Corvus (14 page)

Fornyx took a long
squirt of the wine and handed the skin back to Druze, his gaze never leaving
the receding slaughter. “Yes, he’s quite some general, our little Corvus. But
it’s one thing to beat an outnumbered band of citizens, something else to face
up to the army of the League.”

Druze nodded. “I
know this. And you know what, Fornyx? He is looking forward to it. He wants it
with all his heart. And the more men the League brings against us, the happier
he will be. Sometimes I think his sire is Phobos himself. He has no fear.”

“All men fear
something,” Rictus said. “Even if it’s not death.”

“Then he fears
failure,” Druze acknowledged. “More than anything else. More than death.”

The cavalry reined
in perhaps two pasangs to their front. A few isolated, running dots were all
that remained of the sixteen hundred men who had faced Rictus in line what
seemed like only minutes before. The city of Goron had just lost its menfolk.
All of them.

“What will he do
now, sack the city?” Fornyx asked.

Druze shook his
head. “That is not his way. He cannot abide violence done to women or children.
I think maybe something happened to him in boyhood, to his own people. It is
the thing he hates most.”

Rictus felt a
strange relief. He had seen enough cities sacked before this, and not just his
own. He loathed the vileness which came out in even the best of men when all
the rules were taken away, when the basest of appetites were freely indulged.

“How did you come
to serve him?” he asked Druze, wondering. The dark Igranian did not seem a man
who had ever been defeated. He had the self assurance of someone always on the
winning side.

“Corvus killed my
father,” Druze said simply. “He beat my people in open battle one fine day west
of Idrios. His Companions rode us down like they did these men today.”

“Phobos!” Fornyx
exclaimed.

Druze smiled his
dark smile. “My father was a fine warrior, but also a brigand and a braggart. I
loved him, but I was not blind to his failings.

“He fought Corvus
sword to sword, and fell. And afterwards Corvus gave him a funeral worthy of a
king. My people are not city-dwellers. You would call them uncivilized, and you
would be right; but they can appreciate greatness in a man just as you can.
Corvus has it. And me, I wish to be there when it comes to full flower - for
the adventure of it. I want to be part of the story.”

Rictus and Fornyx
looked at one another, and Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.

The army camped
that night outside
the walls of Goron, their tent-lines greater than the city itself. During the
afternoon, Corvus had had his men gather up all the dead from along the road
and set them on a pyre, to be burned the next day. All through the night, the
women of the city trickled down to the hill of bodies to keen and wail and
mourn their husbands, their fathers, their sons, and their cries carried over
the camp of the army like an accusation, as though Antimone herself were
hovering overhead, black wings beating in the darkness, her tears falling
unseen upon the snow.

Rictus was called
to Corvus’s tent some time before the middle watch of the night, and entered to
find most of the high command there, seated around the map-table with clay cups
in their hands, braziers glowing bright and hot about them. Corvus was striding
up and down, his long black hair loose. In the uncertain light of the hanging
lamps he looked like some beautiful exotic girl dressed in a man’s chiton. The
silver weapon scars on his forearms marred the image.

He greeted Rictus
with that peculiarly winning smile, like that of a son who thinks he has
pleased his father.

“Your men lived up
to their reputation today, Rictus. That is the first time I have ever seen a
spear phalanx keep its formation at a run. You have given Teresian’s spears
something to think about.”

Teresian himself,
a younger version of Rictus, did not seem particularly thoughtful. He stared at
Rictus with veiled hostility, but held up a wine-cup in a grudging gesture of
respect.

“We should not
have had to fight today,” Corvus said, resuming his pacing of the tent. “It was
stupidity on their part - what did they hope to accomplish?”

Anger lifted his
voice a tone. He sounded almost shrill. “I have made an object lesson of the
men of Goron - that example will travel ahead of us. I’m optimistic that we’ll
have no more futile stands before we come to the hinterland of Machran itself.
It is there that the campaign will have its climax. Word has come to me that
the Avennan League is mustering at last, and Karnos has persuaded all the
cities to send contingents. The decisive battle will be fought soon, before
midwinter.”

