"The ten thousand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

THREE

Gasca hitched his cloak higher about his shoulders and set one flap to cover his right ear so that the snow might not find so easy a passage. It was a good cloak, goat’s leather rimmed with dogskin, but it had been his older brother’s before this, and that big bastard had given it much hard wear. Besides which, there was no cloak made that would keep out the bitterness of this evening’s wind. But a people who had made their home in the highland valleys of the Harukush had grown up with it. So Gasca shrugged off the discomfort, as a man ought, and kept his head up, using his spear as a staff to pick his way along the treacherous gravelled slush that was the road, his left arm fighting to keep his bronze-faced shield from flapping up like an old man’s hat.

The Machran road was not busy, but those who had need to travel it at this time of year tended to draw together somewhat. In the evenings it made for an easier bivouac, and there were informal arrangements. Men gathered firewood, women fetched water. Children got under the feet of all, and were cuffed promiscuously by their elders. It was safer to sleep as part of a large camp, for the footpads and bandits in this part of the hills were renowned. As a fully armed soldier, Gasca had at first been avoided, then courted, and now was welcomed in the company of travellers. He had a fine voice, a pleasant manner, and if he was not the most comely of fellows, he had still the good-natured forbearance of youth to recommend him.

All Machran bound, the company was a varied lot. Two merchants led, with plodding donkeys laden with all manner of sacks and bags. Haughty fellows, they refused to divulge the contents, but it was easy enough to smell the juniper berries and half-cured hides once the fire began to warm them. A pair of young couples followed, the men as possessive as stags around their new wives, the girls flirtatious as only married women can be. Then came a grey-haired matron with the bark of a drillmaster, who herded round her skirts a half dozen ragged urchins, orphans running from some war in the far north. She was taking them to sell in the capital, and looked after them with the close attentiveness a man might show to a good hunting dog. One of the girls, she had already offered to Gasca, but he did not like his meat so tender, and besides, he had no money to spare for such indulgences. The children seemed to sense the essential charity in his nature, and when night fell one or two of them would invariably wriggle under his cloak and sleep curled against him. He did not mind, for they were good warmth, and if they were crawling with vermin, well, so was he.

Five days, this serried company had travelled in each other’s ambit, and they had become comrades of the road, sharing food and stories and sometimes going so far as to venture a little personal history about the campfires. The two merchants had unbent somewhat, and over execrable wine had let slip brawny yarns of the battles they had fought in their youth. The young husbands, once they had torn themselves from their bedrolls and wiped the sweat from their brows, confided to the company that they were brothers, married to sisters, and apprenticed to a famous armourer in Machran, Ferrious of Afteni by name, who would teach them his secrets and make of them rich men, artists as much as artisans.

The pimping matron, while picking lice from the hair of one of her charges, extolled the virtues of a certain green-walled house in the Street of the Loom-Makers, where a man might indulge any craving his appetite could muster, and for a very reasonable fee.

“And you, soldier,” one of the merchants said to Gasca over the fire. “What takes you to Machran? Are you to offer your spear for hire?”

Gasca squeezed himself some wine. It was black root-spirit he guessed, cut with goat’s blood and honey. He had drunk worse, but could not quite remember when.

“I go to take up the red cloak,” he admitted, wiping his mouth, and tossing the flaccid wineskin to one of the wan young husbands.

“I thought so. You bear a blank shield. So you’ll paint some mercenary sigil on it and wear scarlet. Under what commander?”

Gasca smiled. “Whatever one will have me.”

“You’ll be a younger son, I’ll bet.”

“I have two elder brothers, the apples of my father’s eyes. For me it was the red cloak or a goatkeeper’s hut. And my fingers are too big to fit round a goat’s tits.”

The men around the fire laughed, but there was a furtiveness to their regard of him. Though young, Gasca was as broad as any two of them put together, and the glued linen cuirass he wore was stained with old blood. It had been his father’s, as had the rest of the panoply he carried. Stealing them had been no easy thing, and one of his favoured elder brothers had taken a few knocks before Gasca had finally made it clear of his father’s land. These weapons and armour he bore were all he owned in the world, an inheritance he had felt to be his due.

