“I had only the one despatch from Phiron,” he said at last. What was the name of that song? Even he, a lowlander, knew the tune. “He had met with our principal at last. He thought the arrangements for our reception in Tanis were not all they might have been, hence his early departure from Sinon. That’s all I know, brothers.”
“No,” Jason said. “There’s more. We’re to be fighting in the Empire, that much has been plain—but who is this principal of yours? What’s the mission, Pasion? We’ve come far enough to know.”
Pasion told them.
Land came into sight three days later. So said the sailors at the mastheads. For the men on deck there was the merest hint of a darker line on the hem of the sky, and with it, some intensification of the smells on the air. They had not known that land could be smelled as though it were a meal preparing, or a fart let go in a corner. They smelled land, and packed the decks of the fleet as though by their presence there they could make it approach the more quickly. When it did, they found it to be a mustard-pale shore clinging to the hem of the world, a line of sand, it appeared. For men bred to mountains, it seemed a strange and unseemly thing that a whole new world could be opening up on the horizon before them and yet seem as flat as a man’s hand for as far as the eye could see. Flat and brown, with no hint of spice or flower to redeem it.
The Great Continent. So it had been known, time out of mind. The Macht had never forgotten their attempt to conquer it any less than the Kufr had. As the Macht fleet came in close to the land, sails reefed and sweeps striking out on the smaller ships, so they found that the very colour of the water under them had changed, becoming brown as an old man’s piss. Birds began to circle the fleet and cluster about the tallest of the yards, shitting white drops on all those below. The Macht mercenaries hunted out their armour and weaponry, and burnished the salt-rust off it, determined to present a fearsome, gleaming front upon landing. And Myrtaios took on board a Kufr pilot to steer the ships of the fleet through the sandbanks and eddying channels of the mighty Artan River, upon whose delta Tanis stood, one of the great and ancient cities of the world. This Kufr stood on the quarterdeck between the twin steering-oars and barked orders in good Machtic to left and right, whilst behind him the better part of a hundred ships followed meekly in line, afraid of grounding their bottoms on the pale sand and yellow rocks of Artaka. Even Jason, standing at the break of the quarterdeck with his black cuirass on his back and iron helm hanging like a pot at his hip, felt the history behind the prosaic moment. He had seen Kufr before, a few, but then he was accounted an educated man. For most of the centons the shape standing immensely, unfeasibly tall at the stern was like some picture brought bright and colourful out of myth. They gaped at it; the golden skin, the weird eyes, the face with human features that were in no way human. And the thing did not even sweat under their regard.
“Perhaps they don’t sweat,” Mynon said, looking on with scarcely more discretion than the newest fish in his centon.
“Ah, don’t tell me you’ve not seen one before.”
“Upon my heart, Jason, I have not. We’re not all well-travelled scroll-scratchers like you.”
And so Tanis opened out before them. The pilot brought them through a broad estuary where the sea turned brown, and on either side the banks began to encroach on the water, narrowing pasang by pasang. Ahead, a tall gleam of white appeared on the brim of the world, and as the day wore on—the long, wearisome day for those who had donned full panoply—so this white grew and lengthened and in some places soared, until there was presented to the men of the ships a sight they had not quite bargained on. They had seen Machran, and thus flattered themselves that they knew what a great city looked like, but what bulked taller on their horizon moment by moment was something else. It was like comparing the mud-forts of children to the project of an engineer.
Tanis. They built with limestone here, a white stone which time pocked and darkened. But still, the passage of the years could not dim the illusion. This was a white city, a gleaming jewel. It reared out of the dun delta which surrounded it. In its midst two dozen towers, and fifty towers within towers, and interlaced battlements, all vast in conception, unreal to see, reared up and up into the clear blue sky, a dream of architects. A marvel. The farther the fleet slipped up the delta of the river, so the higher the buildings became. Men on the ships craned their necks, striving to see the summits of towers which were still pasangs away.
“Our Mother’s God,” Mynon said. His little rat-face was ill-suited to awe, but it was filled to the brim now. His face screwed up, and the awe moved on into baffled resentment. He stared up at the white towers of Tanis like a man whose wife has just betrayed him. “Pasion—I, I—”