Corvus

NINETEEN

Rictus knelt on one knee in the freezing mud. The timber under his hand creaked as he leaned his weight upon it. His breath frosted out in the moonlight.

“Wait,” he said in a low voice. “The cloud’s coming again.”

The wind high up above his head tumbled a broken fretwork of black cloud about the sky. Through rents in the cloud, pale Phobos leered down, and Haukos glowed red and low on the horizon, almost set.

He gripped the rough-hewn wood of the ladder on his left and turned his head this way and that, nodding as he caught the bright feral glow of Ardashir’s eyes beside him. The tall Kufr smiled, a gleam of teeth in the flickering moonlight. Rictus’s vision was heavily circumscribed by the bronze shell of his helm. He longed to take it off, but knew he would need it for the work ahead.

To his right, Druze crouched with a line of men along another ladder. For hundreds of paces, a host of men were kneeling in the frozen mud, formed along the siege ladders like legs on a centipede. Half a pasang to their front, the walls of Machran loomed up huge and black in the night, as solid as a cliff-face.

Rictus stifled a shiver.

“The lazy bastards must be half asleep,” Druze whispered. “One good flash of moonlight and we’re as plain as a turd on a tabletop.”

“Let’s go, Rictus,” Fornyx said behind him. “Druze is right – any second now they’ll wake up on us.”

“Wait for my word,” Rictus said. “Remember the plan.”

A splurge of shouting in the night, off to their left.

“That’s Corvus,” Ardashir said. “He’s starting.”

“Give them a moment,” Rictus hissed to the men around him. He could sense their eagerness, the impulse in all soldiers to get it started, to get the thing over with.

The tumult to the south and west broadened, rising to break apart the stillness of the winter night. They could see torches running along the walls now, and someone began beating on a bronze gong.

“That’s their alarm,” Fornyx said. “Rictus, you want me to piss myself? Let’s go.”

Rictus grinned inside his helm. He rose to his feet, hauling at the heavy wood of the ladder. “All right, girls, up you get. Move quick and quiet.”

The ladder-bearing files of men climbed off their knees and brought the siege-ladders up to their shoulders. Rictus led off at the head of his and the rest followed. They spread out as they approached the walls; a bristling crowd of men, centons intermingled. Dogsheads, Igranians and Companions, all creeping together in the dark under the walls.

They were perhaps a hundred paces from the base when they were spotted. Someone yelled and held a blazing torch over the battlements, looking down, waving his arm.

“Fuck,” Rictus said. “Pick it up, lads. The party’s begun.”

Ardashir darted aside from the line of ladder-carriers. He lifted his bow from his shoulder and reached calmly for an arrow from the quiver at his hip. The rest ran past him.

The man on the walls with the torch cried out, dropped it, and staggered back from the battlement. The torch fell to the ground below and Rictus fixed his eyes upon it, a reference point in the night, something to keep him focused.

They were at the base of the wall. Rictus dropped his end of the ladder. “Lift!” he shouted. “Move in as you push!”

The heavy iron-frapped timber of the siege ladder rose up as a score of men manhandled it upright. They moved in as it rose, until it thumped against the wall above them and they were all in a huddle at its foot.

“Spread out a little, for Phobos’s sake!” Fornyx rapped out.

Rictus took a breath, hearing it hoarse and loud inside the helm. He drew his sword – he was carrying a heavy drepana – and settled his shield on his back. The bronze-faced weight of it seemed almost impossible to manage as he set a foot on the first rung and began to climb. He was glad of the helm now, and instinctively hunched as he ascended, expecting at any second to feel the impact of a stone or arrow.

The ladder flexed and bounced under him as it took the weight of man after man below. The quiet of the night was entirely ruptured now, with men’s voices raised all along the walls in fear and fury. In battle, men would scream themselves hoarse and not even be aware they were making a sound. Rictus had done it himself. But not tonight. He was concentrating too hard on climbing one-handed in full panoply. For the men below him it would be even harder, as there would be muck on the rungs to make their feet slip.

Other ladders on the walls to left and right. They had sawn out fifty in the past two days, chopping down a grove of fine old plane trees for the timber, and hammering out the iron reinforcing brackets in the field-forges of the army using spare horseshoes.

Back over the rise that led down to the city walls, Corvus and Parmenios – his plump little secretary – had set up a cross between a factory and a lumberyard, and men worked there in shifts, night and day. They had felled taenons of woodland and gathered every piece of scrap iron the countryside had to offer, everything from knives to ploughshares. No-one was quite sure what they were at; a bigger thing than these ladders, that was for certain.

But the ladders were the most economical way of getting men upon the walls of the city. They had to attempt a quick assault before settling down to the siege, Corvus had said. Even if it did not succeed, it would rattle the defenders, and give the attackers experience.

Experience, Rictus thought, gasping and gripping the wooden shank of the ladder so hard his bones hurt. Experience is overrated. If you want men to do this kind of thing with a willing heart, they’re better off ignorant.

He raised his head and looked up, a gesture of courage in itself. There were heads framed in the battlements above him. He saw a pair of arms raised.

Phobos! He jerked to one side and the heavy stone clipped the edge of his shield, struck the man behind him full in the face. The fellow did not even manage a scream out of his shattered mouth before he soared backwards and disappeared. In his fall he had thumped against the man below him on the ladder and knocked his feet from the rungs. The second man hung on by one hand – Rictus saw the terror in his eyes, bright in the T-slot of his helm – and then he was gone also, plummeting into the press below.

Rictus felt heavy, drained and weak, cold fear diluting the very blood that pumped madly through his heart. As he began to climb again, he uttered a guttural snarl, and his teeth bared like those of an animal.

A javelin glanced off his helm, clicked against the great bowl of the shield on his back, and was gone. His sandals slapped upon the flattened wooden rungs of the ladder. He held the drepana above his head as though it were some kind of talisman.

And he was there, level with the battlements -looking into the faces of the men who were trying to kill him.

One was pushing at the ladder, trying to lever it off the wall. Rictus flicked out the wide point of the drepana and dropped him with a pierced throat. He climbed higher up the rungs, set a hand on the cold stone. It felt as reassuring as a rope flung to a drowning man. He swept the drepana in a wide arc, missing his blow, but forcing the men in front of him back.

He was off the ladder, perched on the top of a merlon like an immense crow. He lunged forward, keenly conscious of the great long drop at his back, the weight of the shield still liable to drag him towards it.

He tumbled, felt a strike on his shoulder which slid off his black cuirass. A spearhead punched him in his chest, a heavy blow which would have transfixed him were it not for the Curse of God. He straightened, still snarling, his feet planted securely on Machran’s stone, and sent the drepana licking out like a snake, not trying for damage, just unbalancing his attackers, gaining room. With his left arm he angled his elbow into the bowl of the shield and swung it forward, slid his forearm into the centre-grip, and at once felt safer. “Dogsheads!” he bellowed. “Dogsheads to me- on the walls, boys!”

Someone had dropped onto the battlement behind him. A shield was tucked beside his own. He felt a surge of new energy, the bowel-draining fear leaving him.

More of his men were up at the lips of the walls, their heads popping up all down the line. The defenders were being pushed back. Corvus’s diversion had worked; the enemy was very thin on the ground here.

Rictus smashed forward, butting his shield into the face of the man in front, stabbing the drepana low at his knees. He felt the blade shear through flesh and the gristle of a joint. The man cried out, his mouth a wet hole under his helm. Rictus shouldered him hard and he flew backwards, off the catwalk.

More men behind him now. The assault was succeeding – they had a foothold.

“Who’d have thought it?” Fornyx yelled. “Ladders!”

“Keep them coming,” Rictus shouted back. He saw Kesero there under the banner, and Valerian was further along the wall, standing in an embrasure and holding fast to a tottering ladder. Dogsheads were fighting side by side with Druze’s lightly armed Igranians.

Rictus looked west, the world spanning out below his gaze.

To his right there rose the vast dark bulk of Kerusiad Hill. Below him were the narrow contoured streets of the Goshen Quarter. All Machran lay before him, speckled with lights, a vast beast rolling out to the horizon in the fitful moonlight. Corvus’s attack was marked by a long cluster of blazing torches down in the Avennan Quarter some two pasangs away.

Phobos – I hope he keeps the bastards off our back a little longer.

The Dogsheads and Igranians fought along the walls, the heavily armoured mercenaries locking shields and battling forward foot by foot, the Igranians darting in and out with stabbing javelins and drepanas. Rictus saw one of his own men trip over a corpse and go flying into the air – he tumbled off the wall and struck the roof of a house below with an explosion of clay tiles, then slid down the incline, scrabbling for a hold, before pitching to the street below, the shattering impact of the cobbles breaking the body within the armour.

Rictus’s eye was drawn to the streets on his left. Some kind of torchlit procession was pouring along it, like a flame-crested serpent of immense size.

“They’re bringing up reserves!” He shouted. “Make some space, lads – we need more men up here!”

A ladder was shoved back from the walls, a Machran soldier pushing it off with his feet. It swung sideways with a dozen men still clinging to it, and went down with a sickening crash, crushing a whole file of men below.

The troops at the foot of the walls were frantic to ascend the ladders and help their comrades above. A crowd of them clambered up one while more held it steady at the top of the wall, urging them on, pulling them over the battlements as they reached the top.

Then there was a tearing crack, and the ladder broke in the middle. It went down in pieces, men still clinging to it.

One of the men in an embrasure caught a friend by the arm as he fell, held him for a moment, and then was pulled down with him, the two soaring into the crowded carnage below with their fists still locked together.

“Steady, boys!” Rictus shouted, dismayed, “Ten to a ladder, no more!”

The press on the walls was tightening again. One of the great towers of Machran loomed over them to the west; they were fighting towards it under a hail of stones and javelins. The defenders were even throwing shields and helms down upon them. Rictus felt his feet slithering in blood. He raised his shield instinctively as something came at him, a half-guessed shadow of a lunge. A blade clanged off the bronze face and he sent the drepana under his attacker’s guard. It went in below the man’s cuirass.

As Rictus pulled the weapon free he felt the stitches in his arm open up and a hot flow of blood ran down his fist, gluing the sword to his fingers.

There was a whoosh of air over his head – he felt it tug at the transverse crest of his helm – and something flew through the night above him. A clang, and a knot of men behind him went down as though flattened by a giant fist.

He stared uncomprehending for a long moment, disbelief sawing the breath in and out of his throat. A massive spear or bolt, thick as a man’s wrist, had skewered three of his men, bursting through their armour as though the bronze were gilded paper.

“Ballistas!” Fornyx shouted across at him. “I thought those bastards didn’t work anymore!”

Another tore overhead, like some raptor stooping for the kill. On the crowded battlements it could not miss. Rictus saw two Igranians pinned to a Machran spearman, the three joined by the long barbed shaft of the missile.

Men were pouring out of the tower, and more were fighting their way up the stairs to the catwalks, a flood of them with torchlight and moonlight splintering across their armour, playing across it in gleams and flashes. There was open space around Rictus. His own men were falling back to the remaining ladders. The tide of battle had shifted. The ballista bolts hammered into the ranks and knocked men down like skittles.

Fornyx was at his side, supporting Druze. The dark Igranian had a death mask for a face. His bound arm gleamed black with blood.

“Let’s ask them if they want to surrender,” Fornyx said, his teeth white in his beard.

“Get back to the ladders, Fornyx – this isn’t working.”

“Not those fucking ladders again,” Druze groaned.

“Where’s Valerian?”

“Down the wall towards the other tower – same story down there.” Fornyx spat. “The towers are killing us.”

Rictus stood up straight. The ramparts had been flooded with his men and Druze’s. Now the tide had gone out. There was only a wrack of flotsam and jetsam left – and bodies, so many bodies. They choked the catwalks so thickly that they were entangling the feet of the living. The Machran troops who had manned these walls were nearly all dead, but more were on their way, hundreds more.

“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.