Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  The city had five gates, and Karnos was facing the South Prime, also known as the Avennon for the Quarter in which it stood. The gates were ancient, made of oak faced with bronze. Such was the prestige of Machran that Karnos could not remember in his life ever seeing those gates closed. Even at night, the wagons and carts of the country people went in and out of them, bringing their goods and their chattels, their pumpkins and their slaves and their hunting-dogs and their greed and dreams to the richest markets of the hinterland: the Mithannon, the Goshen, the Round Hill. These were places where all things could be had for a price, from a tinsmith’s scoop to a woman’s virtue.

  And now, in this great city, this teeming walled hive of commerce and endeavour, there was something in such short supply that it had become almost beyond price. The courage of fighting men.

  They had left a thousand spears behind when they marched out to meet Corvus west of Hal Goshen, and Karnos had entrusted his fellow Kerusia members, Dion and Eurymedon, with the task of recruiting more. But the true red-cloaked mercenary was a rare beast these days. One might hire any number of so-called warriors from the scum and vagabonds who came and went through the city like corn going through a man’s bowels, but these were not the disciplined, drilled centons of a generation ago. The genuine redcloak was just not to be had anymore, not in any numbers.

  But I have my ten thousand, Karnos thought, just as Rictus had. It must be enough - it will be enough.

  He kicked his horse, and cantered down the long slope towards his city, the fatigue of the road forgotten.

  SIXTEEN

  THE AFFAIRS OF MEN

  ON THE MOVE at last, Corvus’s army did not present a very martial sight. Except for the absence of women, it looked more like a mass migration than a military formation. The men were bundled in their cloaks, most of them barefoot despite the cold, and scores were dropping out of the column to relieve themselves, squatting in the muck and rain-stippled water of the floodplain. Even the Companion Cavalry were afoot, leading their hangdog mounts off to the flank of the main column, the gaudy cloaks of the Kefren drenched and mudstained so as to blend in to the drear landscape.

  The main column straggled along the line of the Imperial Road for over twelve pasangs, and the baggage train was even further back. Only in the van were there compact bodies of formed-up troops, like a fist kept clenched at the end of a withered arm. These were Rictus’s Dogsheads, and Druze’s Igranians. They plodded along with skirmishers thrown out in scattered clumps to their front. The Dogsheads had doubled their red cloaks over their shoulders to keep the hems out of the water, and their shields were slung on their backs, the bronze faces greening in the wet.

  “All things considered, Fornyx said, “I prefer winter in the highlands.” He scratched his beard, squeezing the rain out of it.

  “No good will come of him pushing the army like this,” Rictus said. “If it were up to me, I’d go into winter quarters in Afteni. It’s rich land around here. We could improve the roads back east and consolidate our hold on places like Hal Goshen, do the thing thoroughly.”

  “Teresian hanged three deserters he caught yesterday,” Fornyx said. “Conscript lads from Goshen, been in the army about ten minutes, and missing home. He’s a bloody-minded bastard, that one. Reminds me of you, fifteen years ago.”

  “Rules are rules,” Rictus said dryly, rubbing his wounded arm. “Corvus makes his own.”

  “Well, they’ve brought him this far I suppose.”

  Druze joined them, leaning on a javelin as though it were a staff. Pain had pinched lines about his eyes that had not been there before.

  “Hear the news? Karnos is alive after all.”

  Rictus was not surprised. “A born survivor, that fellow.”

  “He’s on his way back to Machran, it’s said. The Afteni may have surrendered, but some of the hinterland cities are sticking by the League and marching their men back with him.”

  “How many?” Rictus asked.

  “Enough to make a fight of it.”

  “Looks like our triumphal entry into Machran will be problematic,” Fornyx said, and spat into the mud.

  “What does he mean to do, Druze?” Rictus asked.

  “What do you think? He’s Corvus. He’d chase them to hell if they were still thumbing their noses at him. You mark my words, brothers, before the month is out we’ll be sitting in front of Machran looking at those big white walls and wondering how to get on top of them.”

