Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  And he knew, now, why Corvus hesitated to wear the black armour. He was half Kufr, and even his undoubted courage must flinch at the thought of a creature of Kufr blood donning the Curse of God.

  Who knows? Rictus surmised. Maybe it will not even let him wear it. How would that look? So he lets it sit here, a temptation and a reproach.

  And he suddenly had a blink of insight into the engine that drove Corvus on.

  He wants to rule the Macht, because he wants to feel that he is truly one of them. If the Harukush acclaims him its ruler, how can he not be one of us?

  Eunion was right, Rictus thought. He is a dreamer. But there is more to it. This is what drives him on, this thing gnawing at his guts. He has surrounded himself with fatherless boys and made of them a family. He wants to belong.

  Perhaps that is his other secret; to take the orphaned and make them feel part of something again.

  * * *

  THEY LEFT THE camp at dusk, three mudstained men in nondescript woollen chlamys, barefoot in the chill suck of the mud, their hoods pulled over their faces like the komis of the Kufr. They bore the lowland drepanas that Karnos’s troops would carry, and Druze had painted across his leather pelta the machios sigil of Machran.

  The waterlogged plain between the armies had once been good farmland, and there were still the black thickets of olive groves strewn across it, but it had been inundated with the rain that poured down from the hills so that now it bore more of a resemblance to some wildfowler’s marsh, a grey mere of dappled mud and ochre water.

  Karnos had planted his burgeoning army on a low rise across the Imperial road, and the water had filled a ring around its foot so that it seemed like an island, or a vast moated fort, pasangs wide; and the cloud hung so low that it almost met the summit.

  Eight pasangs to the rear of the enemy army was the city of Afteni, renowned for its metal-working. And behind that was Arkadios, and then to the west and south of that one of the great cities of the hinterland, Avennos of the Laws, where Tynon himself had lived and lectured for a time, back in the mists of the past. He had been the author of those codes which now governed nearly all the Macht cities. The origins of the Kerusia - the assembly that every Macht polity possessed - lay there.

  Avennos was not the metropolis it had been; both Avensis to the south, which had been its colony upon a time, and Arienus to the south-west had grown greater with the passage of the years. But Avennos was a part of the Macht identity as surely as Machran was. That, Rictus reasoned, was why Karnos had thrown his army so far forward, extending his supply lines and landing himself in the same muck as Corvus. To preserve that core of tradition. It was militarily unsound, but politically it could not be faulted.

  The darkness drew in over the floodplain, a lightless black without stars or moons. The three men lurched from one footfall to the next, the muck seizing them calf-deep. Once, Druze went on his face and the others had to halt and lever him free, haul him upright again. Corvus was seized by a fit of laughter, and after a contemplation of their absurd condition it flapped through them all so that they stood for a few minutes holding their mouths, leaning on one another like drunks.

  “I’ll lead,” Corvus said at last. “I’m lighter than either of you clodhoppers, and I see better in the dark. Grab a hold of my cloak and try not to pull me on my arse.”

  They went on, their only frame of reference in that starless murk the subdued glow of the enemy campfires. Only a few were burning, fighting a losing battle with the endless rain. Usually a host like Karnos’s would light up the night sky with its fires like a city at festival time.

  Corvus halted, and Rictus felt the young man’s iron grip on his arm.

  “Sentries,” he murmured, his breath warm in Rictus’s ear. “We go right, cast around them.”

  The three made a laborious dog-leg about the sentries which only Corvus had seen. They were glad of the rain, for the sluicing hiss of it covered their lumpen progress. Rictus found his joints aching as they had not since the winter before, in the siege-camp outside Nemasis, and he felt again the ache of the arrow-wound in his thigh. The cold and the wet were always ready to recall his old scars, as though in league with his ageing body to remind him of his mortality.

