Down at the river the army continued to cross by the Bekai bridges, as it had been crossing since the morning of the day before. All but the last of the Kufr baggage and the rearguard were now on the eastern bank and the Macht were already on the march for higher ground, seeking open country beyond the stinking, confined ditches of the lowland farms. Flies and all manner of flying filth haunted these moist fields, for the peasants hereabouts fertilised the land with their own excrement. Thus far in their journey the Macht had lost few men to disease, thanks both to the season and rigid latrine regulations. Phiron did not intend to relax these rules now. The sternest part of the march was before them, looming up at the edge of the world with every sunrise, a saw-toothed barrier now only some two hundred pasangs away. The Magron Mountains.
More lightly armed Macht troopers joined Rictus on the crest of the height. This was not a hill, but one of the ubiquitous tells which marked the sites of old cities all across the Middle Empire. By some unimaginable labour in the distant, legendary past, the inhabitants of these parts had reared up dozens of the things, each large enough to hold a fair-sized Macht city with room to spare. On these stood the most ancient Kufr fortresses and cities. But many were bare and forgotten now. Looking at the shape of the land below, Rictus realised that once the Bekai River had wound close to the foot of this tell, and thus the city built thereon had controlled the crossing. But rivers were fickle things, changing course even in the space of a man’s lifetime. As the Bekai had moved away, so the people had followed it, to keep to the crossings, and they had built another tell for their new city where Kaik now stood, snug up against the steep riverbanks.
Rictus thought of a different river, a mere stream flashing through a quiet glen somewhere in the far west and north. The snowdrops would be gone by now, and there would be primroses and crocuses about the oaks in the valley-bottom. He fingered the coral pendant about his neck, slick with his sweat, and for a moment he felt as lost and bewildered as if he had only this moment left his father’s farm and found himself here, in this immensity of strangeness that was the world.
“Where’re we headed, cap’n?” one of the other men asked. Rictus collected himself. He pointed towards the distant mountains. “Out that way. There’s an Imperial post house twenty pasangs along the road which is still manned. We’re to take it, and everyone in it.”
“Alive or dead?”
Rictus shrugged, and the men about him nodded and rubbed their chins or tested the edge of their javelin-points. These were Phiron’s Hounds, the swiftest, ablest and most vicious of the skirmishers. For some reason, Jason had taken Rictus and made him a Second, commander of a half-centon of them. Rictus now led ten fists into battle. Except that they never saw battle—not as Rictus understood it. They saw massacre and rapine and murder. They cut down the enemy when he was in flight, they seized bridges and gatehouses and defiles ahead of the main army, and they harassed any enemy they found who was too strong for them to destroy. They did not stand in rank, or bear armour, or meet their foes as equals. They fought their little war in as dirty a manner as they could. And Rictus was good at it.
They knew him now, these men—or boys, most of them were—and they trusted his judgement. He had a feel for the land and the manner in which it must be used—the way terrain could even stiffening odds, the value of surprise, of ferocity unleashed at the right moment and from an unsuspected direction. He was brave in battle, a rare hand with both javelin and long spear, and a captain who was not afraid to get up and close with his foe, sometimes charging into a wavering enemy without bothering to find out if the rest of his command had followed. Because of who he was, his men had taken to calling themselves the Iscans, and Rictus had neither approved nor objected. They had even painted the iktos sigil on the leather facings of their shields, though Rictus had left his own blank. After each of their missions, they would rejoin the main body—they were part of Jason of Ferai’s mora—and Rictus would leave for the command tent to report and receive more orders. Buridan the Bear would see to it that they were fed and had dry ground to sleep upon, for if Rictus had one drawback as a leader, it was that he seemed singularly indifferent to such things. He would not let his men starve, but he would not go to special lengths to make them comfortable, either. If anything, this made the men he led respect him all the more, for all that he was a gangling strawhead with the slow twang of the mountains in his speech.
They took off down the slope at an easy run. This pace, they knew they could keep up for many pasangs. Phiron called them his foot-cavalry, and they revelled in the title. The heavy troops might garner the glory of pitched battle, but for those who liked to be ahead of the column, unfettered by too many officers, the light arm was the unit of choice.