Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “Well,” he said, “you got your war.”

  “Yes, I got it,” Rictus answered.

  “What does the little bastard intend to do, do you think, Rictus? He was closeted with Demetrius and Teresian all morning. You think he means to give battle?”

  “Truthfully? I don’t know. He won’t refuse one - that’s not in his nature. But look at that ground, Fornyx - you want to advance across that?”

  “It’s not fit for man nor beast,” Fornyx grimaced.

  “Well, then I suppose Corvus has a plan.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  Corvus had travelled the length of the line from north to south. He halted now in front of Druze, and bent in the saddle to speak to the chief of the Igranians. They saw Druze nodding, and Corvus set a hand on his shoulder, then cantered through the open formless crowd of the skirmishers, raising a hand to acknowledge their cheers, pointing at one or two of them and reining in to exchange witticisms which set many of them roaring with laughter.

  “He can work a crowd, the little bugger, I’ll give him that,” Fornyx admitted.

  Leading a line of mounted aides like a kite trailing its tail, Corvus cantered over to the Dogsheads and reined in. Like Rictus, he had not slept at all the night before, but he looked fresh as a bridegroom.

  “At least it’s not raining,” he said, dismounting and clapping his horse on the neck with great affection.

  “You think they’re going to join battle?” Fornyx asked him bluntly.

  Corvus smiled. “Brother,” he said, “before the sun climbs to noon, they’re going to be right in our laps.”

  DRUZE’S IGRANIANS MOVED out, an orderless crowd of ambling men picking its way across the flooded farmland like a great herd of migrating animals. It still wanted some two hours until noon, and the sun was at their backs. There was no urgency to them; they were like men strolling home after meeting at the assembly.

  Rictus could see them talking amongst themselves as they advanced, and lightly armed as they were, they did not break up the soft ground as a formation of spearmen would. He saw them as a mass of dark speckles on the land, swallowed up here and there by the sunlit glare of the lying water.

  “Stay by me,” Corvus said to him, his face grave now, eyes fixed on the enemy line only some two and a half pasangs away, the tented camp rising like a mud-coloured city behind it. “I want your Dogsheads ready to slot in anywhere along the line.”

  “What’s Druze to do?” Fornyx asked him.

  “He’s going to pick a fight.”

  The Igranians picked up speed, like a flock of birds all of one mind. They were moving out to the south, to threaten the enemy’s right flank; the unshielded side.

  There was a corresponding ruffle of movement in the lines of spearmen there; a row of bronze shields caught the sun one after another in a series of bright flashes. Then Druze led his men in to javelin range -a hundred paces, maybe - and Rictus saw their right arms go back, their bodies arced for the throw. It was too far away to see the missiles go home, but the glitter of enemy shields catching the sun came and went, flickering like summer lightning upon the sea.

  “That’s really going to piss them off,” Fornyx said, with a grin of sheer relish in his beard.

  “I thought they needed a prod,” Corvus said. “The morning’s a wasting.”

  There was always something almost joyful about watching a battle from a distance, Rictus thought. First, you were glad you were not there, in the middle of it with the iron tearing at your own flesh. But it could almost be like a sport, too. One could study the moves of the players with detachment, see the evolutions of the phalanxes with a clear eye, rise above the packed murderous terror of the othismos and survey things with real clarity.

  And with a flash of epiphany, Rictus realised something about Corvus.

  That is how he sees it, all the time. That detachment, that clear-sightedness.

  The enemy spearmen were breaking ranks by centon, sending out detachments to try and come to grips with Druze’s men, but the lightly armed Igranians evaded them like wolves dancing away from the horns of a bull. As the centons withdrew again, the Igranians closed in. For a few minutes they had actually closed with the enemy hand to hand. Fornyx whistled softly at the sight.

  “Those bastards have balls like walnuts.”

  “An Igranian must kill a mountain-lion before he is considered a man,” Corvus said. “They belong to an older time, when the Macht did not feel the need to congregate in cities. Igranon itself has no walls; it’s little more than a glorified trading post.”

