Corvus (2 page)

“You always look
me in the eye.” He kissed her, cupping her face in, his big, spear-calloused
hands. She had his eyes - he had been told - and the thick black hair of her
mother’s youth. “How many summers are you now - thirteen?”

“Fourteen,” she
corrected him scornfully.

“I’ll bet they’ve
been trooping to the door in line to marry you,” he said.

“Yes, but none of
them are rich enough - and I want a man who can read!”

Both Rictus and
Kornyx laughed.

Aise returned with
the two household slaves, Garin, a stocky man in his thirties, and a girl, a
new one Rictus had not seen before.

“Where did you get
her?” he asked Aise, frowning. It was he who decided on the buying and the
selling of the slaves, part of the duties of the master of the household. “What
happened to Veria?”

“She fell pregnant
by Garin here, and lost the child. After that she mooned around and was no good
for anything, so I sold her. I bought this girl, Styra, in Hal Goshen, at the
big market.”

“Hal Goshen -”
Rictus bit off his words, having seen Aise raise her chin in that combative way
of hers, as though readying for a blow. Now was not the time.

He looked at
Garin, who was busy stacking fresh wood and turf by the fire, but the man had
his slave face on, stony blankness. He and Veria had been a couple, a unit that
Rictus would not have broken. But even now, he was more sentimental about these
things than Aise had ever been. It came from memories of his own loss, perhaps.

“Father, you haven’t
said anything to Ona,” Rian said in a whisper, squeezing his hand.

“Yes, yes - come
here girl, I won’t bite you.” Aise had soured his mood somewhat, and it showed
in his voice. Ona approached him as a mouse might a hawk. He held out his hand
to her - his other was still on his eldest daughter’s waist.

“Ona? It’s all
right. Come here to me.”

His youngest
daughter had grown up also, into a freckle-faced child with hair the same shade
as horse-chestnut and great green eyes. She was seven - no, eight years old
now. Rictus gathered her into his free arm and pulled her close, remembering
how she had ridden screaming with laughter on his shoulders the previous
autumn, and the three of them had come home from the woods with a basket of
mushrooms, and beech leaves in their hair. He held his daughters in the circle
of his arms and felt Rian’s breath on his neck, Ona’s stubby hands gripping his
arm, and it seemed to him only then that he had truly come home.

There was good
food laid out for
them, despite the lateness of the hour. Garin built up the fire until it blazed
like a lamp and the new slave, Styra, laid the table with the glazed plates
Rictus and Fornyx had brought back from some long-ago coastal campaign, bright
red earthenware decorated with dolphins and octopi.

There was barley
bread and goat’s cheese, black olives and green oil, and slivers of cured ham
from the pig they had killed only the month before. Garlic dug up from the
riverside, and purple onions to make the eyes water, and fresh thyme to scent
it all. And wine, the thin yellow resin-flavoured wine of the highlands. Rictus
and Fornyx fell on the food like starved, dogs, and for a while the house was
silent save for their grunts of appreciation, and the crackle of wood in the
fire. At last, though, they were sated, and pushed back from the table with
something between a grunt and a groan.

“Last year’s wine,
lady?” Fornyx asked.

Aise nodded. “We
put by six amphorae, and five are still full. We don’t drink wine much when the
master of the house is away.”

Rictus stood up
from the table, stretching. He ruffled Rian’s black hair as he passed her, and
adjusted the midnight gleam of his cuirass where it was displayed on its stand
at the eastern gable. He ran his fingers through the transverse horsehair crest
of his helm, and touched the leather mid-grip of his spear.

For a while he
stood there. Fornyx was coaxing Ona onto his knee - she had always been his
favourite, perhaps because his own daughter had been russet-haired. Aise was
clearing the table, and Eunion and the slaves had left for a last look in on
the stock, what there was of it. The farmhouse was settling back into the
interrupted routine of the night, having made space for Rictus and Fornyx
within it.

“Where did you go
this year, father?” Rian asked, joining him before the sombre panoply of his
armour.

