Corvus

by Paul Kearney

  The baggage train was up at last, and gangs of labourers were set to improving the washed-out sections of the Imperial road that led east, thousands of the inhabitants of the hinterland rounded up and put to work felling trees and quarrying stone. The main camp astride the road took on a more permanent look as the brown army tents went up in neat rows with corduroyed roads laid between them. And the army spread out to north and south, an octopus with arms of barbed spearmen.

  Teresian led two morai west, marching the whole length of the city walls, and set up camp opposite the West Prime Gate. Demetrius and three thousand spears ensconced themselves to the south, cutting the Avennon road. Druze led two overstrength morai of spearmen and Igranians north, and began constructing a stockaded fort outside the Mithannon, on the banks of the Mithos River. One of the first things he did was to retrieve the mouldering dead of the army’s last assault and gather them into a pyre, to burn alongside the ashes of the defenders.

  Corvus remained facing the East Prime Gate with the main body, the cavalry and the baggage-park.

  Stockades of sharpened logs went up in great skeins around the walls, dotted with watchtowers, and beacons were stacked up at key locations, ready to be lit should the defenders decide to sally forth and challenge the tightening grip on the city.

  Machran was wholly surrounded, every road blocked, every means of egress from the city overlooked by men in arms. It was cut off from the outside world.

  “WHAT IS IT this morning? More of that damned barley broth? Get it away from me,” Rictus snapped.

  Fornyx blew on the steaming bowl. “At least it’s hot. Most of the army breakfasts on stale bread and goat meat so high it bleats as you put it in your mouth.”

  “I could do with some of that.”

  “Severan says nothing with a taint in it - you’re still too weak. Now be a good boy and eat your fucking broth.”

  Rictus grunted in pain as he sat up in the bed and took the bowl from Fornyx. “How’s a man supposed to heal without a bit of meat or a splash of wine?”

  “You have me there.” Fornyx leaned back in the leather-strapped chair and closed his eyes a second. The brazier to one side gave off a shimmer of heat, and the air in the tent was close.

  “Open the flap, will you? I can’t breathe in here. That smoke-vent hardly lets any air in at all.”

  Fornyx opened his eyes again. “You want to take the lung fever? Last week you were flat on your back coughing up green slime and talking to people who weren’t there. Another fever will carry you off, Severan says. You’re not the young buck you used to be, made out of rawhide and horse’s piss. None of us are.”

  “Then talk to me, Fornyx. Tell me the news.”

  Fornyx looked at his friend closely. Rictus had been pared back to the essentials of life; sinew, bone and corded muscle. His skull seemed too large for his body now, despite the broadness of his shoulders, and he had lost the outdoor ruddiness of wind and sun and snow. His face had the pallor of an invalid, and there were blue rings beneath his eyes that had not been there before.

  He looked old. For the first time, Fornyx saw the elderly man in him. The youth who had joined the Ten Thousand all those years ago was utterly gone.

  “There’s not much to tell. No spearwork to speak of; our tools this last while have been the spade and the axe. The men spend what free time they have scouring the frozen wasteland they’ve made for a turnip or an onion that’s been overlooked. There’s not an olive tree or a vine left standing for twenty pasangs, and even the grass seems to be withering. Ardashir has had to move some of the horselines ten pasangs back east. Those big Kufr horses are starting to look like rag and bone. By the time the last of them die they won’t even be worth eating.”

  Rictus coughed over his broth and winced, a hand set to his side. “And the men - our men?”

  Fornyx frowned. “Corvus has taken them as a kind of bodyguard. Now that he’s cut us down to size he finds use for us as mascots. We have one under-strength centon still in the scarlet. Those here now are here to stay - Kesero has his heart set on the plunder of Machran. Valerian doesn’t say much. I think this kind of warfare is not to his liking.”

  “Is it to anyone’s? What’s going on in the city? Do we have any inkling?”

  “Machran is a different place now, Rictus, a world apart from ours. There’s no coming or going; the place is sealed up tight. If we’re hungry here, with supplies still coming in from the east and the foraging parties out night and day, then think what it’s like inside those walls, with a hundred thousand and more mouths to feed.”