One of the young husbands spoke up. His wife had joined him at the fire, a lazy cat’s-smile on her face. “I hear tell there’s a great company being gathered,” he said. “Not just in Machran, but in cities across all the mountains. There’s a captain name of Phiron, comes from Idrios; he’s hiring fighting men by the hundred. And he’s a cursebearer, too.”

“Where did you hear this?” his wife asked him.

“In a tavern in Arienus.”

“And what tavern was this?”

Gasca’s mind wandered as the squabble grew apace on the far side of the campfire. His own city, Gosthere, where he had the right to vote in assembly, was a mere stockaded town at the headwaters of the Gerionin River, two hundred and fifty pasangs back in the mountains. As much as anything else, he was going to Machran because he wanted to see a real city. Something built of stone, with paved streets that had no shit streaming down the middle of them. In his haversack he had a copy of Tynon’s Constitution, which described the great cities of the Macht as if they were all set up in marble, peopled with statues and ruled by stately debate in well-conducted assemblies-not the knockabout mob-gatherings they had been back in Gosthere. That was something he wished to see, and if it did not exist in Machran, it likely never had anywhere.

To serve under a cursebearer-now that too would be something. Gasca had never so much as seen one before. Gosthere’s nobility did not run to such glories. He wondered if the stories about the black armour were true.

I am young, Gasca thought. I have taken my man and my wolf. I have a full panoply. I do not want to own the world; I merely want to see it. I want to drink it by the bucketful and savour every swallow.

“And that bitch; that goatherder she-pig-she was there, wasn’t she?”

“Woman, I tell you I was there for the turn of a water-clock, no more.”

Gasca lay back in his cloak, tugging the folds about him and staring up at the stars. Scudding past the moons there were rags and glimmers of cloud. It would be very cold tonight. As children, he and his brothers had buried embers under their bedrolls on such nights, up in the high grazing. They would chaff each other for hours to the clink of the goat-bells, and Felix, their father’s hound, would always lie next to Gasca. When he growled in the dark they would all be up on their feet in a moment, shuddering with cold, reaching for their boy’s spears. Gasca had been thirteen when he had killed his first wolf. Like all the men of his city, he had chiselled out one of its teeth. As he lay now, far from home, he reached up to his neck and touched it, warm from his flesh. For a moment he felt a pang of loss, remembering his brothers when they had all been boys together, before the complications of manhood. Then he grunted, rolled himself tighter in his cloak, and closed his eyes.

When morning came he found that two of the urchin-children had wormed under his cloak in the night and were spliced to him like wasps to a honeycomb. In the warmth under the cloak all his vermin and theirs had come alive, and he itched damnably. Even so, he was reluctant to rise, for the cloak and the ground around it had a light skiff of snow upon it that had frozen hard, and the sunrise just topping the mountains had kindled from it a hundred million jagged points of rose-coloured light. Even the log-butts from the fire had frost on them. When Gasca blinked, he could feel his eyebrows crackle.

The children squealed as he threw aside the cloak and rose to his feet, stamping his sandals into the stone-hard ground and stretching his limbs to the mountains. He strode out to the roadside and pissed there, standing in an acrid cloud of his own making and blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Looking up and down, he saw the road was empty in both directions. To the south it disappeared between the shoulders of two steep white hills, on one of which there loomed the rocky ruins of a city. That was Memnos. They had hoped to see it this morning when they woke. Machran now lay a mere thirty pasangs away, an easy day’s march. Tonight they would sleep under a roof, those who could afford it. Gasca had promised himself a good meal, and wine worthy of the name. He spat the taste of last night’s out onto the road, grimacing.

Something moved in the treeline. The original builders of the road had hewn back the woods on either side for a bowshot, and though those who maintained it now had not done so well, there were still a good hundred paces of open ground before the tangled scrub and dwarf-pine of the thickets began. In the dawn-light Gasca’s piss-stream dried up as he saw the pale blur of a face move in there. He turned at once and dashed back to the campsite, booting aside one of the yawning urchins. His spear was slick with frost and he cursed as it slipped in his fingers.

