Jason took his arm. He had tossed away his ivy crown. “Sit down before you fall down.” Rictus was led out of that focused space in their midst, to the periphery of shadows. A cane stool was found for him, and more wine. A Juthan girl poured it, her blue-black hair in a pigtail that touched his wrist as she bent. He smiled at her, but there was no answer out of the yellow eyes. Jason stood at his side and watched the wrangling, the debating, and the barely restrained animosity go their inevitable way about the banqueting couches. Phiron stood at Arkamenes’s side now, speaking swiftly to the Kefren prince and hammering his fist into his palm.
“What a marvellous thing a Council-of-War is,” Jason said, shaking his head.
“Jason. I saw what I saw. I am not a fool.”
“I know that, Rictus. But all they see is a young buck out on his feet and covered in shit.”
“We need to get more of the Hounds out there, quartering the ground, or some of the Kufr cavalry.”
“Oh, I agree, but the Kerusia must stop talking first.”
Rictus sank back against the heavy leather wall of the tent. The wine had lit up his insides and fogged his mind. He was nodding where he sat. He fell asleep with the clay winecup still clenched in his fist, the endless sound of the voices beating about under the flickering glare of the golden lamps, and the strange perfumes of the Kufr filling his head with dreams.
Thirteen
THE OTHER SIDE
OF THE MOUNTAIN
“He has made good time,” Vorus said, reading the end of the despatch. “I had thought we might catch him still on the western bank of the Bekai, but he is across with all his baggage.”
“Arkamenes’s troops have learned how to march,” Proxis agreed grudgingly. “But it is no matter. We have the numbers, and the ground is adequate.”
“The ground,” Vorus mused, “is bad for cavalry; too many ditches. And it’s wet. The Macht will like this ground, Proxis. It will give them something to stick their heels in.” He slapped shut the despatch scroll.
“There are ten thousand Macht, I hear. Even ten thousand cannot prevail against the force we have brought into the west.”
As one, the pair of them turned and looked eastwards, back at the looming wall of the Magron Mountains. Memories. Fighting to force double-axled wagons through the drifts, whole companies roped together, heaving them onwards by main force. Kefren huddled in windbreaks of flesh as the snow whirled around them. The bodies of those left behind, stark against the snow in their wake, waymarkers of carrion.
“I never thought he had it in him,” Vorus admitted.
“Yes. He is his father’s son after all. We can be thankful for that, at least.”
They turned back to the warmth, the sunlit world of the lowlands and the rivers to the west. Wide and green, it now had carved across it brown scars of churned-up mud where the columns of the army had marched past. Too large to keep in one formation, the levy of the Great King had been split up into four separate entities, each pasangs long, each with its own flanking forces, vanguards and rearguards. The baggage train was back in a fortified camp five pasangs in the rear, a stockade larger than most cities which housed several thousand wagons, and another small army to guard them. This was campaigning on a scale no one had seen before. It was nothing less than a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the entire region, for foraging parties were systematically stripping it bare. They could reap three harvests a year here. In Pleninash, such was the bounty of the soil and the clement generosity of the climate; but to sow one had to plant, and to plant one must have seed. When the war was done and the battle won, there would be famine this winter, here in the breadbasket of the Middle Empire. That was the price paid to stymie one man’s ambition.
They fell into step together, the worn, athletic Macht general and the squat Juthan with the bloodshot eyes. Waiting for them at the base of the slope were a knot of Kefren horsemen, Honai cavalry of the Royal Guard. Beyond them a Juthan Legion stood patiently in the mud, five thousand of the grey-skinned creatures with the round shields and heavy halberds of their race. Many had been squatting upon their hams, talking quietly. They rose now as Vorus and Proxis came closer, a quiet mass of flesh and bronze, their banners limp above their heads. About their faces the river-flies buzzed in clouds, new-hatched by the spring warmth.
Juthan grooms stood in the middle of the magnificent Honai cavalry grasping the halters of two less grand mounts. Vorus could ride a horse, but for him the animal was a means of locomotion, no more. He had Niseians on his estates back in Ashur, but would sooner ride something a little nearer the ground. Proxis habitually rode a mule, its grey pelt the same colour as his own. The magnificent Honai looked faintly offended at their proximity to such poor equine flesh, but then they looked faintly offended by most things, Vorus thought.