water, from leather buckets passed hand to hand down the line, and then they were off again, chivvied along by unseen voices in the dust, men swearing, coughing, an acrid reek as they relieved themselves on the march, and the rising stink of their sweat, which even the dust could not choke out. Summer was blooming into full, brassy flower across the lowlands of Pleninash, and the lush green country was being beaten into a swath of dust by the army’s passage. The heat rose under the canvas canopy of the waggon until it hung like thirst in their throats. They drank all their water by early afternoon of that day, and one of the teamsters had to run off down the column for more, uttering unmistakeable profanities in his own tongue as he did so.
Kurun sat propped up against Roshana in the bed, the frame clicking on the wooden floor of the waggon as they lurched along. He was naked save for the yellow dressing that was bound around his ribs, but was no longer self conscious before her, and their sweat mingled through the linen shift that the Macht had given her to wear, her dark nipples poking the threadbare material. Such things no longer seemed important; all the senses were stunned and then dulled by the immense exodus which had swallowed them.
They slept at last, clinging to each other, juggled in the narrow bed like dice in a box. So used to the motion of the waggon did they become that it was only when it halted that they woke, the world blue-dark all around them and a coolness descending upon it with the oncoming dusk. There were many voices outside, and the light of a fire soaking through the canvas canopy.
Their bodies were soaked in sweat and covered in dust. Kurun’s wound throbbed and ached, but it seemed less profound than it had. He could move, stiffly, slowly. Roshana helped him slip on a wool chiton, and they descended from the waggon with the care of the very old.
Eyes around the fire watched them, and someone tossed them a bulging skin. It was water, not the rancid- smelling wine the Macht drank, and they shared it swallow for swallow, Kurun drinking until he felt his stitches would burst.
A space was made for them by the fire, and they squatted there amid conversations they could not understand, staring into the flames and then at each other. They held hands, needing the touch of the familiar.
One of the men rummaged in a huge leather bag, produced two wooden bowls, and tossed them over, along with two flattened sticks that might conceivably have been seen as spoons. Then he said something and pointed to a larger fire some distance away in the gathering darkness. He made an eating motion.
‘They’re cooking,’ Roshana said. ‘I can smell it. He’s telling us to go and eat.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Kurun lied. He did not feel he could stagger as far as the cooking fire.
‘Then I will go.’ She collected the bowls with a click and stood up while the Macht around the fire watched. She hesitated a moment under all those hard, inquisitive eyes, and then strode off.
There was a vast cauldron, so large she could have sat in it with a lid over her head. Within was a steaming mess that smelled more appetising than it looked. The Macht were gathered around it in rows as though the cauldron were the stage of an amphitheatre. A man stirred its contents. He shone with sweat, was shaven-headed and scarred, and when he smiled Roshana saw that his teeth were ornamented with silver wire.
She stood, as out of place as a lamb in a wolf’s den, and held out the two bowls she had been given.
Silence fell around the cauldron. The silver-toothed man grinned at her, and slopped whatever-it-was into the bowls. He held them out to her, and as she reached for them he drew back again, making a face. A splatter of laughter about the fire.
Some of them stood up. They were behind her. Roshana stood rooted to the spot. She felt a hand touch her buttock and squeeze it. Another slid up her bare thigh. She shuddered, cried out.
And was pushed aside. A huge figure entered the firelight and one of the men behind her was taken by the nape of his neck and tossed aside like an errant puppy. The newcomer swung his arm and the Roshana heard the impact of bone on bone. Another one of her tormentors went down clutching his face. The silver-toothed cook quickly handed Roshana the bowls. She spilled half their contents, her hands were shaking so badly.
It was the old Macht, the tall one who had been in the tent. His eyes glittered like grey shards of glass. He snapped out orders that sounded like curses, and the crowd about the cauldron began to break up at once, men getting to their feet with an alacrity that spoke of fear. Then he set a hand on Roshana’s shoulder and guided her away.
They rejoined Kurun at the waggon. The old Macht reached down easily and seized one of the teamsters by the throat, drawing him to his feet. He held him as though he meant to choke him, and the fellow sputtered out excuses and apologies, the meaning clear in any language. The big Macht dropped him as a terrier will discard a dead rat. He nodded to Roshana and Kurun, and then stalked away into the darkness.
They sat with the bowls in their laps, the food almost forgotten.
‘Who is that?’ Kurun asked.
It was the teamster who replied. Rubbing his throat ruefully he jerked a thumb.
‘Rictus,’ he said with a croak.
The camp never went quiet that night. It was so hot in the waggon that Kurun and Roshana lay on the beaten grass beneath the vehicle, a single blanket between them. They did not sleep for a long time, but listened and watched like latecomers to a show at the theatre, trying to make sense of it all. They could hear columns of men marching in the night, and cavalry. The stars were dimmed by the myriads of campfires. The night was bristling with movement.
‘There are so many,’ Kurun whispered. ‘I did not know there were so many. And Kefren fighting with them, too.’
‘The Great King has more, a hundred times more,’ Roshana told him.
‘They are not like these. The Macht frighten me, even more than the Honai did.’
‘That is because they are strange, Kurun. The Macht are not of this world. They are Mot’s curse upon it, sent to punish us.’
‘But they saved us.’
‘They are animals, all of them.’ Roshana bent her head and began to sob silently, and when Kurun set his hand on her shoulder she shook it off.
‘I should have stayed. I made Rakhsar take me with him. I should have stayed. He would have escaped then, Kurun. He could have been away, and free, but now he is dead. My brother is dead.’
Finally she let Kurun take her in his arms, and he held her, rocking her like a child, until the tears dried and she slept. He lay holding her for hours, feeling the blood seep out along the line of his stitches, but bearing the pain, enduring it as he had endured so many other things in his short life.
And he realised it was possible, whatever the philosophers said, to feel despair and hope in the same breath.
T HE GREAT CAMP seethed, unquiet as an opened grave. Thousand-strong formations of infantry were moving out of the firelit lines to the open country beyond, where more men waited with banners in the dark, to show them where to stand and plant their spears. The Macht army was deploying in darkness, so that they would greet the dawn light with their ranks fully formed, like some army of myth sprung out of the earth itself.
Pasangs to the east, there was a glow in the sky that eclipsed that of their own camp. Ten thousand fires were burning bright, strewn in a vast carpet across the sleeping earth.
The army of the Great King.
PART THREE
SIXTEEN
