Corvus (26 page)

“If you have time,
look in on my wife and sister -let them know I’m not ash on the wind.”

“I will, brother.”
Karnos straightened, swore viciously at the pain angling through his shoulder,
and then kicked the barrel-chested lowland cob into a trot. It flailed its way
through the floodwater, like a boat chopping through a heavy swell.

He raised his good
hand in farewell, and at the head of the long column half a dozen centons who
recognised him set up a cheer. Then he disappeared into the mist of the rain.

Karnos was not
a man attuned to the
natural world. He was more at home on pavement than pasture, and while he loved
to eat red meat, he saw no virtue in killing it himself. The debating chamber,
the bedroom, the marketplace - these were the places he felt at home. He still
had his father in him, he supposed - in all three places the essence of the
thing was a kind of haggling.

Now, as the land
rose under his horse and the floodwaters began to recede, he pushed the animal
hard, cantering to one side of the stone-paved road that led all the way to
Machran with young Gersic shadowing him on a lighter, more spirited animal.
Karnos’s horse was a dogged bay with a rolling gait that was less aggravating
to the jolting pain of his wound. He liked the animal - it had a stubborn
heart, and it ploughed through the muck of the roadside as though it would
never stop.

The natural world.
It was a world shaped by the Macht, cowed by millennia of occupation, ploughed
and planted and pruned to meet the needs and fashions of men. This was the
finest farmland in all the Macht lands - sometimes they brought off two
harvests a year in the hinterland of Machran. One could feed an army here, if
one timed it right. And even in winter, the farms which dotted this country
would have storehouses and byres and smokehouses full of grain and oil and meat
on the hoof.

That was the
problem.

Whatever Corvus’s
logistic woes were at the moment, they would vanish as soon as his army came
this far west. He could live off the land for weeks, perhaps months, without
worrying about his supply lines back to the east.

It was going to
come down to an exercise in endurance. Karnos did not believe it was possible
to assault the walls of mighty Machran so long as they were defended, but
Machran was a great city with over a hundred thousand mouths to feed. The
problem would come when they grew hungry faster than Corvus’s army.

There would have
to be something done about that, and no-one was going to like it.

They stopped for
the night in a village off the road, some nameless little place with a noisome
wine-shop and a menu painted on the walls. Karnos spent coin liberally, silver
obols with the
machios
sigil upon them, and held court in a corner by
the fire while Gersic rubbed down the horses and did whatever it was
horseriding types did to keep the animals on all four legs.

The local
population gathered in the smoky musk of the place and listened to Karnos tell
of the battle lately fought, a hard-clenched affair according to him, in which
both sides had suffered horribly, and it had been a near-run thing who should
be declared victor.

He told them that
the men of Machran and Arkadios and Avennos would be marching through soon,
that the war was not over, that they were to keep faith with the customs of
their fathers and pay no mind if the usurper Corvus came their way; he was a
passing catastrophe, like an earthquake, or a summer thunderstorm.

He had not
convinced them - he could see it in their faces. Not even his heavily edited
version of the truth could disguise the fact that the League forces were in
retreat. He slept that night with his pack beside him on the floor of the
louse-ridden best room, and scratched at the sodden dressing wound clammily
about his shoulder.

He and Gersic were
on the road before dawn, the night’s wine hammering at Karnos’s temples, the
village left buzzing with apprehension behind them. For once in his life,
Karnos found himself wishing he had kept his mouth shut.

More days, grey
with rain and fatigue, the horse under him the only thing of warmth in the world.
They stopped in Arkadios, halfway to Machran now, and here Karnos was welcomed
by the Kerusia, given leave to speak before the assembly. He measured his words
here more carefully, and did not gloss over the defeat.

He spoke bluntly
of the carnage on the Afteni Plain, the fact that their menfolk were marching
back west, not to defend Arkadios itself, but to add to the defence of Machran.