  They waded as quietly as they could through knee-deep freezing water, clenching their chattering teeth shut, and began to hear other sounds than the rain ahead. Men’s voices, a low hum of talk, and the chink and gleam of lights glancing through the gaps in leather-canopied tents. The ground rose under their feet, became marginally drier in that the mud was only ankle-deep.

  “Here we are,” Corvus said, as unconcerned as if he had led them into his own back yard. “From here on in we straighten up and look like citizens. Perhaps we should go under different names. Druze, you look like a Timus to me.”

  “Boss,” Druze said, “I would follow you to the far side of the Veil if you asked me, but don’t try to make me laugh. It’s not one of your gifts.”

  “I fall short in that respect,” Corvus admitted, and they saw him grin under his hood. He seemed as light of heart as a boy who has found a peephole in a bathhouse wall.

  “I wonder if Karnos’s tent is as big as mine. What think you. Rictus? You know him better than I.”

  “I think Druze’s accent and your face will give us away in a moment. Let me lead, for Phobos’s sake, and both of you keep your mouths shut.”

  Corvus nodded, and in an entirely different, clinical voice said, “Count the sigils you see. I want to know which cities have brought up their levies.”

  They walked through the camp as brazenly as though they belonged there, Druze wiping the muck off his pelta so the Machran sigil shone out white in the firelit gaps in the dark. The camp of Karnos’s army stank worse than their own, and Rictus put out of his mind thoughts of what his bare feet must be treading through.

  Men were crowded in their tents, huddled around guttering clay lamps and foul-smelling tallow candles. Some resolute souls were keeping campfires going, atop each the familiar villainous black shape of a centos, the great iron pot fighting men had eaten from since time out of mind. There was a toothsome smell on the air amid the baser stinks; Karnos’s men were eating stewed goat, ladling in mounds of lentils and onions to eke out the meat. Lowland food; the smell of it brought back memories of a dozen old campaigns to Rictus.

  He had to shake his mind into the moment; the scenes before him were so familiar that the sense of danger was dulled.

  He stopped short when he caught sight of the namis sigil on some shields, painted in blue. These were men of Nemasis, with whom he had fought only the summer before. The gap-toothed man with the shaven head was Isaeos, the idiot whose bumbling had cost lives and lost months in Rictus’s last contract. He bent his head into his hood as he passed by.

  The mismatched trio of filthy strangers wandered through the camp without challenge, three more nameless Macht in a sea of them. Rictus stopped counting sigils after he reached twenty. Every city of the hinterland was here, and yet the camp was not big enough to accommodate their full levies. Some must have been sending token contingents, no more. Even among the members of the Avennan League, there were hostilities and rivalries. Karnos had done well to come so far with so many.

  No-one challenged them. Rictus was not surprised. He had known citizen armies all his life. They would fight like lions when the time came, but the idea of camp discipline was beyond them; one might as well try to herd cats.

  After only a few weeks with Corvus, he had begun to take for granted the efficiency of the army on the far side of the plain, to view it with even a trace of indulgence. He had all but forgotten that his Dogsheads were the exception, not the rule, and that Corvus had made something surprisingly different out of his own host.

  Once again, he found himself looking at this Kufr half-breed from a revelatory new angle.

  Kufr. Now that was something to factor into things.

  The three interlopers grew in confidence, emboldened by
the black night, the rain and the muck-stains which made them almost indistinguishable from every other man in the camp. Rictus accepted a squirt of wine from a good-natured drunken fellow with the machios sigil tattooed on his arm, and went so far as to ask him where Karnos’s tent might be found.

  “That fat bastard?” the man cried. “He’s still in Machran with his cock up some slave-girl’s arse. It’s Kassander you want, friend - he commands here. What are you, some kind of messenger? Fucking rain - ain’t it a bitch, eh?” He staggered off, plashing through the muck with the bullish determination of the drunk who knows where he wants to go.

  “The more I hear of this Karnos fellow, the more I like him,” Druze said with his thick black brows beetling up his forehead. “Had I the choice -”

  A woman’s scream cut across him, shrill and terrified.

