by Paul Kearney
Stubbornness.
Vorus raised a hand and saluted them, his countrymen. Then he turned his horse’s head and set off down the Imperial Road to the east, one more fleeing figure in a sea of them.
TWENTY-THREE
COUNTING STONES
The snow had started up again, flying in flurries about the camp and greying out the world. The only colour was in the heart of the campfires, a thousand of them dotted for taenons about the floor of the valley, motes of yellow light with the darkening mountains looming on all sides around them, like titans peering down upon the concerns of ants. No ditch had been dug, and there was no order to the scattered bivouacs. The encampment of the Macht no longer seemed that of an army, but was a disorderly conglomeration of individuals. Most centons stayed together and a few of the morai, but by and large it seemed the higher organisation of the army had been abandoned.
“How is he?” Rictus asked, ducking his head under the flap of the wagon-canopy. The wind was getting up, and though there was not much of a chill in it for those bred to the mountains, it made the leather snap and shudder like a snared bird.
“He’s asleep,” Tiryn told him. “I got some soup down him this morning, but nothing since. I need more water.”
“I’ll get it for you.” Rictus made to leave, but Tiryn’s cold fingers fastened on his wrist. “What is happening out there, Rictus?”
The Iscan’s face did not change. “They’re talking, still talking.”
“Then you should be out there talking with them.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Men look to you; many of them. You can’t let Aristos have his way.”
Rictus stared at her, his eyes the colour of the snow-darkened sky behind him. “I’ll get you the water,” he repeated, and was gone.
Tiryn tied down the canopy once more, and inside the wagon there was only the flickering glow of a single clay lamp. Beside it, wrapped in his red cloak and every other blanket that Tiryn possessed, lay Jason.
She smoothed the dark hair away from his forehead. The sound of his breathing filled the wagon, a harsh, stertorous battle of sound. A spearhead had gone in over the lip of his cuirass, just at the collarbone, and had angled down into the lung.
The breathing paused a second. Jason opened his eyes. His voice was a zephyr. She had to lean close to hear. “Rictus was here,” he croaked.
“He’s fetching water.”
Jason licked his cracked lips. “Cold,” he said.
“We’re in the mountains now, the Irun Gates.”
“Cold,” he said again, closing his eyes.
She lay full length beside him, tugging him close, sharing what warmth she had. On the other side of his body his cuirass was propped upright, black and ominous. He could not settle without it near him. She hated the very look of it; that untouchable blackness, giving nothing, marked by nothing. It was as though his grave-marker already stood beside him in the back of the wagon, watching him fight for his life with cold indifference.
How many days since the battle? Four, five? Latterly they had all seemed the same. She had watched the Asurian cavalry strike home with unadulterated horror; it had seemed that the battle was lost, and the army destroyed. They had fought through the baggage carts, the Asurians and Aristos’s men, whilst Rictus and the light troops had run up the hill to aid the main battle line. She was still not sure how the thing had turned around, but the men were talking of the Juthan deserting the field. They had been saved by the intervention of Antimone herself, many said. As it was, the victory was bitter enough. Over two thousand dead, and hundreds wounded. Tiryn had picked her way up the hill before Irunshahr, stepping in scarlet puddles, on the entrails of men and horses. She had climbed to the hill-crest to find Jason, for he had been on the left, where disaster had fallen. She had never walked upon a battlefield before, had never seen the ground hidden by stark and crawling bodies, Macht and Kefren moaning next to each other, horses screaming and trying to stand on the splintered bones of their legs. She had not known it would be like this, such a concentrated entanglement of lacerated flesh. In the end it was Rictus who found him, who had him borne down to the wagons on a litter made from spears. The only thing that warmed her was their automatic assumption that Jason should be with her. “Look after him,” Rictus had said, his eyes as cold as the mountains.