He liked the
Arkadians. They were a bright, sophisticated people much like his own, and if
one could give an entire city a certain character, then Arkadios would be a
rakish younger son. The Arkadian assembly was known to be mercurial and
volatile, and Karnos had both abuse and praise thrown at him as he stood there
in the marble amphitheatre off the agora. But he gave as good as he got,
relishing the opportunity to indulge his wit, playing upon his wound, talking
up the bloodiness of the battle which was becoming more and more a settled
series of pictures in his mind.

He did not win
them over, but he won their respect. He had to make one concession, though; if Arkadians
were to defend Machran, then Machran must take in those Arkadians who chose to
flee their own city and put their trust in Machran’s walls. To this he agreed,
knowing that he had committed himself to an unwise move. He had tried too hard
with his last knucklebone, and knocked some of his own pieces off the board.

Well, he thought,
you want to eat eggs, you got to break eggshells.

The road again,
the sturdy uncomplaining horse under him to whom he talked as he rode. His
shoulder pained him less, and under the bandages his wound was closed, and the
heat was leaving it.

The rain stopped
at last, and all across the vast lowland bowl of the country about him the sun
caught in a thousand splashes of white reflected water-light, and green came
into the world again. He and Gersic passed through the towns of the hinterland:
Lomnos, Verionin, Mas Gethir, Gan Brakon. This was the most thickly populated
area of the world that Karnos knew, and the people here counted themselves
citizens of Machran, and had the vote in her assemblies. He was almost home
again, and the thought of a hot bath and his own bed and Polio to see to his
needs was a potent spur to his tired frame. He drove his horse harder, thinking
of the men on the road behind him, the things that must be done on his arrival.

But even so, he
reined in his blowing mount when Machran itself finally came into view across
the rolling farmland to the west, the Harukush rearing up in the gem-bright sky
behind it. At the side of the road was an ancient stone waymarker, carved with
writing so ancient that men no longer understood it. The view of the city from
this point was famous, and bumpkins from the east had been known to stand here
and gawp at the sight.

Machran of the
White Walls, the city had once been called, though most of the marble which had
given it that name had been stripped away over the centuries. Those walls were
the height of five tall men, and the towers along them twice that. Sixteen
pasangs, the walls ran, enclosing a close-packed space the shape of an
elongated egg. There were two hills within them, massive mounds which had been
built over again and again since time immemorial. To the west, the Round Hill,
a conical height upon which the richest districts of the city were clustered in
well-spaced streets. To the east, Kerusiad Hill, upon whose slopes Karnos
himself had his home.

Legend had it that
the two hills had once been two separate villages which quarrelled with one
another until some bright soul had suggested they meet in the hollow between
them to settle their differences. This marshy hollow had become a meeting place
for the two communities, until they grew and merged.

There had been a
river there once, which flowed north into the Mithos, but it had been covered
over long ago, and was now the main sewer for the city. And in deference to
ancient tradition, the Empirion stood in that hollow, whose dome Karnos could
see now shining in the winter sunlight. A place of learning, of entertainment,
and - more prosaically - somewhere for the assembly to convene when the weather
was especially bad.

Not far from it
was the Amphion, the Speaker’s Place where the assembly gathered in ordinary
session to hear their leaders debate the issues of the day. The marshy
riverbottom had become the seat of power and government for the greatest of all
the Macht cities. The only one, legend had it, which had never been conquered,
by siege or assault.

The city had five
gates, and Karnos was facing the South Prime, also known as the Avennon for the
Quarter in which it stood. The gates were ancient, made of oak faced with
bronze. Such was the prestige of Machran that Karnos could not remember in his
life ever seeing those gates closed. Even at night, the wagons and carts of the
country people went in and out of them, bringing their goods and their
chattels, their pumpkins and their slaves and their hunting-dogs and their
greed and dreams to the richest markets of the hinterland: the Mithannon, the
Goshen, the Round Hill. These were places where all things could be had for a
price, from a tinsmith’s scoop to a woman’s virtue.

