Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  They retreated to a tall portico which ran around the base of a tower. There was a brazier burning there, a table covered with papers, and men were coming and going, adding to the pile.

  “You have become newly fond of fresh air,” Kassander said, throwing back the hood of his own cloak.

  “I like the view. I can see half a dozen pasangs down the road when the rain lifts a little - it means I’ll see that bastard coming.”

  “By all accounts he’s not on his way just yet - the road is washed out in half a dozen places, where it’s not wholly underwater, and rumour has it there’s sickness in his camp. He’s afloat in a sea of his own shit some ten pasangs back down the road, long may he remain there.”

  Karnos poured some wine with his good hand. “Meanwhile we sit here in relative comfort. It warms my heart to think on it.”

  “He did the right thing with the dead - sent Greynos of Afteni’s body forward under a green branch and burned the rest with all the proper rites.”

  “Yes, he’s quite the fucking gentleman. In the meantime we are sitting here on a castle of sand, leaking centons by the day. Kassander, we must think of Machran now. The League has snapped in our hands like a wishbone.”

  “You think we’re on our own?”

  “Stop and listen.”

  Kassander sighed and nodded. Below the endless patter and hiss of the rain was another noise, a vast hum, like a hive of angry bees.

  “That’s the Afteni assembly in session, ten thousand angry, frightened men standing in the rain at the bottom of this rock, making a debate about something they have already decided. They lost six hundred of their best down on the plain, and Greynos, the only one of their Kerusia with any stones. They are finished, and they know it, but must spin out the argument while Machran and the other contingents are still within their walls looking on. It’s like observing the decencies at a funeral pyre. The eastern cities of the hinterland are lost, Kassander. The rest are waiting to see what Machran can do.”

  “Machran will never capitulate,” Kassander said, his big, good-natured face darkening. “Not while I live.”

  Karnos touched him on the arm. “Well said, brother.” He set down his winecup. A young man in the black sigil-embroidered chiton of the Machran staff coughed politely behind him.

  “Yes, Gersic?”

  “Sir, counsellor Katullus requests that you meet with him at your convenience. He is -” “I know where he is, Gersic; tell him I’m on my way. And Gersic -”

  “Sir?”

  “How is his voice?”

  The young man, dark and earnest and with a stitched-up stab wound on his arm, considered. “He can whisper, sir.”

  “Good enough.” Karnos turned back to Kassander.

  “It has come to something when I view Katullos as an ally, of like mind to myself.”

  Kassander raised his winecup. “Being wounded and left for dead has done wonders for your reputation.”

  “I should have done it years ago,” Karnos said.

  A SMALL, BARE room, austere enough to satisfy even an ascetic like Katullos. There were no windows, and a single lamp burned by the bed. In a corner, the black cuirass sat upon its stand like a silent spirit, not a mark upon it, though Katullos had been at the very heart of the fighting.

  The old man had taken an aichme to the throat. They had closed the wound with a hot iron and it blazed below his chin now like a second, purple-lipped mouth. His magnificent beard had been shorn off by the carnifex, and his face looked absurdly small without it. His skin was flushed with fever, but his eyes were clear. His big, mottled hands picked at his blanket ceaselessly as Karnos took a stool beside him.

  “Lean close,” Katullos said, a zephyr almost drowned out by the sound of the rain outside and the rumbling from the assembly.

  “Here.” A letter, folded and sealed. There had been three attempts at the seal before it had taken -he had done it himself.

  “For the Kerusia. It may help.”

  “What does it say?”

  Katullos smiled. “To trust you.”

  Karnos sat back again, frowning, holding the letter like a trapped bird in his hand. “How do I know that? You have never been a friend to me, Katullos. I may break the seal and look.”

  “Then it is worthless.”

  “Better that than -”

  “Trust me.” Spittle was leaking from the corner of the old man’s mouth. A few days before, he had led a mora into battle while wearing the Curse of God. Now he was reduced to this. Karnos felt a sting of pity.

