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.”
“Why?”
“I do not come here to discuss my day.”
“I know. You come here to receive language instruction from animals. Why are you angry?”
He laughed at that. “Was this why Arkamenes kept you by his side? To needle him out of a dark mood?”
“Perhaps. You like to talk to me, Jason. You lead this army. I do not think you can talk to others.”
“You’ve met Rictus. No? I talk to him. I talk to my friend Buridan. And I talk to you. I do not know why. I do not know why I trust you, but it happens that I do.”
He was in all seriousness, the laughter gone. He stared into the fire and nudged an errant faggot closer to the flames with his foot.
“We are not one army, but two,” he said at last. “For now, we are together, because if we split up, we will no doubt die here. But if the Great King forsakes our pursuit, there will be factions in our ranks. They will tear us apart.”
“Kill the leaders of the other factions,” she said. She took the forgotten pot out of the Juthan girl’s hands and began ladling the lentil stew within onto three earthenware plates.
“The Macht do not conduct their affairs in that way,” Jason said. He seemed displeased.
“Are you hungry?”
“I’ll eat.”
He ate with his fingers, as did the Juthan. Tiryn scooped up her own food with a horn spoon. The taste took her back to the hearth of her father’s house, in the mountains. The fire in the centre of the round room, the woodsmoke tainting every mouthful. She stared at her plate and across her mind a flickering pageant of childhood images played themselves out, stealing away her appetite.
Jason set down his empty plate. He lay back in his cloak and stared up at the stars. “I see Gaenion’s Pointer,” he said. “It shows the way north. Many’s the night march I’ve made with it to guide me. It seems strange, somehow, that our stars are here, in this land.”
“Your stars?” Tiryn asked.
“Gaenion the Smith made the stars out of Antimone’s tears. When she wept he loved the way his wife’s light caught in them-his wife is the sun, Araian. So he caught some of Antimone’s tears, and set them in the heavens in patterns and chains ordained by God Himself. And there they stick.”
“The stars are the gems of Bel, thrown into the sky as the god celebrated the killing of the great Bull, Mot’s beast of the dark,” Tiryn said. “The eyes of the Bull he set in the sky also, though one was full of blood from the beast’s death-throes. They are our moons, Firghe and Anande, Wrath and Patience.”
Jason grinned. “Each to his own gods, I suppose. I don’t know about your Bel, or bull, but I have heard the beat of Antimone’s Wings upon the battlefield, like some black flutter in the core of my heart. And then of course there is this.” He cast aside his cloak, and sitting up, he thumped the black chest of his cuirass, the Curse of God.
“I do not know how these things were made if they are not the work of some god, because assuredly, there is no smith on earth who can fathom their creation.”
Tiryn raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps there was once.”
“What is the word for stubborn?”
“Kura. A mule is a Kuru. I am thinking it a good word for Macht, also.”
Jason got to his feet, and bowed. “Thank you for the wine, the food, and the instruction in humility, my lady.”
She lowered the komis from her face, looking up at him as he stood there. She did not want him to go. “I will see you on the march perhaps, tomorrow?”
“Perhaps.” He reached out his hand, and for an unthinking second she did the same, her fingers longer than his, pale in the firelight. They did not touch. She drew back, startled by the temerity of her own impulse.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I wish to learn the words for hearth, home, and happiness, in case I should ever need them.” Then he turned to go.
“I hope you may need them, one day,” Tiryn said, watching his cloak-wrapped shape disappear into the firelight and shadows of the sleeping camp. She did not think he had heard her.
The next day, a large tell loomed out of the morning mists before Rictus’s trudging skirmishers. All about, the flatlands of the Middle Empire croaked and clicked and buzzed as the sun began to warm the air. A solitary Kufr farmer, leading his ox out for a morning’s work, saw the Macht appear out of the mists and fled, leaving his puzzled animal behind. Rictus slapped the beast’s rump as they passed it, and Whistler grinned. “Rictus, shall I?”
“Leave it. The foragers will pick it up. Cormos-take your centon out on the right, but stay linked.”
“Look,” Whistler said, swinging his pelta from his back to his left arm.
A city reared up before them, afloat on a white sea of mist. Steep-sided as a spearhead, it was a vast black shadow on the edge of their world, coming to life as they watched with the flicker of a hundred, two hundred, a thousand lamps. The inhabitants were rising with the sun.
“Ab-Mirza,” Rictus said. “So Jason says. All centons at the double-pass it down the line. They’ll open the gates at sunrise-we must secure them.”
They ran at a fast jog through the mist, javelins in their shield-fist, short spears in the other. They were nearly all barefoot, for sandals could not compete with the sucking ooze of the farmlands they had passed through. Nine hundred-odd men, their eyes as bright and eager as those of a hunting wolf, no formation to their number, a mere fast-moving, shapeless darkness in the mist.