With the rout of the Kufr army, the governor of Irunshahr had come to their camp under a green branch, to ask for clemency. He did not know just how badly the army had been hurt, but he could see the last of his hopes disappearing along the Imperial Road to the east in a broken panic. He went on his knees before those blood-slathered, bronze-clad men, and begged for the life of his city. Had he but known, he could have kept his gates closed with impunity. The Macht were in no condition to assault the walls, and did not have the stomach for it either. Rictus and Aristos made a good two-man act, the big Iscan as taciturn as a marble pillar, Aristos as arrogant as a Kefren prince. Thus the army had been supplied, after a fashion.
“Buridan,” Jason said. “Where is Buridan?”
“He is dead,” Tiryn told him. “Remember?”
Jason’s eyes opened. For a moment they were clear, though whatever he was seeing it was not in the gloom of the wagon-bed. He smiled a little, a bitter smile, not looking at her. “Phiron would have done it better. He tells me so.” His eyes rolled in his head, “I hear the wings. She is close now.” He drifted off again.
The lamp went out, and there was just the dark in the wagon, the rasp of Jason’s breathing, the thumping of her own heart. Outside, the wind hurled itself up and down the valley. Here, in the Korash, summer had not yet been thought of. Even spring was a starveling urchin of a thing, barely enough to set the grass growing. Tiryn’s Juthan slave, Ushdun, had run off along with the rest of her fellows in the aftermath of the battle. Somehow they had known about the Juthan betrayal, and somehow they had known the perfect moment to escape, when all was in chaos and the fighting just ended. Tiryn had brought Jason back to her wagon to find it ransacked. The Macht walking wounded who had been set to look over the Juthan had instead joined the fight against the Asurians. There were no more slaves with the army. She was, Tiryn realised, the only Kufr in the camp. The thought startled her.
No matter. She drew Jason closer to her. His flesh was hot to the touch, and sweat was streaming down his face, but he was shivering convulsively.
I do not know why it is so, she thought, but I esteem this man, this Macht, this barbarian. It may even be that I love him. Rictus knew that. It may be he saw it before I did.
They had gathered in an open space between the fires of the centons, and there had piled up the carcass of a broken wagon and set it on fire. Around this blaze there now gathered several thousand men. The evening was setting in, and the firelight grew brighter as the light fell. The Macht had come to debate on their predicament, to thrash out things in Assembly, as their race had been wont to do since the end of the Kings, far back in the mythical past. Most of the Kerusia were present, wrapped in their scarlet cloaks like the rest of the men, but wearing the Curse of God beneath as a kind of badge. Their numbers were fewer. Jason was wounded and Grast had died at Irunshahr, close by him in the line. Mynon had been kicked by a horse and now wore his broken arm in a sling, but his black eyes were bright as ever. Old Mochran, the last of the elder leaders, stood a little apart from the rest, wrapped in his cloak, his peppery beard sunk on his chest. He had saved the day, wheeling the right-hand morai inwards on his own initiative, trusting that the Juthan desertion was not a ruse. Had it not been for him, the army would most likely have been destroyed at Irunshahr. The knowledge made a little space around him at the bonfire. He stared into the flames, perhaps remembering the pyres on which they had burned the bodies of two thousand comrades. They had been three days at it, and the reek had soiled the air for pasangs around.
The men stood in silent crowds, ready to listen. They were tired and disheartened as they had not been af
ter Kunaksa. They realised now that the thing was almost done. Fourteen thousand of them had taken ship with Phiron the year before. Of those, almost half were gone. They had marched more than three thousand pasangs, and had beaten every army brought against them, but now they felt that their luck was running out. They had had enough. Now all of them wanted to get home by the quickest route, to get over the mountains and march to the shores of the sea. They did not care if they were paupers when they got there; all that they valued now were the lives they lived.
Haukos has left us, Rictus realised, as he stood with the other generals amid the currents of talk. Hope has gone. We are no longer unbeatable.
And he bowed his head. Gasca, you are well out of this.
