Authors: Paul Kearney
“When you get
back, have the physician stitch that hole closed. What’s behind it will heal in
time by itself. For now, let it bleed free; let it bleed the dirt out. A
sauroter spike is a filthy thing to have had in you.” He clapped Ogio on the
arm, grinning his yellow grin, then rose and padded over to Rictus. In his hand
were the rags of the tunic. He tossed them into Rictus’s lap. “Bind yourself
up. You’re likely to bleed to death else.”
Rictus looked into
his dark eyes. “Why do you not kill me?”
Remion frowned. “Shut
your mouth.”
Rictus wondered if
he were to die anyway. On the battlefield his wound had seemed a thing of
little account. He could still move, run, thrust a spear and behave as a man
ought. But now that the bloodied press of the phalanx had been left behind it
all seemed so much worse. He looked at the men he had wounded and felt sick at
their blood—he who had been around blood and killing all his life.
You want to
eat; then something must have its throat wrung,
his father had said.
Nothing can be had for nothing. When life gives you something, something else
must be taken in return. That is the merest logic.
“Why do you not
kill me?” Rictus asked again. Bewildered.
The man called
Remion glared at him and raised his spear as if to stab. Rictus did not flinch.
He was past that, still in the place where his own life did not matter. He
looked up with wide eyes. Curiosity, resignation. No fear.
“I had a son,”
Remion said at last, his face bunched as tight as his blue-veined bicep. His
eyes were black.
They broke the
fittings off his father’s spear, leaving an arm’s span of splintered wood, and
with this they made a yoke, binding Rictus’s hands before him and then sliding
the shaft through that space between spine and elbows. Rictus did not resist.
He had been brought up to believe in victory and death. He did not know quite
what to make of defeat, and thus stood like a pole-axed ox as they bound
him—not with spite—but like tired men who are keen to get home. Hurt men. The
blood-smell rose even over the stink of shit on Broken-nose’s thighs.
They picked up the
aichme and sauroter. Remi stowed them in the hollow of his tunic. No doubt one
day he would burn them out and reset them in virgin wood. Good spear fittings
were more valuable than gold. They would see service again. The
horsehair-crested helm was claimed by the man with the hole in his face, Ogio.
Already, his face was swelling up like an apple, shiny and pink.
Finally, some of
Rictus’s numbness gnawed through.
“My father lives
in the green glen past—”
“Your father is
carrion now, boy,” Remion said. And there was even a kind of pity in his face
as he said it.
Rictus twisted,
eyes wide, and Broken-nose beat the flat of his spear-shaft into his nape. A
white detonation. Rictus fell to his knees, opening one up like liver. “Please,”
he said. “Please don’t—”
Again, he was
beaten. First the spear-shaft, and then a fist clumping again and again into
the top of his spine. A childish punching, fuelled by rage more than the
knowledge of where a fist does damage. He rode it out, forehead on the sand,
blinking furiously and trying to make his thoughts come in some kind of order.
“The bastard begs!”
I didn’t beg, he
thought. At least, not for me. For my father, I will beg. For my father.
He twisted his
head, still pounded, and caught Remion’s eye.
“Please.”
Remion understood
perfectly. Rictus knew that. In these few, bloody minutes he had come to know
the older man well.
No,
Remion
mouthed. His face was grey. In that instant, Rictus knew that he had seen all
this before. Every permutation of this stupid little dance had already printed
its steps in the older man’s memory. The dance was as old as Hell itself.
Something else his
father had said: Do
not believe that men reveal themselves only in defeat.
Victory tugs the veil aside also.
Goddess of the
Veil; bitter, black Antimone, whose real name must never be spoken. Now she
smiles. Now she hovers here about these dunes, dark wings flickering.
The black side to
life. Pride, hate, fear. Not evil— that is something else. Antimone merely
watches what we do to ourselves and each other. Her tears, it is said, water
every battlefield, every sundered marriage-bed. She is un-luck, the ruin of
life. But only because she is there when it happens.
The deeds, the
atrocities—those we do to ourselves.
A
LONG DAY’S TROUBLE
“We are late to
the party, my friends,” Remion said.
