Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Rictus said.

  “He threw us into the biggest shithole of the day,” Kesero said, “and we came out smiling. I think he owes us a bonus.”

  There was a growled murmur of agreement about the fires.

  “He came in along with us,” Valerian said. “Remember that. He was in the front rank right beside me. He did not do it for a joke - that’s why he was there.”

  “We’re mercenaries,” Rictus said quietly. “We voted for the contract. Our job is to kill and be killed; to look after one another when alive, when hurt and when dead. That comes first of everything. A man who has issue with that can take off the red cloak and walk away when this contract is done -but not before.”

  “And when is this contract done, Rictus? On the fall of Machran?” Kesero asked.

  “That’s what I agreed with him.” At that moment, Rictus could not quite remember the terms of the agreement, but it sounded right enough to his addled mind.

  Kesero winked. “Then we’re going to be rich men very soon,” and he grinned so that his silver-wired teeth glittered white in his face.

  The tension about the fires broke in ribaldry and laughter. After all, they were alive and standing, and they were victors of the greatest battle ever fought in the Harukush. In their minds they had already begun to bury the worst of the day’s memories, leaving what could later be polished up and made part of a better story.

  Rictus knew this - he had done it himself. But he knew also that the black memories were kept by Phobos to fester in the depths of a man’s heart. He could never be rid of them; they became part of who he was.

  “THE SUPPLY WAGONS will be emptied and will take the more severely wounded back to Hal Goshen,” Corvus said, pacing up and down as was his wont. “The looting of the enemy camp is to stop - Teresian, you will see to that. Post more men - your oldest and steadiest. Karnos has stockpiled several day’s rations, and we will use them ourselves while our supply train is away.”

  He paused as Rictus and Fornyx emerged from the darkness beyond the tent-flap, and his face broke open into a grin of delight.

  “I knew a little thing like a slashed arm would not keep my old warrior down. Rictus, you look as pale as Phobos’s face - Teresian, give up your seat there. Brothers, the wine is standing tall in your cups; we can’t have that.”

  Rictus sat heavily in the leather-framed camp chair. Corvus’s scribe, a plump, powerfully built little man named Parmenios, came forward with a waxed slate, his stylus poised.

  “Marshal, how many of your men are still fit to fight?”

  “Three hundred, give or take.”

  Parmenios scratched the slate. His black eyebrows rose up his forehead a little. “A heavy accounting,” he said.

  “I’ve heard it called worse,” Rictus snapped. His mind was a throbbing bruise. More than anything else he longed to lay his head down upon his arms on the map-strewn table in front of him.

  Teresian offered him a cup of wine. “Drink with us, Rictus.”

  They were all holding their cups off the table, looking at him. Poised for a toast, he realised. One-eyed Demetrius, the grim ex-mercenary, spoke for them.

  “Today we saw how men fight, and die.” He lifted his cup higher.

  “To the Dogsheads.”

  “The Dogsheads,” the others repeated. Humourless Teresian, the suspicion gone from his grey eyes. Dark, smiling Druze, with his arm in a sling to match Rictus. And Ardashir, his strange long face solemn. They all drained their cups and then flicked out the dregs for Phobos, mocking Fear itself.

  Rictus caught Corvus’s eye, and the strange young man winked at him.

  The Dogsheads had been sent on a suicidal attack for sound military reasons; it was harsh, but rational. But Corvus had also thought this far ahead. Their obedience, their self-sacrifice had finally won round the doubters among his officers. Rictus had at last earned his place as one of Corvus’s marshals.

  You conniving little bastard, Rictus thought, and he raised his empty cup to Corvus in a small salute.

  “Back to business,” Corvus said briskly. “The roads are turned to soup with this god-cursed rain, and men who have abandoned their armour can run faster than those who have preserved it. The Igranians have done what they can, but I’ve no wish to scatter the army on a wild hunt along the Imperial road. We’re fairly certain that Karnos was expecting reinforcements before battle commenced. It remains to be seen if they will now remain in the field or return to their cities.”

