“We saw your scarlet cloak, and the harness you bear, and wondered if you might be hiring,” Rictus said to the man who stood before them now with one of these ancient artefacts on his back.
The man cocked his head to one side. “If I am, I do not hire in the middle of the street. Nor do I like to be shouted at there by boys who still have their mother’s milk about their gums.” One eyebrow rose at this, a mockery, though the rest of his face remained grave.
Gasca took a step forward, but Rictus tilted out his spear to bar his way.
“You’re right, of course,” he said to the cursebearer. “You have our apologies. Would it be acceptable for us to ask you—to ask you where it would be appropriate to look for employment?”
The man smiled at this. “You’ve not done much apologising in your time, boy. But you want employment you say. As mercenaries?
“Yes, sir.”
“And is this all the panoply you possess?”
“What you see is all we have,” Gasca said. “But it has done good service before now.”
“No doubt. But it’s not enough to get you both in the phalanx. One of you, perhaps, but the other will have to apply to the light arm, or else be a camp servant. Go to the northern gate, the Mithannon they call it. Outside the walls there’s a marshalling square surrounded by tents and shacks. That’s where they hire spears in this town.”
“Thank you,” both Rictus and Gasca said at once, eyes bright as those of children promised some treat.
The man chuckled. “You came to the head of the snake. I am Pasion of Decanth. Drop my name there and you may not get as hard a time. It’s late in the day to be touting your wares. Leave it till the morning, and you’re less likely to be manhandled.”
“Thank you,” Rictus said again.
“You’re from Isca, boy, aren’t you?”
“I... How do you know?”
“The way you met my eyes. Most men outside the scarlet drop their gaze for a second on meeting a cursebearer. You’ve had Iscan arrogance bred into you. Let slip that at the hiring—it will do no harm. Now I must go.” He nodded at them both, then turned and resumed his way through the crowd, the people parting before him as though he were contagious.
“We have luck with us,” Gasca said. “That’s a meeting the goddess had a hand in if ever anyone did. And I have seen the Curse of God at last.”
“I didn’t come all this way to be a camp servant,” Rictus said.
“Let us go to that merchant’s inn. We’ll set ourselves up there and see about joining a company tomorrow. We shall eat and drink and wash and find ourselves a bed.”
Rictus smiled. He looked tired, older than his years, pinched with hunger and bad memories. “Lead on then. And take this shield for a while— fair’s fair.”
The Mithannon faced north towards the Mithos River, a grey flash of cold mountain-water that ran parallel to the walls of the city for five or six pasangs. The open plain there had long ago been flattened out and beaten into a dirt bowl around which there clustered irregular lines of wooden shacks and stalls, hide tents made semipermanent with the addition of sod walls, and hundreds of low-roofed ramshackle shelters brought into being with the connivance of a bewildering variety of materials. The place seemed a mockery of the stone and marble majesty of Machran itself, but if one looked closer there was an order to the encampments. They ran in distinct lines, and some were cordoned off with rawhide and hemp ropes mounted on posts. Flags and banners snapped everywhere, a kind of ragged heraldry splashed across them, painted on signposts, daubed on the skewed planks of shacks and cabins. And everywhere in the midst of these crude streets there walked knots and files of men dressed in scarlet of some shade or other. These were the Hiring Grounds, and the Marshalling Yards, and the Spear-Market, and half a dozen other names besides. Here, men might join the free companies, those soldiers who sold their spears to the highest bidder and who owed allegiance to nothing except their comrades and themselves.
In the quarter of the city closest to the Mithannon there was the greatest concentration of wine-shops and brothels in all Machran. Here, the gracious architecture degenerated into a hiving labyrinth of lesser buildings, built of fired brick and undressed stone, roofed with reed-thatch from the riverbanks rather than red tile, and lacking windows, often doors. Men had built upwards here, for lack of space in the teeming alleyways about them. It seemed, looking up from the splash and mire of the noisome streets, that the buildings leaned in on each other for support, and a mason with a plumb-line might look around himself in despair.