Another astonished farmer. Someone speared him and he splashed to the ground with a sharp cry. Rictus bared his teeth. No point shouting back at the pack behind him. Leading these men, one took the rough along with the smooth.
They passed clusters of farm buildings, mud walled and thatched with reeds. A line of stout palms planted along an irrigation ditch. Mud walls, knee-high, chest-high. They poured over them with scarcely a pause, the clay brick crumbling under their feet and elbows and scrabbling fingers.
And at last, the great smell of the city itself, to be sensed with the nose, and felt as a shadow upon the mist around them. They were at the walls, fired brick, slimy, veined with ivy. “Follow them round-this way. On me, brothers,” Rictus panted. He heard the slap of their feet behind them, the sound women made when washing clothes on the stones of a river.
And here was the gate-a tall barricade of wood, reinforced with green bronze. It was closing in their faces. Rictus screamed something-he knew not what-and sprinted forward. His men roared out a wordless howl of anger and sped up with him. They crashed into the gate at full tilt, heads knocking against the wood with a ripple of cracks.
“Push, you bastards!” Rictus yelled, and they set their shoulders to it.
He backed out of the ranks of his struggling men, made for the dark, thinning gap, and squeezed through there. On the other side were a crowd of Kufr, tall, angular shapes, grunting and shouting. He stabbed the short spear into their bodies, hardly aiming the head of it. Behind him, more of his men were squeezing through the gap. Whistler was beside him, using a javelin as a spear. A sharp point keened off Rictus’s armour, the blow hardly felt. Then another. Someone was loosing arrows into the press, careless of who they hit.
The gates were opening now, and on the far side of them the Macht were a great mass of shouting men, shields held up over their heads, spearheads lancing out below, going for the bellies and groins of the Kufr. They poured into the city, the momentum on their side now, the gates all the way open, that torrent of muscle scraping them across the flags of the gatehouse floor. The Kufr fell back. There was torchlight here, mixed up and competing with the mist-bound glow of the rising sun. The morning was fighting its way into life. Rictus’s men were through the gatehouse and in the streets. Buildings reared up all around like red cliffs, Kufr running everywhere, showers of arrows hissing through the air, men going down with the feathered shafts skewering them. The Kufr were up on the rooftops, archers bobbing up to loose their shafts, others beside them hurling down bricks and stones and all manner of other debris. A dozen Macht were down now, and the cobbled brick of the roadway was puddled with their blood. The rest of the mora, still pushing and pulsing through the gates, set up a great shout as they saw their fallen comrades and lunged forward. The knot around the gatehouse broke up. The Macht leapt over their own dead and wounded and streamed up every street, cutting down all who stood in their way, kicking in doors and hauling out Kufr women, cutting their throats or stabbing them through the heart, the eyes. They pounded up the internal stairways to come out on the rooftops, and on the flat hard-packed earth above they slew their attackers without mercy, throwing them down to the street. Rictus saw two of his men catch a tall Kefren woman, pinion her arms and violate her with a javelin, laughing with a fierce, insane hatred as they did so.
He shouted orders, but they went unheard. The men were slipping out of his command, scattering into the maze of streets, pursuing any Kufr who dared show their face. And still, on the farther rooftops, the inhabitants of the city were popping up to shoot arrows and fling spears and stones, and carts were being wheeled across the roadways to bar the passage of the invaders. There seemed to be no soldiery resisting the Macht; it was the population itself. Rictus’s mora was being soaked into the city. It was disappearing in chaos and murder before his eyes.
He grabbed a young Macht by the scruff and clouted aside the knife which was raised in his face. “Get out of here, back to the army. Find Jason and tell him to bring up some of the other morai. Tell him we’re fighting in the streets, and like to be swamped if he does not hurry. Do you understand? Repeat it to me.” The boy did so, sour and resentful.
“What’s your name?”
“Lomnos.”
“Lomnos, if Jason does not get this message, I will come looking for you-you understand?”
The boy nodded, snarling, and then ran back the way he had come.
“Whistler, is that you? Not the head again.” Whistler’s bald pate had yet another slice out of it. He raised his hand and touched the blood. “Never felt it-I don’t feel nothing there no more-lucky for me, eh? Rictus, we’ve got to rein in these stupid fuckers before they burn the place down around us.”
“I know. Discipline is all to hell. Do what you can. I’ll try to get to the head of them.” Rictus took off up the steep city street at a run, grabbing men here and there, any face he recognised, any name he could shout out. Called like this, the men remembered their duty and followed him up the hill, but hundreds of Rictus’s mora were scattering through the city, killing and looting as they went, beyond the reach of their centurions. The bodies began to pile up in the streets.
The boy Lomnos panted out his message with the spittle spraying from his lips. Jason set a hand on his shoulder. He looked around, saw Aristos in the midst of the marching column, and called him over.
“Take your mora into the city, at the double. Rictus may need help.” Aristos grinned, face flushing with pleasure. He turned to go.