  “We have been adversaries all our public lives, you and I. What has changed?”

  Again, the death’s head smile. “I once told you I would be there to cheer the day you fell. Now I see that to do so would be to cheer the fall of my own city. You did the right thing, fighting when you did. You had your blood spilled for Machran. You love the city as I do. I did not see it before. I thought you loved only your own ambition.”

  “A man can love both.”

  “No, Karnos, not now.” He coughed, a long wet rattle in his chest. Karnos could feel the heat radiating off him, as though his life were burning out in one last, guttering flare.

  “Keep fighting,” Katullos rasped. “Machran must never surrender. This man means to make himself king of us all. If Machran falls, he will have his foot on our necks for a generation.” He sagged. “You see it - but not all men do.”

  “I see it - I have known it a long time.”

  “We were at cross purposes. I was wrong. You are Speaker of Machran; you speak for us all. Break him before our walls. No other city can do it.”

  “We cannot face him in open battle again, Katullos. The League is falling apart.”

  “The walls, Karnos. Hold the walls. Bleed him white. No-one can take Machran if men are on her walls, not even Corvus.”

  Karnos took one of the big, restless hands in his own. A jet of pain ran through his shoulder as he leaned over the dying man in the bed.

  “Katullos, you have my word on it.”

  Katullos smiled again. “That is worth something -I know that now.”

  “I’ll have you on the next wagon heading west -you’ll see the city again, I promise you.”

  “I’ll be dead before then. But take me home, Karnos. Burn me at the Mithos River and scatter my ashes in the water. Carve my name on the catafalque of the Alcmoi.”

  “It shall be done.”

  “My cuirass - see it goes to my family.”

  “I will.”

  Katullos stared closely at him. “You are a disgrace to the Kerusia, a demagogue, a rake and a philanderer. But you are all we have. The rest are sheep.”

  Karnos chuckled. “You flatter me, Katullos...

  “Katullos?”

  The old man remained staring, but the breath was running out of him in a long, hoarse sigh. He was still, the grip of the liver-spotted hand relaxing. Karnos shook his head.

  “Stubborn old bastard.” He closed the still-bright eyes with his fingers and bowed his head a moment. Then he looked up, and stared across the room thoughtfully at the Curse of God which sat silent in its corner.

  THE MEN OF Machran marched out the next day, weighed down with all their gear. The roads had become so bad that no wagon could take to them, so the battered morai splashed through the mire with all their wargear on their backs and as much in the way of scanty rations that Afteni could spare. It was almost two hundred pasangs to Machran, and they would be hungry long before they were home.

  Other contingents of the League were marching out also. The men of the hinterland cities had called their own assemblies in Afteni, and voted on what to do next. The Arkadians and Avennans, who had been keen supporters of the League and allies of Machran for time out of mind, voted to stick with Karnos and Kassander.

  Murchos, polemarch of the Arkadians, was a burly man with a face like that of a pink, startled pig, but he was a guest-friend of Kassander and would follow him anywhere, as his own men would follow him - es
pecially since he was also a Cursebearer.

  The Arkadians had always been a froward, reckless bunch. They threw their knucklebones high when they gambled, as they were gambling now. They would hold true, all three thousand of them.

  The Avennans were much the same, though they liked to see their city as the true heart of the civilized Macht, the place where laws were made. The thought of it being ruled by an upstart warleader of no family, who employed the Kufr as soldiers, was anathema to them. They, too, would march with Machran. Two thousand men under Tyrias, who liked to call himself the Just, but who was known more commonly as Scrollworm, for he was more at home in a library than on a battlefield, despite his polemarch’s helm.

  All told, some nine thousand men marched out of Afteni with Kassander leading them west. Nine thousand men who meant to man the walls of Machran to the end. It was enough. It would have to be enough.

  The rest had gone their separate ways, the mauled contingents from the other cities trailing out of Afteni in a less martial fashion, for many of them had thrown away their arms on the field to aid their flight. And it was understood that Afteni itself would capitulate to the invader when he finally got his army moving again through the mud.