He remembered this
summer’s fighting, the endless marching through the dust, the incompetent
wrangling of the men who were his employers. Blood blazing scarlet in the
withered grass. A man with his guts spilled out, trying vainly to keep the
flies off them. His men singing as they slew. Rictus closed his eyes for a
second.

“It was nothing
much. A lot of running around in the hills about Nemasis. Scarcely real
soldiering at all.”

“What about your
men? Are they - are they all alive?”

“Not all of them,
my honey. That is war; not everyone can come back from it. But we sang the
Paean over the pyres of the dead, and gave the losers back their kin, and so
settled the thing.”

“And is Valerian
all right?”

Rictus looked at
her with eyes only half amused. “Valerian is all of a piece, the same as ever.
Don’t tell me you still carry a lamp for him, my girl?”

Rian blushed, and
her face seemed to bloom like a flower. “I was curious, is all.”

“Well, you may see
him up close ere the winter comes. He and Kesero have promised to visit before
the snow closes the passes.”

“Really?” Her face
lit up - a daisy touched by the sun. She reached up and put her arms about his
neck and kissed his scarred chin.

“Really. Now get
to bed, and take your sister with you. It’s near the middle of the night.”

“In the morning I’ll
show you a new cave where Eunion says the bears sleep.”

“Yes, you do that
- now off to bed.”

Over the years
the farmhouse had
been enlarged and extended. Once it had been no more than a long room with a
rude firepit and a single crooked doorway covered by a flap of goatskin. That
had been in the early days. Back then Rictus and Fornyx and Eunion had clinked
up the walls themselves, stone by raw stone, and used willow withies to support
a turf roof. Aise had cut the turves herself, handing them up to the men as
they perched on the walls above.

That first winter
had been so cold that all four of them had huddled under the sheepskins
together at night, so close to the fire that the wool was singed black, and
wolves had prowled and snuffled just outside the door.

Since then, the
place had expanded with almost every year - near on twenty of them. And in that
time, Rictus had fought in fifteen campaigns, missing all but a handful of
summers and springs here.

Andunnon,
he called this valley of his -
The Quiet Water
- for as the river curled
round the glen bottom beyond the house, so it broadened in its bed and became a
sleepier, brown thing with trout as tawny as freckles flitting shadowlike in
the sunlit depths. It had also been the name of his childhood home, far north
and cast of here, near the burnt ruins of what had once been a city.

Now, Andunnon had
blossomed from a single stone hut into a farm proper. They had cut back the
brush and tamed the tangle of wild olive trees on the western slopes, planted
vines to the east where the glen caught the best of the sun, and harvested
barley in the flat rich soil of the valley floor. Bread, wine, and olives, the
trinity of life, they had made here. And children, to carry that life on after
them. It was more than Rictus had once ever dreamed of having. And it had cost
no blood to build.

The farmhouse had
annexes and extensions grafted onto it now: rooms for slaves and visitors, and
for Fornyx, whose home this was also. It had become an ungainly, ill-planned
sprawl of stone and turf and reed-thatch which nonetheless seemed as much part
of the landscape as the river which bounded it. The farm had settled into the
earth itself, part of the seasons as a man’s hand is part of his arm. No matter
how far Rictus marched, and how many men’s eyes he took the light from, this,
here, was where he belonged, and where his spirit found what peace his memories
allowed.

Fornyx had
staggered off to bed, the potent yellow wine singing in his head, and now
Rictus joined Aise by the dying fire, the hounds lying sprawled and content at
their feet. She had snuffed out the lamps, all save one cracked little clay
bowl which would light their own way when they retired, and between its
guttering light and the red glow of the sinking hearth she seemed almost
youthful again, the lines hidden, the strong bones of her face brought out by
the shadows.

Rictus could see
Rian in that face, and Ona, and the boy who had been born between them and
whose ashes were now in the earth and air of the valley itself. He reached out
his hand and Aise looked at him with that guarded smile of hers and let him
take her fingers in his own.

“Well, wife,”
Rictus said.

“Well, husband.”

