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

EIGHT

Twelve men walked up the echoing length of that great space, that towering weight of marble and gold leaf and limestone arrayed in odd and improbable swirling balconies and galleries clear up to its roof, the vaulted pillars wrought in unsettling sinuous curves which did not ought to lie within the art of the mason. They did not look up, but in their close and fearsome helms kept their eyes facing front. They bore swords, but had left their real weapons behind. In the legendary black God-given armour of the Macht they strode onwards, scarlet cloaks wrapped around their left forearms, scarlet transverse crests nodding to their shoulders. They came to a halt in one bracing crash of iron on stone and stood like things immutable and unworldly in all that varicoloured, fragranced throng which packed the walls of the hall, silenced by curiosity and a little fear.

Tiryn watched from one side of the dais. Phiron she had seen up close-and now she watched him bow and doff his helm before Arkamenes and Gushrun and Amasis, all regal as statues in a little tableau they had practised beforehand, Arkamenes sitting upon the throne, Gushrun standing on his right hand with the staff of the governorship in one manicured hand, Amasis on the left, a vision of white linen. Down the hall the two lines of Kefren spearmen stood tall and fearsome in full, shining armour. It was as good a show as she’d seen-even in Ashur the Great King would not do much better, not for the everyday business of meeting his commanders. So what was different?

Tiryn tugged her veil down a little, that she might smell. The Macht stink she caught at once. There was an acrid fullness to it. These things sweated like animals and smelled like animals. Even the incense in the overhead burners could not wipe it out. In her childhood, Tiryn had sat in the stables while the slaves rubbed down horses fresh from the circuit. The smell was like that.

But there was something else. Impossible to define, it might have been something to do with the way these things simply stood, in attitudes of easy attention before the dais, oblivious to the crowds behind them, the great ones they faced, the opulent and crushing grandeur of their surroundings. They seemed more solid than anything else in the hall. Perhaps it was that fabled armour they wore, which reflected no light. Even the tallest of them barely came to the shoulder of the shortest Kefren guard, and yet…

I here was something unsettling about these mercenaries, far beyond the myth and rumour which surrounded their race. Tiryn felt, standing there with one hand holding her veil from her face, that she was in the presence of something wrong, something that did not belong in the world she knew.

Another stir in the crowded hall as Phiron spoke up in good Kefren, the language of Kings. He had worked hard on his accent and sounded foreign but not boorish. It was remarkable to hear this thing speak up in the cultured tongue of the nobility, that which they spoke in the very throne-hall of Ashur itself.

“My lord, I bring to you the flower of our people, the finest warriors we possess. I bring before you one hundred centons of Macht spearmen to swell the ranks of your armies, to aid you in the time ahead. My lord, we are yours, here and now. We will not quit your service until you stand supreme in the Empire, and are crowned Great King in the holy halls of Ashur. This we have all sworn.” Here, Phiron bowed deep, and after an awkward, ugly little pause, so did the other Macht standing behind them, faces unreadable behind their helmets.

Arkamenes stood up, smiling. “My dear friends,” he began, stretching out his arms in the gesture which was his wont upon making a speech.

Tiryn edged away. Beside her, some of Arkamenes’s higher-caste concubines stepped aside to let her pass, as one would make way for a malodorous beggar. She was the favourite, but when it came to it, he would breed with them. One could not have a true heir with low-caste blood in him. Tiryn lifted her head and thanked God for the kohl and stibium she had applied about her eyes that morning. They felt like armour to her now as she made her way through the crowd. The other concubines would have bowed to her, had Arkamenes’s eyes been upon them. Now they barely gave her room to scrape past them. The closer he came to power, the less he would look for his little low-caste whore, the hufsa from the Magron Mountains. Would he miss her? Probably not. He talked to her in the night because it did not matter what one said to a hufsa. One might as well confide in a stone.

And yet, she thought, I walk here in silk and linen with gold upon my forehead and wrists and ankles, a bodyguard five steps behind, and a maid behind that. Mother, I did well.

