Authors: Paul Kearney
“Come to my wagon,”
Tiryn said, touching him on the arm. “Jason would be glad of it.”
Rictus shook his
head. “Tonight I must be here. Some will want to talk to me, and others I must
talk to. I will come see him tomorrow.”
Tiryn walked away
without another word. Tall beyond humanity, clad in black, she did indeed seem
a visitation from another world.
“Get some sleep,”
Mochran said. “The dark hours are not a time to be making decisions. Best left
for the morning.” He paused, then added, “Rictus, sleep tonight among your own
mora, among men you trust.”
“Have we fallen
that far, Mochran?”
“Aristos was
right; we’re not an army any more, not right now. It may be you can change
that, but in any case, be careful. Aristos does not take this kind of defeat
well. He may try something before morning.”
THINNING RANKS
The sun rose, a
grey light behind the mountains, no more. Snow was drifting down in shifts and
shreds, whirling in flecks and flocks about the encampments, settling on men’s
eyelashes and in their beards as they lay shivering in half-sleep beside the
butt-end of smouldering logs. In the baggage lines, the oxen and mules stood
apathetic and head-down.
“How much of a
head start does he have?” Rictus asked, rubbing grime out of his eyes.
“They were in at
the baggage well before dawn,” Mynon told him. “So I hear at any rate. They
took a dozen mule-carts, no more.”
“Travelling light,”
Mochran said, then bent over to cough and hawk and spit a green gobbet out onto
the ground. “He’s had two turns’ march perhaps, and no wagons or wounded to
slow him down.”
“Why did no one
tell me?” Rictus was bright-eyed with anger now.
“The men let him
go. What were they going to do, start fighting in the camp, kill their own?”
“Just him and
Gominos, then.”
“Yes, and we’re
well rid of them,” Mochran snapped. “They left the gold, which is something—too
heavy for them, I suppose. But they took more than enough supplies to get them
through the mountains.”
“They left the
rest of us short, then.”
Mynon sighed, cradling
his injured arm under his cloak. “Yes, they did.”
Rictus peered
west, along the winding valleys and looming white-tipped mountains. Two whole
morai, some seventeen hundred men, had left camp in the middle of the night and
no one had seen fit to wake the new warleader, that young fool who had thought
he could lead them.
“If we’re not an
army, then what are we?” he said. Mynon and Mochran looked at him gluml
y.
“All right. Pack
up. We’d best get on the road ourselves and make some distance today.”
“You think the
Kufr are still after us?” Mochran asked. He looked back east, but the air was a
veil of blowing snow and there was nothing to see.
“I think they are.”
“If the Juthan are
up in arms against them, maybe they’ve enough in their pot to go around,” Mynon
said, rasping his fingers through his beard. It was coming out black and
silver.
“Maybe. We’ll keep
a rearguard all the same, and march like soldiers.”
Mynon walked away
with something like a sneer on his face. Mochran stood a moment longer, looking
up at the blank sky, the first gleam of the sun vanishing as he watched,
swallowed up.
“It’s not the Kufr
we have to worry about now, Rictus. It’s these mountains.”
They made only a
few pasangs before the snow thickened and the wind picked up to howl about the
surrounding peaks. Phinero’s mora, at the front of the column, broke track for
the rest, stamping through the deepening snow using their spears as staffs and
sending the more swift-footed among them forward to make sure of the way ahead.
Now and then they came across evidence of Aristos’s passage before them: a
discarded pair of sandals, turds by the wayside. But soon the snow covered
these and any other signs there might have been, and the main column of the
army marched in a world of its own, a world defined by the whirling snow, the
grey-glimpsed flanks of the rocky valley ahead, the labouring back of the man
in front, muffled to the eyes.
The men fell out
in the middle of the day to eat hard bread and stale cheese. Many of them cut
strips off the hems of their cloaks and bound up their numb feet with them,
others using emptied grain sacks from the baggage train. They were not equipped
for cold weather, but they were Macht and were used to the mountains, familiar
with the sleep of a man who was overtaken by the cold, and with the white
hardness of frozen flesh that must be thawed before it turned black.