  “I said,” Druze went on, “Had I the choice I’d much prefer -”

  “Shut up,” Corvus snapped. “Rictus, where was that?”

  Rictus pointed down the haphazard line of tents. “It’s not our concern, Corvus. There’s nothing more to be seen here.”

  He was ignored. Corvus strode off on his own in the direction of the scream.

  “Oh, shit,” Druze muttered, and grasped Rictus by the arm, taking off in his leader’s wake. “Rictus, for Phobos’s sake, get a hold of him.”

  Corvus moved like a black, silent raptor through the tent lines, with Rictus and Druze trailing him.

  He had thrown back his hood, and his eyes caught the light of the campfires and reflected it back a violent green.

  He pulled back a tent flap, and out of the interior blew a blare of lamplight, the stink of men’s sweat, and something else, something high and keen and bitter in the night. Fear.

  TEN

  BLOOD AND BLUFF

  KARNOS WOKE WITH a start. He had barely been asleep anyway. Some gaudy dream of standing talking to a crowd, and the men he spoke to were all cheering him, shouting his name, and sharpening knives.

  Subtle, he thought with a mental grunt. Phobos, how is a man to live like this, for weeks at a time? I am Speaker of Machran. I made this army - I created it out of nothing. It is here by my will.

  He turned in the straw, snarling and tugging his cloak about with him. They could at least have made me some kind of bed... there are ticks in this straw.

  He scratched his crotch violently, and cursed aloud. Awake now.

  In all seriousness - how does a man live like this? He thought of his well-stuffed mattress in Machran, and little Grania in it with her white skin and soft mouth. Or that new girl - the one with the lovely arse.

  Here he was, one cloak to his name, lying on tick-infested straw with the damp of the ground creeping through it.

  He opened his eyes wide.

  The lamp was almost out of oil; a blue, guttering blossom pulsing round the wick. It was almost wholly dark in the tent.

  What in hell was that?

  He heard it again; a distant uproar, men shouting. He was used by now to the sound of the interminable quarrels, the fights that flared up out of nowhere; these were the background noises of the camp. But this was different; more urgent.

  He sat up, adjusted the lamp so the end of the wick had a last drop of oil to suck into, and as the light strengthened, he scrabbled through the straw which lined the tent floor, fumbling for sandals, sword; anything which might orientate him to this strange and new place the night had found him in.

  The tent flap was flung open and he saw a black silhouette with fire behind it.

  “Some trouble over at the eastern end - might be nothing, but it sounds ugly. Want to come along?”

  Kassander’s voice.

  “Fuck it, yes. I’m awake now anyway. What time of the night is it?”

  “The bad time, when men are tired but not quite asleep. This may only be a brawl.”

  “I said I’m coming,” Karnos snapped, hopping into his sandals with his sword slung over one shoulder. “Help me with my cloak, will you? Phobos, what a life.”

  In a camp this large, Karnos felt like a tick on the hide of some great unknown beast. He had never truly tried to imagine what a host of some twenty thousand men might look like; he had merely totted up the numbers as they came in. If they stood eight men deep in battle array their line would stretch around three pasangs.

  It was as though a new and noisome city of leather and shit and woodsmoke had been planted on the world, and here he was in the middle of it, one more face in a teeming sea of them.

  This was not like holding forth on the floor of the Empirion - the rules were different here. Walking through the camp, he was accorded a certain amount of -affectionate regard from the Machran host, a level of curiosity from the men of the other cities, but should a Cursebearer chance by, their eyes would be drawn to the black armour instantly, with a degree of awe that was almost religious.

  I must get one of those one day, Karnos thought. It would perfect the image. Or redeem it, maybe.

  He was a wealthy man; in the past he had tried to buy Antimone’s Gift from Cursebearers down on their luck, but his offers had been rebuffed with such contempt that he had given up on the exercise. Once a man had one of those things on his back, it seemed it took up some space in his soul. Death was all that would make him part with it. It was one of the gauges of a city’s greatness; how many Cursebearers it had as citizens.

