The Ten Thousand (21 page)

“What a marvellous
thing a Council-of-War is,” Jason said, shaking his head.

“Jason. I saw what
I saw. I am not a fool.”

“I know that,
Rictus. But all they see is a young buck out on his feet and covered in shit.”

“We need to get
more of the Hounds out there, quartering the ground, or some of the Kufr
cavalry.”

“Oh, I agree, but
the Kerusia must stop talking first.”

Rictus sank back
against the heavy leather wall of the tent. The wine had lit up his insides and
fogged his mind. He was nodding where he sat. He fell asleep with the clay
winecup still clenched in his fist, the endless sound of the voices beating
about under the flickering glare of the golden lamps, and the strange perfumes
of the Kufr filling his head with dreams.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

“He has made good
time,” Vorus said, reading the end of the despatch. “I had thought we might
catch him still on the western bank of the Bekai, but he is across with all his
baggage.”

“Arkamenes’s
troops have learned how to march,” Proxis agreed grudgingly. “But it is no
matter. We have the numbers, and the ground is adequate.”

“The ground,”
Vorus mused, “is bad for cavalry; too many ditches. And it’s wet. The Macht
will like this ground, Proxis. It will give them something to stick their heels
in.” He slapped shut the despatch scroll.

“There are ten
thousand Macht, I hear. Even ten thousand cannot prevail against the force we
have brought into the west.”

As one, the pair
of them turned and looked eastwards, back at the looming wall of the Magron
Mountains. Memories. Fighting to force double-axled wagons through the drifts,
whole companies roped together, heaving them onwards by main force. Kefren
huddled in windbreaks of flesh as the snow whirled around them. The bodies of
those left behind, stark against the snow in their wake, waymarkers of carrion.

“I never thought
he had it in him,” Vorus admitted.

“Yes. He is his
father’s son after all. We can be thankful for that, at least.”

They turned back
to the warmth, the sunlit world of the lowlands and the rivers to the west.
Wide and green, it now had carved across it brown scars of churned-up mud where
the columns of the army had marched past. Too large to keep in one formation,
the levy of the Great King had been split up into four separate entities, each
pasangs long, each with its own flanking forces, vanguards and rearguards. The
baggage train was back in a fortified camp five pasangs in the rear, a stockade
larger than most cities which housed several thousand wagons, and another small
army to guard them. This was campaigning on a scale no one had seen before. It
was nothing less than a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the entire region,
for foraging parties were systematically stripping it bare. They could reap
three harvests a year here. In Pleninash, such was the bounty of the soil and
the clement generosity of the climate; but to sow one had to plant, and to
plant one must have seed. When the war was done and the battle won, there would
be famine this winter, here in the breadbasket of the Middle Empire. That was
the price paid to stymie one man’s ambition.

They fell into
step together, the worn, athletic Macht general and the squat Juthan with the
bloodshot eyes. Waiting for them at the base of the slope were a knot of Kefren
horsemen, Honai cavalry of the Royal Guard. Beyond them a Juthan Legion stood
patiently in the mud, five thousand of the grey-skinned creatures with the
round shields and heavy halberds of their race. Many had been squatting upon
their hams, talking quietly. They rose now as Vorus and Proxis came closer, a
quiet mass of flesh and bronze, their banners limp above their heads. About
their faces the river-flies buzzed in clouds, new-hatched by the spring warmth.

Juthan grooms
stood in the middle of the magnificent Honai cavalry grasping the halters of
two less grand mounts. Vorus could ride a horse, but for him the animal was a
means of locomotion, no more. He had Niseians on his estates back in Ashur, but
would sooner ride something a little nearer the ground. Proxis habitually rode
a mule, its grey pelt the same colour as his own. The magnificent Honai looked
faintly offended at their proximity to such poor equine flesh, but then they
looked faintly offended by most things, Vorus thought.

