The Ten Thousand(90)

He laughed at that. “Was this why Arkamenes kept you by his side? To needle him out of a dark mood?”

“Perhaps. You like to talk to me, Jason. You lead this army. I do not think you can talk to others.”

“You’ve met Rictus. No? I talk to him. I talk to my friend Buridan. And I talk to you. I do not know why. I do not know why I trust you, but it happens that I do.”

He was in all seriousness, the laughter gone. He stared into the fire and nudged an errant faggot closer to the flames with his foot.

“We are not one army, but two,” he said at last. “For now, we are together, because if we split up, we will no doubt die here. But if the Great King forsakes our pursuit, there will be factions in our ranks. They will tear us apart.”

“Kill the leaders of the other factions,” she said. She took the forgotten pot out of the Juthan girl’s hands and began ladling the lentil stew within onto three earthenware plates.

“The Macht do not conduct their affairs in that way,” Jason said. He seemed displeased.

“Are you hungry?”

“I’ll eat.”

He ate with his fingers, as did the Juthan. Tiryn scooped up her own food with a horn spoon. The taste took her back to the hearth of her father’s house, in the mountains. The fire in the centre of the round room, the woodsmoke tainting every mouthful. She stared at her plate and across her mind a flickering pageant of childhood images played themselves out, stealing away her appetite.

Jason set down his empty plate. He lay back in his cloak and stared up at the stars. “I see Gaenion’s Pointer,” he said. “It shows the way north. Many’s the night march I’ve made with it to guide me. It seems strange, somehow, that our stars are here, in this land.”

“Your stars?” Tiryn asked.

“Gaenion the Smith made the stars out of Antimone’s tears. When she wept he loved the way his wife’s light caught in them—his wife is the sun, Araian. So he caught some of Antimone’s tears, and set them in the heavens in patterns and chains ordained by God Himself. And there they stick.”

“The stars are the gems of Bel, thrown into the sky as the god celebrated the killing of the great Bull, Mot’s beast of the dark,” Tiryn said. “The eyes of the Bull he set in the sky also, though one was full of blood from the beast’s death-throes. They are our moons, Firghe and Anande, Wrath and Patience.”

Jason grinned. “Each to his own gods, I suppose. I don’t know about your Bel, or bull, but I have heard the beat of Antimone’s Wings upon the battlefield, like some black flutter in the core of my heart. And then of course there is this.” He cast aside his cloak, and sitting up, he thumped the black chest of his cuirass, the Curse of God.

“I do not know how these things were made if they are not the work of some god, because assuredly, there is no smith on earth who can fathom their creation.”

Tiryn raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps there was once.”

“What is the word for stubborn?”

“Kura. A mule is a Kuru. I am thinking it a good word for Macht, also.”

Jason got to his feet, and bowed. “Thank you for the wine, the food, and the instruction in humility, my lady.”

She lowered the komis from her face, looking up at him as he stood there. She did not want him to go. “I will see you on the march perhaps, tomorrow?”

“Perhaps.” He reached out his hand, and for an unthinking second she did the same, her fingers longer than his, pale in the firelight. They did not touch. She drew back, startled by the temerity of her own impulse.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I wish to learn the words for hearth, home, and happiness, in case I should ever need them.” Then he turned to go.

“I hope you may need them, one day,” Tiryn said, watching his cloak-wrapped shape disappear into the firelight and shadows of the sleeping camp. She did not think he had heard her.

The next day, a large tell loomed out of the morning mists before Rictus’s trudging skirmishers. All about, the flatlands of the Middle Empire croaked and clicked and buzzed as the sun began to warm the air. A solitary Kufr farmer, leading his ox out for a morning’s work, saw the Macht appear out of the mists and fled, leaving his puzzled animal behind. Rictus slapped the beast’s rump as they passed it, and Whistler grinned. “Rictus, shall I?”

“Leave it. The foragers will pick it up. Cormos—take your centon out on the right, but stay linked.”

“Look,” Whistler said, swinging his pelta from his back to his left arm.

A city reared up before them, afloat on a white sea of mist. Steep-sided as a spearhead, it was a vast black shadow on the edge of their world, coming to life as they watched with the flicker of a hundred, two hundred, a thousand lamps. The inhabitants were rising with the sun.