Corvus

TWELVE

Rictus watched the blood dripping from his fingertips with a kind of morbid fascination. He was clenching a filthy clout about his arm at the elbow, twisted tight as he could make it, and the trickle had slowed at last. Even so, the torchlight in the tent seemed incredibly bright to him, splintering in shards and blades, like ground glass in his eyes. That would be the thump on the head, he supposed. He had already been sick once, and were there anything left in his stomach he had no doubt he would be so again.

Fornyx’s face swam into view, shadow in light. He felt the weight of his friend’s hand on the numb meat that was his forearm.

“I got the carnifex.”

“There are men hurt worse than me,” Rictus said muzzily.

“That artery wants stitched shut, or you’ll bleed white. Now shut your mouth before I slap you.”

Rictus smiled. He leaned back, was caught by Fornyx before he toppled off the blood-slimed wooden table, and drifted into a hazier place in his mind. Aise was there, young and smiling again, and Rian had flowers in her hair, a marriage-crown of primroses and forget-me-nots. But who was the man in shadow beside her?

He felt a stab of sharp pain that jolted him awake again. They were holding his arm down and old Severan, one of the Dogsheads’ two carnifexes, was working a blood-brown needle through his flesh. Another scar for Aise to find, Rictus thought.

His gaze drifted. The great tent was full of the stink of death, a slaughterhouse reek. Men were lying on sodden straw or were being pinioned upon stout wooden tables as the army physicians went to work. A strange and horrible calling, to spend one’s days delving into the living flesh of other men.

Rictus dragged himself back to the present, putting to the back of things the pop of the needle as it threaded through skin and muscle and dragged the slashed halves of his arm back together.

“What’s the butcher’s bill?” he asked Fornyx.

The dark little man bent close and looked in his eyes. “Lucky you had a good helm, or that spear would have drilled a hole through to the bone.”

“Fornyx -”

“Forty-six dead on the field, nine from our own fucking arrows. Ninety-six wounded, of whom -Severan?”

The grey-haired man working on Rictus’s arm grunted. “Thirty or so of those will be back in scarlet within a week or two – like the chief here. But of the rest, there are a dozen who will take longer – broken bones and the like. The rest are done with soldiering for good.”

“A third of us,” Rictus said in a cracked whisper.

“A hard day’s work,” Fornyx said. “He gave us the worst job on the field.”

“He gave it to us because he knew we could do it,” Rictus said.

“That’s pretty fucking magnanimous of you.”

“It’s the truth, Fornyx. You know it too. He gave us the hardest job because we are the best he has.”

A bleak smile flitted across Fornyx’s face. “It is a distinction which could well prove the death of us all.”

“Not today,” Rictus answered. He closed his eyes, nausea rising like a blush in his throat. He clenched his teeth shut until his jaws creaked, let it pass.

“I’m done here,” Severan said, rising with a groan and pushing his fists into the small of his back in the way Rictus often did after rising in the mornings.

“Keep that arm slung for a week, and stay awake for the rest of the night – Fornyx, don’t you let him sleep – I’ve seen too many men with a knock on the head sleep their way through Antimone’s Veil. You hear me now?”

“I hear you, you old bugger.”

Severan slapped him on the shoulder and then stumped off to the carnage of the tent without another word.

“No sleep. Ah, Phobos take it,” Rictus groaned.

“You heard him. Let me get you to Corvus’s tent. He wants to see all his underlings tonight, and it’s as good a way to keep you awake as any.”

“Fuck you, you evil-eyed little scrawny bastard.”

“Careful, Rictus; you know I love it when a girl talks dirty.”

Antimone was weeping. It happened often after a battle, especially a large one. The more blood on the ground, the more tears she shed, it was said. The rain came down in a soft cold shroud to fill up the rutted footprints of the living and the dead, to patter on the eyes of the corpses littering the field. At least at this time of year, the process of decay would not set in so quickly as during the usual summer campaigning.

Rictus leant on Fornyx’s bony shoulder as they made their unsteady way through the camp. He could remember little of the battle’s end. The Dogsheads had charged into the mass of Machran warriors once, withdrawn, and then charged again. The next thing he remembered was fighting to keep his head out of the mud while men stood on him.

Well, the thing was done now, at least. The camp was full of drunken men reliving their own versions of the day’s events, pouring thankful libations of wine into the ground for Phobos, for Antimone, in thanks at having survived with eyes and arms and balls intact.

The Dogsheads were more subdued. They had lit two huge fires kindled from broken enemy spears, and were standing around them in their red cloaks passing wineskins with the thoughtful purpose of men who mean to drink deep. They raised a cheer at seeing Rictus, however, and the mood around the fires brightened. Valerian and Kesero were there, Kesero limping with a linen rag knitted about the big muscles of his right thigh, Valerian untouched and as earnest as always.

“You had us worried when we saw you taken into the butcher’s tent,” he said to Rictus. “For a second, we thought you might be in trouble.”

“No trouble,” Rictus assured them. “An aichme’s love-bite is all.”

“Our employer has his victory,” shaven-headed Kesero said. “I hope it makes him happy.”

“Machran is finished now,” one of the other men put in: Ramis of Karinth, Kesero’s second, a high-coloured strawhead who was already drunk. “We must have killed or maimed half the men they had on the field.”

“I believe we did,” Valerian said with a half-smile. “Now I know what a great battle is like. And I know why the stories make of them such glorious and terrible things.”

His mutilated face gave the smile a bittersweet cast. Rictus set a hand on his shoulder. Yes, he thought, I believe Rian could do worse.

“What’s our story now, boss?” another voice broke in. Praesos of Pelion, a good steady fellow like to make centurion in a year or two, if he survived.

Rictus collected his swimming thoughts. “I’m on my way to Corvus now. We’ll see what’s what. There will be a shitload of clearing up tomorrow, for one thing – we must police the battlefield, burn the dead, collect what arms were left on them, and reorganise.”

“Not many of us made it into the enemy camp,” Praesos said. “Every other bugger in the army was there before us, leaving their wounded on the ground. By the time we got round to it, it was picked clean or under guard.”

“We don’t fight for plunder,” Valerian snapped at him. “We look after our hurt and dead first of everything – it’s the way it is done.”

“Well said, brother,” Kesero grinned, “but you can’t blame the lads for being a little put out. We do the right thing, and it leaves us with empty purses while Demetrius’s fucking conscripts raped the place.”

“Aye – what about some pay?” someone called out, back from the firelight and the golden shimmer of the flame-caught rain.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rictus said.

“He threw us into the biggest shithole of the day,” Kesero said, “and we came out smiling. I think he owes us a bonus.”

There was a growled murmur of agreement about the fires.

“He came in along with us,” Valerian said. “Remember that. He was in the front rank right beside me. He did not do it for a joke – that’s why he was there.”

“We’re mercenaries,” Rictus said quietly. “We voted for the contract. Our job is to kill and be killed; to look after one another when alive, when hurt and when dead. That comes first of everything. A man who has issue with that can take off the red cloak and walk away when this contract is done -but not before.”

“And when is this contract done, Rictus? On the fall of Machran?” Kesero asked.

“That’s what I agreed with him.” At that moment, Rictus could not quite remember the terms of the agreement, but it sounded right enough to his addled mind.

Kesero winked. “Then we’re going to be rich men very soon,” and he grinned so that his silver-wired teeth glittered white in his face.

The tension about the fires broke in ribaldry and laughter. After all, they were alive and standing, and they were victors of the greatest battle ever fought in the Harukush. In their minds they had already begun to bury the worst of the day’s memories, leaving what could later be polished up and made part of a better story.

Rictus knew this – he had done it himself. But he knew also that the black memories were kept by Phobos to fester in the depths of a man’s heart. He could never be rid of them; they became part of who he was.

“The supply wagons will be emptied and will take the more severely wounded back to Hal Goshen,” Corvus said, pacing up and down as was his wont. “The looting of the enemy camp is to stop – Teresian, you will see to that. Post more men – your oldest and steadiest. Karnos has stockpiled several day’s rations, and we will use them ourselves while our supply train is away.”

He paused as Rictus and Fornyx emerged from the darkness beyond the tent-flap, and his face broke open into a grin of delight.

“I knew a little thing like a slashed arm would not keep my old warrior down. Rictus, you look as pale as Phobos’s face – Teresian, give up your seat there. Brothers, the wine is standing tall in your cups; we can’t have that.”

Rictus sat heavily in the leather-framed camp chair. Corvus’s scribe, a plump, powerfully built little man named Parmenios, came forward with a waxed slate, his stylus poised.

“Marshal, how many of your men are still fit to fight?”

“Three hundred, give or take.”

Parmenios scratched the slate. His black eyebrows rose up his forehead a little. “A heavy accounting,” he said.

“I’ve heard it called worse,” Rictus snapped. His mind was a throbbing bruise. More than anything else he longed to lay his head down upon his arms on the map-strewn table in front of him.

Teresian offered him a cup of wine. “Drink with us, Rictus.”

They were all holding their cups off the table, looking at him. Poised for a toast, he realised. One-eyed Demetrius, the grim ex-mercenary, spoke for them.

“Today we saw how men fight, and die.” He lifted his cup higher.

“To the Dogsheads.”

“The Dogsheads,” the others repeated. Humourless Teresian, the suspicion gone from his grey eyes. Dark, smiling Druze, with his arm in a sling to match Rictus. And Ardashir, his strange long face solemn. They all drained their cups and then flicked out the dregs for Phobos, mocking Fear itself.

Rictus caught Corvus’s eye, and the strange young man winked at him.

The Dogsheads had been sent on a suicidal attack for sound military reasons; it was harsh, but rational. But Corvus had also thought this far ahead. Their obedience, their self-sacrifice had finally won round the doubters among his officers. Rictus had at last earned his place as one of Corvus’s marshals.

You conniving little bastard, Rictus thought, and he raised his empty cup to Corvus in a small salute.

“Back to business,” Corvus said briskly. “The roads are turned to soup with this god-cursed rain, and men who have abandoned their armour can run faster than those who have preserved it. The Igranians have done what they can, but I’ve no wish to scatter the army on a wild hunt along the Imperial road. We’re fairly certain that Karnos was expecting reinforcements before battle commenced. It remains to be seen if they will now remain in the field or return to their cities.”

“What of Karnos? Any news?” Rictus asked.

“Their dead are out there in heaps,” Ardashir said. “If he is one of them he will take time to find.”

Corvus waved his hand back and forth. “Dead or alive, he brought the League here to its destruction. At least a third of the enemy army is still on the field, and Machran lost most heavily of all the League cities, as I had intended. If we appear before the city walls within the next month, I will be surprised if they do not accept our terms.” “Machran itself,” Demetrius said, with an odd look of awe on his face.

“Machran folds, and the rest go down with it -they will not fight on once we have our feet planted on the floor of the Empirion,” Corvus said. “We are very close, brothers.”

Even through the haze of his exhaustion, Rictus found himself wondering; close to what?

Karnos of Machran is dead.

Karnos has been slain on the field of battle.

Karnos died heroically – no, no, damn it, that’s not it.

He lay in the wet crushing darkness and listened to the rain tap on the stiffened bodies which lay atop him. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life before. In fact it seemed to him that he had never really understood the true nature of thirst before. When the rain came he opened his mouth and let it trickle in, foul-flavoured from the corpses on top of him, but wet.

Life.

Karnos is alive, in the midst of the dead.

Men had gone back and forth across the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting, looking for their own wounded, for enemy wounded to slay, for some trinket which might make their labour worthwhile, or perhaps a better weapon – or, if the gods were smiling, one of those miraculous finds, a black cuirass.

The expensive armour which had so impressed Karnos in the confines of his villa, he now knew to be inferior, gimcrack shite, and these men had seen it as such also. That had saved his life, for they had not tried to strip it from his very much alive and terrified body. And thus he lay here with his fellow citizens sheltering him from the rain.

And pinning him to the ground.

His arm was numb from the shoulder down, and he could not bring himself to look at the black shaft which protruded grotesquely from his flesh. It was a Kufr arrow, fired from a Kufr bow, created by a Kufr fletcher in some far-flung portion of the world which knew nothing of him. And yet it was now inside his flesh, intimate with the very meat of him. All that way, across the sea, in some strange foreign creature’s quiver, then laid against that bow, to flash through the cold air of the Harukush, and end up inside him, Karnos of Machran.

He started at his task again; that which had preoccupied him since the fall of darkness and the departure of the battlefield scavengers. He was inching the bodies of the dead off his own in increments a child could measure with their fingers. In this he showed a patience which he had previously not known he possessed.

As he did, his mind wandered. He remembered squatting in the heat and dust of Tinsmith’s Alley in the Mithannon, scratching at the scabbed-over burns on his bare feet where the sparks from his father’s hand-forge had landed.

He was seven years old, and a passing aristocrat in a himation as white as snow had dropped him a copper obol. He was staring at the little green coin, which would buy him a stick of grilled meat from a foodstall, or a pear-sized cup of wine from one of the shops at the bottom of the alley. It was the first time in his life he had been given something for nothing, and he liked the feeling.

One of the corpses toppled over, as stiff and unlike a living man as an overstuffed sack of flour. Karnos smiled, grunting at the pain, but swallowing it down, as he had swallowed down the beatings he had received as a child. Even then, he had known his father loved him, but knew also that he’d had to lash out on occasion at the nearest thing to hand.

If it were not Karnos, it would be one of the starving strays that littered the city alleyways, and Karnos pitied them even more than himself. They were used and discarded by the slumdwellers who had spawned them, feral little beasts who could barely speak, whose sex was indeterminate, whose eyes held nothing but fear and greed. If they survived they would grow into whores and thieves and beggars, and beget the curse of their existence on another generation. Thus were the slums of Machran renewed.

Karnos began to breathe more easily. He was feeling the cold now, and a warm lassitude came creeping over his battered frame.

They think I have so many slaves because I love lording it over them; me, the boy from the Mithannon, making his own little kingdom. Kassander knows better.

I keep them slaves to protect them. No man or woman wearing my collar will ever be abused in Machran. They are safe with me. Polio knows that. He knows me better than anyone.

He wanted to shout for Polio now, to tell him that his bed was damp, that he needed an extra coverlet. He raised his hand to push back the wet covering that was stealing his thoughts away, and his hand settled on the cold wax-hard face of the dead man whose body lay upon his own. The jolt of that snapped him out of his reverie, and the pain came flooding in, clearing his head. He ground his jaw shut and pushed the chilled meat away from his face, found a leg loosened, and ploughed himself through the mud on his back.

He was freezing cold, but free, staring up at the invisible rain, the teeming dark. How far to Machran? It must be over a hundred pasangs.

Machran, the sun of his world. He loved his city more than he would ever love any wife. One could walk there upon stones that had been shaped in the dawn of his race’s existence. It was rumoured that below the circle of the Empirion were caverns in which the first of the Macht had lived, sealed chambers which housed the dust and dreams of millennia.

My city.

The rain was easing, and in the tattered dark of the sky he could see glimpses of the stars peering through the cloud as the wind picked up and began to harry them away. Phobos was long set, but the pink glow of Haukos could still just be made out, and to one side, Gaenion’s Pointer, showing the way north. He fixed it in his mind, and some almost unconscious part of him made his fist dig a hole in the mud pointing north.

I think my father taught me that. He lived his life in a half dozen narrow streets, and yet he knew about the stars – how is that?

Because even the poor can look up past their next meal. Even the drunkard pauses now and then to cast his face to the sky and hope, and wonder.

We are beaten, Karnos thought. He beat us fair and fully, outnumbered and in the muck of winter when his horses could not run.

I should have offered Rictus more. His men were in front of me today – or yesterday – his Dogsheads. Corvus did that on purpose. What a marvellous bastard he must be. I wish I knew him.

I hope Kassander got away.

And with that thought the rags of the present came back to him. The League he had spent years building was cast to the wind, and the flower of Machran had been slaughtered here, around him.

How many died here today?

He sat up, and the pain became something quite novel in its intensity. He had heard old campaigners say that the worse the wound, the less the pain. He hoped it was true.

Polio, I need a bath. Who knew that war would stink so bad?

Karnos of Machran stood up, a fat man in a gaudy cuirass, barefoot and slathered in mud and blood, a black arrow poking from his right shoulder. He was the only thing moving upon the flooded mere which had been a battlefield.

The Plain of Afteni, they will call it, he thought, for Afteni is not twenty pasangs away along the road. That is where they will be, those who are alive. That is where I must be, if I am to live. He began walking west.

Paul Kearney

Corvus