Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  “The attack has failed,” he said. He looked around.

  Some two dozen Dogsheads were standing in a tight phalanx. Stones and arrows were raining down on them, clanging off their helms and shields. Everyone else was making for the ladders. The Companions in the second wave had not yet climbed them in any numbers. The traffic was all the other way now.

  “This is the rearguard. I stand here. Fornyx, get the rest back down the wall. Have good men at the ladders - for Phobos’s sake don’t overload them, or we’ll all die up here.”

  “Don’t play it the hero, Rictus - Phobos!” They all ducked as another ballista bolt soared over them.

  “We’ve got to get us some of those,” Druze said wryly.

  “Go, brother,” Rictus said. “And try not to fall on your ass.”

  Back to the task at hand. The strength was going from Rictus’s right arm, the blood hanging from it in snot-thick threads. He butted his attackers back with the heavy shield, the drepana darting out in quick, economical lunges, wounding more often than killing. A jet of anger as he regretted his cheap stabbing sword, still back in camp.

  THE MEN AT his shoulders stood with him unquestioning. In the dark and chaos of the fighting he could not even be sure of their names, though they saved his life again and again, as he saved theirs.

  They worked together, fighting for each other against the flood of foes that came barrelling down the catwalk. They fell back step by stubborn step, retreating over their own dead, closing up the gaps left by the fallen. It was a kind of fighting they knew well, and they understood also that behind them their brothers were queuing up at the ladder-heads on the walls.

  To break now would mean the end of them all. They bargained away their own lives for the sake of the army, for the Dogsheads, for their centon.

  For none of those things. They did it for their friends.

  Finally they could retreat no more. Of the men who had climbed up the ladders with the setting of the moon, perhaps half made it back down again. The last ladder broke, and fell in shattered bloody splinters amid the terrible wreckage at the foot of the wall.

  On the battlements above, Rictus stood at bay with a pair of bloodied companions, the dead piled around their feet. There was a grey in the air that heralded the dawn, and he could see the vast city that was the cynosure of the Macht world rising in front of him on its hills, brightening moment by moment.

  He tossed down his broken sword, his arm almost too numb to feel it leave his fist. His shield followed, and finally he lifted off his battered and pitted helm, feeling the cold air on his face, cooling the sweat upon it.

  The enemy soldiers halted, panting. One of them, a centurion by his crest, raised a broken spear.

  “Nicely fought. Toss that fine black cuirass over here and we’ll let you live.”

  Rictus looked at his two companions, who had also doffed their helms and were breathing in the cold air like thirsty men gulping water.

  “Fromir. And little Sycanus of Gost. I thought it was you.”

  “I think they have us, chief,” Sycanus said.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Rictus admitted. “I thank you, brothers, for standing by me.”

  “It seemed like the right thing,” Fromir, a bulky man with thick, curly hair said.

  “Mention it if you get out of this - you’re due a bonus.”

  “Fuck the bonus,” Sycanus said with a mirthless grin.

  “Hand over the armour!” the enemy centurion shouted. He raised a hand.

  Rictus looked up and saw the men at the top of the overlooking tower cock back their arms with javelins in their grasp. Even now, the defenders were wary of coming to grips with three men who wore the scarlet.

  “Alive or dead, I’m having it, old man - your choice.”

  My choice? I suppose it is, Rictus thought.

  He looked over the wall at Corvus’s retreating, broken centons as they straggled back over the plain to their camp; hundreds, thousands of them.

  He climbed up onto a merlon and balanced there, a welter of memories pelting through his mind. Aise, Rian and Ona - the sweetest joys he had known in his life.

  Fornyx and Jason. His brothers.

  The Ten Thousand singing the Paean, marching in time to face their deaths.

  Rictus looked at the centurion, and smiled. “I gained this armour at a place called Kunaksa,” he said. “If you want it, you can come and take it.”

  He stepped out into empty space, and plunged from the tall stone wall of Machran.

  TWENTY

  FLOTSAM OF WAR

  “DEAD?” CORVUS REPEATED. “He cannot be dead.”