By the time he had turned back to the woods the figure was visible. A man walking towards the road with his arms held out from his sides, and in one fist a single-headed spear. The man thrust this point-first into the ground for lack of a sauroter, and then came on with both palms open in the universal gesture. I mean no harm. Gasca’s breathing steadied. He strode forward. Others from the company were blinking their way out of their bedrolls, throwing aside furs and trying to make sense of the morning. One of the younger children was crying hopelessly, blue with cold.

Gasca stood between the approaching figure and the waking camp, and planted the sauroter of his own spear in the roadside. He wished now he had clapped on his father’s helm.

“What’s your business? State it quickly. I have good men at my back,” he said loudly, hoping those good men were out of their blankets. He scanned the treeline, but nothing else moved there. For the moment, at least, this fellow was alone. But that meant nothing. He might have twenty comrades stowed back in the trees, waiting to see the company’s headcount.

The man was tall, as tall as Gasca, though nothing like as broad. In fact he had a gaunt, hungry look. His chiton was worn and stained, ripped open at the neck in the grief-mark, and he had a blanket slung bagwise about his torso. There was a knife at his waist, hanging from a string. A scar marred the middle of his lower lip.

“I mean no harm. I hoped to share your fire,” the man said.

The two merchants and the young husbands joined Gasca at the roadside, wielding clubs and knives. “Shall we kill him?” one of the husbands asked eagerly.

“He’s not robbed us yet. Let him speak,” Gasca said.

He was young, this fellow. Now that they all had a chance to see him up close they realised that he was not much more than an overgrown boy. Until one looked in his eyes. He stared at Gasca, and in his hooded gaze there was utter indifference.

I could kill him right here and now, Gasca thought, and he would not raise so much as a finger.

“What’s your name?” he asked, more gently than he had meant to.

“Rictus.”

“Of what city?”

The thin man hesitated. “I was of Isca,” he said at last, “When Isca still stood.” His eyes hardened. “I seek only to travel with you to Machran. I have no ill intent. And I am alone.” He raised his hands, empty.

“Come on to the fire,” Gasca said. “If we can raise a flame.”

“Isca?” one of the merchants said. “What happened to Isca?”

The man named Rictus turned his head. He had eyes like grey shards of iron, cold as the sea. “Isca is no more.”

“Really? Gods above. Come, boy-come sit and tell us more.”

The strangeness had been broken. A threatening shape walking out of the woods had become a tired young man, who spoke civilly. They gathered around him, glad perhaps of some new story; news that was not shopworn, but fresh and raw. Gasca drew away, still watching this gaunt apparition. The man Rictus did not move. Something flickered in his eyes; pain. He was regretting this already, Gasca realised. He spoke again. “Let me go back for my spear.”

They tensed. He looked at Gasca.

“Go get it,” Gasca said, and shrugged.

Some humanity in the eyes at last. The man nodded, and went back the way he had come.

“You think he’s not a ruse, a roadsman?” one of the young husbands asked.

Gasca was about to answer, but it was the fat merchant who spoke first.

“Look in his face-he tells the truth. I’ve seen eyes like that before.” The merchant’s face tightened. For a second it was possible to see the soldier he might have been in younger days.

“We’ve nothing to fear from this lad. He’s already made his gift to the goddess.”

They got the fire going again, digging out of its black carcass a single red mote of living heat. This they conjured into a blaze, and with the addition of copper cauldrons they had boiling water soon after, and set the barley to swell in it. The campsite regained some of its usual cheer, though the newcomer, Rictus, had an armspan of cold air between himself and the rest. This was remedied when one of the urchins edged close, and finally sat defiantly within the crook of his arm. Rictus appeared startled, then pleased, then grim as a blacksmith’s washbowl. By his posture, one might think he had a spear-staff for a spine. And he was so cold that the warmth of the child next to him finally set him to shivering, with ground teeth.

