‘Why did they run, do you think?’ Theophilus asked, the fresh scar running across his forehead an unappetising purplish-black. The result of a half-deflected war club, it was only the most obvious mark he had gained from the Battle of the Western Reaches, as it was already being called. Subtler, though in the long run more important, was a certain swagger to him in the days since, a roll in his step, a sneer on his lips, half forced but so what? Theophilus had acquitted himself well enough to deserve a modicum of bluster, been at the forefront of the charge that had shattered the Marcher centre. A certain amount of swagger was a good thing, anyhow. A certain amount of swagger kept a man alive. Too much swagger would kill him, of course, but Bas did not think Theophilus was in much danger of going in that direction.
Though Hamilcar swaggered more vigorously than any man Bas had ever met, and the gods had not yet seen fit to make him pay for it. The rest of his countrymen had stayed behind with the infantry, and in truth there was no good reason for their captain to be here without them. But Hamilcar could not be left out of anything, even a task as miserable and unglamorous as this. ‘The Yellow Otter were a cousin tribe of Mykhailo’s own,’ he explained, after ten years as knowledgeable about the intricacies of the Marchers as any man not born among them could be.
‘Mykhailo is dead and buried,’ Theophilus said. ‘Even the plainsfolk can’t make so much of loyalty.’
‘Never think yourself too certain of what goes on inside another’s head,’ Hamilcar responded. ‘Though I doubt it was devotion that drove them to flee. More likely they supposed that having been so closely aligned with the hetman, they’d have a particularly bad go of it.’
Isaac leaned over off his horse, let a spiral of tobacco spit splash into the tall grass. ‘It would have been better than what they’re going to get now.’
No one had anything to add. The sun told Bas he had fifteen minutes before it would be time to lead his men down to the valley below, indiscriminately slaughtering anyone he found there. He pulled his sword out from its sheath, made sure it wouldn’t catch on anything, put it back in its place.
‘Will they surrender?’ Theophilus asked.
‘Better a sword than the stakes,’ Hamilcar said.
‘They’ll surrender,’ Isaac answered, sounding confident.
‘We didn’t,’ Hamilcar said.
‘And how did that work out?’
Bas was flexing his hand along the hilt of his sword, could feel that low hum in the pit of his stomach that he always got in the moments before it seemed he might have to kill something. It was something like nausea, though it never seemed to get bad enough for him to have to vomit.
‘Three tertarum say they choose the stake,’ Isaac said.
‘You’d move so quickly to silver?’ Hamilcar asked, the glint of money shining in his dark eyes and white smile. ‘You must be awfully confident.’
‘I’m three tertarum confident, as I said.’
‘Certainty like that, a man ought to offer odds.’
‘Two to three?’
‘Three to five.’
Issac took his hand off the hilt of his weapon and offered it to Hamilcar, who pumped it happily.
Bas would have made good on his threat, if he’d been pushed to it. A volley or two from the small number of men with bows, just to soften them up, just to let them know there was no point, and then the mad rush of cavalry, the Marchers scattering most likely, and then riding them down against the cliff walls they had backed themselves into, the long, murderous game of hide-and-seek, mothers trying to silence their weeping children, old men dying with gallant futility. And then stripping the bodies of whatever bits of wealth they had on them, copper necklaces and semi-precious stones. He’d have done it, and he’d have collapsed on his bedroll later that night, exhausted by the day’s events, and he’d have woken up the next morning and thought no more about it. Not much, at least.
But still, when Hamilcar shouted that he saw a lone rider approaching the path, Bas felt a twinge of something like happiness. It was no sort of a task, killing women and children, for all that he’d done it before.
The man they had sent to play chief had almost certainly not been that the day before the battle; just a youth who would never get the chance to grow older. His hand was bandaged, and he looked dirty and tired and miserable. But he did not look beaten, riding up the path with his back straight, and when he saw Bas his gaze did not quiver. ‘You are the God-Killer?’ the chief asked. He spoke Aelerian like he was trying to spit out some unpleasant-tasting food.
