Corvus

SIX

The green branch got Rictus up to the city walls. It was snowing, a wet, dark snow that was the child of the decaying season. Impenetrable though the Curse of God might be, it held no warmth, and Rictus was shivering under his scarlet cloak as he stood with the olive branch held up in one hand, the blank pocked stone of the ramparts looming over him. There was activity up there on the walkway; he could see the conical gleam of helms moving, but as yet the massive city gates remained closed.

It had been a year and a half since last he had stood here, the tail end of the summer, just before he left for the Nemasis contract.

The gates had been open then, the sun warm and the land as rich and ripe as a plucked pomegranate.

The roads had been thick with people and handcarts and animals making their way to the Summersend market. For most of the country folk around about it was a once-a-year trip, to sell what they had grown and reared and woven, and in return to buy what they could not make for themselves on their farms. They would go home with the redware pottery that was unique to the city, or perhaps a new axehead, or a slave, or perhaps even a scroll of poetry to read aloud in the dark hours of the winter.

Hal Goshen was the hub of men’s lives for sixty pasangs around, as much a part of the landscape as the mountains that reached white and remote on the northern horizon. It did not seem possible that a thing of such permanence could be taken away, erased from the world because of the will of one man.

But that might well happen now, if Rictus could not raise an answer out of these walls.

He tried again. “I am Rictus of Isca, and I am known to you and to your Kerusia. I am here to speak for the eastern general, Corvus, whose army is behind me.” Nothing. His temper flared.

“Open the fucking gate, will you? I’m one man, and it’s fucking freezing out here.”

A snap of laughter from above. Finally there was the crack of a reluctant bolt, and a postern in the gate swung open, admitting a heavily cloaked figure. The postern slammed shut behind him.

“I hope Aise has the goats down from the high pastures,” the figure said. “There will be drifts up there by now that would bury an ox.” The man was lean as a whip, with long lank grey hair, and a gold stud in one nostril. When he smiled he had the white teeth of a much younger man – he had always been proud of them, Rictus remembered, and the effect his smile had on women.

“Phaestus,” he said. “Thank the goddess. I was thinking it was about time I got an arrow in my neck.”

“I have bows trained on you,” Phaestus said, “not that they’d be much use against a Cursebearer. So it’s true then; you and the Dogsheads have thrown in with the conqueror of the east.”

“It’s true, though we didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

The two men looked wordlessly at one another for a long drawn out minute. Rictus was a guest-friend; he had dined in Phaestus’s home, brought trinkets for his daughters, and told tales of old campaigns to his son. The two men had hunted boar together in the hills, and had shared wine around a campfire, Fornyx making them roar with his filthy jokes.

“Ah, well, it seems he is adept at making men choose,” Phaestus said at last. “Even you. What do you make of him, Rictus? Is he the all-powerful champion we’ve heard?”

Rictus thought of Corvus, the short, slight youth with the painted fingernails, and said truthfully, “Well, he scares me, as no man I’ve met ever has.”

Phaestus looked genuinely shocked at this. “Phobos!”

Rictus grasped the older man’s shoulder gently and led him away from the walls. “I come to bring you his terms.”

“Does he have Aise and the girls – is that it?”

Rictus shook his head. “Listen to me, Phaestus. And look south. Take in what you see and be honest with yourself.”

The white snow had blanketed the farmland south of the city, rendering it a blank field broken only by the outlines of walls, the barely discernable grids of sleeping vineyards and olive groves. But some four pasangs away from where the two men stood there was a black stain on the world, an ordered rash of lines that could just be differentiated into ranks of men, of horses. A massive host whose lines extended five pasangs from end to end, a distance greater than the width of the city they faced.

“He has twenty-five thousand men, Phaestus, every one of them a veteran, fed on victory. Do not try to tell me that your citizen soldiers can contend with that. I know what the strength of Hal Goshen is. I know your centurions and their drills.”

“I don’t doubt it. But Hal Goshen is not alone in this thing, Rictus. What of Machran, and the League? Karnos himself almost had you in his employ at the end of the summer, and you walked away. But the League will come to our aid.”

“The League is too late. They’ve spent the last two years debating what to do about Corvus and have ended up chasing their own tail. There is no army coming to your rescue, Phaestus, so put that out of your mind. He has moved too fast for them. I tell you now in friendship: accept his terms.”

Phaestus’s face was as livid as his hair. “What are the terms?” he said.

“The same as those he has given to a dozen cities in the east. You must give up your independence and join him, accept him as absolute ruler. You must pay a tithe of all your wealth and income to his treasury, and you must send him five hundred spearmen every year to fight in his wars.

