In the dead hours of the night the weary Kefren pickets posted along the hills of Kunaksa looked up to the star-spattered sky. Clouds had come shifting in from the mountains in the east and were now building up overhead to blot out the welkin. One by one the moons disappeared: first pink Haukos with his blessings of hope and compassion, and then leering white-cold Phobos, moon of fear. The night closed in and the rain began, a steady drizzle that did not put out the campfires of the army, but which made all those tens of thousands who lay beside them in the mud edge a little closer to the flames. The spring rains were early. It was a gift from Bel, the Renewer. Mot, god of death and dry-baked summer soil had left the world to his rival for a night, and the cold rain pattered bitterly down to deepen the mud of the war-scarred plain.
The rain brought Tiryn round, pattering into her open mouth and prickling a chill tattoo on her skin. Forgetting where she was, she sought for a moment to wipe it out of her eyes, but then remembered and blinked herself fully awake.
Blurred torchlight, shadows moving before it, back and forth, as they had moved in her nightmares. She shivered convulsively for a few moments under the cold, intimate kisses of the rain, and blinked her vision clear. The hub of the wagon-wheel had gouged a bruise deep into the small of her back, and her bound hands were blue and numb, roped to the rim. She was naked. She no longer knew or cared how many times she had been raped.
The camp was all astir, not the night-time routine of sentries but full, chaotic, crowded, and shouted movement. Some new thing had happened, some new chapter in the savagery of the earth. Tiryn closed her eyes again, meat tied to a wagon-wheel, the mind within drawing back from the world, gnawing on itself, unable to give up the obscenities it had seen.
They were five pasangs from the battle lines here, the humid heat-shimmer of the day before not even allowing them the chance to spectate. Tiryn had walked out of the flimsy stockade with only her maid beside her and had watched the great creeping darknesses of the armies move across the surface of the earth. Faint on the still air had come the awful roar of their meeting. The Macht were winning, she had heard, and she watched Arkamenes’s army advance up the hillside. And she had thought it over, the thing done, the day behind them. My Prince, she thought, is now a King.
Incredibly swift, the disintegration of those complacencies. First there were the stragglers, the cowardly, the broken, the walking wounded. And then had come the great mass of infantry, the Juthan Legion, the Kefren of the main line. These had poured past the camp with barely a glance to spare for those inside, too terrified even to try their hand at the paychests. Because behind them the enemy were snapping like vorine on the heels of sheep.
The Asurian cavalry had been first into the camp, tall high-caste Kefren on magnificent horses, statues of gold and iron and lapis lazuli with bright eyes and bloody swords. The Juthan bag-gage-bearers had fought them off with whips and sticks and ladles and any object that came to hand. When none did, they leapt on the horsemen and used their teeth. They had fought to the end and Tiryn, even in the grip of her terror, had wondered at their ferocious courage.
Her bodyguard, Hurth, had never thought much of her; she had known that. High caste as he was, he thought it demeaning to watch over a little hufsa whore. But he had tried to get her out of the camp, and when they had been caught, it was with his own life that he had bought her the time to run away. This had shocked her, that he had done such a thing. She and her remaining maid had gone to ground after it, too cowed to try again. They had been like rabbits, cowering in knowledge of their own end and unable to do anything about it.
The end had come, the Asurians had prevailed, and the sack of the baggage camp had begun.
Arkamenes was dead, that much was made clear by the triumphant enemy troops who now began to loot the tents and wagons of the army, searching always and foremost for the paychests containing the gold of Tanis. These found, they had time to attend to lighter matters, and one of these was discovered in Arkamenes’s tent, a curved mountain-knife in her fist. A single wound Tiryn had inflicted, and that only enough to earn her a beating. At first she had been set to one side as the looting went on, and the higher-caste concubines of the harem were ferreted out. But once all these had been claimed they came back for her, killed the Juthan maid who threw herself at them, and began the sport of the evening.
Perhaps her own caste would have been gentler; perhaps not. In any case, Tiryn had ended the long, long day tied to this wagon-wheel, and used by any passing soldier who did not mind the blood, the muck, the bruises, and the shining slime of other Kufr’s leavings which now painted her skin.
