“It’s twelve pasangs, Jason,” Mynon said quietly.
“We take the Bekai crossings and hold them, and base ourselves in Kaik. There, we resupply. One more thing: we take back our baggage on the way. I want our bloody pots back.”
“They’ll cut us to pieces on the plain with their cavalry,” Buridan said, a rumble in his beard.
“Their cavalry did a lot of fighting today, even the Great King’s bodyguard itself. And no one takes cavalry into battle in the dark. We have three or four hours until dawn; we must use that time.”
“The wounded?” one of the new generals asked. This was Phinero, whose brother Pomero had died in the Great King’s tent not two hours before.
“Five morai up front, one on each flank, four in the rear. The wounded in the middle. Those who cannot walk must find someone to carry them or take their own lives.”
A pause. No one dissented. They were all half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion, and did not expect to live for much longer themselves. “This is how we move out,” Jason began.
Seventeen
THE SECOND DAY
In the dead hours of the night the weary Kefren pickets posted along the hills of Kunaksa looked up to the star-spattered sky. Clouds had come shifting in from the mountains in the east and were now building up overhead to blot out the welkin. One by one the moons disappeared: first pink Haukos with his blessings of hope and compassion, and then leering white-cold Phobos, moon of fear. The night closed in and the rain began, a steady drizzle that did not put out the campfires of the army, but which made all those tens of thousands who lay beside them in the mud edge a little closer to the flames. The spring rains were early. It was a gift from Bel, the Renewer. Mot, god of death and dry-baked summer soil had left the world to his rival for a night, and the cold rain pattered bitterly down to deepen the mud of the war-scarred plain.
The rain brought Tiryn round, pattering into her open mouth and prickling a chill tattoo on her skin. Forgetting where she was, she sought for a moment to wipe it out of her eyes, but then remembered and blinked herself fully awake.
Blurred torchlight, shadows moving before it, back and forth, as they had moved in her nightmares. She shivered convulsively for a few moments under the cold, intimate kisses of the rain, and blinked her vision clear. The hub of the wagon-wheel had gouged a bruise deep into the small of her back, and her bound hands were blue and numb, roped to the rim. She was naked. She no longer knew or cared how many times she had been raped.
The camp was all astir, not the night-time routine of sentries but full, chaotic, crowded, and shouted movement. Some new thing had happened, some new chapter in the savagery of the earth. Tiryn closed her eyes again, meat tied to a wagon-wheel, the mind within drawing back from the world, gnawing on itself, unable to give up the obscenities it had seen.
They were five pasangs from the battle lines here, the humid heat-shimmer of the day before not even allowing them the chance to spectate. Tiryn had walked out of the flimsy stockade with only her maid beside her and had watched the great creeping darknesses of the armies move across the surface of the earth. Faint on the still air had come the awful roar of their meeting. The Macht were winning, she had heard, and she watched Arkamenes’s army advance up the hillside. And she had thought it over, the thing done, the day behind them. My Prince, she thought, is now a King.
Incredibly swift, the disintegration of those complacencies. First there were the stragglers, the cowardly, the broken, the walking wounded. And then had come the great mass of infantry, the Juthan Legion, the Kefren of the main line. These had poured past the camp with barely a glance to spare for those inside, too terrified even to try their hand at the paychests. Because behind them the enemy were snapping like vorine on the heels of sheep.
The Asurian cavalry had been first into the camp, tall high-caste Kefren on magnificent horses, statues of gold and iron and lapis lazuli with bright eyes and bloody swords. The Juthan bag-gage-bearers had fought them off with whips and sticks and ladles and any object that came to hand. When none did, they leapt on the horsemen and used their teeth. They had fought to the end and Tiryn, even in the grip of her terror, had wondered at their ferocious courage.
Her bodyguard, Hurth, had never thought much of her; she had known that. High caste as he was, he thought it demeaning to watch over a little hufsa whore. But he had tried to get her out of the camp, and when they had been caught, it was with his own life that he had bought her the time to run away. This had shocked her, that he had done such a thing. She and her remaining maid had gone to ground after it, too cowed to try again. They had been like rabbits, cowering in knowledge of their own end and unable to do anything about it.