Corvus (4 page)

“I’ve heard many
men say the same thing, usually while drunk,” Rictus said. “But never you.”

“I thought I had
too much sense. We know war, you and I. So I know what it must have been like
-like some black dream of Phobos. But to have been part of that, to make
history - that would have been something.”

Rictus remembered.

The shattering
heat of those endless days on the Kunaksa hills, the stench of the bodies. The
shrieking agonies of the maimed horses. And the faces of those who had shared
it with him. Gasca, dead at Irunshahr, not much more than an overgrown boy.
Jason, whom he had loved like a brother, who had come through it all only to be
knifed in a petty brawl in Sinon, within sound of the sea.

The sea. How he
had loved it, in his youth. And he remembered the remnants of the Ten Thousand
shouting out in joy at the sight of it. That moment, that bright flash of
delight was carved in stone within his heart.

“It was a long
time ago,” Rictus said, a thickness, to his voice. “Half a lifetime, almost.
The march of the Ten Thousand is nothing more now than an old man’s memory.”

Fornyx spat into
the river. “It’s more than that, and you know it. Just as you will always be
more than some highland farmer with a spear beside the door. We trail our past
with us wherever we go, brother, especially those of us who wear the Black
Curse. It is what we are.”

They stood side by
side as the valley brightened further around them and the birds in the hanging
woods above filled the air with song.

“It is what we
are,” Rictus agreed at last.

* * *

The snow was
a morning wonder which
was gone by mid afternoon, save where the shadows of the trees protected
pockets from the sun. That first day back, Rictus tramped the borders of his
little kingdom with a hazel staff in his hand and a bronze knife in his belt to
cut the bread and cheese and onion that Aise had packed for him.

He and Eunion and
Rian trudged up the tawny hillsides to the open country beyond the woods, and
there stood like royalty to survey the speckle of the goat-herd as the hardy
animals ranged across the last of the year’s good grass. Like everything else,
the herd had grown while Rictus had been away.

The mismatched
trio sat on the grass as the wind surfed it into waves around them, and as the
time wound to noon they munched on red onions as if they were apples. The dogs
lay to one side, bright-eyed and watchful, and Rian’s chatter washed over
Rictus half-heard, tugging his mouth into a smile now and again as he caught
the gist of it. Chiefly, though, he sat enjoying the sound of his eldest daughter’s
voice, and he would now and again grasp her hand in the depths of the yellow
upland grass, as if to make sure she were real.

Voluble though
Rian was, it was from Eunion that Rictus received the clearest version of the
year gone by. There was indeed a bear’s den in the slopes of Crag-End hill,
hidden in the brush and juniper that swamped the northern slope. Bears were
semi-sacred to the Macht, respected for their strength and ferocity, but the
occupant of this particular den was elusive and, for now at least, best left
alone.

The vorine had
hardly been seen in the valley since the killing of the vixen and her cubs, but
wolves had been glimpsed in their place, scouting the hills. The bear would
sleep through winter, but the wolves would not - something to be considered.

The billy goat,
wise, wicked old Grenj, had had a fight with an eagle, a sight Eunion had never
seen before nor heard tell of. Rian mimed the struggle as she described it like
some tale out of legend: one hand the eagle, the other, valiant Grenj. Anyone
else would have seen some portent in the goat’s killing of the eagle, but to
Eunion it was a fascinating natural phenomenon, something to be stored away and
analysed. And as if summoned by the story, Grenj himself ambled past them amid
his harem, with his regal spread of horns and cold yellow eyes. As good as a
hound for protecting his own, Eunion said, though he was old now - another
winter might see him done.

“When he is, we’ll
put his horns up here on a pole,” Rictus said. “It’s what they used to do
around Isca when I was a boy. To keep his spirit here.”

“He’ll live for
years and years,” Rian protested. “He must, after such a feat.”

“I hope he will,”
Rictus said, kissing the top of her head. “You’re right - he deserves to.”

“And your campaigning,
master - how went that with the year?” Eunion asked. “It was Nemasis, was it
not, that hired you?”

