Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  Gestrakos and Ondimion, who had set the world alight with their intellect and their art, had fought as humble foot-soldiers also, so he was in good company. But that did not ease the weight of his armour, the burden of the bronze-faced shield and the dozen aches and scratches that his barely-worn cuirass inflicted on his torso.

  He was fat, unfit, and desperately aware of his own martial ignorance. His only consolation in all of this was that he was fifth man from the front. No-one had ever told him that the men in the middle of the files took the heaviest casualties, which was why the most inexperienced were placed there, sandwiched between the veteran file leaders and closers.

  And around him was the army, these myriads which surely no -

  “Advance! On me - one, two - left!”

  Kassander’s voice, somewhere in front and to his right. He was only a few paces away, but packed in the ranks of the phalanx he might as well have been on the far side of the world.

  The man behind Karnos cursed him. “Get in step, you fat fuck. And watch that sauroter; you poke me with it one more time and I swear I’ll break it off and jam it up your arse.”

  Laughter rattled along the files. “Ostros, don’t you know who you’re talking to?”

  “That’s the Speaker, you stupid fuck!”

  “Karnos - tell us - how many slave-girls do you have a night, eh?”

  “You horny old bastard - I hear tell you’ve nothing but naked cunny to wait on you night and day!”

  Breathing heavily, Karnos found the air to shout, “they smell better than you rotten bastards, that’s for damned sure.”

  “I’ll take a bath, Karnos, and then you can suck my cock.”

  The anonymity of the crowd, the faceless helmeted heads; here was the citizenship of Machran, where all men were equal under bronze. It made Karnos remember a time when he had been nothing more than a quick-thinking slave dealer with a big mouth and a memory for faces. For a few minutes, tossing the filth and the insults back and forth, he was almost enjoying himself.

  A great sound erupted from the front ranks, like a massive groan. The men in the rear began shouting forward. “What the fuck’s going on - you lads -what do you see?”

  “They have archers,” someone yelled back. “The Afteni and Arkadians are getting hammered.”

  “Phobos! They’re really getting fucked! Where the hell are the Arienans? Bastards should be on our right.”

  They were still advancing, but slowly now, stop and start. Finally the halt was called. Karnos could see nothing but the men in front and to either side - he could not so much as turn around, and the close-fitting helm filled his head with a sound like the rush of the sea. As he stood, he worked his feet in the mud, feeling himself sinking into it. His feet were numb with cold, but despite that the chiton he wore under his cuirass was soaked with sweat, and his throat was parched - and the battle had not yet begun.

  Yes, it had. He could hear it now. A surf of noise rising up around him - it was almost impossible to guess which direction it came from. He heard sharp above the roar the screams of men in a last extremity of pain and fear, and a hammering of metal.

  “Front rank, level spears!” came the order. Kassander again. “Centurions, hold together -prepare to advance - advance!”

  And they were off again, but more quickly this time, the files shuffling into a fast march with the centurions calling out the time. “One, two, one, two - pick it up there!”

  “It’s redcloaks - mercenaries!” someone shouted at the front.

  His head bobbing from side to side in the bronze helm, Karnos caught glimpses of the world beyond the phalanx, and saw something coming towards them, something with glittering teeth and shining in bronze and scarlet. He heard the Paean being sung - but not by his own side. What in the hell was -

  An enormous crash. He was brought to a full stop, piling into the man in front. Behind him, the weight of the three men of the file crushed him, the cuirass fighting the pressure. He thought he would faint. He could see faces - helmed men facing the wrong way – Phobos -they were facing him! And then the adder-strikes of spearheads. He saw an aichme come lancing through the ranks in front of him to bury itself in a man’s head and then snap off. The man was borne along by the press for a few minutes, and then slid out of sight. The file closed the gaps, the pressure unrelenting.

  This is it, Karnos thought. This is what the stories are for, what the poetry is about. I am here in the middle of it at last.

  The pressure and the fear emptied his bladder, and the piss ran hot down his legs, but he barely noticed.