And now, in this
great city, this teeming walled hive of commerce and endeavour, there was
something in such short supply that it had become almost beyond price. The
courage of fighting men.

They had left a
thousand spears behind when they marched out to meet Corvus west of Hal Goshen,
and Karnos had entrusted his fellow Kerusia members, Dion and Eurymedon, with
the task of recruiting more. But the true red-cloaked mercenary was a rare
beast these days. One might hire any number of so-called warriors from the scum
and vagabonds who came and went through the city like corn going through a man’s
bowels, but these were not the disciplined, drilled centons of a generation
ago. The genuine redcloak was just not to be had anymore, not in any numbers.

But I have my ten
thousand, Karnos thought, just as Rictus had. It must be enough - it will be
enough.

He kicked his
horse, and cantered down the long slope towards his city, the fatigue of the
road forgotten.

THE
AFFAIRS OF MEN

On the move
at last, Corvus’s army
did not present a very martial sight. Except for the absence of women, it
looked more like a mass migration than a military formation. The men were bundled
in their cloaks, most of them barefoot despite the cold, and scores were
dropping out of the column to relieve themselves, squatting in the muck and
rain-stippled water of the floodplain. Even the Companion Cavalry were afoot,
leading their hangdog mounts off to the flank of the main column, the gaudy
cloaks of the Kefren drenched and mudstained so as to blend in to the drear
landscape.

The main column
straggled along the line of the Imperial Road for over twelve pasangs, and the
baggage train was even further back. Only in the van were there compact bodies
of formed-up troops, like a fist kept clenched at the end of a withered arm.
These were Rictus’s Dogsheads, and Druze’s Igranians. They plodded along with
skirmishers thrown out in scattered clumps to their front. The Dogsheads had
doubled their red cloaks over their shoulders to keep the hems out of the
water, and their shields were slung on their backs, the bronze faces greening
in the wet.

“All things
considered, Fornyx said, “I prefer winter in the highlands.” He scratched his
beard, squeezing the rain out of it.

“No good will come
of him pushing the army like this,” Rictus said. “If it were up to me, I’d go
into winter quarters in Afteni. It’s rich land around here. We could improve
the roads back east and consolidate our hold on places like Hal Goshen, do the
thing thoroughly.”

“Teresian hanged
three deserters he caught yesterday,” Fornyx said. “Conscript lads from Goshen,
been in the army about ten minutes, and missing home. He’s a bloody-minded bastard,
that one. Reminds me of you, fifteen years ago.”

“Rules are rules,”
Rictus said dryly, rubbing his wounded arm. “Corvus makes his own.”

“Well, they’ve
brought him this far I suppose.”

Druze joined them,
leaning on a javelin as though it were a staff. Pain had pinched lines about
his eyes that had not been there before.

“Hear the news?
Karnos is alive after all.”

Rictus was not
surprised. “A born survivor, that fellow.”

“He’s on his way
back to Machran, it’s said. The Afteni may have surrendered, but some of the
hinterland cities are sticking by the League and marching their men back with
him.”

“How many?” Rictus
asked.

“Enough to make a
fight of it.”

“Looks like our
triumphal entry into Machran will be problematic,” Fornyx said, and spat into
the mud.

“What does he mean
to do, Druze?” Rictus asked.

“What do you
think? He’s Corvus. He’d chase them to hell if they were still thumbing their
noses at him. You mark my words, brothers, before the month is out we’ll be
sitting in front of Machran looking at those big white walls and wondering how
to get on top of them.”

“You can’t assault
Machran, it’s never been done. It’s the strongest city in the world,” Fornyx
protested.

Druze grinned. “All
the more reason for him to try.” He patted Fornyx on the shoulder. “Cheer up!
This is what it takes to make history.”

The army slogged
onwards. Rolling
out of their sodden blankets and tireless, cheerless camps well before dawn,
the men were on the road while still chewing on salt goat and mouldy biscuit.
They would march all day, though
march
was a euphemistic term for their
mudsucking, agonising progress.