The fatter of the merchants, the one Gasca now knew to be a true man, threw the wineskin to Rictus.

“Drink, for the gods, for all of us. Have a drink, lad. Pour a libation if you will. Ease that look in your eyes.”

Rictus took the skin and drank. He drank as though it were the last thing he would ever do. And while his cheeks were still puffed full of wine, he poured a stream of it from the mouth of the skin so that it might puddle on the ground.

“That’s good wine-” the thinner merchant cried.

“Shut your mouth,” the fatter one told him, and Gasca nodded when he met his eyes. There were proprieties. There was decency. A man could not weigh the price of all things, and yet ignore their value.

Teeth bared for a moment against the vileness of the wine, Rictus looked at Gasca, and jerked his head towards the thickets on the western margins of the road. “Back in there, maybe two pasangs, or one and a half, there are eight men about a dead campfire arguing over the best time to ambush you.”

Silence about their own fire. The procuress asked, “And they’re friends of yours, are they?”

“If they were, would I be here?”

The fat merchant rubbed his fingertips through his beard. “Eight you say? Why did they not attack us before now? Dawn and dusk are the best time for these things.”

“They were quarrelling over who would have the women-these two younger ones. They had a fight over it last night, then got drunk and slept the time away. Now they are arming, meaning to take you sometime today, before you get much closer to Machran.”

The two husband-brothers stared at one another, white-faced, and then at their new wives. The look on the women’s faces reminded Gasca of a rabbit he once caught alive in a snare.

“And how were you privy to their discussions?” the fat merchant asked.

“I have been travelling with them. I, too, was drinking last night at their fire.”

“A roadsman,” the thin merchant spat, and he whipped out his slim-bladed eating knife. “It’s out of his own mouth.”

“Stay,” his colleague said. To Rictus he said, “What brings you here to warn us?”

“I have seen my fill of killing-that kind of killing. I will fight them with you, if you’ll have me.”

Gasca rose from the fire and went to the roadside again. The sun, mighty Araian, had climbed out of her bedclothes; she broke out now in a wrack of crimson and golden cloud, and the glare of the thin snow was broadening moment by moment. He looked about himself, at the wide spaces around them, then at the hills ahead which framed the road, the ruins of long-sacked Memnos rising white and dark with shadow and snow.

“We must pack up,” he said. “If they catch us on the move we’ll have no chance. We must make for the hills, put our backs to something. Those broken walls; we can climb them and fight from a height.” He turned again. “What weaponry do they have?”

“Spears, swords, javelins. No bows, or shields either, not even a pelta.”

“Are they up and about?”

Rictus considered. He was eerily calm. He does not care, Gasca thought. He thinks to do the right thing, but most of him could care less if he lived or died today.

“They’re slow, hung-over. You have time. Not much, but enough perhaps.”

“We’ll do as the boy says,” the fat merchant said abruptly, rising. “Time to be moving.”

“We’ll outrun them,” one of the young husbands said desperately. “It’s thirty pasangs to Machran; I can run that.”

“And your wife?” the merchant asked. “These children? If we splinter up, they’ll take us in mouthfuls. Fighting together, on good ground, we can hurt them, enough perhaps to make them think again.”

“You care only for the wares on your donkey’s back.”

“Among other things. Run if you wish. They have legs too. You’ll be dead before sundown, and your wife will be a raped slave.”

They packed up their bedrolls, the younger women snivelling, the children subdued by their elders’ fear. They left the fire burning and struck out for the south at a fast pace. The fat merchant was the slowest. Gasca took his donkey’s halter and tugged the animal on while the big man clung to the animal’s tail, sweating. They left the road, and the going became much harder as they forged up the hillside to the ruins above. When the youngest child began to fall behind, Rictus slung her up on his back, and she clung there with a wide smile on her face, hooting triumphantly to the other urchins. The thin merchant paused to catch his breath, and looked back into the lowland below. He cried out, and they all paused, turned their heads. A group of men had come out of the trees, moving fast, black as crows against the snow.