Eunion loved to
hear of the goings-on in the wider world, and he was one of the few men who
could dissect them with intelligence. Rictus looked down at Rian. She was sat,
chin on knees, between them, rubbing Mij’s belly with her bare toes. He caught
Eunion’s eye, and saw the apology in the older man’s face.

“It was a
protracted campaign,” he said gruffly, and he set his hand on his daughter’s
nape as though to comfort her.

“There was little
fighting - one or two clashes south-west of Machran. But they were stubborn,
the Vengans. They have good land around that earth-walled city of theirs, and
they would not admit defeat even when we drove them from the field. So it
became a siege of sorts.”

“A siege!” Rian
exclaimed, as though this were some marvellous revelation.

“A rarity, in this
age,” Eunion said. He rasped one hard palm across the white bristles on his
chin.

“A rarity, thank
God. And in winter, too. We sat there all through the coldest months of the
year, and ate the country bare all around while the Vengans sat in their city
and starved. They made a sally at the turning of the year, and that was their
mistake. We took the gatehouse, and then it was all over.”

“And the terms?”
Eunion always wanted to know. It came of his own fate in life, perhaps.

“What did you do
to them?” Rian demanded. His own eyes, in his daughter’s face, looking up at
him.

“Well, the
Nemasians had been made to freeze in camps half the winter instead of sitting
at home with their wives, so they were not disposed to mercy.”

Rictus was
reluctant to say more. He had no wish to convey to his daughter, or to this
good, gentle man beside her, the carnage and chaos that had concluded the campaign.

“Did Venga
survive?” Eunion asked, tight-lipped.

“Yes. She lost
most of her good land.” And most of her sons and daughters, Rictus added to
himself, thinking of the hopeless lines of shackled children filing up the
roads towards the Machran slave-markets.

“Our own
casualties were light, not above fifty for the whole episode.”

“Fifty? That’s
nothing - you barely fought at all,” Rian accused him.

“Hardly at all,”
Rictus agreed, though something in his face made Rian set a hand on his knee in
obscure apology.

“And what news
from Machran, master?” Eunion persisted. “We’ve been hearing stories down in
Onthere and Hal Goshen, but they are so garbled as to be little better than
myth. Have you heard any more about what is happening in the east?”

Rictus frowned,
rubbing his right thigh just below the hem of his chiton. There was a pink scar
there where a Vengan arrow, almost spent, had smacked into his flesh the year
before. It had been a long time healing in the winter camps and it troubled him
still when he sat awhile on the cold ground, as he did now.

The east, where
this new thing had arisen, this prodigy. It was all anyone had ever asked him
in his travels - what word of the east? What is he doing now? This apparition,
this phoenix of war.

“It’s hard to separate
myth and fact when it comes to talking about the east,” he said at last. “I
know he is well inland from Idrios now, and I heard word that Gerrera and
Maronen had fallen to him.”

“It’s true, then -
he does head this way!” Rian exclaimed, and she lifted both her hands as though
to catch a posy.

“If he has
Maronen,” Eunion said tersely, “then his next step must be Hal Goshen.”

“That is my
thinking also.”

“Master, Hal
Goshen is barely -”

“I know,” Rictus
said curtly.

“What does he
want, father?” Rian asked.

Rictus shrugged. “Some
say he aims at nothing more than overlordship of all the Macht cities. But that’s
absurd.” He spoke over Rian’s head, meeting Eunion eye to eye.

“When we were in
Machran, Karnos was talking of invoking the terms of the Avennan League, and
this time I think the core cities will respond. If that happens, Machran can
field an allied army of maybe forty thousand, a force the like of which the
Harukush has never seen before. This would-be conqueror cannot match that. He
will see sense, and pull in his horns.” He wanted Eunion to agree with him, to
treat the thing as Rian had. But the old man would not oblige.

“Is it true what
they say about him, that he is little more than a boy?” Rian asked, with a wide
grin.

“He’s young, by
all accounts, but it would take more than a boy to do what he has done these
last three years. He has a dozen cities under him now, and rules them as King
in all but name.”

