Authors: Paul Kearney
“What’s going to
happen?” Gasca asked him. “What did the Kerusia decide?”
Rictus wiped his
mouth. Around him, even in the gathering dark, he was suddenly aware of men
pausing in their conversations, cocking an ear to listen.
“We have to stay
together,” he said. He raised his voice as he said it, and like a stone dropped
in a pond, he felt the ripples of his words grip men further and further away
across the square as they listened in. I should stand up and shout, he thought.
But then it would be a speech, and they’d not listen anymore.
“If we break up,
they’ll cut us to pieces. Together we are an army, a Macht army. On the Kunaksa
we beat their best, all by ourselves. If we stay together, hold to the colour,
then we can do it again. And we’ll have to, if we’re to make it all the way
back. We’re marching home by the shortest route, across Pleninash and Kerkh and
Hafdaran, through the Korash Mountains, across Askanon and Gansakr, until we
find ourselves back on the shores of the sea, at Sinon. That’s what we’re
doing. And we’ll march as an army, the whole fucking way. All of us.”
THE MARCH TO THE
SEA
THE GENERAL’S KUFR
Three pasangs
long, the column stretched straight as the Imperial Road would allow across the
soggy lowlands of the plain. Up front, a mora of light-armed troops spread out
on a kind of shapeless crescent before the head of the main body, a thousand
men with javelins and light spears and a weird confection of shields. None wore
scarlet; none in the entire column wore scarlet any more, for those chitons had
been too soaked in the mud and gore of past battles to be of further use. They
wore instead the felt tunics of Asurian peasants, or cut-down linen robes
looted from some Kufr’s household. But upon these rags rested the bronze of
their fathers, and on the shoulders of that armour they leaned the long spears
their race had carried from time immemorial.
The column was
composed almost entirely of marching men, until one came to the latter third.
Here, light wagons
and single-axle carts trooped, drawn by mules and horses and asses and oxen and
any beast which could shoulder a yoke. There were some two hundred of these
vehicles, and perhaps a thousand men walked among them, leaning their shoulders
against the wheels when the animals up front faltered in their relentless
haulage. Behind this cumbersome train there marched a further two thousand
spearmen. These two morai, like the two in the van, did not keep their heavy
shields in the wagon-beds, but wore them on their shoulders. And periodically
they would halt, about-turn, and present a bristling, impenetrable front to
whatever or whoever might be approaching the army from the rear. Thus the Macht
marched, away from the Bekai River, and into the heart of the Pleninash
lowlands.
“I see them as a
dark line on the horizon, no more,” the Juthan, Proxis, said, frowning. “They
collected themselves as if they have a purpose.”
“Of course they
do,” Vorus told him. “They are marching home.”
“We slaughtered
their high command, and yet…”
“The Macht vote on
things,” said Vorus. He smiled a little. “They vote, and create new things out
of that collective will. It is not a good way to run an army, and yet here we
are and there go they, marching as though nothing had happened. They have
another leader, Proxis, someone they all respected before we slaughtered their
generals. He must be a good man to have wrought such wonders out of them at
Kunaksa. I wonder if I know him.”
The two generals
were ahead of the main body some pasang or so, seated on their long-suffering
mounts. Behind them, Kaik rose above the Bekai River on its ancient mound, the
gates of the city wide open, lines of Kefren troops streaming past it, crossing
the river by the two undefended bridges.
“They stripped
Kaik bare,” Proxis said, a hard gleam in his eye. “Food, water, wine, horses,
oxen, and hundreds of my people to be taken along as slaves, beasts of burden.
But then that is what we have always been.”
Vorus looked at
his companion and nodded. “Yes, you have. But I hear tell that in Jutha now the
people are arming, and it’s not to fight the Macht.”
Proxis allowed
himself a small, humourless smile. “I have heard that also.”
“These fine
fellows we’re after, if we let them they’ll tear up half the Empire in their
wake.”
“Perhaps the
Empire’s day has come and gone,” Proxis said and looked away, not able to meet
Vorus’s eyes.
“If it has, then
so has ours,” Vorus said angrily, and he kicked his horse forward.