The company’s fear lent them speed. They passed though the massive broken arch which had once been Memnos’s main gate and raised a startled flock of sparrows out of the stones. The snow was deeper here, high as a man’s calf. Gasca dropped the donkey’s leading rein and ran ahead, his shield and helm bruising his back as they bounced there. The ruins were extensive, and had there been no snow it might even have been possible to hide the party amid them and avoid any fight at all; but now their tracks were clear as a line of flags. He cast about like a hound near a scent-line, and nodded as he found what he was looking for.

“The walls,” he said, rejoining the others. “There’s a stair leading up to a good section of them, and a tower that’s still got a doorway. We go up there, the men defend the stairtop, and the others hide in the tower.”

“What about our animals?” the thin merchant asked, gasping.

“They must stay below.”

“I’ll be ruined,” the thin merchant groaned. But he did not argue.

From the wall-top they could see for pasangs. Their attackers were still toiling up the snowy slope below. The road was empty; no fellow travellers to provide allies or diversions. The world was a vast, bright stage ringed by mountains, snow blowing off their peaks in ribbons and banners, the sky above them flawless, pale blue, blue as a baby’s eye. Only the pine forests provided a darker contrast, the shadow deep beneath their limbs.

“Look,” Rictus said. He stood beside Gasca and pointed. There was a light in his eye.

Machran. To the south the mountains opened out in a vast bowl, perhaps fifty pasangs across, and within this ramp of highland the country was a patchwork of wood and field, the lower hollows of it untouched by snow, and green, green as a dream of spring. Machran itself was a sprawl, a smudge, an ochre stain upon the rolling mantle of this world, and from it the smoke of ten thousand hearths rose in a grey smear to sully the sky. From these heights it looked as though a man with a fair wind behind him might lope there in a matter of minutes. Gasca found himself smiling.

A shout from below. Their attackers had seen them standing up here. There were indeed eight of them. They had knotted their cloaks up over their elbows; sheepskins, fox-hide caps with the fur still on, and high boots. Their beards were black, long and tangled as the tail of a cow.

“Goatmen,” Gasca said, using the contemptuous term reserved for those who had no city, who frequented the high places of the Harukush and were reputed to sleep in caves and hold their women in common. “You travelled with these?”

“I chanced across them,” Rictus said.

“I’m surprised they didn’t kill you out of hand.”

“They tried,” Rictus said, still in the same quiet tone. “Isca trained me. They came round to thinking that might be useful.”

“Ah, Isca,” Gasca said. He had heard the stories. It was hardly the time to hear them again. “You will need that training today.”

They took their place at the stairtop. It was broad enough for two, but slippery with trodden snow. Gasca put on his father’s bronze helm, and immediately all sounds became washed out by the sea-noise within. He had thought to leave it off, but knew how fearsome a crested helm would look to the men below. It would make of him a faceless thing, and hide whatever fear might fill his eyes.

He took the weight of his shield off his shoulder and balanced it on his arm. The bronze-faced oak covered him from shoulder to thigh. “They’ll start with the javelins,” he told Rictus. “Get behind my shield until they’re done.”

“I’d rather stand free.”

“Suit yourself.”

Behind Rictus and Gasca stood the fat merchant, face still shiny with sweat, and one of the husband-brothers. At the rear, the thin merchant and the other husband. Only Rictus and Gasca had spears. The rest were armed with knives and cudgels, the eternal stand-by of all travellers, but of little use today unless the enemy made it up onto the wall.

A harsh braying from below. The thin merchant cursed in the name of Apsos, god of beasts.

“They’ll eat the damn donkeys. Goatmen- worse than animals themselves.” Behind the six men, the sounds of wailing children came from the doorway of the ruined watchtower.

“I wish those brats were mutes,” the thin merchant said.

“I wish you were a mute,” his fat colleague murmured.

The goatmen sidled up to the wall-bottom, watching out for missiles. When it appeared the defenders had none they grew more brazen, edged closer. Two spoke together and pointed up at Gasca, in full panoply, as stark and fearsome as some statue of warfare incarnate.

