Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “You are lucky to be able to do so. For us within these walls, there is no such choice.”

  “That is war. A man cannot always have what he wants.” Fornyx let the last of his wine trickle over the bloodstained stone of the walls. “For Phobos, who has the last word on us all.”

  Karnos did the same. “For Antimone, who watches over us in pity.”

  Fornyx tossed his cup away. “I must get started,” he said.

  THE SHORT WINTER’S day ran its course, and as night came on the corpses lay contorted and hardening at the foot of Machran’s walls amid a wreckage of broken timber and iron, the ghastly flotsam of war. The bodies on the battlements were slowly cleared away, the waggons trundling into the night with their grisly loads, but no-one as yet had gone near the mounded charnel house piled up outside the city. Those who had died going up and down the ladders lay where they had fallen.

  Rictus opened his eyes.

  All day he had lain as still as the corpses surrounding him, drifting in and out of the world. His wounds had stopped bleeding, and he was almost beyond feeling the cold. He knew there were things broken in him, but he could not quite make out what they were. His black armour was so slathered with blood and gobbets of flesh that it had lost its unearthly darkness and was a dull red, the colour of a clay tile.

  He smiled. He was still a Cursebearer.

  There were other things moving in the mound of bodies, and small mewling sounds from men who were still alive deep in that hill of decaying flesh. One of the last to fall, Rictus was near its crest. He had tumbled from the walls and landed on a mattress of dead and dying men, and Antimone’s Gift had stopped the impact from killing him. When he breathed, he could feel the broken ends of bones grating in his chest, but he was breathing.

  Alive, but not quite of this world, not yet. The cold had numbed him, and the reopened wound in his arm had bled him almost white.

  Better the cold than the putrefying heat of the summer.

  There was a snuffling and yapping at the base of the corpse-mound, animals growling and snapping. The vorine had come out in the night to feast upon the dead.

  That galvanised him. He bit down on his own agony as he struggled over the wood-hard limbs and snarling faces that surrounded him. There was torchlight on the battlements high above, and periodically a sentry would lean over an embrasure and study the sights below. Once, one threw a stone at the feeding vorine. Each time, Rictus went limp, staring up with the open eyes of the dead at the men above.

  He was not the only survivor with the strength to move. As he slithered downwards over the bodies here and there a hand clutched feebly at him, a desperate stare met his own. He ignored them, intent on his own salvation, on beating down the pain and keeping the languor of the cold from carrying him out of the world.

  Someone was coming. It was not yet moonrise, but even so, Rictus could make out a crouched shadow working its way about the foot of the mound. He fell still, but the mound shifted under him, and he slid helplessly across the face of a bronze shield, and was jabbed in the thigh by the blade of a broken drepana. He emitted a sharp hiss of new pain.

  The shadow paused, then approached. The vorine turned to meet this new threat, snarling, unwilling to leave the hill of bounty they had found. There was a swift, sharp sound, and one of the beasts yelped.

  Torchlight over the battlements again. All went still. The yellow eyes of the vorine reflected back the light as they drifted off in the darkness, angry and afraid. The light left, the sentry walking on.

  The shadow came closer. Rictus lay paralyzed with sudden terror, as keen a fear as he had felt on any battlefield. Something was climbing up the serried limbs of the dead, standing on their joints and fingers, ascending a ladder of meat.

  Rictus could hear it breathing right beside him, see the warm air it exhaled in a white cloud. Then it set a hand upon his face.

  He lurched, the pain in his chest screaming. The hand forced him down easily.

  “Be quiet, you bloody fool. Lie still.”

  A strange voice, but familiar.

  An eye came into view, a glow about it similar to that which lit the eyes of the vorine.

  “Bel be praised. Rictus!” the voice whispered. “How are you hurt?”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s Ardashir.” The face came closer, and Rictus could see it was that of the tall Kefren. One of his eyes was swollen closed, and all that side of his head was black with blood.

  “Ardashir...” Rictus fell back.

  “Can you walk? Are you much hurt?”

  “I don’t know, Ardashir. What happened to you?”

