The Ten Thousand Read Online Free PDF

any craving his appetite could muster, and for a very
reasonable fee.
    “And you, soldier,”
one of the merchants said to Gasca over the fire. “What takes you to Machran?
Are you to offer your spear for hire?”
    Gasca squeezed
himself some wine. It was black root-spirit he guessed, cut with goat’s blood
and honey. He had drunk worse, but could not quite remember when.
    “I go to take up
the red cloak,” he admitted, wiping his mouth, and tossing the flaccid wineskin
to one of the wan young husbands.
    “I thought so. You
bear a blank shield. So you’ll paint some mercenary sigil on it and wear
scarlet. Under what commander?”
    Gasca smiled. “Whatever
one will have me.”
    “You’ll be a
younger son, I’ll bet.”
    “I have two elder
brothers, the apples of my father’s eyes. For me it was the red cloak or a
goatkeeper’s hut. And my fingers are too big to fit round a goat’s tits.”
    The men around the
fire laughed, but there was a furtiveness to their regard of him. Though young,
Gasca was as broad as any two of them put together, and the glued linen cuirass
he wore was stained with old blood. It had been his father’s, as had the rest
of the panoply he carried. Stealing them had been no easy thing, and one of his
favoured elder brothers had taken a few knocks before Gasca had finally made it
clear of his father’s land. These weapons and armour he bore were all he owned
in the world, an inheritance he had felt to be his due.
    One of the young
husbands spoke up. His wife had joined him at the fire, a lazy cat’s-smile on
her face. “I hear tell there’s a great company being gathered,” he said. “Not
just in Machran, but in cities across all the mountains. There’s a captain name
of Phiron, comes from Idrios; he’s hiring fighting men by the hundred. And he’s
a cursebearer, too.”
    “Where did you
hear this?” his wife asked him.
    “In a tavern in
Arienus.”
    “And what tavern
was this?”
    Gasca’s mind
wandered as the squabble grew apace on the far side of the campfire. His own
city, Gosthere, where he had the right to vote in assembly, was a mere
stockaded town at the headwaters of the Gerionin River, two hundred and fifty
pasangs back in the mountains. As much as anything else, he was going to
Machran because he wanted to see a real city. Something built of stone, with
paved streets that had no shit streaming down the middle of them. In his
haversack he had a copy of Tynon’s Constitution, which described the
great cities of the Macht as if they were all set up in marble, peopled with
statues and ruled by stately debate in well-conducted assemblies—not the
knockabout mob-gatherings they had been back in Gosthere. That was something he
wished to see, and if it did not exist in Machran, it likely never had
anywhere.
    To serve under a
cursebearer—now that too would be something. Gasca had never so much as seen
one before. Gosthere’s nobility did not run to such glories. He wondered if the
stories about the black armour were true.
    I am young, Gasca
thought. I have taken my man and my wolf. I have a full panoply. I do not want
to own the world; I merely want to see it. I want to drink it by the bucketful
and savour every swallow.
    “And that bitch;
that goatherder she-pig—she was there, wasn’t she?”
    “Woman, I tell you
I was there for the turn of a water-clock, no more.”
    Gasca lay back in
his cloak, tugging the folds about him and staring up at the stars. Scudding
past the moons there were rags and glimmers of cloud. It would be very cold
tonight. As children, he and his brothers had buried embers under their
bedrolls on such nights, up in the high grazing. They would chaff each other
for hours to the clink of the goat-bells, and Felix, their father’s hound,
would always lie next to Gasca. When he growled in the dark they would all be
up on their feet in a moment, shuddering with cold, reaching for their boy’s
spears. Gasca had been thirteen when he had killed his