‘Yes.’
‘I am Yan. I speak for the rest.’
‘And what do you say?’
‘The women live?’
‘We’ll leave them the ponies and what food can be spared. They should be able to make their way over the river.’
‘And the boy children?’
‘What is a child?’
‘Fifteen.’
Bas shook his head. A Marcher had two notches into his belt before he had reached ten and five. ‘Twelve,’ Bas said, though he didn’t plan on inspecting each boy to make certain he wasn’t twelve and six months.
The chief thought it over for a moment, then nodded. ‘A half an hour,’ he said next.
‘Leave your weapons piled at the foot of the path,’ Bas said. ‘And lead your horses.’
The chief nodded. He looked the sort of tired from which you could imagine death might even be a release.
After he was out of earshot, Hamilcar broke into as elaborate and sustained a bout of cursing as Bas had seen in a lifetime spent among soldiers. It encompassed three different languages, and threatened acts of molestation against Isaac and his family that Bas thought excessively impractical.
Bas turned to Isaac, who was smiling from cropped ear to cropped ear. ‘How soon can we send out a foraging party?’
‘Ten minutes.’
‘And how long before we’ll have enough stakes?’
‘There was a copse of trees towards the river. Two hours? Two and a half maybe?’
‘Make it two,’ Bas said.
Isaac nodded, saluted and went off to take care of the errand – but not before taking his three silver from Hamilcar.
Jon the Sanguine had won his sobriquet during the series of minor wars that had led to the absorption of the small nations bordering Aeleria and the March proper, after he had given his soldiers permission to sack a resisting town on a feast day. It was a name that dogged his step to the grave. ‘The Blood-Letter’, the Salucians called him, burned him in effigy from the walls of cities he was soon to capture, put a price on his head large enough to bankrupt a port town. But hate is a close cousin of fear, and few men had tried to collect. An officer Bas had once captured promised to tell everything he knew about the defences of his city so long as Bas did not hand him over to his superior to be eaten.
Eight years Bas had known Jon the Sanguine, and had never seen him partake of the flesh of a fellow human. He was a bitter, miserable, brutal sort, but he was neither cruel nor vindictive, took no exaggerated love of violence. The name was useful – the name was a weapon in and of itself. ‘I would rather have my nickname,’ Jon had told Bas once, in a rare display of intimacy, ‘than half a thema in train.’
Bas had earned his title before he had ever met Jon, and he did not imagine any resident divinities were quaking in their celestial boots. But most of his life he had roamed the Marches – first as a child, then as a hoplitai, which was nearly the same thing, following on behind whatever halfwit the Senate had sent out to find creative ways of getting people killed. Later as a Komes, leading small forces of cataphracts into unsettled sections of the Marches, pouring oil on troubled waters or spilling out blood, case depending. And now these last few years as the Commonwealth’s chief representative in the area, the seated arse on the Empty Throne, as far as the barbarians were concerned. If his name was not spoken with quite the reverence that Jon’s was, still it was a heavy thing, a thing to take shelter b
eneath.
And what they said of him was this – the God-Killer did what was required. His word would not bend against you, nor in your favour. Mercy was as alien to him as cruelty. It wasn’t exactly true, to Bas’s mind, but he supposed it was close enough.
By the Aelerian way of thinking, the March lords had risen up in rebellion against the Empty Throne, had broken the oaths of fealty they had sworn. The punishment for rebellion was the stake, a sharpened piece of wood shoved from rectum to throat, the victim left to bleed out, though most died of shock before the operation was finished. This would be the lot of the starving men in the canyon below – quite the price to pay for the safety of their families.
Bas watched the young man they had made chief ride back towards the mass of his fellows, watched him deliver the news. They couldn’t have hoped for anything else. Or perhaps they could – it was strange, the lies people believed. Regardless, there seemed to be no dispute among them, no contingent still wishing to fight.
