Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “What’s this?” Fornyx asked.

  “The execution ground,” Corvus told him. “And here is my tent. Rictus, I would be happy to make you my guest.”

  “Where are my men?” Rictus demanded. “I wish to see them.”

  Corvus nodded to Druze, who sped off. It had begun to rain, a cold drizzle clouding down from the mountains. “Come inside. They’ll be here presently.”

  The tent was tall, a draped house of hides upon which the rain had begun to drum more insistently, with one entire wall lifted up on poles. There were braziers within, bright and hot with charcoal, a broad table covered with maps, a simple cot, and an armour stand hung with weapons and a black cuirass. Two sentries stood stolid as marble by the wide entrance, ignoring the rain running down their faces.

  “This is home for me,” Corvus said, discarding his sodden chlamys and spreading his fingers out to the heat of a brazier. A pair of boys, not more than fifteen, took the cloak and brought wine to the table in a jug of actual glass.

  “After I took Idrios, I had it made - it took the hides of eighty cattle. In the past two years I have not slept under a proper roof more than a half-dozen times.” He raised his head, smiling. “I like to hear the rain beat upon it.”

  He seemed to snap himself out of a reverie. “Drink - it’s not Minerian, but almost as good. I eat at dusk. You’ll meet the other commanders of the army then. We have much to discuss.”

  Rictus drank, admiring the glass jug, discreetly studying the maps upon the table. For the most part they showed the eastern Harukush: its rivers, its roads, its cities and towns. But there was one that portrayed the lay of the land all the way up to Machran and its broad hinterland, the ring of cities about it that were all members of the loose confederation known as the Avennan League, named for the city of Avennos in which it had been formed, over twenty years ago.

  This boy standing at the brazier had in two years conquered his way across some eight hundred pasangs of the Harukush, and by these maps he now controlled at least a dozen major cities, as well as all the countless towns and villages in between.

  Where in the world had he come from?

  “I might have known I’d find you pair with cups in your hands,” a voice said. It was Kesero, grinning so wide as to show every thread of silver ringing his teeth. And beside him Valerian, the ruined beauty of his lop-sided face alight with something akin to relief.

  “Rictus - how went it at the farm - is everyone - is Rian -”

  “My family is well,” Rictus said formally, unsmiling. “Report, centurions. How are my men?”

  They stiffened, raindrops streaking their faces. Fornyx stood silent beside Rictus. The two older men were both in their black armour with the scarlet chitons and cloaks of their calling. The rest of their gear had been carried for them by Druze’s men, but they bore their swords, and looked every inch the hard-boiled mercenary centurions. Valerian and Kesero, by contrast, were clad in grey civilian chitons which had not been washed any time recently.

  “The Dogsheads are bivouacked half a pasang from here, on the south side of the camp,” Valerian said. “All are present with their arms on hand, awaiting your orders.”

  “We voted on it,” Kesero said, his shaven head gleaming with rain. “They’re sticking with you, Rictus. They’ve signed no contract, and will sign none without your say.”

  Rictus looked at Corvus. “I think we may be out of the territory of contracts. The game has changed.”

  “Something else to talk about,” Corvus said. “But later.” Druze and a pair of aides had entered the tent in the wake of Valerian and Kesero, and stood patiently. The Igranian was as lit up with curiosity as a kitten watching a ball of yarn.

  “I must go. Stay here, Rictus, you and your officers. The pages will set up the place for the evening meal in a little while - until then you can have the place to yourselves.” His gaze travelled over the four mercenaries. He seemed to waver for a second, then shook his head, and with a slice of his hand beckoned Druze and the aides out into the rain with him.

  “The conquering hero leaves us,” Fornyx said drily. “Grab yourself some of this wine, brothers -the boy keeps only the best on hand, it seems.”

  But Valerian and Kesero stood immobile, fixed in place by Rictus’s glare.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, in a voice as cold as the rain.

  “We were in a wine-shop in Grescir when they took us,” Valerian said. “Three parts drunk.”

