Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “We’re soft. I had not thought so until we were with the goatherder people last night. I think their women are tougher than us.”

  “They breed them hard, this high,” Phaestus said, and his smile faded. “Your mother and sisters are folk of the city, lowlanders, but my people came from the highlands, and it is in your blood too. It’s well to remember that. The clans of the mountains are not savages - not like the goatmen, who are worse than animals. They are ourselves, in a purer state. What we write down, they keep in their heads, and their sense of honour is as refined as our own. As soon as they sat across a fire from us last night, we were part of their camp, and had some threat come upon us, we would all have fought it together.”

  “And if we had cheated them in the bargaining?”

  “They would have considered themselves fools for being cheated - that is what such barter is about. But you cross them in a matter of honour, Philemon, and they will kill you without mercy, and all your family. You must remember that.”

  “I will.” The boy sobered.

  “Good lad. Now, get back down and help with the repacking and, for Phobos’s sake, don’t overload the mules. They have a long journey still to make. Send Berimus up to me.”

  “Yes, father.”

  Phaestus watched him go.

  Seventeen years old, and ostrakr. It’s still an adventure to him - he has no real idea what it means.

  Berimus stood silently for some time before Phaestus spoke to him, and when he did his tone was entirely different, harsh and cold as the mountain stone below the ice.

  “Are all the preparations made?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “I am no longer your master, Berimus. You are no longer a slave.”

  He turned around. Berimus was a small man, built as broad as an oak door, with a nut-shaped head of dark hair and lively grey eyes. The same age as Phaestus, he looked ten years younger, a compact, muscular version of the tall patrician with the pepper-grey beard, who looked him in the eye.

  Phaestus handed him a clinking pouch of soft leather.

  “That is all we have left, but it should be enough. You won’t need it up here in the hills, and do not show it - it will only make trouble.”

  “I know.” “Once you reach the lowlands, show someone in authority this.” Phaestus produced a sealed scroll of parchment. He rubbed the red wax with one finger.

  “This is the seal of Karnos himself. Any official of the hinterland cities will recognise it, and will assist you. Make due west - it’s four hundred pasangs to Machran. Do not let the ladies tell you otherwise. My wife will think to command you - do not let her. You are a free man now, but still my steward, and the man I trust most in the world.”

  “Master, your family is my own - you know that.”

  “I do. Berimus, we will come out of this thing. When I bring Karnos what I seek we will be citizens again, of the greatest city in our world. I will see you right, I swear.”

  Berimus bowed his head.

  “You remember when we were boys together, and we came up here hunting with my father?”

  “The day the boar felled him - I remember.”

  “We stood over him that day, shoulder to shoulder like brothers. That is what you have always been to me. I am entrusting my family to you now - stand over them as you stood over my father.”

  “I will, master.”

  “I am called Phaestus, my friend.”

  Berimus looked solemn as an owl. “Phaestus. I will deliver your family to Machran, or I will die trying. You have my word on it.”

  They clasped forearms as free men do.

  “Philemos and I will join you before midwinter. Karnos will look after you until then. Give this to him.” Another scroll, another waxed seal.

  “Be careful, Phaestus,” Berimus said. “These hills are a strange and dangerous place.”

  “Dangerous?” Phaestus smiled. “Don’t worry, Berimus. I only go to call on the home of a friend.”

  TWO SEPARATE LINES of people, one family. They moved apart from one another, mere dots on the white spine of the world. Phaestus was throwing his life into the hollow of a knucklebone, and with it, those of all he loved.

  Let me show you how it feels, Rictus, he thought.

  HE HAD HUNTED in these hills for decades; he knew them as well as any city-dweller could. In the winter he had tracked wolf, in the summer deer. North of the Gostheres, in the deep Harukush, there were mountain leopards with blue eyes, and enormous white cave bears. So it was rumoured, though Phaestus had never seen one, or met anyone who had.

