“Who?” she asked thickly, throat closing, eyes burning.
“Our goddess, the guardian of the Macht. She is the goddess of pity. Her tears salt every battlefield. She watches over every crime.”
“A goddess? I was told you worshipped a monster with black wings.”
Jason nodded. “She is that too. Sleep now, Tiryn. There are ten thousand of us guarding your bed.” He turned away, his bare feet padding lightly on the warm stone of the floor as he left.
Strange to say, it was an actual comfort to Tiryn, that thought. She could sleep now. These ten thousand who had been to her little more than animals, let them be her guardians. Her own race had forfeited all loyalty.
The Kerusia met in the Governor’s house near the summit of Kaik’s hill. It was a tall-ceilinged structure of fired brick, massive black beams of river palm and cedar supporting the roof, and high windows letting in a little of the humid air to move lazily above their heads. They gathered round the long table where the Kufr Governor had been wont to entertain, and by each man there was an earthenware jug of lukewarm water from which he sipped almost continuously, without thinking, the parched flesh of his body soaking it up without pause or distraction.
Jason was too tired to stand, too tired almost to register the names of those present. He knew their faces, and those faces were marked in his mind with ink-stabs of impression.
Rictus, perhaps the best of them all, though Jason would never have told that Iscan straw-head such to his face. Jason had seen greatness before now, on a small scale perhaps, but he could smell it out. This overgrown boy had it. Except he was nothing like a boy any more. Kunaksa had burnt out what remained of his innocence.
Old Buridan, grey in the russet glory of his beard, a friend from what seemed a past life. Mynon, extremely capable, the best intriguer of the lot, perhaps the brightest of them all, and utterly untrustworthy anywhere but on a battlefield, for all his smiles.
A clutch of half-known faces. Phinero, very like his dead brother, a hound with good teeth and little brain. Mochran, a dogged old campaigner, one of the few remaining old crew who had been centon-leaders time out of mind. His shaggy head was devoid of imagination, but he would hold to the letter of an order until he bled white.
Aristos, a younger pup well pleased with his elevation. His uncle, Argus, had indulged him too much, put him forward for Second despite arrogance and ineptitude. He had been told to hold the bridges, but had left his men behind to do it while he sat here, ready to kick off this new Kerusia. A rod for my back, Jason thought with an inward sigh.
Four others: Dinon, Hephr, Grast and Gominos. Just names and worn young faces. Jason knew nothing of them. At the moment his body craved sleep, and his thoughts were still dwelling on the face of the Kufr woman he had lately vis ited.
They were talking, half of them at once, mostly the younger ones. Buridan and Mynon and Mochran watched them with a kind of detached wariness. Rictus looked out of a window at the pitiless blue of the sky. It was hot, so hot it got a man to shouting in an instant, weather for argument and lovemaking.
Again, the Kufr girl’s pale face, those dark eyes.
Jason thumped the long table, not hard, but enough to rattle the jugs, to shut them up. He pinched his eyes as though squeezing water out of them; they stung like lemon-juice under his fingers.
“Mynon,” he said into the sudden quiet. “Talk to me. And I swear by Antimone’s cunt, that if any one of you interrupts him, I shall kick you up and down this room.”
Mynon smiled a little. His one brow rose up his forehead, the red skin peeling above it, his black eyes sunken in lines of weariness. Still, he held onto that sneering jauntiness which was his trademark. He produced a slate and a knob of chalk and looked the table up and down.
“We have the paychests; the Kufr ran before us too quickly to take them along. But a man cannot eat gold. And for that reason, we cannot stay here.”
A splutter of argument. Mynon and Jason looked at one another.
“We will bleed this city dry in a matter of days, the countryside round about in less than a month. We stay here, we starve, and we starve the Kufr all about us. Is that clear enough for you, brothers?”
“I’d like you to be Quartermaster, Mynon. You have a knack for it, a head for figures and the like. Do you accept?”
Mynon considered, head to one side in that bird-like way of his. He shrugged fractionally. “All right.”
“You will retain command of your mora. We need your experience in the battle line too.”
“Who are you, Jason, to be elevating and appointing without so much as a say so from the rest of us?” Aristos spoke up, his freckled face burnt dark by the sun, bright hair shining. Another strawhead. Some of the younger ones rapped the table with one knuckle in agreement.