  “You can’t assault Machran, it’s never been done. It’s the strongest city in the world,” Fornyx protested.

  Druze grinned. “All the more reason for him to try.” He patted Fornyx on the shoulder. “Cheer up! This is what it takes to make history.”

  THE ARMY SLOGGED onwards. Rolling out of their sodden blankets and tireless, cheerless camps well before dawn, the men were on the road while still chewing on salt goat and mouldy biscuit. They would march all day, though march was a euphemistic term for their mudsucking, agonising progress.

  Then, as night fell, they would go into camp -another euphemism for lying huddled together in knee-deep mud with their cloaks and blankets drawn round their shoulders, their feet spoked towards whatever pitiable fire they could coax into life through the rain.

  Corvus shared it all with them. The tents had been left behind with the baggage train, but a team of mules carried his along with the main body. He had it set up each evening with braziers burning bright and hot within, and he would spend part of every night rousing up those who seemed worst off with the flux or the cold, or carrying old wounds, and he would set them on clean straw in his tent, ply them with his own stock of wine, and a store of stories no-one had known he possessed. He did not seem to sleep at all.

  The men who were brought to his tent for the night were few in number, considering the size of the army, but they would go back to their comrades with fresh heart, telling of how the general of them all had sat down beside them and poured them wine, piled their plates with fresh meat and bread, and taken the time to hear the stories of their lives.

  Good news and bad travels faster through an army than a man can run, and these efforts on Corvus’s part put new heart into the men. It was deftly done, and Rictus, for one, marvelled not only at Corvus’s handling of his many thousands, but at the stamina of the man, who never admitted to weariness, never lost his temper.

  Youngsters from Hal Goshen, Goron and Afteni, conscripted into an army which had extinguished their city’s independence, would look up to find the man who had done it all to them enquiring after the state of their feet and their stomachs. After a half hour’s banter, Corvus would slap them on the shoulder as though they were old campaigners he had shared a thousand campfires with, and disappear.

  They would be envied by their peers, pressed for stories of the encounter. They would begin to feel part of the massive bristling, brutal mass that was the army around them.

  The army needed that boost to its cohesiveness. More and more of the spearmen in the ranks were now conscripts. Some of them had even fought against Corvus in the last battle. His treatment of conquered cities might be lenient by Macht standards, but the levies he imposed upon them were rigidly enforced. Demetrius, marshal of the conscript phalanx, was not a man to take no for an answer. When he enforced a levy, he split up the city centons of the men who had been pressed into service, scattering them throughout his morai, breaking up the identities of cities in the ranks, embedding loyalty within the formations he created to replace them.

  It was an efficient but harsh process, and almost every morning when the army moved on they left behind them a gibbet with bodies swinging from it. To be left for carrion was the worst thing a Macht could imagine happening to him after death, and the lesson was quite deliberate - and it had been sanctioned by Corvus, the same smiling fellow who came round the campfires at night enquiring after the state of his new conscripts’ feet.

  HE APPEARED AT Rictus’s campfire one night, walking in noiselessly fr
om the teeming dark like an apparition.

  About the struggling flames were all the usual suspects of Rictus’s acquaintance, plus a few more.

  Valerian was there, and Kesero, as always; Fornyx, and Druze, who often dropped by with gossip once the army bedded down for the night. Rictus had come to like the dark Igranian, and he and Fornyx had become like bantering brothers, unable to say anything to one another that was not in some sense a goad. Each knew it, each enjoyed it. They were all listening intently to a particularly vile story that Fornyx was telling, interrupted with great relish every so often by Druze, when they realised that Corvus was just on the brim of the firelight, watching them, his face a white mask with a smile painted across it.

  “Fornyx, don’t look at me like that. I’m not your mother.”

