The Ten Thousand (7 page)

“Look, Rictus—up
front. Do you see him?”

Rictus leaned on
his spear—the butt was becoming splintered—and peered through the coursing
crowds. A black shape, like a shadow cast on a bright day.

“A cursebearer.
What of him?”

“I’ve never seen
one before.”

“Really? A
sheltered life you’ve led.”

“If my eyes are
right, he wears scarlet too—at least I think so. We should speak to him.” He
paused. “Can we speak to him? Can one do that?”

“He’s not a god,
just a man who inherited his father’s harness. Come; if he’s truly wearing
scarlet then we must have a talk.”

“Where did you see
a cursebearer before?” Gasca demanded, a little put out at Rictus’s
non-excitement.

“We had maybe half
a dozen of them in Isca, the
mora
commanders, mostly.”

They pushed
through the crowd none too gently, and received angry glances. “Strawheads!”
someone called out, the ancient insult. Rictus smiled at the shouter and saw
him blench, then kept going, but using the shield with a little more
gentleness. Along his side of his chiton the blood was expanding in little
circles, and he had sweat shining on his forehead.

“Sir—a word if we
might!” he called out, for their quarry was getting too far ahead of them, people
making way for the black armour.

The cursebearer
halted in his tracks, turned round. He was a lowlander, shorter than them,
middle-aged, with a peppery beard and deep-hollowed eyes. He had a scarlet
cloak hung on one shoulder, the end of which was wrapped around his left
forearm. No weapons of any kind. The man did not speak, but looked Rictus and
Gasca up and down appraisingly, as a man would upon buying a horse. The two of
them stood silent before him, breathing through their mouths, feeling the appraisal,
lost for any more words.

The cursebearer
saw two tall boys who were almost men. They might have been brothers. Both were
light-skinned and fair of hair, the colouring of the inner mountains. One had
grey eyes, the other blue. The blue-eyed fellow was broader, heavier, and had
an open, friendly face. Grey-eyes looked underfed and ill-rested. In his glance
there was some knowledge of the world, hard come by.

“What is this word
you want?” the cursebearer asked. He had thick eyebrows, black as soot, and they
moved more than his mouth, which was a thin-lipped gash in his beard with bad
teeth behind it.

It was Rictus who
must needs reply. Gasca was still staring at the black cuirass which the man
wore. It seemed to soak up the very daylight, a midnight black so lightless it
appeared a hole in the fabric of the afternoon. This was the Curse of God, one
of the ancient armours which dated back to the origins of the Macht as a
people. None knew how they had been created, but the legends said that Gaenion
the Smith had made a wager with God Himself, betting that he could fashion a
darkness which not even his wife’s gaze could penetrate. His spouse was Araian,
the lady of the sun, and she was both an inquisitive and indolent creature.
When she rose from her bed her eyes saw all things, and when she left the skies
of Kuf in the evenings she would tell God Himself of the day’s doings.

Gaenion won his
wager, but God took the black stuff he had forged and gave it to Antimone,
Goddess of the Veil, for she was enamoured of darkness, and her two sons,
Phobos and Haukos, loved to ride the horses of the air through the sky when
Araian had left it for her bed.

Antimone wove
Gaenion’s hammered darkness into a chiton with which to clothe the first man of
the Macht, whom God had set down upon the surface of Kuf naked and afraid.
Antimone, in pity, gave this first man, whose name was Ask, the chiton to
protect him, for Gaenion’s fabric, though light and flexible, was more
impenetrable than stone. When God realised what Antimone had done, He was
angry, for He had intended that Ask and his kind should treat the other
denizens of the world with respect, and show them courtesy through fear of
their own vulnerability. But now Ask was unafraid, with Antimone’s Gift to
clothe him, and he set out to master the creatures of Kuf which God had
created. And so, through Antimone’s pity, Creation itself had been set awry. So
God cursed the black armour of Antimone, and stirred up the hearts of all the
other races of Kuf against Ask and his people. The Macht would be warriors
without compare, He decreed, but they would never know peace, and they would
have need of their black armour over the course of the world’s turning, for
they would pay in blood for their desire to master the earth.