It did not take long. Twenty minutes after Bas had spoken to their leader, the last free body of Marchers in the land approached the narrow defile that would lead to the end of their existence as an autonomous people. They walked willingly upslope, women first, then the soldiers – soldiers in theory, though you could barely call the band of stragglers that had managed to escape from Mykhailo’s disaster that any more, bleary-eyed, beaten men showing more rib than their overworked horses. The women were worse off, or at least no better, skeletons in tattered dresses dragging children in their wake, or carrying babes still at suck. These last were the only ones that made any sound, a keen wailing that echoed loudly through the canyon, appropriate accompaniment to the scene.
Isaac and a troop of dismounted soldiers waited for them at the top of the slope, a larger force waiting to be called on if necessary, though it was obvious to anyone with eyes that the Marchers had no fight left in them. They seemed to have very little left of anything, too tired and beaten even to bid proper farewell to the womenfolk and children whose lives they were saving with their sacrifices. Husbands held their wives in tepid embraces, patted the heads of their sons and daughters but did not look at them. For their part, the fortunate survivors seemed bleary-eyed and exhausted beyond meaning, like fruit with all the flesh squeezed out. You could have mistaken it for stoicism, though in fact it was sheer exhaustion. It takes strength to mourn properly, and the Marchers were too tired to do anything but die.
The women and children were led to the rear, out of sight of what was to come. Bas’s forces were travelling light, and had no excess of provisions, but they’d give what they could. With the disappearance of their families the mood among the men seemed to lighten. There was no one to keep a brave face on for any longer; the Marchers were free to make what terms with death they were able. Mostly they did not seem to fear its arrival. They looked more like drawings of people than people, or clay statues, as if whatever animating force was in them had already been extinguished. Isaac looked over at Bas, and Bas nodded, and Isaac led the captured Marchers to be slaughtered.
In a year, when the plainsfolk west of the river crossed to bring their cattle into the great Commonwealth-sanctioned fairs, they would ride past the rotting corpses of their cousins, a stark and horrifying foliage, the only forest within a thousand cables. And they would curse the name of the God-Killer, and the might of Aeleria, and they would keep their weapons sheathed.
If they looked very carefully, however, they would discover that this atrocity was half staged. To properly stake a man was an elaborate ritual, costly in time and effort. It took two men to tie the captive down, three if they fought, and of course they always did. And the act itself was not so simple either; even the bloodiest-minded of men took no great pleasure in it. Shoving a corpse on top of a stake, however, was a much simpler matter, and would have the same effect on any future passer-by. A dozen kneeling men, one hoplitai with a drawn dagger, and then the meat went on the stick. The act of butchering was an exhausting one, but as the executioner was given first pick of their victim’s possessions, it was rarely necessary to assign anyone to it.
If the Marchers realised they had gained a reprieve – though perhaps reprieve was too strong a word – they gave no great signs of joy. They remained unfettered; there would have been no point in chaining them even if Bas had anything to chain them with, which of course he hadn’t. Two weeks of misery, seeing the flower of their nation cut down, their hopes dashed against the rock like the skull of a newborn. They wanted it a little, Bas thought. But then, doesn’t everyone?
Theophilus was vomiting into the roots of some nearby scrubgrass. Bas made a point of not looking at him as he spoke. ‘You’re relieved. Go find Isaac, make sure they’ve got enough men collecting stakes.’
‘I’m fine, sir,’ Theophilus insisted, though Bas could smell yesterday’s dinner from ten steps away.
‘That wasn’t a suggestion,’ Bas said, turning back towards the slaughter.
Theophilus nodded, too tired to argue, or be grateful. But as he slipped past Bas leaned over to him and said in a half-whisper, ‘It gets easier.’
Theophilus looked up at him, white as a ghoul, and he nodded and walked back towards camp.