“We should have stayed at Irunshahr,” big Gominos was saying, as truculent as he was ugly. He reminded Rictus a little of Orsos, but Orsos had been a fine leader of men as well as a rapacious boor. “We could have taken our ease there, had slaves, refitted and rested—”
“We cleared that city out of every bean and husk it had,” Mynon said. “If we’d stayed there, we’d be starving in a week.”
“Starving with a roof over our heads,” Gominos retorted.
“The Great King has more than one army,” Mochran growled. “We stop moving and we die, simple as that. At least here in the mountains we’re less easy to find.”
“So we’re running headlong now after beating his best? Is that it?”
Rictus’s voice, though quiet, cut through the rising quarrel. “Mynon, how do we stand?”
A bird with a broken wing, Mynon set his head on one side. Jason had done the same on occasion; it warranted a kind of detachment. “One week, at full ration. But that’s for the men alone. Fodder for the draught animals is not to be had, not up here. They’ll start dying soon, and then we’ll be pulling the wagons ourselves.”
“We’ve done that before. We’ll hitch the mules to the wagons, and eat the oxen.” Rictus paused. “There are fewer of us now, anyway. Fewer mouths.”
Silence fell. The bonfire crackled and rushed, a soft roar in the blue gathering dark. Around the light of the flames the crowds of men drew closer, as if they could hear what was being said better in the light. Rictus saw Whistler there, and old Demotes from the Dogsheads. How many of them were left now, he wondered. Those nights in the Marshalling Yards of Machran seemed like a different world, and the boy he had been back then was someone else. Rictus raised his hand and touched two things which hung at his throat: Zori’s coral pendant and the tooth of a wolf, clicking together under his fingers. Small things, to hold such a cache of memories.
Aristos stepped forward to warm his hands at the flames. “We’re fewer now, it’s been said. I would go farther. I would say we are not an army any more. We have not been since Kunaksa. Phiron knew how to lead us, and he did it well. When he died, Jason took his place, and he was an obvious choice. He was a good man. But he did not have the skills of Phiron. That is why at Irunshahr, so many of us died.”
Rictus stepped forward, eyes blazing. “Is that why? Search your heart, Aristos. Is that really why?”
“Let me speak, Rictus.” Aristos held up a hand, as regretful and reasonable as one could wish. Out of the assembled men, voices cried: “Let him speak!” The chorus grew. “Let him have a say. Fair’s fair, strawhead.”
Rictus stepped back. He was unarmed, as were they all, but one did not need weapons in the Assembly to fight one’s battles. Words were better and he was not good with them, never had been. Jason was the man for that.
“I have seen a map of the Empire. Brothers, we are in the Korash Mountains. They are not so high as the Magron, but they are further north, and much colder. This valley we have been marching in, it runs all the way through them to the open lands of Askanon and Gansakr beyond. The mountains are some two hundred pasangs from east to west. Once we are through them the way is open to the sea, good marching country with cities on every side. And not the fortress cities of the Middle Empire, but smaller, many of them unwalled. Brothers, once we are beyond the mountains, it is a two week march to the sea. Two weeks.”
A ragged shout went up at this, and men turned to their neighbours, grinning and striking one another on the bicep. They had not dreamed it could be so close, the end of the illimitable Empire. Aristos looked at Rictus, and their eyes met. He knew exactly what he was doing. He raised a hand to still the hubbub.
“Brothers, hear me out. For months now, we have been marching at the pace of the Kufr, held back first by their troops, our so-called allies, and then by the whole impedimenta of warfare as they fight it. These wagons we haul along in our midst—when we fought as centons in the Harukush, which of us had a wagon to carry his baggage for him? Perhaps it made sense in the heat of the lowlands, but we are marching back into our own kind of country now, back to where the seasons are things we know. A cart for the centos, mules for the field-forge—what else did we need? We have been trained by the Kufr to walk at their pace. Brothers, we must strike out again at our own. We must leave all this behind and become again the men we once were. We must strike out at that pace. If we do, I promise you, we shall look once again on the shores of the sea within a month. What say you?”