  “I got hit on the head by a stone, right at the start - I never even made it to the ladders.”

  “You were lucky,” Rictus said. He closed his eyes. The world was moving under him, as though he were too drunk to stand. He grunted as the pain bit into him again, and realised that the Kefren was pulling him down over the dead, grasping him by the wings of his cuirass.

  “If your legs still work, time to start using them,” Ardashir whispered. “It’s a long way back to camp.”

  “My head is stuffed with wool. No, keep going. For the love of God, get me out of this.”

  His legs worked, albeit sluggishly, as though they had gone unused for days. Finally Ardashir and Rictus lay on the cold ground beyond the mounded bodies. Rictus struggled and swayed to his feet, while Ardashir set another arrow to his bow and shot it at the vorine pack which hovered scant yards away.

  “Get yourself a spear, or something to swing at those fellows,” Ardashir said. “They seem rather intent on us.”

  Rictus found a bloodied drepana, but it was too heavy for him. His right arm was a bloodless lump of meat. He found the sauroter-end of a broken spear, and stood with it in his left fist, swaying.

  “I could do with a drink,” he said.

  “You and me both - here, lean on me, and wave that thing at our hungry friends. We’ve a way to go before moonrise.”

  The mismatched pair began limping and stumbling away from the walls of Machran, the tall Kefren half-carrying the dazed Macht. The vorine watched them from a safe distance, and then left off the pursuit for easier pickings among the dead of Corvus’s army.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE SHADOWS ON THE PLAIN

  “LOOK AT IT,” Philemos said in wonder. “It’s like a city. Father, do you see?”

  Phaestus lifted his head, as weary and lean as a dying vulture. “It’s his army. His curse upon the world.”

  Sertorius looked out across the darkened landscape at the vast crescent of campfires which extended for pasangs to the south and east of Machran. He whistled softly. “Phaestus my friend, were I a believing man I would echo you. Never seen anything like it.”

  Bosca spat upon the sleet-thickened pelt of the earth. “Machran still stands, and from what I see this fellow has no campfires to the north of the city, up at the river. Looks like a way in, boss.”

  “Agreed. We’ll follow the riverbank and try for the Mithannon Gate. Come, people; we’re nearly there.”

  He turned to the three huddled figures behind him, scarecrows with hair as wild as brambles and eyes sunken into their heads. He bent and grasped one face in his filthy hand, turning it this way and that.

  “Bosca, you are a slap-happy prick, you know that? Can’t you fuck a woman without using your fists?”

  “She needed a little encouragement,” Bosca said with a shrug. “Wasn’t putting her heart into it.”

  “It makes us look bad, like thugs from the gutter.”

  “That is what you are,” Philemos said evenly.

  Sertorius drew close to the dark-haired boy, smiling. “Careful, lad - we’re not in Machran yet. I’ve indulged you, because I like your spirit. Even gave you the girl to moon over all you want. But don’t you press me too hard - I get cantankerous, this close to the end of a job.”

  “The boy means nothing by it,” Phaestus croaked.

  “Well
make sure you speak up for us in Machran, Phaestus - make me look good. I’ve not come all this way for a pat on the head and a bronze obol set in my hand. Me and mine have earned something substantial, getting these bitches this far.”

  “Get us into the city and you shall have your just deserts, Sertorius, I promise you,” Phaestus said.

  “Very well, then. Up, ladies! The last leg lies before us.”

  He bent Over Aise again. “Soon that sweet cunny of yours will get a rest, wife of Rictus. You can spend what’s left of your days looking back on the fond memories we ploughed you with.”

  Then he turned and set his face close to Rian’s. “I only wish I had tasted you, my little honey-pot. I would have given you dreams to remember me by.”

  He straightened. “Let’s go. Adurnos, carry the brat, and keep it quiet.”

  The little company moved out. Sertorius led Aise on a leash, and she stumbled in his wake, her once beautiful face bruised and swollen and bloody. Then came hulking Adurnos, carrying Ona on his shoulder as though she were a sack. The child’s eyes were dead as stones, and when she gathered breath for a cough he set his fingers over her mouth and smothered it.