Dusk was coming
on, and a bitter wind was beating around the pines on the hillsides. Rictus’s
arms were numb from the elbow down, and when he looked at his hands he saw they
were swollen and blue. He sank to his knees, unable to look at the valley
below.
Broken-nose yanked
his head up by the hair. “Watch this, boy. See what happens when you go about
starting wars. This is how it ends.”
There was a city
in the valley, a long, low cluster of stone-built houses with clay-tiled roofs.
Rictus had made tiles like that on his father’s farm. One shaped the mud upon
the top of one’s thigh.
For perhaps two
pasangs, the streets ran in clumps and ribbons, with a scattering of
pine-shadowed lots among them. Here and there the marble of a shrine blinked
white. The theatre where Rictus had seen Sarenias performed rose inviolate,
head and shoulders above the swallow’s-nest alleyways. And surrounding all, the
very symbol of the city’s integrity, was an undulating stone wall two
spear-lengths high. There were three gates visible from this direction alone,
and into each ran the brown mud of a road. A hill rose up at one end of this
sprawling metropolis, one flank a sheer crag. Upon this a citadel had been
built with a pair of tall towers within. There was a gatehouse, black with age,
and the gleam of bronze on the ramparts.
And people, people
everywhere.
The sound of the
city’s agony carried up into the hills. A dull roar, a swallowing up of all
individual voice, so that it seemed the sound was not made by men and women and
children, but was the torment of the city itself. It rose with the smoke, which
now began to smart Rictus’s eyes. Plumes of black rose in ribands and banners
within the circuit of the walls. Crowds clogged the streets, and in the midst
of the roar one could now make out the clangour of metal on metal. At every
gate, mobs of men were pressing inwards with spears held aloft, bearing the
hollow-bowled shields of the Macht warrior class. There were devices on those
shields, a city badge.
Rictus looked to
his side in the gathering darkness, at Remion. His captors had retrieved their
cached panoplies on the way here. White on scarlet, there was painted upon
Remion’s shield the sigil
gabios,
first letter of his city’s name.
Almost all the shields below had such devices.
“Isca dies at
last,” Remion said. “Well, it has been a long time coming, and you folk have
been a long time asking for it.”
“You thought you
were better than us,” Broken-nose sneered. “The mighty Iscans, peerless among
all the Macht. Now we will fuck your women and slaughter your old and make
slaves of your vaunted warriors. What have you to say to that, Iscan?” He
punched Rictus in the side of the head.
Rictus staggered,
straightened, and slowly rose to his feet. He stared at the death of his city,
the red bloom of its fall now beginning to light the darkening sky. Such things
happened perhaps once in a generation. He had merely been unlucky, he and all
his comrades.
“I say,” he said
quietly, “that it took not one, nor two, but three cities in alliance to bring
us to this. Without the men of Bas Mathon, and Caralis, you would have been
chased clear off the field.”
“Bastard!” and
Broken-nose raised his spear. Remion took one step forward, so that he was
between them. His eyes did not shift from the sights in the valley below. “The
boy speaks the truth,” he said. “The Iscans bested us. Had it not been for the
arrival of our allies, it would be Gan Burian burning now.”
Ogio, he of the
swollen, punctured face, spoke up. “The Iscans began it. They reap what they
have sown.”
“Yes,” Remion
said. “They have earned this.” He turned to regard Rictus squarely. “You Iscans
put yourselves apart, drilled like mercenaries, made war in the same way others
planted the vine and the olive. You made it your business, and became better at
it than we. But you forgot something.” Remion leaned closer, so that Rictus was
washed by the garlic of his breath. “We are all the same, in the end, all of
us. In this world, there are the Kufr, and the Macht. You and I are of the same
blood, with the same iron in our veins. We are brothers in our flesh. But
forgetting this, you chose to take war—which is a natural thing—to an unnatural
end. You sought to enslave my city.”
He straightened. “The
extinction of a city is a sin in the eyes of God. A blasphemy. We will be
forgiven for it only because it was forced upon us. Look upon Isca, boy. This
is God’s punishment for your crime. For seeking to make slaves of your own
people.”