  “If all they had to eat was this shit they’d open the gates tomorrow,” Rictus said, setting the bowl to one side. He lay back in the bed - it had been made specially for him on Corvus’s orders - and looked at his old friend.

  “Druze tells me you were going to leave the army when you thought me dead.”

  Fornyx shrugged. “There didn’t seem to be much point to it any more.” “You were the one so keen to find yourself part of history, Fornyx. This is it - we are inside it right now. There were times in the Empire I wanted to lie down and die, many times -”

  “I told you once I thought it must have been like some black dream of Phobos. I was right.”

  “Well, then.”

  “At least in the Empire you knew where you were going, Rictus. Here, I look around and wonder what it’s all in aid of. Are we here to make Corvus into a king?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you’re happy with that? That half-breed boy lording it over all the Macht like a Kufr tyrant?”

  “He’s not as bad as you make out.”

  “Oh I know - you and he are like family now. I see it, Rictus. He was half out of his mind with joy when Ardashir brought you back from the dead.”

  “He is Jason’s son, and it was my fault his father died.”

  “That’s not a debt he can hold over you all his life - he never even knew his father.”

  “I knew him,” Rictus said firmly. “He was a better man than either of us, and his mother a fine woman.”

  “A Kufr.”

  “A Kufr, yes - does it matter?”

  “Most of the clodhoppers in this army have no idea their beloved general has Kufr blood in his veins. What do you think they’d do if they found out?”

  “Nothing. He has luck on his side, Fornyx. Knowing him, it would only add to his mystery.”

  Fornyx lowered his head. “All right, all right. I hear myself and I sound like some bitching recruit missing his mother’s tit. This grand scale of war, it’s new to me. There are too many faces missing around the centos, Rictus, men you and I had marched with for years. They fell in windrows up on that wall, and at Afteni.”

  “There will be others, Fornyx. The faces have always changed. Doesn’t he have you recruiting?”

  Fornyx laughed. “He does. He has given permission for any spearman in the army to try for us. Valerian and Kesero have them lined up outside their tents every morning, young fellows with a hankering to wear that scarlet cloak and call themselves a Dogshead.

  “There was a time, Rictus, years ago, when there were mercenaries in every city, and the red cloak was nothing more than a badge of shame. Now, since the return of the Ten Thousand, and with this campaign, it’s something else.”

  “An honour,” Rictus said.

  “Yes. Who’d have thought it?”

  “We’ll take the best of them, and build the Dogsheads up again, Fornyx,” Rictus said, patting his friend’s hand.

  Fornyx grinned with a flash of his old vulpine self. “We’re drilling them till they puke.”

  TO THE REAR of the camp which sprawled across the Goshen Road, east of Machran, a fenced-off lumberyard and ironworks had been set up. Within it, Corvus’s secretary Parmenios was lord and master, and he had conscripted every carpenter and blacksmith to be found from Machran to Afteni.

  Every day the waggons poured into the enclosure, bearing lumber and scrap iron and charco
al, and the forges sparked and hammered there day and night. Tall structures began to rise up in the middle of them, rising higher- day by day, and new orders went out across the countryside. Herds of cattle were brought in, slaughtered for the beef that the army would eat, and then stripped of their hides.

  Soon the reek of a tannery was added to the smoke of the roaring forges, and Corvus set sentries about this strange enterprise of Parmenios’s, most of them Kufr from the Companions. They turned away every curious soldier who ambled over the hill to see what was going on, and the army buzzed with speculation as the last days of the year ran out, and the dark night of midwinter came upon the earth.

  ALMOST TWO HUNDRED pasangs to the south and east, the city of Avensis rose on its crag to dominate the wide plain between Nemasis and Pontis. A great trading settlement, a hub of the caravan trails which converged before joining the Imperial road, it was also the richest member of the Avennan League after Machran itself.

  The men of Avensis had fought at Afteni and fallen by the hundred. Now the Kerusia had decided to wait upon events, so advised by Ulfos the polemarch, who had been at Afteni and seen the prowess of Corvus’s army first hand.

  They were meeting in the citadel of the city, an airy colonnaded space that looked out over the fertile plain below. Ulfos stood upon the grey mottled marble, blowing into his hands.

  Winter was here; even this far south it had its bite, though there was no snow on the ground as yet. The circle of the Kerusia was a fine place to meet on a summer’s day when the sky was a cerulean blue overhead, but today the place had a bleakness to it that matched the mood of the men taking their seats on the stone semi-circle of benches.

  Parnon, the Speaker of Avensis, rose in the classic fashion, himation caught up over one forearm. He extended the other to Ulfos.

  “General, you said you had news. Best to present it quickly.” One of the elderly Kerusia behind him sneezed, and there was a muttering, swiftly silenced by a look from the stately Parnon, his white beard jutting like a brush.

  Ulfos turned around and beckoned at the antechamber beyond. At his signal, a scrawny, bedraggled figure limped into the Kerusia circle, a filthy shock-haired youth, his cloak in rags and his bare feet bloody.

  “This can’t be good,” one of the old men muttered to his neighbour.

  “Speak up, lad,” Ulfos said. “Give what you carry to the Speaker here and then tell him what you told me.”

  The boy looked the Kerusia over, then reached into his cloak and produced a tattered, rain-spotted scroll. He handed it to Parnon.

  “Your honour, that is a message from Karnos of Machran himself, with his seal upon it - and it ain’t broke, I made sure of that.”

  Parnon looked down at the scroll as though the boy had placed a turd in his hand. His gaze swept the Kerusia circle, and then he broke the seal, unrolling the paper. His lips moved, and his face grew set and hard.

  He looked up at the boy again. “How did you get here?” he asked.

  “I ran, your honour.”

  “You ran? What - all the way?”

  The boy laid an open hand on his chest as though feeling for his own heartbeat. “All the way. I swear. Karnos made me promise to stop for nothing, to talk to no-one on the road.”

  “Did he send any other message?”

  “He told me to tell you there would be no more messages.”

  Parnon nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Fidias, your honour.”

  Parnon drew near the boy and set a hand on his shoulder. “You have done a thing of great worth, Fidias. I thank you for it.” He looked at Ulfos, who stood biting his thumbnail, his cloak bundled around his arms.

  “Look after this young fellow. He has quality in him. Go now, Fidias - you look as though a bath and a hot meal would not go amiss.”

  The boy’s face lit up. “Thank you, your honour!” At a gesture from Ulfos he trotted out of the room, his gait a peculiar limping shuffle, at once sprightly and painful-looking.

  Parnon threw the scroll down upon the marble floor of the circle.

  “Machran is under close siege. The failure of the first assault has not dented Corvus’s determination. He has the walls surrounded and is building a circumvallation to seal off the city entirely. Karnos tells us that the city can subsist perhaps a month before starvation sets in. He asks that the forces of the League reassemble for a relief attempt as soon as possible.”

  He bent and retrieved the scroll again, his eyes dark.

  “That’s it then,” one of the Kerusia said, his breath rattling in his throat. “Machran is finished.”

  “Without our help,” Parnon said.

  “We gave our help already, and saw our men burned outside Afteni,” another said bitterly. “We have done enough. Do you forget that Machran offered us no help fifteen years ago when Pontis attacked?”

  Parnon lifted his hand. “Let us not dig up the past. There’s enough here to occupy us right now.”

  “I thought Machran had greater reserves of food,” another said.

  “They had.” It was Ulfos who spoke up now. He worried at his thumbnail like a terrier after a rat. “So many refugees came into the city from Arkadios and some of the other hinterland cities that the numbers went beyond normal reckoning. Too many mouths to feed.”

  Parnon tapped the crumpled scroll against his upper lip. “How many spears can we still turn out, Ulfos?”

  “Maybe three thousand, if we leave nothing behind.”

  “You think we could persuade the other polemarchs to meet here? Pontis, Arienus?”

  “They’ve already been beat once by Corvus, Parnon. What makes you think they’ll stake another throw of the knucklebone?”

  Parnon held the scroll out. “Corvus lost a thousand men in his failed assault. He has had to detach more to hold down Arkadios, Afteni, and the other hinterland cities. He has nothing like the numbers that faced us before. If we do not try again now, then it is over for Machran.”

  “If Machran falls, then no-one can stand against him,” one of the Kerusia said, an old man who banged his olive-wood walking stick on the floor with a crack. “The cities of the Planaean Coast have no armies to speak of; Minerias grows wine, not fighting men. They’re soft - useless! There’s us, the Pontines and the Arienans. That’s all the backbone left in this part of the world. By Phobos, were I young again -”

  “Therones is right,” Parnon said. “All the best of the Macht fighting cities are either already gone, or were at Afteni with us. We must reassemble them -it has to be worth a try. I will go to Pontis myself.”

  “Then you’d best run as fast as that brave boy with the bloody feet,” old Therones barked, and he banged his stick again.

  NORTH, ALONG THE ancient caravan trails which ran in the hollows of the hills and followed the fastest path like the flow of water. The roads were brown now, rutted with hardened mud, and there were few people upon them at this dark heart of the year.

  The southern hinterland of Machran had not yet seen the host of Corvus in all its might, but they had endured the foraging parties he sent out to keep his army fed, and the people of the small farms and towns south of Machran had marvelled at the sight of the Companions on their tall black Kefren horses, beasts bred from the Niseians that bore the Great King himself.

  The Kufr who rode them spoke Machtic, after a fashion, and sometimes they even paid for the grain they took and the animals they herded away. They never cleaned out a district entirely, but left the seed-corn and the makings of a new flock or herd behind when they left.

  The small farmers of the plain about Gast and Nemasis and Avennos did not quite know what to make of them; they possessed better discipline than the citizen armies that had tramped over their lands from time immemorial, and their outlandish appearance lent them a kind of alien glamour.

  There were those who grew hot-headed at the thought of Kufr looting the country of the Macht, but for the most part these kept their thoughts to themselves, as did s
o many in these days.

  NORTH AGAIN ALONG the ancient caravan trail, and the land grew empty. The foraging parties of Corvus would find nothing to glean here, for Karnos had already stripped the country bare in preparation for the siege, and the local people had fled their farms rather than starve. What had once been well-tilled farmland was now bare and sere, and scattered houses lay empty to the rain and snow.

  And finally the city itself, the centre of the winter world, a subject of conversation in every wineshop from Sinon to Minerias.

  Machran had always been a crowded city, even before the siege, but with the addition of the refugees who had followed their retreating spearman rather than live in their own occupied cities, the condition of the place had deteriorated. What open spaces that existed within the walls had over the weeks been transformed from parkland and gardens to shanty-towns, and thousands lived in cobbled together shacks packed into every space available.

  The first deaths had begun. Not the normal everyday passing of the old and the very young, but deaths caused by sickness and exposure. The old died as they always had, but they died in greater numbers, unable to afford food or firewood at the inflated prices now soaring all over the city. The Kerusia had tried to stamp out profiteering, and hanged the worst offenders from a gallows newly erected near the Amphion, but a thriving black market existed in the Mithannon and was too widely patronised to be shut down.

  The Kerusia met infrequently now, and when it did there was little Karnos asked of them that they did not agree to. A council of older men with their wisdom and their insight might be a fine thing in time of peace, but in wartime hope withered in the old more quickly than the young.

  In most respects the city was ruled by himself and Kassander, with help from Murchos and Tyrias. Due legal process was quietly set aside for the duration, and the edicts of the quartet went unquestioned, backed up as they were by all the fighting men of the city.

  The ground barley and oats that were held in the city granaries were doled out once a week in the open area around the Amphion where the assembly had usually been convened in happier times. Now it was a fight to keep the hungry people in line, and the gravelled walkways were becoming ever more constricted, hemmed in by the jerry-built slums of the refugees from Arkadios.