“If I had some rag of red about my shoulders they’d walk away,” he muttered to Rictus. There was no response from the Iscan. Despite the cold, Gasca was sweating, and the heavy shield dragged at his left bicep. Wolves he had killed, and other men he had broken down in brawls, but this was the first time he had ever hoped to plunge a spearhead into someone’s heart.

He jumped, as beside him Rictus shouted with sudden venom. “Are you afraid? Why be afraid?” For a second, fury flooded his limbs as he thought the Iscan was talking to him; then he realised that Rictus was shouting at the goatmen below. He turned his head, and saw through the confined eye-spaces of his helm that Rictus was red-faced, angry. More than angry. He was feral, hate shining out of his eyes. Gasca shifted away from him out of sheer instinct, as a man will give space to a vicious dog.

“Is it too much, to fight men face to face, who have weapons in their hands? Can you not do that? Or will we send out children with sticks, and let them taste your valour? Come-you know me. You know where I hail from. Come up here and taste my spear again!” Now Gasca was thrust aside, and Rictus stood alone at the top of the steps. There was spittle on his lips. He opened out his arms as if to pray.

The javelin came searing up from the men below. Gasca, by some grace, saw it coming, even with his circumscribed vision, and managed to lift his shield crab-wise. It clicked off the rim of the bronze, pocking it.

“What in the gods are you doing?” he shouted at Rictus. He had half a mind to shove this madman down the steps.

“Now keep your shield up,” Rictus said, and his face was rational again.

A flurry of javelins. They came arcing in: one, two, three. Two bounced off Gasca’s shield. The third struck the ground between his feet, making him flinch. His panoply seemed impossibly heavy. He wanted to rip off the damned helm and see what was going on. His eye-slots seemed absurdly small.

But now Rictus was smiling. In his hand he held two javelins. The tips were bent a little; soft mountain-iron.

“Well thrown. Now have them back.” His arm swooped in a blur. He had looped the middle-strings of the weapon about his first two fingers and as he loosed it the javelin spun, whining. It transfixed one of the goatmen below, entering under his beard and emerging from his nape for half a foot. The man crumpled, and his comrades scattered around him as though his bloody end were contagious.

The second sped into them three seconds later. This one missed a man’s head by a handspan but struck the fellow next to him just above the knee. He yelped, dropped his spear, and grasped his spitted limb with both hands, mouth wide and wet.

“Even odds now,” Rictus said, perfectly calm.

“Boy, the goddess has you under her wings,” the fat merchant said behind them.

“Isca trained me well. They’ll rush the stairs now. We stop the rush, and they’ll break. Then we go after them. Agreed?” The men around him mumbled assent.

“They come,” Gasca said, and raised his spear to his shoulder.

The rank smell rose before them as they scrabbled up the snow-covered stone of the stairway. Jabbing with their spears, snarling, they did not seem like men at all. Gasca crouched and took the impact of one blow on his shield. It jolted him, but the heavy wood and bronze shrugged off the spearpoint. His mouth was a slot of spittle as he breathed in and out, and all fear left him; there was no time for it. He felt his own spear quiver in his hand as he grasped it at the balance point and poked downwards. The goatmen were trying to come to grips with the defenders, get under the spearheads. One got a fist about Gasca’s spearpoint but he ripped it back through the man’s hand, the keen aichme shearing off fingers as it came free of his grasp. The man shrieked. Then Rictus stabbed out with his own weapon, transfixing the fellow through the mouth, the shriek transforming horribly into a gargle. He toppled backwards. Behind him, two of his fellows roared and swore as his carcass rolled down the stairs and took their legs out from under them. A tumble of foul-smelling flesh encased in fur, flashing eyes, a snap as a spear-shaft broke under them. They rolled clear to the ground below, and bounced to their feet again as enraged as before.

