Corvus

NINE

“Phobos, what a damned awful stupid time of year to be in harness,” Fornyx said in disgust. “My second winter campaign in as many years. This is no way to run the shop.”

He and Druze stood in the mire with their cloaks over their heads and stared at the flat grey world of the rain. In the country to their front the water had gathered in broad sword-pale lakes in which the black outline of trees stood forlorn and stark. The mountains were invisible, the sullen shadow of the clouds gnarled over the north and west, the sky brought low to meet a colourless landscape. And the rain did its best to bring the two together in one new element composed of equal parts water and mud.

“Six day’s march to Machran,” Druze said with that sinister, oddly winning smile of his. “Or maybe not.”

“And still he pushes us on, your lord and master,”

Fornyx said. “What did we make, day before yesterday – six pasangs? The baggage spent a whole day just travelling the length of the column – and as for the supply lines, well…”

“I wish it was snow,” Druze said. “Snow I am used to. But this lowlander’s winter of yours, it sucks at a man’s marrow, neither one thing nor the other.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You’ll have to, if you’re not to retire back to banditry in the hills.”

“There are worse trades, my friend. My people, they have strong places carved out of the very rock of the world, back in the Gerreran Mountains above Idrios. We hole up in those in the winter like bears, eat ourselves fat and greasy and fuck, our women until they walk bow-legged.”

Fornyx snorted with laughter. “Not a bad way to pass the winter. Me, I like the idea of a fishing town on the Bay of Goshen, where the sky is blue all through the dark months and a man can sit at one of those wine shops on the water and stare out at the Sinonian while eating fresh octopus and grilled herrin.”

They stared silently at the rain for a long while, their feet ankle-deep in mud.

“I have wine in my tent…” Fornyx said at last, grudgingly.

“We are here to watch the enemy,” Druze said.

“Look at them – they’re not going anywhere. The bastards are as mired in shit as we are.”

Out at the limits of visibility it was possible to make out a shadow on the world, dark as a forest. Within that shadow were the lights of struggling campfires.

They covered the land for many pasangs. As the rain-curtain shifted and drifted aimlessly, it was possible at times to make out the lines of the enemy’s tents, but that was all. There was no movement, not a single ominous snake of men on the march. The enemy army was as motionless as a felled tree.

“A cup or two would not hurt,” Druze admitted. “All right, then.”

“And a game of knucklebones perhaps – Kesero had one on the go when I left.”

“Not for me. You red-cloaked bastards cleaned me out last night.”

The two men turned and began making their slow, plodding way back down the long slope they had ascended in the morning. They were barefoot; the mud sucked even the most heavily strapped footwear off men’s feet. Some two dozen Macht were standing in the rain waiting for them: half Druze’s Igranians, the rest scarlet-cloaked Dogsheads of Fornyx’s centon. One of these spoke up.

“Any more of this and we can float over the walls of Machran in fucking boats.”

“That’s the plan,” Fornyx said. “Didn’t you know? Back to camp, lads – there’s nothing doing out here that needs watching.”

The little band of men followed their leaders back along the flooded length of the Imperial road, wading through the cold water with the stoicism of those who have seen it all before. To the east, the vast bivouac of Corvus’s all-conquering army sat like a flooded squatter’s camp, motionless in the unending downpour.

Rictus, also, was staring at the rain. He stood in the doorway of Corvus’s command tent and watched the rills of brown water curl and thicken about the corduroyed pathways of the camp. As far as the eye could see the horizon was an unending mass of brown tents. The latrines had flooded out, and the stink of ordure hung over them. This was no place to remain long. Men sickened when they gathered together in great numbers. It was as if they produced an air unwholesome to their own existence.

He thought of Aise and the girls. Up in the highlands the snow would be thick and deep, the world closed down in mountain winter. They were safe, now – nothing and no-one would be able to make it through the drifts to Andunnon until the spring thaw. There was that to be thankful for.

“Some warmth in a cup,” a voice said.

It was Ardashir, the tall Kufr. He proffered the brimming goblet to Rictus with a smile.

“Corvus is out digging drains with his Companions, to set an example. He will be a while.” The Kefren marshal was liberally plastered with mud himself.

“I did my turn of digging this morning,” he explained.

Rictus took the wine. Thin, watered stuff, but welcome all the same. The roads had been washed out and the supply-trains were not making it through. The entire army was on half rations. Another reason they could not stay here.

“It would seem Antimone is on Karnos’s side for the present,” he said, sipping the execrable wine.

“Your Antimone, goddess of pity and of war. A strange deity. Myself, I believe that Mot, the dark blight of the world, is passing over.”

“Different gods, same rain,” Rictus grunted. He walked away from the uplifted side of the tent and stood at the map table. They were so close.

Some two hundred and thirty pasangs separated them from the walls of Machran.

That, and the army which Karnos had managed to cobble together with incredible speed to throw in their path. It was not yet the full muster of the League, but it was a respectable showing all the same. Perhaps twenty thousand men were encamped on the other side of the hill, enduring the same rain as their enemies, and he did not doubt that more would be marching in over the next few days, mud or no mud.

“We should hit them hard, now, before the other hinterland cities send their contingents,” he said. “This waiting is… unwise.”

Ardashir came to the table, towering over Rictus like a totem. “In this weather?”

“Men have fought in worse.”

“I know they have, Rictus. But we talk not only of men. What of horses?’ Cavalry cannot operate in this swamp. We must delay now until the plains dry out. Corvus foresaw that this might happen. He talks of glory, and he means it, but there is always a stone cold reasoning behind what he does. Until we have hard ground to fight on, the army cannot go on the offensive. If it does, then it will simply be two bodies of spears slogging it out, and in that contest, numbers will be more telling.”

“I had not thought of your horses,” Rictus conceded, throwing back his wine. “It is not something a Macht would usually take into account.” He looked the tall Kefren up and down.

“Tell me, Ardashir – tell me honestly – what-in hell are you doing here?”

Ardashir grinned. He had a kindly face, but so elongated and strange did it appear that it was easy to miss the humanity in his eyes.

“Corvus is my friend, the best I have. I would follow him anywhere.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s one answer.”

Then Ardashir inclined his head. “Very well. Then know this; my father was Satrap of the province of Askanon, maybe ten years after you and your Ten Thousand passed through it. He was a good man, an honourable man, but even good men can have worthless brothers.” The Kefren’s face changed. It was if the bones of it became more pronounced; a mask that was truly alien – like those of the Honai that Rictus had faced at Kunaksa.

“He killed my father, took my sister – his niece – to wife against her will, and proclaimed himself Satrap. I was a child, smuggled out of my father’s palace in Ashdod by our family steward. He took me to Sinon, where my uncle could not touch me, it being a Macht city. And there I spent much of my boyhood, in poverty. When Kurush our steward died, I was left alone. All that remained of the life before was this -” Here he unsheathed the curved sword which hung at his flank. It was a plain Kefren scimitar with an hourglass hilt, and set in the pommel was a small incised ruby. He rubbed his thumb across it. “Our family seal. This was my father’s sword. All I have of him.”

His face brightened. “And I met Corvus, playing on the shore outside Sinon one fine day some twelve years ago. He was an undersized child, half my height, but he was the leader of all the local boys, and he made me, a Kufr, part of his friends. I have never forgotten that.” He looked down at Rictus.

“Corvus does not care about Macht and Kufr. He cares about friendship. Once he gives it, he will never betray you.”

Rictus stared up at the tall creature who stood before him. He had learned how to judge men over the years, and to judge soundly. He knew that Ardashir was not lying. More, he found himself liking this quiet Kufr, this dispossessed prince who had followed his mad friend west in pursuit of an insane idea.

He looked down at the map table again, seeing writ across it the fate of his world, his people.

“There is Kufr blood in Corvus, isn’t there?” he said.

Ardashir nodded. “His mother was a hufsa, one of the mountain tribes. But she was an educated and refined woman. You and I can see it in him, as can all those who have known a little of both worlds; but most Macht have never met a Kufr; they think we are all horse-faced demons with glowing eyes.” He smiled.

“So who was his father?”

“I never knew him, and nor did Corvus. He had left or died before the boy was born.”

Rictus looked across the interior of the tent to where the Curse of God, the armour that Corvus would not wear, sat perched on its stand like some amputated statue. A sudden insight went like a shiver down his back.

Corvus’s father had been a Cursebearer.

He might have said something, but as if summoned by their talk, Corvus himself entered the tent, flapping the rain off his cloak and bantering with Teresian, who was with him. The leader of the army was as plastered with mud as if he had been rolling in it; his teeth and eyes gleamed out of a brown face. His smile widened as he saw Rictus and Ardashir at the table.

“Ha! Steering clear of the muck, are we? And winecups in your hands! Come, Ardashir, this is a disgrace; lend me a gulp, will you?” He drank deep out of the Kufr’s cup.

“Not Minerian, Rictus, sorry to say. But it all leaves us in the same way, whatever the vintage – Teresian, pour us more. I swear I have mud in my very gullet.”

Corvus’s spirits seemed undimmed by the rain and the morass his army found itself in. He threw off his cloak and one of the page boys came forward from the shadows to catch it – Rictus had not even known he was there.

“Thank you, Sasca,” Corvus murmured, and when he set a hand on the page’s shoulder the boy’s face lit up.

“What word of the Dogsheads?” Corvus asked Rictus, making for the banked red coals of the brazier and standing so close to it they could smell the singeing wool of his chiton.

“Fornyx and your man Druze report that the enemy camp is about as lively as ours – no coming or going. No-one can make a move in this weather.”

Corvus seemed profoundly satisfied by this news. “Excellent. Ardashir, the supply train?”

“It’s making slow progress some twenty pasangs up the road. The wagons are up to their axles and the oxen are dying on their feet. It will be at least another two days before it reaches us.”

“Ah.” Even this did not dim his high spirits. “Brothers, we must not let a little rain dampen our mood. There may be a way to have some fun out of this downpour. Teresian, the wine stands by you; pass it round, man.”

Fun? Rictus thought. He looked at Ardashir and the Kufr shrugged.

“I feel the urge to get to know my enemies better,” Corvus went on. “There they are over the hill by the thousand, and we have not so much as said hello to one another. This Karnos is a fascinating fellow, by all accounts – like you, Rictus, a self-made man of a certain age. I’m thinking I should get a better look at him.”

“I know Karnos – I’ve spoken to him many a time,” Rictus said. “He’s a braggart, an upstart slave-dealer with a silver tongue.”

“That tongue of his certainly has a way of getting things done,” Corvus replied, still in a good humour. “Look across the way and name me one other member of the Machran Kerusia who could have got their levies out on the road as quickly as Karnos did. No, he’s a man of some substance this fellow, not just a crowd-pleaser.” He paused. “I think I would like a look at him.” “What shall we set up – some kind of embassy?” Teresian asked, narrow-eyed.

“We could pitch a tent between the armies,” Ardashir suggested.

Corvus held up a hand. “I was thinking of something a little more personal. I want to get a look at him tonight.”

They were all foxed by his words, and then it dawned on Rictus. “You want to enter the enemy camp.”

Corvus cocked his head to one side, and flakes of mud fell off his face. He peeled off some more, held it in his hand. “Why not – covered in this, all men look alike.”

“Corvus, my brother -” Ardashir began.

“Not you, Ardashir – no amount of mud could cover your origins.” Corvus was smiling, but the humour had dimmed in him. He was in earnest.

“You, Rictus – will you come with me?”

A moment of silence, the rain drumming on the roof of the great tent.

“You think it wise?” Rictus asked evenly.

“I did not say it was wise. I said it was what I intended to do. And as you are one of my marshals, I should like your company.”

Another test. Rictus held the younger man’s eyes. Something like perfect understanding passed between them.

“Very well,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “Shall it be we two alone, then?”

“The fewer the better. But I wish Druze to join us – he has a gift for escapades.”

“And when shall we leave?”

Corvus stretched in front of the brazier so that its red glow underlit his face, making it seem less than ever like that of a normal man.

“We’ll wait for darkness,” he said. “And Rictus -”

“Yes?”

“We’ll travel light. Your cuirass will stay here, and that scarlet cloak with it.”

Rictus nodded. Both Teresian and Ardashir were protesting, claiming it was a hare-brained venture, unnecessary risk. They did not use the word madness, but it was in their thoughts all the same. Both Corvus and Rictus ignored them. The leader of the army and his newest marshal needed to find trust in one another, and they both knew it.

His life will be in my hands, Rictus thought, as mine has been in his. I have only to raise my voice in the enemy camp, and he will be captured, and this army of his will fall apart. He knows this.

He had to marvel at Corvus’s audacity. This boy -

No; he was not a boy. That way of regarding him was no longer tenable. In fact he was no younger than Rictus had been when he had been elected leader of the Ten Thousand. Sometimes, with the selective memory of a middle-aged man, Rictus forgot that he, too, had been something of a prodigy.

He took off his cloak, and began unclicking the fastenings of his black cuirass. He stared at the other Curse of God in the tent, perched on its armour-stand like some silent ghost. Who wore you? He wondered. Were you one of us, who made the March beside me?

He placed his cuirass beside its fellow, and for a moment all the occupants of the tent fell silent, looking at them.

These were the keystone of the heritage of the Macht. No Kufr had ever possessed or worn one of them in all of recorded history. Antimone’s Gift was a black mystery at the heart of the Macht world. Sometimes, Rictus thought that if one could puzzle out the origins of these artefacts, then one would have unravelled the enigma of the Macht themselves. He had come to think, during the long march all those years ago, that the Macht were somehow not part of this world they inhabited. At least, they had not been here in the beginning.

And he knew, now, why Corvus hesitated to wear the black armour. He was half Kufr, and even his undoubted courage must flinch at the thought of a creature of Kufr blood donning the Curse of God.

Who knows? Rictus surmised. Maybe it will not even let him wear it. How would that look? So he lets it sit here, a temptation and a reproach.

And he suddenly had a blink of insight into the engine that drove Corvus on.

He wants to rule the Macht, because he wants to feel that he is truly one of them. If the Harukush acclaims him its ruler, how can he not be one of us?

Eunion was right, Rictus thought. He is a dreamer. But there is more to it. This is what drives him on, this thing gnawing at his guts. He has surrounded himself with fatherless boys and made of them a family. He wants to belong.

Perhaps that is his other secret; to take the orphaned and make them feel part of something again.

They left the camp at dusk, three mudstained men in nondescript woollen chlamys, barefoot in the chill suck of the mud, their hoods pulled over their faces like the komis of the Kufr. They bore the lowland drepanas that Karnos’s troops would carry, and Druze had painted across his leather pelta the machios sigil of Machran.

The waterlogged plain between the armies had once been good farmland, and there were still the black thickets of olive groves strewn across it, but it had been inundated with the rain that poured down from the hills so that now it bore more of a resemblance to some wildfowler’s marsh, a grey mere of dappled mud and ochre water.

Karnos had planted his burgeoning army on a low rise across the Imperial road, and the water had filled a ring around its foot so that it seemed like an island, or a vast moated fort, pasangs wide; and the cloud hung so low that it almost met the summit.

Eight pasangs to the rear of the enemy army was the city of Afteni, renowned for its metal-working. And behind that was Arkadios, and then to the west and south of that one of the great cities of the hinterland, Avennos of the Laws, where Tynon himself had lived and lectured for a time, back in the mists of the past. He had been the author of those codes which now governed nearly all the Macht cities. The origins of the Kerusia – the assembly that every Macht polity possessed – lay there.

Avennos was not the metropolis it had been; both Avensis to the south, which had been its colony upon a time, and Arienus to the south-west had grown greater with the passage of the years. But Avennos was a part of the Macht identity as surely as Machran was. That, Rictus reasoned, was why Karnos had thrown his army so far forward, extending his supply lines and landing himself in the same muck as Corvus. To preserve that core of tradition. It was militarily unsound, but politically it could not be faulted.

The darkness drew in over the floodplain, a lightless black without stars or moons. The three men lurched from one footfall to the next, the muck seizing them calf-deep. Once, Druze went on his face and the others had to halt and lever him free, haul him upright again. Corvus was seized by a fit of laughter, and after a contemplation of their absurd condition it flapped through them all so that they stood for a few minutes holding their mouths, leaning on one another like drunks.

“I’ll lead,” Corvus said at last. “I’m lighter than either of you clodhoppers, and I see better in the dark. Grab a hold of my cloak and try not to pull me on my arse.”

They went on, their only frame of reference in that starless murk the subdued glow of the enemy campfires. Only a few were burning, fighting a losing battle with the endless rain. Usually a host like Karnos’s would light up the night sky with its fires like a city at festival time.

Corvus halted, and Rictus felt the young man’s iron grip on his arm.

“Sentries,” he murmured, his breath warm in Rictus’s ear. “We go right, cast around them.”

The three made a laborious dog-leg about the sentries which only Corvus had seen. They were glad of the rain, for the sluicing hiss of it covered their lumpen progress. Rictus found his joints aching as they had not since the winter before, in the siege-camp outside Nemasis, and he felt again the ache of the arrow-wound in his thigh. The cold and the wet were always ready to recall his old scars, as though in league with his ageing body to remind him of his mortality.

They waded as quietly as they could through knee-deep freezing water, clenching their chattering teeth shut, and began to hear other sounds than the rain ahead. Men’s voices, a low hum of talk, and the chink and gleam of lights glancing through the gaps in leather-canopied tents. The ground rose under their feet, became marginally drier in that the mud was only ankle-deep.

“Here we are,” Corvus said, as unconcerned as if he had led them into his own back yard. “From here on in we straighten up and look like citizens. Perhaps we should go under different names. Druze, you look like a Timus to me.”

“Boss,” Druze said, “I would follow you to the far side of the Veil if you asked me, but don’t try to make me laugh. It’s not one of your gifts.”

“I fall short in that respect,” Corvus admitted, and they saw him grin under his hood. He seemed as light of heart as a boy who has found a peephole in a bathhouse wall.

“I wonder if Karnos’s tent is as big as mine. What think you. Rictus? You know him better than I.”

“I think Druze’s accent and your face will give us away in a moment. Let me lead, for Phobos’s sake, and both of you keep your mouths shut.”

Corvus nodded, and in an entirely different, clinical voice said, “Count the sigils you see. I want to know which cities have brought up their levies.”

They walked through the camp as brazenly as though they belonged there, Druze wiping the muck off his pelta so the Machran sigil shone out white in the firelit gaps in the dark. The camp of Karnos’s army stank worse than their own, and Rictus put out of his mind thoughts of what his bare feet must be treading through.

Men were crowded in their tents, huddled around guttering clay lamps and foul-smelling tallow candles. Some resolute souls were keeping campfires going, atop each the familiar villainous black shape of a centos, the great iron pot fighting men had eaten from since time out of mind. There was a toothsome smell on the air amid the baser stinks; Karnos’s men were eating stewed goat, ladling in mounds of lentils and onions to eke out the meat. Lowland food; the smell of it brought back memories of a dozen old campaigns to Rictus.

He had to shake his mind into the moment; the scenes before him were so familiar that the sense of danger was dulled.

He stopped short when he caught sight of the namis sigil on some shields, painted in blue. These were men of Nemasis, with whom he had fought only the summer before. The gap-toothed man with the shaven head was Isaeos, the idiot whose bumbling had cost lives and lost months in Rictus’s last contract. He bent his head into his hood as he passed by.

The mismatched trio of filthy strangers wandered through the camp without challenge, three more nameless Macht in a sea of them. Rictus stopped counting sigils after he reached twenty. Every city of the hinterland was here, and yet the camp was not big enough to accommodate their full levies. Some must have been sending token contingents, no more. Even among the members of the Avennan League, there were hostilities and rivalries. Karnos had done well to come so far with so many.

No-one challenged them. Rictus was not surprised. He had known citizen armies all his life. They would fight like lions when the time came, but the idea of camp discipline was beyond them; one might as well try to herd cats.

After only a few weeks with Corvus, he had begun to take for granted the efficiency of the army on the far side of the plain, to view it with even a trace of indulgence. He had all but forgotten that his Dogsheads were the exception, not the rule, and that Corvus had made something surprisingly different out of his own host.

Once again, he found himself looking at this Kufr half-breed from a revelatory new angle.

Kufr. Now that was something to factor into things.

The three interlopers grew in confidence, emboldened by the black night, the rain and the muck-stains which made them almost indistinguishable from every other man in the camp. Rictus accepted a squirt of wine from a good-natured drunken fellow with the machios sigil tattooed on his arm, and went so far as to ask him where Karnos’s tent might be found.

“That fat bastard?” the man cried. “He’s still in Machran with his cock up some slave-girl’s arse. It’s Kassander you want, friend – he commands here. What are you, some kind of messenger? Fucking rain – ain’t it a bitch, eh?” He staggered off, plashing through the muck with the bullish determination of the drunk who knows where he wants to go.

“The more I hear of this Karnos fellow, the more I like him,” Druze said with his thick black brows beetling up his forehead. “Had I the choice -”

A woman’s scream cut across him, shrill and terrified.

“I said,” Druze went on, “Had I the choice I’d much prefer -”

“Shut up,” Corvus snapped. “Rictus, where was that?”

Rictus pointed down the haphazard line of tents. “It’s not our concern, Corvus. There’s nothing more to be seen here.”

He was ignored. Corvus strode off on his own in the direction of the scream.

“Oh, shit,” Druze muttered, and grasped Rictus by the arm, taking off in his leader’s wake. “Rictus, for Phobos’s sake, get a hold of him.”

Corvus moved like a black, silent raptor through the tent lines, with Rictus and Druze trailing him.

He had thrown back his hood, and his eyes caught the light of the campfires and reflected it back a violent green.

He pulled back a tent flap, and out of the interior blew a blare of lamplight, the stink of men’s sweat, and something else, something high and keen and bitter in the night. Fear.