Arkamenes is dead, she thought. Why can it not be over? And she prayed to Mot, the dark god, for the blessing of her own release.
One hundred paces away, in the tent that had been his brother’s, the Great King was roused out of sleep by old Xarnes. No ceremony; Honai were lighting the lamps without being given leave to do so, and Xarnes had actually touched the royal shoulder to bring Ashurnan into the present. He sat up at once, still fully dressed, though wearing his brother’s silk slippers.
“What’s happened?” Fear of the event had taken away their fear of him; it must be bad.
“The Macht have attacked, my lord-all along the hills.”
Ashurnan blinked. A Honai held out a goblet of wine and he waved it away, frowning. “How long did I sleep?”
“Three hours, my lord, by the turn of the clock.”
“Any word from Vorus?”
“Nothing as yet.”
“Then how do we know?”
Xarnes hesitated. He looked very old in the gathering lamplight, an elderly man kept from his bed. “Some of the troops up on the Kunaksa have already fled this far.”
There it was, cold water down the spine. Ashurnan rolled out of bed and straightened with the quicksilver poise of a dancer. “Stand-to the bodyguard,” he said. “Couriers to Vorus. Where is Proxis?”
“In the camp, my lord, but we have not yet located him. He was supervising the transport of the paychests across the river until the middle night.”
“Find him, Xarnes.”
“Yes, lord.” The ancient chamberlain bowed and withdrew.
The Honai were watching him. We had victory, Ashurnan thought-we had the glory of it, the thing sitting in our very hands. What in the depths of hell have these animals done to me now? Can they not lie down and die?
They were dying indeed. They were dying by the hundred, but they were on their feet and advancing over their own dead. In the rain-drenched dark of the starless night they were singing the Paean of their race, and never had it seemed so apposite as now that the battle-hymn of the Macht should also be the song sung in the hour of death.
They advanced on a frontage of some seven hundred paces, a compact mass of interlocked centons and morai. The line was ragged as men tripped in the dark or wove around obstacles half-seen until a boulder barked their shins, but it came together again always, the clash of bronze in the blackness guiding those who lost their way, the mud sucking the sandals off their feet, the rain-the blessed rain-trickling down their bodies so that whole morai raised their heads as one and opened their mouths to let the life of the water spot their tongues. Antimone had fluttered her Veil, men said. She wept above them, and so they had her tears to moisten their mouths here, in the shadow of strange mountains. The rain gave them new strength, new heart. It did not convince them that they would live, but it persuaded them that they could make a good end.
The Kufr pickets had been swept away in the first moments, and now the Macht had pushed deep into the scattered ranks of the King’s army, catching hundreds, thousands of his troops before they had gathered into formation. The Macht heavy spearmen stabbed out in the dark at half-guessed masses of milling bodies and kept advancing. It was not the casualties that mattered but the fact of their advance, that remorseless tide of flesh and bronze welling up out of the night, the Paean rising with it, the feet of the infantry keeping time. This was an army the Kufr had already made a story of. As the morai advanced, so the Great King’s forces streamed away from the forefront of that line. For pasangs up and down the hills a panic took root. This-an assault on this scale-could not be happening in the dark of a moonless night. It was impossible. And so the Kufr troops assigned mythical properties to the half-seen battle line of the Macht spearmen, and the song which accompanied their relentless advance.
Only the Honai of the Great King’s bodyguard stood firm. Ten thousand heavy infantry, superbly armoured, they moved into rank with a discipline that baffled their fellow soldiers and took up position like a rock around which the waters of their lesser brethren whirled and rippled. Midarnes, their general, stood at their rear, and here Vorus found him standing as stolid as some ancient reared-up stone.
“Hold them,” Vorus said. “We must stop them here. Dawn is not far off. When the sun rises, things shall take a different turn.”
Midarnes was a nobleman of the old school, as high a caste as one could come at in this Empire without becoming a king. In the dark his eyes shone pale, looming over Vorus. He looked down on the Macht renegade without rancour, with even a shade of respect. “Your people,” he said, “are worthy of the stories.” Then he straightened. “You had best see to the flanks. Here in the centre, I shall hold them.”
