“Grapes and apples,” Tiryn said, her arm about his shoulders.
“Hearth and home.”
They came down out of the high places at last, a meandering column of ragged, limping men, their beards long and tangled, their faces blackened by wind and cold. They drew in their midst thirty or forty battered carts, taking turns to haul and push them bumping over the rocks. In these were piled shields and helms and the cooking pots they had not cooked with for many days, and in the beds of the carts lay the gold of Tanis, or as much of it as had survived. Knowing it was within the vehicles, the men manhandled them along without complaint. Now that it seemed they might survive after all, it had taken on a new importance.
They marched with their spears in hand. Their armour they had abandoned up in the mountains, except for those among them who wore the Curse of God. As they descended the air grew warm about them, and they cast off the rags they had bound about their bodies, unstrapped the filthy bindings from their feet and marched barefoot, feeling the new grass between their toes. Their eyes glittered, sunken in fleshless faces. Some wept silently as they marched, not believing what they saw.
The land swelled out before them, a green and blue immensity running up to the horizon. Here and there the gleam of a river caught the sun, and there were trees, crops, orchards, and pasture-land with animals moving across it in herds. Nearer at hand a large town or city sprawled in the foothills below, the smoke rising from it in a thousand threads of grey. It was unwalled, the houses built of pale stone, roofed with clay tiles such as the Macht used themselves in the Harukush.
“That is Kumir,” Rictus said, pointing. “We’ll form up before the city and send an embassy, ask for supplies. This is rich country here, and it’s easy going all the way to the sea.”
“How much farther to the sea?” Whistler asked, scratching his scarred pate.
“A man marching light could make it in two weeks, I reckon.”
“Aristos must be close, by now,” Whistler said. “If he’s still alive.”
“I think he is,” Rictus told him. “His kind always are.”
He had been here before them, him and Gominos. The town elders came out to talk to Tiryn and Jason and Rictus with several hundred of their young men armed at their backs. They saw on the hill above their settlement a fearsome army, five thousand men or more, all standing in rank with faces lean and hungry as wolves, a rancid smell about them, and filth crusting every facet of their appearance except their spearpoints. These glittered painfully bright in the early summer sun. It was an army of vagabonds, but vagabonds who knew discipline, and were the more frightening for it.
The town’s Headman was an old Kefre, his golden skin faded, but his eyes still the startling violet of the Kefren high castes. He came forward leaning on a black staff and flanked by two others scarcely less infirm than he.
“You are Macht,” he said in Asurian.
“We are.”
“We have seen the likes of you before. Nine days ago your people came through here, a thousand of them. They stole our cattle and looted our farms and slew our folk out of hand. Are you here now to finish what they began?”
“Aristos,” Rictus said through clenched teeth.
It was Jason who spoke up in the Headman’s own language. “We need food, draught animals, and wagons. Give us those, and I swear we shall harm none of you.”
“How can I believe you?”
Tiryn stepped forward, dropping her veil. “You may believe him. These are not like the ones who came before. They are men of honour.”
The old Kefre stared at her, both startled and scandalised. “What do you do here, with these animals?” he demanded in Kefren, the language of the kings.
“I am guiding them home. The faster you provide them with what they need, the sooner they shall be gone. They are starving. If you do not give it to them, they will take it.”
The Kefre nodded slowly. “So it has always been. The spearpoint cannot be denied. Very well.” He paused. “I have heard stories from the south. These then are the Macht who fought the Great King?”
“They are.”
“Then we will feed them. But we will curse their names, and rue the very footsteps they must take across our world.”
Tiryn nodded. “I know,” she said.
They marched across the green hills and open farmland of Askanon, and upon meeting the Sardask River, they consulted Jason’s map and decided to cross it before it broadened in the flatter plains below. The army splashed through it thigh deep, and on the far side they pitched camp and sent out foraging parties. They drew water from the river and set it to boil in the centoi, whilst the herd of livestock that now travelled with them was picked through for the day’s meat. The citizens of Kumir had handed over all their draught animals to Aristos, and what was left over in their grain stores after the winter. There had been little enough to spare for the main body of the Macht, but for hungry men it had been enough. For a while at least.