It had been a long
time, however, since they had felt the bite of frost on their faces, or marched
through snow; it seemed like a re-education in a past life to them. The deserts
of Artaka, the steaming lowlands of Pleninash, seemed now like a brilliantly
coloured dream half-remembered before waking. The snowstorms that raged about
their faces, the half-felt loom of the encroaching mountains: these were reality.
They were all that had ever been real.
That night, forage
though they might across the lower slopes of the mountains and across the
twisted valleys and re-entrants with their foaming white rivers, they could not
gather up enough firewood to do more than heat their evening meal. The men
gathered around the communal centoi with the snow plastering their backs, and
took turns coming up to the heat to thaw out their feet and hands, the
firelight playing on their peeling faces. They cupped the stew-bowls in their
hands to savour the warmth before gulping down the thin broth within, clenching
their teeth on their shivers and exchanging catcalls and insults with their
comrades. Then they went to their bivouacs, laid their blankets on the snow,
and lay belly to back in long rows with their heads covered, their frozen feet
drawn up under the ragged hems of their cloaks.
Five days went by
in this manner, the snow never quite thick enough to warrant a halt in their
march, but never letting up enough to glimpse the sun. They climbed higher into
the mountains and began to feel the air thinning about them as the earth under
their feet rose to meet the sky. Only at night did the cloud clear somewhat,
and the men lying there in the drifts could look up past the grey frame of
their own breath to see the stars blaze out white and pitiless, as bright as
they had ever been in the high places of the Harukush, Gaenion’s Pointer
showing the way home lay. In the morning they would have to break themselves
out of their brittle blankets like men smashing glass, their beards frosted
white so that they were an army of old men. When the first of the wounded died,
they would have burned them with their dwindling store of firewood, but Rictus
forbade it. The dead were buried under cairns of stone instead, the wood saved
to keep life in the living.
Just over six
thousand men laboured like this through the high passes of the Korash
Mountains, in the eleventh year of the reign of the Great King Ashurnan, in the
year of the Juthan Rebellion, the year after the death of the pretender
Arkamenes at the Battle of Kunaksa. The Macht army, which had shaken the
Asurian Empire to its foundation, disappeared into the rocky roof of the world
as though it had never been. But its passage did not go unremarked; in the
snow-covered hollows of the mountains, there were watchers who noted its
progress.
Rictus brought a
hot jar of army stew to Tiryn’s wagon every night, usually accompanied by
Whistler and one or two others from his old centon. Whistler had been a
teamster in a former life, and now had taken it upon himself to see to Tiryn’s
wagon and the poor beasts that drew it, rubbing them down every evening and
checking the vehicle for the day’s wear and tear. When the wagons broke down,
throwing a wheel or cracking an axle, they were at once hacked up for firewood,
for there was no decent timber to repair them, and the field-forges could not
be got hot enough to work the iron wheel-rims and yoke-fittings. The army’s
wake was a littered trail of abandoned gear, and many of the men had thrown
away their shields to ease their travels.
Some oil yet
remained to light Tiryn’s sole lamp. Rictus produced the earthenware jar from
under his cloak. Too hot to touch when he had first taken it, the clay was now
only lukewarm. Tiryn spooned the stew into a pair of bowls. Jason was sitting
up now, and though his face was white and wasted, his eyes were clear. The
fever that had consumed him was broken at last, having feasted on his flesh
since the Irunshahr battle. Rictus could have made thumb and forefinger meet
around his once brawny forearm. As Jason spooned stew into his mouth, the
utensil shook in his hand as if even that were too much for his stripped
muscles. He saw the look in Rictus’s eyes and grinned, his face momentarily
becoming a hairy skull.
“Don’t you be
wearing that long face for me. I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“I thank the gods
you are.”
“Thank Tiryn.
Without her I’d be buried under a pile of rocks in our rear.” His free hand
went out and clenched the Kufr woman’s fingers. Tiryn smiled. She was
beautiful. Rictus wondered why he had never noticed it before. For a second he
envied Jason that look in her eyes. No woman had ever looked at him in such a
way.
