“A good hunting?” he asked casually.
“A good hunting,” Rictus said. Something twisted his mouth. He looked down into his stew. “Not much of a fight though, once they broke.”
“Fight enough for me, getting cross that bloody river undrowned,” his friend said, rising; Gasca, that was the name. This fellow was beefy, his face shining with fat. He was drunk, too, but then most of them were. Drunk with having survived. It came upon even veterans after a battle, and Jason thought none the worse of him for it. But Rictus interested him.
“You think we should have let them go?” he asked.
“I think the slaughter was excessive. If we’re here to win an Empire for our employer, I don’t see how we’ll do it by killing every mother’s son who stands up against us.”
“Mother’s son—listen to him,” one of the veterans scoffed. “They’re Kufr, lad. Not even human. What do we care how many of them bleed under our spears? The more the merrier I say.” And there was a chorus of full-mouthed approval around the great black, steaming centos.
“You got to break eggshells to eat eggs,” someone else said, spitting gristle into the fire.
Rictus shrugged. He was a self-contained young fellow, Jason thought. “I’ve not met many Iscan mercenaries,” he said.
Rictus spooned his stew around his plate. “Isca is gone. It’s barely a memory now. Here, we’re all the same.” He raised his head and looked about him at the catcalling, carousing company which filled the night, and there was a kind of hunger in his eyes. He still wants to belong, Jason thought. Well, that’s a good thing. I can use that, perhaps.
Rictus spoke again. He was awkward now, some of the maturity dropping off him. “I found a good shield with a bronze facing. It’s smaller than ours are, but sound enough. And I have a spear and a helm now. I could take my place in the battle line. I’ve drilled; I know the way of it.” He met Jason’s eyes, then looked away again.
“I’ll think on it,” Jason said, though he would not. He thought there were other things to be had from this young fellow, things that hunger in his eyes might make him good at.
Eleven
THE PASSAGE
OF THE STORM
Tal Byrna, a great city, now scooped up as a man will stoop to lift a chestnut off the ground and put it in his pocket.
There it clicked with the others: Tanis, Geminestra. The south-eastern portion of the Empire had been secured by Arkamenes now, that change in ownership ratified in the blood of the Abekai Crossing.
The army marches, there is a slaughter, and a form of words is made to make the world change. But the world does not change; the water still flows, the seeds still sprout, and those who work the soil continue to work it, a little poorer, a little thinner and sadder than before. The storm moves on, and in its wake the world goes once more about its business. This is war, this passing storm on the land. This stink on the air, this dust-cloud which hems the sky. These creatures marching in their thousands, changing everything and changing nothing with their passage. This is war.
So thought the lady Tiryn as she pulled back the curtains of her bobbing litter to watch the green hills of Jutha roll past, their bases bedded in the glittering tracery of water-channels which enriched this earth and held it back from the embrace of the desert to the west. Nothing in her life had so sickened her as the sight of the broken Kefren army lying scattered for pasangs between the Abekai River and the walls of Tal Byrna. The corpses had been stripped naked, high-born Kefren some of them, all of them high caste, the masters of this world. As naked frameworks of meat they had been piled into mounds by the Juthan peasants and set afire, great stinking pyres topped with pillars of oily smoke that could be seen for pasangs. Thus did the mighty of the world pass away: as ashes, to be scattered into the dirt and nourish the seeds of next year’s harvest.
She looked down at the heavy scroll in her lap. On one side, words in her own tongue—Asurian, the language of the masses. On the other, in the same script, odd-sounding gibberish, nonsense-words that were nonetheless somehow familiar to her. She had been bred in the Magron Mountains, and the tribes there had dialects of their own, words lowlanders did not know or could only half guess at. Some of these meaningless words sounded like the tongue of her childhood, the rough speech her father’s goatherds had used.
It was the speech of the Macht, transcribed phonetically in good Asurian script. Amasis had given her this scroll, to keep her occupied perhaps. The sister-copy had been given to the Macht general some time before. Tiryn had been learning Machtic now for many weeks, since landfall in Tanis, and the more she learned of it, the more she became convinced that it was—or had once been—the same language the mountain-people of the Empire spoke in their snowy fastnesses. Whatever the Macht were now, at some time in the distant past they, too, had lived in the highlands of the Empire, and had spoken something akin to Asurian. This knowledge Tiryn had kept to herself—for who was there to tell? Arkamenes had barely spoken to her in weeks. Tiryn was a tool, once of great use in palaces, but now mere baggage in the midst of a marching army.