Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  Since then, the place had expanded with almost every year - near on twenty of them. And in that time, Rictus had fought in fifteen campaigns, missing all but a handful of summers and springs here.

  Andunnon, he called this valley of his - The Quiet Water - for as the river curled round the glen bottom beyond the house, so it broadened in its bed and became a sleepier, brown thing with trout as tawny as freckles flitting shadowlike in the sunlit depths. It had also been the name of his childhood home, far north and cast of here, near the burnt ruins of what had once been a city.

  Now, Andunnon had blossomed from a single stone hut into a farm proper. They had cut back the brush and tamed the tangle of wild olive trees on the western slopes, planted vines to the east where the glen caught the best of the sun, and harvested barley in the flat rich soil of the valley floor. Bread, wine, and olives, the trinity of life, they had made here. And children, to carry that life on after them. It was more than Rictus had once ever dreamed of having. And it had cost no blood to build.

  The farmhouse had annexes and extensions grafted onto it now: rooms for slaves and visitors, and for Fornyx, whose home this was also. It had become an ungainly, ill-planned sprawl of stone and turf and reed-thatch which nonetheless seemed as much part of the landscape as the river which bounded it. The farm had settled into the earth itself, part of the seasons as a man’s hand is part of his arm. No matter how far Rictus marched, and how many men’s eyes he took the light from, this, here, was where he belonged, and where his spirit found what peace his memories allowed.

  Fornyx had staggered off to bed, the potent yellow wine singing in his head, and now Rictus joined Aise by the dying fire, the hounds lying sprawled and content at their feet. She had snuffed out the lamps, all save one cracked little clay bowl which would light their own way when they retired, and between its guttering light and the red glow of the sinking hearth she seemed almost youthful again, the lines hidden, the strong bones of her face brought out by the shadows.

  Rictus could see Rian in that face, and Ona, and the boy who had been born between them and whose ashes were now in the earth and air of the valley itself. He reached out his hand and Aise looked at him with that guarded smile of hers and let him take her fingers in his own.

  “Well, wife,” Rictus said.

  “Well, husband.”

  The wind was picking up outside, and Rictus knew from the whistle in the clay-chinked chimney that it was from the west, off the mountains. It would bring snow with it soon, perhaps even tonight. He almost started to ask Aise if the goats had been brought down to the lower pastures yet, but caught himself in time. She would have seen to it already, as she saw to everything while he was away.

  “The sow had a litter of six,” Aise said, withdrawing her hand. “We slaughtered two, sold the rest down in Onthere. We lost two kids to the vorine, but in the spring Eunion and Garin found a den north of Crag End hill, and killed the vixen and her cubs. There have been no more of them about since then.”

  Rictus nodded.

  “We had a good pressing, a dozen jars. I made that olive paste you like, with the black vinegar from the lowlands - we got a skin of it when I sold the pigs.”

  “You should not have sold Veria,” Rictus said quietly.

  Aise’s face did not change.

  “She was discontented, harping on about her dead baby, and she was unsettling Garin with her keening.”

  “A dead child is no light thing,” Rictus said, heat creeping into his voice. Aise seemed not to hear him.

  “I had to go into the chest for gold to make up the difference, but Styra is a better prospect. She’s young, she has good hips, and Garin will father a child on her soon enough.” She paused. “Unless you would prefer to plough her furrow yourself.”

  Rictus looked at his wife in baffled anger, searching her face in the red firelight.

  “I don’t fuck my slaves, wife. It is something I have never done.”

  “I was your slave; you fucked me,” Aise said coldly.

  Something like a chill went down Rictus’s back. They had gone straight back to the old caches of forgotten weapons stored in their hearts, and unearthed them all sharp and glittering again.

  “It was different then - we were different. Gods below, woman, I will not go over this again the very night I appear back home. You are the stone I have built this life here upon. What’s done is done.”

  “And through the year’s campaigning, do you have some camp girl service you at the end of the day?”

  “You know I do, on occasion - I’m a man. I have blood in my veins.”

