Some oil yet remained to light Tiryn’s sole lamp. Rictus produced the earthenware jar from under his cloak. Too hot to touch when he had first taken it, the clay was now only lukewarm. Tiryn spooned the stew into a pair of bowls. Jason was sitting up now, and though his face was white and wasted, his eyes were clear. The fever that had consumed him was broken at last, having feasted on his flesh since the Irunshahr battle. Rictus could have made thumb and forefinger meet around his once brawny forearm. As Jason spooned stew into his mouth, the utensil shook in his hand as if even that were too much for his stripped muscles. He saw the look in Rictus’s eyes and grinned, his face momentarily becoming a hairy skull.
“Don’t you be wearing that long face for me. I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“I thank the gods you are.”
“Thank Tiryn. Without her I’d be buried under a pile of rocks in our rear.” His free hand went out and clenched the Kufr woman’s fingers. Tiryn smiled. She was beautiful. Rictus wondered why he had never noticed it before. For a second he envied Jason that look in her eyes. No woman had ever looked at him in such a way.
“You are a lucky man, Jason.”
“I’ve been luckier,” Jason told him, around a mouthful of stew. “Phobos! Are we down to mule already?”
“When the animals die, we carve them up at once. I’m trying to save the beans until there’s nothing else.”
“How goes our merry march, lad? Longer than expected, I take it.”
“The weather has slowed us down, and there are so many westward-heading valleys that it takes time for the scouts to let us know which ones are not dead-ends. We’re feeling our way forward pace by pace.”
“And meanwhile, our old friend starvation marches alongside us. How are the stores?”
“Aristos took more than his share when he left. The army has been on half-rations for days now. As things go, we’ll be all out in three more days. After that, it’s just the pack animals, and whatever we can grub out of the ground. No one has seen a lick of game since we got high up, not so much as a bird. This is a desert, Jason.”
“We’ll march hungry,” Jason said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “It’s been done before.”
“We’ll march hungry,” Rictus agreed, tonelessly.
Jason watched him by the low flicker of the lamplight, his bowl forgotten in his lap. “Not much fun, is it, Rictus, that lonely space above the snowline?”
“It’s not something I’ve ever wanted.”
“And yet I hear you are good at it. Mynon and Mochran have been to visit. Between them they’ve forty years on you, and yet they’re happy as fresh fish to leave the decisions your way.”
Rictus did not reply.
“I left you Aristos and his snot-nosed friends as morai commanders,” Jason said. “That is on me. I should have looked harder for leaders.”
“What’s done is done.”
“I hear your friend Gasca died.”
“At Irunshahr, yes.”
“That, too, was my fault.”
“No! It was Aristos. He—”
“It was my fault, Rictus. I am not the strategist Phiron was. Give me a centon or a mora, and I am a happy man. But an army like this—I did not see it. I am sorry.”
“These things happen,” Rictus said.
“This is your army now. You will lead it home.”
“And you?”
Jason stared at Tiryn, and she back at him. “I have what I want, right here. I am done with armies, done with war.”
“I—I don’t—”
“What was your father’s name?”
The question threw Rictus completely. It was a moment before he could reply. “He was called Aritus.”
“He must have been a good man, to raise such a son.”
The next morning the snow grew thinner, hard flakes that struck exposed flesh with the heft of sand. The army staggered on through it, the morai hunched up around narrow-waisted gaps in the rocks, stringing out where the ground opened. The Imperial Road had long ago disappeared; the stone-paved companion that had led their feet all the way from Kunaksa had become a wide dirt track with stone waymarkers every pasang, then a mere half-guessed trail, and finally nothing more than a memory buried in snow.
A river crossed their path, a wide, wild, foaming wall of water racing down from the heights above and widening out as it crossed the valley floor. The men waded across it, shouting with the cold, leaning on their spears and manhandling the wagons and carts through the waist-deep torrent. One cart full of wounded hit an unseen stone and tilted over, the mule screaming in its harness as it went with it. Fifty men splashed and waded at once to right it again, but by the time they had done so the dozen wounded inside had been carried off by the roaring water, mere black dots hurtling downstream to be smashed to pieces against the rocks. The army went into camp that night shuddering and soaked, the water freezing their cloaks to the hardness of armour. They stripped off their clothes and rolled naked in the snow, pummelled each other until the blood showed pink under the skin, slapped life back into each other’s flesh, and laughed while they did it, still able to see the absurd side of things.