The Ten Thousand(87)
Gasca shook his head. “My place is here, with this crowd. I belong here, Rictus, holding a spear and following the man in front. It’s all I want.”
Rictus nodded. He looked very young in the failing light, though as the dusk grew about them all and the campfires took life from the dark, it was possible to see the lines and bones graven in his face.
“Have a drink, centurion. Antimone’s tits, what is this we have here? A love affair? Take it somewheres else.” Astianos grinned, and thumped the wineskin against Rictus’s shoulder.
“What’s going to happen?” Gasca asked him. “What did the Kerusia decide?”
Rictus wiped his mouth. Around him, even in the gathering dark, he was suddenly aware of men pausing in their conversations, cocking an ear to listen.
“We have to stay together,” he said. He raised his voice as he said it, and like a stone dropped in a pond, he felt the ripples of his words grip men further and further away across the square as they listened in. I should stand up and shout, he thought. But then it would be a speech, and they’d not listen anymore.
“If we break up, they’ll cut us to pieces. Together we are an army, a Macht army. On the Kunaksa we beat their best, all by ourselves. If we stay together, hold to the colour, then we can do it again. And we’ll have to, if we’re to make it all the way back. We’re marching home by the shortest route, across Pleninash and Kerkh and Hafdaran, through the Korash Mountains, across Askanon and Gansakr, until we find ourselves back on the shores of the sea, at Sinon. That’s what we’re doing. And we’ll march as an army, the whole fucking way. All of us.”
PART THREE
THE MARCH TO THE SEA
Nineteen
THE GENERAL’S KUFR
Three pasangs long, the column stretched straight as the Imperial Road would allow across the soggy lowlands of the plain. Up front, a mora of light-armed troops spread out on a kind of shapeless crescent before the head of the main body, a thousand men with javelins and light spears and a weird confection of shields. None wore scarlet; none in the entire column wore scarlet any more, for those chitons had been too soaked in the mud and gore of past battles to be of further use. They wore instead the felt tunics of Asurian peasants, or cut-down linen robes looted from some Kufr’s household. But upon these rags rested the bronze of their fathers, and on the shoulders of that armour they leaned the long spears their race had carried from time immemorial.
The column was composed almost entirely of marching men, until one came to the latter third.
Here, light wagons and single-axle carts trooped, drawn by mules and horses and asses and oxen and any beast which could shoulder a yoke. There were some two hundred of these vehicles, and perhaps a thousand men walked among them, leaning their shoulders against the wheels when the animals up front faltered in their relentless haulage. Behind this cumbersome train there marched a further two thousand spearmen. These two morai, like the two in the van, did not keep their heavy shields in the wagon-beds, but wore them on their shoulders. And periodically they would halt, about-turn, and present a bristling, impenetrable front to whatever or whoever might be approaching the army from the rear. Thus the Macht marched, away from the Bekai River, and into the heart of the Pleninash lowlands.
“I see them as a dark line on the horizon, no more,” the Juthan, Proxis, said, frowning. “They collected themselves as if they have a purpose.”
“Of course they do,” Vorus told him. “They are marching home.”
“We slaughtered their high command, and yet...”
“The Macht vote on things,” said Vorus. He smiled a little. “They vote, and create new things out of that collective will. It is not a good way to run an army, and yet here we are and there go they, marching as though nothing had happened. They have another leader, Proxis, someone they all respected before we slaughtered their generals. He must be a good man to have wrought such wonders out of them at Kunaksa. I wonder if I know him.”
The two generals were ahead of the main body some pasang or so, seated on their long-suffering mounts. Behind them, Kaik rose above the Bekai River on its ancient mound, the gates of the city wide open, lines of Kefren troops streaming past it, crossing the river by the two undefended bridges.
“They stripped Kaik bare,” Proxis said, a hard gleam in his eye. “Food, water, wine, horses, oxen, and hundreds of my people to be taken along as slaves, beasts of burden. But then that is what we have always been.”
Vorus looked at his companion and nodded. “Yes, you have. But I hear tell that in Jutha now the people are arming, and it’s not to fight the Macht.”