In songs and stories, the lines met with a great clash and roar. Sometimes this was true. But in the dark of that rain-swept night on the hills of Kunaksa, the Macht and the Great King’s Honai melted together in a wicked hedge of spearpoints lit up by the kicked sparks of dying campfires, a cataclysm introduced at walking pace-blind, savage, and bloodier than any legend.
Rictus was in the front rank. The initial contact was a glimpse of pale gold, and then a massive impact of some great creature’s shield upon his own. He felt the breath of the thing on his eyes as they were pinned there, breast to breast, by the weight of the ranks behind them both. He stabbed out with his spear, as did his opponent, but they could not stab at each other. They were held there in a vice of flesh and blood, this thing a foot taller than him, its thighs moving against his own in a strangely intimate struggle through the muck underfoot. He butted the thing in the windpipe with his crested helm, and its weight gave a little. Immediately, the press of the men behind sent him forward. His opponent slid downwards. There was the smell of blood, the scrape of bronze, and the thing was at his waist, his knees, and then under his feet. He stamped down on it with his bare heel, one strike encountering the hard jar of bronze, the second snapping something of flesh. Then he was propelled along again, and he knew that the sauroters of those behind him would take care of it. Another face, another form, impossibly tall, with the same eyes. The panic to be fought, until he locked down the fact that the aichmes of those behind him were at work. One of the great eyes went dark, and again, the thing slid down, clunked earthwards to be kicked and stabbed in the ankle-deep muck, the flesh robbed of the spirit, the advance continuing. Those in the rear ranks were still singing the Paean, a hoarse, dry-throated rasp of defiance. Rictus smashed his shield forward into the line, aware now of the light indomitability of the cuirass he wore, the different balance of the transverse-crested helm. I lead these men, he thought calmly. They look to me-to this black armour, this crest.
I must be better than this, he thought.
And so he used his gangling strength to butt forward into the enemy line, his feet sinking deep into the mud, the foreign silt splaying his toes as they took the weight. He pushed his way into the Honai ranks with no skill or courage, merely a black determination to see the thing done. And before him, the Honai were shoved backwards, lowering their shields as their balance went-and into that gap the aichmes of the Macht stabbed pale and dark, silver and bloody, and a gap was opened out, and the shield-wall of the Honai was ruptured.
Vorus felt the balance of the thing shift, even in the dark, even in the epicentre of that great, flailing cauldron of violence. The lines of Kefren spearmen before him seemed to shudder, like a horse twitching off a fly. And then there was a sullen, agonising falling back. It scarcely seemed possible that the tall Kefren of the Honai could be physically pushed back by the Macht, but this was happening. They were not retreating; they were being killed up at the front of the line faster than they could be replaced, and they were being physically shoved backwards.
They will break, Vorus realised. He was not entirely, intellectually surprised, but he was still shocked. After all these years in the east, he had thought the Honai of the Great King unbeatable. He had forgotten too much about his own heritage.
The line broke. Not the wholesale rout of the day before, but a bitter, sullen retreat. It was like watching a flock of starlings, at one moment so black and dense as to fill the sky, the next, a scattered shifting cloud opening up into something else. The Honai did not turn their backs on the enemy, but fell back step by step, and as they retreated so their formation was scrambled. No longer a battle line, it was fast becoming a mere dense crowd of individuals.
Vorus reached up and took Midarnes by the upper arm. “Withdraw. Pull back your companies and reform.”
Midarnes looked down at him, and actually smiled. “Never.” Then he raised his voice and shouted in the Kefren of the Court. “To me! Rally to me!” He raised his spear and smote it upon the brazen face of his shield. Around him, the Honai began to coalesce in a formless crowd. Further away, the Macht were still pushing them back, wedges of their troops battering through the ranks and stepping over the dead. And all this in a darkness lit only by the hellish glow of a few neglected campfires, and the rain silvering down to hiss in meeting with the sparks flying up, as though fire and water were at war also.
