“A hundred thousand already.” Achilles’s hands shook. That frightened me. His shock was natural enough—the fifty ships Achilles brought to Troy from Phthia, with fifty men in each, had been a mighty force in the days when all Greek states together could not boast a million souls. The thousand ships that Helen launched brought fifty thousand men to Agamemnon’s call, and now I handed Achilles twice that force, all scavenged from the criminal caste our law had thrown away. The King of the Myrmidons, Homer’s Achilles, should indeed have trembled at a number with six digits, but not my Major. He should have memories of the World Wars, of fleets of iron massing vast as cities, of soldiers in their millions bloodying Europe’s shores. He should have memories of space ships, and of billions. Had those versions of the Major faded so much already? Was the script which Bridger’s dying fantasy set for this world so fixed on Troy?

“This world’s too big,” Achilles said at last, looking to me as if it were my fault. Perhaps it was. “A hundred… five hundred… divided by…” He counted on his fingers. “A hundred a day will take about a month.”

I smiled. “To meet them all?”

He did not return my smile. “To have their oaths. I won’t have a soldier at my back who isn’t mine by oath. Would you?”

He did not press me to answer.

“They could take it in batches, I suppose,” he half mumbled, his mind still slowed by math.

“Do you have a specific oath in mind?” Outis asked first. “I’ve been drafting—”

“Nothing complex,” Achilles answered. “Just ‘I swear by all I hold inviolable that I renounce all other ties, and from this day shall live, and fight, and kill, and die only for Achilles.’ Will you swear that?”

They would and did, our convict captains, each hesitating just long enough to prove that they thought hard about the words before they spoke them. They had expected him to make some such demand. I had told them how, in ancient days, a soldier’s loyalty was sworn, not to his state or homeland, but to his general. The great conquests—and tyrannies—of early history were enabled by that personal bond of command, which made armies flexible, able to switch sides, even switch wars, when their commanders willed. With this war’s chasm opening before us, many-sided, we needed that again. The fourteen Servicers I brought today were not mere friends or chance companions, but the leaders of we who are allowed no leaders, elected by charisma and notoriety to represent the others in this first meeting with our chosen commander.

“Not you, Mycroft.”

He would not let me take the oath. Nor could I have, reader. Too many ties.