  “What of Karnos? Any news?” Rictus asked.

  “Their dead are out there in heaps,” Ardashir said. “If he is one of them he will take time to find.”

  Corvus waved his hand back and forth. “Dead or alive, he brought the League here to its destruction. At least a third of the enemy army is still on the field, and Machran lost most heavily of all the League cities, as I had intended. If we appear before the city walls within the next month, I will be surprised if they do not accept our terms.” “Machran itself,” Demetrius said, with an odd look of awe on his face.

  “Machran folds, and the rest go down with it -they will not fight on once we have our feet planted on the floor of the Empirion,” Corvus said. “We are very close, brothers.”

  Even through the haze of his exhaustion, Rictus found himself wondering; close to what?

  Karnos of Machran is dead.

  Karnos has been slain on the field of battle.

  Karnos died heroically - no, no, damn it, that’s not it.

  He lay in the wet crushing darkness and listened to the rain tap on the stiffened bodies which lay atop him. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life before. In fact it seemed to him that he had never really understood the true nature of thirst before. When the rain came he opened his mouth and let it trickle in, foul-flavoured from the corpses on top of him, but wet.

  Life.

  Karnos is alive, in the midst of the dead.

  Men had gone back and forth across the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting, looking for their own wounded, for enemy wounded to slay, for some trinket which might make their labour worthwhile, or perhaps a better weapon - or, if the gods were smiling, one of those miraculous finds, a black cuirass.

  The expensive armour which had so impressed Karnos in the confines of his villa, he now knew to be inferior, gimcrack shite, and these men had seen it as such also. That had saved his life, for they had not tried to strip it from his very much alive and terrified body. And thus he lay here with his fellow citizens sheltering him from the rain.

  And pinning him to the ground.

  His arm was numb from the shoulder down, and he could not bring himself to look at the black shaft which protruded grotesquely from his flesh. It was a Kufr arrow, fired from a Kufr bow, created by a Kufr fletcher in some far-flung portion of the world which knew nothing of him. And yet it was now inside his flesh, intimate with the very meat of him. All that way, across the sea, in some strange foreign creature’s quiver, then laid against that bow, to flash through the cold air of the Harukush, and end up inside him, Karnos of Machran.

  He started at his task again; that which had preoccupied him since the fall of darkness and the departure of the battlefield scavengers. He was inching the bodies of the dead off his own in increments a child could measure with their fingers. In this he showed a patience which he had previously not known he possessed.

  As he did, his mind wandered. He remembered squatting in the heat and dust of Tinsmith’s Alley in the Mithannon, scratching at the scabbed-over burns on his bare feet where the sparks from his father’s hand-forge had landed.

  He was seven years old, and a passing aristocrat in a himation as white as snow had dropped him a copper obol. He was staring at the little green coin, which would buy him a stick of grilled meat from a foodstall, or a pear-sized cup of wine from one of the shops at the bottom of the alley. It was the first time in his life he had been given something for nothing, and he liked th
e feeling.

  One of the corpses toppled over, as stiff and unlike a living man as an overstuffed sack of flour. Karnos smiled, grunting at the pain, but swallowing it down, as he had swallowed down the beatings he had received as a child. Even then, he had known his father loved him, but knew also that he’d had to lash out on occasion at the nearest thing to hand.

  If it were not Karnos, it would be one of the starving strays that littered the city alleyways, and Karnos pitied them even more than himself. They were used and discarded by the slumdwellers who had spawned them, feral little beasts who could barely speak, whose sex was indeterminate, whose eyes held nothing but fear and greed. If they survived they would grow into whores and thieves and beggars, and beget the curse of their existence on another generation. Thus were the slums of Machran renewed.

  Karnos began to breathe more easily. He was feeling the cold now, and a warm lassitude came creeping over his battered frame.