  “Level your fucking spear!” the man behind him shouted, and he hefted the weapon horizontal on his shoulder, feeling the sauroter tear into flesh behind him as he brought it up. He rested the long weapon on the wing of the file-leader’s cuirass for a second, getting used to the balance of it, and then thrust forward into the red-cloaked mass that faced him. The spearpoint jarred, the whole shaft quivering in his fist as he struck a shield.

  He tried again, aiming for a helm-slot, but struck empty air. A spear came the other way, the two shafts clashing together as they met. The aichme dunted him in the forehead, rasped along the crestbox and snapped his head back. He would have fallen were it not for the men behind him pushing into the small of his back. His eyes were full of tears. There was something wet inside his helm and he did not know whether it was blood or sweat.

  He stabbed again, angry now, and from his chest there came that hoarse animal roaring that had no thought behind it but was a base response, a defiant bellow of rage. Thousands of men were making it -it was part of every battlefield. It rose now and filled the air above them, as deafening as the blacksmith’s clatter of iron on bronze. This was the othismos, the bowels of war itself.

  They were advancing, step by step, and mixed in with the wordless bellowing were cries of triumph. Karnos stepped over a body, glanced down quickly and saw a red cloak on the ground. He stepped on the man’s body and it moved under his feet, still warm.

  He vomited, with the sensation and the heat of the press and the singing sound in his head. The vomit ran down his fine ornate cuirass unheeded, one more stink among many. The fluids of mens’ insides were running into the muck at their feet, and making of it a terrible mire. They plunged their dogged way through it, calf-deep.

  The sandal was sucked off Karnos’s right foot, but trailed behind him, its strap entangled in his greave, until someone behind him trod on it and snapped it free. They were still advancing. Up front, someone shouted, “They’re pulling back!” and a growl of triumph tore through the files. But seconds later someone else shouted, “Arrows - they’re shooting at us!”

  The long black clothyards of the Kefren poured down upon them. As if in a dream, Karnos saw an arrow strike the helm of the man in front and flick up into the air, jerking his head to one side. Most of the men were wearing cuirasses of stiff, layered linen, and Karnos watched in horrified fascination as the arrows came arcing down like black snakes and clear through the wings of the armour, burying themselves in men’s shoulders, smashing collar-bones.

  A new cry, from behind this time. A javelin flew over Karnos’s head - he saw the cold gleam of the iron point not a foot from his eyes. The file-closers were shouting. “About face! The bastards are behind us, brothers!”

  The phalanx was losing its cohesion, men turning this way and that, desperate to see what was going on. The advance stalled and the lines intermingled. Packed close together by the threats to front and rear, the men of Machran stood irresolute, frightened, angry. The centurions were bellowing orders like men possessed, but the spearmen in the ranks seemed as unresponsive as cattle.

  The sweat running down the small of Karnos’s back went icy cold. This was not how it was supposed to be. There was no order now, and even the centurions were beginning to look about themselves in growing panic. How had -

  A crash to the front - the fearsome red-cloaked mercenaries had hammered into their face again, laying on
the pressure. The air was crushed out of Karnos’s chest as the crowd tightened, recoiling on itself. Some men tripped and went down, unwounded, and were then trampled to suffocation in the deepening mud at their feet.

  Karnos looked at the sky, the black arrows raining across it. The press of men tilted this way and that, battered on all sides. He heard the roar and clash of a fresh onset off to his left, and the entire phalanx shuddered as though it had taken a body-blow. Someone shouted that the left wing had been routed, and then a few moments later some other idiot insisted it was the right wing.

  It did not matter - they were pinned here like a turtle on its back. The cohesiveness of the phalanx might have gone, but the pure brute weight of meat and metal remained. It was being packed tighter on itself.

  Karnos’s feet were dragged from the mud, sucking as the press shifted and took him with it. He gasped for air, and beat down the impulse to scream for space, for room to move and breathe. For the first time, the reality of his own death began to crowd his mind.

