“I believe they’ve had enough,” Rictus said.
“It was so fast,” one of the young husbands said behind them. He had been four feet from the struggle, and it had not touched him, nor had he so much as raised his arm. Dimly, Gasca had some insight of what real phalanx fighting might be like. The proximity to violence of some, so close to the spearheads, and yet not part of the fight.
“Now, after me,” Rictus said. There was a kind of joy in his face as he started down the stair.
“No, boy!” the fat merchant shouted, and he seized Rictus’s chiton in much the way he had Gasca’s. “Let them go. You go down those stairs and they’ll fight you to the death. You may win, but there’s no need for it, and you’re likely to take a bad hurt before the last goes down.”
Rictus suddenly looked very young, like a sullen boy denied the treat he had been promised. He hesitated, and the look vanished. That calm came across his face again, and a smile that was not entirely pleasant. He gently lifted the fat merchant’s hand from his clothing, and then turned to address their enemies.
“Take your wounded and go,” he called down to the goatmen.
“Come down and fight us here,” one shouted back in the guttural accents of the high Harukush. “We will wait for you.”
“You will die, all of you, if we do,” Rictus said. And he was still smiling.
The goatmen stared at him. One spat blood onto the snow. Then they began to methodically strip their dead, whilst one remained at the foot of the stairs, spear at ready.
“You’ve done well, lads,” the fat merchant said. “Now with a little more help from the goddess, we’ll be in Machran by nightfall. We’ve nothing left to fear from these ugly wights.”
They stood upon the wall, watching while the goatmen bundled up the belongings of their dead comrades. When they were done, the three bodies lay nude in the snow, their hairy nakedness taking on a bluish tinge already. Then, without ceremony, the five survivors took off, the leg-hurt one hobbling and hissing in the rear. They turned a corner of the ruins and disappeared.
“They may hide and ambush us,” Rictus said. “I would.”
“You and your friend have put fear in them,” the fat merchant said. “I know these sorts. I come from Scanion, in the deep mountains. We used to hunt them like they were boar. Good sport, if you’ve a strong stomach. They’re brave when they’re in numbers, with an easy kill in sight, but you kill one or two and the rest lose heart right quick, like vorine. This pack is spent. Though what they’re doing so close to Machran is anybody’s guess. I’ve never met them so low.” And then, “Boy, that leg of yours needs attended.”
Gasca took off his helm and closed his eyes as the cold air cooled the sweat on his head. “You saved my life between you. I am in your debt now.”
“You saved mine by standing there,” the fat merchant grunted. “Do not speak of debt to me.”
“Nor me,” Rictus said. “You took that first javelin on your shield when it was aimed my way.”
Gasca and Rictus looked at one another. Both their hands rose in the same moment, and in the next they grasped each other’s wrists in the warrior salute, smiling, seeming not much more than boys.
“Of course, you did piss yourself,” Rictus said.
Four
MACHRAN
There was a legend that the Macht had once been ruled by a single King, a mighty soldier, a just ruler, an architect of ambition and vision. He had gathered together all the scattered cities of his empire and connected them with a series of great roads, hewn with titanic labour out of the very faces of the mountains. Bas Mathon on the coast, he had linked to Gan Cras in the very heart of the Harukush range. Thousands of pasangs of highway he had carved across the northern world, the better to speed the passage of his messengers, his governors, his armies. But they also sped the feet of his enemies. An unruly, restless and stiff-necked people, the Macht had overthrown him, broken down his palace at Machran, and splintered his empire into a hundred, two hundred different vying polities. The cities had elected their own rulers, one by one. They had forged alliances and broken them, and they had bludgeoned their own passage through history, heedless of any larger call on their allegiances. The empire of the Macht was no more; the idea of a single King ruling all the great cities of the Harukush came to seem fantastic, then risible; a tale to he scoffed at in taverns. But the roads still stood. Some fell into disrepair, but the most important ones survived, and men still walked them to trade their wares and make their wars and indulge the lust of their wanderings. The King who had made them became a figure of myth, and in time even his name was forgotten, and the stones he had set up to commemorate it were worn smooth by the wind and rain of centuries.