  Fornyx stood in front of him, his blade-scarred helm in one arm, his tattered scarlet cloak folded over the other, and the Curse of God slathered with blood across his chest. He looked like some sculptor’s ideal of war incarnate.

  “The last ladder broke before he made it down off the wall. If he had been captured we would have heard of it by now.” He bowed his head a second. His voice was raw. “Rictus is gone.”

  Corvus sank back onto the map-table, eyes staring at nothing. He had a bloodied linen clout tied about his upper thigh, and another on his forearm.

  “Druze, what do you say?”‘ he asked.

  Druze stood like a whey-faced ghost, his arm strapped to his side. “Fornyx got me down, or I would be dead too. We were among the last. When we took to the ladders Rictus was still fighting with maybe a dozen of his men, covering the retreat. None of them made it.”

  Corvus rubbed his forehead. Fornyx glared at him.

  “When the Dogsheads took your contract - if you want to call it that - we numbered over four hundred and sixty, Corvus. Today, rather less than a hundred of us are still standing. And Rictus is dead. Did you mean to destroy us, or was it something you had just not factored into your deliberations? I’m curious. Tell me.”

  Corvus looked up. In the tent about him all the senior officers of the army were gathered, as sombre as men at a funeral. He looked their faces over one by one.

  “Where is Ardashir?” he asked.

  “He has not been found,” Druze said heavily. “But there are very many bodies out there at the foot of the walls.”

  “Phobos,” Corvus whispered. His eyes filled with tears. He turned from them and leaned on the map table, the dressing on his forearm darkening as fresh blood stained it.

  One-eyed Demetrius stepped forward. “It was a close thing, Corvus - the diversion worked. When they saw your banner at the South Prime they rushed every man they could there - had we possessed more ladders, I think Rictus’s assault would have succeeded.”

  “It was meant to succeed,” Corvus said with a strangled groan. “Fornyx, despite what you think of me, I do not send men out to die for nothing.”

  “These things happen in war,” Teresian spoke up. “Now we know better what we face.”

  “The towers,” Druze said, “And the machines they have upon them. They crucified us on those walls.”

  “Parmenios,” Corvus said. He wiped his eyes. “Do you have numbers yet?”

  The fat little secretary came forward with a waxed slate and a stylus. Despite his paunch, he was powerfully built about the shoulders, and he had the hands of a man who built things. He tapped the slate. “These are provisional - such is the confusion -”

  “Tell me!”

  “Just under a thousand men, dead or so badly wounded as to be lost to the army for good. The Dogsheads and Igranians suffered worst, though Demetrius’s conscripts also took heavy casualties.”

  “They fought well,” Corvus said, collecting himself. “Demetrius, I congratulate you. Your command is a thing to be proud of.”

  Demetrius bowed his head slightly in acknowledgement, his single eye shining.

  Corvus approached Druze. “Forgive me, brother,” he said brokenly.

  Druze smiled, that quicksilver darkness. “There is nothing to forgive. This is the first time I have known defeat under you. It is Phobos�
��s doing - he means to humble us.”

  Corvus leaned over the table again. He raised his voice slightly.

  “I cannot afford to lose the services, or the example, of men such as you, Fornyx. Since you and Rictus joined this army I have given you the hardest post of all; but it was the post of honour. I thought there was a possibility we could end this thing with one quick assault. It had to be tried, and I knew that I wanted my best at the tip of the spearhead. I miscalculated, and you paid for it with your blood.”

  He turned around. His eyes were bright and rimmed with red, and the high angular bones of his face seemed more pronounced than ever in the shadow of the tent. “You all paid for it, and I will not forget that. We were beaten last night, but we are not defeated. We will prevail against Machran -the city has shown that she is a worthy adversary.”

  He laid a hand on Fornyx’s chest, and wiped some of the dried blood off the black cuirass. “I made you pay too high a price. Rictus was a man none of us could afford to lose.” He smiled, and his eyes welled up again.