  It was an ancient place, the Deep Mountains. The legends said that the Macht themselves had originated there, migrating south and east out of the snows and the savage peaks, leaving behind them a lost city - the first city - whose walls had been made of iron.

  The first Macht had all been Cursebearers, according to the myth, and had known Antimone herself. She had descended to the surface of the world to dress them in her Gift, and then had left for her endless vigil among the stars with only her two sons for company.

  And God had turned His face from them all, from the goddess of pity and the race on whose behalf she had intervened upon the face of the earth.

  So said the legends. Phaestus was nothing if not a rational man, but he was astute enough to know the value of myth. The black armours which dotted the Macht world were an undeniable reality, and had not been made by any craft that now existed. So there was that seed of truth at the root of the legends. If there was one, there might be others.

  He had talked to Rictus of it, back in the days when he had been an honoured guest at Andunnon and the two had sat by the fire after a few days’ hunting in the hills. Together, they had speculated idly that they might one day make an expedition into the lost interior of the Deep Mountains, to look for that lost city with walls of iron. Something to occupy their retirement.

  Antimone, Lady of Night, Phaestus thought, how did it come to this?

  THEY KEPT TO the high ridges to steer clear of the drifts, and found, themselves in a blue and white world, where the wind took their breath away and set the snow clouding in a blizzard off the rocks and stones at their feet. The sky was empty except for the pale red disc that was Haukos, always reluctant to quit the sky in winter, but to the north the great peaks of the Harukush - legendary even among the Kufr - barred the horizon like a white wall. Down from them the wind swooped, and the bite of it was as bitter as a plunge into a midwinter sea.

  There were six of them: Phaestus, Philemos, and four others who had come out of Hal Goshen with them. One of these, Sertorius, had been at various times in his life a mercenary, a hunter, a slave-dealer, and a pimp. It was in this latter guise that he had come to the attention of Phaestus, in his duties as chief magistrate of the city.

  The two had known each other for many years, and from their confrontations there had arisen a grudging mutual respect. In his own way, Sertorius was as proud and stiff-necked as Phaestus, and as disgusted by the tame surrender of his city. It was he, and his silent little band of henchmen, who had smuggled the Speaker of Hal Goshen, his family and some of his household out of the city - and with a surprising degree of discretion.

  Ostrakr, the sentence had been, but Phaestus had no doubt that he was not intended to survive. His rival, Sarmenian, had ached for the chief magistracy for too long to be magnanimous in victory.

  Sertorius had been well paid for his troubles, but this current exploit he was doing for free. Like Phaestus, he was a man without a city now, and were he to walk through the gates of Machran, he wanted to do so with something to show for his trouble, something which would ease the transition.

  He was a lowlander, a black-haired, brown-skinned man with eyes the colour of a thrush’s back and a convict’s gall-marks on his wrists. His face was seamed and scarred with knife-fights and wickedness and he had a wide gap between his front teeth. He was not the company Phaestus would have chosen for a trip into the highlands in winter -s
till less the three hulking street-thugs that were his companions - but the choice had not been wide, and Sertorius had at least a brassy, hail-fellow-well-met way of getting along with others which had come in useful with the goatherder folk the night before.

  What Sertorius and his men lacked, however, was a knowledge of the mountains, and they stumbled in the wake of Phaestus and his son, holding onto the tails of the mules and complaining endlessly about the cold.

  “Two good day’s travel,” Phaestus told them, reining in his contempt with the practice of a politician. “That’s all. Two days, and then we shall have a roof over our heads, for a day or two at least.”

  “If the weather holds,” Sertorius said, the words hissing through his gapped teeth. “I hope the prize we seek is worth it, Phaestus.”

  “Believe me, my friend, it will be well worth the trip. But we must make it to Machran as quickly as we can. The last I heard, Corvus was banking on a swift winter campaign. The fighting is going on even as we speak.”