  It still wanted a month to midwinter.

  KARNOS BENT LOW in the saddle, hissing with the damnable pain of it. He dropped the reins and shook Kassander’s hand.

  “March them hard, brother. The longer we have to ready the city the easier the thing will be.”

  “You should have an escort, Karnos. You’re not near healing, and if you fall off that horse it’ll take a file of men to push you back up on it again.”

  “I’m thinner than I was, I’ll have you know.” Karnos tugged the oilskin soldier’s cloak closer about his neck. “Gersic is enough. He’s a good boy, over-eager, sincere, and none too bright; just the type I like to have about me. I mean to do it in four days at most.”

  “You have my letters.”

  “Next to my heart, Kassander. Whatever rumour has run ahead of me, I bear the first official news. And I will tell it my way.”

  “If you have time, look in on my wife and sister -let them know I’m not ash on the wind.”

  “I will, brother.” Karnos straightened, swore viciously at the pain angling through his shoulder, and then kicked the barrel-chested lowland cob into a trot. It flailed its way through the floodwater, like a boat chopping through a heavy swell.

  He raised his good hand in farewell, and at the head of the long column half a dozen centons who recognised him set up a cheer. Then he disappeared into the mist of the rain.

  KARNOS WAS NOT a man attuned to the natural world. He was more at home on pavement than pasture, and while he loved to eat red meat, he saw no virtue in killing it himself. The debating chamber, the bedroom, the marketplace - these were the places he felt at home. He still had his father in him, he supposed - in all three places the essence of the thing was a kind of haggling.

  Now, as the land rose under his horse and the floodwaters began to recede, he pushed the animal hard, cantering to one side of the stone-paved road that led all the way to Machran with young Gersic shadowing him on a lighter, more spirited animal. Karnos’s horse was a dogged bay with a rolling gait that was less aggravating to the jolting pain of his wound. He liked the animal - it had a stubborn heart, and it ploughed through the muck of the roadside as though it would never stop.

  The natural world. It was a world shaped by the Macht, cowed by millennia of occupation, ploughed and planted and pruned to meet the needs and fashions of men. This was the finest farmland in all the Macht lands - sometimes they brought off two harvests a year in the hinterland of Machran. One could feed an army here, if one timed it right. And even in winter, the farms which dotted this country would have storehouses and byres and smokehouses full of grain and oil and meat on the hoof.

  That was the problem.

  Whatever Corvus’s logistic woes were at the moment, they would vanish as soon as his army came this far west. He could live off the land for weeks, perhaps months, without worrying about his supply lines back to the east.

  It was going to come down to an exercise in endurance. Karnos did not believe it was possible to assault the walls of mighty Machran so long as they were defended, but Machran was a great city with over a hundred thousand mouths to feed. The problem would come when they grew hungry faster than Corvus’s army.

  There would have to be something done about that, and no-one was going to like it.

  They stopped for the night in a village off the road, some nameless little place with a noisome wine-shop and a menu painted on the walls. Karnos spent coin liberally, silver obols with the machios sigil upon them, and held court in a corner by the fire while Gersic rubbed down the horses and did whatever it was horseriding types did to keep the animals on all four legs.

  The local population gathered in the smoky musk of the place and listened to Karnos tell of the battle lately fought, a hard-clenched affair according to him, in which both sides had suffered horribly, and it had been a near-run thing who should be declared victor.

  He told them that the men of Machran and Arkadios and Avennos would be marching through soon, that the war was not over, that they were to keep faith with the customs of their fathers and pay no mind if the usurper Corvus came their way; he was a passing catastrophe, like an earthquake, or a summer thunderstorm.

  He had not convinced them - he could see it in their faces. Not even his heavily edited version of the truth could disguise the fact that the League forces were in retreat. He slept that night with his pack beside him on the floor of the louse-ridden best room, and scratched at the sodden dressing wound clammily about his shoulder.