She remembered the white mountains, and the blue sky beyond. From there, one looked down on the brown and green plains below with the glitter of the rivers and thought of them as another world, a place to provide a sorry backdrop to the real existence of snow and stone. And yet those endless, horizon-spanning river-plains with their black soils and thrice-yearly harvest were the powerhouse of the world, and demanded tribute from those who lived on their borders. And so Tiryn had been sent, in lieu of a son for the army. One serviced the Empire in whatever way one could.

And now it had been so long that the mountains were mere distant pictures in her head. I have become spoiled, she thought. Too long in palaces. I was born in a place where people worshipped God out of doors, stood before fallen rocks on the heads of mountains and looked up and spoke their mind to him. Now He is hedged about with ceremony and sanctuary, candlelight and gold. One whispers to Him in the shadows.

One begins to doubt if He is there to listen.

Momentarily, she hated herself. This soft, well-clad creature with painted eyes and pointed nails, who now doubted all the good things her parents had fought to make her learn. Why? Because she had seen something of the world and had begun to count herself wise.

Her mother had sliced off a fingertip the day the Tax collectors had taken Tiryn away. Wordless, white-faced, and without complaint, she had lopped it off with the best of her cooking knives, making of Tiryn’s going a bereavement. Tiryn had understood and had not wept upon leaving, so shocked was she by the knowledge that this was for real and forever, not some temporary exile. But she had cried herself to sleep later that night, after the Tax collectors had taken it in turns to rape her.

Leaving the hall, staring down a pair of sentries in order to leave by one of the bewilderingly situated side doors, she found herself walking downhill because it was the easiest way to go. The heat of the day was beginning to fade a little, and it was becoming colder. Many of the local folk were clad in wrapped burnooses, which made Tiryn smile unwillingly, remembering childhoods deep with snow, and frozen lambs set in the ash of the fire to bring back some warmth of life. This winter, as they called it, was as warm as an upland spring. Artaka claimed to be the oldest place in the world, and Tanis its oldest city. Tiryn could believe that, but she still felt that slight scorn the mountain-dweller harbours towards the lowlander. Higher the land, lower the caste, the old saying went. That also was true. The tall, golden-skinned Kefren from the humid and fertile river-plains; these had been rulers of the world time out of mind. They utilised the other races and castes as a carpenter will reach into his box of tools. It had always been this way, and most thought it always would. But for Tiryn, looking on that small group of black-armoured soldiers in the great hall of Tanis today, there had been a jolt of some strange emotion she could not quite bring to register. These things; these men. They had never been anything to do with that box of tools. They did not show deference; they did not care about caste. They were ignorant, and Tiryn sensed that in their ignorance they would be full of hate. But all the same-all the same-how good it was to see the mighty Kefren stand unassured for once, and somehow in awe of the fierce creature they had invited over their doorstep.

Rictus had always liked climbing, whether it was trees or hills, and thus he was quite at home in the rigging of the ship. He sat in the Top of the mainmast, a narrow platform of heavy, salt-scarred wood some six feet across, and listened with a smile to one of the crew tell a story of a certain lady’s house in Kupr, the forested island of many springs in the northern Tanean which Macht navies had plundered time out of mind for the excellence of its timber, their own homegrown stuff being too gnarled and hard to work for proper masts and spars. This certain lady had entertained two sea-captains in the one evening, and had kept them amused in turn, going from room to room in her spacious apartments until one had followed her and found her in the arms of his brother. Neither had been much fazed by this (both being very drunk), and the two of them had married her, all three living in serene contentment for the rest of their lives. When one brother was at sea the other would be on land, and so the lady was kept occupied and the brothers had a fine housekeeper to come home to. But that’s folk on Kupr, the sailor finished with a wink and a grin.

The ship below them looked like a gralloched deer. Every hatch was gaping, and in some places the planking of the deck had been levered up so that the stores in the hold might be off-loaded more quickly. Rictus lay on the wood of the Top and looked down on the avid activity below. He was hungry and thirsty, as were almost all those detailed to remain with the ships, but the heat of the day was fading at last, and all along the dozen crescents of sea-leaning buildings and warehouses and other edifices which formed this part of the harbour the lamps were being lit, both onshore and in the ships which were moored nearby and along the wharves. Never in his life before had he seen anything resembling the marvel of such a sight, such a high and multi-layered snowstorm of lights. He lay there staring at it, thinking about this Great Continent, this vast beast upon whose hide he now looked in the darkening of a foreign evening.