  “A hard people to tame,” Rictus said, raising one eyebrow.

  Corvus shook his head. “I did not tame the Igranians, Rictus; I merely earned their respect. Their trust.” He watched the distant fight with his curious pale eyes. “You have that, and they will follow you anywhere.”

  The Igranians broke off the battle, wheeling away from the League army. They had cut several centons to pieces; Rictus had been able to make out men running back to their own lines without shields.

  In rear of the enemy battle-line, there was now a strong column marching from north to south.

  “He’s reinforcing his right,” Corvus said. “Good.” He turned to one of his aides, seating on a snorting horse. “Marco, go to Teresian, and tell him it is time.”

  “Yes Corvus.” The fellow kicked his horse into a whinnying canter and the mud from its hooves spattered them all as he took off.

  “The curtain rises,” Corvus said. “Look, brothers. We finally woke them up.”

  The enemy army was on the move, that vast snake of men undulating forward over the plain. Faint at first, and then louder, there came the sound of the Paean.

  The advance was ragged, halting. Some of the League’s contingents were better ordered than others and had to mark time while their comrades caught up. In the middle, a great body of spearmen remained in good order throughout, many thousands. They were the core. The men on the flanks were not as well drilled, but they presented a fearsome sight for all that.

  “That is Machran, in the centre,” Corvus said. “See the sigils?” It was too far for Rictus to make out, but he nodded.

  “Their polemarch is Kassander, an ex-mercenary and close friend of Karnos himself. He has trained the spearmen of Machran well - so far as a citizen army goes. Karnos is wise enough to know he is an orator, not a soldier, but he’s a good judge of men, by all accounts, and he can charm the birds off the trees when he has a mind to.

  “I want him to die today.”

  “I’m sure he feels the same way about you,” Fornyx drawled, and Corvus laughed.

  Their own army had begun to move now. On the left, Teresian was taking forward the veteran spears, four thousand men in eight ranks. Their line extended some half pasang, and they too began to sing the Paean as they advanced. Rictus watched their dressing with the close attention of a professional, and he had to grudgingly admit to himself that they were not half bad.

  The conscript spears under Demetrius remained immobile, stubbornly refusing to move. Alarmed, Fornyx grabbed Corvus by the arm, his black beard bristling.

  “Half your spearline is still asleep, Corvus.”

  “No. This has all been set in train by my hand, Fornyx. Be patient. Enjoy the view. When was the last time you were able to stand and watch history being made?”

  It was quite a sight, indeed. Thirty thousand men were on the move now across the plain in various formations. To the south, Druze’s Igranians were pulling back, and the League’s reinforced right wing was making good time, though their ranks were not all they might be; the soft ground was scrambling them. Teresian’s veterans were marching out to meet them, veering left as they advanced. An oblique. Only good, disciplined troops could accomplish such a manoeuvre.

  Finally, Demetrius’s conscripts began to move. Their line was as untidy as that of the enemy, and there was a widening gap between them and Teresian. The two bodies of spearmen advanced s
eparately on the enemy. In the centre there was nothing but a growing hole.

  “Phobos,” Fornyx whispered.

  Valerian joined them, out of breath. He hauled off his helm, his lopsided face burning with urgency. “Rictus - Corvus - for the love of God, look at the line! We’re broke in two before we even begin!”

  Corvus held up his hand. “Do not concern yourself, centurion - get back to your men and stand-to. I shall be wanting you presently.”

  His whole attention was fixed on the moving bodies of men out on the plain. There was none of his flashing levity now; he was as solemn as a statue.

  But his eyes blazed, like a gambler watching the fall of the dice.

  “Rictus!” Valerian protested.

  “Do as he says,” Rictus said quietly. “Shields up, Valerian.”

  The young man stamped off unhappily, but a few moments later the order rang out and the Dogsheads lifted their shields onto their shoulders, donned their helms, and worked their spears side to side to loosen the sauroters in the sucking ground. Rictus’s heart began to quicken in his chest, pushing against the confines of Antimone’s Gift. He and Fornyx stood silent, watching as Corvus sent couriers out to right and left, young men on tall horses beating the animals into gallops that sent clods of muck flying through the air like birds.