Three remained on the stair. One had eyes that were different colours. Gasca was able to see this, notice it, store it away. He had never known that his own senses could be so keen. Two spearpoints jutted up. One came below the rim of the shield, scoring the metal. Gasca felt a sting in his thigh, no more. He thrust his own spear down at them and felt it go into something soft. Recovering the thrust, he felt warm liquid trickling down the side of his leg. Thrust, recover, catch another point on the shield. A goatman came up bellowing, dropped his spear and sought to grasp Gasca’s shield in his fists and pull it away. Gasca felt his balance go, and fear so intense flooded him as he felt himself fall that he urinated hotly where he stood.

Then Rictus had embedded his eating knife in the goatman’s neck, right up the hilt. The man wailed, his grasp loosened. He scrabbled at the knife handle and tumbled backwards. About to follow him, Gasca’s chiton was seized from behind. There were arms about him, a stink of sweat and cheap scent.

“Easy there,” the fat merchant said. “Find your feet, lad.”

Recovering himself, Gasca blinked sweat out of his eyes. On the steps below him his blood had trickled in a thin stream, now diluted with his urine, steaming, all the stuff of his insides turned to liquid.

The goatmen backed down the stairs. Three of them now lay still and dark on the snow, and two more were grasping their wounds and struggling to keep the blood inside their flesh.

“I believe they’ve had enough,” Rictus said.

“It was so fast,” one of the young husbands said behind them. He had been four feet from the struggle, and it had not touched him, nor had he so much as raised his arm. Dimly, Gasca had some insight of what real phalanx fighting might be like. The proximity to violence of some, so close to the spearheads, and yet not part of the fight.

“Now, after me,” Rictus said. There was a kind of joy in his face as he started down the stair.

“No, boy!” the fat merchant shouted, and he seized Rictus’s chiton in much the way he had Gasca’s. “Let them go. You go down those stairs and they’ll fight you to the death. You may win, but there’s no need for it, and you’re likely to take a bad hurt before the last goes down.”

Rictus suddenly looked very young, like a sullen boy denied the treat he had been promised. He hesitated, and the look vanished. That calm came across his face again, and a smile that was not entirely pleasant. He gently lifted the fat merchant’s hand from his clothing, and then turned to address their enemies.

“Take your wounded and go,” he called down to the goatmen.

“Come down and fight us here,” one shouted back in the guttural accents of the high Harukush. “We will wait for you.”

“You will die, all of you, if we do,” Rictus said. And he was still smiling.

The goatmen stared at him. One spat blood onto the snow. Then they began to methodically strip their dead, whilst one remained at the foot of the stairs, spear at ready.

“You’ve done well, lads,” the fat merchant said. “Now with a little more help from the goddess, we’ll be in Machran by nightfall. We’ve nothing left to fear from these ugly wights.”

They stood upon the wall, watching while the goatmen bundled up the belongings of their dead comrades. When they were done, the three bodies lay nude in the snow, their hairy nakedness taking on a bluish tinge already. Then, without ceremony, the five survivors took off, the leg-hurt one hobbling and hissing in the rear. They turned a corner of the ruins and disappeared.

“They may hide and ambush us,” Rictus said. “I would.”

“You and your friend have put fear in them,” the fat merchant said. “I know these sorts. I come from Scanion, in the deep mountains. We used to hunt them like they were boar. Good sport, if you’ve a strong stomach. They’re brave when they’re in numbers, with an easy kill in sight, but you kill one or two and the rest lose heart right quick, like vorine. This pack is spent. Though what they’re doing so close to Machran is anybody’s guess. I’ve never met them so low.” And then, “Boy, that leg of yours needs attended.”

Gasca took off his helm and closed his eyes as the cold air cooled the sweat on his head. “You saved my life between you. I am in your debt now.”

“You saved mine by standing there,” the fat merchant grunted. “Do not speak of debt to me.”

“Nor me,” Rictus said. “You took that first javelin on your shield when it was aimed my way.”

Gasca and Rictus looked at one another. Both their hands rose in the same moment, and in the next they grasped each other’s wrists in the warrior salute, smiling, seeming not much more than boys.

“Of course, you did piss yourself,” Rictus said.