Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  The ground in the Avennan Quarter had always been low-lying, and soon it became infamous for the miasma which hung around it, the effluent from thousands of people living more or less in the open, squatting to relieve themselves wherever they could find a quiet corner.

  Karnos went everywhere in a nondescript box chair now, borne by four of his most trusted slaves. When he walked on the streets openly he would not get a hundred paces before some woman would be holding her sick baby up to him and shrieking. So he went through the streets of Machran - his city -looking out from behind a twitching curtain while the slaves negotiated a way through the febrile crowds, aided by a file of spearmen who were unafraid to use their shields to bowl the stubborn or bloody-minded out of the way.

  He watched as day by day the great capital of the Macht, with its towering marble buildings and soaring domes, became a cesspool of the desperate and the wicked. Little could be done about public order, because the spearmen were needed on the walls - even so, they had put out two major fires in the last week.

  He climbed out of the box-chair in front of his house, and Polio was waiting for him, slamming the heavy doors behind him, and shutting out the close-packed chaos of the streets outside. Like water, the people seemed to gather in the hollows of the city in preference to the hilltops, and the Kerusiad Hill was quieter than the districts around the Empirion and the Amphion.

  As for the Mithannon, it had become a law unto itself, and gangs were operating there with relative impunity. Not the old, well-established street-tribes of Machran, but new, disorderly, vicious bodies of desperate men who would not pick up a weapon to defend the walls, but would fight to maintain control over the few wretched alleyways they considered theirs to rule.

  No doubt that was where Sertorius and his henchmen were now.

  The three had broken out of the villa the day after they had arrived and had disappeared into the vastness of Machran. There was no point in trying to find them again; they would fit well into the anarchy prevailing in the Mithannon. Karnos was glad they were gone, in a way that made him feel ashamed. He had wanted the three of them dead, for the brute animals that they were, but his own part in the death of Rictus’s wife left him with dirty hands. He did not feel he had the right to sit in judgement over anyone anymore, no matter what Kassia said.

  He was not the only one, either. Phaestus had joined his family in a rented villa further down the hill, and Karnos had not spoken to him since the day after his arrival in the city. He was failing fast, at any rate, coughing his lungs out of his mouth piece by piece. Antimone’s wings beat over him now, and from what Philemos had told Karnos, the old man did not seem to mind. He had led a blameless life, but had ended it with one brutal act, and seemed to feel that his painful death was punishment for it.

  We all think more and more in terms of death and the gods these days, Karnos thought. We flick out our libations and make light of it when we have wine inside us and the wolf is far from the door, but break down our world a little, let us glimpse the eyes watching us from beyond the firelight, and we call on the gods like children wailing for a parent.

  “Any trouble?” he asked Polio automatically.

  “No, master. The guard’s day shift was just relieved. There is nothing to report.”

  Twice in the last fortnight, prowling mobs had sallied up the hill looking for the house of Karnos, to let him know just how much they resented his mishandling of the city’s administration. Twice, Machran spearmen had beaten them back, and killed several of their own citizens in the process.

  Law and order, Karnos thought. In the end it all comes down to who has the biggest stick.

  “Have we visitors?”

  “Master Philemos is here, and the lady Kassia is waiting for you. Polemarch Kassander sent word by runner that he will be here for dinner.”

  “Dinner!” Karnos laughed. “Very well. Thank you, Polio.”

  He looked in on Rictus’s children. They had a suite of rooms at their disposal, and he had hired a quiet, middle-aged Arkadian woman to look after the youngest.

  She was kneeling on the floor now with the little russet-haired girl, Ona, and the two of them were assembling wooden blocks in front of a meagre fire.

  For weeks now, the child had withdrawn from the world. She cried silently night and day, and would speak to no-one except her sister, but would become absorbed at the sight of a trinket or crude toy, crooning over it for hours.

