The Ten Thousand(106)

How many days since the battle? Four, five? Latterly they had all seemed the same. She had watched the Asurian cavalry strike home with unadulterated horror; it had seemed that the battle was lost, and the army destroyed. They had fought through the baggage carts, the Asurians and Aristos’s men, whilst Rictus and the light troops had run up the hill to aid the main battle line. She was still not sure how the thing had turned around, but the men were talking of the Juthan deserting the field. They had been saved by the intervention of Antimone herself, many said. As it was, the victory was bitter enough. Over two thousand dead, and hundreds wounded. Tiryn had picked her way up the hill before Irunshahr, stepping in scarlet puddles, on the entrails of men and horses. She had climbed to the hill-crest to find Jason, for he had been on the left, where disaster had fallen. She had never walked upon a battlefield before, had never seen the ground hidden by stark and crawling bodies, Macht and Kefren moaning next to each other, horses screaming and trying to stand on the splintered bones of their legs. She had not known it would be like this, such a concentrated entanglement of lacerated flesh. In the end it was Rictus who found him, who had him borne down to the wagons on a litter made from spears. The only thing that warmed her was their automatic assumption that Jason should be with her. “Look after him,” Rictus had said, his eyes as cold as the mountains.

With the rout of the Kufr army, the governor of Irunshahr had come to their camp under a green branch, to ask for clemency. He did not know just how badly the army had been hurt, but he could see the last of his hopes disappearing along the Imperial Road to the east in a broken panic. He went on his knees before those blood-slathered, bronze-clad men, and begged for the life of his city. Had he but known, he could have kept his gates closed with impunity. The Macht were in no condition to assault the walls, and did not have the stomach for it either. Rictus and Aristos made a good two-man act, the big Iscan as taciturn as a marble pillar, Aristos as arrogant as a Kefren prince. Thus the army had been supplied, after a fashion.

“Buridan,” Jason said. “Where is Buridan?”

“He is dead,” Tiryn told him. “Remember?”

Jason’s eyes opened. For a moment they were clear, though whatever he was seeing it was not in the gloom of the wagon-bed. He smiled a little, a bitter smile, not looking at her. “Phiron would have done it better. He tells me so.” His eyes rolled in his head, “I hear the wings. She is close now.” He drifted off again.

The lamp went out, and there was just the dark in the wagon, the rasp of Jason’s breathing, the thumping of her own heart. Outside, the wind hurled itself up and down the valley. Here, in the Korash, summer had not yet been thought of. Even spring was a starveling urchin of a thing, barely enough to set the grass growing. Tiryn’s Juthan slave, Ushdun, had run off along with the rest of her fellows in the aftermath of the battle. Somehow they had known about the Juthan betrayal, and somehow they had known the perfect moment to escape, when all was in chaos and the fighting just ended. Tiryn had brought Jason back to her wagon to find it ransacked. The Macht walking wounded who had been set to look over the Juthan had instead joined the fight against the Asurians. There were no more slaves with the army. She was, Tiryn realised, the only Kufr in the camp. The thought startled her.

No matter. She drew Jason closer to her. His flesh was hot to the touch, and sweat was streaming down his face, but he was shivering convulsively.

I do not know why it is so, she thought, but I esteem this man, this Macht, this barbarian. It may even be that I love him. Rictus knew that. It may be he saw it before I did.

They had gathered in an open space between the fires of the centons, and there had piled up the carcass of a broken wagon and set it on fire. Around this blaze there now gathered several thousand men. The evening was setting in, and the firelight grew brighter as the light fell. The Macht had come to debate on their predicament, to thrash out things in Assembly, as their race had been wont to do since the end of the Kings, far back in the mythical past. Most of the Kerusia were present, wrapped in their scarlet cloaks like the rest of the men, but wearing the Curse of God beneath as a kind of badge. Their numbers were fewer. Jason was wounded and Grast had died at Irunshahr, close by him in the line. Mynon had been kicked by a horse and now wore his broken arm in a sling, but his black eyes were bright as ever. Old Mochran, the last of the elder leaders, stood a little apart from the rest, wrapped in his cloak, his peppery beard sunk on his chest. He had saved the day, wheeling the right-hand morai inwards on his own initiative, trusting that the Juthan desertion was not a ruse. Had it not been for him, the army would most likely have been destroyed at Irunshahr. The knowledge made a little space around him at the bonfire. He stared into the flames, perhaps remembering the pyres on which they had burned the bodies of two thousand comrades. They had been three days at it, and the reek had soiled the air for pasangs around.