  They think I have so many slaves because I love lording it over them; me, the boy from the Mithannon, making his own little kingdom. Kassander knows better.

  I keep them slaves to protect them. No man or woman wearing my collar will ever be abused in Machran. They are safe with me. Polio knows that. He knows me better than anyone.

  He wanted to shout for Polio now, to tell him that his bed was damp, that he needed an extra coverlet. He raised his hand to push back the wet covering that was stealing his thoughts away, and his hand settled on the cold wax-hard face of the dead man whose body lay upon his own. The jolt of that snapped him out of his reverie, and the pain came flooding in, clearing his head. He ground his jaw shut and pushed the chilled meat away from his face, found a leg loosened, and ploughed himself through the mud on his back.

  He was freezing cold, but free, staring up at the invisible rain, the teeming dark. How far to Machran? It must be over a hundred pasangs.

  Machran, the sun of his world. He loved his city more than he would ever love any wife. One could walk there upon stones that had been shaped in the dawn of his race’s existence. It was rumoured that below the circle of the Empirion were caverns in which the first of the Macht had lived, sealed chambers which housed the dust and dreams of millennia.

  My city.

  The rain was easing, and in the tattered dark of the sky he could see glimpses of the stars peering through the cloud as the wind picked up and began to harry them away. Phobos was long set, but the pink glow of Haukos could still just be made out, and to one side, Gaenion’s Pointer, showing the way north. He fixed it in his mind, and some almost unconscious part of him made his fist dig a hole in the mud pointing north.

  I think my father taught me that. He lived his life in a half dozen narrow streets, and yet he knew about the stars - how is that?

  Because even the poor can look up past their next meal. Even the drunkard pauses now and then to cast his face to the sky and hope, and wonder.

  We are beaten, Karnos thought. He beat us fair and fully, outnumbered and in the muck of winter when his horses could not run.

  I should have offered Rictus more. His men were in front of me today - or yesterday - his Dogsheads. Corvus did that on purpose. What a marvellous bastard he must be. I wish I knew him.

  I hope Kassander got away.

  And with that thought the rags of the present came back to him. The League he had spent years building was cast to the wind, and the flower of Machran had been slaughtered here, around him.

  How many died here today?

  He sat up, and the pain became something quite novel in its intensity. He had heard old campaigners say that the worse the wound, the less the pain. He hoped it was true.

  Polio, I need a bath. Who knew that war would stink so bad?

  Karnos of Machran stood up, a fat man in a gaudy cuirass, barefoot and slathered in mud and blood, a black arrow poking from his right shoulder. He was the only thing moving upon the flooded mere which had been a battlefield.

  The Plain of Afteni, they will call it, he thought, for Afteni is not twenty pasangs away along the road. That is where they will be, those who are alive. That is where I must be, if I am to live. He began walking west.

  THIRTEEN

  THE HIGHLAND SNOWS

  PHAESTUS - ONE-TIME SPEAKER of Hal Goshen, until Rictus had shown up at his gates - had always been a man who prided himself on his appearance. He liked the attention of women; his wife, Thandea, had been a noted beauty in her day and was still a handsome matron. More to the point, she was an amenable adornment to his life who kept his household running smoothly in conjunction with his steward, leaving Phaestus to consider the weightier things in life, be they the running of a great city or the pursuit of other men’s wives.

  That was all in the past.

  To become ostrakr was a blackened distinction within the Macht world. It meant a man had no city, no citizenship, and hence no redress for wrongs done to him.

  He might own taenons of good land, but the moment he was ostrakr, that land became anyone’s to own. He might try to defend it with the strength of his own arm, but what is one man to do when three or four - or fifty - walk onto his farm and declare their intention to take it from him? He dies fighting, or he leaves it all behind.

  The same applies to his house, his slaves, all his possessions. And if some stranger takes a fancy to his wife or his daughter, then it is his own spear, and that alone, which will preserve their honour. There is no recourse to the courts, to the assembly, or even to the assistance of friends and neighbours. He is ostrakr - he no longer exists.

