by Paul Kearney
“We beat those bastards. We beat them fair and square,” Rictus said, and it was as if the younger man had caught the current of his thought.
“If we beat them once, we can do it again.”
EIGHTEEN
THE LAND OF THE RIVERS
Tiryn opened her eyes on a brown, heavily-beamed ceiling. A gecko was sidling across it, head turning this way and that every time it paused. A faint roaring came on the air, the sound of many voices, but at a distance. It was quiet. She lay in a decent bed, with sheets and a coverlet of linen, and there was light flooding in a west-facing balcony, drapes drawn back and shutters wide open. Dust danced in the sunlight, motes of it hanging in the air. The heat of the lowlands filled the room and she was thirsty, above all else, thirsty.
She made as if to rise, but the racking pains in her shoulders and arms caused her to lie back again. At once, there was movement on the far side of the room. A Juthan girl came forward, yellow eyes gleaming as she passed from shadow into light. She dipped a gourd into a clay pot hanging in one corner, and cradling Tiryn’s head said, “Drink. Slowly now.” She spoke Asurian with the guttural accent of the Juthan, but her hands were gentle. Tiryn sipped the water slowly, relishing every drop, her mouth suddenly a thing of movement again.
“Where am I?”
“You are in Kaik, the city,” a strange voice said with an even stranger accent, the words clumsy and ill-used. A man approached the bed, a Macht. He was dark of skin, hazel-eyed, and he wore the felt tunic of a hufsan peasant.
“Do not be afraid. I saw you once, before.”
Before. Before what? She dimly remembered being carried or dragged in a huge moving crowd. Before that, the wagon-wheel; before that, the knowledge of defeat.
“You are safe here,” he said. A flicker of something passed on his face. “You are safe,” he repeated.
“Arkamenes is dead,” she said. She switched into the Macht tongue she had learned for months on the long road east. “What has happened? What is to happen?”
At that, the Macht smiled. He had a good face, though it was worn to the bone by privation and worry. “I don’t know,” he said in his own tongue.
“Why am I here?”
“Would you rather we had left you where we found you?”
She felt heat in her skin, a blush mounting up her face. She was naked under the bedclothes, her body clean but bruised and aching. Dressings had been tied in neat, tiny knots about her wrists where the ropes had galled her. All of that came back to her now, that long night, that black obscenity. She shut her eyes and tears welled under them. “Better you had left me,” she said.
He came closer. She felt his hand in her hair, a light touch, with nothing but pity behind it. She turned her head away.
“This Juthan will look after you,” he said, his voice gruff now, the anger back in it. But it was not directed at her. “You need rest. Do not worry about things. Do not think or remember. Drink the water, eat, and enjoy the sunlight.”
She looked at him again, baffled by the compassion in his voice. He smiled at her, eyes dancing. In better times he would have humour about him, a lightness. Now there was a shadow.
“Who are you?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Jason of Ferai, once centurion of the Dogsheads centon, now a general of the Macht that remain. You are...”
“Tiryn.”
“That was it. You told me once.”
“A long time ago.”
“Not so long. It seems long, sometimes. Last week seems a long time ago to me.” He smiled again. There were indents of purple flesh below his eyes. He looked like a man who had forgotten how to sleep.
“Why did you help me? I am Kufr; you are Macht.”
Again the anger. The tiredness sparked it out of him, she felt that quickness, that flare. She liked it.
“I would not have left a dog like that.” Her heart fell. He rubbed one big-knuckled hand over his face, and chuckled, rueful. “Or a beautiful Kufr.” Then he sat on the side of her bed. The sudden closeness of him startled her, that smell they had, the Macht. It was not like that of a Kufr; it was earthier, both repulsive and oddly interesting. Not quite that of an animal, for all she had thought in the past.
“I need you to teach me your language,” Jason said simply. “We are lost in your world now and must learn your tongue in order to make our way through it.”
Some strange little hope within her withered. But she nodded slightly. She wanted him to move away; he was too close. The memories were fighting round the corner. Soon they would be back in full flood.