  And the pressure began to ease. The sea-roar of noise - in his helm changed, picked up a note. Oh, thank Antimone, the crowd was opening out. The tide had turned, it seemed; this was the way it was supposed to happen after all. Victory was still there, in the air. In his relief, he felt he could almost taste it.

  Men were throwing down their shields and tearing off their helms, shouting about betrayal and defeat. The phalanx, which a few moments before had seemed a brute, packed, immovable thing, now began to fall apart. As men abandoned their bronze burdens, so they became more mobile, and somewhere out at the edges of the formation, or what was left of it, they were running.

  They were running away. Karnos stared in disbelief so utter that it cancelled out the bowel-draining fear. “No! No!” he screamed. All Machran was here in front of him, seven thousand men, the heart of the greatest city in the Macht world - and it was bleeding to death in the churned muck, or in flight right in front of his horrified eyes.

  He sagged as the men about him moved away. A shield, dropped by his neighbour, struck his anklebone an agonising blow. He raised his head to shriek his pain and his anger at the cold sky, and the falling arrow lanced cleanly through the right wing of his cuirass, sinking into his shoulder with an impact that sent him reeling on his back into the bloody mire below.

  TWELVE

  LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY

  RICTUS WATCHED THE blood dripping from his fingertips with a kind of morbid fascination. He was clenching a filthy clout about his arm at the elbow, twisted tight as he could make it, and the trickle had slowed at last. Even so, the torchlight in the tent seemed incredibly bright to him, splintering in shards and blades, like ground glass in his eyes. That would be the thump on the head, he supposed. He had already been sick once, and were there anything left in his stomach he had no doubt he would be so again.

  Fornyx’s face swam into view, shadow in light. He felt the weight of his friend’s hand on the numb meat that was his forearm.

  “I got the carnifex.”

  “There are men hurt worse than me,” Rictus said muzzily.

  “That artery wants stitched shut, or you’ll bleed white. Now shut your mouth before I slap you.”

  Rictus smiled. He leaned back, was caught by Fornyx before he toppled off the blood-slimed wooden table, and drifted into a hazier place in his mind. Aise was there, young and smiling again, and Rian had flowers in her hair, a marriage-crown of primroses and forget-me-nots. But who was the man in shadow beside her?

  He felt a stab of sharp pain that jolted him awake again. They were holding his arm down and old Severan, one of the Dogsheads’ two carnifexes, was working a blood-brown needle through his flesh. Another scar for Aise to find, Rictus thought.

  His gaze drifted. The great tent was full of the stink of death, a slaughterhouse reek. Men were lying on sodden straw or were being pinioned upon stout wooden tables as the army physicians went to work. A strange and horrible calling, to spend one’s days delving into the living flesh of other men.

  Rictus dragged himself back to the present, putting to the back of things the pop of the needle as it threaded through skin and muscle and dragged the slashed halves of his arm back together.

  “What’s the butcher’s bill?” he asked Fornyx.

  The dark little man bent close and looked in his eyes. “Lucky you had a good helm, or that spear would have drilled a hole through to the bone.”

  “Fornyx -”

  “Forty-six dead on the field, nine from our own fucking arrows. Ninety-six wounded, of whom -Severan?”

  The grey-haired man working on Rictus’s arm grunted. “Thirty or so of those will be back in scarlet within a week or two - like the chief here. But of the rest, there are a dozen who will take longer - broken bones and the like. The rest are done with soldiering for good.”

  “A third of us,” Rictus said in a cracked whisper.

  “A hard day’s work,” Fornyx said. “He gave us the worst job on the field.”

  “He gave it to us because he knew we could do it,” Rictus said.

  “That’s pretty fucking magnanimous of you.”

  “It’s the truth, Fornyx. You know it too. He gave us the hardest job because we are the best he has.”

  A bleak smile flitted across Fornyx’s face. “It is a distinction which could well prove the death of us all.”