Jason stepped out of the front rank. There was a gap opening up before his men, a space. He held his spear up horizontal above his head and shouted until he thought the veins in his throat would burst. “Hold! Hold here!” He jogged up the line. The Kefren were streaming backwards, beaten for the moment, and the front ranks of the Macht stood on hummocked mounds of their dead.
A transverse crest. He grabbed the man’s shoulder. Who was it? It did not matter. “Wheel left-pass it on. All morai to wheel left starting with Mynon on the extreme right. Pass it down the line!”
The minutes passed. He looked up at the sky, but saw only blank darkness, felt the rain on his eyes and licked it off his lips, his mouth and throat heaving-dry. He had gone past exhaustion. He must stay upright now, keep moving. If he stopped or so much as laid down his shield, he would never be able to lift it again.
At last the movement, and the Paean out on the right, a thousand tortured voices. Thank the goddess the line was short, five morai long, six hundred paces. And behind it, what was left of the wounded, and the rear companies. The Macht were in an immense square, ragged, incomplete, but compact. Cohesion, Jason thought, that’s the thing. Mynon will keep the right-hand lines together. Phobos, we’re too slow!
The Macht line wheeled westwards, pivoting on Buridan’s mora. The movement was ragged, hesitant, performed by exhausted men in the dark, but they kept shoulder to shoulder with one another, the formations drawing together and gaining cohesion from the human contact of those to each side, those in front, those behind. The men in the front rank had the hardest task. Jason was able to watch them by the stuttered illumination of a few still-burning fires. They looked like ghosts walking past the flames, men already dead and in the hell of all lost souls. The Macht did not have a god of war; they had Antimone to watch over them instead. For though they gloried in combat, they knew the price it exacted. A true man did not need help from the gods to kill-that was in him from birth-in all of them. He needed their help to face what came afterwards. He needed the pity and compassion of the Veiled Goddess. And she was here tonight, Jason was sure. If he shut his eyes he thought he might even be able to hear the beat of her black wings.
Further to the right, the Macht morai struck those Honai who were struggling to reform about Midarnes. There was a bitter fight and the front ranks of Mochran’s mora were actually driven in, but then the centons to right and left piled into the Honai flanks, leaving the line to lunge forward. The Honai broke, a small knot of them fighting to the end about their standard, the rest driven beyond their capacity to endure and in danger of being cut off. They threw away their shields and ran down the hillside. Midarnes disappeared under a pile of bodies, and on the Kunaksa ridge, the Macht dressed their lines yet again and continued the advance. None of them were singing now. Their tongues had swollen in their mouths. They were things of unsparing sinew and bone, barely able to conjecture an end to the night or the possibility of rest.
There was one new thing about their travail though: for the first time since the battle had begun, they were marching downhill, towards the river. This realisation gave them some heart. They stepped out, centurions forward of the main line. The ridge-crest was theirs, and they looked down on the fire-dotted plain that led to the Bekai River, now some ten pasangs away. They fixed their minds on that thought, the possibility of water, of something like sanctuary, and they marched on.
Many thousands of Kefren and Juthan troops were now in flight across the Bekai plain, but most had fled eastwards, towards the Magron Mountains and their own baggage camps pasangs behind the Kunaksa Hills. It was in this direction that Vorus had gone, striving in vain to rally the second-line Kefren units. In the dark, it was impossible. They would run now until they thought pursuit had stopped, until their own tents brought them to a halt. The Macht army had completely routed the main body of the Great King’s forces, and had all but annihilated his Household troops, the best there was. There was nothing left for it but to wait for the panic to subside and then begin picking up the pieces. As Vorus kicked his tired horse into a lumbering canter, he pulled a fold of his cloak about his head and wore it like a scarlet komis. In the midst of that great, maddened, frantic crowd of armed Kufr, it was not good to have a Macht face.
But where was Ashurnan? That question brought cold sweat to his spine. The Great King had decided to rest for a few hours in the enemy’s captured baggage camp. It lay now square in the path of the Macht advance. Vorus reined in. It was no good; there was no one to send who would get through alive.