  There will be a few on the ground before all this is over, Karnos thought. I will talk to Kassander about it.

  The two of them picked their way through the camp lines. The men had been sheltering in their tents, grumbling their way into sleep, or sharing a skin of wine, or rattling a game of knucklebones. Now the place was stirring again, and the paths between the bivouac lines were filling up with yawning, bad-tempered crowds, wondering what was causing the racket.

  “I bet it’s the Aftenai again,” Kassander muttered. “A more bloody-minded set of fractious bastards I’ve never seen.”

  The noise rose - men were fighting, it was clear now. They heard the clash of iron, and. someone shrieked, a death-scream.

  “Phobos!” Kassander cursed, and he began to run.

  RICTUS FELT THE man’s blood spatter warm across his face as the drepana took the fellow’s arm off above the elbow. He was unused to the heavy lowland weapon; it felt like a butcher’s cleaver in his grasp, made for chopping and slashing.

  He had the end of his cloak wrapped round his left arm, and threw it up in the next man’s face, making him flinch long enough for the drepana to arc round again and open his belly. A stink of shit and hot meat as his entrails flopped down his legs into the mud, entangling his feet. The man tripped up and gave a high-pitched scream, rolling in the ropes of his own insides.

  “Now,” Corvus snapped, “back to us.”

  Rictus turned in the space he had made and darted between Corvus and Druze. The Igranian’s pelta had been chopped in two and hung bloody from his arm. In the other his sword described a vertical circle as neat as a juggler’s flourish, and another one of the enemy went to his knees, wide-mouthed in disbelief, and then fell flat, cleaved open from collar to breastbone.

  Corvus leapt in with a flash and took down a third. “Machran!” he shouted. “Machran to me!”

  A gap opened up in the ring that surrounded them and they were through it in a moment, slashing to left and right, out of the firelight and into the rainswept dark. Rictus tripped on a guy-rope and went on his elbows, only to be seized upright by the scruff of his neck and shoved onwards. Even in that instant, he found himself startled by the brute strength in Corvus’s thin frame.

  More men running at them, weapons in their hands. They were in the midst of a massive, congealing mob of bewildered figures, all shouting at once. The wounded were squealing behind them, and torches were being lit from the campfires. The rain hammered down on their faces and their legs were drained of energy, nothing more than mindless sinew hauling on the bone.

  Rictus thought his che
st was about to burst. He could not speak. Corvus and Druze both grabbed him and half-dragged his burly form through the tent-lines. An animal growl rose out of his throat; anger went white hot through his limbs and restored some sense to his head.

  “Get the fuck off me.” He shook away their helping hands.

  Men shouted enquiries at the trio, unsure. Druze tossed aside his split shield and tucked his maimed arm in his cloak, bundling up the fabric around a slash which had laid him open to the bone.

  “Knucklebones,” Corvus said loudly, panting. “Cheating bastards tried to rob us. They’re still at it back there.”

  “Halt and identify yourselves,” some officious prick yelled at them.

  “Kiss my arse. We have a hurt man here - go stop that fight back there,” Rictus shot back.

  “Hold your ground!”

  There were too many around them, crowding as men will about bad news or a quarrel. Rictus reversed his drepana and punched the officious prick low down in the groin with the wooden bulb of the weapon’s pommel, then shouldered him aside. When the man next to him protested in snarling outrage, Corvus laid the flat of his sword against his temple, and he went down like a dropped sack of sand.

  “Out of our bloody way.”

  They were through again, into the darkness, a tight, determined knot moving with a purpose, like an arrowhead plunging through the bowels of an ox.

  KASSANDER BENT AND held the lamp up as he entered the tent. Karnos followed, mastering the impulse to retch at the stench within.

  “What in the world happened here?”

  The bloodied man in the torn chiton was holding the flesh of his forearm onto the bone, gore dripping in black strings from between his clenched fingers.