The Ten Thousand

by Paul Kearney

  In songs and stories, the lines met with a great clash and roar. Sometimes this was true. But in the dark of that rain-swept night on the hills of Kunaksa, the Macht and the Great King’s Honai melted together in a wicked hedge of spearpoints lit up by the kicked sparks of dying campfires, a cataclysm introduced at walking pace—blind, savage, and bloodier than any legend.

  Rictus was in the front rank. The initial contact was a glimpse of pale gold, and then a massive impact of some great creature’s shield upon his own. He felt the breath of the thing on his eyes as they were pinned there, breast to breast, by the weight of the ranks behind them both. He stabbed out with his spear, as did his opponent, but they could not stab at each other. They were held there in a vice of flesh and blood, this thing a foot taller than him, its thighs moving against his own in a strangely intimate struggle through the muck underfoot. He butted the thing in the windpipe with his crested helm, and its weight gave a little. Immediately, the press of the men behind sent him forward. His opponent slid downwards. There was the smell of blood, the scrape of bronze, and the thing was at his waist, his knees, and then under his feet. He stamped down on it with his bare heel, one strike encountering the hard jar of bronze, the second snapping something of flesh. Then he was propelled along again, and he knew that the sauroters of those behind him would take care of it. Another face, another form, impossibly tall, with the same eyes. The panic to be fought, until he locked down the fact that the aichmes of those behind him were at work. One of the great eyes went dark, and again, the thing slid down, clunked earthwards to be kicked and stabbed in the ankle-deep muck, the flesh robbed of the spirit, the advance continuing. Those in the rear ranks were still singing the Paean, a hoarse, dry-throated rasp of defiance. Rictus smashed his shield forward into the line, aware now of the light indomitability of the cuirass he wore, the different balance of the transverse-crested helm. I lead these men, he thought calmly. They look to me—to this black armour, this crest.

  I must be better than this, he thought.

  And so he used his gangling strength to butt forward into the enemy line, his feet sinking deep into the mud, the foreign silt splaying his toes as they took the weight. He pushed his way into the Honai ranks with no skill or courage, merely a black determination to see the thing done. And before him, the Honai were shoved backwards, lowering their shields as their balance went—and into that gap the aichmes of the Macht stabbed pale and dark, silver and bloody, and a gap was opened out, and the shield-wall of the Honai was ruptured.

  Vorus felt the balance of the thing shift, even in the dark, even in the epicentre of that great, flailing cauldron of violence. The lines of Kefren spearmen before him seemed to shudder, like a horse twitching off a fly. And then there was a sullen, agonising falling back. It scarcely seemed possible that the tall Kefren of the Honai could be physically pushed back by the Macht, but this was happening. They were not retreating; they were being killed up at the front of the line faster than they could be replaced, and they were being physically shoved backwards.

  They will break, Vorus realised. He was not entirely, intellectually surprised, but he was still shocked. After all these years in the east, he had thought the Honai of the Great King unbeatable. He had forgotten too much about his own heritage.

  The line broke. Not the wholesale rout of the day before, but a bitter, sullen retreat. It was like watching a flock of starlings, at one moment so black and dense as to fill the sky, the next, a scattered shifting cloud opening up into something else. The Honai did not turn their backs on the enemy, but fell back step by step, and as they retreated so their formation was scrambled. No longer a battle line, it was fast becoming a mere dense crowd of individuals.

  Vorus reached up and took Midarnes by the upper arm. “Withdraw. Pull back your companies and reform.”

  Midarnes looked down at him, and actually smiled. “Never.” Then he raised his voice and shouted in the Kefren of the Court. “To me! Rally to me!” He raised his spear and smote it upon the brazen face of his shield. Around him, the Honai began to coalesce in a formless crowd. Further away, the Macht were still pushing them back, wedges of their troops battering through the ranks and stepping over the dead. And all this in a darkness lit only by the hellish glow of a few neglected campfires, and the rain silvering down to hiss in meeting with the sparks flying up, as though fire and water were at war also.