Antimone was punished
also. She had erred in pity, in softness of heart, and so God set her down on
Kuf itself to watch over the Macht in all their travails down the millennia.
She would foresee the fate of those she loved, but would not be able to change
it, and so would weep bitter tears, for she would be witness to every crime
that man would commit in his tenure of the earth.

Her sons, Phobos
the elder and Haukos the younger, wished to follow their mother to Kuf, but God
forbade it as part of Antimone’s punishment. So they drew as near as they
dared, riding their great black horses in shadow across the night sky, when
Araian the sun was not there to tell God of their doings. Phobos hated the
Macht for causing his mother’s exile from heaven, and his white face leered down
upon men from the depths of the night sky. But Haukos had inherited his mother’s
soft heart. To his pink countenance men prayed for intercession with Antimone,
and hence, with God Himself.

Such was the
legend.

Whatever their
origin, there were some five thousand sets of Antimone’s black armour abroad in
the world, and those who bore them were known as cursebearers. The armour was
passed down through families for centuries, though many had changed hands in
battle. None were ever given up willingly, and a city might go to war for
possession of a single black cuirass. Ageless and indestructible, some said
that in them resided the very essence of the Macht as a people, and were they
to disappear, then so would mankind.

“We saw your
scarlet cloak, and the harness you bear, and wondered if you might be hiring,”
Rictus said to the man who stood before them now with one of these ancient
artefacts on his back.

The man cocked his
head to one side. “If I am, I do not hire in the middle of the street. Nor do I
like to be shouted at there by boys who still have their mother’s milk about
their gums.” One eyebrow rose at this, a mockery, though the rest of his face
remained grave.

Gasca took a step
forward, but Rictus tilted out his spear to bar his way.

“You’re right, of
course,” he said to the cursebearer. “You have our apologies. Would it be
acceptable for us to ask you—to ask you where it would be appropriate to look
for employment?”

The man smiled at
this. “You’ve not done much apologising in your time, boy. But you want
employment you say. As mercenaries?

“Yes, sir.”

“And is this all
the panoply you possess?”

“What you see is
all we have,” Gasca said. “But it has done good service before now.”

“No doubt. But it’s
not enough to get you both in the phalanx. One of you, perhaps, but the other
will have to apply to the light arm, or else be a camp servant. Go to the
northern gate, the Mithannon they call it. Outside the walls there’s a
marshalling square surrounded by tents and shacks. That’s where they hire
spears in this town.”

“Thank you,” both
Rictus and Gasca said at once, eyes bright as those of children promised some
treat.

The man chuckled. “You
came to the head of the snake. I am Pasion of Decanth. Drop my name there and
you may not get as hard a time. It’s late in the day to be touting your wares.
Leave it till the morning, and you’re less likely to be manhandled.”

“Thank you,”
Rictus said again.

“You’re from Isca,
boy, aren’t you?”

“I… How do you
know?”

“The way you met
my eyes. Most men outside the scarlet drop their gaze for a second on meeting a
cursebearer. You’ve had Iscan arrogance bred into you. Let slip that at the
hiring—it will do no harm. Now I must go.” He nodded at them both, then turned
and resumed his way through the crowd, the people parting before him as though
he were contagious.

“We have luck with
us,” Gasca said. “That’s a meeting the goddess had a hand in if ever anyone
did. And I have seen the Curse of God at last.”

“I didn’t come all
this way to be a camp servant,” Rictus said.

“Let us go to that
merchant’s inn. We’ll set ourselves up there and see about joining a company
tomorrow. We shall eat and drink and wash and find ourselves a bed.”

Rictus smiled. He
looked tired, older than his years, pinched with hunger and bad memories. “Lead
on then. And take this shield for a while— fair’s fair.”