  “Not with those hips,” Fornyx shot back. “Lord high and mighty - why don’t you pull up a knee and have some wine - I found a skin of it on the road today. It tastes like piss, but so does the water we’ve been drinking this last week.”

  Corvus squirted wine into his mouth and swallowed. “That’s an Afteni vintage, if I’m any judge.”

  “I think it followed the army a while before it lay down to die,” Fornyx said with a wink.

  Corvus handed over the skin. “Here and there, if a skin of wine goes wandering, there’s no harm I suppose. So long as it does not become a habit. This army is made up of soldiers, not thieves.” He smiled.

  The lazy drunken light left Fornyx’s eye in an instant. He sat upright, his splayed fingers sinking into the mud as he rose. “Thief is an ugly word. Not one to be thrown around lightly.”

  The men around the fire fell silent, watching. The rain was hissing about the logs farthest from the flames, and beyond them the hum of other conversations about other fires went on, a background murmur. But here it seemed as though a silent bell had been struck, and they were listening to its echoes.

  Druze broke it. “Tell the truth, I think I pissed in that wineskin earlier. My cock is so shrivelled these days, the neck just about fit. You ever tried to fuck a wineskin, Rictus?”

  Rictus smiled, still watching Fornyx and Corvus. “Not me. I’m hung like a donkey. Ask Fornyx - you ever wonder why he’s such a bow-legged bastard?”

  The men about the campfire lit up with laughter, and even Fornyx threw his head back with the rest of them. Rictus and Corvus caught one another’s eye, each smiling falsely with their mouths.

  “Chief,” Rictus said, rising with a loud groan, “let me escort you away from these degenerates. They’re ill-educated runts. The best part of them ran down their mother’s leg.”

  Another chorus, laughter, feigned outrage. The skin tossed about the campfire. Rictus took Corvus by the arm; his bicep was as slender as that of a girl, but made of steel wire.

  “Let’s walk the camp, you and I.”

  Corvus came with him, the rain falling on them both in the darkness. Rictus was as drunk as cheap wine and short commons could make him. He set his good arm about the younger man’s shoulders, and for some inexplicable reason thought that moment of Rian, and how he had kissed her hair in the upland pasture while they sat there with Eunion talking about the slight young man now walking beside him.

  I’m getting old, he thought. Those tall enough to bear the spear are now young enough to be my sons. This boy here, he is a thing of genius, and he teeters on the edge of disaster. I see it now.

  Phobos, how I miss them.

  The drink set his mind running down courses he would as soon as left alone. He gripped Corvus tighter.

  I had a son once, dead and burned. He would not be much younger than this boy here, if he had lived. Is that what I’m doing here?

  “I hanged two men tonight,” Corvus said. “For looting and rape. Some farmer’s daughter they dragged back to camp.” His voice was a strained croak. “A time is coming when this army will have to live off the land like a host of locusts. I know that, but there are some things I will never tolerate. That discipline must be learned now, if it is to hold later, when this thing becomes harder.”

  “You need to sleep,” Rictus told him.

  Corvus smiled. “Sometimes I am afraid that I will go to sleep, and when I awake, the army will be gone, scattered to the winds. It’s getting harder, as we come west. In the east we were more tightly knit. I wish you could have seen us.”

  “I wish so too,” Rictus said, honestly. “Tell me something, Corvus - how did it all begin? What was it that brought you to this?”

  The smaller man halted and turned to look at him, the strange eyes with that light in them in the night. “This is what I was born for. I was conceived in war, and I am my father’s son.” “And who was your father?”

  “Do you not know - have you never guessed? Rictus, I thought you more acute.”

  “I’m tired and more than a little drunk, Corvus. Indulge me.”

  They began walking again, round the perimeter of the sprawling camp. Corvus nodded to a sentry, spoke to the man and called him by his name.

  “My father was once of the Ten Thousand, Rictus. From what my mother tells me he was a great leader, a good man who died needlessly.

  “His name was Jason of Ferai.”

  Rictus’s arm slipped from the younger man’s shoulders. He halted in his tracks.

