Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “He came in here like something sent by Phobos. He had a white face, and eyes, eyes like -”

  “What happened to these men?” Kassander asked patiently. The inside of the tent was a charnel house, chopped-up corpses steaming as the heat left them. The back of the tent had a rent slashed in it from top to bottom.

  “We had a girl, a slave girl the mess had gotten from the wagon-park. We were taking turns on her and he came in out of nowhere - General, his eyes -they were not those of a man. He came in here like a storm, killing right and left. There were others with him. They grabbed him as he was about to finish me off, cut open the back of the tent, and then they all went out that way. They cut us up like we were rabbits on a block, general. They were not men at all.”

  The man was in white bloodless shock, his lips blue. “Go to the carnifex,” Kassander told him. “I’ll talk to you later. What’s your name?”

  “Lomos of Afteni, your honour.”

  “All right Lomos, get out.”

  “Wait - where’s the girl?” Karnos demanded.

  “She ran. She’s all right. It was just some fun, General, I swear.”

  “Go - go on - get that looked at.”

  Karnos and Kassander squatted on their haunches amid the carnage, the lamp’s light lending a flicker of mocking movement to the bodies. Karnos counted five men there. It was as close as he had ever come to violent death in his life thus far, and while his stomach was still heaving, his mind studied the scene with a revolted fascination.

  “Drepana wounds,” Kassander said, moving the lamp this way and that. “The strawheads use stabbing swords. We must find that girl - perhaps she was not a slave at all, and had relations in camp - it has been known. Come, Karnos.”

  The camp was bristling like a kicked anthill now. The two men emerged into the rain to find that something was still going on, out near the eastern lines. A fully armed centurion with a transverse crest halted in front of Kassander.

  “General, we think the enemy is behind this -there are infiltrators in the camp, and they’ve been raising hell. We have men hurt and killed all over the eastern end.”

  “Phobos!” Kassander hissed. He scraped a hand through his hair and turned to Karnos. “This makes no sense.”

  “Is it the precursor to an attack, you think?” Karnos asked. His heart lurched in his chest. Only a few days before, the notion of battle - real warfare, with himself in the thick of it - had seemed like the stuff of distant and slightly absurd conjecture. Here, in the chaos of rain and firelight, with other men’s blood soaked into his feet, it was real and terrifying.

  “We must turn out the army, just in case,” Kassander decided. He turned to the centurion, noticing the alfos sigil on his shield. “Are you from Afteni?”

  “Yes, general - these are my men butchered here.”

  “Pass it along the lines - the men are to arm and stand-to. I want them formed up on the eastern side, by centon.” He turned to Karnos, his big, good natured face something entirely different now.

  “We must gather the Kerusia, and rouse out all the contingents at once. There’s no telling what this presages.”

  Karnos nodded. “You’re the soldier, Kassander.”

  “You’re the man who got us all here, brother. It’s your job to talk to the other city leaders. We must assemble the army at once.”

  RICTUS, CORVUS AND Druze collapsed in the sucking mere some half pasang from the enemy camp, and lay in the freezing water, utterly spent.

  “It must be near daylight,” Rictus said. “We have to get on, or we’ll be stuck out here like cockroaches on a tabletop when the sun comes up.”

  Corvus was wiping blood from his face with the corner of his sodden cloak. “Agreed. Look at them, Rictus; you see what we have done?”

  There were torches lit all over the enemy camp now, travelling up and down it like fireflies. Even out here they could hear the surf of noise on the hill, men’s voices raised in an angry clamour.

  “Reminds me of stoning a hornet’s nest when I was a boy,” Druze said.

  “It was madness,” Rictus said, turning to Corvus. “By rights, we three should be dead in there, or captive.”

  “I saw your face when you looked in that tent,” Corvus said, unabashed. “There was a time when you would have done the same thing. You wanted to, tonight.” “I have learned to think of the consequences of my actions.”

  “I have learned to trust to my luck sometimes, Rictus. And it has held. Phobos watches over me. He brought us out of there.”

