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The Ten Thousand(78)

By:Paul Kearney


The end had come, the Asurians had prevailed, and the sack of the baggage camp had begun.

Arkamenes was dead, that much was made clear by the triumphant enemy troops who now began to loot the tents and wagons of the army, searching always and foremost for the paychests containing the gold of Tanis. These found, they had time to attend to lighter matters, and one of these was discovered in Arkamenes’s tent, a curved mountain-knife in her fist. A single wound Tiryn had inflicted, and that only enough to earn her a beating. At first she had been set to one side as the looting went on, and the higher-caste concubines of the harem were ferreted out. But once all these had been claimed they came back for her, killed the Juthan maid who threw herself at them, and began the sport of the evening.

Perhaps her own caste would have been gentler; perhaps not. In any case, Tiryn had ended the long, long day tied to this wagon-wheel, and used by any passing soldier who did not mind the blood, the muck, the bruises, and the shining slime of other Kufr’s leavings which now painted her skin.

Arkamenes is dead, she thought. Why can it not be over? And she prayed to Mot, the dark god, for the blessing of her own release.

One hundred paces away, in the tent that had been his brother’s, the Great King was roused out of sleep by old Xarnes. No ceremony; Honai were lighting the lamps without being given leave to do so, and Xarnes had actually touched the royal shoulder to bring Ashurnan into the present. He sat up at once, still fully dressed, though wearing his brother’s silk slippers.

“What’s happened?” Fear of the event had taken away their fear of him; it must be bad.

“The Macht have attacked, my lord—all along the hills.”

Ashurnan blinked. A Honai held out a goblet of wine and he waved it away, frowning. “How long did I sleep?”

“Three hours, my lord, by the turn of the clock.”

“Any word from Vorus?”

“Nothing as yet.”

“Then how do we know?”

Xarnes hesitated. He looked very old in the gathering lamplight, an elderly man kept from his bed. “Some of the troops up on the Kunaksa have already fled this far.”

There it was, cold water down the spine. Ashurnan rolled out of bed and straightened with the quicksilver poise of a dancer. “Stand-to the bodyguard,” he said. “Couriers to Vorus. Where is Proxis?”

“In the camp, my lord, but we have not yet located him. He was supervising the transport of the paychests across the river until the middle night.”

“Find him, Xarnes.”

“Yes, lord.” The ancient chamberlain bowed and withdrew.

The Honai were watching him. We had victory, Ashurnan thought—we had the glory of it, the thing sitting in our very hands. What in the depths of hell have these animals done to me now? Can they not lie down and die?



They were dying indeed. They were dying by the hundred, but they were on their feet and advancing over their own dead. In the rain-drenched dark of the starless night they were singing the Paean of their race, and never had it seemed so apposite as now that the battle-hymn of the Macht should also be the song sung in the hour of death.

They advanced on a frontage of some seven hundred paces, a compact mass of interlocked centons and morai. The line was ragged as men tripped in the dark or wove around obstacles half-seen until a boulder barked their shins, but it came together again always, the clash of bronze in the blackness guiding those who lost their way, the mud sucking the sandals off their feet, the rain—the blessed rain—trickling down their bodies so that whole morai raised their heads as one and opened their mouths to let the life of the water spot their tongues. Antimone had fluttered her Veil, men said. She wept above them, and so they had her tears to moisten their mouths here, in the shadow of strange mountains. The rain gave them new strength, new heart. It did not convince them that they would live, but it persuaded them that they could make a good end.

The Kufr pickets had been swept away in the first moments, and now the Macht had pushed deep into the scattered ranks of the King’s army, catching hundreds, thousands of his troops before they had gathered into formation. The Macht heavy spearmen stabbed out in the dark at half-guessed masses of milling bodies and kept advancing. It was not the casualties that mattered but the fact of their advance, that remorseless tide of flesh and bronze welling up out of the night, the Paean rising with it, the feet of the infantry keeping time. This was an army the Kufr had already made a story of. As the morai advanced, so the Great King’s forces streamed away from the forefront of that line. For pasangs up and down the hills a panic took root. This—an assault on this scale—could not be happening in the dark of a moonless night. It was impossible. And so the Kufr troops assigned mythical properties to the half-seen battle line of the Macht spearmen, and the song which accompanied their relentless advance.