“You are a lucky
man, Jason.”
“I’ve been
luckier,” Jason told him, around a mouthful of stew. “Phobos! Are we down to
mule already?”
“When the animals
die, we carve them up at once. I’m trying to save the beans until there’s
nothing else.”
“How goes our
merry march, lad? Longer than expected, I take it.”
“The weather has
slowed us down, and there are so many westward-heading valleys that it takes
time for the scouts to let us know which ones are not dead-ends. We’re feeling
our way forward pace by pace.”
“And meanwhile,
our old friend starvation marches alongside us. How are the stores?”
“Aristos took more
than his share when he left. The army has been on half-rations for days now. As
things go, we’ll be all out in three more days. After that, it’s just the pack
animals, and whatever we can grub out of the ground. No one has seen a lick of
game since we got high up, not so much as a bird. This is a desert, Jason.”
“We’ll march
hungry,” Jason said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “It’s been done before.”
“We’ll march
hungry,” Rictus agreed, tonelessly.
Jason watched him
by the low flicker of the lamplight, his bowl forgotten in his lap. “Not much
fun, is it, Rictus, that lonely space above the snowline?”
“It’s not
something I’ve ever wanted.”
“And yet I hear
you are good at it. Mynon and Mochran have been to visit. Between them they’ve
forty years on you, and yet they’re happy as fresh fish to leave the decisions
your way.”
Rictus did not
reply.
“I left you
Aristos and his snot-nosed friends as morai commanders,” Jason said. “That is
on me. I should have looked harder for leaders.”
“What’s done is
done.”
“I hear your friend
Gasca died.”
“At Irunshahr,
yes.”
“That, too, was my
fault.”
“No! It was
Aristos. He—”
“It was my fault,
Rictus. I am not the strategist Phiron was. Give me a centon or a mora, and I
am a happy man. But an army like this—I did not see it. I am sorry.”
“These things
happen,” Rictus said.
“This is your army
now. You will lead it home.”
“And you?”
Jason stared at
Tiryn, and she back at him. “I have what I want, right here. I am done with
armies, done with war.”
“I—I don’t—”
“What was your
father’s name?”
The question threw
Rictus completely. It was a moment before he could reply. “He was called
Aritus.”
“He must have been
a good man, to raise such a son.”
* *
*
The next morning
the snow grew thinner, hard flakes that struck exposed flesh with the heft of sand.
The army staggered on through it, the morai hunched up around narrow-waisted
gaps in the rocks, stringing out where the ground opened. The Imperial Road had
long ago disappeared; the stone-paved companion that had led their feet all the
way from Kunaksa had become a wide dirt track with stone waymarkers every
pasang, then a mere half-guessed trail, and finally nothing more than a memory
buried in snow.
A river crossed
their path, a wide, wild, foaming wall of water racing down from the heights
above and widening out as it crossed the valley floor. The men waded across it,
shouting with the cold, leaning on their spears and manhandling the wagons and
carts through the waist-deep torrent. One cart full of wounded hit an unseen
stone and tilted over, the mule screaming in its harness as it went with it.
Fifty men splashed and waded at once to right it again, but by the time they
had done so the dozen wounded inside had been carried off by the roaring water,
mere black dots hurtling downstream to be smashed to pieces against the rocks.
The army went into camp that night shuddering and soaked, the water freezing
their cloaks to the hardness of armour. They stripped off their clothes and
rolled naked in the snow, pummelled each other until the blood showed pink
under the skin, slapped life back into each other’s flesh, and laughed while
they did it, still able to see the absurd side of things.
Another morning,
and with sunrise the men rising from their bivouacs found that some of their
comrades did not rise with them, but lay in their midst stiffened and cold,
their faces as peaceful as if they were asleep after a long day’s journey. The
centurions did a headcount and reported to Rictus, as they did every morning.
He received their news with a grim face. Over three dozen men had frozen to
death during the night, and many more had woken to find their feet mere useless
frozen blocks.