The Ten Thousand Read Online Free PDF Page B

first wolf. Like all the
men of his city, he had chiselled out one of its teeth. As he lay now, far from
home, he reached up to his neck and touched it, warm from his flesh. For a
moment he felt a pang of loss, remembering his brothers when they had all been
boys together, before the complications of manhood. Then he grunted, rolled
himself tighter in his cloak, and closed his eyes.
    When morning came
he found that two of the urchin-children had wormed under his cloak in the
night and were spliced to him like wasps to a honeycomb. In the warmth under
the cloak all his vermin and theirs had come alive, and he itched damnably.
Even so, he was reluctant to rise, for the cloak and the ground around it had a
light skiff of snow upon it that had frozen hard, and the sunrise just topping
the mountains had kindled from it a hundred million jagged points of
rose-coloured light. Even the log-butts from the fire had frost on them. When
Gasca blinked, he could feel his eyebrows crackle.
    The children
squealed as he threw aside the cloak and rose to his feet, stamping his sandals
into the stone-hard ground and stretching his limbs to the mountains. He strode
out to the roadside and pissed there, standing in an acrid cloud of his own
making and blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Looking up and down, he saw the
road was empty in both directions. To the south it disappeared between the
shoulders of two steep white hills, on one of which there loomed the rocky
ruins of a city. That was Memnos. They had hoped to see it this morning when
they woke. Machran now lay a mere thirty pasangs away, an easy day’s march.
Tonight they would sleep under a roof, those who could afford it. Gasca had
promised himself a good meal, and wine worthy of the name. He spat the taste of
last night’s out onto the road, grimacing.
    Something moved in
the treeline. The original builders of the road had hewn back the woods on
either side for a bowshot, and though those who maintained it now had not done
so well, there were still a good hundred paces of open ground before the tangled
scrub and dwarf-pine of the thickets began. In the dawn-light Gasca’s
piss-stream dried up as he saw the pale blur of a face move in there. He turned
at once and dashed back to the campsite, booting aside one of the yawning
urchins. His spear was slick with frost and he cursed as it slipped in his
fingers.
    By the time he had
turned back to the woods the figure was visible. A man walking towards the road
with his arms held out from his sides, and in one fist a single-headed spear.
The man thrust this point-first into the ground for lack of a sauroter, and
then came on with both palms open in the universal gesture. I mean no harm. Gasca’s
breathing steadied. He strode forward. Others from the company were blinking
their way out of their bedrolls, throwing aside furs and trying to make sense
of the morning. One of the younger children was crying hopelessly, blue with
cold.
    Gasca stood
between the approaching figure and the waking camp, and planted the sauroter of
his own spear in the roadside. He wished now he had clapped on his father’s
helm.
    “What’s your
business? State it quickly. I have good men at my back,” he said loudly, hoping
those good men were out of their blankets. He scanned the treeline, but nothing
else moved there. For the moment, at least, this fellow was alone. But that
meant nothing. He might have twenty comrades stowed back in the trees, waiting
to see the company’s headcount.
    The man was tall,
as tall as Gasca, though nothing like as broad. In fact he had a gaunt, hungry
look. His chiton was worn and stained, ripped open at the neck in the
grief-mark, and he had a blanket slung bagwise about his torso. There was a
knife at his waist, hanging from a string. A scar marred the middle of his
lower lip.
    “I mean no harm. I
hoped to share your fire,” the man said.
    The two merchants
and the young husbands joined Gasca at the roadside, wielding clubs and