Bas had caught three hours of sleep in between arriving at the canyon and the first light of dawn, which brought the total for the last week to something like thirty. He could remember a time when he could spend days in the saddle without resting, as hard as any Marcher, or nearly so. But those days were gone, gone with the jet black of his hair. He had been carried through the course of the morning by the possibility that he would see combat before the end of it, but with that no longer a spur, exhaustion had returned. He had to fight to keep from blinking, each flicker of his eyelids offering slumber purchase against his waking mind. There was no particular reason to stay and watch this, it would continue just the same with him asleep on a bedroll. But Bas did not go to find one. It did not do to look away from these things. It did not do to forget what one was.
The yellowed grass, withered and dry after the long summer months, drank deeply. But then, the earth is never satiated, nor the things that walk above it.
It took an aide three calls to get his attention, and even then he managed to do little more than stare back at him irritably. ‘What?’
‘There’s a messenger here to see you, sir. From the capital.’
That was unexpected enough to shake Bas out of his lethargy. He followed the aide away from the open-air abattoir he had created.
They were ten men strong, five from the army that Bas had left behind, the other five Imperial emissaries, to judge by their horses and how unhappy they looked to be here. A month ago you’d have to have been mad to come this close to the Pau River with only ten men, but after what the Marchers had endured Bas did not imagine banditry would be much of a problem, not for the next few years at least.
The man who greeted him was that brand of officer who had earned his post from being someone’s nephew. You didn’t see many of them out here on the Marches, presumably because most uncles don’t have so much hate for their siblings’ children. The man looked a little disappointed, and Bas couldn’t blame him. He’d come to find the Caracal, a colossus of sharpened steel, eyes like a raging fire, a voice like the strike of lightning. All he’d found was a tired old man in a battered suit of chain.
‘Legatus,’ he said, striking a faist off his breastplate.
Bas returned the salute. ‘You’ve a message?’
‘From the Senate itself.’ He nodded happily.
They stood there looking at each other.
‘Are you going to give it to me?’ Bas asked finally.
The man blushed, stammered some, reached into his purse and passed over a packet, along with a stream of apologies.
Bas ignored them and cracked open the seal. The parchment was soft vellum and still had the faint scent of perfume. It was dated a week back, just after word of the victory would have arrived by pigeo
n. The formal greetings took up half the first page, but Bas skipped past without really seeing any of it. What remained were three or four lines of intricately traced calligraphy that upended the world.
In recognition of the great and noble services you have provided to the Empty Throne, it is the privilege of the Senate to recognise you as Strategos. It is also the wish of the Senate that you return to the capital with all possible speed, that the state may thank you properly, and determine where in the Commonwealth your talents can be most effectively utilised. Legatus Alexios will take over your command.
Bas reached the end of the missive and went back to the beginning. When he had finished he repeated the exercise a third time.
The news that he had been promoted went through Bas’s mind without triggering any hint of excitement, gratitude or even pleasure. It was no more than his due, given the recent victory – would have been a strange and deliberate slight had he not received it. It was the second part of the message that had struck him like a cudgel blow, left him confused and struggling with its obvious meaning.
Isaac had snuck up behind him, anxious to find out the news but trying not to show it. ‘The foraging party has returned,’ he said. ‘Time to start planting some Marchers.’
Bas didn’t answer, though after a moment he handed over the letter. His adjutant took it with some surprise. Bas watched his lips move silently for about a minute and a half, and then Isaac looked up at him blankly. ‘We’re going home?’ he asked.
Bas shrugged. That was not the way Bas would have put it. That was not the way Bas would have put it at all.
9
Eudokia was in her bedroom, getting ready for the evening’s festivities. In contrast to what most of the women attending the party would be wearing, Eudokia’s outfit was distinctly traditional, even old-fashioned, though of course it made the best use of the figure that remained to her. When she’d been younger her tastes had run towards the innovative and occasionally the salacious, but in latter years she had cultivated a more conservative style. This enlightened simplicity was difficult to pull off, required fine attention, and Heraclius was making it no easier with his constant interruptions.
Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 Page 11