The Ten Thousand(80)

Vorus reached up and took Midarnes by the upper arm. “Withdraw. Pull back your companies and reform.”

Midarnes looked down at him, and actually smiled. “Never.” Then he raised his voice and shouted in the Kefren of the Court. “To me! Rally to me!” He raised his spear and smote it upon the brazen face of his shield. Around him, the Honai began to coalesce in a formless crowd. Further away, the Macht were still pushing them back, wedges of their troops battering through the ranks and stepping over the dead. And all this in a darkness lit only by the hellish glow of a few neglected campfires, and the rain silvering down to hiss in meeting with the sparks flying up, as though fire and water were at war also.

Jason stepped out of the front rank. There was a gap opening up before his men, a space. He held his spear up horizontal above his head and shouted until he thought the veins in his throat would burst. “Hold! Hold here!” He jogged up the line. The Kefren were streaming backwards, beaten for the moment, and the front ranks of the Macht stood on hummocked mounds of their dead.

A transverse crest. He grabbed the man’s shoulder. Who was it? It did not matter. “Wheel left—pass it on. All morai to wheel left starting with Mynon on the extreme right. Pass it down the line!”

The minutes passed. He looked up at the sky, but saw only blank darkness, felt the rain on his eyes and licked it off his lips, his mouth and throat heaving-dry. He had gone past exhaustion. He must stay upright now, keep moving. If he stopped or so much as laid down his shield, he would never be able to lift it again.

At last the movement, and the Paean out on the right, a thousand tortured voices. Thank the goddess the line was short, five morai long, six hundred paces. And behind it, what was left of the wounded, and the rear companies. The Macht were in an immense square, ragged, incomplete, but compact. Cohesion, Jason thought, that’s the thing. Mynon will keep the right-hand lines together. Phobos, we’re too slow!

The Macht line wheeled westwards, pivoting on Buridan’s mora. The movement was ragged, hesitant, performed by exhausted men in the dark, but they kept shoulder to shoulder with one another, the formations drawing together and gaining cohesion from the human contact of those to each side, those in front, those behind. The men in the front rank had the hardest task. Jason was able to watch them by the stuttered illumination of a few still-burning fires. They looked like ghosts walking past the flames, men already dead and in the hell of all lost souls. The Macht did not have a god of war; they had Antimone to watch over them instead. For though they gloried in combat, they knew the price it exacted. A true man did not need help from the gods to kill—that was in him from birth—in all of them. He needed their help to face what came afterwards. He needed the pity and compassion of the Veiled Goddess. And she was here tonight, Jason was sure. If he shut his eyes he thought he might even be able to hear the beat of her black wings.

Further to the right, the Macht morai struck those Honai who were struggling to reform about Midarnes. There was a bitter fight and the front ranks of Mochran’s mora were actually driven in, but then the centons to right and left piled into the Honai flanks, leaving the line to lunge forward. The Honai broke, a small knot of them fighting to the end about their standard, the rest driven beyond their capacity to endure and in danger of being cut off. They threw away their shields and ran down the hillside. Midarnes disappeared under a pile of bodies, and on the Kunaksa ridge, the Macht dressed their lines yet again and continued the advance. None of them were singing now. Their tongues had swollen in their mouths. They were things of unsparing sinew and bone, barely able to conjecture an end to the night or the possibility of rest.

There was one new thing about their travail though: for the first time since the battle had begun, they were marching downhill, towards the river. This realisation gave them some heart. They stepped out, centurions forward of the main line. The ridge-crest was theirs, and they looked down on the fire-dotted plain that led to the Bekai River, now some ten pasangs away. They fixed their minds on that thought, the possibility of water, of something like sanctuary, and they marched on.

Many thousands of Kefren and Juthan troops were now in flight across the Bekai plain, but most had fled eastwards, towards the Magron Mountains and their own baggage camps pasangs behind the Kunaksa Hills. It was in this direction that Vorus had gone, striving in vain to rally the second-line Kefren units. In the dark, it was impossible. They would run now until they thought pursuit had stopped, until their own tents brought them to a halt. The Macht army had completely routed the main body of the Great King’s forces, and had all but annihilated his Household troops, the best there was. There was nothing left for it but to wait for the panic to subside and then begin picking up the pieces. As Vorus kicked his tired horse into a lumbering canter, he pulled a fold of his cloak about his head and wore it like a scarlet komis. In the midst of that great, maddened, frantic crowd of armed Kufr, it was not good to have a Macht face.