The Great King
took up residence in the Governor’s Palace of Kaik. His immense baggage train
was moved forward from the east bank of the river, and for the space of a day
the unfortunate inhabitants of the city watched as the endless line of wagons
and carts and pack mules entered their gates. They were to have the honour and
blessing of the King’s presence among them for some time to come, as he had
designated Kaik his forward headquarters. What crumbs the Macht had left them
were now ferreted out by the stewards of the Royal Household. Skeining out
across the bountiful lowlands of Pleninash, the foraging parties went in their
columned thousands, more troops set to gathering supplies than marched behind
Vorus in pursuit of the enemy. These were the realities of warfare. Even the
diminished host the Great King still held to his standards represented another
three or four cities of hungry mouths set down in the middle of the region. And
more troops were arriving by the week: levies come late to the campaign,
summoned from every crevice of the Empire which would produce and arm warriors.
“I want reports
from Vorus every day,” Ashurnan said. The fanbearers wafted perfume into his
face. Lately, the very hall in which he sat had been used as a meeting-place by
the generals of the Macht. It had been scrubbed clean by Juthan slaves and
sluiced down with well-water, but still the Great King could not get out of his
mind the picture of those creatures sitting up and down the long table before
him. He ordered the table taken out and burnt.
“They have made of
Kaik a sewer,” he said to himself. And when old Xarnes leaned closer to catch
his words he waved a hand. “No matter. General Berosh, we are certain that the
messengers went off before the Macht took possession of the city?”
Berosh, the new
commander of his majesty’s bodyguard, bowed by way of affirmation. “They and
their escorts were on the road before the battle on the hills had ended, my
lord. They are well on their way.”
“So much the
better.” Ten heads, ten dead men’s faces pickled in jars, to be shown around
the Empire like so many signposts of warning. That, at least, had gone to plan.
“A pity we could
not have been so quick with the gold,” he said, and Berosh bowed again.
“When the Asurian
Horse has refitted and rested they are to join Vorus. We need cavalry to keep
pace with these animals. We must get ahead of them, pen them in.” Ashurnan
thumped his fist down on the elbow of his throne. “They must be rounded up and
destroyed to the last man.”
“All possible
steps are being taken, my lord,” Berosh said, inclining his head.
“Taken—yes—taken
now.
Now that the foe is on the wing.” He stood up, and the whole chamber
full of courtiers, slaves, soldiers, and attendants bowed deep. All his life,
this had been the protocol, the way things were done, but right now he felt it
suffocating him.
His brother’s
face, as the blade took him under the chin.
“Clear the room,”
he said. “All but Xarnes and Berosh.
Now.”
They went out in a
hushed queue, even the fanbearers. Ashurnan stripped the heavy robe from his
shoulders. In the long linen singlet he wore beneath, he went to one of the
great wall-openings, a tall window without glass. There was a breeze up here,
and it played cool on the soaked fabric of his undergarment. He pulled off the
royal komis and felt the air on his face, breathed deep. Even here, he could
smell the foul stench of the lower city.
“Great King,”
Xarnes began uncertainly.
“I was too hot,
Xarnes, nothing more. Leave me be. There is nothing to fear. Nothing at all.”
To Berosh, he spoke over his shoulder. “Have couriers sent to the north-west
provinces, all governors. If I find one city which opens its gates to the
Macht, I shall raze it. Do you hear me, Berosh?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I shall have no
more Kefren cities defiled as they have defiled this one, filling the streets
with blood and excrement. I want the streets washed. Turn out the whole
population if you have to, but make this place clean again.”
He turned to face
them, and closed his eyes, the breeze cooling his back, unwrinkling the sodden
linen.
“We must wash them
from our world, Berosh. They do not belong here. I do not think they ever have.”
When they camped
for the night, the Macht dug a shallow ditch all around their camp. It was not
so much a defence as a demarcation. The ten morai laid out their bedrolls in a
great hollow square, and in the centre of this were the baggage vehicles and
the draught animals, the paychests full of the gold of Tanis, and the Juthan slaves
that had been led out of Kaik in chains with sacks and barrels and jars
balanced on their heads, the way in which the Kufr had carried their burdens
since the world had been created.