Screens of light
cavalry were operating on every front of the army, gathering what information
they could and sending it back to the high command in an unending stream of
mud-slathered couriers.. Looking south, Vorus could see some now, a pennanted
column of them, as gaily dressed as if going to a fair. All the Kefren loved
finery, and war called out the dandy in them in a way that even court
ceremonial could not quite match. Even the Juthan legions were in gaudy
liveries of the various Kefren lords, and the mighty Qaf had painted their
faces with all the barbaric enthusiasm of children. Added to this, the various
provincial factions called up to the standards wore versions of their national
costumes. The Medisai trimmed their harness with feathers from the parrots of
the Pan-jir River valley, the Arakosans preferred the white fur of
mountain-leopards. The Asurians of the heartland made no bones about it, and
had all their wargear inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli dredged from the bed of
the Oskus. If one of their nobles went down in the mud a prince’s ransom in
bullion and gems would fall with him. Vorus did not approve. In Anurman’s day
such extravagance was saved for the court. On the hunt, and in war, his
soldiers had left their armour unadorned.

It was our deeds
marked us out in those days, Vorus thought, not some brooch or robe or crown.
But even Anurman might have donned his finest, were he to go out and meet a
Macht army in battle. Such events seemed a part of myth rather than historical
reality.

Another courier
came galloping up, the muck flying from his horse’s feet like a flock of
startled birds and the ranks of the Juthan making an avenue for him. He threw
up an arm in salute, a
hufsan
from the mountains with the dark eyes of
his caste. He was grinning, face alight with the joy of his position, the
armies massing on the plain, the good horse under him. Simple folk, the
hufsan
Kefren, and the most vicious warriors in the army, bar the Honai.

“General! I find
you! I bring a message from the Archon Midarnes.” The
hufsan
proffered a
leather despatch-case, spattered with mud from his passage. Vorus took it with
a nod, breaking the seal. Midarnes was up front some five pasangs, feeling out
the terrain with his soldiers’ feet, and claiming space should the army need to
shake out into battle line.
Dominating the ground,
the manuals of Vorus’s
youth had called it. For the earth upon which they fought would have its say in
their lives and deaths as surely as any tactic of the enemy.

Vorus paused for a
second as he realised his hands were trembling. He clenched his jaw, the
muscles jumping under his face, and read the scroll.

To Vorus of the
Macht, officer commanding the armies of his excellent majesty Ashurnan, King of
Kings, Great Kings, Lord of—

He skipped the
pleasantries. Midarnes was commander of the Household Guard, and sometimes he
let protocol get in the way of haste, for all that he was a capable fellow.

The vanguard of
the traitor’s army has been sighted ten pasangs east of the Bekai River. I hold
high ground two pasangs to their front, and have put all my forces into line of
battle. There is good space here for the rest of the army to deploy to my right
and left. The Macht are out on the enemy right, the traitor and his Bodyguard
in the centre. They, too, are deploying into line. I shall hold this position
until further orders.

Vorus swore under
his breath, though he kept his face blank, aware of the Honai guards watching,
Proxis’s eyes upon him. He passed the scroll to the Juthan. “Things move fast,
my friend.” He looked up at the sky, squinting into the sun and gauging how
long it had to meet the flat river-plain of the western horizon.

Proxis, too,
uttered some profanities in his own, dark tongue. “This is the King’s work. If
we don’t move fast he’ll be up there alone. He has his father’s courage, but as
for judgement—”

“Mount up. We must
get to Midarnes.”

“It’s too late in
the day for battle, surely.”

“Phiron of Idrios
commands the Macht, a canny bastard if ever there was one. We must gather up
the army at once, and concentrate on Midarnes. Courier—courier, there! Proxis,
have you ink and quill?”

