The Ten Thousand(26)

“It smells all right. Hold still. This’ll hurt.”

He made two fists and pressed the knuckles in on either side of the wound, squeezing it. Gasca uttered one strangled yelp, and then at the amused looks of the other spearmen in the shack he clenched shut his teeth until they creaked.

The wound popped, and out spat a yellow gush of pus. Rictus kept pressing until the pus ended and clean blood began.

“Where’s your old chiton? Give it here.” He ripped off a strip and bound it about Gasca’s leg, knotting it loose enough that a man might slide two fingers underneath. His father had taught him that, the day the boar had ducked under the aichme. One had to let the blood keep flowing.

Rictus wiped his sticky hands on his chiton and sat back. “Now you can march with the best of them.”

Gasca did not meet his eyes. His gaze flicked over the other men in the hut. More and more were coming in, and the shadowed space was becoming crowded and raucous. The other soldiers had leather bags into which they were stuffing their belongings with careless enthusiasm, high-spirited and talkative, throwing memories back and forth, insults, requests to borrow kit. No one spared a glance for the two youths in the corner.

Finally Gasca levered himself to his feet, spurning Rictus’s hand but offering a smile. “This is life now, I suppose. Best to get used to it.”

He looked around himself at the squalid hut, at the crowd of profane, battle-scarred, foul-smelling men that filled it.

“This is life,” Rictus agreed, “and tomorrow we march out to see a little more of it.”





Six




KUFR



The port of Sinon was a relic. For those who had a smattering of education, an inkling of history, it was proof positive that in some legends there were kernels of truth. The city was as ancient as any Macht polity in the fastnesses of the Harukush, but it lay across the sea from the Macht lands. It had been founded on the coast of that vast, endless continent whereon lived the teeming masses and untold races of the Kufr. Men called those places The Far Side Of The Sea, but while to the south the Sinonian Sea opened out into the vast Tanean, here the straits that separated the Harukush landmass from that of the Great Continent were only thirty pasangs wide. Once, the Macht had crossed these straits eastwards, in fleets of oared galleys, and had taken warfare and conquest to the lands of the Kufr on the eastern shore. Gansakr and Askanon had fallen to them, broad, hilly lands with fertile pastures and rich orchards that made a mockery of their own stony soil. It was said the Macht hosts had pressed even as far as the Korash Mountains, more than seven hundred pasangs to the south and east. There, they had been confronted by armies so vast that there was no hope of victory against them. They had been beaten back, and had retreated to the coast of the Sinonian once more, like a tide tugged by the two moons of Kuf. The city of Sinon had been a fortress then, built to retain a fingerhold on the coast of the Great Continent. Exhausted by years of bloody slaughter, Macht and Kufr had signed a treaty. The Macht had sworn never again to cross the Straits in panoply of war, and the Kufr had conceded the port-fortress of Sinon to them, as a gateway through which embassies and merchants and commerce might come and go. The Kufr warleader who had signed that treaty had been named Asur. He had founded a line of kings, had built an empire. His descendants now ruled the world, and called themselves Great King, King of Kings. And the Asurian Empire had endured over the centuries, until it had become part of the fabric of Kuf itself, its greatness ordained by God, and destined to endure forever. So said the Kufr legends.

One hundred and seventeen ships, Phiron thought. And that’s cutting it fine. Perhaps too fine. Perhaps I should have insisted on more. He has the whole of the Tanis treasury to draw on now, if Artaka has truly declared for him. He could fit half the Macht in his pocket if he chose.

Phiron turned away from his perusal of the harbour, in which were moored his one hundred and seventeen ships. Like a forest, their masts were so thick together that from the quays they withheld the sunrise. There was no room for them all along the wharves, so dozens had moored out in the shelter of the harbour moles, made fast to bladder-buoyed ropes at bow and stern. These were the lighter ones, the troop-carriers. Made fast to the stone of the docks were the heavy, wide-bellied transports, with hatches in their sides so that animals might be walked aboard, two by two.

These ships represented the seagoing craft of several nations. Such a fleet had never been gathered all in one port before. Even the entire war-navy of the Great King mustered at most some two hundred vessels, and they were scattered in deep-water bases up and down the Tanean, the greatest of these the naval yards at Ochos and Antikauros.