Alpheo's foot sank into the scorching sand, the heat licking up at his skin even through the new and already worn leather of his soles. He exhaled slowly, dragged a hand across his sweat slicked brow, and turned his gaze upward. The sun still hung high above them, and had every appearance of intending to stay there and piss light as much as he could over them.
"We march until we find water," he said aloud, more to himself than to the men strung out behind him. "I want every canteen full before nightfall. There's a source near here. I remember it."
A murmur of discontent and exhaustion rippled back through the ranks.
He saw it in the way they shifted their weapons from shoulder to shoulder, and in the glances they stole at one another when they believed he was not looking.
He needed every last one of them. He had not come this far to watch his force crumble apart in the sand before it ever reached the gates of civilisation.Even then at the peak of their success they were standing just at edge, teethering toward great failure.
The trail they had left behind them was written in blood and ash for those who cared to read. A shattered camp stripped of its wealth and littered with the bodies of the men who had been left to defend it.
Clio had urged him to take more, to empty the coffers entirely and strip every tent down to the poles.
"The fattest pig is the first one slaughtered," Alpheo had told him. "Take everything, and they'll come after us with the whole army at their backs, and they'll ride through the night to do it. Take only enough, and they'll come limping, half hearted, careless, wanting to be home before supper."
And so they had taken only what they needed. It would not spare them pursuit, but it might spare them the kind of pursuit they would not survive
Still, Alpheo knew riders would come. Honour would demand it. The shame of being gutted by runaway slaves and outcasts was too great a thing for the lords of the desert to swallow quietly.
Let them come. We have the means to answer now.
A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth as he wondered idly how long a man might survive buried to the neck in scalding sand with only his head left above it. Whether the heat would take him first, or the thirst.
At one point he had even considered putting the remaining supplies to the torch.
He had resisted. The last thing he needed was for the main army, locked in battle miles away, to look back and see smoke climbing off their own camp and assume the enemy had got behind them. Men move very fast indeed when they think that, the last thing he wanted was to hurry their own downfall.
They had time. The army was enormous and slow, weighed down by its own numbers and its baggage train. Speed was the one advantage Alpheo's people held, and he intended to spend it carefully.
And at last, after what felt like an age of walking, they reached the oasis.
The moment the water came into sight the men broke and ran for it, a collective sigh of relief escaping cracked lips. Some dropped to their knees at the edge of the pool and plunged their hands in as though into a chest of coin, drinking deep with trembling fingers. The horses shouldered in beside them, nostrils flaring, slurping noisily and without apology.
Alpheo remained standing, watching them. He permitted himself a moment of stillness, the ghost of his fatigue whispering somewhere in his bones, and then shifted his gaze to the horizon.
Beyond the dunes, close enough to walk before dark, sat a village. It had been spared the wrath of the war, its lords having paid off the emperor in gold rather than in blood.
That could prove useful.
But first there were more pressing matters.
The men sat in loose weary clusters, bodies slack, minds dulled by heat. Some leaned back against their packs. Others sprawled outright, letting their limbs sink into the sun warmed sand. A few had stripped to the waist and were pouring water over their arms and necks, because if ever there was an hour to be cool, this was it.
Alpheo strode through them with sharp eyes, reading faces. He found Jarza first, tired but alert, water still running down his brow. Clio and Egil were not far off and rose the moment they saw him coming.
They knew what it meant when he walked toward them like that.
As the four of them moved away from the rest, Egil's voice carried a note of concern. "Something wrong, Alph?"
Clio studied his face, eyes narrowing. "That's the look you get before you ruin somebody's week. Usually mine."
Alpheo's expression gave up nothing. "Not much. But I need your help with something.Actually....not something, a great deal of things."
"Go on, then," Egil said.''Not like we have been made poor following your directives until now.''
Alpheo turned to face the three men he trusted more than anyone alive, and there was a weight in his gaze none of them had seen there before, something a good deal deeper than the simple ambition to live through the afternoon.
