The Ten Thousand (8 page)

“Agreed, Jason,”
Pasion said. “I will talk to them. Brothers, you must keep your men outside the
walls, and in camp. We cannot afford friction with the Kerusia, or any others
of the city councils.”

A rumble went down
the table. Discontent, impatience. The room crackled with pent-up irritability.

“I’ve had my
centon here the better part of a month,” an older man said, his beard white as
pissed-upon snow and his eyes as cold as those of a dead fish. This was Castus
of Goron, perhaps the wickedest of them all. “I’ve lost eleven men: two maimed
in brawls, one who’s gotten himself hung by the magistrates, and eight who took
off out of boredom. Most of us here can say the same to some degree. It’s not
lambs we lead, Pasion. My spears are losing their temper. Where in Phobos’s
Face are you taking us anyway, if we’re not to annoy Machran itself? The
capital can muster some eight thousand aichme, given time. If we’re to strike,
it must be very soon, before these farmers get themselves together.” There was
a murmur of agreement.

Pasion smashed his
fist down on the planks of the table.

“Machran is not
our goal,” he said with quiet vehemence. “Nor are any of the other hinterland
cities. Hammer that into your heads and those of your men. You’ve taken money
from my hand— that makes me your employer as much as anyone else. If you cannot
hold to your half of the contract, then refund me your retainers and be off. Go
pit your wits in some skirmish up north. I hear Isca has been sacked at last,
so there’s not a decent soldier up there to stand in line. Rape some goatherder
women if you will, and boast of killing farmers’ sons. Those who stay with me
will find real flesh for their spears, a true fight such as we’ve not seen in
the Harukush in man’s memory. Brothers, stay to the colour here and I promise
you, we shall all become forgers of history.”

The centurions
looked at the wine-ringed table-top, frowning. At last Mynon said; “Fine words.
Eloquent. I put them in my head and admire them. You always had a way with
words, Pasion, even as far back as Ebsus. You could make men believe their own
shit didn’t stink, if you had a mind to, but we’ve all grey in our beards here,
and rhetoric to us is like a middle-aged wife. You can admire it, flirt with
it, but you’re not going to let it fuck with you. Take my advice and speak
plain now, or you’re going to start bleeding spears.”

Someone guffawed,
and there was a chorus of assent. As Pasion looked down the table he realised
that Mynon was right. Mercenaries would put up with many things and, contrary
to popular myth, they would not desert the first time their pay was late.
Stubborn bastards, proud as princes, and sentimental as women, they could be
held to the colour by many things beyond money. Sometimes they would believe in
promises, if those promises were grand enough, and if they flattered their own
vanity. Mercenaries had their own kind of honour, and a fierce pride in their
calling. It was only to be expected. Once a man donned scarlet, he became
ostrakr,
and abandoned whatever city had spawned him. It had to be so, or
else allegiances to different warring cities would tear every centon apart. To
replace that allegiance, the mercenary committed himself to his centon and his
comrades. They became his city. The centurion was their leader, but could not
commit his men to any contract until they had voted for it among themselves. It
was the law of the Assembly writ small, and it gave each mercenary company the
cohesion and brotherhood that all men craved in their hearts. To become a
sellspear, a man might forsake his ancestors, his memories, the very place that
gave him birth, but in return he was admitted to this brutal brotherhood and
given a new thing to fight for. A city in miniature, clad in bronze, and
dedicated to the art of warfare.

“Very well,”
Pasion said at last. “You scorn rhetoric, so I will give you fact. More words,
but these are set in iron. I will tell you this now, and it will never leave
these walls.” He looked the table up and down, checking that he had each of
their attentions. Had he been a less restless man, he would have loved the
stage, the faces hanging on each word he chose to give and withhold.

“We are not
gathered here for some city fight. We are making an army, a full-sized army,
and all of it composed of mercenaries. Brothers, we have a journey before us, and
its destination lies far, far outside the Harukush.”

There was a pause
as this sank in.

“Brothers, we are—”

“
Phobos,
”
Orsos swore loudly. “You mean to take us into the Empire.”