  The room was warm, at least, and there were a couple of lamps burning. He met the eyes of the nurse and shook his head when she made to lift the little girl for him to look at, then walked past the doorway without a sound, feeling like a thief in his own home.

  Rian, Rictus’s beautiful eldest daughter, was in the inner courtyard, sat on a bench with a blanket round her shoulders. Philemos stood in front of her, chattering away. He was quite a talker when he got going, Philemos. Karnos liked the lad; he had courage, though he would never be physically formidable, and he was clearly besotted with Rian.

  Karnos stood silently behind a pillar and watched the pair of them. Rian’s skin was pale as a hawthorn bloom, and her ordeal had brought out the exquisite bones of her face. Sadness made her features even finer. Philemos had told Karnos of their journey to Machran, and he knew there was a strength in Rian that matched that of her dead mother.

  You had a fine family, Rictus, Karnos thought. You should have kept out of all this, stayed in the hills and left your spear by the door. How could a man not be happy with what you had?

  Rian looked up and saw him there. Philemos paused in mid flow, and gave her his hand. They came towards him side by side, and Karnos suddenly realised that the affection was not all one way.

  It was Kassia who had drawn their eyes. He could smell her perfume as she came up behind him and slid her arm through his.

  “The master of the house returns. How went the day, Karnos?”

  He set his hand on hers, smiled at Philemos and Rian.

  “It goes much better now than it did. What say you we all take a seat by the fire, and I’ll tell you about it?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  MOON OF WRATH

  THE FORAGING PARTY was two hundred strong, strung out along two pasangs of track, its column broken up by lumbering waggons and the braying stubbornness of a mule train. At its head a knot of horsemen rode with their cloaks pulled up over their heads, and the tall Niseians plodded below them in gaunt doggedness, their coats staring and as muddy as the harness of their masters.

  “Old Urush here is near the end of his rope,” one of them said in Kefren, patting the corded neck of his mount. “It’s been nothing but yellow grass and parched oats for him these three weeks past.”

  “The Macht eat horses,” another said. “They think nothing of it. How can a race pretend to civilization when they will eat a horse?”

  “You might be glad of a taste of it ere we’re done,” a third said, a grin splitting the golden skin of his long face. “Ardashir, what say you?”

  Their leader reined in and held up one long-fingered hand. “Shoron, you have good eyes - look south to where the track goes round the spur of the hill, maybe seven pasangs.”

  “I can’t see a thing. The rain is like a cloud in this country.”

  “Wait a moment, it will shift - there. You see?”

  The Kefren called Shoron dug his knees into the withers of his horse and raised himself up off the saddle. He shaded his eyes as though it were a summer day.

  “Mot’s blight, that’s infantry, a column marching this way. I count... blast the rain. Maybe five thousand - the column’s at least a pasang long. Could be more.”

  “Bless your sight, Shoron,” Ardashir said. He looked back at the long train of horsemen and waggons and mules behind him. His mount picked up his mood and began to lumber impatiently. He hissed at it. “Easy, Moros, you great fool.” He shook his head.

  “It’s no good. We must leave the waggons - even infantry can outmarch the damn things. B
ring the mules along. We must pick up the pace and get back to the city. Arkamosh, head back down the column and tell the rest. Break off back the way we came. Make all speed.”

  “I thought we had all the Macht beaten or penned up in the city,” Shoron said.

  “They are a stubborn people,” Ardashir replied. “Defeat does not come easy to them.”

  * * *

  THE MEN AT the head of the infantry column saw a fistful of horsemen in the distance, half hidden by the rain; they disappeared over the crest of a hill and were gone. The rain turned icy, and the day closed in on them. Steam rose from the men tramping along in their armour. Their shields bore the alfos sigil of Avensis, and further back in the column, the piros sigil of Pontis. They marched in their stubborn thousands, their faces set towards the north, and the siege-lines of Machran.

  “EMPTY YOUR POCKETS, gentlemen. Let’s see what we’ve all brought to the pot,” Sertorius said.

  The gang about the battered table muttered and did as they were told, like hulking children obeying a schoolmaster. Onto the burn-scarred wood fell scraps of root vegetables, a rind of salted meat, cheese blue with mould and some crusts of flatbread, hard as the wood of the table itself. A pause, and Sertorius ran his eyes over them one by one. A second shower of scraps followed, much like the first.

  “Now the other. Don’t hold back, brothers - we are all in this together now.”

  There was a clinking little waterfall of coin. Bronze obols for the most part, but there were threads of silver in it, and at the end Bosca grinned yellow in his beard and set a single gold obol atop the pile. There was a silence as the other men about the table looked at it.

  “Bosca, how in the world?” Sertorius began.

  “I ventured up Kerusiad Hill last night, boss, and a fine-looking lady gave me this to escort her home.”

  “You fuck her?” Adurnos asked. A professional enquiry, nothing more.

  “She was older than my mother, and hardly a tooth in her head.”

  “He did, then,” Sertorius said, and the table broke into laughter.

  People walking by the group of men at the crossroads stopped and stared a moment at the mirth, then walked on hurriedly.

  They were gathered together under a tattered cloth awning in the front of what had been a wineshop. But the shop had been looted and burnt out weeks ago, and was now little more than a shell, a fitting base of operations for Sertorius’s new venture in Machran.

  He had seven men under him now, a tight-knit gang who had all been strangers to the city until the siege. Apart from Adurnos and Bosca, there were a pair of brothers from Arkadios, and three Avennan soldiers who had pawned their armour for food long ago and were now intent only on avoiding starvation, as the siege drew near its end.

  Food, or the procurement of it, was what obsessed them all, as it did every person still alive within the walls. The grain-dole had been halved, and was barely enough to keep a child standing, let alone a full grown man. Antimone was hovering over the city now, waiting for the end. There were wild-eyed prophets who haunted the shanty-towns and swore that they had seen her gliding on black wings around the dome of the Empirion at night.

  There was no longer any wood to be spared for burning the dead, and the corpses were tossed over the walls each morning by details of men who were paid in bread. Women were selling themselves for a crust, offering their children to strangers for some morsel that would keep the life in them another day.

  Lurid rumours of cannibalism ran through the Mithannon, but Sertorius for one did not put much stock by them. There were still rats to be had, two obols apiece, and enterprising archers had started to shoot down the crows and ravens that circled the city as though it were one vast carrion pit. They were not such good eating, but they kept the life in a man.

  Sertorius lifted up the gold obol, and clapped Bosca on the shoulder. “You see this, boys? Right now we would pay this for a boiled chicken, or a half skin of wine. But this here means something. We get clear of this shithole, and this piece of gold is worth a horse, or some cattle, or a slave. We got to remember that, if we’re to come out of this smiling.”

  “I’d rather have the chicken,” one of the Arkadians said.

  “Right now we all would. But think on it, lads -there’s houses up on the Kerusiad that are stuffed with these. When the whole thing turns to ratshit, we all have to stick together, and think of the future. One day very soon, that Corvus is going to come in over the walls, and when that happens, we’ll be ready. There will be a shower of gold for those who keep their heads, and maybe other things too.” His face hardened. “I hear tell that Phaestus, the old bastard, is still alive, and living in comfort in a house not far from Karnos’s.”

  “Fucker,” Adurnos said with feeling.

  “And we know where Karnos’s house is, don’t we? He’s the richest bastard in the city - think what he has stowed away up there.”

  “That little black-haired bitch,” Bosca said, running his hand through his matted beard. “By Phobos, boss, I’d die a happy man if I could get a cock in her before I go.”

  Sertorius brought a fist down on the table. “There you are, then. We wait this out, boys, steer clear of the other crossroads-gangs and keep our heads down. Then, when the big show begins, we make our way up to the Kerusiad, settle some old scores, and fill our pockets. We play this right and the whole thing can end happy. Are you with me?”

  Around the table, the men growled in agreement.

  THERE WAS HUNGER on the other side of the walls also. The supply waggons trundled in ceaselessly from the east, but there was never enough to go round, and the men in the various camps of Corvus’s army grew restless.

  Desertions had begun, conscript spearmen who had had enough and were sick of the tented lines, the huddled campfires, and the persistent hunger. This was not how they had imagined war.

  Corvus toured the camps with an escort of Dogsheads, and Ardashir’s Companions patrolled the stockade-lines ceaselessly to deter those who had had enough from putting their discontent into action, but despite the arrival of fresh levies from some of the eastern cities, there was a growing disquiet in the army, a feeling that their general might have miscalculated.

  Rumours flew abroad like crows - Maronen had rebelled, and the uprising had been put down by its garrison only after a bloody battle that had seen the streets run red. Hal Goshen and Afteni were simmering with discontent, and reinforcements meant for the army surrounding Machran had been diverted to reinforce their garrisons.

  Most unsettling of all, there were scattered reports that the Avennan League had recovered from its mauling of the year before, and was now assembling an army for the relief of Machran. It was already on the march, camp gossip said. Soon Corvus would be caught between two fires, and the besieger would find himself outnumbered and surrounded.

  “THERE IS TRUTH in some rumours,” Corvus said. He stood in front of the map table with his father’s black cuirass gleaming dark and menacing on its stand behind him. In front of the table stood all the senior officers of the army, except one.

  “I have had word from Ardashir this evening. He’s in the hills twenty pasangs to the south of our lines, a foraging trip with two hundred of the Companions and a train of waggons.” Corvus let his strange bright eyes range over the silent men standing before him. Rictus was there, hollow-cheeked and lean as a winter wolf. Beside him stood Fornyx, and then Teresian, one-eyed Demetrius, dark Druze, and Parmenios, not so plump as he had been, and wearing armour now like the rest.

  “It would seem our friends in the League have used the winter months to some advantage. They have taken heart, and rebuilt an army of sorts. That army is even now marching to the relief of Machran.”

  The men he faced said nothing, but stared at him. There was no speculation; there were no questions. They had been at their trade too long for that. Corvus smiled at them, his white face shining like a bone.

  “It will be here in the morning.”

 
; Now they did stir. Frowning, Rictus spoke up. “How many?”

  “Ardashir reckons on some seven thousand, all spears.”

  “The defenders will sally out, when they get wind of this,” Demetrius grunted. “Even if they’re half-dead with hunger, they will come out.”

  “Yes, they will,” Corvus said. “And therein lies our hope.” He leaned over the map table. Once, it had been covered with maps of the entire eastern Harukush, with cities dotted over it like cherries, blobs of red wax with ancient names. Now there was one large sheet of paper, the corners held down with empty winecups, and drawn across it were the outlines of Machran’s walls.

  It has all come down to this, Rictus thought, looking down on the map. One lone city, and tomorrow: one single day. Like the point of a spearhead.

  Corvus met his eyes, and grinned. He seemed to be thrumming with barely suppressed energy; there was almost a gaiety about him. Always, he seemed happiest when on the cusp of great events, be they good or bad.

  “Take a look at our lines, gentlemen. We’re spread thin, to contain the city. That job is done. After tomorrow it will not matter any more, one way or the other. So I intend to consolidate the army once more, but only to make a fresh division of it.”

  They raised their heads and looked at him, puzzled. His hand skittered over the map.

  “Druze, you will abandon your camp on the Mithos, and bring your command back here, to the main body. Teresian, you will take your morai south, to join with Demetrius. Ardashir will concentrate the Companions on you as well. Rictus, you will take your Dogsheads -” he raised his head. “How many have you trained up now?”

  “Six hundred.”

  Demetrius’s face darkened. “That’s why Teresian and I have understrength morai - we’ve been leaking our best men to Rictus and Fornyx for weeks. Every bastard wants to get himself one of those red cloaks.”