He spun the horse on its haunches and took off back the way he had come. Someone has to get through, he thought. And who better to try than one of the Macht?
Behind him, the paling sky in the east broke open pink and bloody with the day’s dawn, the Magron Mountains standing like black titans on the edge of the world. A wind from the west picked up and began to shunt aside the heavy cloud of the night. In the gathering light the Macht army marched stumbling down off the bloody, muck-churned heights of the Kunaksa and began to plash wearily through the wet lowland below. Before them the stragglers of the Kefren army scattered like quail before a fox, no longer a coherent whole, but a beaten remnant. Some ran for the Bekai bridges, some scattered to north and south, parallel to the river-line. From the tented square of the Macht camp, they flooded out like cockroaches from under an upturned stone, abandoning their loot, their women, their arms. From a distance the Macht formation looked as disciplined and indomitable as it had the day before, going up the hill. It came down from the heights in silence, no voice left able to raise the Paean. At a distance it was impossible to see the staggering weariness of the spearmen, the broken shafts of their weapons held up for want of anything better, the crowds of wounded being dragged along in the middle of the morai, rags stuffed in their mouths to stop their screams. They had taken thirteen and a half thousand men up the hill the morning before, and now some ten thousand were marching back down. Many of those would not see another morning.
Ashurnan watched them come, sat on his tired horse to the south of the camp. About him a motley crowd of aides, bodyguards, and sundry officers had gathered, all mounted, all shattered by the sight of the advancing phalanx, the disappearance of their own mighty army. It did not seem real. The half-light of the gathering dawn made it into some nightmare from which they must try and waken.
Ashurnan leaned in the saddle and grasped old Xarnes’s arm. The elderly Chamberlain had begun to slide from the back of his horse.
“My lord, you should not-”
“And let you fall? I think not, Xarnes.” Ashurnan smiled, but his face was empty as that of a glass-bound fish. He looked at his feet, at his brother’s mud-spattered slippers, then up again at the advancing army.
“All the gods in their heavens, what incredible creatures these are,” he said, shaking his head in genuine wonder.
“My King,” one of the bodyguards said. “We should-”
“I know, Merach. I see them too. Watch them march! Our legends did not lie, did they?” His face tightened. “Someone else to join us, I see, some other lost soul.”
It was Vorus, on a blown, shattered horse. He dropped his cloak from his face and held up a hand. “My lord-”
“Is Midarnes dead?”
Vorus could only nod.
“I knew he would not run, not Midarnes. He was my father’s friend also.” Suddenly the Great King looked away, pulled his komis up over his eyes and choked down a sob. They sat there on their horses, appalled and afraid and understanding as he bit down on his grief, knuckles white on his reins, and before them the Macht marched on, scarcely half a pasang away now.
He collected himself, the tears shining on his face, his violet eyes still glittering. “General Vorus, I rejoice to see you alive. What do you suggest?”
Vorus’s tired horse was moving restlessly below him now, for it had picked up the vibration beneath its feet, the tramp of the approaching army.
“We flee, my lord,” Vorus said. “We flee, and we pick another time, another place, to finish what was begun here.”
“Your brother is dead, my King,” old Xarnes added. “This Empire stands. The Macht are a problem for another day, as the general says. But you, you must not come to harm. Your place is no longer here.”
Ashurnan’s mouth twisted. He looked at the oncoming Macht spearmen. Now he was close enough to see the stumbling weariness of their stride, the blood that soaked them, the broken spears and dinted shields. These were not a legend; they were men at the end of their strength. They were not invincible.
“Let us go,” he said. “Merach, lead on. Take us back to camp. We leave this field to the Macht.”
The girl was bound naked to a wagon-wheel. At first he thought her dead, but when he took her by the hair and raised up her head, he saw the eyelids flutter. She was Kufr, one of the shorter ones. What were they called?
Gasca reached for his knife. Once, his father’s best hound had been gored by a stag, its entrails spread far and wide. He had done then what he would do now, not out of anger or vindictiveness, but out of pity. He set the knife at the Kufr girl’s throat, thinking how much a pity it was, for she did not look so inhuman at all. He sighed heavily. The knife was blunt.