  “Rictus,” Corvus said, turning back to the mercenaries. “What is it the Dogsheads can do that citizen soldiers cannot?”

  “We can die needlessly, that’s for damned sure,” Fornyx murmured.

  “We can advance at the run,” Rictus said.

  Corvus nodded. “I like to read. Have you heard of Mynon?”

  “He was a general of the Ten Thousand. He made it home.”

  “He wrote it all down, some fifteen years ago, before dying in some stupid little war up near Framnos. I read his story, Rictus; they had it in the library at Sinon, copied out fair by a good scribe. He talked of Kunaksa, how it was won, what you all did that day.”

  The Paean rose and rose, tens of thousands of voices singing it now all across the plain. Druze was taking his men in again, harassing the enemy’s southern flank once more, and Teresian’s spears were going in alongside him. The enemy line was skewed and slanted to meet this threat.

  A gasping courier reined in before them.

  “Ardashir is ready, Corvus.”

  Corvus cocked his head to one side, like a crow eyeing a corpse.

  “Tell him to go.”

  The courier galloped off like a man possessed, a youngster bursting with the enthusiasm of his age.

  “At Kunaksa, the Kefren had thousands of archers, who should by rights have shot the Ten Thousand to pieces before they closed - am I right?”

  “What is this, a fucking history lesson?” Fornyx demanded.

  “We went in at a run. They hit us with the first volley, but by the time they’d readied a second we were already at their throats,” Rictus said. He had not been a spearman that day, but he remembered watching, seeing the morai go in.

  “Citizen soldiers cannot advance at the run, or they lose their formation,” Corvus said, and he shrugged.

  “Now watch.”

  THERE WAS A long line of movement out to their right, in the ranks of the dismounted Companions. Ardashir led a solid mass of his command forward, following in the wake of Demetrius’s slowly advancing conscripts. There was something odd about them, Rictus noted.

  “Kufr,” Fornyx said. “He’s taking in all the Kufr. Corvus, this won’t -”

  “Shut up,” Corvus said.

  Some sixteen hundred Kufr, tall Kefren of the Asurian race, who had, like all their fellows, been brought up to do three things. They had been taught how to ride a horse, how to tell the truth... and how to shoot a bow.

  They cast aside their brightly coloured cloaks, left them lying on the mud, and from their backs they pulled the short recurved composite bows of Asuria. They had quiver-fulls of arrows at their hips, and at a shouted command from Ardashir they nocked these to their bowstrings.

  Ardashir raised his scimitar, a painfully bright flash of steel. He held it upright one moment, watching the battlefield to come, the advancing League spearmen on the plain before him. They were perhaps four hundred paces away.

  In front of him, Demetrius’s gruff voice rang out, and the conscripts halted.

  A shouted command in Asurian, the tongue of the Empire, and following it a heartbeat later came the sweeping whistle of the arrows, some one and a half thousand of them arcing up in the air over Teresian’s spears, to come down like a black hail on the advancing enemy.

  That is the sound, Rictus thought. That is what I heard that day.

  A staccato hammering as the broadheads struck bronze, the individual impacts merging to form a hellish, explosive din of metal on metal.

  Scores of men went down. The line of advancing shields buckled, faltered, the ranks merging, breaking, gaps appearing up and down, men tripping over bodies, men screaming, cursing, shouting orders.

  And moments later the second volley hit them.

  It was like watching a vast animal staggered by the wind. Some men were still advancing, others had halted and were trying to lift the heavy shields up to counter this unlooked-for hail of death. Others were standing in place with the black shafts buried in their limbs, tugging on them, looking to left and right, shouting in fear and fury. Centurions were seizing the irresolute, thumping helmed heads with their fists, moving forward out of the mass of stalled spearmen, urging them on.

  A third volley.