TAKING SCARLET

For Jason of
Ferai, the morning clatter of the Marshalling Grounds was a piercing agony he
could as well have done without. Rasping his tongue across the roof of his
mouth he sent one hand out to find the water jug and the other down to his
waist, where his money-pouch still hung, as flaccid as an old man’s prick. He
poured the contents of the jug over his head in the bed, getting some down his
rancid throat and causing his bed-mate to squeal and dart upright in outrage.

“It’s only water,
my dear. You had worse over you last night.”

The girl rubbed
her eyes, a pretty little thing whose name he had not bothered to learn. “It’s
dark out yet. You’ve the bed for another turn of the jar if you want it.”

Jason rose and
kissed the nape of her neck. “Consider it a bonus. A turn alone.”

She threw his
scarlet rag of chiton at him, and stood up, stretching. “Have it your way.”

Jason stood up
also, the room doing its morn-ing-after lurch in his eyes. The girl was
striking flint on tinder and making a hash of it. He took the stones from her
and blew on the spark he clicked out, first time, then lit the olive-lamp from
it. The grey almost-light of the pre-dawn receded. It was night in the room
again. He pinched the girl’s round white buttock. “Any wine left?”

“There’s the dregs
of the skin, bought and paid for.”

“Like you.”

“Like me.”

“Join me in a
snort.”

They sat back down
on the bed, naked and companionable, and squirted the black wine into one
another’s mouths.

“So when is it to
happen?” the girl asked. Her fingers eased the bronze slave-ring about her
throat.

“What’s to happen?”

“This war of
yours.”

“I wish I knew.
What’s the word in the stews?”

The girl yawned.
She had good teeth, white as a pup’s. “Oh, Machran is to be attacked by all
your companies, and sacked for every obol.”

“Ah, that war. It
may wait a long time yet.”

Suddenly earnest,
the girl grasped Jason’s nut-brown, corded forearm. “When it comes, I will hide
and wait for you, if you like. I would have you as a master.”

Jason smiled and
stood up again. “You would, would you? Well, don’t be hiding on my account.” He
dug into his pouch and levered out a bronze half-obol, flicked it at her. She
caught it in one small, white fist.

“Don’t you know
what war is like, little girl?”

She lowered her
head, a greasy, raven mane. “It cannot be worse than this.”

Jason lifted her face
up, one forefinger under her chin. All humour had fled his face.

“Do not wish to
see war. It is the worst of all things, and once seen, it can never be
forgotten.”

Buridan was
waiting for him, faithful as a hound, and they fell into step together as they
made their way to the Mithannon amid gathering groups of red-clad mercenaries
who were staggering in streams to the roster-calls. There was a floating mizzle
in the air, but it was passing, and Phobos was galloping out of the sky on his
black horse, his brother long gone before him.

“Gods, it’s enough
to make you wish you were on the march again,” Jason groaned, splashing through
unnameable filth in his thick iron-shod sandals and shoving the more incapable
of the drunks out of his way. “After this morning, there will be no more
city-liberty. I’ll confine them to camp; Pasion’s orders. The citizens are
becoming upset.”

“Can’t have that,”
Buridan said, face impassive. He was a broad, russet-haired man with a thick
beard, known as Bear to his friends. Jason had seen him break a man’s forearm
with his hands, as one might snap a stick for kindling. Under the beard, at his
collarbone, there was the gall of a long-vanished slave-ring. Not even Jason
had ever dared ask him how he had come by his freedom. He was decurion of the
centon, Jason’s second. The pair had fought shoulder to shoulder now for going
on ten years, and had killed at each other’s side times beyond count. One did
not need to share blood to have a brother, Jason knew. Life’s bitterness
brought men together in ways not mapped out by the accidents of their birth.
And even the blackest-hearted mercenary was nothing if he had no one to look to
his back.

They passed
through the echoing, dank tunnel of the Mithannon, the gate guards eyeing them
with a mixture of hostility and respect, and as they came out from under that
vault of stone the sun broke out in the sky above them, clearing the mountains
in a white stab of light. At the same moment the roster-drums began to beat,
sonorous boomings which seemed to pick up the glowing pulse of last night’s
wine in Jason’s temples. One thing to be said for Pasion: once he stopped
talking, he was free with his drink. Most of the twenty centurions would be too
wretched to lead their centons out of the encampment today. Their hangovers
would keep them under the walls. Perhaps that was Pasion’s policy, the canny
bastard.