  “It was insane,” Rictus persisted.

  “If a sane and sensible life includes walking past rape without blinking, then I would rather be dead,” Corvus said, and there was a cold menace to his words that made Rictus and Druze look at one another.

  He wiped his eyes with his cloak hem. “Sneer if you will, Rictus.”

  “I am not sneering.” Rictus thought of the sack of Isca, of Ab Mirza in the Empire, the excesses of the Ten Thousand.

  Once, I was the same, he thought.

  “It may be expedient to tolerate what revolts you,” Corvus said, “but where does that leave you, in the end? Better to die fighting for what you know is right and wrong.”

  “Black and white,” Rictus said.

  Corvus smiled. “Indeed. Druze, my brother, how is that arm?”

  “It stings a little.” Druze’s face was pinched with pain.

  “Then let’s get you back home.” Corvus put his arm about Druze’s shoulders and pulled him close, then kissed him on his forehead.

  “You took that blade for me,” he said.

  They staggered through the marshland with the adrenaline of the fight still singing in their nerves. It brought them another pasang or so, before draining away, leaving them wrung-out and thick-headed. At least that was how Rictus felt. Corvus began to talk again, as easily as a man lingering over his wine.

  “Twenty sigils; that’s the hinterland cities plus a few more. I saw the alfos and hammer of Arienus there, and Gast and Ferai - even Decanth. But they are not sending their full levies, or Karnos’s army would be twice as big. Druze, give me your arm - that’s it.

  “It means they’re holding back. Even now, they are not fully combined. Perhaps they do not rate their own danger as high as they should. I want them all in front of me, the men of every great city of the Macht. If we are to help our friend Karnos gather them all in his ranks, we will have to twist his tail a little more - more than we have done tonight.”

  “Boss, I think you went over there looking for a fight,” Druze said.

  “Perhaps I did. Did you see their lines? Amateurs, ankle-deep in their own shit, half-drunk most of them, their sentries gathered around fires and blind to the dark. At least we got them out of their blankets for a night.”

  He looked back. A grey light was growing in the air, Araian making her slow way up the back of the clouds to the east.

  “Dawn is coming, and they’re forming up on the brink of the hill - look, Rictus - they’ll be all morning at it.”

  A black line was growing across the land, thickening and lengthening with every minute. Spearmen, moving into battle array.

  “It would be rude not to respond,” Corvus said, his pale grin back on his face. “When we get back, I think I’ll have to turn out our lot to say hello.”

  Rictus looked at him sharply.

  “You mean to bring on a battle?”

  “Why not? Warfare is half blood and half bluff, Rictus. Karnos does not know what we’re about, so he’s taking the sensible route; he’ll stand his men there in the rain for as long as he thinks we’re about to come at him. Last night, the curtain went up. Now I intend to amuse the audience further.”

  WITH THE RISING of the sun, the clouds that had blanketed the sky for so many days finally began to part and shift, as though Araian had become impatient and was peeling them back to see what had become of the world. The rain petered out, and as the light broke broad and yellow across the fl
ooded plain between the two camps it was caught by the pools of standing water and set alight in dazzling flashes of rippled reflection.

  The curtain rises, Karnos thought. You would almost think he had planned it that way.

  He stood uncomfortable and self-conscious in his panoply, acutely aware that there was not a single dint in his shield or scrape on the bronze greaves strapped to his shins. He had bought a layered linen cuirass in Afteni years before, the best of its kind, the belly reinforced with iron scales, the wings painted crimson and inlaid with black niello work. It had seemed splendid and martial back then; in this camp it now seemed brash and ostentatious when worn amid thousands of heirlooms and hand-me-downs, scraped and patched and rebuilt after numerous campaigns.

  Men received their panoplies from their fathers; some were decades old, rebuilt and repaired time and again. The bronze breast-plates could be older still. But Karnos’s father had never been prosperous enough to belong to the ranks of armoured spearmen that formed the backbone of every citizenry.

