The Ten Thousand(95)

“Nothing like learning the hard way,” Mynon said, yawning. “You’re wondering what’s left in the larder, I suppose.”

“Most of what was in Ab-Mirza got burned, which fucked the supply situation all to hell. What do we have, Mynon? Be nice.”

“Three days’ full rations. We go on half, stint the slaves, and we can make it a week. The place is picked clean for pasangs around, and from what I hear—”

“Our Macht friend has an army galloping up our arse. I know. He’s two days behind us now, and there’s cavalry with him. It’s eight hundred pasangs to the mountains. If we push it, we can do it in twenty to twenty-five days. In the mountains, we will turn and fight. Until then, we march as hard as we can.”

“Our bellies flapping.”

“It’s tongues I’m worried about now, as much as bellies. Rictus was right; we make a habit of cutting loose like we did yesterday, and we’ll be nothing more than rabble inside of a month. Those young pups would be happy that way, but it would mean the death of the army, pure and simple.”

“Some would say the best part of the army is dead already,” Mynon said, sombre for once.

“Antimone is still with us, Mynon, believe me. We are still—”

“Macht. I know. I was here earlier. What was it Orsos used to say? It was a quote, from Sarenias I think. ‘Brothers, let us go into the dark together, in the shadow of Antimone’s wings’ .”

They stood, remembering, the fire cracking at their feet, beginning to sink now. Around them the teeming insect life of the lowlands chittered and clicked, filling the night with meaningless sound.

“We do not belong here,” Jason said softly.

“I know. I see the same stars overhead and wonder why they are not different. Even the water tastes strange to me here. I think sometimes, Jason, that the Kufr have more right to this world than we.”

Jason tried to laugh, but the humour died in his throat. “The water? Yesterday the gutters of Ab-Mirza were full of blood. It poured over the walls. How many thousands, Mynon? More than died at Kunaksa, I think. Whatever wrongs have been inflicted on us, we have repaid them many times over.”



Before dawn, the army was on the march again, the men sullen and subdued, like a drunk remembering the antics of the night before. Jason had the centurions go through the camp and have all the loot from Ab-Mirza flung in the embers of the campfires. Those Kufr women which had been brought along in capture yokes were freed and left by the wayside like naked, whey-faced ghosts. The men marched with empty bellies and sore heads; up and down the column the centurions bellowed at them to pick up the pace. When pack-animals failed, whole centons were detailed to bear their loads. Dozens of men were assigned to the heavier of the wagons and levered them through the muck of the Pleninash lowlands by main force, thrashing the exhausted mules and oxen that strained alongside them. Half the army, it seemed, laboured under a sense of disgrace. The other half simmered with resentment, like a man wrongfully accused. Up and down the trudging ranks men argued amongst themselves. Periodically some would fall out of the column to brawl in the mud of the wayside, until the centurions broke it up.

“I wish it all to the back of the fucking Veil, this fucking country,” Gratus said, slapping his neck. He peeled something black from his skin, regarded it with distaste, and wiped his bloody fingers in his hair. “I mean, we’re not into high summer yet, and this heat would make a fish sweat. How do they bear it?”

“It’s their country,” old Demotes said, a wizened vision of white beard and blackened face, blue eyes bright and out of place in the middle of it. “They’re bred to it, like we’re bred to the mountains. Besides, it’s not so bad. At home, in the winter, my knees lock up after a march and I’m rubbing on them like a boy who’s just found out how to work his piss-tube until I can stand up again.”

“I saw you grab that Kufr girl, Gasca, how’d that work out?” Astianos said. “Me, by the time I got to anything with a slot between its legs, it was dead. And I draw the line at carrion.”

Gasca marched on, saying nothing.

“He’s shy,” Astianos said, slapping him on the back. “It was his first time, and so fucking a Kufr doesn’t count. He’s a virgin yet.”

Gasca’s broad face remained impassive. The sun had burnt his blond hair white and his skin was dark as boot-leather, the freckles about his nose and cheeks a black tattoo. He had indeed grabbed that girl, to keep her from the others. She had seemed pretty to him, the first Kufr he had ever regarded in that way. In the chaos of the sacked city he had hauled her into a quiet alleyway and stripped her. The excitement of the city’s fall had invaded his brain, and he had drunk some grain-spirit that Astianos had ferreted out of a tall-sided house. He had run his filthy hands up and down her skin, had poked and prodded her. But her eyes had halted him. They were dark and hopeless. She was weeping silently, just like a real woman. So he let her go. Oddly enough, he felt no less of a man for not raping her. He felt only relief, that he had come out of Ab-Mirza the same man who had gone in. His friends would not understand that, but Rictus would. He knewRictus would. So he bore the good-natured chaffing of his fellows with a slight smile, no more. Had he but known it, the last of the boy had left him. He marched along now with a veteran’s face, his smile that of a full-grown man who knows his own mind.