But where was Ashurnan? That question brought cold sweat to his spine. The Great King had decided to rest for a few hours in the enemy’s captured baggage camp. It lay now square in the path of the Macht advance. Vorus reined in. It was no good; there was no one to send who would get through alive.
He spun the horse on its haunches and took off back the way he had come. Someone has to get through, he thought. And who better to try than one of the Macht?
Behind him, the paling sky in the east broke open pink and bloody with the day’s dawn, the Magron Mountains standing like black titans on the edge of the world. A wind from the west picked up and began to shunt aside the heavy cloud of the night. In the gathering light the Macht army marched stumbling down off the bloody, muck-churned heights of the Kunaksa and began to plash wearily through the wet lowland below. Before them the stragglers of the Kefren army scattered like quail before a fox, no longer a coherent whole, but a beaten remnant. Some ran for the Bekai bridges, some scattered to north and south, parallel to the river-line. From the tented square of the Macht camp, they flooded out like cockroaches from under an upturned stone, abandoning their loot, their women, their arms. From a distance the Macht formation looked as disciplined and indomitable as it had the day before, going up the hill. It came down from the heights in silence, no voice left able to raise the Paean. At a distance it was impossible to see the staggering weariness of the spearmen, the broken shafts of their weapons held up for want of anything better, the crowds of wounded being dragged along in the middle of the morai, rags stuffed in their mouths to stop their screams. They had taken thirteen and a half thousand men up the hill the morning before, and now some ten thousand were marching back down. Many of those would not see another morning.
Ashurnan watched them come, sat on his tired horse to the south of the camp. About him a motley crowd of aides, bodyguards, and sundry officers had gathered, all mounted, all shattered by the sight of the advancing phalanx, the disappearance of their own mighty army. It did not seem real. The half-light of the gathering dawn made it into some nightmare from which they must try and waken.
Ashurnan leaned in the saddle and grasped old Xarnes’s arm. The elderly Chamberlain had begun to slide from the back of his horse.
“My lord, you should not—”
“And let you fall? I think not, Xarnes.” Ashurnan smiled, but his face was empty as that of a glass-bound fish. He looked at his feet, at his brother’s mud-spattered slippers, then up again at the advancing army.
“All the gods in their heavens, what incredible creatures these are,” he said, shaking his head in genuine wonder.
“My King,” one of the bodyguards said. “We should—”
“I know, Merach. I see them too. Watch them march! Our legends did not lie, did they?” His face tightened. “Someone else to join us, I see, some other lost soul.”
It was Vorus, on a blown, shattered horse. He dropped his cloak from his face and held up a hand. “My lord—”
“Is Midarnes dead?”
Vorus could only nod.
“I knew he would not run, not Midarnes. He was my father’s friend also.” Suddenly the Great King looked away, pulled his komis up over his eyes and choked down a sob. They sat there on their horses, appalled and afraid and understanding as he bit down on his grief, knuckles white on his reins, and before them the Macht marched on, scarcely half a pasang away now.
He collected himself, the tears shining on his face, his violet eyes still glittering. “General Vorus, I rejoice to see you alive. What do you suggest?”
Vorus’s tired horse was moving restlessly below him now, for it had picked up the vibration beneath its feet, the tramp of the approaching army.
“We flee, my lord,” Vorus said. “We flee, and we pick another time, another place, to finish what was begun here.”
“Your brother is dead, my King,” old Xarnes added. “This Empire stands. The Macht are a problem for another day, as the general says. But you, you must not come to harm. Your place is no longer here.”
Ashurnan’s mouth twisted. He looked at the oncoming Macht spearmen. Now he was close enough to see the stumbling weariness of their stride, the blood that soaked them, the broken spears and dinted shields. These were not a legend; they were men at the end of their strength. They were not invincible.
“Let us go,” he said. “Merach, lead on. Take us back to camp. We leave this field to the Macht.”
The girl was bound naked to a wagon-wheel. At first he thought her dead, but when he took her by the hair and raised up her head, he saw the eyelids flutter. She was Kufr, one of the shorter ones. What were they called?