The Ten Thousand(71)

The Macht had come together again on the ridge-crest of Kunaksa and now their centons were facing out in all directions. In the hollow heart of the formation several hundred lightly wounded were strapping themselves up as best they could, helped by those of the skirmishers who were too young or too old to bear the weight of a full panoply. A few hundred paces away, the Kufr lines were extending to east and west, a shallow crescent of troops thickening moment by moment. On the plain below the great hunt went on, Kefren horsemen riding down and slaughtering the last of Arkamenes’s army before they could come to the Bekai bridges. There were so many figures on the move that the plain seemed to be crawling with life for pasangs to the west, as though someone had tipped up a termite mound and let the occupants spill out in their busy, frantic tens of thousands.

Phiron wiped the sweat from his face. What remained of the water had been given to the wounded, and his tongue was rasping against his teeth like something foreign in his mouth. “We go to them,” he said tersely. “Otherwise they wait for thirst to do half their work for them.”

“What way?” Pomero asked.

“Not to the river; they’ll be expecting that. We hit them here, as hard as we can, and beat them back off the heights. Their cavalry is still busy down on the plain, so we stick to the hills. We head north, parallel to the river. There are big cities up there, on the river. One called Carchanis maybe eight, ten days’ march from here. We get there, take that city and hold it, regroup and resupply. Then—”

“Then?” Orsos demanded.

“Then we decide what to do next.”

“If we get to decide how to die in the next two hours we’ll be lucky,” Mynon snapped, black eyes flashing. “Ten days’ march? And we eat and drink what on the way? And won’t the Great King have something to say about us tramping off through his Empire?”

“Mynon’s right,” Pasion said quietly, kneading his jaw. “We fight and die here and now, or we sue for terms. Ashurnan knows we’ll take ten times our number with us when we go down; he may be amenable to some kind of compromise. Otherwise his army could well be wrecked by our last stand.”

“You think he cares?” Teremon spoke up. An older man, a close friend of both Castus and Orsos, he had taken an arrow in the face during the morning’s fighting and now a bloody rag was stuffed in the socket where his left eye had been. “He can call up a million spears against us if he wants; the whole Empire sits around us. What does he care if he loses another ten thousand, another fifty thousand, so long as he sees the end of us?”

“Calling up more levies takes time,” Pasion said patiently. “For now, the only army in the Empire that the Great King can rely on stands opposite us, on these hills. Don’t forget that Jutha, and Istar and Artaka are still in rebellion. He’ll have to send troops to recall them to the fold. No, Teremon, he cannot afford to see this army of his wrecked upon these hills. I say we send him an embassy under a green branch, and see if we can come to some arrangement. Who knows, he may need Macht spears as his brother did. We fight for pay, not for any cause. He must learn of this, and quickly. If the fighting starts again, then the moment is lost. We will leave our bones here, and the Kufr will pick Antimone’s Gift off our bodies.”

There was an angry murmur at this. The thought of the black armours falling into Kufr hands was unthinkable, impious; there were scores of them in the ranks of the army.

“All right then,” Phiron said. He seemed shrunken, as if the turn of events had done something to his insides. “We’ll send out an ambassador. Someone who can speak their damned language.” There was a pause. “That’s—”

“Me, you fucks,” Jason said. “Yes, I know. I’ll do it. And I’ll take the strawhead here with me.”

The heat of the afternoon was an enervating oven which must be struggled against physically. The corpses had already begun to add something to the brew, and their luckier comrades had to piss and shit somewhere. So for pasangs all around, the stink on the unmoving air was a thing that hung heavy in the stomach. It was as if the bloodletting had fouled some essential balance in the earth itself, and now the face of Kuf was revolted by it. The Macht had a name for this miasma, as they had for most things connected with warfare: the soup, they called it. By naming it, joking about it, they made it more bearable. For the carrion birds circling and the black flies laying their eggs in the eyes of the dead it was a field of bounty, and their claims upon it would soon make of this place a plague-pit.