“And Aristos-keep them in hand!”
The lead mora broke into a run, clapping on their helms and sliding their shields from back to shoulder with the neck-strap. Jason looked round again, saw Buridan two hundred paces away. He pointed to the city and pumped his fist up and down. Buridan nodded, and shouted at his men. Immediately, this second mora began to pick up their pace as well. Two thousand men, sweating and gasping in their armour, now streaming towards the open gates of Ab-Mirza at a run.
“Shields!” Jason cried. The centurions around him took it up, and the five middle morai of the column immediately broke ranks and made for the baggage train, where their shields were stored on the wagons. Morai took it in turns to provide the shield-bearing rear and van guards, because to march all day with the shield was punishing. It would thus be some time before Jason could send more fully-armed morai into the city. For the moment, whatever was happening in there was the concern of Rictus and Aristos and Buridan alone.
Perhaps two hundred men held around Rictus in a body; all that he could gather out of his mora. These were mainly veterans who had been close to him at the Kunaksa, older men with more level heads, but even they were eager to be off and join their comrades. He could feel it. Some fool had knocked a cresset into a stable, and half a street was burning. Rictus found himself frozen, staring at the flames, remembering Isca, the sound of the city’s torture roaring up into the pine-shrouded hills.
Up the steep city streets more troops were advancing, hundreds of heavy spearmen, a curse-bearer at the head. He doffed his helm and became Aristos, lithe, olive-skinned, his face alight with happiness. “Well, lads,” he shouted, “Let’s finish what Rictus has begun. Remember my uncle Argus-remember Phiron! Teach these kutr their names!”
Vorus was woken by an orderly, a young hufsan with a set face. “General, I was told to wake you. Outside, there is something you must see.”
Mystified, Vorus threw a blanket about his shoulders and padded barefoot out of the tent. Dawn was almost upon them, and the great camp around him was stirring, the smell of woodsmoke and horseshit mingling on the air.
“General Proxis is on the mound, sir,” the hufsan said.
Vorus laboured up the slope of the small tell, all that was left of some indescribably ancient city. There was a lookout post at the top, this being the highest point for miles around. Proxis stood there now, along with three other Juthan of the Legion.
“Proxis.”
“Look west, General. What do you see?
A glow on the brim of the sky, red in the white mist-sea which blanketed the plain. Vorus’s face hardened.
“They’re burning a city,” he said. “Where would that be?”
“Ab-Mirza. It’s sixty pasangs from here; two days’ march.”
“I know it. The King’s messenger got through, then; they must have made a fight of it.”
“That, or the Macht are simply setting an example.”
“I don’t think they would,” Vorus said quietly. “What purpose could it serve? No; there’s been a fight in that city, Proxis.”
“And the city has lost. The Governor of Ab-Mirza has brought ruin down on himself. And his people.”
“Would you suggest we order all governors to throw open the gates of their cities to these brigands?” Vorus asked, angry now. “The King was right. We must make them fight every step of the way.”
“Then they’ll be treading on Kufr bodies every step of the way,” Proxis retorted. Vorus turned from the silent spectacle on the horizon. Up here, on the tell, they were above the mist, and below they could hear but not see the army about them. As though it were a mere phantom.
“Proxis,” he said quietly. “My friend, what is the trouble?” He knew it went beyond this morning’s revelation. The three Juthan behind Proxis stared rigidly out to the west, but there was something there between the four of them, something Vorus felt had excluded him.
“Proxis?”
“Nothing. I do not like to see a city burn, that’s all.” Proxis was stone cold sober, with not a breath of wine about him, which meant he had not drunk the night before either. Vorus had known this Juthan for two decades, and he could not remember the last time Proxis had gone to bed without at least a cupful of something, if the cupful could be found.
“Join me in my tent. We’ll have some wine, warm our livers.”
“I have things to do,” Proxis said with a shake of his head.
“It’s not like you to turn down a drink, Proxis.”
The Juthan stared at him. He came up to Vorus’s chin, but was half as broad again about the shoulders. His yellow eyes had veins of blood shot through them, and in the dawn light his skin looked dark as charcoal. “Perhaps I will swear off wine. As a slave I drank every gut-rotting brew I could pour in my mouth,” he said. “Enough for two lifetimes.”
“You are not a slave now,” Vorus said hotly.
“We are all slaves, Vorus. Even you.”
He turned and left the summit of the tell and the three other Juthan followed him, silent and sombre as all their race. But now there was something missing-a certain regard for the general they passed by on their way down the hill. A deference which Vorus had scarcely remarked before, and only knew of now it was gone.
“Damn him,” Vorus whispered. “Twenty years too late, he becomes proud. Damn him.”
He looked back at Ab-Mirza’s ghost, burning in the mist of the far away horizon. We’ll be treading on bodies now, all right, he thought. Every step of the way.