Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (38 page)

At this point, few of them were showing much talent for anything. The pike was a simple weapon, when compared with the sword or the bow. The range of movements required of it was limited – over your shoulder when you walked, up in the air when you stood stationary, in front of you when it was time to shove it into someone. The trick was that each motion needed to be performed in unison with the men behind and beside you, or else you started to stab your own people. Which, with his long experience, Bas knew to be an ineffective tactic.

‘You are the most incompetent pack of fuckwitted peasants I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure!’ Isaac yelled. ‘I’m tempted to march you all out into the river, watch you drown beneath your packs.’ Isaac’s merits as a subordinate were many; among them were the fact that he could yell louder than Bas, and that he was more creative in his displays of contempt.

But still, Isaac was not the Caracal, and on occasion Bas felt it necessary to make his presence clear. He strutted forward suddenly and stopped face to face with one of the men in the front ranks, grabbed his pike and righted it. The unfortunate victim of his instruction seemed about to vomit from the attention. ‘You will keep this pike straight if I have to shove it down your throat,’ Bas said.

The hoplitai nodded and started to stutter.

‘That did not require a response,’ Bas said.

The hoplitai seemed happy to hear that, kept his weapon upright while Bas returned to his perch.

That they all seemed to be in mortal fear of him was not an altogether good thing. At the moment it made them compliant, but ultimately it would just make them stupid. In truth, it was not the hoplitai that worried him. Anyone could be taught the basics of drill, virtually anyone at least, and the true imbeciles would be weeded out soon enough. But an army lived or died on the strength of its petty officers, its pentarches and tetrarches, bitter, scarred veterans whom no one liked and everyone listened to and who inevitably died standing. Those weren’t bred in three months of training, Bas knew, nor in three years.

‘Enough,’ Bas roared, the front-line hoplitai flinching at the volume. ‘If tomorrow is this bad, I’m going to break out the whip. We’ll see if you learn any quicker with your backs cut to ribbon.’ Which sounded rough, but wasn’t any more than hot air. Bas wasn’t actually going to lash anyone the next day, nor the day after. Feared was one thing, hated was another, and judicious use of corporal punishment was how one stayed on the right side of that line.

Isaac dismissed them in detail, and Bas marked their retreat with an expression that would have withered a daisy or broken a length of iron.

‘Well?’ Bas asked, after the task was completed.

‘They ain’t the Thirteenth,’ Isaac said. He took a flask from one of his pockets, offered it to Bas, drank from it unsparingly after the Strategos turned him down. It was not the first time he had nipped from it that day, if his breath and conduct were any guide. The themas contained few teetotallers, and Isaac had always been the sort who more needed than enjoyed a drink. But this was the first Bas had seen of this new development, and he liked it less than he did his new crop of soldiers.

Problems atop problems, but at least he was doing something now, rather than burning away the days in the city. Bas walked over to a nearby rain barrel, cupped his hands and drank until his stomach was full, then dumped a quart or two over his head, matting his long hair over his eyes.

‘The Caracal is disappointed?’ someone asked during this moment of blindness.

Bas didn’t recognise the voice, which was like silk or a whore’s perfume, but he was reasonably certain he wouldn’t like whoever it belonged to. He looked up to discover Konstantinos holding a towel out to him, and after a moment Bas took it, tussled it though his hair and hung it round his neck. ‘They’re green as saplings,’ Bas said.

‘We’ll have time to season them,’ Konstantinos said.

Bas wasn’t sure who ‘we’ were in that sentence, but regardless, he did not think it true. A soldier was not truly that until he had survived his first battle, felt death in his bowels and overcome it, seen his comrades do the same. All the pike practice in the world wouldn’t prepare them for shoving a piece of metal in the wriggling flesh of a fellow human. Though this in no way invalidated the necessity of more pike practice, else the first person these virgins would kill was likely to be on their own side.

‘Besides,’ Konstantinos continued, smirking like a youth, ‘they hardly need to be crack fighters to take up a spot in a garrison in Dycia.’

‘Is that what they’ll be used for?’ Bas asked.

Konstantinos shrugged in a fashion he might have mistaken for sly, happy to be asked and happy not to tell. ‘That’s the official word,’ he said.

Bas didn’t push him, in part because he didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but in larger part because he felt a queasy sort of certainty that Konstantinos did not really know either, only thought he did. This suspicion was confirmed a moment later when Konstantinos leaned in close and whispered, ‘I would not want to be a Salucian come next summer.’