  “When you left, you said it was a summer campaign, no more - and here you are with almost a year and a half gone by. You said it was over, Rictus. No more soldiering. You said you would put aside the scarlet and stay here with me.” “I know.”

  “We need no more money- we have everything here a man could want.”

  “Except a son,” he snapped. And the instant he said it he could have slapped his own face. Such stupid warfare, as fruitless as the year’s campaigning.

  Aise stared into the fire, seeming somehow to wither before him, though she did not move.

  “I should not have said that - I had no cause,” he said, reaching for her hand again. She gave it, but it was limp in his fist; obedient, no more.

  “Men want sons,” Aise said lightly. “That is the way of life. It’s how they make themselves remembered. A daughter leaves the house, and she becomes someone else’s family. A son continues his own.” She faced Rictus squarely, her face as blank as a blade. “You should take another wife.”

  “I have a wife.”

  “I’m past bearing children now, or as close as makes no matter. And you are no longer young either. If you want an heir you must father one on some decent woman - it would not do to have a slave as his mother.”

  “You were a slave once,” Rictus reminded her sharply. “Do you think that matters to me, after all this time?”

  She smiled, and in her face there was both bitterness and a peculiar kind of happiness, as if a memory had lit up her eyes.

  “You freed me. You would have no other but me. I do not forget, Rictus. I will never forget that.”

  “Then let’s go to bed,” he said, tugging on her hand like a child intent on its mother’s attention. It was like pulling on the root of an oak.

  “No; I will bide here awhile with the dogs. Go you to bed - there’s a dish of water to wash in.”

  “There was a time when you would have washed me yourself, Aise, and I would return the favour.”

  “We are not youngsters, Rictus, coupling like dogs every chance we get.”

  “We’re not dead yet, either,” he snapped, and he rose, the anger flooding his face. He seized his wife by the arms and drew her to her feet. Her eyes met his, blank as slate. With something like a snarl he hoisted her into his arms and strode across the room, the dogs whimpering at the mood in the air. He kicked open the door that led to their bedroom - there was a single lamp left burning in it, and his muscles locked as he prepared to toss her onto the bed.

  But he stopped, arms tight about her spare frame, she tense within the embrace as a man’s face stiffens before a blow.

  A neat, ordered space. She had laid out a fresh chiton for him, and the battered sandals he always wore about the farm. There were the year’s last flowers, fresh-cut in a jar - the deep aquamarine jar he had brought all the way from Sinon, a lifetime ago - she had always treasured it, for the memory. Clean linen, a jug and ewer, all set out as she had set them out for him these twenty years and more, sometimes under a roof, sometimes under the ragged canvas of an army tent, and sometimes under nothing but the canopy of the stars. His anger drained away.

  He laid her gently down on the willow-framed bed, his face harsh and set. Then he kissed his wife on the forehead, her own features unreadable in the shadow he cast before the lamp. He stood over her a moment, a dark giant, an interloper filling the room with his bulk and t
he smell of the road, the stink of the army. Then he turned and left, closing the door behind him.

  THAT FIRST NIGHT back in his home, Rictus slept on the floor before the dying fire, wrapped in his scarlet cloak with the dogs curled up around him for company.

  TWO

  THE GOAT AND HIS EAGLE

  AS RICTUS HAD predicted, the snow came that night, drifting down soundlessly in the black hours. He rose well before dawn to poke the ashes of the fire into red warmth again and toss kindling upon the pulsing glow of the embers. The dogs rose beside him, stretching and yawning. Old Mij licked his face and would not leave him alone until he had had his ears well scratched, while Pira, the young bitch, rolled on the floor, arching her back like a cat.

  He opened the door, shivering in his well-worn cloak, and in the pre-dawn dark the snow stretched grey and unbroken across the valley before him. Above the lip of the mountains red Haukos still sailed, but his brother Phobos had almost set.

  Rictus crunched barefoot across the virgin snow, the dogs trotting after. In the blank whiteness only the river seemed dark, prattling noisily to itself.

