The Ten Thousand(120)

Mochran and Mynon joined them, jostled and bumped by the tide of men running past. “Is it true?” Mochran demanded. “Boy, I’ll brain you if it’s not.”

“Just a few pasangs, General, I swear by the mother that bore me. Go up the hill and see for yourself.”

They looked at one another and finally Jason said, “Well, brothers,” and led the way.

At the top of the hill fully two thirds of the army now stood and knelt and embraced each other and wept and shouted thanks to the gods. Rictus felt his heart rising in his throat, beating as fast as if he were going into battle. Beside him, Jason and Tiryn strode hand in hand. The Kufr woman had torn the komis from her head and her dark hair was blowing out like a flag in the wind.

And Rictus smelled it, that salt in that air, that slake of earth. He pushed his way through the raucous crowds on the hilltop and stood at their fore, his knuckles white on the shaft of his spear. So dazzled was he by his tears and the sunlight that for a moment all he could see was a bright blur, a blueness. He blinked his eyes clear, and there it was, all the way to the horizon.

“The sea, the sea,” he whispered, the tears streaming down his cheeks. The immensity of it, and on the edge of that vast blueness, the darker shapes of the Harukush Mountains, a mere guess at the end of sight. He bent his head, and the hammering of his heart began to ease. He was thinking of Gasca, of Phiron and Pasion and a dozen others. The faces of the dead filled his heart until he thought it would burst.

Jason set an arm about his shoulders. “I wish you joy of the sight, brother,” he said quietly. “I wish you joy.”

They camped that night within sound of the breakers, and men left the campfires to splash in the shallows like children and throw up cascades of moonlit spray at one other, laughing. Phobos cast a long glittering path of broken light below him, so that men said he was making a road for them across the waters to the Harukush beyond. He had forgiven them their failings; his brother and his mother had softened his heart. He would let them see home again after all.

Rictus sat by a driftwood fire at the shoreline, his toes buried in sand. He rested his elbows on his knees and stared out at the waters, the vast panoply of the stars above them, the white foam of the waves catching the moonlight. All around him, the Macht had lit their fires up and down the coast and men were talking around the flames as they had not done in a long time. They talked of home, of ships, of Sinon. Some even broached the topic of employment. They talked of the future. It was something they had not cared to raise since Kunaksa. Something in them had come alive again, if only for tonight.

Mynon, Jason, and Mochran joined Rictus at his fire. All of them had left off their armour and reclined in the sand with just their filthy chitons on their backs.

“I never liked the sea, until now,” Mynon said, poking at the fire with a wave-worn stick. “I believe I could sit up all night just to stare at it.” Unconsciously, he clenched and unclenched the fist of his once-broken arm as he lay there.

“Sinon is up the coast a ways from here, at the end of the Imperial Road,” Mochran said gruffly. He rubbed at his eyes; they had been troubling him ever since the mountains.

“Two days’ march,” Jason told him, “across the Haneikos River.”

“At Sinon, we will use the gold to hire ships to take us home, and then whatever is left, we will share out among the men,” Rictus said. “Agreed?” They all nodded.

“You think Aristos will be waiting for us there?” Mynon asked. “He’s not got the coin to hire ships. His men may well be stranded.”

“He can be sitting in hell for all I care,” Jason snorted. “What is he to us, now? He can’t loot Sinon as he has been these Kufr villages. May he rot there.”

“He deserted the colour,” Rictus said in a low voice. “The penalty for that is death.”

The others stared at him. “You won’t keep to that now, not now?” Mynon asked.

“When he left he took food out of our mouths when we needed it most. He could have warned us of the Qaf had he chose, and perhaps saved hundreds of lives. He betrayed us. He must die for it.”

The cold, even tone of these words silenced them all. The fire cracked and spat, blue salt-flames hissing out of the driftwood.

“Let it go, Rictus,” Jason said at last. “We’ve come too far to end it by killing our own.”

“One man, Jason—it is just one man. When it is done it will be over for me, and not before.” Rictus rose and walked away from the firelight, down to the breaking waves of the sea.





Twenty-Eight