Up into the sky
the red light of the sack reached, vying with the sunset, merging with it so
that it seemed to be all one, the burning city, the dying day, the loom of the
white mountains all around, stark peaks blackening with shadow. The end of the
world, it seemed. And for Rictus, it was. The end of the life he had known
before. For a moment, he was a boy indeed, and he had to blink his stinging
eyes to keep the tears from falling.
Broken-nose
hoisted his shield up so that the hollow of it rested on his shoulder. “I’m
off. If we don’t shift ourselves the prettiest women will all be taken.” He
grinned, for a moment becoming almost a likeable man, someone who would stand
by his friends, share his wine. “Come, Remion; leave that big ox harnessed here
for the wolves. What say you to a scarlet night? We’ll drink each cup to the
lees, and rest our heads on something softer than this frozen ground.”
Remion smiled. “You
go on, you and Ogio. I will catch you up presently. I have one last business to
attend to.”
“You want help?”
Ogio asked. His misshapen face leered with hatred as he peered at Rictus.
“Go get the
carnifex to look at that hole,” Remion said. “I can attend to this on my own.”
The other two
Burians looked at one another and shrugged. They set off, sandals pattering on
the cold ground, Rictus’s helm dangling from one of their belts. Down the
hillside, following the hardened mud of the road, into the roar and glow of the
valley below where they would find recompense for their long day’s trouble.
With a sigh,
Remion set down the heavy bronze-faced shield, then laid his spear on the
ground. His helm, a light, leather bowl, he left dangling at his waist. From
the look of it, he had eaten broth out of it that morning. He took his knife
and thumbed the edge.
Rictus raised his
head, exposing his throat.
“Don’t be a damned
fool,” Remion snapped. He cut the bindings from Rictus’s wrists, and slid the
spear-shaft free of his elbows. Rictus gasped with pain. His hands flooded with
fire. He sat back on the ground, air whistling through his teeth, white agony,
a feeling to match the sights of the evening.
They sat side by
side, the grizzled veteran and the big-boned youth, and watched the dramas
below.
“I remember
Arienus, when it went up, twenty, twenty-five years ago,” Remion said. “I was a
fighting man then, selling my spear for a living, with mercenary scarlet on my
back instead of farmer’s felt. I got two women out of the sack and some coin, a
horse, and a mule. I thought I had climbed the pig’s back.” He smiled, Isca’s
burning lit tiny yellow worms in his eyes.
“I married one of
the girls; the other I gave to my brother. The horse bought me citizenship and
a
taenon
of hill-land. I became a Burian, put aside the red cloak. I
had—I had a son, daughters. The blessings of life. I had heart’s desire.”
He turned to
Rictus, his face as hard and set as something hewn out of stone. “My son died
at the Hienian River battle, four years back. You killed him, you Iscans.” He
looked back at Isca below. It seemed that the spread of the fires was being
stymied. Beetled crowds packed the streets still, but now there were chains of
men and women leading from the city wells, passing buckets and cauldrons from
hand to hand, fighting the flames. Only up around the citadel did it seem that
fighting went on. But still, from the houses in the untouched districts, the
screams and shouts rose, wails of women outraged, children terrified, men dying
in fury and fear that they might not see what was to become of those they
loved.
“I fought today
because if I had not I would have lost the right to be a citizen of Gan Burian,”
Remion said. “We are Macht, all of us. In the world beyond the mountains I have
heard that the Kufr tell tales of our savagery, our prowess on the battlefield.
But among ourselves, we are only men. And if we cannot treat one another as
men, then we are no better than Kufr ourselves.”
Rictus was
clenching and unclenching his bulbous fists. He could not say why, but Remion
made him feel ashamed, like a child admonished by a patient father.
“Am I your slave?”
he asked.
Remion glared at
him. “Are you cloth-eared, or merely stupid? Take yourself away from here. In a
few days’ time Isca will be no more. We will raze the walls and sow the ground
with salt. You are
ostrakr,
boy; cityless. You must find yourself
another way to get on in the world.”
The wind picked
up. It battered the pines about their heads and made the branches thrash like
black wings grasping at the sunset. Remion looked up.