* *
*

The Mithannon
faced north towards the Mithos River, a grey flash of cold mountain-water that
ran parallel to the walls of the city for five or six pasangs. The open plain
there had long ago been flattened out and beaten into a dirt bowl around which
there clustered irregular lines of wooden shacks and stalls, hide tents made
semipermanent with the addition of sod walls, and hundreds of low-roofed
ramshackle shelters brought into being with the connivance of a bewildering
variety of materials. The place seemed a mockery of the stone and marble
majesty of Machran itself, but if one looked closer there was an order to the
encampments. They ran in distinct lines, and some were cordoned off with rawhide
and hemp ropes mounted on posts. Flags and banners snapped everywhere, a kind
of ragged heraldry splashed across them, painted on signposts, daubed on the
skewed planks of shacks and cabins. And everywhere in the midst of these crude
streets there walked knots and files of men dressed in scarlet of some shade or
other. These were the Hiring Grounds, and the Marshalling Yards, and the
Spear-Market, and half a dozen other names besides. Here, men might join the
free companies, those soldiers who sold their spears to the highest bidder and
who owed allegiance to nothing except their comrades and themselves.

In the quarter of
the city closest to the Mithannon there was the greatest concentration of
wine-shops and brothels in all Machran. Here, the gracious architecture
degenerated into a hiving labyrinth of lesser buildings, built of fired brick
and undressed stone, roofed with reed-thatch from the riverbanks rather than
red tile, and lacking windows, often doors. Men had built upwards here, for
lack of space in the teeming alleyways about them. It seemed, looking up from
the splash and mire of the noisome streets, that the buildings leaned in on
each other for support, and a mason with a plumb-line might look around himself
in despair.

Up in the swallow’s
eyrie of one of these there was an upstairs room. A man might spit through the
gapped planks of the floor there onto the heads of the drinkers below, but
somehow the place stood, stubborn and askew and seething with all manner of
babel that wine could conjure out of men’s mouths. It was a place where
conversations could be had in shouts, and still no one an armspan away would
make sense of them.

“When is Phiron to
return?” one of the men asked. This was Orsos of Gast, whose face had writ
across it the dregs of every crime known to man. He was known as the Bull to
friends and enemies alike. Now his deep-set eyes glinted with suspicion. “I
have a firm offer from Akanos, me and my centon. Time is money, Pasion.
Promises never fattened a purse.”

The cursebearer
named Pasion cast his gaze down the long, wine-stained table. Twenty centurions
sat there in the faded red chitons of mercenaries. Any one of them alone would
have made a formidable foe; gathered together they were a fearsome assemblage
indeed. A jug of water sat untouched on the tabletop. Pasion knew better than
to buy them wine before the talking was done.

“He is in Sinon,”
Pasion said casually, “Putting the final touches to our arrangements. With fair
winds and good weather, he’ll be here in a week at the outside. What’s the
matter, Orsos; do you have trouble holding your men to the colour?”

“Not since I
stopped shitting yellow,” the Bull said, and about the length of the table
there were grunts of humour.

“Then have some
patience. Pity of the goddess, this is the biggest fee you’ll ever earn and you’re
havering over the matter of a few days here and there. If this thing comes off,
we will all of us be rich as kings.”

Greed warmed the
air of the room a little. The men leaned forward or back as the mood took them,
chairs creaking under a bulk of scarred muscle. From below, the raucous
slatternly din of the wine-shop rose up through the floorboards.

“Quite a little
army your Phiron is digging up, Pasion,” another of the men said. This fellow
was lean as whipcord, with one long brow of black across his forehead, and eyes
under it that made a blackbird’s seem dull. He had a trimmed goat’s-beard, and
a moist lip. No father would trust his daughter to that face.

“I hear that this
is only the tip of the spear, this host of ours gathered here. There’s more
down in Idrios, and others in Hal Goshen. We’ve near two thousand men in the
colour, here in Machran, and that’s the biggest crowd of hired spears I’ve ever
heard tell of. What employer is this that can hire such myriads and keep them
kicking their heels for weeks as though money were barley-grain to him?”

“Our employer’s
name is not to be spoken,” Pasion snapped. “Not yet. That is one of the terms
of the contract. You took the retainer, Mynon, so you will abide by it.”

“If you do not
mean to take Machran itself I would do something to reassure the Kerusia of it,”
another man said, a dark-skinned, hazel-eyed fellow with the voice of a singer.
“They’re more jittery than a bride on her wedding night, and wonder if we have
designs on their virtue. There’s talk of a League being gathered of the
hinterland cities: Ponds, Avennos and the like. They don’t like to see so many
of our kind gathered together for so long in one place.”