Free The Ten Thousand by Paul Kearney Page A

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