Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 by Daniel Polansky

haunches made by axe or blade, one that made it impossible for him to keep pace with the charge.
    A battle has only one certainty, and that is that at some point everything will descend into chaos, with no one individual capable of enforcing his will upon the whole. The day had reached that point. The Marchers were thinking of nothing more than escape, the Aelerians so fired by victory and bloodlust that they’d have sprinted over a cliff sooner than notice the orders of their commander. It was each man to his own, until exhaustion set in or night fell.
    Bas was lost in the melee, the rest of his force striking against the fleeing Marchers. After a few moments his horse had dropped down to a canter, and then a walk, and then began to stumble.
    Bas sheathed his sword and slipped down off Oat. The charge had carried him out into the hinterland between where the two armies had begun the day. In front of him the mass of plainsmen that had been able to flee were doing so, the cataphracts in fierce pursuit. Behind him those Marchers that were unable to break free from combat against the pikemen were dying in a fashion bloody and wholesale. On a battlefield of more than seventy thousand men, Bas found himself virtually alone.
    Oat collapsed into the grass about the same time that Bas noticed a retreating Marcher wheel and turn to face him. His horse looked to be of decent stock but the war lance he carried was tipped black where it had been tempered in fire – his first battle, then, newly blooded and looking to make a name for himself. Bas could see in the boy’s face the certainty of escape compete with the possibility of glory, and he knew which would win out. Bas had been fighting the Marchers since before this youth had been a dream of his mother’s – prestige would always trump survival.
    The boy whooped and charged.
    Pain and fear are the two gifts with which the gods have provided man to ensure the propagation of the species. It is the purpose of discipline and routine to render a soldier ignorant of these two saving graces, to ignore the reasonable instinct that makes a man flee from death. Man for man, the barbarians were the superiors of the thema, a fact which was well recognised even in the Aelerian camp. A lifetime of hardship inured them to cold and hunger and toil, their first toys as children were smaller versions of the arms they carried into battle, their skill on horseback was remarkable. But the barbarians fought for personal glory, or perhaps for some grand sense of national destiny, which was equally unhelpful from a practical perspective.
    A hoplitai fought because that was what he did, because it was his profession. He was not brave because of a personal sense of courage, because he hoped to gain glory or renown. He was certainly not brave out of any love of country, the very suggestion of which would have got you mocked out of the mess tent. He was brave because the men next to him demanded it – in effect, the genius of the thema lay in replacing the fear of death with the fear of contempt, a curious bit of chicanery that had ensured their onward progress across a dozen-odd nations. But alone, outmatched, without hope of assistance, even the fiercest of men can find their skin growing cold and the breath in their lungs slow to escape.
    Bas’s next action carried with it little in the way of courage, if by courage one means the ability to overcome fear. Because – and this was the one way in which the reputation he had gained matched the reality of it – Bas was possessed of no such emotion, had never known the presence of it, even so much as its shadow. Fear is the bastard child of imagination – and Bas was the sort of man who had no clear conception of what might be, only what ought. It was his duty not to fall beneath the blade of the plainsman, and Bas was never one to shirk a duty.
    Some ten paces ahead Bas noticed a small indentation in the ground, and he moved towards it as fast as his