“Who’s that asleep in the Top?” a voice snapped out below.

“That’ll be the Iscan, Rictus.”

“Get him the fuck down. There’s work here that needs another back.”

As Phobos rose in the sky and Haukos trailed after him, so Rictus laboured on the wharves amid crowds of his own people and a dwindled gang of Juthan. Most of these had left with the coming on of dusk, and hence the Macht must sweat now to get their own stores ashore. The two races worked together without any communication other than grunts, nods, and arm-waving, but managed to get the job done with little more than the usual profanity.

They had stacked the crates too high. One was teetering over now, like to fall on the bent figure of a Juthan below it. Always fast on his feet, Rictus dashed to the creature’s side with a shout and shoved it out of the way. He reached up at the falling crate and the wood of it struck him hard in the breastbone. He knew in that moment that it was too heavy for him.

The Juthan he had knocked aside rounded upon him, eyes glaring, fists clenched. Then it saw what he was doing. The Juthan ducked in under Rictus’s arms and set its own strength to work. Between them, they edged the crate to one side. It missed them both, falling to the cobbles with a crash. It broke open to reveal bundled sheaves of aichmes, iron and bronze spearheads wrapped in straw.

Rictus straightened, staring at the Juthan and rubbing his bruised ribs. He smiled.

The yellow eyes regarded him carefully. The thing shrugged, then went back to work. But after that, when a heavy piece of cargo was lowered his way, Rictus often found this Juthan close by, and they would handle it together.

Several hours of staring seemed to sate the curiosity of the dockyard crowds. Before the middle of the night, while the work went on unabated at the quays, they dispersed, and the Kefren spearmen who had been set there to control them relaxed their guard, setting their shields on the ground and doffing their helms to reveal the strange, long-boned faces of their kind. Tiryn stepped through their scattered line with her attendants ten paces behind, her bodyguard bright-eyed and watchful, the maidservant veiled and impassive as only a Juthan could be. There were untold pasangs of docks and wharves down here at the waterfront, and almost every one it seemed had been given over to the Macht ships and the thousands of their occupants and crews who had not marched up the hill to the Aadan. How many of them have sailed here, really? Tiryn wondered.

She approached the nearest ship and the hill of casks, crates, and sacks that cluttered the dock-side before it. The Juthan were here, of course, as they were anywhere in the Empire where heavy work needed to be done. They were humming their deep songs as gangs of them hauled on the tackles of the dockyard cranes. How odd, how disconcerting to see them working side by side with these strangers. The Macht labouring here wore no armour, of course. They were all sizes and all ages. Greybeards with nut-brown skin and corded forearms worked side by side with slim-shouldered youngsters. Was it true, as Amasis had told her, that the Macht had no castes?

There-look at that. One of the younger Macht, tall for their kind, and with pale-coloured hair, was drinking from a waterskin. When he had finished he offered it to the squat figure of a Juthan beside him. And the Juthan took it, squirting liquid into the red gape of its maw. Tiryn stepped forward, fascinated. Her bodyguard, a tall Kefren warrior long past his youth, appeared at her side. “Lady, is this fitting?” he murmured.

“Leave me be, Hurth.” She walked forward, long skirts trailing and grimed from the passage of the streets. The Macht and the Juthan stopped to watch her.

“How can you share this thing’s water?” she asked the Juthan in the common Asurian of the streets. “It is an animal. Can you not smell it?”

The Juthan bowed low, having noted the jewellery she bore, the bodyguard standing hand on sword behind her.

“Mistress, I was thirsty.”

Tiryn found herself catching the eyes of the Macht who was watching this exchange with wariness and curiosity. In the light of the dock-side cressets it was possible to see how gaunt it was, dressed in not much more than rags, and scarred about the mouth. A slave, then. But the eyes were undaunted. There was humour in them. The thing said something, and then had the effrontery to hold its waterskin out to her.

