Jason smiled. “I give you my own word,” he said. “Help us make our way home, and I shall try to get us there without the burning of cities, the deaths of the innocent.”
The lamp winked out with a tiny hiss, leaving them in the dark under the stars. Jason leaned forward and touched his mouth against hers, just for a moment, a dizzying second. She sat like some fine-boned statue of marble, fists suddenly clenched in the blanket that covered her lap. Slowly, she replaced the folds of the linen komis about her face, and then sat as unmoving as before. Jason opened his hand, as though he were about to make her a gift. Then he turned and clambered down from the wagon without another word.
The gates of Hadith were shut, and the walls were lined with defiant citizenry. Jason strode up to the kiln-fired brick of the battlements with only a single companion, whilst half a pasang behind him the Macht stood in line of battle. He waved a green branch as he approached, remembering the last time he had tried to negotiate with Kufr. The sweat dripped down his face.
“Drop your veil,” he said to his companion. “Let them see what you are.”
Tiryn did as she was told. Her skin, normally the colour of a hazelnut shell, was pale now. She was trembling with fear, eyes wide and fixed on the spears and javelins and bows in the hands of the defenders. Jason took her hand. It was cool in his, fine-boned and slender. She tugged it away, some colour coming back to her face. “Keep your word,” she said quietly. “That is all I ask.”
“If they do not open their gates, we will march away. I swear it.”
She turned and looked down on him, managed to smile. “Very well then.”
The Macht general and the Kufr woman stood under the loom of the city walls, and Tiryn called out in her clear, carrying voice. She asked for food, for wagons, for draught animals. And in return she promised the defenders that the Macht would leave their city be, and would march off with the following dawn. If the requested supplies were not forthcoming by dusk, she said, the city would be assaulted, and would suffer the fate of Ab-Mirza.
An hour later, the gates were opened, and the folk of Hadith began hauling out the contents of their granaries and their stables and their byres. The Macht stood like an army cast in bronze, motionless. As night fell, they moved in to collect their spoils, and by dawn they were gone, a mere shadow on the western road, the dust rising in a cloud to mark their passage. The gates of Hadith were opened again, and the more valiant of its citizens went out to inspect the beaten earth of the Macht camp. As they stood there, marvelling, they saw in the east another dust-cloud, hanging high in the still air and moving westwards in the wake of the Macht. A great army was on the road.
Twenty-One
BROTHERS IN ARMS
“The land is rising,” Rictus said. He leaned on his spear and stared westwards, into the endless shimmering haze, the blue of distance. He stamped one heel into the ground. “It’s drier here, better going for man and beast. Could be the lowlands are coming to an end at last.”
“Those hills on your left are Jutha,” Jason told him, consulting the calfskin of Phiron’s map. “The province capital, Junnan, is three hundred pasangs to our south-west.” He raised his head, staring westwards with Rictus, a look not unlike hunger on his face. “From here, it’s two hundred pasangs to the mountains. Five or six days’ march, if the weather holds. Think of that, Rictus, mountains again.”
“How high are these mountains?” Rictus asked, ever practical. He was looking at Tiryn, kneeling on the short-cropped turf of the hillside and running her hand across it as a farmer will feel the ears of his crop.
“Not so high as the Magron,” she said. She stood up, taller than either of them. “The Korash are much colder though, and there is only the one pass through them which is fit for the passage of armies: the Irun Gates. It is defended by two fortress-cities. On the eastern side, Irunshahr, on the western, Kumir. And it is said the Qaf live in the mountains between the two.”
“Beyond the mountains is the land of Askanon,” Jason told them, still staring westwards. “Beyond it, Gansakr, and then the sea.”
Rictus had turned and was now looking back the way they had come. Below them the camp of the army sprawled in its rough square, the grey ribbons of a thousand campfires rising up from it in the still air. They led the oxen out to graze, and he could hear the armourers at work in the smithies, hammering upon their field-anvils. At this distance, the measured strokes could almost be the tolling of bells.
He looked farther along the horizon and there it was still, the yellow cloud on the air that was the army of the Great King in pursuit, as dogged as a sniffing hound.