  “Tiryn,” he said. “Antimone’s pity, she was your mother.”

  He remembered. He remembered. Almost a quarter of a century gone by, and still he could recall the happenings of those days in gem-sharp images. This boy’s mother was a beautiful Kufr woman who had been Arkamene’s concubine, abandoned and abused after Kunaksa. Jason had fallen in love with her, and she with him - as unlikely a pairing any story ever saw. Jason had been about to retire, to forsake the red cloak and the Curse of God, and buy a farm somewhere east of the sea, to live out his days in some obscure corner of the Empire, in peace.

  Rictus shook his head, baffled with the bright glittering memory of it all.

  “Your father,” he said thickly, “He was like a brother to me.”

  “And it was because of you he died.”

  “Yes, it was. I was a stupid boy, a young fool who had no self control.”

  “My mother told me. She never forgave you, Rictus.”

  “I do not blame her for that. Is this why you came seeking me, Corvus? Is this some kind of -”

  “Revenge?” Corvus laughed. “My friend, I have been hearing stories of you since I was of an age to speak. I hold no ill will for the death of a father I never knew. But I counted always on meeting the famous Rictus, to face the legend and see what truth there was behind the stories.”

  Rictus shook his head. “You of all people should know that stories are never anything more than an echo of the truth.”

  “I have met the man, and he measures up to the stories, Rictus. If he did not, he would be dead by now.”

  Corvus walked away, until the darkness was near swallowing him up. “You are a man of honour, and you know what excesses an army can commit, in victory or defeat. You think as I do, Rictus - you hate the things I hate. I need men like you right now. In the times to come I will need you even more.”

  He wiped his forearm across his eyes, and seemed like nothing so much as some lost boy standing in the dark.

  “I have fallen between two worlds. I have had to fight to find my way with the Macht - my own people. And yet Ardashir and the Companions see me also as one of their own.”

  “You are lucky in your friends, Corvus. As lucky as I once was.”

  “That may be. But I still do not belong in the world as I find it, so I have decided to refashion it. The Macht are - we are - ignorant barbarians, compared to the civilization that exists on the far side of the sea. And the Empire is tired and decadent, for all its riches, its ancient culture, its diversity. I think something better can be made of both.”

  Rictus blinked, the last of the wine leaving his mind. “What are you saying?”

  Corvus turned round and grinn
ed. At once, he had that unearthly look about him again, and the tortured boy had vanished utterly.

  “I am thinking aloud, daydreaming in the night. Pay me no heed, Rictus.”

  He advanced on the older man. “If you had command of the army, what would you do now -how would you proceed against Machran?”

  Rictus rubbed his chin, collecting himself. Corvus’s eyes on him were unsettling.

  “I would take the hinterland cities, first off. They’re broken up at the moment, demoralised. They should be ripe fruit. Then I would sit out the winter in them, divide up the army to garrison the major cities and prepare to attack Machran in the spring. By that time the new levies will have settled in and the men will be rested and ready for another fight. Machran will be a hard nut to crack open. We must prepare ourselves for it.”

  “I agree on that. But if we wait until spring, the untaken League cities, and Machran itself, will have time to recover from the shock of their defeat. In all likelihood, we would have our work to do all over again. Given time, Karnos will reconstitute the League - he is a resourceful man.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  Corvus smiled. “Were I Rictus, I would do what you suggest. It is the sensible thing. But I am Corvus.

  “We will move on Machran with all we have, at once, invest the city through the winter if we have to. I want the thing over and done with by the spring. We have them on the run right now - let us keep them that way.”

  Rictus shook his head. “We don’t have enough men.”

  “Numbers aren’t everything, if an army is all motivated by one spirit, one idea. There is a thing I have found about the Macht since I began leading them and fighting them; something that is different from the peoples of the Empire. They will fight for an idea, an abstraction - if that idea is powerful enough. It is what makes them a great people.”