He sensed it somehow and rose at once, backing away a step. “You’re alive,” he said quietly. “Many thousands died on those hills, but you are still here. Thank Antimone for that, at least.”
“Who?” she asked thickly, throat closing, eyes burning.
“Our goddess, the guardian of the Macht. She is the goddess of pity. Her tears salt every battlefield. She watches over every crime.”
“A goddess? I was told you worshipped a monster with black wings.”
Jason nodded. “She is that too. Sleep now, Tiryn. There are ten thousand of us guarding your bed.” He turned away, his bare feet padding lightly on the warm stone of the floor as he left.
Strange to say, it was an actual comfort to Tiryn, that thought. She could sleep now. These ten thousand who had been to her little more than animals, let them be her guardians. Her own race had forfeited all loyalty.
The Kerusia met in the Governor’s house near the summit of Kaik’s hill. It was a tall-ceilinged structure of fired brick, massive black beams of river palm and cedar supporting the roof, and high windows letting in a little of the humid air to move lazily above their heads. They gathered round the long table where the Kufr Governor had been wont to entertain, and by each man there was an earthenware jug of lukewarm water from which he sipped almost continuously, without thinking, the parched flesh of his body soaking it up without pause or distraction.
Jason was too tired to stand, too tired almost to register the names of those present. He knew their faces, and those faces were marked in his mind with ink-stabs of impression.
Rictus, perhaps the best of them all, though Jason would never have told that Iscan straw-head such to his face. Jason had seen greatness before now, on a small scale perhaps, but he could smell it out. This overgrown boy had it. Except he was nothing like a boy any more. Kunaksa had burnt out what remained of his innocence.
Old Buridan, grey in the russet glory of his beard, a friend from what seemed a past life. Mynon, extremely capable, the best intriguer of the lot, perhaps the brightest of them all, and utterly untrustworthy anywhere but on a battlefield, for all his smiles.
A clutch of half-known faces. Phinero, very like his dead brother, a hound with good teeth and little brain. Mochran, a dogged old campaigner, one of the few remaining old crew who had been centon-leaders time out of mind. His shaggy head was devoid of imagination, but he would hold to the letter of an order until he bled white.
Aristos, a younger pup well pleased with his elevation. His uncle, Argus, had indulged him too much, put him forward for Second despite arrogance and ineptitude. He had been told to hold the bridges, but had left his men behind to do it while he sat here, ready to kick off this new Kerusia. A rod for my back, Jason thought with an inward sigh.
Four others: Dinon, Hephr, Grast and Gominos. Just names and worn young faces. Jason knew nothing of them. At the moment his body craved sleep, and his thoughts were still dwelling on the face of the Kufr woman he had lately vis ited.
They were talking, half of them at once, mostly the younger ones. Buridan and Mynon and Mochran watched them with a kind of detached wariness. Rictus looked out of a window at the pitiless blue of the sky. It was hot, so hot it got a man to shouting in an instant, weather for argument and lovemaking.
Again, the Kufr girl’s pale face, those dark eyes.
Jason thumped the long table, not hard, but enough to rattle th
e jugs, to shut them up. He pinched his eyes as though squeezing water out of them; they stung like lemon-juice under his fingers.
“Mynon,” he said into the sudden quiet. “Talk to me. And I swear by Antimone’s cunt, that if any one of you interrupts him, I shall kick you up and down this room.”
Mynon smiled a little. His one brow rose up his forehead, the red skin peeling above it, his black eyes sunken in lines of weariness. Still, he held onto that sneering jauntiness which was his trademark. He produced a slate and a knob of chalk and looked the table up and down.
“We have the paychests; the Kufr ran before us too quickly to take them along. But a man cannot eat gold. And for that reason, we cannot stay here.”
A splutter of argument. Mynon and Jason looked at one another.
“We will bleed this city dry in a matter of days, the countryside round about in less than a month. We stay here, we starve, and we starve the Kufr all about us. Is that clear enough for you, brothers?”
