The Ten Thousand(91)
“Ab-Mirza,” Rictus said. “So Jason says. All centons at the double—pass it down the line. They’ll open the gates at sunrise—we must secure them.”
They ran at a fast jog through the mist, javelins in their shield-fist, short spears in the other. They were nearly all barefoot, for sandals could not compete with the sucking ooze of the farmlands they had passed through. Nine hundred-odd men, their eyes as bright and eager as those of a hunting wolf, no formation to their number, a mere fast-moving, shapeless darkness in the mist.
Another astonished farmer. Someone speared him and he splashed to the ground with a sharp cry. Rictus bared his teeth. No point shouting back at the pack behind him. Leading these men, one took the rough along with the smooth.
They passed clusters of farm buildings, mud walled and thatched with reeds. A line of stout palms planted along an irrigation ditch. Mud walls, knee-high, chest-high. They poured over them with scarcely a pause, the clay brick crumbling under their feet and elbows and scrabbling fingers.
And at last, the great smell of the city itself, to be sensed with the nose, and felt as a shadow upon the mist around them. They were at the walls, fired brick, slimy, veined with ivy. “Follow them round—this way. On me, brothers,” Rictus panted. He heard the slap of their feet behind them, the sound women made when washing clothes on the stones of a river.
And here was the gate—a tall barricade of wood, reinforced with green bronze. It was closing in their faces. Rictus screamed something—he knew not what—and sprinted forward. His men roared out a wordless howl of anger and sped up with him. They crashed into the gate at full tilt, heads knocking against the wood with a ripple of cracks.
“Push, you bastards!” Rictus yelled, and they set their shoulders to it.
He backed out of the ranks of his struggling men, made for the dark, thinning gap, and squeezed through there. On the other side were a crowd of Kufr, tall, angular shapes, grunting and shouting. He stabbed the short spear into their bodies, hardly aiming the head of it. Behind him, more of his men were squeezing through the gap. Whistler was beside him, using a javelin as a spear. A sharp point keened off Rictus’s armour, the blow hardly felt. Then another. Someone was loosing arrows into the press, careless of who they hit.
The gates were opening now, and on the far side of them the Macht were a great mass of shouting men, shields held up over their heads, spearheads lancing out below, going for the bellies and groins of the Kufr. They poured into the city, the momentum on their side now, the gates all the way open, that torrent of muscle scraping them across the flags of the gatehouse floor. The Kufr fell back. There was torchlight here, mixed up and competing with the mist-bound glow of the rising sun. The morning was fighting its way into life. Rictus’s men were through the gatehouse and in the streets. Buildings reared up all around like red cliffs, Kufr running everywhere, showers of arrows hissing through the air, men going down with the feathered shafts skewering them. The Kufr were up on the rooftops, archers bobbing up to loose their shafts, others beside them hurling down bricks and stones and all manner of other debris. A dozen Macht were down now, and the cobbled brick of the roadway was puddled with their blood. The rest of the mora, still pushing and pulsing through the gates, set up a great shout as they saw their fallen comrades and lunged forward. The knot around the gatehouse broke up. The Macht leapt over their own dead and wounded and streamed up every street, cutting down all who stood in their way, kicking in doors and hauling out Kufr women, cutting their throats or stabbing them through the heart, the eyes. They pounded up the internal stairways to come out on the rooftops, and on the flat hard-packed earth above they slew their attackers without mercy, throwing them down to the street. Rictus saw two of his men catch a tall Kefren woman, pinion her arms and violate her with a javelin, laughing with a fierce, insane hatred as they did so.
He shouted orders, but they went unheard. The men were slipping out of his command, scattering into the maze of streets, pursuing any Kufr who dared show their face. And still, on the farther rooftops, the inhabitants of the city were popping up to shoot arrows and fling spears and stones, and carts were being wheeled across the roadways to bar the passage of the invaders. There seemed to be no soldiery resisting the Macht; it was the population itself. Rictus’s mora was being soaked into the city. It was disappearing in chaos and murder before his eyes.
He grabbed a young Macht by the scruff and clouted aside the knife which was raised in his face. “Get out of here, back to the army. Find Jason and tell him to bring up some of the other morai. Tell him we’re fighting in the streets, and like to be swamped if he does not hurry. Do you understand? Repeat it to me.” The boy did so, sour and resentful.