Eunion nodded
thoughtfully.
“Corvus,
he calls himself. That’s an old word indeed. I
wonder how he dug it up. It denotes a black carrion bird, a raven or suchlike.”

“It’s what he’s
called. His true name, no-one knows, or he has not seen fit to tell it, at any
rate. But whatever his name is, he has an army of twenty thousand in the field
this year, and it swells with each fresh conquest. When he takes a city, his
terms are so lenient that its citizens are almost glad to fight for him
afterwards. He enslaves no-one; he confiscates no land or property. All he
wants are men to hoist spear in his ranks, and coin to finance his campaigns.
He makes war feed upon itself.”

“I hear tell he
reads like a scholar,” Eunion said with a curiously wistful smile.

“I don’t know
about that. Folk say all manner of nonsense about him.” Rictus stared at
Eunion, From his daughter, he might have expected it, but it disappointed him
to see the old man caught up in the stories, the weave of myth that was
thickening about this Corvus. He had experienced something like it in his own
life, and knew how baseness could squat behind a legend. “I’ve also heard that
he grows wings by moonlight, that he is the son of Phobos himself, that he’s
not even one of the Macht, but some kind of demigod. You of all people, Eunion,
should not believe all you hear.”

The old man smiled
again.

“I know, master.
But sometimes men need the stories.” He set a hand on Rian’s head. “We all do.
It is what set us apart from the beasts.”

They felt his
anger. Rian shrank from him towards Eunion, which made him angrier still. In
silence, the three stared across the foothills to where the dark forests ended
at the hem of the mountains in the north and west. Last night’s snow lay on the
peaks; they were white as a dream of winter.

“I’ve always
scoffed at signs and portents, not thinking them worth a rational man’s time,”
Eunion said, “but were I a peasant from the hills -”

“A strawhead?”
Rictus asked, mocking, bitter even.

Eunion inclined
his own bald pate. “That is a word I’ve not heard for a long time, living up
here. But, if you like. If I were an uneducated highlander, I might read
something into old Grenj’s defeat of the eagle.”

“And what would
that be?” Rictus asked, frowning again.

“The upset of
normal things. Something new in the wind - a change for us. For all of us. For
all the Macht.”

“You read a lot into
a goat’s good luck,” Rictus said coldly. He did not like to hear Eunion talk
like this.

“Forgive me,
master. This boy conqueror, this… phenomenon. I don’t think he is going to
leave the world without making a mark on it much larger than the one he has
henceforth. And if I read you rightly, you believe the same. Fornyx let slip
you are thinking of hanging up the scarlet. Is it true?”

Rian’s face
upraised to him, open and delighted. “Father! Is it?”

“Eunion, you leap
like one of these damn goats from one subject to another.”

“I think not. I
think there is a connection there.”

Rictus said
nothing for a long time. He bit into his onion, the crisp sting of it flooding
his mouth, and then chased it down with a lump of creamy goat’s cheese.

“This Corvus is making
war on us,” he said. “And it is a war like we haven’t seen before; he does
things so differently. Do you know he has cavalry in his army - not as scouts
or foragers, but as part of the main battle line? He is, as you say, a
phenomenon.”

Rictus breathed in
deep, smelling the tang of the pines on the wind, the close-to smells of goat
and onion and the wool and sweat of his own body and those beside him. The
grain of the world itself, this quiet emptiness of the highlands. A place
apart, it had always seemed to him, beyond the concerns and confines of the
lowland plains, the cities, the politicking of men.

He set one arm
about Rian’s shoulders, and brought her tight to him, until he could smell the
lavender and thyme that Aise always layered in the clothes chests.

“Father -”

“I’ve been a
soldier all my life, Eunion. I’ve carried the Curse of God near a
quarter-century and I have seen men kill one another in every manner in which
the act can be conceived. It is part of life.

“For me, it has
been a trade, a calling for which I find I have an aptitude, as other men can
make music or build with stone and marble. I accept that. I have carved my life
around it. But there is something else in the wind now. Things are going to
change.

“I think that to
carry a spear in the times to come is to fight in a war without end.”

He bent his head,
and kissed his daughter’s black hair.