  “Not today,” Rictus answered. He closed his eyes, nausea rising like a blush in his throat. He clenched his teeth shut until his jaws creaked, let it pass.

  “I’m done here,” Severan said, rising with a groan and pushing his fists into the small of his back in the way Rictus often did after rising in the mornings.

  “Keep that arm slung for a week, and stay awake for the rest of the night - Fornyx, don’t you let him sleep - I’ve seen too many men with a knock on the head sleep their way through Antimone’s Veil. You hear me now?”

  “I hear you, you old bugger.”

  Severan slapped him on the shoulder and then stumped off to the carnage of the tent without another word.

  “No sleep. Ah, Phobos take it,” Rictus groaned.

  “You heard him. Let me get you to Corvus’s tent. He wants to see all his underlings tonight, and it’s as good a way to keep you awake as any.”

  “Fuck you, you evil-eyed little scrawny bastard.”

  “Careful, Rictus; you know I love it when a girl talks dirty.”

  ANTIMONE WAS WEEPING. It happened often after a battle, especially a large one. The more blood on the ground, the more tears she shed, it was said. The rain came down in a soft cold shroud to fill up the rutted footprints of the living and the dead, to patter on the eyes of the corpses littering the field. At least at this time of year, the process of decay would not set in so quickly as during the usual summer campaigning.

  Rictus leant on Fornyx’s bony shoulder as they made their unsteady way through the camp. He could remember little of the battle’s end. The Dogsheads had charged into the mass of Machran warriors once, withdrawn, and then charged again. The next thing he remembered was fighting to keep his head out of the mud while men stood on him.

  Well, the thing was done now, at least. The camp was full of drunken men reliving their own versions of the day’s events, pouring thankful libations of wine into the ground for Phobos, for Antimone, in thanks at having survived with eyes and arms and balls intact.

  The Dogsheads were more subdued. They had lit two huge fires kindled from broken enemy spears, and were standing around them in their red cloaks passing wineskins with the thoughtful purpose of men who mean to drink deep. They raised a cheer at seeing Rictus, however, and the mood around the fires brightened. Valerian and Kesero were there, Kesero limping with a linen rag knitted about the big muscles of his right thigh, Valerian untouched and as earnest as always.

  “You had us worried when we saw you taken into the butcher’s tent,” he said to Rictus. “For a second, we thought you might be in trouble.”

  “No
trouble,” Rictus assured them. “An aichme’s love-bite is all.”

  “Our employer has his victory,” shaven-headed Kesero said. “I hope it makes him happy.”

  “Machran is finished now,” one of the other men put in: Ramis of Karinth, Kesero’s second, a high-coloured strawhead who was already drunk. “We must have killed or maimed half the men they had on the field.”

  “I believe we did,” Valerian said with a half-smile. “Now I know what a great battle is like. And I know why the stories make of them such glorious and terrible things.”

  His mutilated face gave the smile a bittersweet cast. Rictus set a hand on his shoulder. Yes, he thought, I believe Rian could do worse.

  “What’s our story now, boss?” another voice broke in. Praesos of Pelion, a good steady fellow like to make centurion in a year or two, if he survived.

  Rictus collected his swimming thoughts. “I’m on my way to Corvus now. We’ll see what’s what. There will be a shitload of clearing up tomorrow, for one thing - we must police the battlefield, burn the dead, collect what arms were left on them, and reorganise.”

  “Not many of us made it into the enemy camp,” Praesos said. “Every other bugger in the army was there before us, leaving their wounded on the ground. By the time we got round to it, it was picked clean or under guard.”

  “We don’t fight for plunder,” Valerian snapped at him. “We look after our hurt and dead first of everything - it’s the way it is done.”

  “Well said, brother,” Kesero grinned, “but you can’t blame the lads for being a little put out. We do the right thing, and it leaves us with empty purses while Demetrius’s fucking conscripts raped the place.”

  “Aye - what about some pay?” someone called out, back from the firelight and the golden shimmer of the flame-caught rain.