Konstantinos smelled of cinnamon, Bas noticed, better than a man ought to allow himself to smell. He was also wrong, or at least not altogether right.

Bas was a man with a keen understanding of his own qualities. He was a fine soldier, a competent tactician, a mediocre strategist and no sort of politician. But it hardly requires genius to predict the progress of a wheel, and Bas had watched this game play out once before. The Salucians had never been any good at soldiering, but then again they hadn’t needed to be, because behind the Salucians, with their silk brocades and lisped voices and cleft arseholes, there were the Others, and the Others were very good at soldiering, very good indeed. That Aeleria not be allowed to consume Salucia had been the official policy of the Roost for half a century, they had gone to war over it twenty years earlier, and Bas had little hope that their feelings on the subject had since changed. Aeleria would march north, burning as they went, and they would enter Salucia like it was a virgin’s bedchamber – and then? Then?

‘Then they’d best be prepared,’ Bas said, hoping that it would be enough to get Konstantinos to leave.

Konstantinos took his hand off Bas’s shoulder, but kept his bright blue eyes on him. ‘How could they not be,’ he said, ‘with the Caracal training them?’

When Bas didn’t respond long enough for the silence to become awkward, Konstantinos laughed in his stead and trotted off towards the rest of the officers. By Enkedri, but he looked the part. Tall and broad-shouldered and the sort of handsome that suggested intelligence. And he had none of the aristocrat’s typical disdain, or if he did he managed to hide it competently, gladhanding each man in turn as if for that moment the whole of his world resided in them.

Bas had served for eight long years beneath perhaps the greatest military leader Aeleria had ever possessed, Jon the Sanguine. Jon had looked nothing like he should have, a small man with a big head, tiny, ugly, beady eyes, bow-legged with an ungainly roll when he walked. Jon had a high-pitched voice, like a woman or a eunuch, and a sharp tongue that he used liberally, to anyone who had earned his displeasure and a good many who hadn’t. Jon took offence easily, was over-conscious of any perceived slight, put far too much stock in medals and honours and had a sense of discipline that bordered on the sadistic.

Jon had a mind like a steel trap, knew the name of every officer in the army down to the level of pentarche and a good many of the hoplitai as well. On campaign he slept for three hours a night, awoke as if his cot were covered with fire ants, fiercely impatient with any subordinate who might be feeling the strain of eighteen hours in the saddle and six months at war. Jon could dictate a dispatch to the Senate while planning the next day’s route, sniff out a falsehood before it was uttered, look into a man’s eyes and delineate the contents of his soul. Ever shrewd, always prudent, never risking anything except when it needed to be risked, but then tossing everything in the pot, Jon had snatched victory from the certainty of defeat with such frequency that it had become all but commonplace, had left a monument to his own greatness in scorched earth and weeping widows from the Pau River to the Dycian Sea.

Of course, even Jon the Sanguine hadn’t been enough against the demons. Looking at Konstantinos, Bas wondered why exactly this uptrussed popinjay imagined himself to be capable of what had been beyond the powers of the Blood-Letter himself.

‘I knew your father,’ Isaac was saying. ‘Not well,’ he was quick to add, as if fearful of seeming bothersome, ‘but I was a subaltern in the Thirteenth, during the last dust-up with the Birds.’

‘The Thirteenth? Then you would have been at Scarlet Fields, when he fell.’

Bas had never seen Isaac duck his head before, and he didn’t like seeing it now, not before this blueblood, no matter who his father had been. ‘Yes sir, I was there. They held up the Birds for an hour, Enkedri as my witness. I never saw a man die so well. The Strategos was there too, he saw it same as I did.’

‘I have a bad memory,’ Bas said pre-emptively, hoping not to be dragged into the conversation.

Actually, he remembered Konstantinos’s father quite well – had been there to watch the man’s death, as Isaac had said, though he’d been busy enough trying to avoid his own to pay too much attention. Phocas had been handsome, like his son, and well-muscled, like his son, and gave off a strong impression of confidence, a lack of which Konstantinos clearly did not suffer from.

