The courier had arrived four days before with the fortuitous elan of some staged play. The governor of southern Jutha had a sizeable garrison of Kefren to play with, and as soon as he had dropped the Imperial scroll from his nerveless hands he had mustered these and set them on the road, no small achievement in the time allotted to him. These twenty thousand spearmen now stood in eight ranks along the ruins of the Abekai bridge, and had arrived there a scant two days before the appearance of Arkamenes’s vanguard.
Out of the desert these invaders had come, their ranks shimmering in magnified blurs of scarlet and shine as they tramped amid the heat-haze of the Gadinai. It had been a spectacle to see, a life’s event. Crowds had ridden out from Tal Byrna to watch, then had hurried away again. In the van of the enemy host had been the bronze and scarlet machine of the Macht, and when one saw them move unwearied into camp in perfect ranks, singing as they came, somehow the thousands of landlords’ sons on the eastern bank seemed less reassuring.
That first night, the opposing banks had been dark and bristling, there being no firewood to burn on this edge of the Gadinai. The Kefren spearmen had stood by the riverbank and stared out into the darkness opposite and had tried, as all men have always tried, to look into the hearts of their enemy. A hundred paces away, the creatures on the western bank had done likewise, Macht and Kefren and Juthan alike, sidling down to the riverbank in the small hours to try and glean some wisdom out of the night and perhaps gain some courage. But on either side of the river, none truly believed that his adversary was doing the same. They walked back to their fireless camps with hearts as full of ignorance and hatred and fear as before.
“The skirmishers, in a mass, in the night,” Phiron was saying. At his shoulders Pasion stood mute, and Jason listening. “We send them across in morai, and as they gain the eastern bank, so we feed in the spearmen. We must have space for the phalanx to shake out and reassemble, lord, else their impact is lost.”
He had been giving this speech, or variations on it, for an hour now, a good two turns of the clock. And watching Arkamenes’s golden face, he knew that it was all piss dropped down a drain.
“My lord, you perhaps overestimate the capabilities of our race.”
“I do not,” Arkamenes said with great good humour, speaking for the first time in too long. He was well wrapped in a scarlet cloak lined with the fur of hares, and the great tent within which they all spoke was warmed further by a series of braziers, all burning the black stones that passed for fuel hereabouts. They did not smell as fine as burning wood, but they did the job well enough, and were better than the camel-dung that had been their lot in the crossing of the Gadinai.
“In truth, General, all I want is to demonstrate the fighting superiority of this race of yours. Something, I might add, which I have been eager to witness at first hand. If your soldiers are all that hearsay makes them out to be, then you will do this thing for me—and you may even call it a demonstration of good faith. I have been paying your wages now for quite some time. I wish to see this machine of yours in full flow, as it were. I do not want to see a series of ragged boys wading through the river to sling stones at the enemy. Do you take my meaning? Or am I being unclear?”
Phiron bowed. What this Kufr said was almost just. The crossing of the desert had frayed all their nerves—especially since the Macht had been always in the van, by virtue of their faster marching. The Kufr host had been eating their dust for weeks, and this had not improved cooperation between the races.
We could have been here two sennights ago if it had not been for you and that ridiculous baggage train, Phiron thought, but his face remained blank. This, here, was where the contract cost the lives of his men. It had always been so—it was just a little more pronounced this time, and on a larger scale.
What fat-headed fuck sired him? he wondered as he bowed to Arkamenes and promised a heavy assault in the morning. And he promised himself that in event of disaster, he would find his way back to this warm tent, and see if he couldn’t make Antimone weep a little.
They walked away from the king’s tent in the chill desert night, and Jason explained with surprising accuracy what had just occurred—this to Pasion, who worked his mouth and said nothing until Jason was done. Phiron paused and looked up at the stars, closing his eyes for a moment to Phobos as one should, and nodding at Haukos for hope. As Pasion began to speak, he cut him off.
“We do it. He’s paying us, and this is the way he wants it done.”
“He’s never led so much as a dance-line in his life,” Pasion said. “Ignore him. Do it properly.”