Ashurnan had left
all his finery behind on the back of another tall Kefre who might have been his
twin. This officer, lucky or luckless according to opinion, now stood in the
royal chariot, his head shaded by the royal parasol-bearers and the Great King’s
standard waving slightly with its long plumes above his head. Ashurnan himself
had taken two close companions for a horseback tour of his mustering army. They
were coming up into line by their thousands, and he galloped along their front
on his grey gelding in the brilliant robes of a staff officer, no more, whilst
a gleaming white komis kept most of his face covered, and soon became black
with the tiny flies hatching out of the river-mud. He had mud on his arms and
legs also, thrown up by the exuberant passage of his horse. Beneath the komis
he was grinning like a child, so happy to be young, and a king, and
well-mounted to the front of a mighty army that would halt or move or march
into battle at his will. He raised his eyes to the sky as his horse sped over
the tightly-packed earth of the Middle Empire—his empire—and he gave thanks to
the Creator Himself for all this, for the breath of Kuf that had given life to
them all, for the ability to be glad at this time, to find worth in the great
issues and bloody struggles of the world. For if a man could not savour such a
dish, then he was no man at all.

The Household
troops, the Honai, were ten thousand strong in themselves, and in eight ranks
they had a frontage of some thirteen hundred paces. Unlike the other Kefren contingents,
they did not rely on the horse or the bow, but on the spear. Like the Macht,
they were close-quarter killers, trained to prevail in the most demanding mode
of warfare known.

They were
magnificent. Ashurnan had never seen them gathered all together before, and now
it seemed that there could not be a force in the world to contend with them.
All through the passage of the mountains, they had hid their wargear under
leather campaign casings, but these were discarded now, and the effect made
Ashurnan rein in his horse and stare, Great King though he was. Their arms and
armour were gilded and inlaid with every precious metal and gem known to exist;
the sun caught these now and made their line a scintillating blur of
varicoloured light. They did not seem things made of flesh at all.

And more troops
were coming up minute by minute, thousands of them. Kefren from Asuria,
hufsan
from the mountains, Qaf from the north, Juthan Legions marching in dour ranks,
and files of brightly clad cavalry from the Oskus valley. A world in arms, it
seemed; an army which could no more be fought than could the passage of the
moons.

Ashurnan wheeled
his horse and stared back down the long slope towards the river valley of the
Bekai. Far in the distance, the tall hill of Kaik could be made out, a shadowed
hummock on the edge of the plain, and beyond it the westering sun had begun to
lengthen the shadows. Closer to hand there was the enemy, a line of armoured
troops with the sun behind them, who had come here to kill him and take his
throne.

Arkamenes is
there, he thought. My brother sits his horse somewhere in that line, and
watches, and wonders where I am.

In the harem there
had been many wives, and many children, all sired by great Anurman. The boys
had been taken away soon after birth, so that the court might not poison their
upbringing. They had been reared as sons of simple fathers, and hence had been
taught those things the Kefren still held essential to hold true the course of
life: to wield the bow, to ride a horse, to speak the truth. Such things were
their heritage, and no matter how depraved and indolent the ruler of the Empire
might become, he had the knowledge of those values buried in his soul, to
reproach him when he fell short. Such simple things.

To tell the truth.

At age thirteen,
Ashurnan had been brought back to Ashur, and told of his true parentage by
matter-of-fact tutors his mighty father had hired to complete his education.
Illiterate as the
hufsan
couple who had fostered him, he had been thrown
into a world of palace protocol, vicious conspiracy, simmering feuds, and
poison—the weapon of choice for wives, concubines, eunuchs, and courtiers. No
bows or horses here, and precious little of the truth, either. That was the
palace.

The Great King
stood above it all, or at least Anurman had, and at his shoulders he had two
creatures he trusted. The Macht, Vorus, and the Juthan, Proxis. These two were
faithful as dogs, and were treated like dogs by the Kefren nobility, outraged
beyond fury by the Great King’s reliance on them. All this, Ashurnan had known,
had seen at first hand and heard at second whilst growing into his manhood
within the confines of the ziggurat. His father had been a distant, stern
figurehead, hardly connected to him at all, but Vorus had looked in on him from
time to time, to make reports he supposed. He had hated Vorus, knowing that
Anurman, his own father, loved this alien Macht as though he were his son. He
would see the two of them together at state occasions, Vorus elevated to
commander of Ashur’s very garrison, made greater than the highest-caste Kefre
of the Great King’s own blood. He had hated Vorus for his patience, for his
honesty, for his loyalty. The very qualities any King needs in a friend.