Corvus

THIRTEEN

Phaestus – one-time Speaker of Hal Goshen, until Rictus had shown up at his gates – had always been a man who prided himself on his appearance. He liked the attention of women; his wife, Thandea, had been a noted beauty in her day and was still a handsome matron. More to the point, she was an amenable adornment to his life who kept his household running smoothly in conjunction with his steward, leaving Phaestus to consider the weightier things in life, be they the running of a great city or the pursuit of other men’s wives.

That was all in the past.

To become ostrakr was a blackened distinction within the Macht world. It meant a man had no city, no citizenship, and hence no redress for wrongs done to him.

He might own taenons of good land, but the moment he was ostrakr, that land became anyone’s to own. He might try to defend it with the strength of his own arm, but what is one man to do when three or four – or fifty – walk onto his farm and declare their intention to take it from him? He dies fighting, or he leaves it all behind.

The same applies to his house, his slaves, all his possessions. And if some stranger takes a fancy to his wife or his daughter, then it is his own spear, and that alone, which will preserve their honour. There is no recourse to the courts, to the assembly, or even to the assistance of friends and neighbours. He is ostrakr – he no longer exists.

Mercenaries forsook their cities when they took up the red cloak, though there were far fewer of them around now than there had been – so many had died with the Ten Thousand that a kind of tradition had been lost, and even now the true, contracted fighting man who fought by the code of his centon was something of a rarity. Such men were ostrakr also, but they at least had the brotherhood of their fellows to fall back on. They exchanged one polity for another.

A man who had nothing to fill up the framework of his world was naked in the dark, and must subsist with the tireless wariness of the fox until he somehow found a way to become a citizen again, to come in from that darkness.

That is what Phaestus had meant to do.

He stood now wrapped in bear-furs which he had bartered from a group of drunk goatherder men over the campfire of the night before. They had been good men, rough and ready as all were who lived up in the highlands with no city to call their own. Up here it was still the world of the clan and the tribe, a more ancient place. But still, men belonged to something. They looked after those of their own blood.

It was a white, frozen world this high in the hills, and the Gosthere Range was a marching line of blinding-bright giants all along the brim of the horizon, the sky as blue and clear as a robin’s egg above them. Here, winter had already come into its own, and the drifts were building deep, the dark pinewoods locked down in frozen suspension, and the rivers narrowed to fast flowing black streams between broadening banks of solid ice, the very rocks bearded with foot-long icicles.

The goatherder men had been bringing their flocks and their families down into the valleys for the winter, and were glad to trade: furs and dried meat for wine and pig-iron ingots. They had haggled hard over the wine and then shared it out liberally afterwards, for such was their nature.

These were the original strawheads of the high country, from whom Phaestus’s own people had come. The dark-skinned lowlanders might sneer at them, but they at least did not burn down cities and enslave populations. All they wanted was grazing for their animals, a place to pitch their dome-shaped tents of weathered hide, and room to roam. They were a picture, perhaps, of how the Macht had lived in the far and misty past. Perhaps.

Phaestus watched them go, and raised his spear to answer the headman’s departing salute. Ten families, perhaps thirty warriors and a hundred women and children and old folk. A unit more cohesive than the citizenry of any city.

If only life were that simple, Phaestus thought.

He had grown a beard to keep the wind from his face, and it had come out as grey as hoar frost. His plump wife had lost some of her padding and had stopped complaining about having to sleep on the ground. And his son had become a man right in front of his eyes, discarding the preening sulks of the adolescent in a few short weeks.

Exile had been good for him, young Philemos. Dark like his mother, and inclined to amplitude like her, he had become an angular young man who took to this life of exile as though he had been waiting for it to happen. There was that much, at least, to be thankful for. The two girls were a different matter.

Phaestus turned in his tracks to regard the straggling little column on the slope below him. One mule had died already, and the rest were overburdened. They would have to dump more of their possessions, pitifully few though they were. His complete collection of Ondimion was already in a snowdrift two days back, a sacrifice which had wrenched his heart. But there was no need to read of drama in a scroll when it was the stuff of their daily lives now.

Tragedy, revenge; yes, that is what life hinges around. The poets had it right after all.

He looked north, at the furrowed valleys and glens of the Gostheres, white in a dreaming world of snow.

That old word they used, from the ancient Machtic – nemesis. That is what I am, Phaestus thought.

His son joined him, scratching and grinning. “These bearskins have lice in them, father. Are we to become barbarians to survive?”

“Yes,” Phaestus said. “That is exactly what we must be. But not forever, Philemos.”

“I hope not – I can’t listen to my sisters carp and moan for much longer. I love them dearly, but I would also love to clash their heads together.”

Phaestus laughed, his white teeth gleaming in his beard. “Now you know how I have felt these last few years. The women are unhappy, and rightly so -this is not their world, up here. Everything they have known has been taken away from them – the least we can do is bear their carping without complaint. That is what men do.”

“We’re soft. I had not thought so until we were with the goatherder people last night. I think their women are tougher than us.”

“They breed them hard, this high,” Phaestus said, and his smile faded. “Your mother and sisters are folk of the city, lowlanders, but my people came from the highlands, and it is in your blood too. It’s well to remember that. The clans of the mountains are not savages – not like the goatmen, who are worse than animals. They are ourselves, in a purer state. What we write down, they keep in their heads, and their sense of honour is as refined as our own. As soon as they sat across a fire from us last night, we were part of their camp, and had some threat come upon us, we would all have fought it together.”

“And if we had cheated them in the bargaining?”

“They would have considered themselves fools for being cheated – that is what such barter is about. But you cross them in a matter of honour, Philemon, and they will kill you without mercy, and all your family. You must remember that.”

“I will.” The boy sobered.

“Good lad. Now, get back down and help with the repacking and, for Phobos’s sake, don’t overload the mules. They have a long journey still to make. Send Berimus up to me.”

“Yes, father.”

Phaestus watched him go.

Seventeen years old, and ostrakr. It’s still an adventure to him – he has no real idea what it means.

Berimus stood silently for some time before Phaestus spoke to him, and when he did his tone was entirely different, harsh and cold as the mountain stone below the ice.

“Are all the preparations made?”

“Yes, master.”

“I am no longer your master, Berimus. You are no longer a slave.”

He turned around. Berimus was a small man, built as broad as an oak door, with a nut-shaped head of dark hair and lively grey eyes. The same age as Phaestus, he looked ten years younger, a compact, muscular version of the tall patrician with the pepper-grey beard, who looked him in the eye.

Phaestus handed him a clinking pouch of soft leather.

“That is all we have left, but it should be enough. You won’t need it up here in the hills, and do not show it – it will only make trouble.”

“I know.” “Once you reach the lowlands, show someone in authority this.” Phaestus produced a sealed scroll of parchment. He rubbed the red wax with one finger.

“This is the seal of Karnos himself. Any official of the hinterland cities will recognise it, and will assist you. Make due west – it’s four hundred pasangs to Machran. Do not let the ladies tell you otherwise. My wife will think to command you – do not let her. You are a free man now, but still my steward, and the man I trust most in the world.”

“Master, your family is my own – you know that.”

“I do. Berimus, we will come out of this thing. When I bring Karnos what I seek we will be citizens again, of the greatest city in our world. I will see you right, I swear.”

Berimus bowed his head.

“You remember when we were boys together, and we came up here hunting with my father?”

“The day the boar felled him – I remember.”

“We stood over him that day, shoulder to shoulder like brothers. That is what you have always been to me. I am entrusting my family to you now – stand over them as you stood over my father.”

“I will, master.”

“I am called Phaestus, my friend.”

Berimus looked solemn as an owl. “Phaestus. I will deliver your family to Machran, or I will die trying. You have my word on it.”

They clasped forearms as free men do.

“Philemos and I will join you before midwinter. Karnos will look after you until then. Give this to him.” Another scroll, another waxed seal.

“Be careful, Phaestus,” Berimus said. “These hills are a strange and dangerous place.”

“Dangerous?” Phaestus smiled. “Don’t worry, Berimus. I only go to call on the home of a friend.”

TWO separate lines of people, one family. They moved apart from one another, mere dots on the white spine of the world. Phaestus was throwing his life into the hollow of a knucklebone, and with it, those of all he loved.

Let me show you how it feels, Rictus, he thought.

He had hunted in these hills for decades; he knew them as well as any city-dweller could. In the winter he had tracked wolf, in the summer deer. North of the Gostheres, in the deep Harukush, there were mountain leopards with blue eyes, and enormous white cave bears. So it was rumoured, though Phaestus had never seen one, or met anyone who had.

It was an ancient place, the Deep Mountains. The legends said that the Macht themselves had originated there, migrating south and east out of the snows and the savage peaks, leaving behind them a lost city – the first city – whose walls had been made of iron.

The first Macht had all been Cursebearers, according to the myth, and had known Antimone herself. She had descended to the surface of the world to dress them in her Gift, and then had left for her endless vigil among the stars with only her two sons for company.

And God had turned His face from them all, from the goddess of pity and the race on whose behalf she had intervened upon the face of the earth.

So said the legends. Phaestus was nothing if not a rational man, but he was astute enough to know the value of myth. The black armours which dotted the Macht world were an undeniable reality, and had not been made by any craft that now existed. So there was that seed of truth at the root of the legends. If there was one, there might be others.

He had talked to Rictus of it, back in the days when he had been an honoured guest at Andunnon and the two had sat by the fire after a few days’ hunting in the hills. Together, they had speculated idly that they might one day make an expedition into the lost interior of the Deep Mountains, to look for that lost city with walls of iron. Something to occupy their retirement.

Antimone, Lady of Night, Phaestus thought, how did it come to this?

They kept to the high ridges to steer clear of the drifts, and found, themselves in a blue and white world, where the wind took their breath away and set the snow clouding in a blizzard off the rocks and stones at their feet. The sky was empty except for the pale red disc that was Haukos, always reluctant to quit the sky in winter, but to the north the great peaks of the Harukush – legendary even among the Kufr – barred the horizon like a white wall. Down from them the wind swooped, and the bite of it was as bitter as a plunge into a midwinter sea.

There were six of them: Phaestus, Philemos, and four others who had come out of Hal Goshen with them. One of these, Sertorius, had been at various times in his life a mercenary, a hunter, a slave-dealer, and a pimp. It was in this latter guise that he had come to the attention of Phaestus, in his duties as chief magistrate of the city.

The two had known each other for many years, and from their confrontations there had arisen a grudging mutual respect. In his own way, Sertorius was as proud and stiff-necked as Phaestus, and as disgusted by the tame surrender of his city. It was he, and his silent little band of henchmen, who had smuggled the Speaker of Hal Goshen, his family and some of his household out of the city – and with a surprising degree of discretion.

Ostrakr, the sentence had been, but Phaestus had no doubt that he was not intended to survive. His rival, Sarmenian, had ached for the chief magistracy for too long to be magnanimous in victory.

Sertorius had been well paid for his troubles, but this current exploit he was doing for free. Like Phaestus, he was a man without a city now, and were he to walk through the gates of Machran, he wanted to do so with something to show for his trouble, something which would ease the transition.

He was a lowlander, a black-haired, brown-skinned man with eyes the colour of a thrush’s back and a convict’s gall-marks on his wrists. His face was seamed and scarred with knife-fights and wickedness and he had a wide gap between his front teeth. He was not the company Phaestus would have chosen for a trip into the highlands in winter -still less the three hulking street-thugs that were his companions – but the choice had not been wide, and Sertorius had at least a brassy, hail-fellow-well-met way of getting along with others which had come in useful with the goatherder folk the night before.

What Sertorius and his men lacked, however, was a knowledge of the mountains, and they stumbled in the wake of Phaestus and his son, holding onto the tails of the mules and complaining endlessly about the cold.

“Two good day’s travel,” Phaestus told them, reining in his contempt with the practice of a politician. “That’s all. Two days, and then we shall have a roof over our heads, for a day or two at least.”

“If the weather holds,” Sertorius said, the words hissing through his gapped teeth. “I hope the prize we seek is worth it, Phaestus.”

“Believe me, my friend, it will be well worth the trip. But we must make it to Machran as quickly as we can. The last I heard, Corvus was banking on a swift winter campaign. The fighting is going on even as we speak.”

“Then we’re well out of it,” Adurnos, one of Sertorius’s henchmen muttered.

“If it hurts the little fucker who took our city, then I’m all for it,” Sertorius said. “But remember, Phaestus, I was paid only to get you out of Hal Goshen. This here trip is my own charity.”

“And your own self-interest,” Phaestus told him. “This way you turn up at Machran with something that Karnos wants. You arrive there empty-handed, and you’ll be starting at the bottom again.”

“The bottom’s where I feel comfortable,” Sertorius said with a laugh.

Struggling along the knife-ridge later in the day, with the sun setting at their left shoulders and the wind masking all conversation, Philemos drew his father close.

“I don’t trust them.”

“Nor do I. But so long as their interests and ours coincide, they will serve us faithfully. Sertorius is a rogue, but he has a keen sense of what’s good for him.”

“They’re animals, father; scum from the sewers. What’s to stop them turning on us?”

“Philemos,” Phaestus said, smiling, “I am their introduction to Karnos, to the fleshpots of Machran. And more than that, look at them. They’re lowland city criminals – if you and I walked away from them now they would perish up here. They need us as we need them. They are outside their own world.”

“So are we,” his son said. “Father, I would sooner we had gone to Machran and joined the League army – to fight in open battle. What we’re doing here -”

“What we do here is worth a thousand men on the battlefield,” Phaestus snapped. “Not everything comes down to standing in a spearline, boy. And you’ll get your chance at that before we’re done.” His face softened at the look on his son’s.

“Philemos, you were born to be more than phalanx-fodder, as was I. If you are to be a man, you must learn from me. A man cannot always follow the dictates of what he perceives to be his honour -sometimes that will lead him to his ruin.”

“Father, you could have been ruler of Hal Goshen under Corvus – it was your honour that has brought you here.”

Phaestus smiled. “Well said. I shall make a rhetorician of you yet.” He turned away, and the smile curdled on his face.

It was not honour. It was ambition, and outrage, and bloody-minded hatred. To be offered something like that, like a coin dropped on a beggar’s plate -and by Rictus, who despite everything was nothing more than a brute mercenary.

It could not be borne. It was the manner in which the offer had been made, as much as the offer itself.

I am a better man than Rictus, he thought. And I will prove it.