  “It was just a little shithole on the way to Hal Goshen,” Kesero put in. “We halted on the march to let the men fill their skins. They must have been watching the road. That black-eyed bastard Druze surrounded the place with what looked like a thousand men, then sent in word that they had you and Fornyx and were negotiating a contract with you.”

  “They gave us safe passage if we would follow them to their camp,” Valerian said. “By the time we had formed up they had a thousand more on the hills outside the town, and cavalry too. What the fuck could we do, Rictus?”

  “You could keep a better watch,” Rictus said quietly.

  “This fellow Corvus knows all about you,” Kesero rumbled. “Your history, your family, the farmhouse. He must have had spies on every road from Idrios to Machran watching out for the Dogsheads these last few months.”

  “What about the men - how are they provisioned ?”

  “They’re being fed by Corvus’s quartermasters. They’ve even been issued tents and a place in the baggage train.” Valerian shook his head. “It’s all been organised, like it was set up for us weeks ago.”

  “I believe it was,” Rictus said. “Corvus does not like to leave things to chance. I know that much now.”

  “So what’s the play?” Kesero asked. “You want to try something, or are we to bow our necks to this boy and let him fuck us up the arse?”

  Rictus looked at the maps on the table. Everything is deliberate, he realised. He left these here to let me see what he has done, what he has achieved and what he means to do.

  What would this phenomenon be like in battle, with his strange ideas, his men on horses? Once again, the curiosity of it welled up in him.

  “How stupid would it be, to let pride get in the way,” he murmured, touching the map table, seeing the whole of the Macht countries laid out there before him like some picture of history already drawn. He thought of the petty, brutal campaign of the summer and the winter before it. The crass incompetence of the men who had hired him. And before that, the countless little quarrels he had fought in over the last twenty years, purposeless warfare, squalid little battles with nothing to show for them but the dead and the maimed and the enslaved.

  How boring it had all been.

  And he remembered Kunaksa, the terrible glory of those days on the Goat’s Hills, fighting for the fate of an empire. Creating a legend.

  “We could do worse things,” he said, musing aloud. He regarded his two junior centurions with one eyebrow lifted. “You look like shit. How long have you been here?”

  “Five days,” Valerian said with a nervous grin. “We’ve been keeping ourselves to ourselves.”

  “Clean yourselves up - I want you in scarlet by the time we sit down with this fellow’s officers. We’re not going to look like some vagrant bandits in front of him.”

  “The same goes for the men,” Fornyx added sternly, but there was a light in his eye. “We’re professionals - this fellow Corvus, he’s just a gifted amateur.”

  THE OFFICERS OF the amateur’s army trooped in later that evening, as the campfires of the host began to brighten in the blue rain-shimmered dusk. Trestle tables had been set up, with narrow benches lining the sides.

  A group of beardless boys waited on the diners. They were not slaves, and in fact held themselves with a peculiar nonchalance. They watched Rictus and his centurions with open curiosity.

  The others were more guarded. These were mostly young men, Valerian’s age. Corvus introduced them as the food was placed up and
down the table without ceremony. Plain army fare: black bread, salted goat meat, yellow cheese and oil and vinegar to help it down. The wine was local; Rictus had drunk it a thousand times before. Apparently the best vintages were saved for special guests and occasions.

  Druze was there, as chieftain of the Igranians, and a broad shouldered strawhead named Teresian was named as general of Corvus’s own spears. Looking at his face, Rictus saw himself twenty years before, raw-boned, grey-eyed and withdrawn.

  An older man, perhaps in his thirties, was named as Demetrius. He had one eye, the other a socket of whorled scar tissue - he was general of the conscript spears, the levies which Corvus had brought east from each of the twelve cities he had conquered. Rictus wondered how these men - there were some six thousand of them, by all accounts - felt fighting far from home for a man who had destroyed their independence. They were likely here as hostages for their cities’ good behaviour as much as anything else.

  But the real shock was the leader of Corvus’s own Companion Cavalry. This fellow’s name was Ardashir, and he was a head taller than anyone else in the room, with violent green eyes and skin a pale gold. His face was so long as to be almost equine, and he had dragged his long black hair into a topknot.

