Corvus (21 page)

“No sleep. Ah,
Phobos take it,” Rictus groaned.

“You heard him.
Let me get you to Corvus’s tent. He wants to see all his underlings tonight,
and it’s as good a way to keep you awake as any.”

“Fuck you, you
evil-eyed little scrawny bastard.”

“Careful, Rictus;
you know I love it when a girl talks dirty.”

Antimone was weeping
. It happened
often after a battle, especially a large one. The more blood on the ground, the
more tears she shed, it was said. The rain came down in a soft cold shroud to
fill up the rutted footprints of the living and the dead, to patter on the eyes
of the corpses littering the field. At least at this time of year, the process
of decay would not set in so quickly as during the usual summer campaigning.

Rictus leant on
Fornyx’s bony shoulder as they made their unsteady way through the camp. He
could remember little of the battle’s end. The Dogsheads had charged into the
mass of Machran warriors once, withdrawn, and then charged again. The next
thing he remembered was fighting to keep his head out of the mud while men
stood on him.

Well, the thing
was done now, at least. The camp was full of drunken men reliving their own
versions of the day’s events, pouring thankful libations of wine into the
ground for Phobos, for Antimone, in thanks at having survived with eyes and
arms and balls intact.

The Dogsheads were
more subdued. They had lit two huge fires kindled from broken enemy spears, and
were standing around them in their red cloaks passing wineskins with the
thoughtful purpose of men who mean to drink deep. They raised a cheer at seeing
Rictus, however, and the mood around the fires brightened. Valerian and Kesero
were there, Kesero limping with a linen rag knitted about the big muscles of
his right thigh, Valerian untouched and as earnest as always.

“You had us
worried when we saw you taken into the butcher’s tent,” he said to Rictus. “For
a second, we thought you might be in trouble.”

“No trouble,”
Rictus assured them. “An aichme’s love-bite is all.”

“Our employer has
his victory,” shaven-headed Kesero said. “I hope it makes him happy.”

“Machran is
finished now,” one of the other men put in: Ramis of Karinth, Kesero’s second,
a high-coloured strawhead who was already drunk. “We must have killed or maimed
half the men they had on the field.”

“I believe we did,”
Valerian said with a half-smile. “Now I know what a great battle is like. And I
know why the stories make of them such glorious and terrible things.”

His mutilated face
gave the smile a bittersweet cast. Rictus set a hand on his shoulder. Yes, he
thought, I believe Rian could do worse.

“What’s our story
now, boss?” another voice broke in. Praesos of Pelion, a good steady fellow
like to make centurion in a year or two, if he survived.

Rictus collected
his swimming thoughts. “I’m on my way to Corvus now. We’ll see what’s what.
There will be a shitload of clearing up tomorrow, for one thing - we must
police the battlefield, burn the dead, collect what arms were left on them, and
reorganise.”

“Not many of us
made it into the enemy camp,” Praesos said. “Every other bugger in the army was
there before us, leaving their wounded on the ground. By the time we got round
to it, it was picked clean or under guard.”

“We don’t fight
for plunder,” Valerian snapped at him. “We look after our hurt and dead first
of everything - it’s the way it is done.”

“Well said,
brother,” Kesero grinned, “but you can’t blame the lads for being a little put
out. We do the right thing, and it leaves us with empty purses while Demetrius’s
fucking conscripts raped the place.”

“Aye - what about
some pay?” someone called out, back from the firelight and the golden shimmer
of the flame-caught rain.

“I’ll see what I
can do,” Rictus said.

“He threw us into
the biggest shithole of the day,” Kesero said, “and we came out smiling. I
think he owes us a bonus.”

There was a
growled murmur of agreement about the fires.

“He came in along
with us,” Valerian said. “Remember that. He was in the front rank right beside
me. He did not do it for a joke - that’s why he was there.”

“We’re
mercenaries,” Rictus said quietly. “We voted for the contract. Our job is to kill
and be killed; to look after one another when alive, when hurt and when dead.
That comes first of everything. A man who has issue with that can take off the
red cloak and walk away when this contract is done -but not before.”