The wind was
picking up outside, and Rictus knew from the whistle in the clay-chinked
chimney that it was from the west, off the mountains. It would bring snow with
it soon, perhaps even tonight. He almost started to ask Aise if the goats had
been brought down to the lower pastures yet, but caught himself in time. She
would have seen to it already, as she saw to everything while he was away.

“The sow had a
litter of six,” Aise said, withdrawing her hand. “We slaughtered two, sold the
rest down in Onthere. We lost two kids to the vorine, but in the spring Eunion
and Garin found a den north of Crag End hill, and killed the vixen and her
cubs. There have been no more of them about since then.”

Rictus nodded.

“We had a good
pressing, a dozen jars. I made that olive paste you like, with the black
vinegar from the lowlands - we got a skin of it when I sold the pigs.”

“You should not
have sold Veria,” Rictus said quietly.

Aise’s face did
not change.

“She was
discontented, harping on about her dead baby, and she was unsettling Garin with
her keening.”

“A dead child is
no light thing,” Rictus said, heat creeping into his voice. Aise seemed not to
hear him.

“I had to go into
the chest for gold to make up the difference, but Styra is a better prospect.
She’s young, she has good hips, and Garin will father a child on her soon
enough.” She paused. “Unless you would prefer to plough her furrow yourself.”

Rictus looked at
his wife in baffled anger, searching her face in the red firelight.

“I don’t fuck my
slaves, wife. It is something I have never done.”

“I was your slave;
you fucked me,” Aise said coldly.

Something like a
chill went down Rictus’s back. They had gone straight back to the old caches of
forgotten weapons stored in their hearts, and unearthed them all sharp and
glittering again.

“It was different
then - we were different. Gods below, woman, I will not go over this again the
very night I appear back home. You are the stone I have built this life here
upon. What’s done is done.”

“And through the
year’s campaigning, do you have some camp girl service you at the end of the
day?”

“You know I do, on
occasion - I’m a man. I have blood in my veins.”

“When you left,
you said it was a summer campaign, no more - and here you are with almost a
year and a half gone by. You said it was over, Rictus. No more soldiering. You
said you would put aside the scarlet and stay here with me.” “I know.”

“We need no more
money- we have everything here a man could want.”

“Except a son,” he
snapped. And the instant he said it he could have slapped his own face. Such
stupid warfare, as fruitless as the year’s campaigning.

Aise stared into
the fire, seeming somehow to wither before him, though she did not move.

“I should not have
said that - I had no cause,” he said, reaching for her hand again. She gave it,
but it was limp in his fist; obedient, no more.

“Men want sons,”
Aise said lightly. “That is the way of life. It’s how they make themselves
remembered. A daughter leaves the house, and she becomes someone else’s family.
A son continues his own.” She faced Rictus squarely, her face as blank as a
blade. “You should take another wife.”

“I have a wife.”

“I’m past bearing
children now, or as close as makes no matter. And you are no longer young
either. If you want an heir you must father one on some decent woman - it would
not do to have a slave as his mother.”

“You were a slave
once,” Rictus reminded her sharply. “Do you think that matters to me, after all
this time?”

She smiled, and in
her face there was both bitterness and a peculiar kind of happiness, as if a
memory had lit up her eyes.

“You freed me. You
would have no other but me. I do not forget, Rictus. I will never forget that.”

“Then let’s go to
bed,” he said, tugging on her hand like a child intent on its mother’s
attention. It was like pulling on the root of an oak.

“No; I will bide
here awhile with the dogs. Go you to bed - there’s a dish of water to wash in.”

“There was a time
when you would have washed me yourself, Aise, and I would return the favour.”

“We are not
youngsters, Rictus, coupling like dogs every chance we get.”

“We’re not dead
yet, either,” he snapped, and he rose, the anger flooding his face. He seized
his wife by the arms and drew her to her feet. Her eyes met his, blank as
slate. With something like a snarl he hoisted her into his arms and strode
across the room, the dogs whimpering at the mood in the air. He kicked open the
door that led to their bedroom - there was a single lamp left burning in it,
and his muscles locked as he prepared to toss her onto the bed.