Who am I indeed? Jason wondered. For a cold moment, he saw himself packing a horse and taking off across the Empire alone, making hell’s leather for the west and the shores of the sea. But that would leave his Dogsheads here, and Buridan. That would leave behind the best part of what he had earned for himself in this life. A name, and respect for that name. If he left that behind, he would be worthless. Go back to soldiering in the Harukush? Why? He had the adventure of his lifetime here and now.
“Aristos makes a fair point,” he said lightly. “Shall we vote on it, then? I put myself forward to take Phiron’s place. Who will have me?”
His own hand went up first, those of Buridan and Rictus in the same second; then old Mochran, and Mynon. And then a pause. Finally Phinero joined them. “I don’t see no one else here I’d take orders from,” he said with a shrug.
Aristos made no sign of acceptance or anger. He flapped his hand on the table. “You have a majority, Jason. You are our warleader.” He had a smile even less pleasant than Mynon’s. “Some proprieties must be preserved, or else what are we?”
“We’re in shit up to our necks, so we’d best start shovelling,” Buridan growled. “What’s the plan, Jason?”
He got up from the table and paced over to one of the great openings in the wall. From here one could look down on the garden-rooves of Kaik, green squares retreating down the hill’s steep slope amid a sea of brown brick, all shimmering in the heat. A steady train of refugees was leaving the city, heading along the roads to the west. Running before the storm. His men had wrecked I Ins city simply by entering it and taking what they needed—not loot, or women so much—but water, food, a place to lay their heads. This army would wreck many more before they made it home, he thought. And home is where we must be going. There is nothing for us here, in the Empire.
For the first time, perhaps, he understood the real abilities of Phiron and Pasion. They had collected these centons, had fed and watered and supplied them, had held them together to the end. Until one Kufr’s death had turned their certainties upside-down.
“We go home,” Jason said simply. “That is all we can do. “The Great King has shown he cannot be trusted or negotiated with, so we will not try.” He turned back to face the others, the sunlight behind him making of his form a black shadow, faceless.
“We must march to the sea.”
There was a square below the Governor’s Palace, built up on one side like a massive terrace to make level the slope of the hill. All around it, the fired-brick buildings of the city reared up three and four stories tall, and on their rooves could be seen date palms, juniper bushes, vines, a cool green horticulture three and four spear-lengths above the cobbles of the square itself, ivy and ferns trailing their tendrils down the faces of the houses. In the centre of the square was an oasis of cedar and poplar trees, a sizeable copse surrounded by the beating heat of the open stone around. This was where the city’s markets had been held, and there was still the wreckage of a hundred, two hundred stalls scattered far and wide across it, melons rolling underfoot, pomegranates broken open like bloody relics of battle, pistachios scattered like pebbles on a sea’s shore. Here, a great many of the exhausted Macht had set up a camp of sorts, burning the market-stalls in their campfires and roasting anything four-footed they could find over them. There were public wells at the four corners of the square, and running up to each of these were ceaseless queues of thirsty men bearing buckets, pots, and skins to fill for their centons. It was orderly, in a way, though to the terrified inhabitants of the surrounding district it must have seemed as though some great shambling beast of the apocalypse had wandered into their world and collapsed with a tired groan. Perhaps six thousand men were bedded down on the cobbles, their heads pillowed on the ragged red rolls of their cloaks. They had all claimed their own centoi again, and congregated round the black cauldrons like acolytes stunned by their oracle. The pots were not being cooked in, but were full of drinking water. The alleyways and streets leading up to the square were already stinking with the army’s effluent, and centurions were clustering here and there, haranguing each other about where each centon should piss. Tired men were almost as ready now to fight each other as they had been to fight the Kufr, the uncertainty of their plight finally looming through the receding haze of thirst and exhaustion.
Gasca had been to the Carnifex to have a wound stitched, but the charnel-house stench of the buildings set aside for the wounded drove him away. Groups of gagging Kufr had been pressed into disposal of the bodies, and were hauling them out of the city on flat-bed wagons, to be burned down by the river. The walking wounded rejoined their centons as soon as they could; in this heat, an injury gained in the filth of the Kunaksa went bad very fast, and the flies choking the air about the infirmaries were too fat and blue and insistent to keep from every wound. Men were lying with maggots crawling upon their flesh, their eyes sunk in blackened sockets of pain. Their comrades stayed with them as long as they could bear it, but their fate was written in their eyes; already they could see the land beyond the Veil.