Hurth stepped forward and slapped the skin our of the Macht’s hand, snarling. All about them work on the dockyard stopped. Macht and Juthan all paused to view the little incident. Others of the Macht came crowding forward, and some bore knives. Others were untangling slings from their belts, eyes hot and bright. A splash of shouting in their language, and in the middle the Juthan standing like stone, as if waiting.

“That’s enough, Hurth. Leave him. He-he meant no harm, I think.”

Hurth drew his sword and backed away. “Insolence,” he said. “But there are too many of them. We should leave, lady.”

They retreated from the wharf, pursued by catcalls and whistles. A half-cobble soared through the air to land at their feet. Tiryn jumped, and the Macht about the ships laughed. All save the one with the waterskin. He bent to retrieve it, and watched their hasty departure with thoughtful eyes.

Twelve men stood on a bare hill, every one in black armour with a red chiton underneath. Above them, the sky was blinding blue, and around them a host of untold thousands went about its business, covering the land about like some windswept plague of legend. Off to the west, the glitter of a great river could be made out. There the land was green and there were trees worthy of the name, but here the dust tumbled in ochre clouds before the wind, and only thorn and greasewood and creosote shrubs fought their way out of the cracked dirt.

“From Tanis to Geminestra is four hundred pasangs, give or take,” Phiron said. He knelt beside the map, scanning the calfskin as a man might search a foreign horizon. In his hand a length of withered stick served as a pointer. “It’s desert, scrub land-rather like the plains about Gast back home.”

“Only a little warmer,” Jason said, and there was a rattle of laughter about the map-table. Phiron waved the flies from before his face. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose, more glistening along his cheekbones.

“Fuck this heat,” someone murmured venomously.

“I second that. We will march at night. I have already discussed this with our principal. We will lie up in the heat of the day. By all accounts, the Gadinai Desert is not to be trifled with.”

“Four hundred pasangs,” Orsos the Bull said. “Ten days’ march, if all goes well.” He had shaved his head, and the scalp was burnt pink. His face shone as if oiled.

“Fifteen,” Phiron corrected. When the centurions stared at him he raised both hands palm upwards, like a stallkeeper accepting a bad bargain. “The Kufr cannot march as fast as we can, it seems.”

“You march slower, you eat and drink more,” Jason said. “This is their country; what makes them so bad at walking across it?”

“They are not us,” Phiron said simply.

He looked up from the map, eyes screwed narrow against the glare. One hand eased the rub of his cuirass against his collarbone. “We will start out tonight. Pasion, you have the manifest. We will be in the middle of the column-”

“Eating his Royal Highness’s dust,” Orsos growled.

“Indeed. But the main part of the Kufr forces will be in our rear. We keep our own baggage train with us, in our midst. Brothers, whether we are part of this Kufr host or not, I intend to proceed as if were on our own. Skirmishers out to the flanks, heavy infantry in hollow square. Baggage animals in the centre.”

“We need to sweat,” Mynon said, blackbird eyes darting over the map. “The men are out of shape after the voyage, and they need to get the last of our employer’s wine out of their guts.”

“Agreed,” Phiron said “Pasion? You are close-mouthed this morning.”

“You keep your mouth shut and less flies get in it,” Pasion retorted. He was rubbing the side of his jaw, like a man with toothache. “I was just thinking. So, we’ve divided the army into ten battalions, morai, with ten generals to command them; but we’ve only enough spearmen for nine. We should perhaps think of making up those numbers out of the skirmishers.”

“What, kit out the old men and boys with panoplies? I’d rather be under strength,” Orsos snorted.

“There’s likely enough lads among them,” Pasion said, glaring at the Bull. “We have the gear; it’s weighing down the wagons as we speak. Better it sits on a man’s back than in a wagon-bed.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Phiron said quickly, smothering the birth of the quarrel. “Brothers, to your morai. Brief your centurions, and have all ready. Pasion will inspect each centon’s baggage this evening. Let your men sleep this afternoon. Any questions?”

