the brick and timber walls which encircled it as dark and warm in hue as an earthenware bowl. Within those walls the population numbered many tens of thousands, perhaps more.
And now it was burning.
‘They rely too much on mud and straw for their defences,’ Fornyx grunted. ‘They should have gone to the mountains for stone and made their walls of that.’
‘If they had,’ Rictus said, ‘We’d be sitting outside them still. The Kufr don’t think like us, Fornyx. They haven’t had our history, where every city is at the throat of every other, where every man has his spear. They’re a peaceable folk, by and large.’
‘Much good it may do them.’
They listened. As the evening darkened, so the fires in the city grew brighter, until they began to define its silhouette against the darkening plain. They could be heard, a distant roar, sometimes the deeper rumble as some building collapsed, its timbers burnt through.
‘Druze reckons we’ll collar maybe twenty thousand Kufr tonight,’ Fornyx said, his tone lowered. ‘That’s twenty thousand more shoulders to the wheel. It worries me, Rictus, this reliance on Kufr sweat. Can’t we just do the damn thing by ourselves? I don’t like being followed by a train of slaves.’
‘Parmenios needs labour, and there aren’t enough of us to go around,’ Rictus said with a grim smile. ‘And we’re not even in the Middle Empire yet. All we’ve seen and done so far, Fornyx, is the warm-up act before the real players take to the stage.’
‘You think he’ll come? The Great King?’
‘He will.’ Rictus gestured to the distant hell of the burning city. ‘Corvus has made sure of that now.’
‘Is that why he did it? And him so delicate about civilians and all. I wondered if the little bastard hadn’t just had a tantrum.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t shrink from, brother, if he thought it necessary.’
‘I just wish he wasn’t so damned cold-blooded about it, is all. He just gave the order, no quarter, and there we were hip-deep in gore, whilst up to now we’ve been treading on tip-toe through this country, and it as ripe and rich as a willing woman.’
‘Darios defied him, after being offered good terms. This had to happen. What’s the matter, Fornyx, are you getting squeamish in your old age?’
‘Maybe I am. And maybe you’re not so high and mighty about killing as you once were.’
Rictus stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he has you in his spell, like half the army. If he told you to advance on the gates of hell, you’d start planning the route.’
‘That’s horseshit and you know it.’
Fornyx shrugged, and tugged his worn scarlet cloak tighter about his shoulders. In the failing light, his narrow, pointed face seemed vulpine, especially when the distant flames caught his eyes.
The two men stood leaning on their spears atop a low tell midway between the burning city behind them and the head of the marching columns farther east. Further down the slope a body of spearmen, several centons strong, stood with their shields resting against their knees in the age-old posture of the waiting soldier. They, too, were cloaked in scarlet, and one among their number held a banner, somewhat ragged, and hard to make out with the fading of its colours. It might have carried the image of a canine head.
‘Two days to the mountains, at this pace,’ Fornyx said in a lighter tone. ‘You’ve been through the Korash, of course.’
‘I have.’ It was in the Korash Mountains that the remnants of the Ten Thousand had finally fallen apart. They had split into competing factions, and then the winter had swooped in on them, and with the snow had come the Qaf.
It was in the Korash that Rictus of Isca had been voted leader of the Ten Thousand, except that there had been nowhere near ten thousand left of them at that point.
Rictus raised his head and looked at the high land to the east, that rampart of stone and snow, and something like a shiver went down his spine, the chill wind of his memories.
It would be different this time — he knew that. They were not a hunted band of starving men, but a mighty army, well-supplied and, above all, united.
And they would stay united.
‘Corvus has been giving us orders for long enough now that you should know what he’s about,’ he said to Fornyx. ‘It does no good questioning his intentions.’
I don’t piss and moan in front of the men — you know that,’ the other retorted. ‘Only to a select friend or two, those who have known me for somewhat longer than Corvus has.’ He walked away, descending the slope, using his spear as a staff.
Rictus almost called him back, but thought better of it. Fornyx would never do more than tolerate Corvus, and he could never think of the strange, brilliant youth who led them as his king. He was here because Rictus was here, and perhaps because he knew no other life.
There had been a time, back after Machran, when it might have been different. Andunnon was thriving; the quiet valley where Rictus had once made a home was risen from its ashes. Philemos lived there now, married to Rictus’s beautiful daughter Rian, and there were children in the house by the river. His grandchildren.
But every time Rictus had tried to settle there, to forswear the scarlet, the image of his own wife had swamped the joy in the place. Poor, wretched Aise, the only woman Rictus had ever loved, whose life had ended in torment and suicide.
Because of him.
I have too many ghosts, he thought. Even Fornyx does not truly understand that.
He remembered his own father, as fine a man as he had ever known, slaughtered after the fall of Isca. Another home in flames around him.
For Rictus, the hearth of a good home brought back too many evil pictures to his mind. Whereas in the camp of an army he felt at ease, and when his soldiers died it was something expected, even fitting. And he knew that in this thing, he and Corvus were the same. The King of the Macht preferred a tent in the open to the halls of a palace, and he was never happier than when surrounded by comrades in arms, all of them bound to a single purpose — that dream of fire which had launched him on his extraordinary career.
It was this which drove him, as much as any lust for conquest. He was afraid of what life would be at the end of the final campaign.
That is the frightening thing, Rictus thought — to get to the end of it all, and find it meant nothing — any of it.
Better to keep marching.
For the older men in the army the very concept of a king was still strange, a Kufr idea. It helped that Corvus had no sense of ceremony about him, and had acquired no airs or graces since his crowning in Machran all those years ago, in the wake of the great siege. He was as like to be found sharing rough wine with a bunch of conscripts in the evenings as he was to be in the royal tent.
But he was their king — that much he had earned — and Rictus, thinking on it, found himself almost surprised at the sense of protectiveness he felt towards the young man who had conquered them all.
I never had a son, and I will never have one, now. But if I could have had one like Corvus, I would have been content.
That night, they trooped into Corvus’s great tent, stinking of smoke and blood, their feet blackened with soot and their faces smeared with it. The long trestle table was cleared of maps and pointers and inkwells and the paraphernalia of military planning, and the high officers of the army sat in their sweat-sodden scarlet chitons and passed jugs of wine up and down, drinking from them in turn like brothers at a wedding.
His Marshals, Corvus called them, and he had formalised the rank within the army. Each of these men commanded many thousands, and all of them had shed blood together. Each was as powerful as a king unto himself.
They were all Macht save one, all veterans of many battles, and yet most of them were young, though Corvus was still the youngest of them all.
Rictus sat with Fornyx on one side and the Kufr Ardashir on the other. Save for Valerian, who was now