  “Fornyx, I loved him too, more than you know.”

  Fornyx’s face remained hard as flint and his voice when he spoke was harsh as that of a crow.

  “I wish to send a green branch to Machran to ask for his body. His wife would wish it of me.”

  “Do as you think best.”

  “It is an admission of defeat, to ask for the dead,” Demetrius rumbled.

  “Then it is stating no more than the obvious,” Corvus replied. “The men of Machran fought well last night - let them have their triumph. If they now believe themselves invincible, then by Phobos we will use that against them.”

  “They have one more Cursebearer on the walls of the city today,” Fornyx spat. “Think on that, if you will.”

  A THIN VEIL of sleet came slanting down out of a blank sky as winter settled itself comfortably about the lowlands surrounding Machran. On the horizons the mountains were white, their peaks lost in cloud. It was a day when a man prefers to set his back to the door and stare into a good fire.

  Karnos stood in the arched shadow of the South Prime Gate as the huge oak and bronze doors were swung back by a dozen armoured men. Behind him, a centon in full panoply stood in ranks, most with the sigil of Machran on their shields, but Avennos and Arkadios were represented too. Murchos of Arkadios stood beside him wrapped in a piebald goatskin cloak against the cold. He wiped his nose on the fur and stamped his feet to keep the blood flowing.

  “I don’t like this - he’s a tricky bastard, Corvus.”

  “It’s three men, Murchos - what can three men do, even if they wear the scarlet? We have a hundred here - and the rest of the bugger’s army is back in camp nearly two pasangs away. Unless they grow wings and fly, they’re not going to interfere. And besides, I want to know what the great Rictus has to say.”

  “Nothing good. It was he who brought the surrender terms to Hal Goshen, don’t forget.”

  “After last night, I hardly think they’re here to demand that. Relax yourself, Murchos - you’re worse than Kassander.”

  The gates were wide open now, and Karnos walked through them, close-wrapped in a wool cloak of his own. Murchos followed him, a bear of a man made more feral by the rough goatskin. And behind the pair the centon of spearmen advanced, some ninety armoured men in close ranks.

  Three men in red cloaks stood awaiting them in the shadow of the walls, one holding aloft a branch of. olive wood with a few thin leaves clinging to it. Around them, scores of corpses still lay contorted on the cold ground, the residue of Corvus’s diversionary attack of the night before. The three looked like the sole survivors of some disaster as they stood there amid the tumbled bodies of the dead.

  None of them were Rictus, Karnos noted at once, disappointed. He slid his good arm out of his cloak and raised his hand.

  “Close enough, friend - what is it you’ve come to say?”

  The branch-bearer was a lean, wiry man with a black beard. He walked forward a few steps, his feet cracking the ice which had gathered in the frozen rutted mud of the roadway. Blood, too, had frozen in puddles hard as gemstones, but he avoided stepping on it. He let his cloak fall back and Karnos saw that he was a Cursebearer; he studied the man’s face more intently.

  “Fornyx?”

  The man smiled. “You have a good memory for faces, Karnos. We only met the once, I think.”

  “You’re Rictus’s second, aren’t you?”

  “I was.” A spasm of pain crossed the lean man’s features. “I come here to ask you a favour, one soldier to another.”

  Karnos’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “After last night, I find this a strange time to -”

  “Rictus of Isca died on your walls last night. I have come to ask you for his body.”

  Karnos’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He looked like a landed fish. Murchos sprang forward. “What’s that you say?”

  Fornyx’s face was a study in sinew and bone. His eyes flashed. “You heard me. I ask your permission to search through the bodies on your walls.” His jaw worked as though he wanted to bite back the words as he spoke them. “I lay no claim to his armour. I want only to be able to burn him decently, for his wife’s sake.”

  The news had run through the ranks of the spearmen in the gateway. Their voices were a low buzz of wonder.

  “Quiet!” Murchos shouted.

  “This could be a trick,” Karnos said, more for form’s sake than anything else; he could read a man’s face, and he knew that Fornyx was telling the truth.