  I am Karnos of Machran, he told himself. It may be that I am not much of a soldier, but it is I who have created this army, and I hold it together. They sneer at me as the slave-dealer from the Mithannon, but it is I who am cheered by the mob of Machran. I have done what none of them could do, for all their noble heritage and their bloodlines and their ancient heirlooms.

  He turned around. Some two dozen men faced him, all in full armour, six in the Curse of God. This was the military Kerusia of the Avennan League, and it comprised the fighting leadership of the greatest of the Macht cities. They were all here today in some form or other: Ferai, Avensis, Arienus, even great Pontis from the south, whose membership had been for decades considered purely nominal. They had all brought their citizens to this hill, perhaps not as many as they might have, but they were here.

  Kassander was here too, and his smile warmed Karnos, brought him upright in his heavy war-harness. He had never before been so conscious of his girth: amid these lean, ascetic-looking aristocrats he looked soft; even Periklus of Pontis, twenty years older, seemed more athletic.

  But he spoke for Machran here, and the seven thousand spears she had sent to the field. His city was more populous than any two of the others combined, and had once been the seat of the ancient monarchy that had ruled all the Macht. The names of those kings had been lost to history, but the legend of them remained, as did the pre-eminence of Machran itself.

  “The enemy moves,” Karnos said, raising his voice to be heard over the marching phalanxes on the slopes below. The tents were emptying like a decanted jug, pouring a sea of men out onto the plain of Afteni.

  “Last night it seems he conducted a reconnaissance of our camp. Today, he has set his troops in motion. It would seem that his numbers have been exaggerated; we outnumber him three to two, and what is more the ground is too soft for his cavalry. The odds favour us, brothers” — how that word almost stuck in his throat - “and while not all the promised city levies have yet joined us” - he paused, looking his sombre audience up and down with a hint of accusation, a note of disappointment - “we have the power here to defeat this Corvus where he stands. He has made a mistake, one which we must make fatal.”

  “You mean to fight here?” Glauros of Ferai asked. “Today?”

  “Today.”

  “The ground may be bad for horses, but it is too wet for spears also,” Ulfos of Avensis said. “Can you see our morai advancing through that muck?”

  Kassander spoke up.

  “Corvus is a soldier of great talent. His strength is in manoeuvre. His troops are better drilled than ours and thus more flexible. We must bog him down and bring our numbers to bear.

  “This place, at this time, we can rule his cavalry out of the equation, and we cannot be sure of doing that somewhere else, or at some other time. We have a unique chance here. Citizen levies put their heads down and push; it is almost all they are trained to do. We do that here, and our numbers will soak up anything he can throw at us. We have the soldiers of twenty different cities here who have never fought together before - brothers, we cannot let this thing get complicated.

  “We advance on a long front, into the floodplain, and there we fight this Corvus to a standstill. It will not be pretty, and Phobos knows there are many standing on this hill today who will be on the pyre by nightfall, but it is the surest way to take our kind of fighting to the enemy.”

  There was a silence as this sank in. They respected Kassander; he had been a soldier all his life, a mercenary in his youth before old Banos had brought him in to train up the Machran city guard. But his present position was due to Karnos, whom they despised. Karnos could almost see the wheels turning in their heads as they stood there cultivating their patrician aloofness, Katullos among them.

  “Let this not be about politics,” he said. “Whatever you think of me, consider the position as it stands.

  We are here, brothers” - this time the word came easier, for he was sincere - “we are here to preserve the liberty of our cities and our institutions from a tyrant. All else is an indulgence.”

  He caught Katullos’s eye, and thought he actually saw a flicker of approval there.

  “There are men of Hal Goshen in the ranks across the way, and Maronen and Gerrera and Kaurios. These have been conscripted into this Corvus’s army against their will, their cities enslaved and their treasuries emptied. How hard do you think they will fight for the invader?