“I’d like you to be Quartermaster, Mynon. You have a knack for it, a head for figures and the like. Do you accept?”
Mynon considered, head to one side in that bird-like way of his. He shrugged fractionally. “All right.”
“You will retain command of your mora. We need your experience in the battle line too.”
“Who are you, Jason, to be elevating and appointing without so much as a say so from the rest of us?” Aristos spoke up, his freckled face burnt dark by the sun, bright hair shining. Another strawhead. Some of the younger ones rapped the table with one knuckle in agreement.
Who am I indeed? Jason wondered. For a cold moment, he saw himself packing a horse and taking off across the Empire alone, making hell’s leather for the west and the shores of the sea. But that would leave his Dogsheads here, and Buridan. That would leave behind the best part of what he had earned for himself in this life. A name, and respect for that name. If he left that behind, he would be worthless. Go back to soldiering in the Harukush? Why? He had the adventure of his lifetime here and now.
“Aristos makes a fair point,” he said lightly. “Shall we vote on it, then? I put myself forward to take Phiron’s place. Who will have me?”
His own hand went up first, those of Buridan and Rictus in the same second; then old Mochran, and Mynon. And then a pause. Finally Phinero joined them. “I don’t see no one else here I’d take orders from,” he said with a shrug.
Aristos made no sign of acceptance or anger. He flapped his hand on the table. “You have a majority, Jason. You are our warleader.” He had a smile even less pleasant than Mynon’s. “Some proprieties must be preserved, or else what are we?”
“We’re in shit up to our necks, so we’d best start shovelling,” Buridan growled. “What’s the plan, Jason?”
He got up from the table and paced over to one of the great openings in the wall. From here one could look down on the garden-rooves of Kaik, green squares retreating down the hill’s steep slope amid a sea of brown brick, all shimmering in the heat. A steady train of refugees was leaving the city, heading along the roads to the west. Running before the storm. His men had wrecked I Ins city simply by entering it and taking what they needed—not loot, or women so much—but water, food, a place to lay their heads. This army would wreck many more before they made it home, he thought. And home is where we must be going. There is nothing for us here, in the Empire.
For the first time, perhaps, he understood the real abilities of Phiron and Pasion. They had collected these centons, had fed and watered and supplied them, had held them together to the end. Until one Kufr’s death had turned their certainties upside-down.
“We go home,” Jason said simply. “That is all we can do. “The Great King has shown he cannot be trusted or negotiated with, so we will not try.” He turned back to face the others, the sunlight behind him making of his form a black shadow, faceless.
“We must march to the sea.”
There was a square below the Governor’s Palace, built up on one side like a massive terrace to make level the slope of the hill. All around it, the fired-brick buildings of the city reared up three and four stories tall, and on their rooves could be seen date palms, juniper bushes, vines, a cool green horticulture three and four spear-lengths above the cobbles of the square itself, ivy and ferns trailing their tendrils down the faces of the houses. In the centre of the square was an oasis of cedar and poplar trees, a sizeable copse surrounded by the beating heat of the open stone around. This was where the city’s markets had been held, and there was still the wreckage of a hundred, two hundred stalls scattered far and wide across it, melons rolling underfoot, pomegranates broken open like bloody relics of battle, pistachios scattered like pebbles on a sea’s shore. Here, a great many of the exhausted Macht had set up a camp of sorts, burning the market-stalls in their campfires and roasting anything four-footed they could find over them. There were public wells at the four corners of the square, and running up to each of these were ceaseless queues of thirsty men bearing buckets, pots, and skins to fill for their centons. It was orderly, in a way, though to the terrified inhabitants of the surrounding district it must have seemed as though some great shambling beast of the apocalypse had wandered into their world and collapsed with a tired groan. Perhaps six thousand men were bedded down on the cobbles, their heads pillowed on the ragged red rolls of their cloaks. They had all claimed their own centoi again, and congregated round the black cauldrons like acolytes stunned by their oracle. The pots were not being cooked in, but were full of drinking water. The alleyways and streets leading up to the square were already stinking with the army’s effluent, and centurions were clustering here and there, haranguing each other about where each centon should piss. Tired men were almost as ready now to fight each other as they had been to fight the Kufr, the uncertainty of their plight finally looming through the receding haze of thirst and exhaustion.