  “Then we’re well out of it,” Adurnos, one of Sertorius’s henchmen muttered.

  “If it hurts the little fucker who took our city, then I’m all for it,” Sertorius said. “But remember, Phaestus, I was paid only to get you out of Hal Goshen. This here trip is my own charity.”

  “And your own self-interest,” Phaestus told him. “This way you turn up at Machran with something that Karnos wants. You arrive there empty-handed, and you’ll be starting at the bottom again.”

  “The bottom’s where I feel comfortable,” Sertorius said with a laugh.

  Struggling along the knife-ridge later in the day, with the sun setting at their left shoulders and the wind masking all conversation, Philemos drew his father close.

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “Nor do I. But so long as their interests and ours coincide, they will serve us faithfully. Sertorius is a rogue, but he has a keen sense of what’s good for him.”

  “They’re animals, father; scum from the sewers. What’s to stop them turning on us?”

  “Philemos,” Phaestus said, smiling, “I am their introduction to Karnos, to the fleshpots of Machran. And more than that, look at them. They’re lowland city criminals - if you and I walked away from them now they would perish up here. They need us as we need them. They are outside their own world.”

  “So are we,” his son said. “Father, I would sooner we had gone to Machran and joined the League army - to fight in open battle. What we’re doing here -”

  “What we do here is worth a thousand men on the battlefield,” Phaestus snapped. “Not everything comes down to standing in a spearline, boy. And you’ll get your chance at that before we’re done.” His face softened at the look on his son’s.

  “Philemos, you were born to be more than phalanx-fodder, as was I. If you are to be a man, you must learn from me. A man cannot always follow the dictates of what he perceives to be his honour -sometimes that will lead him to his ruin.”

  “Father, you could have been ruler of Hal Goshen under Corvus - it was your honour that has brought you here.”

  Phaestus smiled. “Well said. I shall make a rhetorician of you yet.” He turned away, and the smile curdled on his face.

  It was not honour. It was ambition, and outrage, and bloody-minded hatred. To be offered something like that, like a coin dropped on a beggar’s plate -and by Rictus, who despite everything was nothing more than a brute mercenary.

  It could not be borne. It was the manner in which the offer had been made, as much as the offer itself.

  I am a better man than Rictus, he thought. And I will prove it.

  FOURTEEN

  TEST OF LIFE

  THERE WAS SOMETHING in Aise which responded to winter. She respected it, with the good sense of a woman who had lived her life in the blue and white world of the high hills. But there was more to it than that.

  It was not that she enjoyed the sensations of the season - although she did - it was more that the vast labour of the year was done, at long last, affording a chance to stand and look around, and to lean back from the earth upon which she threw all the life she had within her, year upon year.

  She did not like winter - no fool could - but there was a certain satisfaction about it, seeing all which had been set in train throughout the year lead up to the moment of truth. That was winter in the highlands; the test of life itself.

  The barley had been scythed, threshed and winnowed, and the grain stored in the three-legged wooden bin at one end of the yard. When Aise felt cold, or out of sorts, she would open the bin and scoop out a bucketful, then pound it to flour in the great hollow stone that Rictus and Fornyx had dragged out of the river years in the past. They had been two days getting it from the water to where it now sat, and every time she thumped the iron-hard log into it she thought of them that summer, sitting grinning at one another with the muck of the riverbank all over them and that great stone between them. Now it sat in the yard as though it had been there since time immemorial, a totem of their permanence here.

  A clinking of bronze bells, the nattering bleat of the goats. Rian was walking slowly across the yard with a leather bucket of goat’s milk, which was steaming in the chill of the morning. Ona chattered along beside her, bright as a starling, and around the two girls the dogs flounced like puppies, sure of their share of the milk.