“And when is this
contract done, Rictus? On the fall of Machran?” Kesero asked.

“That’s what I
agreed with him.” At that moment, Rictus could not quite remember the terms of
the agreement, but it sounded right enough to his addled mind.

Kesero winked. “Then
we’re going to be rich men very soon,” and he grinned so that his silver-wired
teeth glittered white in his face.

The tension about
the fires broke in ribaldry and laughter. After all, they were alive and
standing, and they were victors of the greatest battle ever fought in the Harukush.
In their minds they had already begun to bury the worst of the day’s memories,
leaving what could later be polished up and made part of a better story.

Rictus knew this -
he had done it himself. But he knew also that the black memories were kept by
Phobos to fester in the depths of a man’s heart. He could never be rid of them;
they became part of who he was.

“The supply wagons
will be emptied
and will take the more severely wounded back to Hal Goshen,” Corvus said,
pacing up and down as was his wont. “The looting of the enemy camp is to stop -
Teresian, you will see to that. Post more men - your oldest and steadiest.
Karnos has stockpiled several day’s rations, and we will use them ourselves
while our supply train is away.”

He paused as
Rictus and Fornyx emerged from the darkness beyond the tent-flap, and his face
broke open into a grin of delight.

“I knew a little
thing like a slashed arm would not keep my old warrior down. Rictus, you look
as pale as Phobos’s face - Teresian, give up your seat there. Brothers, the
wine is standing tall in your cups; we can’t have that.”

Rictus sat heavily
in the leather-framed camp chair. Corvus’s scribe, a plump, powerfully built
little man named Parmenios, came forward with a waxed slate, his stylus poised.

“Marshal, how many
of your men are still fit to fight?”

“Three hundred,
give or take.”

Parmenios
scratched the slate. His black eyebrows rose up his forehead a little. “A heavy
accounting,” he said.

“I’ve heard it
called worse,” Rictus snapped. His mind was a throbbing bruise. More than
anything else he longed to lay his head down upon his arms on the map-strewn
table in front of him.

Teresian offered
him a cup of wine. “Drink with us, Rictus.”

They were all
holding their cups off the table, looking at him. Poised for a toast, he
realised. One-eyed Demetrius, the grim ex-mercenary, spoke for them.

“Today we saw how
men fight, and die.” He lifted his cup higher.

“To the Dogsheads.”

“The Dogsheads,”
the others repeated. Humourless Teresian, the suspicion gone from his grey
eyes. Dark, smiling Druze, with his arm in a sling to match Rictus. And
Ardashir, his strange long face solemn. They all drained their cups and then
flicked out the dregs for Phobos, mocking Fear itself.

Rictus caught
Corvus’s eye, and the strange young man winked at him.

The Dogsheads had
been sent on a suicidal attack for sound military reasons; it was harsh, but
rational. But Corvus had also thought this far ahead. Their obedience, their
self-sacrifice had finally won round the doubters among his officers. Rictus
had at last earned his place as one of Corvus’s marshals.

You conniving
little bastard,
Rictus thought, and he raised his empty cup to Corvus in a
small salute.

“Back to business,”
Corvus said briskly. “The roads are turned to soup with this god-cursed rain,
and men who have abandoned their armour can run faster than those who have
preserved it. The Igranians have done what they can, but I’ve no wish to
scatter the army on a wild hunt along the Imperial road. We’re fairly certain
that Karnos was expecting reinforcements before battle commenced. It remains to
be seen if they will now remain in the field or return to their cities.”

“What of Karnos?
Any news?” Rictus asked.

“Their dead are
out there in heaps,” Ardashir said. “If he is one of them he will take time to
find.”

Corvus waved his
hand back and forth. “Dead or alive, he brought the League here to its
destruction. At least a third of the enemy army is still on the field, and
Machran lost most heavily of all the League cities, as I had intended. If we
appear before the city walls within the next month, I will be surprised if they
do not accept our terms.” “Machran itself,” Demetrius said, with an odd look of
awe on his face.