Gasca had been to the Carnifex to have a wound stitched, but the charnel-house stench of the buildings set aside for the wounded drove him away. Groups of gagging Kufr had been pressed into disposal of the bodies, and were hauling them out of the city on flat-bed wagons, to be burned down by the river. The walking wounded rejoined their centons as soon as they could; in this heat, an injury gained in the filth of the Kunaksa went bad very fast, and the flies choking the air about the infirmaries were too fat and blue and insistent to keep from every wound. Men were lying with maggots crawling upon their flesh, their eyes sunk in blackened sockets of pain. Their comrades stayed with them as long as they could bear it, but their fate was written in their eyes; already they could see the land beyond the Veil.
The youngest, the fittest, the most venturesome of the Macht were scattered throughout the city, ostensibly to gather what supplies they could find. In reality there was a lot of discreet looting going on. But from what Gasca had seen, it was not gold or jewels the men were after, but footwear, clothing, weapons. Anything which might speed their pilgrim way across the Empire. A mora was guarding the city gates, but some of the Macht were making off across the walls, leaving Kaik, their centons, their comrades, and striking out alone across the vastness of the Empire, believing in the madness of their hearts that they could somehow trek all the weary pasangs back to the Harukush. No one stopped these fools, and nearly all who remained recognised them for that. But all the same, the army was creaking and fraying and breaking down. There were a few would-be orators in the main square, arguing that their contract was null and void now, and they were no longer beholden to anyone but themselves. They would hold to their centons for now, but some of them had begun to think in terms of their cities. Lines were developing, even among the Cursebearers.
Gasca found the Dogsheads close to the shade of the trees in the centre of the square, and was handed a waterskin without a word. Bivouacked around them were the Dolphins and the Blackbirds; these three centons had worked as one since the Abekai crossing, and stuck together.
Astianos lifted up a hand to shad
e his eyes. “You get it seen to?
“There were too many. It’s not much more than a scratch anyways.”
“I’ll stitch it for you later, if you like.”
“You can kiss my arse.”
Astianos grinned. He was Gasca’s opposite, as dark as the strawhead was light, and he had few teeth left to fill out his smile. “Bend over, sweetie, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Even a Kufr arse would be something to look upon right now,” big Gratus said with feeling. He was Gasca’s file leader, and lay now with his hands clasped on his stomach.
“Go take your pick; they’re all around,” said another.
“But let us watch, Gratus,” old Demotes cackled. “I want to see what a Kufr makes of that skinny little dog’s dick of yours.”
Desultory, reflexive, the profanities were thrown out upon the air. These men had lately fought two great battles, and had found themselves cut off two and a half thousand pasangs from home, but give them a drink of water, and a few hours sleep, and they would be trading insults again, just for the fun of it. Their shoulders had been right next to Gasca’s through the Abekai, through Kunaksa. Their aichmes had kept him alive, and he had taken blows meant for them on his own shield. They had shared water with him when their own mouths were cracked and dry for the lack of it. Sitting down upon his cloak, Gasca reflected that the men on either side of him were more his brothers than those he had grown up with. Whatever happened, he was glad he had come here, and had known this. He thanked Antimone silently, whilst laughing at the obscenities thrown among them like balls for boys to catch and fling back. It may be I’m meant to be here after all, he thought.
Rictus found him as the afternoon had begun to shade into the swift-dwindling twilight of the lowlands. He stepped over sleeping bodies and picked his way across a carpet of battered humanity until he stood over Gasca and held up a small skin. “Palm wine,” he said. “Are you ready for it, or is this crowd still drinking water?”