  Mercenaries forsook their cities when they took up the red cloak, though there were far fewer of them around now than there had been - so many had died with the Ten Thousand that a kind of tradition had been lost, and even now the true, contracted fighting man who fought by the code of his centon was something of a rarity. Such men were ostrakr also, but they at least had the brotherhood of their fellows to fall back on. They exchanged one polity for another.

  A man who had nothing to fill up the framework of his world was naked in the dark, and must subsist with the tireless wariness of the fox until he somehow found a way to become a citizen again, to come in from that darkness.

  That is what Phaestus had meant to do.

  He stood now wrapped in bear-furs which he had bartered from a group of drunk goatherder men over the campfire of the night before. They had been good men, rough and ready as all were who lived up in the highlands with no city to call their own. Up here it was still the world of the clan and the tribe, a more ancient place. But still, men belonged to something. They looked after those of their own blood.

  It was a white, frozen world this high in the hills, and the Gosthere Range was a marching line of blinding-bright giants all along the brim of the horizon, the sky as blue and clear as a robin’s egg above them. Here, winter had already come into its own, and the drifts were building deep, the dark pinewoods locked down in frozen suspension, and the rivers narrowed to fast flowing black streams between broadening banks of solid ice, the very rocks bearded with foot-long icicles.

  The goatherder men had been bringing their flocks and their families down into the valleys for the winter, and were glad to trade: furs and dried meat for wine and pig-iron ingots. They had haggled hard over the wine and then shared it out liberally afterwards, for such was their nature.

  These were the original strawheads of the high country, from whom Phaestus’s own people had come. The dark-skinned lowlanders might sneer at them, but they at least did not burn down cities and enslave populations. All they wanted was grazing for their animals, a place to pitch their dome-shaped tents of weathered hide, and room to roam. They were a picture, perhaps, of how the Macht had lived in the far and misty past. Perhaps.

  Phaestus watched them go, and raised his spear to answer the headman’s departing salute. Ten families, perhaps thirty warriors and a hundred women and children and old folk. A unit more cohesive than the citizenry of any city.

  If only
life were that simple, Phaestus thought.

  He had grown a beard to keep the wind from his face, and it had come out as grey as hoar frost. His plump wife had lost some of her padding and had stopped complaining about having to sleep on the ground. And his son had become a man right in front of his eyes, discarding the preening sulks of the adolescent in a few short weeks.

  Exile had been good for him, young Philemos. Dark like his mother, and inclined to amplitude like her, he had become an angular young man who took to this life of exile as though he had been waiting for it to happen. There was that much, at least, to be thankful for. The two girls were a different matter.

  Phaestus turned in his tracks to regard the straggling little column on the slope below him. One mule had died already, and the rest were overburdened. They would have to dump more of their possessions, pitifully few though they were. His complete collection of Ondimion was already in a snowdrift two days back, a sacrifice which had wrenched his heart. But there was no need to read of drama in a scroll when it was the stuff of their daily lives now.

  Tragedy, revenge; yes, that is what life hinges around. The poets had it right after all.

  He looked north, at the furrowed valleys and glens of the Gostheres, white in a dreaming world of snow.

  That old word they used, from the ancient Machtic - nemesis. That is what I am, Phaestus thought.

  His son joined him, scratching and grinning. “These bearskins have lice in them, father. Are we to become barbarians to survive?”

  “Yes,” Phaestus said. “That is exactly what we must be. But not forever, Philemos.”

  “I hope not - I can’t listen to my sisters carp and moan for much longer. I love them dearly, but I would also love to clash their heads together.”

  Phaestus laughed, his white teeth gleaming in his beard. “Now you know how I have felt these last few years. The women are unhappy, and rightly so -this is not their world, up here. Everything they have known has been taken away from them - the least we can do is bear their carping without complaint. That is what men do.”