The Ten Thousand(10)

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.