  Rictus’s eye was caught by tracks in the snow - a hare, and heading down to the brim of the river was the spoor of an adventurous vole not yet ready for its winter sleep. The dogs snuffled along the riverbank, lapping at the water.

  Rictus knelt beside them in the chill mud and dipped his hands in the flow, dashing the water about his head and neck. The bite of it made him gasp, but brought him fully awake.

  When he returned, the household was coming to life. The fire was a yellow roar now, and Aise was tending a pot suspended above it; barley porridge, by the smell. The new slave, Styra, was bringing in more wood and Fornyx was sat at the kitchen table, last night’s drinking dragging down his face.

  “You’re too damn sprightly looking,” he told Rictus. “You don’t drink enough - never did. Lady” - this to Aise - “Would there be any more of that fine yellow wine to chase down the humours?”

  “Porridge will serve you better,” Aise said, and clicked a bowl down in front of him.

  “Where are the girls?” Rictus asked her. She did not look up from the pot as she replied.

  “Out milking the yard-goats. They’ll be in presently. Eat, husband, while there’s heat in it.”

  He ate standing, out of long habit, scooping up the glutinous stuff with his fingers, until he caught Fornyx’s meaningful look, and took a horn spoon off the table instead.

  The girls came in with pails of warm goat’s-milk, chattering like starlings, though Ona went wide-eyed and silent when she saw her father standing in his red warrior’s cloak. Eunion was close behind them, wrapped in the greasy sheepskin he’d worn in cold weather since Rictus had first known him. All at once the kitchen was alive and crowded and noisy, the table framed by faces, the tick and clatter of earthenware. Fornyx joined in the morning banter with Rian as though he had never been away, and the dogs sat silently behind the two girls until their patience bore fruit in the form of bread crusts soaked in milk.

  Rictus remained standing by the door, his spoon circling his empty bowl mechanically. He watched them without a word, like some guardian apparition, and felt an inexplicable ache near his heart. This was his family. He had brought it together, had made it himself. The girls were of his own blood, and the others were so bound to him by memories and the sharing of the years that they were as good as kin.

  Why, then, did he sometimes feel that he was on the outside of it, looking in?

  EUNION HAD BEEN a tutor of literature before Rictus and his men had defeated his city’s army in battle. A tithe of the defeated citizen-soldiers had been sold into slavery as part of the negotiations which had concluded the war - some petty little affair away to the west of Machran - Rictus could no longer even remember the name of the city that had hired him to battle Eunion’s people.

  The defeated had drawn lots, to see who would be sold, and Eunion had simply been unlucky. He had a beautiful singer’s voice, and he knew every ballad and lay of the western lowlands; for this, and his learning, Rictus had purchased him, to preserve him from the slave-agents who picked like crows in the aftermath of every battlefield. A simple decision, made on the whim of the moment. It had kept Eunion from the mines, and had gained for Rictus the friendship of an exceptional man, as upright and decent as it was possible to be in this fractured world.

  Fornyx had taken scarlet with a brute mercenary centon while still little more than a boy. He had been badly used by them, made into a camp servant. Rictus’s own centons had destroyed them in a hard, bitter fight near the Kuprian coast. It had been autumn, the campaigning season almost over, and the two little armies had fought in a rainstorm, churning the ground beneath their feet into a mire in which the wounded were trampled and suffocated.

  When the battle was over, Rictus had discovered the boy Fornyx busily smashing out the brains of his own centurion with a stone. He had recognised the look in the boy’s eyes - had seen it in the eyes of a host of others like him up and down the war-torn cities of the Harukush. Once, his own face had looked the same. So he recruited the undersized Fornyx into the ranks of his own centons, and in time the boy had become a man, and had proved more faithful than any hound, though possessed of an acerbic wit that could ignite men in a roar of laughter or set them at each other’s throats in the time it took to drink a bowl of wine.

  There had been a woman, in later years, and a daughter, but these had been killed by goatmen while travelling to join Fornyx here, at Andunnon. It was the only time Rictus had ever seen his friend weep, as they burned the pitiful remains of his family on a hasty pyre. After that, it was as though some light had gone out of him.

