned in the melee, legs broken between the ribs of the maddened animals. From these platforms of plunging flesh their masters hacked at each other with bright swords or stabbed overhand with their lances, the points and blade
s clashing amid flurries of sparks. Asurian steel struck Asurian steel, Kefren killing Kefren, and the momentum of the enemy charge was still felt through the horseflesh and the confusion, the King’s standard rearing up like a raptor above the killing.

  Ashurnan’s bodyguard were the finest warriors of their race, mounted on the mightiest warhorses the Empire could breed. And they had momentum on their side. The Great King fought his way forward, and those who died under his blade saw that there was a kind of gladness on his face, a recklessness. He did not expect to live long, and so meant to live well for what remained of this life to be measured in moments, the mere drips of an almost empty waterclock. His followers had caught his mind and were with him in the moment, wholly reconciled. Even Arkamenes, watching, thought there was a kind of beauty about it. And for one broken second, he found himself loving the brother he had known as a boy, who had been his conscience and his ally. That familiar face, transfigured so as to be a boy’s again.

  The second passed, and there was only the murderous insane violence of the present and the task in hand, something to grasp through the fog of fear and confusion. Arkamenes’s bodyguard had been pressed back in a mass by the concussion of the King’s charge, and now there was nowhere to go. Even if a man were able to dismount in that milling crush he would be trampled underfoot within seconds.