Corvus (36 page)

DEATH
AND THE GODS

Like a sluggish
beast, the army of
Corvus came awake in its camps. As the first snows came and went in the
dilatory way of the lowland winter, so the morai of the conqueror began
marching again.

The baggage train
was up at last, and gangs of labourers were set to improving the washed-out
sections of the Imperial road that led east, thousands of the inhabitants of
the hinterland rounded up and put to work felling trees and quarrying stone.
The main camp astride the road took on a more permanent look as the brown army
tents went up in neat rows with corduroyed roads laid between them. And the
army spread out to north and south, an octopus with arms of barbed spearmen.

Teresian led two
morai west, marching the whole length of the city walls, and set up camp
opposite the West Prime Gate. Demetrius and three thousand spears ensconced
themselves to the south, cutting the Avennon road. Druze led two overstrength
morai of spearmen and Igranians north, and began constructing a stockaded fort
outside the Mithannon, on the banks of the Mithos River. One of the first
things he did was to retrieve the mouldering dead of the army’s last assault
and gather them into a pyre, to burn alongside the ashes of the defenders.

Corvus remained
facing the East Prime Gate with the main body, the cavalry and the
baggage-park.

Stockades of
sharpened logs went up in great skeins around the walls, dotted with
watchtowers, and beacons were stacked up at key locations, ready to be lit
should the defenders decide to sally forth and challenge the tightening grip on
the city.

Machran was wholly
surrounded, every road blocked, every means of egress from the city overlooked
by men in arms. It was cut off from the outside world.

“What is it
this morning? More of
that damned barley broth? Get it away from me,” Rictus snapped.

Fornyx blew on the
steaming bowl. “At least it’s hot. Most of the army breakfasts on stale bread
and goat meat so high it bleats as you put it in your mouth.”

“I could do with
some of that.”

“Severan says
nothing with a taint in it - you’re still too weak. Now be a good boy and eat
your fucking broth.”

Rictus grunted in
pain as he sat up in the bed and took the bowl from Fornyx. “How’s a man
supposed to heal without a bit of meat or a splash of wine?”

“You have me
there.” Fornyx leaned back in the leather-strapped chair and closed his eyes a
second. The brazier to one side gave off a shimmer of heat, and the air in the
tent was close.

“Open the flap,
will you? I can’t breathe in here. That smoke-vent hardly lets any air in at
all.”

Fornyx opened his
eyes again. “You want to take the lung fever? Last week you were flat on your
back coughing up green slime and talking to people who weren’t there. Another
fever will carry you off, Severan says. You’re not the young buck you used to
be, made out of rawhide and horse’s piss. None of us are.”

“Then talk to me,
Fornyx. Tell me the news.”

Fornyx looked at
his friend closely. Rictus had been pared back to the essentials of life;
sinew, bone and corded muscle. His skull seemed too large for his body now,
despite the broadness of his shoulders, and he had lost the outdoor ruddiness
of wind and sun and snow. His face had the pallor of an invalid, and there were
blue rings beneath his eyes that had not been there before.

He looked old. For
the first time, Fornyx saw the elderly man in him. The youth who had joined the
Ten Thousand all those years ago was utterly gone.

“There’s not much
to tell. No spearwork to speak of; our tools this last while have been the
spade and the axe. The men spend what free time they have scouring the frozen
wasteland they’ve made for a turnip or an onion that’s been overlooked. There’s
not an olive tree or a vine left standing for twenty pasangs, and even the
grass seems to be withering. Ardashir has had to move some of the horselines
ten pasangs back east. Those big Kufr horses are starting to look like rag and
bone. By the time the last of them die they won’t even be worth eating.”

Rictus coughed
over his broth and winced, a hand set to his side. “And the men - our men?”

Fornyx frowned. “Corvus
has taken them as a kind of bodyguard. Now that he’s cut us down to size he
finds use for us as mascots. We have one under-strength centon still in the
scarlet. Those here now are here to stay - Kesero has his heart set on the
plunder of Machran. Valerian doesn’t say much. I think this kind of warfare is
not to his liking.”

“Is it to anyone’s?
What’s going on in the city? Do we have any inkling?”