“I say he talks too fucking much,” Mochran said to Rictus out of the corner of his mouth. But it was no matter. The men were cheering Aristos to the echo. He was offering them hope, a way ahead, something to batten onto, and their cheers were an outpouring of relief.
“I will not serve under him,” Rictus said.
“You must, lad. I believe he’s about to call an election. With Jason out of the way, he’ll swing the vote in the Kerusia. If you want to make the thing go otherwise, you’d best get up on your hind legs and do a little talking yourself.”
“You’ll vote for me?”
“So will Phinero and Mynon, I’m sure. Talk, Rictus. These men at the front of the crowd have been planted here; I see scores from Aristos’s own mora. Start flapping your fucking mouth, or this son of a bitch is going to be leading us.”
“I might not be any better,”
“Horse’s shit. From what I hear, you’re one of the best men in the fucking army.”
That brought Rictus up short. He had not expected it; he even felt a kind of resentment. I didn’t set out to do this, he thought. All I wanted—
All I wanted was to die facing an enemy. To have a good death.
And here he was, when so many better than him were burnt to ashes. He bent his head a second, remembering them, the dead whom he had loved. Of its own volition, his hand came up and touched the talismans which hung at his neck.
“Rictus—” Mochran said.
“He’s going to take the fleetest and leave the rest. He’s out for himself.” And he’s the reason Gasca died, Rictus added to himself. It might not be true, but it felt right to think it.
He stepped back into the light of the blazing wagon-carcass, a big man with a shock of straw-coloured hair and eyes that caught the light like some reflection of Phobos’s moon.
“I am Rictus. The map which Aristos here is talking of belongs to Jason of Ferai, who commands this army. He came into possession of it after the death of Phiron. Phiron commanded us once, as you may remember. He took us to victory at Kunaksa. When he was murdered, Jason brought us through it. He led us all the way across the Middle Empire, to a place where home does not seem so far away. He brought us here together, and behind us we left only our dead.
“Aristos is right about the distance to the sea, but he is wrong about the time it will take to get there. We have wounded in the wagons who cannot be left behind. If we must travel faster than a wagon, then we must abandon our wounded. We are Macht. This is not something we do, or have ever done. I will not do it. Phiron would not have done it. If the army must have a leader while Jason heals, then I shall be that man. And I say that this decision will not be taken by the Kerusia alone, but by the whole army. Let us vote, here and now, every one of us who can lift a stone. Her
e in these mountains, decide, and let us be done with it.”
Mochran took off his cloak and spread it on the ground. “I stand here for Rictus,” he cried. There was a moment’s pause, and then Gominos did the same, spreading out the fabric of his cloak and tossing a single stone upon it as he straightened. “This, here, is for Aristos.”
The crowds of men about the bonfire stood silent for a moment. Beyond the light of the flames they could hear the more ardent souls running through the camp, shouting out the news. Mochran bent, and with careful intent, placed a stone on the faded scarlet fabric of his cloak. “Brothers,” he said, “Let us vote on it.”
Rictus and Aristos stood with their arms folded, as tradition dictated, while about them the gathered crowds of men pushed closer. The stones tossed onto one cloak and then the other began to clink against each other, and then to pile up. All through the scattered camp the news was spread, and more and more men began to congregate round the dying fire of the burnt wagon, some bringing more timber to keep it alight, some eddying in and out of the firelight, some standing fast once they had cast their stone to watch over the fast-buried scarlet of the two cloaks. it took until the middle part of the night for the last stone to click down atop the cloaks. Those who were too injured to walk to the piles were carried there. Last of all, there came walking through the assembled crowds of men a tall, veiled shape. Tiryn strode through the firelight in a black robe, only her eyes showing above the veil, and set down a single stone atop Rictus’s pile.
“And who are you to be voting here?” Aristos demanded.
“I set this here for Jason,” she said calmly. Aristos seemed about to say more, but Gominos and Hephr drew him back. “Enough, Aristos; look at her.”