There were many. Phiron could feel them hanging before him in the air, dancing in the heat-shimmer above the hill upon which they stood. Finally, inevitably, it was Orsos who spoke up. Despite his years, the mass of kneaded flesh which formed his face made him look like some huge, brutish child.

“You put this whole deal together, Phiron, and for that we all here give you credit”-a collective murmur of assent, but grudgingly given. Phiron raised an eyebrow, and moved his feet like a man about to receive a blow-”but you’re not to forget that this here is now a Kerusia, an Army Council. The men elected ten of us out of a hundred centurions, but no one elected you-or Pasion there, if you come to it. We know you’re the only one among us speaks Kufr, and so there’s no thought of pushing you out of the way; but when it comes to decisions made for the army, we make them together now.”

“You’re not a king, brother.” This was white-bearded Castus. Old as he was, he had the blackest heart of any of them. The scar that ran into his beard turned his smile into a leer. “You know these foreigners, it’s true, but me, or Argus here, or Teremon, we all have more campaigns under our belt than you.”

“And in battle, Castus, shall we take a vote on it every time I want a centon to hoist their shields?” Phiron asked lightly, but there was a wire in his voice.

“Don’t be stiff-necked. We’ll be working with these here Kufr when the time comes, so it makes sense you give the orders. Yonder would-be King will be sending you couriers by the dozen once the fur begins to fly. But for other things, for the ways we march and the places we stop, you come to us, this here Kerusia, and we puts a vote on it. Fair’s fair.”

“All right.” Phiron bent his head a little. Castus, Orsos, Argus, and Teremon. The most experienced centurions in the army, a little quartet of killers. The younger generals- Pomero, Durik, Marios, and Jason-these formed another group. They even stood a little apart from the rest. And the crowd-pleasers, the talkers: Mynon and Gelipos. These would watch the way the wind blew, and make their votes the deciders.

“Anything else?” The ten generals looked at each other, nodded, shrugged. Pomero cracked his knuckles with a show of nonchalance. Argus spat into the dust and rubbed the liquid into a little turd with his foot.

“Very well then, brothers. Let us go about our business.” And as the knot of men broke up, “Jason, stay a moment.”

Three remained. Phiron, Pasion, Jason. The tell upon which they stood was no more than three spear-lengths high, and looked to have been made by man; there were ancient clay bricks peeping through the dirt at their feet. It made a fine vantage-point to survey the encampments of the army. They had not erected tents, but each centon had marked out its bivouac with cairns of heaped stones. The men had laid their bedrolls on the rolling dust of the plain in neat rows, two paces per man, and the company wagon in the middle. All told, the Macht camp was two pasangs long and somewhat wider. Not even Phiron had ever been part of so large an army before, or seen it spread out before him as it was here on the sere plain that bordered the Gadinai Desert.

But that was not the whole. The Macht lines were drawn some six pasangs from the eastern walls of Tanis, but between them and the walls was an even larger encampment. This was less ordered, a hiving, chaotic and many-tented city of some tens of thousands. A haze of dust hung over it, along with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires, and out upon its western borders great herds of animals darkened the earth. These were the beasts and soldiers of Arkamenes himself, his own household and the troops which Gushrun of Artaka had granted him. There were perhaps thirty thousand of them all told, and that did not take into account the camp-followers. Their camp was closer to the river, where there was still some grass. In the spring, all this would be a lush plain and there would be reed-beds down by the Artan, for the river flooded twice a year, swelled by some unknown source far back in the uncounted wildernesses of the interior. For now, the Macht were using a series of ancient wells out here on the plain and getting used to the sensation of sand in their teeth.

“If yonder host is ready to move at nightfall, then I’m a lady’s maid,” Pasion grunted, still kneading his jaw. “What is it, Phiron? There’s a lot to do.”

“Our elders in the Kerusia made a good point, Pasion, about talking to the Kufr. It had occurred to me also. To that end, I have something here.” Phiron had bent and was rolling up his calfskin map. It was a gift from Arkamenes, and detailed the lands from Tanis to the Magron Mountains. Sometimes he wished he had never seen it. Four hundred pasangs on that calfskin was no more than a handspan. He thrust it into the oxhide bag he had been carrying on his back for twenty years, and dug out something else instead. “Jason, for you. Pasion, you may use it too if you’ve a mind to.”