“Machran folds,
and the rest go down with it -they will not fight on once we have our feet
planted on the floor of the Empirion,” Corvus said. “We are very close,
brothers.”

Even through the
haze of his exhaustion, Rictus found himself wondering;
close to what?

Karnos of
Machran is dead.

Karnos has been
slain on the field of battle.

Karnos died
heroically - no, no, damn it, that’s not it.

He lay in the wet
crushing darkness and listened to the rain tap on the stiffened bodies which
lay atop him. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life before. In
fact it seemed to him that he had never really understood the true nature of
thirst before. When the rain came he opened his mouth and let it trickle in,
foul-flavoured from the corpses on top of him, but wet.

Life.

Karnos is alive,
in the midst of the dead.

Men had gone back
and forth across the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting, looking for
their own wounded, for enemy wounded to slay, for some trinket which might make
their labour worthwhile, or perhaps a better weapon - or, if the gods were
smiling, one of those miraculous finds, a black cuirass.

The expensive
armour which had so impressed Karnos in the confines of his villa, he now knew
to be inferior, gimcrack shite, and these men had seen it as such also. That
had saved his life, for they had not tried to strip it from his very much alive
and terrified body. And thus he lay here with his fellow citizens sheltering
him from the rain.

And pinning him to
the ground.

His arm was numb
from the shoulder down, and he could not bring himself to look at the black
shaft which protruded grotesquely from his flesh. It was a Kufr arrow, fired
from a Kufr bow, created by a Kufr fletcher in some far-flung portion of the
world which knew nothing of him. And yet it was now inside his flesh, intimate
with the very meat of him. All that way, across the sea, in some strange
foreign creature’s quiver, then laid against that bow, to flash through the
cold air of the Harukush, and end up inside him, Karnos of Machran.

He started at his task
again; that which had preoccupied him since the fall of darkness and the
departure of the battlefield scavengers. He was inching the bodies of the dead
off his own in increments a child could measure with their fingers. In this he
showed a patience which he had previously not known he possessed.

As he did, his
mind wandered. He remembered squatting in the heat and dust of Tinsmith’s Alley
in the Mithannon, scratching at the scabbed-over burns on his bare feet where
the sparks from his father’s hand-forge had landed.

He was seven years
old, and a passing aristocrat in a himation as white as snow had dropped him a
copper obol. He was staring at the little green coin, which would buy him a
stick of grilled meat from a foodstall, or a pear-sized cup of wine from one of
the shops at the bottom of the alley. It was the first time in his life he had
been given something for nothing, and he liked the feeling.

One of the corpses
toppled over, as stiff and unlike a living man as an overstuffed sack of flour.
Karnos smiled, grunting at the pain, but swallowing it down, as he had
swallowed down the beatings he had received as a child. Even then, he had known
his father loved him, but knew also that he’d had to lash out on occasion at
the nearest thing to hand.

If it were not
Karnos, it would be one of the starving strays that littered the city
alleyways, and Karnos pitied them even more than himself. They were used and
discarded by the slumdwellers who had spawned them, feral little beasts who
could barely speak, whose sex was indeterminate, whose eyes held nothing but
fear and greed. If they survived they would grow into whores and thieves and
beggars, and beget the curse of their existence on another generation. Thus
were the slums of Machran renewed.

Karnos began to
breathe more easily. He was feeling the cold now, and a warm lassitude came
creeping over his battered frame.

They think I have
so many slaves because I love lording it over them; me, the boy from the
Mithannon, making his own little kingdom. Kassander knows better.

I keep them slaves
to protect them. No man or woman wearing my collar will ever be abused in Machran.
They are safe with me. Polio knows that. He knows me better than anyone.

He wanted to shout
for Polio now, to tell him that his bed was damp, that he needed an extra
coverlet. He raised his hand to push back the wet covering that was stealing
his thoughts away, and his hand settled on the cold wax-hard face of the dead
man whose body lay upon his own. The jolt of that snapped him out of his reverie,
and the pain came flooding in, clearing his head. He ground his jaw shut and
pushed the chilled meat away from his face, found a leg loosened, and ploughed
himself through the mud on his back.