  “I will enter the city alone, if you like. I’m not a spy - I know Machran well in any case. I wish only to do the decent thing by my friend.”

  Karnos nodded. He saw something else in Fornyx’s eyes, an anger smouldering alongside the grief. That was interesting. He turned and looked at Murchos. The big Arkadian seemed torn between astonishment and glee. He made a show of considering the matter a moment.

  “Very well, then. You can enter - you alone. Your companions can wait here. The gate will be shut, and I will escort you myself.”

  Fornyx bowed slightly. He nodded to the other two mercenaries who accompanied him, handing the olive branch to a young man with a scar that tugged his face askew, and then stepped into the shadow of the South Prime Gate.

  The spearmen made a lane for Karnos and Fornyx, while Murchos ordered the gates shut in a voice of brass. They clunked shut with a boom, and Fornyx stopped and looked at them in wonder.

  “First time I ever saw them shut, close to,” he said. “You must have had a hell of a time loosening those old hinges.”

  “It took enough oil to drown an ox,” Karnos said. “But then, we’ve plenty to spare. Perhaps you’d care for some wine before we begin your sad task? I’m sure I can lay hands on a skin.”

  Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a half-smile. “You are a shifty bastard, Karnos. But I make a point of never refusing wine, especially on a morning like this.”

  “I’ll have some sent to the wall. We can pour a libation for the dead.”

  THE DEAD STILL lay in heaps. Many hundreds of men had died on the walls of the Goshen Quarter and the clean-up process had only begun. The bodies of the enemy were first looted, stripped of arms, armour and any trinkets of value, and then the defenders tossed their stiff, stripped carcasses over the parapet to lie like gutted fish in the street below. Waggons waited there, and municipal slaves with the machios sigil painted on their tunics were loading the corpses upon them like cords of wood.

  Fornyx drained his wine-cup while standing beside Karnos on the battlements he had fought atop the night before. They were treacherous with frozen blood. It was splashed about the stone of the merlons as liberally as paint. Karnos raised his voice and called a halt to the grisly work.

  “What will you do with them?” Fornyx asked him.

  “Our own dead will be burned on a pyre outside the Mithannon with all the proper rites, if Corvus will allow us to do so without harassment.”

  “H
e will. He has authorised me to promise that.”

  Karnos inclined his head. “Your people are your own affair. They will be hauled north separately, and left on the banks of the Mithos.”

  “You would leave them there like carrion?”

  “You are our enemy, Fornyx. I will not use up the city’s resources to make you a pyre.”

  “Fair enough. Give me some more, will you?” He held out his cup.

  Karnos filled it himself from a wineskin. Soldier’s wine, as raw as vinegar. Fornyx downed the cup in a single throat-searing swallow.

  “It was a good enough way to die. At least he did not fall in some poxed little skirmish somewhere. The walls of Machran are a grand enough stage even for Rictus.”

  “He could have been defending these walls. I asked him - you know that,” Karnos said.

  “I know. In the end, it was his curiosity that killed him.”

  “How so?”

  Fornyx smiled. “Come, Karnos - you must have felt it yourself. This phenomenon, Corvus. Tell me you would not like to meet him.” “I would,” Karnos conceded. “But the price of his fame has been too high.”

  “Yes it has,” Fornyx said. And then: “More wine.”

  The cup was refilled and emptied again. Fornyx’s eyes were bloodshot and watering with the potent stuff, but his face remained as hard as ever. Karnos merely sipped at his own cup, watching the mercenary closely.

  “Your men died well,” he said, “but there cannot be many of the Dogsheads left now. They are a dying breed.”

  “They are dead. They died here with Rictus. I am done with this war, Karnos. I am going home. Rictus’s wife is a woman -” he halted, looked into his cup, frowning.

  “Yes?” Karnos looked as prick-eared as a cat.

  “Nothing. All I want now is to walk away from this.” A twisted smile flitted across his face.

  “The fun has gone out of it, you might say. I care not a damn now whether Machran stands or falls.”