He had also been a fool, a quality that Bas strongly hoped had skipped a generation. Phocas had been in charge of the right wing of the infantry, and he had positioned it badly – even Bas had been able to see that, and him only a tetrarche. Taken up a line with a steady sloping hill behind them, nowhere to run when things went bad, no chance of a fighting retreat. Bas did not think that anything could have won them victory against the Others, but he was certain that Konstantinos’s father had not helped the matter. True, when the day was lost he had played his role out in full, hadn’t run when many men would have, had seen to it that his men conducted themselves similarly. No doubt they had accounted for some few of the Four-Fingers. Unquestionably they had found a place in the national myth.

Isaac was right, Phocas had died very well. What of it? The man had had no monopoly on bravery, which was, as far as Bas was concerned, an overrated virtue, indiscriminately distributed. For sheer furious courage, for that disdain for mortality that was effectively indistinguishable from a suicidal tendency, there were none to compete with the Marchers. How many battles had Bas seen them hurl their massed cavalry against the Aelerian line, how many thousands had he watched expire with a line of steel stuffed through their intestines, how loud their screams and how desperate their courage? And what had all that dying gained them? Their country lost, their children enslaved, their holy places desecrated, their existence all but ended.

Dying did not impress Bas, he did not see the point of it. Any fool could die, and most did.

‘If you were at Scarlet Fields, then you must also have been at Ebbs Wood,’ Konstantinos said, turning his eyes from Isaac to Bas.

Isaac nodded more vigorously than was needed, the result either of the drink or of his unprecedented slavishness. ‘Yes sir, I was there as well.’ Bas looked over at Isaac, hoping to halt his friend’s descent into foolishness. But either he didn’t see it or he chose not to follow. ‘It was the grandest moment of the war,’ Isaac asserted passionately. ‘They were always sending out champions before the battles, like the Marchers do, and of course none of us was ever mad enough to go out and meet one, especially after Scarlet Fields. I was holding a pike in the front line that morning when they sent theirs riding across, big as two men standing atop each other, like they all are. And then the Caracal – I suppose he wasn’t the Caracal yet – broke out from our lines, pretty as you please, went out to meet the man.’ Isaac shook his head back and forth, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he had seen, even all these years later. ‘I know there are men who say it’s a myth, who cannot imagine that a human could defeat an Other, not even the Caracal. But you can look at his weapon and know it’s the truth.’

‘I’d like to see this fabled sword,’ Konstantinos said.

Bas didn’t answer for a while. ‘The Marchers have a tradition,’ he said finally. ‘A drawn blade is not to be sheathed dry.’

Konstantinos took no offence, or at least showed none. ‘A wise people, the Marchers,’ he said. ‘Shame we had to kill so many of them.’ Then he smiled and dipped his head to Bas before slapping Isaac on the shoulder and strutting off, ready to spill his beneficence further down the line.

‘Twenty years I served on the Marches,’ Isaac said, ‘and I’ve never heard of that tradition.’

‘Stop drinking before sundown,’ Bas answered, softly even though he was confident no one was in earshot.

To his credit, Isaac didn’t argue or bluster, just dropped his eyes and nodded. ‘I don’t like it here,’ he said, finally.

‘There’ll be another war. There’s always another war.’

Bas wasn’t sure why this seemed a source of comfort to Isaac. He wasn’t sure why it seemed to be a source of comfort to him, either. Lately, Bas found himself unsure about a great many things.

T
he Roost was the largest and most prosperous port in the world. The goods of a hundred lands washed up on its shores, silks and slaves and raw ore and dried onions and salted cod and powdered ginger. Bales of sweet-scented cloves and packed casks of honeycomb with bee corpses drowned in the sweetness they had made, and books in every language and of every description, and straight-edged Aelerian blades – though these were less common than usual at the moment, as if the Aelerians were holding on to their weapons. Collections of exotic wildlife, trapped and caged and transported from across the seas in hopes of finding a place in the menagerie of an Eternal, hooded raptors swivelling their heads blindly, pink squid puckered tight against great glass tanks, fierce tawny cats the size of ponies pacing back and forth in iron cages. Here and there, kept behind double-locked glass and watched over by scowling guards, one could even find scattered pieces of High work, filched by an unscrupulous house servant or sold by some desperate seneschal to pay off their lord’s profligacy. Not more than toys, really: spinning gadgets of metal and steam, wild-maned horses that galloped about in circles when you wound them up – the sort of thing a hatchling might play with in the brief period of innocence before entering their ageless maturity.