  Jason stepped out of the front rank. There was a gap opening up before his men, a space. He held his spear up horizontal above his head and shouted until he thought the veins in his throat would burst. “Hold! Hold here!” He jogged up the line. The Kefren were streaming backwards, beaten for the moment, and the front ranks of the Macht stood on hummocked mounds of their dead.

  A transverse crest. He grabbed the man’s shoulder. Who was it? It did not matter. “Wheel left—pass it on. All morai to wheel left starting with Mynon on the extreme right. Pass it down the line!”

  The minutes passed. He looked up at the sky, but saw only blank darkness, felt the rain on his eyes and licked it off his lips, his mouth and throat heaving-dry. He had gone past exhaustion. He must stay upright now, keep moving. If he stopped or so much as laid down his shield, he would never be able to lift it again.

  At last the movement, and the Paean out on the right, a thousand tortured voices. Thank the goddess the line was short, five morai long, six hundred paces. And behind it, what was left of the wounded, and the rear companies. The Macht were in an immense square, ragged, incomplete, but compact. Cohesion, Jason thought, that’s the thing. Mynon will keep the right-hand lines together. Phobos, we’re too slow!

  The Macht line wheeled westwards, pivoting on Buridan’s mora. The movement was ragged, hesitant, performed by exhausted men in the dark, but they kept shoulder to shoulder with one another, the formations drawing together and gaining cohesion from the human contact of those to each side, those in front, those behind. The men in the front rank had the hardest task. Jason was able to watch them by the stuttered illumination of a few still-burning fires. They looked like ghosts walking past the flames, men already dead and in the hell of all lost souls. The Macht did not have a god of war; they had Antimone to watch over them instead. For though they gloried in combat, they knew the price it exacted. A true man did not need help from the gods to kill—that was in him from birth—in all of them. He needed their help to face what came afterwards. He needed the pity and compassion of the Veiled Goddess. And she was here tonight, Jason was sure. If he shut his eyes he thought he might even be able to hear the beat of her black wings.

  Further to the right, the Macht morai struck those Honai who were struggling to reform about Midarnes. There was a bitter fight and the front ranks of Mochran’s mora were actually driven in, but then the centons to right and left piled into the Honai flanks, leaving the line to lunge forward. The Honai broke, a small knot of them fighting to the end about their standard, the rest driven beyond their capacity to endure and in danger of being cut off. They threw away their shields and ran down the hillside. Midarnes disappeared under a pile of bodies, and on the Kunaksa ridge, the Macht dressed their lines yet again and continued the advance. None of them were singing now. Their tongues had swollen in their mouths. They were things of unsparing sinew and bone, barely able to conjecture an end to the night or the possibility of rest.

  There was one new thing about their travail though: for the first time since the battle had begun, they were marching downhill, towards the river. This realisation gave them some heart. They stepped out, centurions forward of the main line. The ridge-crest was theirs, and they looked down on the fire-dotted plain that led to the Bekai River, now some ten pasangs away. They fixed their minds on that thought, the possibility of water, of something like sanctuary, and they marched on.

  Many thousands of Kefren and Juthan troops were now in flight across the Bekai plain, but most had fled eastwards, towards the Magron Mountains and their own baggage camps pasangs behind the Kunaksa Hills. It
was in this direction that Vorus had gone, striving in vain to rally the second-line Kefren units. In the dark, it was impossible. They would run now until they thought pursuit had stopped, until their own tents brought them to a halt. The Macht army had completely routed the main body of the Great King’s forces, and had all but annihilated his Household troops, the best there was. There was nothing left for it but to wait for the panic to subside and then begin picking up the pieces. As Vorus kicked his tired horse into a lumbering canter, he pulled a fold of his cloak about his head and wore it like a scarlet komis. In the midst of that great, maddened, frantic crowd of armed Kufr, it was not good to have a Macht face.

  But where was Ashurnan? That question brought cold sweat to his spine. The Great King had decided to rest for a few hours in the enemy’s captured baggage camp. It lay now square in the path of the Macht advance. Vorus reined in. It was no good; there was no one to send who would get through alive.