  Ardashir was not Macht. He was Kufr.

  It had been a long time since Rictus had laid eyes on a Kufr. From his own experience he knew that the other peoples of the world came in many shapes and sizes. He had encountered most of them in his travels, and while the Macht might lump them all under the same derogatory label, he knew better.

  There were many castes in the Empire, but the highest were formed by those who came from the heartland of Asuria, who spoke the language of the Great King’s court, provided his bodyguards and administrators. By his appearance Ardashir was one of these, a high-caste Kefren of the Imperial nobility. And he sat here at a Macht table, commanding troops in a Macht army.

  Rictus found the tall Kefren studying him almost as intently as he was being studied. Ardashir smiled. “It is not often one finds oneself breaking bread with a legend. Rictus of Isca, I have heard your name in stories all my life, as have we all here. It lifts my heart to think that we shall be fighting shoulder to shoulder from this day on.” His voice was deep, melodious, his Machtic almost perfect.

  “Come, drink with me.”

  Rictus found his throat seizing up on him. The Kefren’s face had jolted his memories. He remembered faces like that raging down at him in a line thousands strong, crashing in close enough that their spittle sprayed his face, their blood soaked his skin. He had trampled faces like that into the muck and mire of Kunaksa. He had not believed the memories could be brought back so bright and vivid while he sat eyes open and wide awake, and had to fight a momentary, overwhelming urge to spring to his feet. He bowed his head and choked down a cup of yellow wine.

  The whole table was watching him; Rictus, leader of the Ten Thousand, thrown into panic by the sight of a single Kufr. He beat it down, grinding his teeth on the wine. When he raised his head again his face was as blank as a flint.

  “You are a long way from home,” he managed.

  Ardashir bowed his head in acknowledgement. “A friend came this way, and I followed him.”

  “Ardashir’s people make up most of the Companion Cavalry,” the one-eyed man, Demetrius, said. “They were among the first to fight for Corvus, and have come all this way -”

  “They are my friends, all of them,” Corvus said, his high, clear voice cutting the older man short. “They have fought by my side on a dozen battlefields. The Macht have never been a people to appreciate the potential of cavalry, and a man does not become a horse-soldier overnight. To create a mounted arm, I had to look over the sea. Rictus, in your youth you battled your way across half the Empire. You of all men should be able to appreciate the valour of the people within it.”

  Corvus was taut-faced, staring at him. Here was a test, Rictus realised. He spoke to Ardashir again.

  “I fought the Great King’s Honai at Kunaksa, and the Asurian cavalry at Irunshahr. I do not have to be convinced of your people’s prowess.”

  Druze leaned close to Ardashir and reached up to shake the Kefren by the shoulder. “Prowess or not, he still beat you, you big yellow streak of shit.”

  The table erupted in laughter, Ardashir laughing as loud as the rest. He clinked cups with Druze, the two of them as familiar with each other as any two fighting comrades can be. Rictus wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He found Corvus still watching him, smiling without humour. Then the pale-faced youth raised his own cup to Rictus and drained it. It would seem the test had been passed.

  “Rictus has drilled his Dogsheads to a level not equalled by any other troops I have seen,” Corvus said, raising his voice. The long table fell silent instantly.

  “They are only a half-mora of spearmen, but I intend that their example shall be followed throughout the army. Here and now, I name Rictus of Isca as one of my marshals, equal to all of you here. Demetrius, Teresian, you will consult with Rictus on the drilling of your own men. If we can field a phalanx that fights as well as did the Ten Thousand, then there is nothing in all of the Harukush that can stand against us.”

  There was a general buzz of consent, and Fornyx slapped Rictus on the back, leaning in close to speak in his ear.

  “Congratulations, marshal. Before you let me kiss your elevated arse, look at your colleagues. I think you just pissed in their wine.”

  One-eyed Demetrius, and rawboned Teresian. They drank silently, looking over the rim of their cups at Rictus, and he realised that he had just made his first enemies in Corvus’s army.

