The Ten Thousand(18)

“Sir—a word if we might!” he called out, for their quarry was getting too far ahead of them, people making way for the black armour.

The cursebearer halted in his tracks, turned round. He was a lowlander, shorter than them, middle-aged, with a peppery beard and deep-hollowed eyes. He had a scarlet cloak hung on one shoulder, the end of which was wrapped around his left forearm. No weapons of any kind. The man did not speak, but looked Rictus and Gasca up and down appraisingly, as a man would upon buying a horse. The two of them stood silent before him, breathing through their mouths, feeling the appraisal, lost for any more words.

The cursebearer saw two tall boys who were almost men. They might have been brothers. Both were light-skinned and fair of hair, the colouring of the inner mountains. One had grey eyes, the other blue. The blue-eyed fellow was broader, heavier, and had an open, friendly face. Grey-eyes looked underfed and ill-rested. In his glance there was some knowledge of the world, hard come by.

“What is this word you want?” the cursebearer asked. He had thick eyebrows, black as soot, and they moved more than his mouth, which was a thin-lipped gash in his beard with bad teeth behind it.

It was Rictus who must needs reply. Gasca was still staring at the black cuirass which the man wore. It seemed to soak up the very daylight, a midnight black so lightless it appeared a hole in the fabric of the afternoon. This was the Curse of God, one of the ancient armours which dated back to the origins of the Macht as a people. None knew how they had been created, but the legends said that Gaenion the Smith had made a wager with God Himself, betting that he could fashion a darkness which not even his wife’s gaze could penetrate. His spouse was Araian, the lady of the sun, and she was both an inquisitive and indolent creature. When she rose from her bed her eyes saw all things, and when she left the skies of Kuf in the evenings she would tell God Himself of the day’s doings.

Gaenion won his wager, but God took the black stuff he had forged and gave it to Antimone, Goddess of the Veil, for she was enamoured of darkness, and her two sons, Phobos and Haukos, loved to ride the horses of the air through the sky when Araian had left it for her bed.

Antimone wove Gaenion’s hammered darkness into a chiton with which to clothe the first man of the Macht, whom God had set down upon the surface of Kuf naked and afraid. Antimone, in pity, gave this first man, whose name was Ask, the chiton to protect him, for Gaenion’s fabric, though light and flexible, was more impenetrable than stone. When God realised what Antimone had done, He was angry, for He had intended that Ask and his kind should treat the other denizens of the world with respect, and show them courtesy through fear of their own vulnerability. But now Ask was unafraid, with Antimone’s Gift to clothe him, and he set out to master the creatures of Kuf which God had created. And so, through Antimone’s pity, Creation itself had been set awry. So God cursed the black armour of Antimone, and stirred up the hearts of all the other races of Kuf against Ask and his people. The Macht would be warriors without compare, He decreed, but they would never know peace, and they would have need of their black armour over the course of the world’s turning, for they would pay in blood for their desire to master the earth.

Antimone was punished also. She had erred in pity, in softness of heart, and so God set her down on Kuf itself to watch over the Macht in all their travails down the millennia. She would foresee the fate of those she loved, but would not be able to change it, and so would weep bitter tears, for she would be witness to every crime that man would commit in his tenure of the earth.

Her sons, Phobos the elder and Haukos the younger, wished to follow their mother to Kuf, but God forbade it as part of Antimone’s punishment. So they drew as near as they dared, riding their great black horses in shadow across the night sky, when Araian the sun was not there to tell God of their doings. Phobos hated the Macht for causing his mother’s exile from heaven, and his white face leered down upon men from the depths of the night sky. But Haukos had inherited his mother’s soft heart. To his pink countenance men prayed for intercession with Antimone, and hence, with God Himself.

Such was the legend.

Whatever their origin, there were some five thousand sets of Antimone’s black armour abroad in the world, and those who bore them were known as cursebearers. The armour was passed down through families for centuries, though many had changed hands in battle. None were ever given up willingly, and a city might go to war for possession of a single black cuirass. Ageless and indestructible, some said that in them resided the very essence of the Macht as a people, and were they to disappear, then so would mankind.