  “We have but to hold the line, and they will see what way their freedoms lie. Without his cavalry, this Corvus is nothing but a master of slaves.” There were a few arch looks at this, from those who knew him. Karnos, whose wealth had been built on the backs of slaves. No matter - he had them now. He and Kassander had swayed them. Thank the goddess.

  There would be a battle today, the greatest fought in the Harukush for generations.

  And he, Karnos, would have to be in the middle of it.

  His own rhetoric had led him to overlook this.

  As his father had used to say, with the fatalism of the poor; you want to eat bread, you got to grind the corn.

  ELEVEN

  THE FLOODED PLAIN

  RICTUS STOOD AT the forefront of his men with his helm cradled in one arm. His shield was leaning against his planted spear in the front rank. All of the Dogsheads were in battle-line, shields resting against their knees, helms off, enjoying a last feel of the air on their faces, a look at the sky.

  They were back of the front line, and the ground was a little drier here on the rising slope leading east along the Imperial Road to the camp. Up front, the ranks of spears had already trampled the sodden earth into an ankle-deep mire simply by getting into formation. Most of the men were barefoot despite the chill of the day, for the plain ahead of them would suck the best-strapped footwear off a man’s feet in a few minutes of fighting.

  In front of the red-cloaked mercenaries, Corvus’s army had shaken out into battle formation, a line of infantry some two pasangs long.

  Not long enough, Rictus thought. He’ll be outflanked on one side, maybe both. What the hell does he have in mind?

  The cavalry had left their horses back in camp and stood beside the Dogheads. There were some two thousand of them under Ardashir, the orphaned prince. They were shieldless, armed with lances and drepanas, clad in the short corselet of the horseman. They were not equipped for phalanx fighting; against a line of heavily armoured spearmen they would be massacred.

  Though it had to be admitted, they did lend an exotic sort of variety to the sombre, mud-coloured army. They seemed to vie with one another to own the gaudiest cloaks and most outrageous helmet-crests. And most of them were Kufr, head and shoulders taller than the Macht, their skin seeming almost to glow in the pale autumn sunlight. Ardashir their leader stood out in front of them, leaning on the long, wicked lance of the Companions, his cloak folded around him.

  Corvus was on horseback, riding along the front of his troops and making a speech that Rictus
could not hear. The men clashed their shields in response to it, and a full-throated roar travelled the length of the line.

  Nine thousand heavy spearmen, over half of them conscripts from the conquered cities of the eastern seaboard led by one-eyed Demetrius, the rest dependable veterans under young Teresian. On their left, two to three thousand Igranians under Druze, whose left arm was in a sling, but who was not going to miss this for the world.

  As if he could feel Rictus’s contemplation, Druze turned around, out on the left, and raised his javelin in salute, his dark grin visible even at that distance. Rictus raised a hand in return.

  On the right, nothing. Corvus had his right flank up in the air, and that was the flank held by Demetrius and his conscript spears. It was as though he was inviting them to collapse. True, the dismounted Companions were there to the rear, but they would not be able to stop a serious rout.

  Across the flashing gleam of the waterlogged plain, the army of the Avennan League had almost finished shaking out its line. They had been at it for hours now; the men’s freshness would be gone.

  It was one thing to set up a line when a single city’s troops were involved, when the men knew each other and their officers. It was quite another to co-ordinate the interlocking phalanxes of twenty different cities, with their own rivalries, their petty politics, their vying for prestige and advantage. Rictus had seen it on a small scale over a lifetime of warfare; he could imagine what a colossal pain in the arse it would be to command twenty thousand half-drilled citizen soldiers with their own ideas about how they should be deployed. Even Demetrius’s conscripts were better trained than the spearmen he saw standing in half-dressed lines opposite.

  But they had numbers on their side. More than that, they were fighting for something they believed in. That counted for a lot in war. It was why the Ten Thousand had been victorious at Kunaksa; the choice had been to win or die.

  Fornyx blew his nose on his fingers and flicked the snot away. He was still angry about the antics of the night before, about fighting here in this swamp, about being held in the rear.