The Ten Thousand(7)
The dead were less easily found. They were stumbled across in the lightless shadow below the trees. Rictus tripped over a bank of them, and for an instant set his hand on the cold mask of a man’s face. He sprang away with a cry that set the wound in his side bleeding again. By and large the dead had been stripped of everything, sometimes even clothing. They lay pale and hardening in the cold. Out of the dark, packs of vorine had already begun to gather about them, the grey-maned scavengers of the hills.
A healthy man, on his feet, alert and rested, need not fear the vorine, but a man wounded and reeking of blood, staggering with tiredness—he drew their interest. When they circled him, green eyes blinking in the dark, they snarled their confidence at Rictus, and he snarled back at them, as much a beast as they. Stones, sticks, bravado—he beat them away with these until they went seeking less lively prey.
He stripped a corpse of a long-sleeved chiton, not minding the blood that stiffened it. The dead man lay on top of a broken spear, an aichme with some three feet of shaft still set in it. With these on his back and in his fist, Rictus shivered less. The vorine could smell the bronze, and left him alone. The torchlit patrols inspired anger now as well as fear, and in his head Rictus fantasised about surprising them at their barbarous work, the stump of spear working scarlet wonders in his hand. The fantasy hovered in his mind for pasangs, until he saw it for what it was; a glimmer from the far side of Antimone’s Veil. He put it out of his head then, and concentrated on the track before him, that paleness under the stars that ran between the midnight dark of the trees.
One patrol passed him as he lay pressed into the fragrant pine-needles at the side of the track. A dozen men perhaps, they bore the light shields of second-line troops: wicker peltas faced with hide. The mirian sigil was splashed in yellow paint across them. These were men of the coastal city, Bas Mathon. Rictus had been there many times with his father; for all that it was eighty pasangs away to the east. He remembered now the gulls screaming over the wharves, the high-prowed fishing smacks, the baskets of silverfin and horrin, bright as spearheads as they were hauled up on the quays. Summer sunlight, a picture from another age. He silently thanked the goddess for granting him the memory.
The men were drinking barley-spirit from leather skins, pressing the bulging bags until the liquid squirted high in the air, and then fighting and laughing like children to have their mouth under as it descended. In their midst two women limped barefoot and naked, heads down and hands bound before them. From the bruises which marked them, they had been captured quite early in the day. One had blood painted all down her inner thighs, and breasts that had only begun to bud. Hardly a woman at all.
They passed by like some twisted revel of the wine-god, lacking only pipe-song to complete the image. Rictus lay a long time in the dark when they had gone, letting the shadow bleed back into his eyes after the dazzling torchlight, seeing beyond the darkness the hopeless face of the young girl, eyes blank as those of a slaughtered lamb. Her name was Edrin. She came from the farm next to his father’s. He had played with her as a child, he five years older, carrying her on his back.
It was the middle part of the night before Rictus stood once more at the lip of his father’s glen. Artdunnon, this place was called; the quiet water. It was brighter now. Rictus looked up to see that both moons were rising above the trees. Great Phobos, the Moon of Fear, and fiery Haukos, Moon of Hope. He bowed to them, as all men must, and then set off down the hillside to where the river glittered amid the pastures in the bottom of the glen.
He could not so much as stub a toe on this track, even in the dark, so well did he know it. The smells of wild garlic from the edge of the woods, the thyme in the rocks, the good loam underfoot; all these were as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart. He allowed himself to hope for the first time since the battle line had broken that morning. Perhaps this place had been passed by. Perhaps his life was not yet shipwrecked beyond hope. Something could be salvaged. Something—
The smell told him. Acrid and strange, it drifted all through the valley bottom. There had been a burning here. It was not woodsmoke, but heavier, blacker. Rictus’s pace slowed. He stopped altogether for a few seconds, then forced himself on. Above him the cold face of Phobos rose higher in the night sky, as if wishing to light his way.
Rictus had been a late child, his father already a grey-templed veteran when he had sired him— much like Remion, now he came to think of it. His mother had been a wild hill-girl from one of the goatherder tribes further north. She had been given to his father by a hill-chief in payment for service in war, and he had made of her not a slave, but a wife, because he had been that kind of man.