“Machran is a
different place now, Rictus, a world apart from ours. There’s no coming or
going; the place is sealed up tight. If we’re hungry here, with supplies still
coming in from the east and the foraging parties out night and day, then think
what it’s like inside those walls, with a hundred thousand and more mouths to
feed.”

“If all they had
to eat was this shit they’d open the gates tomorrow,” Rictus said, setting the
bowl to one side. He lay back in the bed - it had been made specially for him
on Corvus’s orders - and looked at his old friend.

“Druze tells me
you were going to leave the army when you thought me dead.”

Fornyx shrugged. “There
didn’t seem to be much point to it any more.” “You were the one so keen to find
yourself part of history, Fornyx. This is it - we are inside it right now.
There were times in the Empire I wanted to lie down and die, many times -”

“I told you once I
thought it must have been like some black dream of Phobos. I was right.”

“Well, then.”

“At least in the
Empire you knew where you were going, Rictus. Here, I look around and wonder
what it’s all in aid of. Are we here to make Corvus into a king?”

“I think so.”

“And you’re happy
with that? That half-breed boy lording it over all the Macht like a Kufr tyrant?”

“He’s not as bad
as you make out.”

“Oh I know - you
and he are like family now. I see it, Rictus. He was half out of his mind with
joy when Ardashir brought you back from the dead.”

“He is Jason’s
son, and it was my fault his father died.”

“That’s not a debt
he can hold over you all his life - he never even knew his father.”

“I knew him,”
Rictus said firmly. “He was a better man than either of us, and his mother a
fine woman.”

“A Kufr.”

“A Kufr, yes -
does it matter?”

“Most of the
clodhoppers in this army have no idea their beloved general has Kufr blood in
his veins. What do you think they’d do if they found out?”

“Nothing. He has
luck on his side, Fornyx. Knowing him, it would only add to his mystery.”

Fornyx lowered his
head. “All right, all right. I hear myself and I sound like some bitching
recruit missing his mother’s tit. This grand scale of war, it’s new to me.
There are too many faces missing around the centos, Rictus, men you and I had
marched with for years. They fell in windrows up on that wall, and at Afteni.”

“There will be
others, Fornyx. The faces have always changed. Doesn’t he have you recruiting?”

Fornyx laughed. “He
does. He has given permission for any spearman in the army to try for us.
Valerian and Kesero have them lined up outside their tents every morning, young
fellows with a hankering to wear that scarlet cloak and call themselves a
Dogshead.

“There was a time,
Rictus, years ago, when there were mercenaries in every city, and the red cloak
was nothing more than a badge of shame. Now, since the return of the Ten
Thousand, and with this campaign, it’s something else.”

“An honour,”
Rictus said.

“Yes. Who’d have
thought it?”

“We’ll take the
best of them, and build the Dogsheads up again, Fornyx,” Rictus said, patting
his friend’s hand.

Fornyx grinned
with a flash of his old vulpine self. “We’re drilling them till they puke.”

TO
the rear
of the camp which
sprawled across the Goshen Road, east of Machran, a fenced-off lumberyard and
ironworks had been set up. Within it, Corvus’s secretary Parmenios was lord and
master, and he had conscripted every carpenter and blacksmith to be found from
Machran to Afteni.

Every day the
waggons poured into the enclosure, bearing lumber and scrap iron and charcoal,
and the forges sparked and hammered there day and night. Tall structures began
to rise up in the middle of them, rising higher- day by day, and new orders
went out across the countryside. Herds of cattle were brought in, slaughtered
for the beef that the army would eat, and then stripped of their hides.

Soon the reek of a
tannery was added to the smoke of the roaring forges, and Corvus set sentries
about this strange enterprise of Parmenios’s, most of them Kufr from the
Companions. They turned away every curious soldier who ambled over the hill to
see what was going on, and the army buzzed with speculation as the last days of
the year ran out, and the dark night of midwinter came upon the earth.

Almost two hundred
pasangs to the
south and east, the city of Avensis rose on its crag to dominate the wide plain
between Nemasis and Pontis. A great trading settlement, a hub of the caravan
trails which converged before joining the Imperial road, it was also the
richest member of the Avennan League after Machran itself.