The men slept on
the ground, wrapped in whatever blankets and hangings they had been able to
loot from Kaik. Most had managed to keep hold of their scarlet cloaks also, and
so in the evenings there was almost a uniformity about their appearance. The
foraging parties usually made it back into camp around dusk, each two or three
centons strong, each—if they had been lucky—resembling a rural circus, for the
procession of braying, bleating, clucking animals they drew along in their
ranks. By the time they returned, the wood-gathering parties would have come
in, and the water-haulers. The fires would be lit under the big centoi with the
water bubbling within. In all, perhaps a third of the army was scattered across
the surrounding countryside by late afternoon of every day, stripping it clean
of anything the Macht could possibly make use of. By the time the army were a
week out of Kaik this had become routine, and despite the Kufr scouts watching
them from the tallest of the surrounding tells, there was as yet no other sign
of the Great King’s pursuit.
Tiryn sat near one
of the central fires in the midst of the baggage, her Juthan slave heating
something in a copper pot over the flames. Jason looked out for them, making
sure they had food at the end of each day, and the common soldiery knew better
now than to try and molest the general’s Kufr. When he could, he would join
them at the fire in the later part of the night, and he and Tiryn would trade
words in each other’s tongues, she reaching Asurian and learning Machtic as he
did the opposite. It was a little piece of routine which anchored Tiryn to some
kind of reality in a bewildering world, and she had come to look forward to
those quiet nights by the campfire, even the animals asleep in their rope
corrals, Jason and she exchanging quiet words, using their minds for something
other than the day to day business of survival.
He was frowning as
he arrived this night. He wrapped his cloak about his knees as he took his
usual place by the fire, as if to keep out the memories of the day as much as
the cool night air. He looked around at the wagons and carts parked in lines,
the hobbled horses and mules, the nodding oxen, and the lines of chained Juthan
sitting silent and exhausted by their day’s labour.
“They’re damn near
as good as mules, these people,” he said to Tiryn, nodding at her personal
slave. The Juthan girl sat eyes downcast on the other side of the fire, a hemp
slave collar about her broad throat. In her hands the copper pot sat forgotten.
“Her name is
Ushdun,” Tiryn said. “She was born in Junnan, in northern Jutha, and was given
to an Imperial Tax Collector as part payment for her father’s debt.”
Jason considered
this, disgust on his face. “These people give up their children to pay a tax?”
Tiryn’s eyes
burned. “It is the way the Empire works. Arkamenes told me it was good for the…
the circulation of the population, and it avoided beggaring the smallholders.
Most have too many mouths to feed as it is.” Like my father, she thought hut
could not say—would never say.
“Then they deserve
their Empire,” Jason said with contempt.
“Do you not have
slaves in your homeland?”
“Yes, but they’re
taken in war, not freely given up by their parents.” He thought again, shrugged
a little. “Well, maybe the goatherder tribes—but they’re little better than
animals.”
“And are we, then,
little better than animals?”
Jason looked at
her, head cocked to one side. “Your Machtic is very good now. What say you, we
try and get my Asurian up to the same mark?”
“The word for
slave is
durun.
The word for animal is
qaf.
Have you heard of the
Qaf?”
Jason smiled. “I
see I am to be educated in several ways tonight. I have heard of them, yes.”
“They are taller
than the tallest Kefre, and broader than Juthan. They live far north of here,
in the snows of the Korash Mountains. They do not like the heat of the
lowlands, but I saw some in Ashur.”
“They sound like
fearsome creatures indeed.”
“The word for
angry is
irghe.
You are angry tonight.”
“Did Gasca bring
you that jar of wine? I’d have some, if there’s any left.”
She ordered the
Juthan to get it out of the wagon. Jason clicked off the clay lid and drank
straight from the lip of the jar. He wiped his mouth, nodding. “That’s the
right stuff. I was sick of palm wine. It’s a relief to know someone here makes
a drink out of the grape.” He caught Tiryn’s eyes still upon him. “Yes, I am
angry.”