The Ten Thousand Read Free Page B

the edge.
    Rictus raised his
head, exposing his throat.
    “Don’t be a damned
fool,” Remion snapped. He cut the bindings from Rictus’s wrists, and slid the
spear-shaft free of his elbows. Rictus gasped with pain. His hands flooded with
fire. He sat back on the ground, air whistling through his teeth, white agony,
a feeling to match the sights of the evening.
    They sat side by
side, the grizzled veteran and the big-boned youth, and watched the dramas
below.
    “I remember
Arienus, when it went up, twenty, twenty-five years ago,” Remion said. “I was a
fighting man then, selling my spear for a living, with mercenary scarlet on my
back instead of farmer’s felt. I got two women out of the sack and some coin, a
horse, and a mule. I thought I had climbed the pig’s back.” He smiled, Isca’s
burning lit tiny yellow worms in his eyes.
    “I married one of
the girls; the other I gave to my brother. The horse bought me citizenship and
a taenon of hill-land. I became a Burian, put aside the red cloak. I
had—I had a son, daughters. The blessings of life. I had heart’s desire.”
    He turned to
Rictus, his face as hard and set as something hewn out of stone. “My son died
at the Hienian River battle, four years back. You killed him, you Iscans.” He
looked back at Isca below. It seemed that the spread of the fires was being
stymied. Beetled crowds packed the streets still, but now there were chains of
men and women leading from the city wells, passing buckets and cauldrons from
hand to hand, fighting the flames. Only up around the citadel did it seem that
fighting went on. But still, from the houses in the untouched districts, the
screams and shouts rose, wails of women outraged, children terrified, men dying
in fury and fear that they might not see what was to become of those they
loved.
    “I fought today
because if I had not I would have lost the right to be a citizen of Gan Burian,”
Remion said. “We are Macht, all of us. In the world beyond the mountains I have
heard that the Kufr tell tales of our savagery, our prowess on the battlefield.
But among ourselves, we are only men. And if we cannot treat one another as
men, then we are no better than Kufr ourselves.”
    Rictus was
clenching and unclenching his bulbous fists. He could not say why, but Remion
made him feel ashamed, like a child admonished by a patient father.
    “Am I your slave?”
he asked.
    Remion glared at
him. “Are you cloth-eared, or merely stupid? Take yourself away from here. In a
few days’ time Isca will be no more. We will raze the walls and sow the ground
with salt. You are ostrakr, boy; cityless. You must find yourself
another way to get on in the world.”
    The wind picked
up. It battered the pines about their heads and made the branches thrash like
black wings grasping at the sunset. Remion looked up.
    “Antimone is here,”
he said. “She has put aside her veil.”
    Rictus shivered.
The cold from the ground ate into his buttocks. The wound in his side was a half-remembered
throb. He thought of his father, of Vasio, the old steward who had helped them
on the land. Zori, his wife, a nut-brown smiling woman whose breast Rictus had
suckled at after his own mother had died having him. What were they now;
carrion?
    “There will be
stragglers by the hundred out in the hills, looting every farmstead they come
across,” Remion said, as if he had caught the drift of the younger man’s
yearning. “And they will be the worst of us, the shirkers who kept to the rear
of the battle line. They catch you, and you will not see morning. They’ll rape
you twice; once with their cocks, and once with an aichme. I’ve seen it. Do not
go back north. Go south, to the capital. Once you’re healed, that broad back of
yours will earn your keep in Machran.”
    He rose to his
feet with a low groan and hoisted shield and spear again. “There’s weapons
aplenty lying about the hills, in dead men’s hands. Arm yourself, but take
nothing heavy. No point