Jason’s troop
lines were fifty spearlengths of hand-me-down lean-tos from which the fine
fragrance of burning charcoal was already wandering. Before them was a beaten
patch of earth, muddy in places, cordoned off from similar spaces by a line of
olive-wood posts which had hemp ropes strung between them. Over all there
flapped his centon’s banner, a stylised dog’s head embroidered on linen, with
further layers of linen glued to the first to stiffen it out. Where the
embroidery of the symbol had worn away, the pattern had been completed with the
addition of paint. It was an old standard. Dunon of Arkadios had given it to
Jason on retiring, and with it a few greybeards who had fought under it time
out of mind. They were all gone now, but the Dogsheads were still here under
that rag; different faces, same game.

Below the banner
there now stood ten files of yawning, belching, scratching, glowering men, all
clad in chitons that had once been bright scarlet, but which now had faded to
every shade north of pink. They were a sodden, debauched, sunken-eyed crew, and
Jason looked at them with distaste.

“How many?” he
asked Buridan.

“Eighty-three by
my count. One or two more may still wander in.”

“That’s four down
on yesterday.”

“Like I said, they
may yet wander in.”

“Another month of
this, and we’ll be hard put to it to get together a single file.”

“There’s fresh
fish coming in all the time,” Buridan rumbled, and he gestured to where a small
knot of men stood unsure to one side, looking around them with eyes wide one
second, narrowed the next. Though they bore weapons, none wore scarlet. The
red-clad mercenaries filed past them without so much as a glance, though with
the inevitable epithets flung out.

“Shitpickers.”

“Goatfuckers.”

“Strawheads.”

“Too damn fresh. I
like my fish stinking,” Jason said.

“Like your women,”
Buridan said mildly.

“And your mother,”
Jason added. The two men grinned at one another.

“You call the
roll,” Jason said. “I believe I’ll go check on the fish.”

“We’re short an
armourer,” Buridan reminded him.

“Fat chance we’ll
get one of those.”

Would-be
mercenaries. They came in two distinct categories. There were those with dreams
and ideas of their own place in the world. These saw themselves as men amongst
men. They craved adventure, the sight of far cities, the clash and clamour of
war as the poets sang of it, and that bright panoply the playwrights made of
phalanx warfare. Of these hopeful souls, perhaps one in four would last past
his first battle. In the
othismos
there was no room for dreamers. Those
who stayed to the colour soon put aside their illusions.

The second
category was more useful; and more dangerous. These were those men who had
nothing to lose. Men running from the things they had seen and done in their
past, or running from those who wished to bring them to account for it. Such
fellows made good soldiers, and were generally fatalistic enough to be brave.
That, or they no longer valued their own lives. Either way, they were useful to
any commander.

One of each, Jason
thought, as he approached the two foremost of the fresh fish. Mountain lads,
one with the bright, hopeful gaze of the ignorant, the other with old pain
etched about his eyes. The bigger one, he of the broad, half-smiling face, had
an old-fashioned panoply: cuirass, shield, close-faced helm at his hip, and
spear. The other had a torn chiton and not much else.

“Names,” Jason
said, rubbing his forehead and cursing Pasion’s cheap wine.

“Gasca of
Gosthere.”

“Rictus of—I was
of Isca.”

Damn. Iscan
training too. What a waste. But without proper gear he was of no use to the
centon—no fighting use.

“Famed Isca,
breeder of warriors. I hear they’ve levelled the walls now, and all the women
are being fucked six ways from yesterday. And what did you do when they were
burning your city?” This Jason asked Rictus, sliming the question with a
fine-tuned sneer. “Were you herding goats, or clinging to your mother’s knees?”

The boy’s eyes
widened, grey as old iron. “I was in the second rank,” he said, his voice
quiet, at odds with the anger blazing on his face. “When we were hit in flank
and rear I threw down my shield and ran.”