  In the house Styra was tending the fire - at this time of year it was never allowed to go out. Garin had been chopping wood since dawn, and was sat before the hearth, talking to her. The talk ceased when Aise entered, and Garin rose with a sullen look about him. He and Styra had become a couple very quickly - slaves were wont to do such things, casting around for what comfort they could in life - but he had never forgiven Aise for selling Veria, and his work was falling off. He spent more time out in the woods now, trapping and tree-felling and hunting, sometimes with Eunion, sometimes alone.

  It is Rictus he stays for, Aise thought. My husband has a way of garnering loyalty, even when he is not trying.

  Eunion came to the table with a cloak wrapped about him, a few strands of white hair standing out from his head like a dandelion gone to seed. He was yawning, and in the morning his face seemed as wrinkled as a walnut.

  “You should not sit up so late,” Aise said, kneading the barley dough into flat cakes for the griddle. “You read too much, Eunion.” She hated that Eunion was getting old. She could not imagine life here without him. She would be lost, and that made her all the more terse.

  “I was reading. One of these months I will go to Hal Goshen for a better lamp, a three-flame one with a deep well. My eyes smart like blisters.”

  “They look more like cherries. Have some milk. I will have bannock made soon. Rian!”

  Rictus’s daughter stuck her head in the front door. “Yes, mother?”

  “Draw me a gourd of oil from the jar, and set the plates. Where is Ona?”

  “Playing with the dogs.”

  “Bring her in.”

  The household gathered about the table. When Rictus and Fornyx were not here they all ate together, slaves and free alike. Aise rose, flushed, from the fire with barley bannock hot to the touch, and poured the oil over the pale, flat cakes. There was soft cheese to go with them, and goat’s milk with the animals’ warmth still in it. Eunion munched on an onion, and winced as his ageing teeth met their match in the purple bulb of it.

  “I was reading about the Deep Mountains,” he said to the table.

  “Which story? The one about the city of iron?” Rian asked eagerly.

  I will have to brush her hair tonight, Aise thought. It is as matted as a horse’s mane - and I do not believe her face has felt water this morning.

  “Yes,” Eunion went on, gesturing with the onion. “It seems to me there’s something to be said for the theory that the first Macht wanted to keep themselves hidden, hence the remote location of the legendary city of iron.

  “But more than that. When I read the myths, I find that Antimone is t
here with them at the beginning, not just as the goddess we know and pray to, but as a creature who lived upon the face of Kuf in their midst. Who knows - she may even have been one of us - a Macht woman of great learning and wisdom that subsequent generations imbued with the godhead. When it comes to the black armour -”

  “Eunion, you read too much that is not there,” Aise said, looking up from her bowl. “It’s one thing to spend the whole night ruining your sight in front of a bunch of old scrolls, but quite another to be filling the children’s heads with - with -”

  “Blasphemy?” Eunion said.

  “Well, yes. Antimone watches over us all eternally. She was never a mortal woman; that’s absurd. You’re just playing with ideas, and Rian has enough of those in her head already.”

  Eunion grinned. “Aise, I merely flex my mind. It is a muscle, like those in your arm. If you do not exercise it, it will atrophy, and we would all be no better than goatmen.”

  “Drink your milk, old man, you talk too much.” But she smiled.

  “Goatmen! Tell us, Eunion,” Rian wriggled in her chair, “how was it that they came to be?”

  “Gestrakos tells us that -”

  The dogs growled, low in their throats, and padded away from the table towards the open door of the farmhouse. Eunion fell silent.

  “Maybe they smell wolf on the wind,” Garin said.

  The family sat quiet, listening. The two hounds both had their hackles up and their teeth bared.

  They walked stiff-legged outside, and began baying furiously.

  “We have visitors,” Eunion said, and rose up from the table with a swiftness that belied his years. Garin rose with him, wiping his mouth.

  “Spears?”

  “Yes - go get them.”

  “The pass is closed,” Aise said. She could feel the blood leaving her face.

  “Perhaps father has come back!” Rian said.

  “The dogs know better,” Aise told her. “Stay here.”