Corvus

TWENTY-ONE

“Look at it,” Philemos said in wonder. “It’s like a city. Father, do you see?”

Phaestus lifted his head, as weary and lean as a dying vulture. “It’s his army. His curse upon the world.”

Sertorius looked out across the darkened landscape at the vast crescent of campfires which extended for pasangs to the south and east of Machran. He whistled softly. “Phaestus my friend, were I a believing man I would echo you. Never seen anything like it.”

Bosca spat upon the sleet-thickened pelt of the earth. “Machran still stands, and from what I see this fellow has no campfires to the north of the city, up at the river. Looks like a way in, boss.”

“Agreed. We’ll follow the riverbank and try for the Mithannon Gate. Come, people; we’re nearly there.”

He turned to the three huddled figures behind him, scarecrows with hair as wild as brambles and eyes sunken into their heads. He bent and grasped one face in his filthy hand, turning it this way and that.

“Bosca, you are a slap-happy prick, you know that? Can’t you fuck a woman without using your fists?”

“She needed a little encouragement,” Bosca said with a shrug. “Wasn’t putting her heart into it.”

“It makes us look bad, like thugs from the gutter.”

“That is what you are,” Philemos said evenly.

Sertorius drew close to the dark-haired boy, smiling. “Careful, lad – we’re not in Machran yet. I’ve indulged you, because I like your spirit. Even gave you the girl to moon over all you want. But don’t you press me too hard – I get cantankerous, this close to the end of a job.”

“The boy means nothing by it,” Phaestus croaked.

“Well make sure you speak up for us in Machran, Phaestus – make me look good. I’ve not come all this way for a pat on the head and a bronze obol set in my hand. Me and mine have earned something substantial, getting these bitches this far.”

“Get us into the city and you shall have your just deserts, Sertorius, I promise you,” Phaestus said.

“Very well, then. Up, ladies! The last leg lies before us.”

He bent Over Aise again. “Soon that sweet cunny of yours will get a rest, wife of Rictus. You can spend what’s left of your days looking back on the fond memories we ploughed you with.”

Then he turned and set his face close to Rian’s. “I only wish I had tasted you, my little honey-pot. I would have given you dreams to remember me by.”

He straightened. “Let’s go. Adurnos, carry the brat, and keep it quiet.”

The little company moved out. Sertorius led Aise on a leash, and she stumbled in his wake, her once beautiful face bruised and swollen and bloody. Then came hulking Adurnos, carrying Ona on his shoulder as though she were a sack. The child’s eyes were dead as stones, and when she gathered breath for a cough he set his fingers over her mouth and smothered it.

He was followed by Philemos and Rian, half-dragging Phaestus with them. Bosca brought up the rear. He amused himself now and then by shoving Rictus’s eldest daughter in the back, his grin a yellow gleam in the darkness.

They straggled through the night, a haggard company of travellers at the end of their journey. As they drew nearer to Machran they could smell burning; not woodsmoke, but a putrid, sickening reek that hung heavy in the night.

“That’s a funeral pyre,” Sertorius sniffed, “a big one.”

“There’s been a battle,” Philemos said.

The river was loud and pale to their right. The open plain about Machran seemed deserted, the city and the conqueror’s army facing each other across it as though separated by a gulf of shadow.

“Phobos is rising,” Phaestus said. He fell to one knee. Philemos hauled him up again. Phaestus leaned his weight on the shoulders of his son and Rictus’s daughter.

“Forgive me,” he murmured to Rian.

“Shit,” Sertorius said. “Someone’s out there – I can see them. Down, all of you.”

They lay in the broken crackling rows of a winter vineyard. The plants had been slashed and trampled flat, but were still high enough to conceal them. Sertorius and his men drew their knives.

A pair of shadows lurched by not two hundred paces away to the south, one supporting the other like a man helping a drunken friend. They were making a painfully slow progress across the plain to the camp of Corvus’s army.

Sertorius breathed out. “Just stragglers, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Up, up – let’s go before the night gets old.”

Aise stood staring at the retreating shadows for a moment before the leash at her throat jerked her into motion. She trudged after Sertorius again, head down, her feet bare and bloody and the white skin of her naked shoulder shining like a bone under the rising moons.

The pyre was still burning as they passed it, flames licking here and there in fitful tongues. There were people coming and going between it and the open gate of the Mithannon, and centons of spearmen standing in ordered ranks. Women were keening and sobbing, an eerie chorus in the night, and the torchlight made of it all a dark tableau of shadow and fire, a dramatist’s invocation of grief. The company made their halting way to the looming gateway of the city, and there were stopped by men in full panoply, one bearing a centurion’s transverse crest.

“Your names and district.”

“Phaestus,” Sertorius said, “This is on you, now.”

The old man straightened and seemed to find some last reserve of strength. He stood tall in front of the centurion.

“I am Phaestus of Hal Goshen, and I bear news for Karnos, Speaker of Machran. You must take me and those with me to him at once.”

When the centurion did not move, he barked out in a much louder voice, “Do as I say!”

The strength left him. He sagged, and was seized with a fit of wet, bloody coughing.

The centurion turned to one of his men. “Get Kassander here.”

From the Mithannon Gate to Kerusiad Hill was two pasangs as a crow might fly, half as long again by the meander of the Mithannon’s cramped streets and alleyways. Phaestus and Aise had nothing left in them, nor any strength to trudge over the hard cold cobbles of the city amid the night-time crowds. When Kassander arrived he looked over the travellers one by one. As he saw Aise’s condition his eyes widened and anger made of his mouth a wide, lipless slot.

“What has happened to this woman?”

“She tried to escape,” Sertorius said. Standing by the burly armoured polemarch he seemed like a jackal cowering before a lion. “She’s been difficult from the start. We’ve travelled over half the Gostheres to get here, through snowdrifts as high as your head. Been near three weeks on the road.”

Kassander flicked a hand at the centurion. “Cut her free. The other one too.” He looked down at Sertorius and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He turned.

“I know you, Phaestus. We have met in the past.”

“You know me,” Phaestus agreed. He lay on the cobbles with Philemos supporting him. “I must see Karnos.”

“Can you walk?”

Phaestus smiled faintly. “I’ve walked this far.”

“I will have a cart brought here. Centurion!”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stay with these people. When transport arrives escort them to Karnos’s villa on the Kerusiad. Then set a guard about the house.”

He turned to Sertorius, leaned in so close that the bronze face of his helm was misted by the other man’s breath.

“I don’t give a fuck who she is; you’d better have a good reason for treating a woman that way.”

For a city under siege, Machran did not lack liveliness, even at this hour of the night. The mule-drawn cart sent for them had to have a path cleared for it through the crowds by the escorting spearmen, and by the time it had meandered across a third of the city, Phobos was almost set and Haukos was high in the sky.

Pink Haukos – to the Macht he was the moon of hope, but across the teeming Empire of the Kufr, he was called Firghe, moon of wrath.

Word had gone ahead of them. When the mule-cart finally completed its clattering ascent of the Kerusiad Hill, the doors of Karnos’s villa were already open in a blaze of torchlight, and the master of the house stood wrapped in a woollen chlamys against the cold, his household all about him. He saw the condition of those in the cart and clapped his hands. Half a dozen slaves congregated on the vehicle. Phaestus lifted his head, but could not speak.

Karnos bent over him and took his hand. “My friend, be at ease. Your wife and daughters arrived here over a week ago. I have them quartered in comfort further up the hill. I shall send word to Berimus.” Phaestus closed his eyes, and tears trickled down his face. Karnos patted his shoulder.

“You must be Philemos,” he said. “A fine looking young man. I salute you for seeing your father to safety.” Philemos bowed his head, looking more than anything else ashamed. Karnos sucked his teeth a moment.

“You three,” he said to Sertorius and his comrades. “What part did you play in all this?”

“We were the escort,” Sertorius said with a grin that flickered on and off in his face. “Without us, Phaestus would be dead in the drifts of the Gostheres.”

“Is this true?” Karnos asked Phaestus. The older man’s eyes opened and he nodded.

Karnos ran his gaze over the brutalised captives in the cart. Rian met his eyes with a glaring, tearstained defiance, holding Ona in her arms. Aise sat with her head resting on her elder daughter’s shoulder, eyes shut, barely conscious.

“You are to be congratulated,” he said at last to Sertorius. “It’s not a time to be on the road.” He raised his voice slightly. “Polio.”

“Master?” The old steward was also staring at the women in the cart, his white beard quivering.

“We must find a space for these three fine fellows to lay their heads. Water for washing, food and wine – whatever they want. Have the cook run something up.”

“How about a plump little slave girl?” Bosca leered.

Karnos looked at him. “Centurion?”

“Yes, Speaker.”

His eyes were still fixed on Bosca. “I want four men to stand guard over our guests here. Make sure they do not wander round my house and lose themselves.”

“Yes, Speaker.”

“Now listen here, Karnos -” Sertorius exclaimed.

“Ah, I have it. Grania, show these gentlemen to the grain store. You will forgive me, my friends, but I am a little short on space.” Karnos jerked his head to one side and the spearmen clustered around Sertorius, Adurnos and Bosca. The slim slave girl led the way.

“Phaestus – you tell him!” Sertorius shouted over his shoulder. “You’d be dead were it not for me!” The spearmen shoved him along in Grania’s wake with the relish of angry men.

Karnos was still staring at Rictus’s brutalised family. “Phobos,” he seethed under his breath. He and Polio looked at one another.

“We couldn’t stop them,” Philemos said miserably. Karnos looked at him with contempt, then shook his head and touched Rian gently on the arm.

“Lady, you are in my house now, and here I swear no man shall touch you.”

Rian bent her head and began to sob silently.

The slaves went about their business in unaccustomed silence. They had rarely seen their master in such a mood. He was not shouting, ranting or throwing winecups at the walls, as they had seen him do many a time on returning from the Amphion. He was not drunk, nor was he impatiently shouting orders as was his wont.

He sat in his chair before the fire of the main hall and stared into the flames with unblinking eyes as though he were waiting for something to appear there. The long room was almost in darkness, a few single-wicked lamps glowing in the corners. His chlamys lay on the floor at his feet, and no slave had yet dared approach to pick it up.

It was Polio who broke his dark reverie.

“Master, the lady Kassia is here.”

“What? Fuck!”

“Shall I show her in?”

Karnos stared into the fire again. He had lost weight, and as the flesh had melted from his face so the bones beneath had become more prominent. He was no longer the florid fat man he had been before Afteni..

Polio cleared his throat. “I believe Kassander sent her. She has two servants with her, and baskets of linens.”

Karnos nodded. “That’s Kassander’s way. I was going to send for a carnifex to look at them, but the last thing they need is another fucking man pawing -” He clenched his teeth shut on the words. “Let them in, Polio.”

Before Polio could move away, Karnos set a hand upon the older man’s fingers and gripped them.

“Thank you,” he said.

Polio raised his eyebrows slightly. “You do not need to thank me for a thing, master.”

“Perhaps I will before this is done. What about Phaestus and the boy?”

“They are sleeping.”

“Let them sleep then. And send in that bloody woman.”

He bent and tossed another log on the fire. Pine wood, hewn from the forests north of the Mithos River. The resin in the timber oozed and spat and flared up in little knots of white fury.

“Sitting in the dark?” Kassia’s voice said behind him.

“The dark seems best, for now.”

She bent and retrieved his cloak from the floor. “Kassander told me, said I might be needed here. I brought two good women. One’s a midwife. They will look after them.”

Karnos nodded.

“What are you going to do with them?”

He looked up, and laughed. “What would you have me do? They were brought here because they are the family of a dead man. Their suffering has no significance, no sense to it.”

“Most suffering doesn’t.”

Karnos clenched one fist in another. “What a filthy world we live in, Kassia.”

She sat in the chair across from him, picking at the threads of his chlamys, teasing out the wool. “There are a thousand women like them in the city.”

“I am responsible for this, Kassia. Me.” He stood up, began pacing the room, in and out of the dark and the firelight and the lamplight, up and down like something caged.

“I encouraged Phaestus to do this thing. It was his idea, but I wrote, urging him on. Get them, I said. Bring them here. We will hold this over the great Rictus’s head and cleave him from Corvus. I was so fucking clever about it. My seal on a scroll of paper is what brought them to this.”

Kassia stared at her busy fingers picking the wool in her lap. “I see.”

“It is one thing to face a man on a battlefield, or on the floor of the Empirion for that matter. But this is pure poison, even had it worked.”

“You love your city, Karnos,” Kassia said simply. “You would do anything that would help preserve it.”

“You have not seen them, or the leering bastards that brought them here. I would have killed those animals on the spot, except I am no better. It would not be justice, unless I had the same done to me – I am complicit.” “You did not know this would happen, Karnos.”

“A man’s family, Kassia.”

“Do they know he is dead?”

“What? No – not yet. I must tell them, I suppose.”

“Not tonight, for Antimone’s sake. They have been through enough.”

“You are right not to marry me. I am not fit for a decent woman.”

She stood up and blocked his path, took him by the arms as he tried to sidestep her. “If that were so I would not be here, and this would not be tearing you up the way it is. You made a mistake, Karnos. But you are leader of a great city in desperate times, making a hundred decisions a day. You will be wrong some of the time, and because you have power in your hands, your mistakes will bring misfortune and misery to people. That is the nature of your position.”

Karnos stared at her and managed a strangled laugh. “By God, Kassia, you can be a cold-blooded bitch when you want to be.”

She slapped him across the face, eyes blazing. “You are Speaker of Machran. You do not have the time to indulge your guilt. The thing is done. That’s all there is to it.”

He glared at her, and for a moment they measured up to one another in a crackling silence. She lifted her hand again and touched the reddening welt on his face.

“Kassander is right – we should marry and get it over with. Then we could make up like married people do.”

The fire in his eyes smouldered. He took her by the upper arms and kissed her, hard enough to blush her lips into a bruised rose.

“I am a big-bellied slave-dealer with a streak of drama running through me. At heart I am still only that. I mind these things. I cannot play the great man and put them to one side.”

“Machran is lucky to have you.”

“I wish I could believe that.” He kissed her again, gently this time, then turned and faced the fire, watching the smoke rise up to be sucked out of the slats in the roof. The moonlight was red outside, the smoke taking colour from it as it left the house.

“Will you go to Rictus’s wife in the morning Kassia? Tell her about her husband. I cannot do that. Maybe I am Speaker of Machran, but I cannot stand in front of that wretched woman with such news.”

She nodded. “I will.”

“And Kassia, tell her that she is safe here. She can come or go as she pleases.”

“You want her under your roof, knowing you had a hand in her fate?”

“I deserve it. I too must pay.”

She stood beside him and twined her fingers in his.

“Karnos, they burned a thousand men on a pyre today, and it was counted a victory. The times we live in are full of blood. Before this thing is done, we will have it on all our hands.”

“I wonder sometimes if it’s worth it. To fight like this – and for what? So we can tell ourselves that we are free men? What did freedom mean to my father? He was more a slave than Polio is. Freedom is a word, Kassia.” “There has to be something worth dying for. Remember what Gestrakos said: a man who cares for nothing is a man already dead.”

Karnos grimaced. “There’s another saying, about ends and means. Let me show you something.”

He led her down to the end of the long room. At the bottom a tall cabinet of dark wood stood, barely lit by the oil lamp in the corner. Karnos touched the bottom of the cabinet and there was an audible click. A door opened, taller than either of them.

“I had Framnos make this, the same time he built me my couches,” Karnos said. “Now you know how it opens, as only he and I did before.” He swung open the door. There was a darkness within, and in that darkness a deeper black.

“Reach out and touch it.”

Kassia put her hand out hesitantly, then recoiled. “I can’t see – what is it?”

Karnos brought the lamp over and held it high. Set within the cabinet was a black cuirass. It seemed to soak up the light of the flame, like a hole in the fabric of the world. And then they saw a gleam run over it here and there, like a delayed reflection.

“The Curse of God,” Karnos said.

“Karnos – I never knew – how did you find this?”

“I stole it,” he said with a crooked smile.

Her mouth opened. “You cannot steal this, Karnos. These things -”

“It belonged to Katullos. I was with him when he died. He wanted it given to his son, but his son is not twelve years old. So I took it for myself. I, the Speaker of Machran.” “It’s not right. His family -”

“Call it fortune of war.” Karnos reached out and touched the lightless contours of the armour. “I shall wear it on the walls, when the end comes, for good or ill. It will do the city more good on my back than in the family vault of the Alcmoi.”

They stood looking at it, until Kassia shivered. “I don’t like these things – they are not of this world.”

“You may be right. But they are part of what we are. They cannot be pierced, damaged or destroyed. They simply exist. As long as they do, so shall we.”

He closed the cabinet door again. “You think me a thief now, I suppose.”

She looked at him closely, studying his face, the mark she had left upon it. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“What is it, Kassia? Are you ashamed of me?”

“No – not ashamed. Afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“I know you, Karnos. You are many things, but a thief is not one of them.

“You stole that armour because you see yourself dying in it.”

With the morning came the light in the room, a bright winter sun edging over the Gostheres to the east. She lay and watched it brighten the blue slots above her, breaking in the slatted windows up on the wall. With it came the smell of woodsmoke, of bread baking, and the unfamiliar sea-surf sound of the waking city beyond.

Her daughters were with her in the bed, Ona curled up in her arms, Rian spooned against her back. For a few moments, Aise was able to lie and listen to them breathe, and be herself again. She could put out of her mind the pain of her blistered feet and throbbing face, the dull ache of her insides. There was not a part of her they had not touched.

The moment was gone, so quickly lost it had not truly existed. She lay in the clean bed breathing quickly, heart hammering, no longer seeing the sunlight on the wall. Her mouth was full of dirt, her face pressed into it, and they were holding her down, entering her in the darkness, filling her body with foulness, the hot filth jetting out of them to find its way to her very heart.

She drew breath deeply, listening to the sleeping heartbeats of her daughters, blinking her way back to the present. It was over, it was finished with.

And yet the men who had done this to her were still in this house, mere yards away.

She sat up in the bed. Rian and Ona stirred, but did not waken. She wriggled out from between them and pulled the blanket over their shoulders, smoothed the hair from their faces.

I made the bargain, and the gods kept it. I took the worst thing on myself, and they allowed me that grace. I must be thankful.

She kissed her sleeping daughters one after the other.

There was a pile of cloaks and clothing on the other bed in the room. She selected a heavy peplos, a woman’s winter garment, and wrapped it around her shoulders. The stone floor was cold underfoot, but it soothed the ragged tears in her feet. She limped out of the room, closing the door without a sound.

She was in a tiny courtyard with a pool in the middle, a colonnaded walkway all around, and plants in pots. In pots. She touched a pungent juniper, smelled lavender, bay, and mint. All dying back, all past their best, but easing her mind with their scents and their memories.

How marvellous it was to be free of fear, just for now. To stand and feel the winter sunlight on her face and rub lavender between her fingers…

The smell of the clothes chests at Andunnon.

A slave entered the courtyard with a basket, looked at her, startled, then bowed and scurried away. Aise sank back against a pillar, not sure what this might presage. It was only a few moments before a well-dressed woman appeared in the slave’s place. A dark-haired lady with a broad, handsome face, her hair braided up behind her head. She was young, perhaps not yet thirty, but she had a direct gaze, and there was nothing hesitant about her as she approached.

“I am Kassia, my dear. My people looked after you last night. Did you sleep well? How are the children?”

Aise folded her arms inside her cloak. “We are well,” she said.

“Perhaps you would like to break your fast? Karnos’s cook baked bread fresh this morning, and there is honey to be had, and clean water.”

Aise stood as if rooted to the spot. At last she said, “I’m sorry. I am not -”

The woman called Kassia took her arm. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. You brought your children through this, and you are all alive. The rest is a matter for time and Antimone’s mercy.”

“I must go back to them. They’re sleeping,” Aise said, edging away.

“Let them sleep,” Kassia told her. “Please. Come with me, Aise. There’s a fire burning and a table laid.”

Eunion, biting into a purple onion at breakfast, the last thing he would ever eat.

“No, I cannot.”

“Listen,” Kassia said, and her eyes left Aise’s face for the first time. “I have news you need to hear, something you should know. And it were best I tell you now, while your children are asleep.”

Aise’s face became blank. “Tell me, then.”

“No, please, not out here. Come join me at the fire. We’ll have some wine.”

“I will not drink wine,” Aise said.

“Then I will.” Kassia smiled, flustered now. “Please come with me.”

Unwillingly, Aise allowed herself to be tugged along by the arm. They left the courtyard and entered a room in which the walls were painted the colour of an earthenware pot. There was a small corner hearth, its beehive interior full of fire – olive wood, by the smell. And a balcony. Aise stepped over to it in wonder. There was a thick wooden balustrade the height of her thigh, and beyond it, a soaring view of Machran. She caught her breath at the sight.

Kassia joined her, lifting a winecup off the table that sat like an island in the middle of the room.

“It’s quite something, to see it all from here,” she said, smiling. “We are high up on Kerusiad Hill, and you’re looking west. There’s the Empirion, and Round Hill rising behind it. All of Machran at your feet. I never tire of looking at it.”

“I’ve never seen it like this, like a view through the eye of a bird.”

“The Kerusiad is a tall hill. At the top of it is the citadel of Machran, an old fortress where the Kerusia meet in session. They’re repairing it now, just in case we…”

“In case Corvus and my husband breach your walls,” Aise said. She turned around. “Lady, you seem a kindly woman. Of this Karnos I know nothing except that he has a reputation as a womaniser and an orator. Tell me, what does he intend to do with my girls and I?” Aise stared at Kassia unblinking. The white of one eye had half-filled with blood, and its socket was a purple hollow.

“Karnos is a good man, whatever you’ve heard of him,” Kassia said earnestly. “He detests what was done to you. He has told me that you and your children are welcome to make his home your own for as long as you wish.”

“He sounds like a man with a guilty conscience,” Aise said. “I know we are not here on a whim. He seeks to use me against my husband.”

Kassia set down her wine carefully on the tabletop.

“Aise.” She glided forward and took the older woman’s hands in her own, looking her full in that beautiful, broken face.

“Rictus died yesterday in an assault upon the walls.”

Aise stood very still for perhaps three heartbeats. Then she jerked her hands out of the younger woman’s grasp and backed away.

“That is a lie.”

“I am so sorry.”

“I do not believe you.”

“I would not lie about such a thing. Aise, yesterday morning Rictus’s second, Fornyx, came to the city under a green branch and asked to retrieve his body.”

“Fornyx?” Aise backed away further. One hand came up and covered her mouth.

Kassia followed her, opening her arms. “Believe me when I say Karnos has no hidden plans for you. With Rictus gone -”

“With Rictus gone I am without worth,” Aise said. And spoke his name again, so softly it could barely be heard.

Tears burned bright in her bruised and blood-filled eyes. She drew a breath that was part sob, part snarl.

All this time the knowledge that he was there in the world, a black-armoured invincible pillar of her life – it had kept her on her feet. The fact of his very existence had made her take one step after another when she wanted nothing more than to give up, to lie down and shut herself away from the memories poisoning her heart. Rictus would find her. Rictus would set things right, if he had to tear Machran stone from stone to do it.

A childish belief, but it was the last hope she had possessed.

And now he was dead.

“Aise -” Kassia began, her face twisted with pity.

“Stay away from me.” The look in Aise’s eyes halted Kassia in her tracks.

She walked to the balcony and stood there with her hands on the reassuring wood of the balustrade. All Machran loomed out below her, a surf of noise and activity that filled the world. Men shouting, dogs barking, mules braying, the rattle of cartwheels, and unending, ceaseless chatter. Tens of thousands talking, talking.

She set her hands on her ears, the tears trickling down her face, thinking of Andunnon, the quiet world of the hills, making bread that last morning before it was all destroyed. She would never know peace again, now. She knew that.

Even in the most silent hour of the night, she would hear them laughing as they violated her, and see their faces. Rictus would have killed them. He would have made things right.

Rictus was dead. Her world was destroyed.

“Aise,” Kassia said. “In time…”

She had made a bargain with the gods, and they had kept it. Let it all be on me, she had prayed, and her prayer had been answered. Her daughters were alive and whole.

“You say you will look after my children.”

“Yes – of course.”

She had done enough. All her life she had been doing things for others. Now she would do one last thing for herself.

“Aise!” Kassia screamed, and lunged forward.

Too late. Rictus’s wife leaned out over the balcony and let herself fall. A flash of turning pictures galloped past her mind, bright leaves from a forest of memories; and then there was a shattering blankness. And she knew true peace at last.