  SIX

  THE MAN AT THE GATE

  THE GREEN BRANCH got Rictus up to the city walls. It was snowing, a wet, dark snow that was the child of the decaying season. Impenetrable though the Curse of God might be, it held no warmth, and Rictus was shivering under his scarlet cloak as he stood with the olive branch held up in one hand, the blank pocked stone of the ramparts looming over him. There was activity up there on the walkway; he could see the conical gleam of helms moving, but as yet the massive city gates remained closed.

  IT HAD BEEN a year and a half since last he had stood here, the tail end of the summer, just before he left for the Nemasis contract.

  The gates had been open then, the sun warm and the land as rich and ripe as a plucked pomegranate.

  The roads had been thick with people and handcarts and animals making their way to the Summersend market. For most of the country folk around about it was a once-a-year trip, to sell what they had grown and reared and woven, and in return to buy what they could not make for themselves on their farms. They would go home with the redware pottery that was unique to the city, or perhaps a new axehead, or a slave, or perhaps even a scroll of poetry to read aloud in the dark hours of the winter.

  Hal Goshen was the hub of men’s lives for sixty pasangs around, as much a part of the landscape as the mountains that reached white and remote on the northern horizon. It did not seem possible that a thing of such permanence could be taken away, erased from the world because of the will of one man.

  But that might well happen now, if Rictus could not raise an answer out of these walls.

  He tried again. “I am Rictus of Isca, and I am known to you and to your Kerusia. I am here to speak for the eastern general, Corvus, whose army is behind me.” Nothing. His temper flared.

  “Open the fucking gate, will you? I’m one man, and it’s fucking freezing out here.”

  A snap of laughter from above. Finally there was the crack of a reluctant bolt, and a postern in the gate swung open, admitting a heavily cloaked figure. The postern slammed shut behind him.

  “I hope Aise has the goats down from the high pastures,” the figure said. “There will be drifts up there by now that would bury an ox.” The man was lean as a whip, with long lank grey hair, and a gold stud in one nostril. When he smiled he had the white teeth of a much younger man - he had always be
en proud of them, Rictus remembered, and the effect his smile had on women.

  “Phaestus,” he said. “Thank the goddess. I was thinking it was about time I got an arrow in my neck.”

  “I have bows trained on you,” Phaestus said, “not that they’d be much use against a Cursebearer. So it’s true then; you and the Dogsheads have thrown in with the conqueror of the east.”

  “It’s true, though we didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

  The two men looked wordlessly at one another for a long drawn out minute. Rictus was a guest-friend; he had dined in Phaestus’s home, brought trinkets for his daughters, and told tales of old campaigns to his son. The two men had hunted boar together in the hills, and had shared wine around a campfire, Fornyx making them roar with his filthy jokes.

  “Ah, well, it seems he is adept at making men choose,” Phaestus said at last. “Even you. What do you make of him, Rictus? Is he the all-powerful champion we’ve heard?”

  Rictus thought of Corvus, the short, slight youth with the painted fingernails, and said truthfully, “Well, he scares me, as no man I’ve met ever has.”

  Phaestus looked genuinely shocked at this. “Phobos!”

  Rictus grasped the older man’s shoulder gently and led him away from the walls. “I come to bring you his terms.”

  “Does he have Aise and the girls - is that it?”

  Rictus shook his head. “Listen to me, Phaestus. And look south. Take in what you see and be honest with yourself.”

  The white snow had blanketed the farmland south of the city, rendering it a blank field broken only by the outlines of walls, the barely discernable grids of sleeping vineyards and olive groves. But some four pasangs away from where the two men stood there was a black stain on the world, an ordered rash of lines that could just be differentiated into ranks of men, of horses. A massive host whose lines extended five pasangs from end to end, a distance greater than the width of the city they faced.

  “He has twenty-five thousand men, Phaestus, every one of them a veteran, fed on victory. Do not try to tell me that your citizen soldiers can contend with that. I know what the strength of Hal Goshen is. I know your centurions and their drills.”