“You do these things, and Hal Goshen will not be touched – he will not even enter the city, but will appoint a governor.” Rictus took Phaestus by the arm again, squeezing flesh down upon bone. “I have spoken to him of this. You will be the governor, Phaestus. You have my word on it. And if you prove loyal, then your son Philemos will follow you.”

“He’s establishing dynasties now, is he?” Phaestus snapped. “Petty little kings, to serve under him, the Great King of all. What are we now, Rictus, no better than Kufr? A free man bears his spear and has his voice heard among his peers – that is how the Macht have always lived.”

“Times are changing,” Rictus said, angry now, though not with Phaestus. “I warn you, as a friend, if you do not submit to him, he will take Hal Goshen, and he will destroy it, to make an example. You and your son will die and your womenfolk will be enslaved. Hal Goshen will disappear as Isca did. He will do it, Phaestus, believe me.”

Phaestus looked at him with a mixture of wonder and contempt.

“The great leader of the Ten Thousand, whom I termed my friend. Rictus of Isca, reduced to the errand boy of a barbarian. Run back to him, Rictus, and tell him -”

“For Antimone’s sake, Phaestus, don’t come all high and mighty on me now. We stand in a cold hard world, and honour is something we leave for the stories. You are being offered something priceless here. There can yet be honour in what you accept, and you will save your city a nightmare.”

Phaestus looked like a man in doubt as to whether he was about to sob or shout. He shook his head.

“I never yet truly understood the nature of a mercenary. You redcloaks are a dying breed, and we have made you into a kind of legend. But in the end, all that matters is the weight of the purse you are offered. What you consider honour, I spit upon, Rictus.”

Rictus seized him by the throat, his grey eyes blazing. “Watch what you say, old man. You do not know of what you speak. Have you ever watched a city burn? I have. I have seen my people led off to the slave market, my family butchered. If your pride seeks to consign your own folk to the same fate then I swear to you I will make special effort, when your walls are breached. I will find you and kill you myself, and your precious son. And your last sight on this earth will be that of my men raping your wife and daughters.” He tossed Phaestus aside as a dog will discard a dead rat.

“I came to you out of friendship. I advanced your name with Corvus because I knew you to be a just and honourable man, one who would rule wisely. You love this city, as do I. Its fate is in your hands now.”

Phaestus rubbed his throat, eyes hot and white. “You think I would enjoy setting myself up as a tyrant, the slave of a greater tyrant? You do not know me as well as I thought you did, Rictus. And it seems I do not know you at all.”

“Take his terms to the Kerusia, then – see what the other elders have to say, and put it to the assembly.”

Phaestus’s lip curled. “How did he buy you? Are you to have the pickings of his conquests? Antimone watches us, Rictus. Her black wings beat over our heads all our lives. You and Corvus will answer for what you are doing.”

“I’ll take my chances with the gods. You think on the offer I have made, and ask whether your ideals are worth the death of a city. Corvus expects answer before nightfall. If there is none, the army will assault your walls at dawn.”

Rictus turned on his heel and walked away. Neither Phaestus nor the men on the walls could see the agony written across his face.

Hal Goshen capitulated that evening. A leading elder of the Kerusia, Sarmenian, was proclaimed governor by Corvus. The city accepted a small staff of clerks from the conqueror’s entourage, and agreed to forward provisions to the army for the remainder of the present campaign. Five hundred glum-faced youths wearing their fathers’ armour marched out to join the army on the plain below, and were folded into Demetrius’s command.

Of Phaestus there was no sign. He had relayed the terms of the city’s surrender to the Kerusia, and then disappeared, fleeing Hal Goshen with his family, making for the hills. In his absence, and on Corvus’s insistence, he was declared ostrakr by the Kerusia, before that body disbanded itself. Like Rictus, he no longer had a city to call his own.

It was perhaps the most efficient example of conquest Rictus had ever seen. Not a drop of blood had been spilled, and yet a great city had fallen. And with the fall of Hal Goshen, the way was open to the western heartlands of the Harukush. The cork was out of the bottle.

The army of Corvus shook out into march column next morning, a river of men that blackened the face of the lowlands. The great camp in which they had passed the preceding days was dismantled and abandoned – the leather tents, the field-forges, the barrelled provisions all packed up and loaded onto the waggons of the baggage train. Then the thing began to move. The clouds broke open and yellow sunlight made of their passage an immense, barbed snake slithering west, the endless companies passing by the walls they had not been called upon to breach.

In their midst, Rictus trudged silently at the head of his men, and his black armour reflected not a gleam of the autumn sun. He did not look back.