“All right.” Phiron bent his head a little. Castus, Orsos, Argus, and Teremon. The most experienced centurions in the army, a little quartet of killers. The younger generals— Pomero, Durik, Marios, and Jason—these formed another group. They even stood a little apart from the rest. And the crowd-pleasers, the talkers: Mynon and Gelipos. These would watch the way the wind blew, and make their votes the deciders.
“Anything else?” The ten generals looked at each other, nodded, shrugged. Pomero cracked his knuckles with a show of nonchalance. Argus spat into the dust and rubbed the liquid into a little turd with his foot.
“Very well then, brothers. Let us go about our business.” And as the knot of men broke up, “Jason, stay a moment.”
Three remained. Phiron, Pasion, Jason. The tell upon which they stood was no more than three spear-lengths high, and looked to have been made by man; there were ancient clay bricks peeping through the dirt at their feet. It made a fine vantage-point to survey the encampments of the army. They had not erected tents, but each centon had marked out its bivouac with cairns of heaped stones. The men had laid their bedrolls on the rolling dust of the plain in neat rows, two paces per man, and the company wagon in the middle. All told, the Macht camp was two pasangs long and somewhat wider. Not even Phiron had ever been part of so large an army before, or seen it spread out before him as it was here on the sere plain that bordered the Gadinai Desert.
But that was not the whole. The Macht lines were drawn some six pasangs from the eastern walls of Tanis, but between them and the walls was an even larger encampment. This was less ordered, a hiving, chaotic and many-tented city of some tens of thousands. A haze of dust hung over it, along with the smoke of a thousand cooking fires, and out upon its western borders great herds of animals darkened the earth. These were the beasts and soldiers of Arkamenes himself, his own household and the troops which Gushrun of Artaka had granted him. There were perhaps thirty thousand of them all told, and that did not take into account the camp-followers. Their camp was closer to the river, where there was still some grass. In the spring, all this would be a lush plain and there would be reed-beds down by the Artan, for the river flooded twice a year, swelled by some unknown source far back in the uncounted wildernesses of the interior. For now, the Macht were using a series of ancient wells out here on the plain and getting used to the sensation of sand in their teeth.
“If yonder host is ready to move at nightfall, then I’m a lady’s maid,” Pasion grunted, still kneading his jaw. “What is it, Phiron? There’s a lot to do.”
“Our elders in the Kerusia made a good point, Pasion, about talking to the Kufr. It had occurred to me also. To that end, I have something here.” Phiron had bent and was rolling up his calfskin map. It was a gift from Arkamenes, and detailed the lands from Tanis to the Magron Mountains. Sometimes he wished he had never seen it. Four hundred pasangs on that calfskin was no more than a handspan. He thrust it into the oxhide bag he had been carrying on his back for twenty years, and dug out something else instead. “Jason, for you. Pasion, you may use it too if you’ve a mind to.”
A close-written scroll. Jason opened it in his hands, dragging the spindles apart. “What’s this? I see words here, Machtic script, and then some gibberish opposite.”
“It’s a word-hoard, a dictionary. Arkamenes’s vizier, Amasis, had a scribe in Tanis write it out plain and fair for me. It tells you Machtic words in Asurian, the common tongue of the Empire, written as they sound in our own script.” Phiron grinned, for Jason’s face had lit up like a boy’s. “We need someone who can understand what these bastards are saying besides myself. We can’t always be relying on interpreters, or the charity of our allies.”
“The charity of our allies...” Pasion mused on the phrase a moment before continuing. “We’ll need that charity by the ton ere we’re done, Phiron. What food will take us across this desert we can take on our backs, and you say there’s water-holes out there too. But when we get to Geminestra, the bag is empty. I hope our princely employer has some skill with logistics, or we’ll be eating mule before a month is out.”
“It’s been arranged, Pasion,” Phiron said testily.
“I’m quartermaster. I like to arrange these things for myself.”
Phiron tapped a finger on the scroll Jason held. “Then read this. Learn these things. If you cannot speak to the Kufr, how can you tell him what you want?”
Pasion set his jaw. He smiled a little. “As you say. Jason, I wish you joy of your studies. I go to count up sacks of grain, and hope they have multiplied in my absence.” He turned and descended the hill, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun.