Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  And yet, when one looked in the eyes... There was a coldness there, an implacability.

  Corvus stood by the hearth and splayed his long white fingers to the flames, the nail-paint on them black in the firelight. It was barely midday outside, but here in the farmhouse it might have been the middle of the night. There was the low murmur of talk from the men beyond the walls, but no wind in the valley. The Andunnon River was a mere liquid guess of noise.

  Corvus turned around. He was smiling.

  “It is very simple,” he said. “I am here to hire you, your friend Fornyx, and your men. I wish you to come and serve in the ranks of my army.”

  Rictus took a seat, squirted more wine for himself into a clay cup, and methodically filled cups for them all. Druze raised his in salute before sipping at it, black eyes as watchful as those of a stoat. Fornyx sat down beside him, the two dark men looking more than ever like children of the same father, though one was hefted with wide-boned muscle, the other as lean as a blackthorn stick.

  “Mercenaries pick their employers,” Rictus said. “They choose their contracts, and vote on them. You may wish to hire us, Corvus, but that does not mean you can.”

  Corvus approached the table, lifted a cup, and studied the trembling face of the wine within.

  “Oh, I think I can,” he said softly. “Druze, tell him.”

  “Your senior centurions, Valerian and Kesero, are guests of our army as we speak,” Druze said, flapping a hand in apology. “Your centons have been rounded up and are in our camp outside Hal Goshen.”

  “Prisoners,” Fornyx hissed.

  “Guests,” Corvus corrected him. “I have already broached my terms of employment to them, and they find them agreeable. But they want to know your word on it, Rictus of Isca.”

  There it was. The glove slipped off, the fist shown at last. This slender cold eyed boy held Rictus and his family in the palm of his hand.

  “What if I said no?” Rictus asked.

  Corvus looked back down into his cup. “This is a harsh world. A man must do what he can to safeguard those he loves. And he will do what he must to make the life he has chosen for himself. I know that Karnos of Machran has approached you and your centons with a view to employment - employment against me. The Dogsheads are renowned across our world - how many are they now, Druze?”

  “Four hundred and sixty two,” Druze said instantly, “Not including those present here.”

  “Four hundred and sixty two men, only - but those men have been trained by Rictus of Isca. Their prowess, their very name - your name - is worth ten times those numbers of ordinary spearmen. And if Karnos sees sense, and offers you, Rictus, overall command of the League’s field-army, why then, my work would be doubled. The leader of the Ten Thousand, at the head of the Avennan League’s army - think on it! You would light a fire in the Harukush, one that might consume my ambitions forever.”

  Corvus was smiling now, tight-lipped, and in the firelight his high-boned face did not .seem entirely human. His eyes caught the flames like those of a fox.

  “So you see why I am here.”

  Rictus’s voice rasped like gravel out of his mouth. “What if I take employment with none of you -what if I wish to stay here and till my land and live out my life in peace, here in this valley?”

  Corvus nodded. “Your centurions have told me that you have spoken thus. You think of hanging up your spear, of following a plough, herding goats, laying down that scarlet cloak.” He paused. “You have loyal friends, Rictus. They almost convinced me.”

  Slowly, he tipped his cup and poured a thin stream of the ruby wine onto the tabletop. It spattered and pooled like fresh spilt blood.

  “For Phobos,” he said. “A libation.” He placed his hand in the wine and then raised it, palm outwards.

  “We are men of blood, you and I, Rictus. Sons of Phobos himself. You can no more set aside your nature than can I. In the times to come, you will don that cloak once more, you will heft a spear, and you will follow your calling. Do not try to tell me different. I see in you the restlessness that I have felt in myself all my life. If you join with me, you will be a part of great things; you will live your life as it was meant to be. You will have a part in the changing of the world. And I will keep faith with you forever. This I swear, to Phobos himself.” Then he looked Rictus in the eye.

  “If you do not join with me, then I will do what I must. You will die here today. But I promise you that you will die alone. Fornyx here will be spared - as will your family - and your men will take service with me. Your name will have a place in the story, but your part in it will be over. Today.” He smiled a little, and in his face there was something genuine -an earnest regret.

  Then he turned away, and at once his eyes blazed like those of a hungry animal.

  “I will let you think on it. And I will see you outside when you have made up your mind. Druze, let us go.”

  Druze rose and opened the door, letting in a blare of white light and the chill air of the world outside. He and Corvus went out, closing the door behind them. For a few moments Rictus was blind in the dimness of the farmhouse, his vision flaring with afterimages. It seemed that not only his eyes but his mind was reeling a little with what he had been told. As his vision returned, he drank deep of his wine.

  “Modest little bastard, ain’t he?” Fornyx said, sitting down heavily.

  “A phenomenon,” a voice said, and both Rictus and Fornyx started. It was Eunion, forgotten in the corner. He rose stiffly now and approached the table with the scroll still hanging in his hand. The dogs whined as they picked up the mood of the room.

  “A slave’s gift,” he said with a tight smile. “To have oneself overlooked.”

  “A gift I find myself wishing I had,” Rictus conceded.

  “You think he means what he says?” Fornyx asked.

  It was Eunion who answered. “He means it, master, he means all of it. He is a man who has a certain picture of himself in his head, and he will do anything to keep that picture real. Such men are the most dangerous of all to know. They are not pragmatists, but dreamers.”

  “His dreams have taken him far,” Fornyx said sourly, running his fingers through his beard. “Rictus, we’re in a corner here - we’ll have to go along with the little fuck, for now at least.”

  Rictus sat rolling the wine around in his mouth. He was curiously detached. He felt that he had never in his life tasted a cup of wine so completely, enjoying every nuance of its taste. There were complexities within it he had not guessed at, far beyond the run of his own mountain vintages.

  Something else - this Corvus knew him, knew him well enough to prod at the weaknesses in his makeup. Not just the veiled threats to his family and his men, not just a crude leverage. One gained men’s obedience that way, but not their loyalty.

  Corvus had lifted a curtain and made a promise of something greater beyond it, and Rictus knew, without question, that if this slender, terrible boy gave his word on something,” he would keep it. Because, as Eunion had said, he was a dreamer, and to break his word would destroy some picture he held of himself in his mind.

  Rictus looked at his friends. “We can trust him,” he said. “I know it.”

  Fornyx let out a low whistle. “You’re going to do it.”

  “It’s that or death - why not?” Rictus replied. He stood up, the wine loosening his brain. Looking around the homely room, he realised that this place had always been a refuge for him, and he hoped it always would be. But Corvus had been right - and Fornyx too.

  He would live and die with a scarlet cloak on his back.

  FIVE

  THE ARMY

  HAL GOSHEN. IN old Machtic the name denoted a gateway, and in the centuries since men had settled there, that was what it had been, commanding a gap between stone and water.

  The Gosthere Range, a jagged, rocky, bare-headed line of high hills or low mountains, threw out a long spin here, some two hundred pasangs from north-east to south-west. At the end of it
, on a wide flattened knob of high ground, the city had been built. It overlooked the ancient highway that connected the eastern portion of the Harukush with the western, and was a scant fifteen pasangs from the sea.

  The lowland ground between coast and mountain hail been fought over for generations, and was the root of Hal Goshen’s prosperity. It had deep, black soil which might yield two good crops a year, if the weather were kind, and down on the shore to the south were scores of fishing villages and small towns whose menfolk counted themselves citizens of the city on the hill, and voted in its assemblies. The port of Goshen itself was the largest of these, linked to the hilltop city by a fine road. It had one of the best natural harbours on the southern seaboard, and a prosperous fishing fleet was based there.

  An army travelling west across the Harukush would find the land narrowing between the mountains and the sea, until the grey tufa walls of Hal Goshen were before it, like the cork in a bottle. To drink the wine of the west, that cork would have to be popped.

  A company of men stood on the high ridge northeast of the city and halted there to take in the wide sweep of the world before them. It was bitterly cold, and snow was blowing across the ridge in clouds as hard and heavy as sand, pluming off the peaks of the mountains behind them in long banners across a pale sky, blue as a robin’s egg.

  Corvus seemed to feel the cold more than most. He was buried in a thick cloak, highlander’s felt, and held the hood close about his mouth.

  “There she lies, the door to the west. I hope we shall not have to knock too hard,” he said.

  Rictus scanned the open country to the south of the city, the scattered farms, so much closer together than in the highlands. A taenon of earth here would be a mere tithe of the expanse a man would need to support a family in the high country. Even with autumn well into its stride, the place had a prosperous, comfortable look, lined with vines and well-spaced olive trees, the woods cut back, the wetlands drained, neat tufa walls everywhere; a thousand years of labour or more. A tamed landscape, this; a fat pigeon waiting for a hawk.

  “It does not seem to me that the men of Hal Goshen are much panicked by your army,” Fornyx said. Snow had greyed his beard and eyebrows. He looked pinched, almost as grizzled as Rictus.

  “Our camp is eight pasangs back to the east,” Corvus said, his gaze fixed hungrily on the city. “But I hey know we’re here. They closed their gates eight days ago, and brought what provisions they could within the walls. The road to the port has been cut by my cavalry.”

  “I see no burnt farms or uprooted vines,” Rictus said.

  “That is not the way I make war,” Corvus told him. “I mean to possess this city, and the lands around it. I do not intend to capture a wasteland.”

  “Then how do you feed your men?” Fornyx asked, genuine surprise in his voice.

  “Trains of supply wagons are sent to me from my eastern possessions,” Corvus said. “That is why I am able to keep campaigning with winter coming on. We do a certain amount of foraging when we are on the march, but in general I find that it is best not to despoil a country whose inhabitants you wish to conciliate.”

  “It could be argued that a man whose farm is burning is more apt to listen to reason,” Fornyx said.

  Corvus turned his strange pale eyes upon him. “I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”

  “Your world is a stark and simple place,” Fornyx said.

  “I sleep well at night,” Corvus retorted with a grin.

  Rictus listened to their exchange without a word. He was thinking of Hal Goshen. For twenty years he had lived close by - Andunnon was barely sixty pasangs away, up in the Gosthere hills. He knew the men inside those tufa walls, had sat at their tables and drunk their wine. Phaestos, the Speaker of their kerusia, had hired him more than once, had eaten in Andunnon, hunted with him. He and Aise had been to the theatre there, to see Ondimion acted. Her scarlet dress had been bought in the city agora.

  It was from the port of Goshen that Rictus had taken ship for the Empire, so long ago. The sea had been black, then, with the ships of the Ten Thousand.

  He had no wish to see this city besieged, assaulted, or watch its people broken and enslaved. This was too close to home, to the memories that spanned the web of his life.

  “Your reasoning is sound,” he told Corvus. “Hal Goshen and its surrounds can muster some four thousand fighting men, maybe two thirds of them spearmen. They have no chance. If we inform them of that fact, then I don’t believe that it will prove difficult to make the Kerusia open the gates.”

  Corvus nodded, watching Rictus’s face closely. “That would be my take on it also. Of course, it would be better if this were pointed out to them by someone they know. Someone they trust.”

  Rictus looked down at the hooded youth, frowning. “Indeed.”

  Fornyx broke in. “Well, what say you we go take a look at this army of yours first? I want to see what all the fuss has been about.”

  AN ARMY’S CAMP usually announced itself on the wind, with the stink of men’s excrement. That, and woodsmoke. As they tramped down from the high land to the plain below they were able to take in the smell on the breeze, and at once it brought back to Rictus a spate of memories.

  In all the fighting he had done since returning with the Ten Thousand over two decades before, he had never been part of a force greater than two or three thousand men. The inter-city conflicts of the Macht were small-scale affairs, conducted almost to a kind of ceremony. Sieges such as that of his last campaign were unusual.

  The fighting men of two cities would line up in the summer, well before harvest-time, and crash into each other with all the tactical refinement of two rutting slags. Often the battlefields they fought upon had been fought over by their fathers and grandfathers, cockpits of war since time immemorial. One side would win, one would lose, and the victor would dictate terms. It was rare that such an encounter would lead to the extinction of a city as a political entity - the Macht considered it vaguely impious to destroy a polity entirely.

  There were special cases, however. Rictus’s own city, Isca, had been extinguished by a combination of her neighbours because Isca had drilled her citizens like mercenaries and made war on others with the intention of subjugating them entirely to her will, rendering them her vassals. To the Macht this was intolerable, unnatural. War in the Harukush was a bloody ritual, a way to make men of boys, and enhance a city’s riches and prestige. It was not conducted with the aim of outright conquest.

  And now Corvus had changed all that.

  How the hell did he do it? Rictus wondered. Who is this boy and where does he come from? He had so many questions, and he had not yet admitted even to himself that part of the reason he was here was sheer, avid curiosity. He wanted to see how it had been done.

  The camp of Corvus’s army was huge, a sprawling scar upon the face of the countryside. Roughly square, it was perhaps twenty taenons of tents and horse-lines and wagon-parks, the largest encampment Rictus had ever seen in the Harukush. Fornyx halted in his tracks at the sight of it and ran his fingers through his beard. “Phobos! So all the bullshit is true, after all. You really have conquered the east, and you’ve brought half of it here with you!”

  Corvus pointed out segments of the camp to them both.

  “Those lines nearest to us are the conscript spearmen, citizens of the eastern cities who are here for the duration of the campaign. Behind them are my own spears, who have followed me since the fall of Idrios, two years ago. Druze’s Igranians are encamped on the north side, and in the rear are my Companions, the cavalry of the army.”

  Rictus had seen large armies before. There had been over thirty thousand in the forces of Arkamenes, the Kufr pretender to the Great King’s throne, and Ashurnan had brought several times that to the field at Kunaksa. This was the camp of many thousands, but it was not the army he had
heard of in the stories - it was too small.

  “How many men do you have here?” he asked Corvus bluntly.

  “Enough for the task in hand. I have had to leave several garrisons behind me.” Corvus cocked his head to one side in that bird-like gesture of his.

  “The army you see here numbers somewhat under fourteen thousand.”

  “Phobos!” Fornyx exclaimed again, but Rictus was not so easily impressed.

  “You had best hope then that Karnos does not marshal all the forces of the Avennan League against you.”

  “Numbers are not everything,” Corvus said. “You of all men should know that, Rictus.”

  They walked down the descending slopes of the hills to the camp itself. There were mounted pickets out in twos and threes, unarmoured men bearing javelins, perched upon the tough hill-ponies of the eastern mountains. Closer to the mass of hide tents, spear-carrying infantry stood sentry. The Macht’ cities emblazoned the shields of their warriors with the sigils that denoted their city’s name, but Corvus’s soldiers all had the symbol of a black bird painted on theirs, their only concession to uniformity.

  The nearest of them raised their spears and shouted Corvus’s name as he was recognised, and it seemed to send a stir throughout the camp, as wind will usher a wave across a field of ripe corn. The hooded boy walking beside Rictus threw back the folds of his highlander chlamys and raised a hand as he entered the encampment of his army, to be met by a hoarse formless shout from the crowds of men who saw him arrive.

  “They love the little bugger,” Fornyx said, marvelling.

  A tented city, with neat streets, the roadways within corduroyed with logs where the ground was soft. Latrines had been dug at every crossroads, deep slit trenches with men squatting over them. Fresh ones were being dug even as Rictus watched. There was discipline here, a level beyond that of the usual citizen-army.

  An open space before the largest tent they had yet seen. A line of tall wooden posts with outspanning arms had been embedded in the earth along one side, like a series of gibbets.