The Ten Thousand(4)

Finally, some of Rictus’s numbness gnawed through.

“My father lives in the green glen past—”

“Your father is carrion now, boy,” Remion said. And there was even a kind of pity in his face as he said it.

Rictus twisted, eyes wide, and Broken-nose beat the flat of his spear-shaft into his nape. A white detonation. Rictus fell to his knees, opening one up like liver. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t—”

Again, he was beaten. First the spear-shaft, and then a fist clumping again and again into the top of his spine. A childish punching, fuelled by rage more than the knowledge of where a fist does damage. He rode it out, forehead on the sand, blinking furiously and trying to make his thoughts come in some kind of order.

“The bastard begs!”

I didn’t beg, he thought. At least, not for me. For my father, I will beg. For my father.

He twisted his head, still pounded, and caught Remion’s eye.

“Please.”

Remion understood perfectly. Rictus knew that. In these few, bloody minutes he had come to know the older man well.

No, Remion mouthed. His face was grey. In that instant, Rictus knew that he had seen all this before. Every permutation of this stupid little dance had already printed its steps in the older man’s memory. The dance was as old as Hell itself.

Something else his father had said: Do not believe that men reveal themselves only in defeat. Victory tugs the veil aside also.

Goddess of the Veil; bitter, black Antimone, whose real name must never be spoken. Now she smiles. Now she hovers here about these dunes, dark wings flickering.

The black side to life. Pride, hate, fear. Not evil— that is something else. Antimone merely watches what we do to ourselves and each other. Her tears, it is said, water every battlefield, every sundered marriage-bed. She is un-luck, the ruin of life. But only because she is there when it happens.

The deeds, the atrocities—those we do to ourselves.





Two




A LONG DAY’S TROUBLE



“We are late to the party, my friends,” Remion said.

Dusk was coming on, and a bitter wind was beating around the pines on the hillsides. Rictus’s arms were numb from the elbow down, and when he looked at his hands he saw they were swollen and blue. He sank to his knees, unable to look at the valley below.

Broken-nose yanked his head up by the hair. “Watch this, boy. See what happens when you go about starting wars. This is how it ends.”

There was a city in the valley, a long, low cluster of stone-built houses with clay-tiled roofs. Rictus had made tiles like that on his father’s farm. One shaped the mud upon the top of one’s thigh.

For perhaps two pasangs, the streets ran in clumps and ribbons, with a scattering of pine-shadowed lots among them. Here and there the marble of a shrine blinked white. The theatre where Rictus had seen Sarenias performed rose inviolate, head and shoulders above the swallow’s-nest alleyways. And surrounding all, the very symbol of the city’s integrity, was an undulating stone wall two spear-lengths high. There were three gates visible from this direction alone, and into each ran the brown mud of a road. A hill rose up at one end of this sprawling metropolis, one flank a sheer crag. Upon this a citadel had been built with a pair of tall towers within. There was a gatehouse, black with age, and the gleam of bronze on the ramparts.

And people, people everywhere.

The sound of the city’s agony carried up into the hills. A dull roar, a swallowing up of all individual voice, so that it seemed the sound was not made by men and women and children, but was the torment of the city itself. It rose with the smoke, which now began to smart Rictus’s eyes. Plumes of black rose in ribands and banners within the circuit of the walls. Crowds clogged the streets, and in the midst of the roar one could now make out the clangour of metal on metal. At every gate, mobs of men were pressing inwards with spears held aloft, bearing the hollow-bowled shields of the Macht warrior class. There were devices on those shields, a city badge.

Rictus looked to his side in the gathering darkness, at Remion. His captors had retrieved their cached panoplies on the way here. White on scarlet, there was painted upon Remion’s shield the sigil gabios, first letter of his city’s name. Almost all the shields below had such devices.

“Isca dies at last,” Remion said. “Well, it has been a long time coming, and you folk have been a long time asking for it.”

“You thought you were better than us,” Broken-nose sneered. “The mighty Iscans, peerless among all the Macht. Now we will fuck your women and slaughter your old and make slaves of your vaunted warriors. What have you to say to that, Iscan?” He punched Rictus in the side of the head.