  The ground was thick with the dead and the wounded. These soldiers were small farmers, tradesmen, family men. There were fathers and sons on the field, brothers, uncles. Some of the untouched spearmen were dropping their arms to help relatives, neighbours. Hundreds fell back, but a core came on regardless of casualties. They were Macht, after all.

  Corvus was watching it all with a kind of grim satisfaction, but at least he did not seem to relish the developing massacre. If he had - if he had shown any kind of pleasure at the sight - Rictus would have killed him on the spot.

  “And now, Demetrius,” Corvus said quietly.

  Rictus had lost count of the volleys, but the others had not. The conscript spears began advancing again, five thousand of them moving to meet what had been a line of six thousand League troops. The odds were evened out now, but more than that, the League forces were little more than a mob, a snarled-up confusion of armed men struggling in a mire which their own feet were deepening with every minute.

  “That should do it on our right,” Corvus said. He turned to look south.

  Teresian was about to make contact with the enemy right, and Druze was supporting him, worrying at the end of the enemy line, his cloud of skirmishers partially enveloping it. He was working round the back of the League army while they advanced steadily to meet the spearmen to their front.

  Even as they watched, they heard the roar and crash as the two bodies of heavy spears met, bronze smashing against bronze, spearheads seeking unprotected flesh. Two bulls meeting head on -Rictus could feel the ground quiver under his own feet at the clash of armour.

  As soon as the enemy was committed to the attack, Druze led his men north behind the line. The Igranians split in two. Half pitched into the rear of the enemy phalanx that was now irretrievably entangled with Teresian’s veterans. The other half - almost fifteen hundred men - kept going north, parallel to the League battle-line - towards the rear of the enemy centre.

  That centre was now almost upon them. These were the best of the League troops, the levies from Machran under Kassander. Seven thousand men in good order, they had paused as Corvus launched his army on the wings, seemingly unable to believe that there was nothing facing them but the empty plain. Now they were advancing again. They could pitch in to either one of the two separate battles that were now raging to north and south.

  Corvus turned to Rictus. “I have a job for you, brother, you and your Dogsheads.” He pointed at the long lin
e of shields bearing the machios sigil.

  “I want you to take your Dogsheads and hit those fellows as hard as you can.”

  “You’re not serious,” Fornyx breathed.

  “You have only to halt them in their tracks, hold them a little while, bloody their noses a little. You have to buy me time.” He gestured to the north and south. “We will beat them on the flanks, and then come and meet you in the centre. And Druze is already in the rear of the Machran morai - as soon as he sees you going forward, he will attack. And Ardashir will support you also.”

  “I’m like to lose half my men,” Rictus said, staring Corvus in the face.

  “Fight smart, Rictus - don’t get enveloped. All you have to do is poke them in the eye.”

  The thunder of the battle rose and rose. The critical point of it was approaching - Rictus could feel it, like he could feel the loom of winter in his ageing bones. Was Corvus trying to have him killed? He did not believe it. No - he was simply moving the knucklebones on the board, using what he had. Sentiment did not even, enter into it.

  Rictus pulled on his crested helm, reducing his world to a slot of light.

  “Very well,” he said.

  “One more thing,” Corvus added, tossing up his hand as though it were an afterthought.

  “What?”

  “I’ll be going in with you.”

  FOR KARNOS THE world had become a strange and fearsome place. He was the fifth man in an eight-deep file, one cog in the great machine that was the army of Machran, which in turn was but part of the forces assembled here today. He alternated between an inexplicable exhilaration and bowel-draining apprehension.

  This, the greatest clash of armies in a generation, was his first battle.

  In earlier years he had drilled on the fields below the Mithos River along with the other men of his class, but since his elevation to the Kerusia he had not so much as lifted a spear. He was Speaker of Machran, as high as one could be in the ruling hierarchy of the city, but on the battlefield he was the same rank as all the other sweating men in the spear-files. Here, Katullos the Cursebearer commanded a mora - Kassander, the entire levy - but he, Karnos, commanded only himself. He found it unbelievable now that he had overlooked something so basic -incredible that he was included in this anonymous horde like every other citizen.