  He and Gersic were on the road before dawn, the night’s wine hammering at Karnos’s temples, the village left buzzing with apprehension behind them. For once in his life, Karnos found himself wishing he had kept his mouth shut.

  More days, grey with rain and fatigue, the horse under him the only thing of warmth in the world. They stopped in Arkadios, halfway to Machran now, and here Karnos was welcomed by the Kerusia, given leave to speak before the assembly. He measured his words here more carefully, and did not gloss over the defeat.

  He spoke bluntly of the carnage on the Afteni Plain, the fact that their menfolk were marching back west, not to defend Arkadios itself, but to add to the defence of Machran.

  He liked the Arkadians. They were a bright, sophisticated people much like his own, and if one could give an entire city a certain character, then Arkadios would be a rakish younger son. The Arkadian assembly was known to be mercurial and volatile, and Karnos had both abuse and praise thrown at him as he stood there in the marble amphitheatre off the agora. But he gave as good as he got, relishing the opportunity to indulge his wit, playing upon his wound, talking up the bloodiness of the battle which was becoming more and more a settled series of pictures in his mind.

  He did not win them over, but he won their respect. He had to make one concession, though; if Arkadians were to defend Machran, then Machran must take in those Arkadians who chose to flee their own city and put their trust in Machran’s walls. To this he agreed, knowing that he had committed himself to an unwise move. He had tried too hard with his last knucklebone, and knocked some of his own pieces off the board.

  Well, he thought, you want to eat eggs, you got to break eggshells.

  The road again, the sturdy uncomplaining horse under him to whom he talked as he rode. His shoulder pained him less, and under the bandages his wound was closed, and the heat was leaving it.

  The rain stopped at last, and all across the vast lowland bowl of the country about him the sun caught in a thousand splashes of white reflected water-light, and green came into the world again. He and Gersic passed through the towns of the hinterland: Lomnos, Verionin, Mas Gethir, Gan Brakon. This was the most thickly populated area of the world that Karnos knew, and the people here counted themselves citizens of Machran, and had the vote in
her assemblies. He was almost home again, and the thought of a hot bath and his own bed and Polio to see to his needs was a potent spur to his tired frame. He drove his horse harder, thinking of the men on the road behind him, the things that must be done on his arrival.

  But even so, he reined in his blowing mount when Machran itself finally came into view across the rolling farmland to the west, the Harukush rearing up in the gem-bright sky behind it. At the side of the road was an ancient stone waymarker, carved with writing so ancient that men no longer understood it. The view of the city from this point was famous, and bumpkins from the east had been known to stand here and gawp at the sight.

  Machran of the White Walls, the city had once been called, though most of the marble which had given it that name had been stripped away over the centuries. Those walls were the height of five tall men, and the towers along them twice that. Sixteen pasangs, the walls ran, enclosing a close-packed space the shape of an elongated egg. There were two hills within them, massive mounds which had been built over again and again since time immemorial. To the west, the Round Hill, a conical height upon which the richest districts of the city were clustered in well-spaced streets. To the east, Kerusiad Hill, upon whose slopes Karnos himself had his home.

  Legend had it that the two hills had once been two separate villages which quarrelled with one another until some bright soul had suggested they meet in the hollow between them to settle their differences. This marshy hollow had become a meeting place for the two communities, until they grew and merged.

  There had been a river there once, which flowed north into the Mithos, but it had been covered over long ago, and was now the main sewer for the city. And in deference to ancient tradition, the Empirion stood in that hollow, whose dome Karnos could see now shining in the winter sunlight. A place of learning, of entertainment, and - more prosaically - somewhere for the assembly to convene when the weather was especially bad.

  Not far from it was the Amphion, the Speaker’s Place where the assembly gathered in ordinary session to hear their leaders debate the issues of the day. The marshy riverbottom had become the seat of power and government for the greatest of all the Macht cities. The only one, legend had it, which had never been conquered, by siege or assault.