"Assume we survive," he said, his voice measured. "Assume we shake the riders and come out of this desert with our heads still on.Which is a big assumption. What happens then?"
Silence settled over the four of them.
A quiet, sobering understanding arrived with it. Not one of them had ever thought that far ahead.
For years their only goal had been to break the chain. They had been so consumed by the business of staying alive that the future had never been more than a vague and unreachable rumour.
Now they stood at the edge of it, and found it a gaping hole waiting to be filled with something.
Some of them had families they would never see again, whether because home lay too far away or because those same families had been the ones to sell them. Others had nothing at all to their names but the names themselves and the weapons in their hands.
Jarza broke it first. "Do you have a plan?"
"I do." Alpheo said letting the water drip from his fingers. "We cannot simply wander the land as outlaws. Men like that end swinging from a gallows with a sign round their necks, and no one remembers their faces by spring, not that they would be able with the work the crows will get on us. So we will not be outlaws. We will be mercenaries. We have weapons, we have horses, we look the part well enough that nobody will trouble to ask questions.There must be someone willing to pay for hired sword"
Egil raised an eyebrow. "Mercenaries."
"For a start."
"For a start?" Clio said slowly. "Alph. Yesterday you were a slave carrying sacks. This morning you took a camp. Now you say mercenaries are the modest version."
"Yesterday I was a slave carrying sacks," Alpheo agreed. "So were you. Tell me which of those two facts you think should decide the rest of your life."
Nobody answered that.
"I have had a long time to think," he went on. "Ten years of it, and nothing to do but watch how men with power hold on to it. It is not magic. It is not blood. Half the lords I have carried water for could not organise a supper, and every one of them dies exactly as easily as the rest of us. I have seen it done badly by everyone above me, my whole life. I think I could do it better if I were given the damn chance..."
He let that stand there in the heat a moment.
"But I cannot do any of it alone. I need people I trust at my back, and for now the count I have is three.Not a bad place to start..."
He drew a slow, deliberate breath.
"Follow me and you will not scrape by. That I promise you. You will not live as exiles picking over other men's leavings for coin and bread. You will command instead of serve. You will eat at your own tables in your own halls, and other men will stand while you do it. Stay with me and I will make you rich, and I will make you feared, and I will not ask you to kneel for either.
All I want from you is your trust, and your backs to mine when it comes to that. Stand with me now and I will lead you to a great deal more than survival.I have a plan" He suddendly muttered looking back at the road they left behind ''A plan that might yet be the crown of our lives.''
Egil let out a low scoff, though there was no mockery anywhere in his eyes.
"If any other man alive had said that to me, I'd have knocked his teeth down his throat for the stupidity of it.We are free, and we have enough silver to actually start something of a life" He shook his head slowly. "From you? Gods help me. I believe it. it might come to my death ,in that case I'd say I hope hell take you....but you'd find a way to become its king and swindle demons our of their tridents and whips." He exhaled and gave a sharp nod. "Through rain and dirt , It seems I am at your back."
Jarza chuckled, rubbing at the stubble on his jaw. "I've a debt I'll never pay, no family left who'd know me or I them, and a sword that's been restless for four years." He tapped the hilt of it and grinned. "You're the only man I've met since who talks like he knows where tomorrow is. I'm with you as well."
Clio, ever the quiet one, crossed his arms and looked at each of the others in turn before he spoke.
"I had a boat once," he said. "Small thing. Took everything I had and then they took it anyway." He looked up. "If we do this, we do it together. All four, all the way. No turning back and no leaving anyone in the sand.I would very like to have a boat once more one day." He sniffed ''Perhaps something a bit bigger...''
"Together," Alpheo said. "That is the whole of it."
A rare warmth flickered across his face then. Without another word he reached forward and pulled the three of them into a firm embrace.
They had fought beside one another. Bled beside one another. Endured chains and hunger and the long slow death of hope together.
Now they would rise together, or not at all.