“Karnos has done
well,” Demetrius, the one-eyed marshal of the conscript spears said, tilting
his head to bring his eye to bear.

“He’s quite the
orator, it seems, and the Machran polemarch, Kassander, is an old friend of his
- they work together like the hand and the gauntlet. All this is to our
advantage.”

“I fail to see
how,” Rictus said. “The League can muster thirty or forty thousand men if it
has the time to muster them. We don’t have half that here.”

Corvus smiled. “But
if those thirty or forty thousand are fairly beaten in open battle, the thing
will be done at a stroke - all the hinterland cities will have been defeated at
once.”

“If they are
defeated.” Rictus was more puzzled than alarmed. Did this boy
want
to
fight against hopeless odds?

Corvus seemed to
catch his thought. “Where is the glory, Rictus, in beating citizen armies one
by one in an endless series of petty battles? No, we will let them combine. Let
them grow confident in their numbers. Once they have mustered, they will find
the confidence to come out and meet us spear to spear.”

“Glory,” Rictus
repeated. He looked round the other men in the tent, thinking of the morning’s
slaughter. That had been a petty affair indeed, but the women keening at the
funeral pyre would disagree.

He shook his head.
Maybe I am too old, he thought. I have forgotten what ambition was like. What
it can do in a man.

Druze winked at
him. Teresian was lost in his wine. Demetrius, the oldest, seemed as
unperturbed as a stone. Rictus had heard his name before; he had commanded a
mercenary centon years in the past, lost his eye fighting for Giron on the
Kuprian Coast, and had gone east. To end up with Corvus.

And Ardashir, the
Kufr marshal. He met Rictus eye to eye, and there was something surprising in
his face. A kind of fellow-feeling. A sympathy. Then the Kufr looked away and
Rictus was left imagining it.

“What is it you
want?” he asked aloud. “What is all this for?”

Corvus stopped his
pacing, his pale face lifted in surprise.

“An odd question
for a sellspear to ask,” Teresian sneered.

Yes, Rictus
thought; one day you and I will have a reckoning, my friend.

“Not so odd,”
Corvus said. “And Rictus is more than a sellspear. Much more.” He cast his gaze
about the tent, and a silence fell in which the keening of the women out at the
pyre could be heard as a rumour on the wind.

“He commanded an
army once, the most celebrated army the Macht have ever fielded, outside of
legend.”

I commanded it by
chance, Rictus thought. Because all the best men were dead. It was a whim of
Phobos, no more.

But he said
nothing.

“I was born
outside of Sinon, in the land beyond the sea,” Corvus went on. “Most of you
here already know this. I have seen the Empire that Rictus marched through, or
a corner of it - as has Ardashir. He and I grew up together, and whether he be
Kufr or no, he is my brother in all things but blood.” He stared at the men in
the room deliberately, meeting their eyes one by one.

“Sinon is where
the march of the Ten Thousand ended, where their epic came to a close.” Now he
looked at Rictus.

“Not in glory, but
in squalor. When the last centons of these heroes finally straggled down to the
shores of the sea, what did they do?

“They set about each
other like squabbling dogs. They killed one another for gold, for insults given
and taken on the long march west. They were riven into pieces before they even
saw the sea. They were Macht, and they had defeated the armies of the Great
King over and over in open battle. They had humbled an Empire, but they could
not govern themselves.”

A flash of
something passed over Corvus’s face, something between contempt and anger. It
chilled Rictus’s spine to look upon it. This boy, he was -

“That is the fatal
flaw within the Macht,” Corvus ploughed on. His face was a mask without colour,
the strange violet eyes within it bright as those of some feral animal.

“Unless they face
death from without, then they will spend their lives fighting each other -
farmyard cocks all crowing on their separate dunghills. This is what we are,
here in the Harukush, the poorest patch of stone in the world.

“In the Empire the
Macht are a thing of legend and wonder, a tale told to frighten children. We
are the fearsome beast of the night, the things which crossed the sea to wreak
havoc, and then disappeared. I know - I have heard these stories across the
Sinonian. But here -” Disgust crossed his face. “Here we are a million
struggling dwarfs, all pissing and moaning about where we shall have space to
shit.”