The men of Avensis
had fought at Afteni and fallen by the hundred. Now the Kerusia had decided to
wait upon events, so advised by Ulfos the polemarch, who had been at Afteni and
seen the prowess of Corvus’s army first hand.

They were meeting
in the citadel of the city, an airy colonnaded space that looked out over the
fertile plain below. Ulfos stood upon the grey mottled marble, blowing into his
hands.

Winter was here;
even this far south it had its bite, though there was no snow on the ground as
yet. The circle of the Kerusia was a fine place to meet on a summer’s day when
the sky was a cerulean blue overhead, but today the place had a bleakness to it
that matched the mood of the men taking their seats on the stone semi-circle of
benches.

Parnon, the
Speaker of Avensis, rose in the classic fashion, himation caught up over one
forearm. He extended the other to Ulfos.

“General, you said
you had news. Best to present it quickly.” One of the elderly Kerusia behind
him sneezed, and there was a muttering, swiftly silenced by a look from the
stately Parnon, his white beard jutting like a brush.

Ulfos turned
around and beckoned at the antechamber beyond. At his signal, a scrawny,
bedraggled figure limped into the Kerusia circle, a filthy shock-haired youth,
his cloak in rags and his bare feet bloody.

“This can’t be
good,” one of the old men muttered to his neighbour.

“Speak up, lad,”
Ulfos said. “Give what you carry to the Speaker here and then tell him what you
told me.”

The boy looked the
Kerusia over, then reached into his cloak and produced a tattered, rain-spotted
scroll. He handed it to Parnon.

“Your honour, that
is a message from Karnos of Machran himself, with his seal upon it - and it ain’t
broke, I made sure of that.”

Parnon looked down
at the scroll as though the boy had placed a turd in his hand. His gaze swept
the Kerusia circle, and then he broke the seal, unrolling the paper. His lips
moved, and his face grew set and hard.

He looked up at
the boy again. “How did you get here?” he asked.

“I ran, your
honour.”

“You ran? What -
all the way?”

The boy laid an
open hand on his chest as though feeling for his own heartbeat. “All the way. I
swear. Karnos made me promise to stop for nothing, to talk to no-one on the
road.”

“Did he send any
other message?”

“He told me to
tell you there would be no more messages.”

Parnon nodded. “What’s
your name?”

“Fidias, your
honour.”

Parnon drew near
the boy and set a hand on his shoulder. “You have done a thing of great worth,
Fidias. I thank you for it.” He looked at Ulfos, who stood biting his thumbnail,
his cloak bundled around his arms.

“Look after this
young fellow. He has quality in him. Go now, Fidias - you look as though a bath
and a hot meal would not go amiss.”

The boy’s face lit
up. “Thank you, your honour!” At a gesture from Ulfos he trotted out of the
room, his gait a peculiar limping shuffle, at once sprightly and
painful-looking.

Parnon threw the
scroll down upon the marble floor of the circle.

“Machran is under
close siege. The failure of the first assault has not dented Corvus’s determination.
He has the walls surrounded and is building a circumvallation to seal off the
city entirely. Karnos tells us that the city can subsist perhaps a month before
starvation sets in. He asks that the forces of the League reassemble for a
relief attempt as soon as possible.”

He bent and
retrieved the scroll again, his eyes dark.

“That’s it then,”
one of the Kerusia said, his breath rattling in his throat. “Machran is
finished.”

“Without our help,”
Parnon said.

“We gave our help
already, and saw our men burned outside Afteni,” another said bitterly. “We
have done enough. Do you forget that Machran offered us no help fifteen years
ago when Pontis attacked?”

Parnon lifted his
hand. “Let us not dig up the past. There’s enough here to occupy us right now.”

“I thought Machran
had greater reserves of food,” another said.

“They had.” It was
Ulfos who spoke up now. He worried at his thumbnail like a terrier after a rat.
“So many refugees came into the city from Arkadios and some of the other
hinterland cities that the numbers went beyond normal reckoning. Too many
mouths to feed.”