  He spun the horse on its haunches and took off back the way he had come. Someone has to get through, he thought. And who better to try than one of the Macht?

  Behind him, the paling sky in the east broke open pink and bloody with the day’s dawn, the Magron Mountains standing like black titans on the edge of the world. A wind from the west picked up and began to shunt aside the heavy cloud of the night. In the gathering light the Macht army marched stumbling down off the bloody, muck-churned heights of the Kunaksa and began to plash wearily through the wet lowland below. Before them the stragglers of the Kefren army scattered like quail before a fox, no longer a coherent whole, but a beaten remnant. Some ran for the Bekai bridges, some scattered to north and south, parallel to the river-line. From the tented square of the Macht camp, they flooded out like cockroaches from under an upturned stone, abandoning their loot, their women, their arms. From a distance the Macht formation looked as disciplined and indomitable as it had the day before, going up the hill. It came down from the heights in silence, no voice left able to raise the Paean. At a distance it was impossible to see the staggering weariness of the spearmen, the broken shafts of their weapons held up for want of anything better, the crowds of wounded being dragged along in the middle of the morai, rags stuffed in their mouths to stop their screams. They had taken thirteen and a half thousand men up the hill the morning before, and now some ten thousand were marching back down. Many of those would not see another morning.

  Ashurnan watched them come, sat on his tired horse to the south of the camp. About him a motley crowd of aides, bodyguards, and sundry officers had gathered, all mounted, all shattered by the sight of the advancing phalanx, the disappearance of their own mighty army. It did not seem real. The half-light of the gathering dawn made it into some nightmare from which they must try and waken.

  Ashurnan leaned in the saddle and grasped old Xarnes’s arm. The elderly Chamberlain had begun to slide from the back of his horse.

  “My lord, you should not—”

  “And let you fall? I think not, Xarnes.” Ashurnan smiled, but his face was empty as that of a glass-bound fish. He looked at his feet, at his brother’s mud-spattered slippers, then up again at the advancing army.

  “All the gods in their heavens, what incredible creatures these are,” he said, shaking his head in genuine wonder.

  “My King,” one of the bodyguards said. “We should—”

  “I know, Merach. I see them too. Watch them march! Our legends did not lie, did they?” His face tightened. “Someone else to join us, I see, some other lost soul.”

  It was Vorus, on a blown, shattered horse. He dropped his cloak from his face and held up a hand. “My lord—”

  “Is Midarnes dead?”

  Vorus could only nod.

  “I knew he would not run, not Midarnes. He was my father’s friend also.” Suddenly the Great King looked away, pulled his komis up over his eyes and choked down a sob. They sat there on their horses, appalled and afraid and understanding as he bit down on his grief, knuckles white on his reins, and before them the Macht marched on, scarcely half a pasang away now.

  He collected himself, the tears shining on his face, his violet eyes still glittering. “General Vorus, I rejoice to see you alive. What do you suggest?”

  Vorus’s tired horse was moving restlessly below him now, for it had picked up the vibration beneath its feet, the tramp of the approaching army.

  “We flee, my lord,” Vorus said. “We flee, and we pick another time, another place, to finish what was begun here.”

  “Your brother is dead, my King,” old Xarnes added. “This Empire stands. The Macht are a problem for another day, as the general says. But you, you must not come to harm. Your place is no longer here.”

  Ashurnan’s mouth twisted. He looked at the oncoming Macht spearmen. Now he was close enough to see the stumbling weariness of their stride, the blood that soaked them, the broken spears and dinted shields. These were not a legend; they were men at the end of their strength. They were not invincible.

  “Let us go,” he said. “Merach, lead on. Take us back to camp. We leave this field to the Macht.”

  The girl was bound naked to a wagon-wheel. At first he thought her dead, but when he took her by the hair and raised up her head, he saw the eyelids flutter. She was Kufr, one of the shorter ones. What were they called?

  Gasca reached for his knife. Once, his father’s best hound had been gored by a stag, its entrails spread far and wide. He had done then what he would do now, not out of anger or vindictiveness, but out of pity. He set the knife at the Kufr girl’s throat, thinking how much a pity it was, for she did not look so inhuman at all. He sighed heavily. The knife was blunt.