He lifted his
chin, stood straight. He was slight as a girl, but Rictus had no doubt in that
moment that he could have killed any one of those in the tent who stood up
against him. Men smelled fear and weakness, as surely as dogs did. And in
Corvus there was none. He was a creature of singular determination.

“I am here to
unite the Macht, to make of them one people, one purpose, We were put upon this
world to rule it, and that is what we shall do. To make us all of one will, I
must conquer all. I intend to bring all our people under one ruler.”

He smiled with a
moment’s disarming irony.

“I will wear the
black Curse of God, Rictus; on the day that I am named King of the Macht.”

THE
GHOST IN THE TENT

“Phobos, what a
damned awful stupid
time of year to be in harness,” Fornyx said in disgust. “My second winter
campaign in as many years. This is no way to run the shop.”

He and Druze stood
in the mire with their cloaks over their heads and stared at the flat grey
world of the rain. In the country to their front the water had gathered in
broad sword-pale lakes in which the black outline of trees stood forlorn and
stark. The mountains were invisible, the sullen shadow of the clouds gnarled
over the north and west, the sky brought low to meet a colourless landscape.
And the rain did its best to bring the two together in one new element composed
of equal parts water and mud.

“Six day’s march
to Machran,” Druze said with that sinister, oddly winning smile of his. “Or
maybe not.”

“And still he
pushes us on, your lord and master,”

Fornyx said. “What
did we make, day before yesterday - six pasangs? The baggage spent a whole day
just travelling the length of the column - and as for the supply lines, well…”

“I wish it was
snow,” Druze said. “Snow I am used to. But this lowlander’s winter of yours, it
sucks at a man’s marrow, neither one thing nor the other.”

“You’ll get used
to it,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You’ll have to, if you’re not to retire back
to banditry in the hills.”

“There are worse
trades, my friend. My people, they have strong places carved out of the very
rock of the world, back in the Gerreran Mountains above Idrios. We hole up in
those in the winter like bears, eat ourselves fat and greasy and fuck, our
women until they walk bow-legged.”

Fornyx snorted
with laughter. “Not a bad way to pass the winter. Me, I like the idea of a
fishing town on the Bay of Goshen, where the sky is blue all through the dark
months and a man can sit at one of those wine shops on the water and stare out
at the Sinonian while eating fresh octopus and grilled herrin.”

They stared
silently at the rain for a long while, their feet ankle-deep in mud.

“I have wine in my
tent…” Fornyx said at last, grudgingly.

“We are here to
watch the enemy,” Druze said.

“Look at them -
they’re not going anywhere. The bastards are as mired in shit as we are.”

Out at the limits
of visibility it was possible to make out a shadow on the world, dark as a
forest. Within that shadow were the lights of struggling campfires.

They covered the
land for many pasangs. As the rain-curtain shifted and drifted aimlessly, it
was possible at times to make out the lines of the enemy’s tents, but that was
all. There was no movement, not a single ominous snake of men on the march. The
enemy army was as motionless as a felled tree.

“A cup or two
would not hurt,” Druze admitted. “All right, then.”

“And a game of
knucklebones perhaps - Kesero had one on the go when I left.”

“Not for me. You
red-cloaked bastards cleaned me out last night.”

The two men turned
and began making their slow, plodding way back down the long slope they had
ascended in the morning. They were barefoot; the mud sucked even the most
heavily strapped footwear off men’s feet. Some two dozen Macht were standing in
the rain waiting for them: half Druze’s Igranians, the rest scarlet-cloaked
Dogsheads of Fornyx’s centon. One of these spoke up.

“Any more of this
and we can float over the walls of Machran in fucking boats.”

“That’s the plan,”
Fornyx said. “Didn’t you know? Back to camp, lads - there’s nothing doing out
here that needs watching.”

The little band of
men followed their leaders back along the flooded length of the Imperial road,
wading through the cold water with the stoicism of those who have seen it all
before. To the east, the vast bivouac of Corvus’s all-conquering army sat like
a flooded squatter’s camp, motionless in the unending downpour.