  He was followed by Philemos and Rian, half-dragging Phaestus with them. Bosca brought up the rear. He amused himself now and then by shoving Rictus’s eldest daughter in the back, his grin a yellow gleam in the darkness.

  They straggled through the night, a haggard company of travellers at the end of their journey. As they drew nearer to Machran they could smell burning; not woodsmoke, but a putrid, sickening reek that hung heavy in the night.

  “That’s a funeral pyre,” Sertorius sniffed, “a big one.”

  “There’s been a battle,” Philemos said.

  The river was loud and pale to their right. The open plain about Machran seemed deserted, the city and the conqueror’s army facing each other across it as though separated by a gulf of shadow.

  “Phobos is rising,” Phaestus said. He fell to one knee. Philemos hauled him up again. Phaestus leaned his weight on the shoulders of his son and Rictus’s daughter.

  “Forgive me,” he murmured to Rian.

  “Shit,” Sertorius said. “Someone’s out there - I can see them. Down, all of you.”

  They lay in the broken crackling rows of a winter vineyard. The plants had been slashed and trampled flat, but were still high enough to conceal them. Sertorius and his men drew their knives.

  A pair of shadows lurched by not two hundred paces away to the south, one supporting the other like a man helping a drunken friend. They were making a painfully slow progress across the plain to the camp of Corvus’s army.

  Sertorius breathed out. “Just stragglers, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Up, up - let’s go before the night gets old.”

  Aise stood staring at the retreating shadows for a moment before the leash at her throat jerked her into motion. She trudged after Sertorius again, head down, her feet bare and bloody and the white skin of her naked shoulder shining like a bone under the rising moons.

  THE PYRE WAS still burning as they passed it, flames licking here and there in fitful tongues. There were people coming and going between it and the open gate of the Mithannon, and centons of spearmen standing in ordered ranks. Women were keening and sobbing, an eerie chorus in the night, and the torchlight made of it all a dark tableau of shadow and fire, a dramatist’s invocation of grief. The company made their halting way to the looming gateway of the city, and there were stopped by men in full panoply, one bearing a centurion’s transverse crest.

  “Your names and district.”

  “Phaestus,” Sertorius said, “This is on you, now.”

  The old man straightened and seemed to find some last reserve of strength. He stood tall in front of the centurion.

  “I am Phaestus of Hal Goshen, and I bear news for Karnos, Speaker of Machran. You must take me and those with me to him at once.”

  When the centurion did not move, he barked out in a much louder voice, “Do as I say!”

  The strength left him. He sagged, and was seized with a fit of wet, bloody coughing.

  The centurion turned to one of his men. “Get Kassander here.”

  FROM THE MITHANNON Gate to Kerusiad Hill was two pasangs as a crow might fly, half as long again by the meander of the Mithannon’s cramped streets and alleyways. Phaestus and Aise had nothing left in them, nor any strength to trudge over the hard cold cobbles of the city amid the night-time crowds. When Kassander arrived he looked over the travellers one by one. As he saw Aise’s condition his eyes widened and anger made of his mouth a wide, lipless slot.

  “What has happened to this woman?”

  “She tried to escape,” Sertorius said. Standing by the burly armoured polemarch he seemed like a jackal cowering before a lion. “She’s been difficult from the start. We’ve travelled over half the Gostheres to get here, through snowdrifts as high as your head. Been near three weeks on the road.”

  Kassander flicked a hand at the centurion. “Cut her free. The other one too.” He looked down at Sertorius and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He turned.

  “I know you, Phaestus. We have met in the past.”

  “You know me,” Phaestus agreed. He lay on the cobbles with Philemos supporting him. “I must see Karnos.”

  “Can you walk?”

  Phaestus smiled faintly. “I’ve walked this far.”

  “I will have a cart brought here. Centurion!”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stay with these people. When transport arrives escort them to Karnos’s villa on the Kerusiad. Then set a guard about the house.”