“Stop there!” This was Jason of Ferai, doffing his helm and striding forward. He set down his shield. “Lower the blade, son. Lift up her face again.”
Dumbly, Gasca did as he was told, cursing the fact that he had stopped at all. The mora had retaken the camp and lost all order in its search of the remaining tents and wagons. Water, they were after, more than anything, but there was none to be found. The centurions had set them to loading up the wagons with the centoi instead, and as there were no draught animals left alive in the camp it would seem they were to draw these across the river with the yokes on their own necks. Had it not been for the semi-sacred regard the mercenaries held the great cooking cauldrons in, there might have been trouble, a last straw to break the back of their discipline; but for the most part, it had held. The camp was a gutted wreck and there was nothing else in it to ease their passage, but even the most bloody-minded of the Macht would be glad to have those damn pots back.
And this girl… Gasca looked at Jason curiously.
“I believe I know this one,” Jason said. He knelt before the girl and moved her face this way and that, as though studying a sculpture. “Phobos, what have they done?” he whispered, taking in her abused form. Anger lit his eyes. He unstrapped his cloak from the back-belt and threw it down. “Who is it-Gasca? Cut her free, wrap her in that, and bring her with us. Keep her alive, Gasca.”
Gasca set his jaw. “General-”
“Don’t fucking argue with me, strawhead. And don’t try fucking her, either.” At the expression on Gasca’s face he laughed, and thumped the wing of the younger man’s cuirass. “All right then. Just humour me-bring her along. She may be useful. Where’s your friend Rictus?”
Gasca was sawing methodically at the ropes binding the Kufr to the wheel-rim. “Haven’t seen him since he stuck on that black armour. He could be dead, for all I know.”
“That one? Never. He’ll see old bones. You know why? Because he doesn’t care if he will or not. Look after her, Gasca!” Jason rose, collected his shield with an audible groan, and then was off shouting at a group of spearmen who had dropped their weapons to rifle through some sacks.
Rictus stood at the Bekai Bridge with his shield leaning against his knees and his forehead leaning against his spear-shaft. He thought that if the spear slipped, there would be nothing in the world that would keep him on his feet. He would topple down the steep bank, through the mizzling clouds of mosquitoes, and into the brown water. He would drink that water, no matter if every Kufr ever born had pissed in it, and he would die bloated and happy.
His head jerked up, and a spike of pain transfixed his skull as the helm came with it. Another man’s helm, not set to the bones of his own face. The pain woke him from the half-doze. He stamped his bare feet and looked down on the endless column of men crossing the bridge before him and half a pasang away, the same on the other bridge. They were crossing the river again, back the way they had come only some-what-three days ago? It seemed like a month.
Jason found him there, nodding in and out of a kind of sleep.
“Bastards took my scroll, all my gear,” he said. “You’re still this side of the Veil I see.”
“Still this side,” Rictus said thickly, his tongue rasping against his teeth like meat rolled in sand.
“We take the men into Kaik, and we get whatever we can out of the city. But we can’t stay there long. The Empire did not disappear in the night. Rictus, I will need you for light work again.”
Rictus stared at him, bloodshot eyes crusted within the T-slot of the helm. “Why?”
“We will need light troops, more than ever now, and you’re half-good at leading them.”
Rictus said nothing. Talking was too painful. All he could think of was water.
“Join your mora-get into the city. I’ll stand over the rearguard.”
But Rictus did not move. “What do we do now, Jason?” he asked. “Do we look for another employer, set up shop in some city?”
“We’ll talk later,” Jason said. His hazel-green eyes caught the light as he looked back eastwards to the dark heights of the Kunaksa. How many bodies left there? In a few days the place would be fetid. Then he looked west, to the unending plains and farmlands of Pleninash. They seemed to go on for ever, flat and lush, with man-made tells pimpling up out of the heat-haze, each one a city. This teeming world, this alien place, and here he and these half-dead men were lost in it.
“We beat those bastards. We beat them fair and square,” Rictus said, and it was as if the younger man had caught the current of his thought.
“If we beat them once, we can do it again.”