“Shut your mouth, you damn fool,” Buridan growled, more bear-like than ever in the firelight.
“Enough,” Jason snapped. “Aristos, do you contest my authority?”
“I say we vote for warleader again.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that some members of this Kerusia are not fit to command a mora.”
“I agree. But we are not going to start swapping generals right now, with the Great King on our tails and the supply-carts half-empty.”
“I say we put it to the vote, here and now!”
“And I say you shut your mouth, or I will demote you.”
“You can’t do that!” Aristos said, wide-eyed.
“I can. The generals were not voted in by the men. I simply gathered up the Second in every mora when we were down on our tits at Kunaksa. At the proper time, the men should have a say in their generals, but now is not that time. Do you agree?”
After a long moment, Aristos nodded.
“Then my orders are still to be obeyed. There will be no more sacking of Kufr cities. That is to be made clear all the way down the line. We’re in a hole as it is, without digging it any deeper.
Make it clear. I will begin instituting field punishments for any man who thinks otherwise.” He paused, looking them up and down, remembering Phiron and Pasion, Orsos and Castus, and the other dead men who had once stood where these striplings stood now. He felt old, he felt as though they were all diminished in some way. That sense of brotherhood that had taken them so far was gone now. He wondered if even Phiron could have brought it back after this.
“Brothers,” he said, “we are Macht. Remember that.”
Some of them returned his gaze. Old Mochran nodded, the memories in his eyes also. Young Phinero, who had loved his dead brother. Even Mynon had the grace to look somewhat ashamed. Rictus was lost in simmering rage, unreachable. Aristos and his supporters—the words meant almost nothing to them.
“Dismissed,” Jason said heavily. “Mynon and Rictus, stay behind if you please.”
He looked up at the stars—his stars. He smiled, remembering. They were half a pasang out of camp, the better to have their debate without the whole army hearing it. To the west, the Macht bivouacs were a square of campfires, a pasang to a side. And to the east, Ab-Mirza still burned on the horizon, behind them now. He had marched the army hard today, made them sweat out the wine they had looted from the city. Jason closed his eyes, remembering that awful moment when he had felt the army slip out of his control and become a mob. Aristos and his mora had poured through the gates without discipline or order or thought for anything except satisfying their basest desires. Buridan’s men, the best in the army, had come upon what they thought was a battle, and had joined in the slaughter.
And he, Jason, had sent them in there.
It was no battle. Aristos’s and Rictus’s troops had been killing Kufr women and children and old men at that point, spilling blood for the sake of it. By the time order had been restored the city was aflame, a burning charnel-house. Nothing for it then but to leave it burning, to walk away.
Jason did not know why it bothered him so. Rictus had seen Isca go up; no doubt his family had been slaughtered—his father, if tonight were anything to go by—so he had an excuse. But Jason had been at the death of a city before this—a Macht city, too. He could not fathom why this one bothered him so.
“Phobos,” he whispered, baffled and angry. Now at least the Kufr knew what it was like to have a Macht rape them. Another phenomenon for this changing world.
“It was my fault,” Rictus said. He was rubbing his eyes as though their brightness pained him. “They got away from me and wouldn’t come back, except for a few. It was my mora started it. Aristos is right. I am not fit to command.”
“You lead too near the front,” Jason told him brusquely. “You must stand back a little and grip the centons behind the assault. They are the key. You are a general, Rictus, and you were the first man through the gate. This is not a story out of legend we are making here. A general must hang back and consider the larger play of things. Do you understand?”
“I wish to be demoted.”
“Shut up. Go back to your mora and make them obey you. Get out of my sight.”
Rictus left them, trudging into the dark with the slow gait of a tired old man.
“That boy has strange ideas,” Mynon said. “Perhaps it is the Iscan in him.”
“He wants to think well of men, to believe they are better than they are,” Jason said. “His men love him for it; Buridan told me. When they let him down, he takes it bad. He’s young. He’s learning.”