  He turned to Sertorius, leaned in so close that the bronze face of his helm was misted by the other man’s breath.

  “I don’t give a fuck who she is; you’d better have a good reason for treating a woman that way.”

  FOR A CITY under siege, Machran did not lack liveliness, even at this hour of the night. The mule-drawn cart sent for them had to have a path cleared for it through the crowds by the escorting spearmen, and by the time it had meandered across a third of the city, Phobos was almost set and Haukos was high in the sky.

  Pink Haukos - to the Macht he was the moon of hope, but across the teeming Empire of the Kufr, he was called Firghe, moon of wrath.

  Word had gone ahead of them. When the mule-cart finally completed its clattering ascent of the Kerusiad Hill, the doors of Karnos’s villa were already open in a blaze of torchlight, and the master of the house stood wrapped in a woollen chlamys against the cold, his household all about him. He saw the condition of those in the cart and clapped his hands. Half a dozen slaves congregated on the vehicle. Phaestus lifted his head, but could not speak.

  Karnos bent over him and took his hand. “My friend, be at ease. Your wife and daughters arrived here over a week ago. I have them quartered in comfort further up the hill. I shall send word to Berimus.” Phaestus closed his eyes, and tears trickled down his face. Karnos patted his shoulder.

  “You must be Philemos,” he said. “A fine looking young man. I salute you for seeing your father to safety.” Philemos bowed his head, looking more than anything else ashamed. Karnos sucked his teeth a moment.

  “You three,” he said to Sertorius and his comrades. “What part did you play in all this?”

  “We were the escort,” Sertorius said with a grin that flickered on and off in his face. “Without us, Phaestus would be dead in the drifts of the Gostheres.”

  “Is this true?” Karnos asked Phaestus. The older man’s eyes opened and he nodded.

  Karnos ran his gaze over the brutalised captives in the cart. Rian met his eyes with a glaring, tearstained defiance, holding Ona in her arms. Aise sat with her head resting on her elder daughter’s shoulder, eyes shut, barely conscious.

  “You are to be congratulated,” he said at last to Sertorius. “It’s not a time to be on the road.” He raised his voice slightly. “Polio.”

  “Master?” The old steward was also staring at
the women in the cart, his white beard quivering.

  “We must find a space for these three fine fellows to lay their heads. Water for washing, food and wine - whatever they want. Have the cook run something up.”

  “How about a plump little slave girl?” Bosca leered.

  Karnos looked at him. “Centurion?”

  “Yes, Speaker.”

  His eyes were still fixed on Bosca. “I want four men to stand guard over our guests here. Make sure they do not wander round my house and lose themselves.”

  “Yes, Speaker.”

  “Now listen here, Karnos -” Sertorius exclaimed.

  “Ah, I have it. Grania, show these gentlemen to the grain store. You will forgive me, my friends, but I am a little short on space.” Karnos jerked his head to one side and the spearmen clustered around Sertorius, Adurnos and Bosca. The slim slave girl led the way.

  “Phaestus - you tell him!” Sertorius shouted over his shoulder. “You’d be dead were it not for me!” The spearmen shoved him along in Grania’s wake with the relish of angry men.

  Karnos was still staring at Rictus’s brutalised family. “Phobos,” he seethed under his breath. He and Polio looked at one another.

  “We couldn’t stop them,” Philemos said miserably. Karnos looked at him with contempt, then shook his head and touched Rian gently on the arm.

  “Lady, you are in my house now, and here I swear no man shall touch you.”

  Rian bent her head and began to sob silently.

  THE SLAVES WENT about their business in unaccustomed silence. They had rarely seen their master in such a mood. He was not shouting, ranting or throwing winecups at the walls, as they had seen him do many a time on returning from the Amphion. He was not drunk, nor was he impatiently shouting orders as was his wont.

  He sat in his chair before the fire of the main hall and stared into the flames with unblinking eyes as though he were waiting for something to appear there. The long room was almost in darkness, a few single-wicked lamps glowing in the corners. His chlamys lay on the floor at his feet, and no slave had yet dared approach to pick it up.