  “Stop there!” This was Jason of Ferai, doffing his helm and striding forward. He set down his shield. “Lower the blade, son. Lift up her face again.”

  Dumbly, Gasca did as he was told, cursing the fact that he had stopped at all. The mora had retaken the camp and lost all order in its search of the remaining tents and wagons. Water, they were after, more than anything, but there was none to be found. The centurions had set them to loading up the wagons with the centoi instead, and as there were no draught animals left alive in the camp it would seem they were to draw these across the river with the yokes on their own necks. Had it not been for the semi-sacred regard the mercenaries held the great cooking cauldrons in, there might have been trouble, a last straw to break the back of their discipline; but for the most part, it had held. The camp was a gutted wreck and there was nothing else in it to ease their passage, but even the most bloody-minded of the Macht would be glad to have those damn pots back.

  And this girl... Gasca looked at Jason curiously.

  “I believe I know this one,” Jason said. He knelt before the girl and moved her face this way and that, as though studying a sculpture. “Phobos, what have they done?” he whispered, taking in her abused form. Anger lit his eyes. He unstrapped his cloak from the back-belt and threw it down. “Who is it—Gasca? Cut her free, wrap her in that, and bring her with us. Keep her alive, Gasca.”

  Gasca set his jaw. “General—”

  “Don’t fucking argue with me, strawhead. And don’t try fucking her, either.” At the expression on Gasca’s face he laughed, and thumped the wing of the younger man’s cuirass. “All right then. Just humour me—bring her along. She may be useful. Where’s your friend Rictus?”

  Gasca was sawing methodically at the ropes binding the Kufr to the wheel-rim. “Haven’t seen him since he stuck on that black armour. He could be dead, for all I know.”

  “That one? Never. He’ll see old bones. You know why? Because he doesn’t care if he will or not. Look after her, Gasca!” Jason rose, collected his shield with an audible groan, and then was off shouting at a group of spearmen who had dropped their weapons to rifle through some sacks.

  Rictus stood at the Bekai Bridge with his shield leaning against his knees and his forehead leaning against his spear-shaft. He thought that if the spear slipped, there would be nothing in the world
that would keep him on his feet. He would topple down the steep bank, through the mizzling clouds of mosquitoes, and into the brown water. He would drink that water, no matter if every Kufr ever born had pissed in it, and he would die bloated and happy.

  His head jerked up, and a spike of pain transfixed his skull as the helm came with it. Another man’s helm, not set to the bones of his own face. The pain woke him from the half-doze. He stamped his bare feet and looked down on the endless column of men crossing the bridge before him and half a pasang away, the same on the other bridge. They were crossing the river again, back the way they had come only some—what—three days ago? It seemed like a month.

  Jason found him there, nodding in and out of a kind of sleep.

  “Bastards took my scroll, all my gear,” he said. “You’re still this side of the Veil I see.”

  “Still this side,” Rictus said thickly, his tongue rasping against his teeth like meat rolled in sand.

  “We take the men into Kaik, and we get whatever we can out of the city. But we can’t stay there long. The Empire did not disappear in the night. Rictus, I will need you for light work again.”

  Rictus stared at him, bloodshot eyes crusted within the T-slot of the helm. “Why?”

  “We will need light troops, more than ever now, and you’re half-good at leading them.”

  Rictus said nothing. Talking was too painful. All he could think of was water.

  “Join your mora—get into the city. I’ll stand over the rearguard.”

  But Rictus did not move. “What do we do now, Jason?” he asked. “Do we look for another employer, set up shop in some city?”

  “We’ll talk later,” Jason said. His hazel-green eyes caught the light as he looked back eastwards to the dark heights of the Kunaksa. How many bodies left there? In a few days the place would be fetid. Then he looked west, to the unending plains and farmlands of Pleninash. They seemed to go on for ever, flat and lush, with man-made tells pimpling up out of the heat-haze, each one a city. This teeming world, this alien place, and here he and these half-dead men were lost in it.