The Ten Thousand(75)

“Is this all?” Jason asked hoarsely. “That cunting renegade. I will have his life, before this is over.” He rested his forehead in the clammy ground and his body shook in silent spasm for a few seconds. When he raised his head again his features were a mask of mud and hatred.

Mynon’s eyelids fluttered. He groaned loudly, and Rictus placed a hand over his mouth. The dark-browed man glared at him, then collected himself. He levered Rictus’s palm gently from his face. “Who is this? Rictus?—and Jason.”

“Quiet,” Jason whispered.

A chariot trundled forward and about it gathered a body of Kufr cavalry, well-armoured Kefren of the bodyguard. In the chariot were a bufsan driver and a tall Kufr with a snow-white komis about his face. Juthan warriors lined up and held their torches above their heads, making an avenue of torchlight leading up to the chariot. Up this avenue came a file of Honai, some bloodied and limping. Each of them bore something dangling from one hand. Vorus was at their rear, his black armour gleaming.

The Honai lifted up their burdens. First the Juthan and then the mounted bodyguards gave a great shout and clashed their spears against shields and breastplates. Ten severed heads, held up dripping in the torchlight to stripe the arms of their bearers. The leaders of the Ten Thousand, their features frozen in death, eyes blank and glazed.

“I’ve seen enough,” Jason said. “We go now, while they’re having their party. Up the hill.”

The three of them began crawling up the muddy slope in the darkness, whilst behind them the Kufr shouted and cheered their King and the heads of the ten generals were set upon poles as trophies.

“Is that all?” Ashurnan asked. “Did we get them all, Vorus?”

The Macht general had a face like some grey mask carved out of stone. “I believe one or two escaped. But we got Phiron, and Pasion, all the senior officers of experience. The Macht are lead-erless now. We must attack them at dawn, a full assault.”

The Great King stared at the pole-mounted heads that snarled at him in the torchlight. Bred to war though they were, his chariot horses stamped and snorted uneasily under the regard of those dead eyes. “You know what to do with these,” he said briskly. “I will return to the camp. Take them at dawn, Vorus, and wipe them out. If any are alive by the moons of tomorrow, I want them in capture yokes.”

“Yes, lord.”

Ashurnan regarded his general more closely, dropping his komis from his mouth. “Would you rather some other officer undertook this mission? I would understand. They are your people, after all.”

Vorus drew himself up, anger sparking out of his eyes. “I serve the Great King. I do his bidding, whatsoever it might be. I have served the Great King for twenty years, and never yet have I begged off a mission or disobeyed a command. I will continue to serve the Great King until the day of my death.”

Ashurnan smiled. “I do not doubt it, my friend. Send word of events to me. Midarnes, you will place the Household troops under Vorus’s command, and obey his orders as though they were my own. I go now, General, to see what remains of my brother’s baggage train and the riches he brought from Tanis. Should you need me, seek me there.” He raised a hand and the charioteer slapped the reins on the horses’ rumps. The vehicle moved away, and with it a great cloud of Honai cavalry, their hooves thumping out a triumphant tattoo on the ground. Vorus stood and watched them go for a long while, the Juthan and Kefren guards standing around him in the torchlight, the dead eyes of the Macht watching all.

“Proxis,” he said.

“Aye.” The old Juthan stepped forward. He was somewhat drunk, but steady as an oak, and his yellow eyes were as shrewd as one sober.

“You know what to do with these?”

“I know,” Proxis said, heavily.

“Then see to it. I am going up the hill to meet with our officers.” Vorus strode away from the circle of torchlight, out into the stinking darkness of the Kunaksa heights, where the Kufr army waited around its campfires for the bloody work yet to come.

The heads were to be transported to Kaik, just across the plain, where they would be embalmed, and then a powerful escort would take them through the rebel provinces of Istar, Jutha, and Artaka under a green branch, to declare that Arkamenes was dead and the invincible Macht had been destroyed. A special wagon was already being constructed to display them to best advantage on their travels. It was a calculated barbarism. Vorus saw the purpose behind it, and approved of it. But for all that, it turned something in his stomach.

The army was restless about its fires, the Honai sitting on the bowls of their shields, their eyes catching the firelight like the polished bulbs of brass lamps. In the hufsan lines, the mountain folk were singing their dark croon of lament for the dead, celebrating and remembering those of their kin who had fallen during the day. The Juthan sat in quiet circles, their halberds on their knees, talking in their sonorous tongue. Farther back, on the less broken ground to the south, the cavalry were quartered. These had seen the brunt of the day’s fighting, and up and down the horse-lines the Arakosans and the Asurians were tending their animals. They took their mounts down to the river to drink in shifts of a thousand, and many of the Arakosans did not come back from these trips. Vorus suspected that they were deserting in large numbers, for their assault on the Macht flank had broken them, and hundreds had no horse to ride at all. They had been in the centre of the day’s carnage, and seemed haunted by it. None of the rest of the troops who remained on the hills had yet fought the Macht, and the Arakosans were telling gloomy tales of slaughter to visitors from other quarters of the camp who came to find out how exactly these creatures made war. All of the army had seen the left wing disintegrate under the Macht assault, and had heard the Paean sung in great and bloody splendour. That part of the battle was already becoming a kind of legend.