  Not until both Rictus’s own daughters had been born had Fornyx regained some of his old flash and fire, as though Rian and Ona were in some way a reparation for the wife and daughter he had lost. He had lived at Andunnon ever since - Aise had insisted. Fornyx was senior centurion of the Dogsheads, second in command. He was a natural leader, accustomed to commanding the most hardbitten of men. But Rictus’s daughters knew him as Uncle Fornyx, who brought them back trinkets from his travels and told them tall tales that made them squeal with laughter.

  He was the closest thing to a brother that Rictus had ever known.

  AND THEN THERE was Aise. Rictus watched her sit by the fire as was her wont, eyes softening as she listened to Fornyx elaborate on one of his preposterous yarns at the table, and the girls listened agog.

  Aise was the spoils of war, a slave-girl given to Rictus in part-payment for a debt. He had been hired by a poor highland town to defend it through a long winter from the ambitions of its more prosperous neighbour. The job done, the town had little in the way of coin to pay with, and so had given over what it could - cattle, pig-iron, wine, and slaves.

  The tall, beautiful dark-haired girl who carried herself like a queen had caught Rictus’s eye at once, something the town elders had no doubt been counting upon. She was indeed a beauty, but it was not that which had drawn Rictus to her - he had seen beautiful slave-girls by the thousand in the course of his campaigns. No, it was the way she held herself, the stillness that seemed to be about her.

  In the first few weeks of his ownership, Rictus had not even attempted to bed her. He had seen what rape did, and though there were many men who regarded it as simply a part of the process of warmaking, he hated it with a cold fury. He had killed his own men for it before now. Instead, he treated Aise with courtesy, almost as though she were his guest. He was not even sure why.

  At least, it was not something he could have put into words that made sense - even to Fornyx. But it was around the campfires in those early days that he had looked at the faces about him: Fornyx, Eunion, and then Aise, and had come to realise he had found something rare here, or had a chance to. A kind of wholeness perhaps.

  He was not without self-awareness; he knew, deep down, that he was trying to recreate the family he had once lost, years before in Isca
’s fall. But that did not mean he was wrong.

  When he had first bedded Aise, it was because she had come to him of her own accord, and that had made her even more singular in his eyes. They joined together out of curiosity and a kind of mutual hunger. Perhaps she, too, had been trying to recreate something of a previous life, one she had lost forever.

  Less than a month later, Rictus freed both Aise and Eunion, while Fornyx rolled his eyes and the other centurions took bets on how long the pair would stick around.

  And that had been twenty years ago.

  AISE LOOKED UP from her bowl at him. Her magnificent mane of hair was bound up tight at the back of her head, iron-grey right through now, and there were dark lines running from the corners of her nose. The shapeless long-hemmed chiton she wore made her almost sexless, and her hands were raw-knuckled and coarse with the work of a highland farm. But her eyes were the same, that sword-edge grey so rare in the lowlands. Like himself, she had the eyes of a highlander.

  A bubble of laughter burst round the table, Eunion throwing back his head like a boy. Fornyx rose, wiping his mouth, the joke still in his eyes. “Ah, you’re a whimsical lot, to see humour in the tale of my mishaps. Lady, I thank you for the food - I believe I’ll go look upon the day outside, and perhaps add something to the flow of the river. Will you join me, brother?”

  Rictus cast one more look at his wife, but she was clearing the table, issuing orders to the girls and to Eunion, calling for the slaves. The machinery of the farm was ticking smoothly. His return had barely made it pause.

  “I’ll join you. I’m not needed here.” The flat ugly tone of his voice made Aise stop and look at him once more, but whatever she was thinking remained tucked out of sight behind her eyes.

  The sun was up over the mountains now and the valley was a sharp-edged glare of white and blue. The dogs crunched through the thin snow-crust, sniffing at invisible trails of scent. Rictus stood beside Fornyx as the smaller man pissed into the river, eyes closed and smiling.