A close-written scroll. Jason opened it in his hands, dragging the spindles apart. “What’s this? I see words here, Machtic script, and then some gibberish opposite.”

“It’s a word-hoard, a dictionary. Arkamenes’s vizier, Amasis, had a scribe in Tanis write it out plain and fair for me. It tells you Machtic words in Asurian, the common tongue of the Empire, written as they sound in our own script.” Phiron grinned, for Jason’s face had lit up like a boy’s. “We need someone who can understand what these bastards are saying besides myself. We can’t always be relying on interpreters, or the charity of our allies.”

“The charity of our allies…” Pasion mused on the phrase a moment before continuing. “We’ll need that charity by the ton ere we’re done, Phiron. What food will take us across this desert we can take on our backs, and you say there’s water-holes out there too. But when we get to Geminestra, the bag is empty. I hope our princely employer has some skill with logistics, or we’ll be eating mule before a month is out.”

“It’s been arranged, Pasion,” Phiron said testily.

“I’m quartermaster. I like to arrange these things for myself.”

Phiron tapped a finger on the scroll Jason held. “Then read this. Learn these things. If you cannot speak to the Kufr, how can you tell him what you want?”

Pasion set his jaw. He smiled a little. “As you say. Jason, I wish you joy of your studies. I go to count up sacks of grain, and hope they have multiplied in my absence.” He turned and descended the hill, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun.

“He’s a professional, and thus dislikes being brigaded with amateurs,” Phiron said, watching him go. “Can’t say as I blame him. We march on the word of a Kufr, and from now on will eat and drink on his say so.”

“If we run short, there are always other ways of making up the difference,” Jason said. He rolled up the scroll and set the closer in place. “Thank you for this, Phiron. I’ll put it to good use.”

“What? No, no. I know what you’re saying, Jason. But we cannot pillage lands we hope to win to our side. Arkamenes will look after us- it’s in his own interest after all. I do not fear being betrayed or neglected, not by him. At least, not while he still lacks a crown.”

The two men looked at one another, understanding. Jason sighed. “I was happier when I was ignorant-as ignorant as I shall keep my centurions. I never thought being a general would entail so much talk.”

“It is always the way. He’s offering us help with the baggage, you know.”

“Help?”

“Eight hundred Juthan with broad backs. I’ve heard they’re hardy as mules.”

“I’d keep them out of our lines, for now, Phiron. Our men are not yet used to the Kufr cheek-by-jowl.”

“As you say. We may be glad of them before long though. We march out tonight, Jason, whatever the Kufr do.”

“And if they are late?”

“If they are late, then they can eat our dust.”

From Tanis, the Gadinai Desert stretched out flat and brown, a parched plain that extended all the way to the Otosh River in the north, broken by wadis and gullies that the flash-floods of the rainy spring carved out deeper every year. To the south, the Gadean Hills stretched in line after line of broken, pale-coloured stone. White cliffs marked them out from afar, and dotted through them were the timeworn quarries from whence the very stuff of Tanis’s mighty walls and towers had been hewn, in block after gargantuan block. Kefren shepherds roamed the hills, tending their goats as they had for time immemorial. Further south, tribes of hill-bandits made their lairs in the maze-like confusion of the bluffs and canyons.

These watched, amazed, from the highest of the crumbling escarpments, as now a great rash spread over the desert, a river of men, dark under the sun save where the light caught the points of their spears. They raised a dustcloud behind and around them, a tawny, leaning giant, a toiling yellow storm bent on blotting out the western sky. It seemed a nation on the march, a whole people set on migrating to a better place. The sparse inhabitants of the Gadinai drew together, old feuds forgotten, and watched in wonder as the great column poured steadily onward, as unstoppable as the course of the sun. It was as grand as some harbinger of the world’s end, a spectacle even the gods must see from their places amid the stars. So this, then, was the passage of an army.