Corvus (8 page)

“Four hundred and
sixty two,” Druze said instantly, “Not including those present here.”

“Four hundred and
sixty two men, only - but those men have been trained by Rictus of Isca. Their
prowess, their very name - your name - is worth ten times those numbers of ordinary
spearmen. And if Karnos sees sense, and offers you, Rictus, overall command of
the League’s field-army, why then, my work would be doubled. The leader of the
Ten Thousand, at the head of the Avennan League’s army - think on it! You would
light a fire in the Harukush, one that might consume my ambitions forever.”

Corvus was smiling
now, tight-lipped, and in the firelight his high-boned face did not .seem
entirely human. His eyes caught the flames like those of a fox.

“So you see why I
am here.”

Rictus’s voice
rasped like gravel out of his mouth. “What if I take employment with none of
you -what if I wish to stay here and till my land and live out my life in
peace, here in this valley?”

Corvus nodded. “Your
centurions have told me that you have spoken thus. You think of hanging up your
spear, of following a plough, herding goats, laying down that scarlet cloak.”
He paused. “You have loyal friends, Rictus. They almost convinced me.”

Slowly, he tipped
his cup and poured a thin stream of the ruby wine onto the tabletop. It
spattered and pooled like fresh spilt blood.

“For Phobos,” he
said. “A libation.” He placed his hand in the wine and then raised it, palm
outwards.

“We are men of
blood, you and I, Rictus. Sons of Phobos himself. You can no more set aside
your nature than can I. In the times to come, you will don that cloak once
more, you will heft a spear, and you will follow your calling. Do not try to
tell me different. I see in you the restlessness that I have felt in myself all
my life. If you join with me, you will be a part of great things; you will live
your life as it was meant to be. You will have a part in the changing of the
world. And I will keep faith with you forever. This I swear, to Phobos himself.”
Then he looked Rictus in the eye.

“If you do not
join with me, then I will do what I must. You will die here today. But I
promise you that you will die alone. Fornyx here will be spared - as will your
family - and your men will take service with me. Your name will have a place in
the story, but your part in it will be over. Today.” He smiled a little, and in
his face there was something genuine -an earnest regret.

Then he turned
away, and at once his eyes blazed like those of a hungry animal.

“I will let you
think on it. And I will see you outside when you have made up your mind. Druze,
let us go.”

Druze rose and
opened the door, letting in a blare of white light and the chill air of the
world outside. He and Corvus went out, closing the door behind them. For a few
moments Rictus was blind in the dimness of the farmhouse, his vision flaring
with afterimages. It seemed that not only his eyes but his mind was reeling a
little with what he had been told. As his vision returned, he drank deep of his
wine.

“Modest little
bastard, ain’t he?” Fornyx said, sitting down heavily.

“A phenomenon,” a
voice said, and both Rictus and Fornyx started. It was Eunion, forgotten in the
corner. He rose stiffly now and approached the table with the scroll still
hanging in his hand. The dogs whined as they picked up the mood of the room.

“A slave’s gift,”
he said with a tight smile. “To have oneself overlooked.”

“A gift I find
myself wishing I had,” Rictus conceded.

“You think he
means what he says?” Fornyx asked.

It was Eunion who
answered. “He means it, master, he means all of it. He is a man who has a
certain picture of himself in his head, and he will do anything to keep that
picture real. Such men are the most dangerous of all to know. They are not
pragmatists, but dreamers.”

“His dreams have
taken him far,” Fornyx said sourly, running his fingers through his beard. “Rictus,
we’re in a corner here - we’ll have to go along with the little fuck, for now
at least.”

Rictus sat rolling
the wine around in his mouth. He was curiously detached. He felt that he had never
in his life tasted a cup of wine so completely, enjoying every nuance of its
taste. There were complexities within it he had not guessed at, far beyond the
run of his own mountain vintages.

Something else -
this Corvus knew him, knew him well enough to prod at the weaknesses in his
makeup. Not just the veiled threats to his family and his men, not just a crude
leverage. One gained men’s obedience that way, but not their loyalty.

Corvus had lifted
a curtain and made a promise of something greater beyond it, and Rictus knew,
without question, that if this slender, terrible boy gave his word on
something,” he would keep it. Because, as Eunion had said, he was a dreamer,
and to break his word would destroy some picture he held of himself in his
mind.

Rictus looked at
his friends. “We can trust him,” he said. “I know it.”

Fornyx let out a
low whistle. “You’re going to do it.”

“It’s that or
death - why not?” Rictus replied. He stood up, the wine loosening his brain.
Looking around the homely room, he realised that this place had always been a
refuge for him, and he hoped it always would be. But Corvus had been right -
and Fornyx too.

He would live and
die with a scarlet cloak on his back.

THE
ARMY

Hal Goshen. In
old Machtic the name
denoted a gateway, and in the centuries since men had settled there, that was
what it had been, commanding a gap between stone and water.

The Gosthere
Range, a jagged, rocky, bare-headed line of high hills or low mountains, threw
out a long spin here, some two hundred pasangs from north-east to south-west.
At the end of it, on a wide flattened knob of high ground, the city had been
built. It overlooked the ancient highway that connected the eastern portion of
the Harukush with the western, and was a scant fifteen pasangs from the sea.

The lowland ground
between coast and mountain hail been fought over for generations, and was the
root of Hal Goshen’s prosperity. It had deep, black soil which might yield two
good crops a year, if the weather were kind, and down on the shore to the south
were scores of fishing villages and small towns whose menfolk counted
themselves citizens of the city on the hill, and voted in its assemblies. The
port of Goshen itself was the largest of these, linked to the hilltop city by a
fine road. It had one of the best natural harbours on the southern seaboard,
and a prosperous fishing fleet was based there.

An army travelling
west across the Harukush would find the land narrowing between the mountains
and the sea, until the grey tufa walls of Hal Goshen were before it, like the
cork in a bottle. To drink the wine of the west, that cork would have to be
popped.

A company of men
stood on the high ridge northeast of the city and halted there to take in the
wide sweep of the world before them. It was bitterly cold, and snow was blowing
across the ridge in clouds as hard and heavy as sand, pluming off the peaks of
the mountains behind them in long banners across a pale sky, blue as a robin’s
egg.

Corvus seemed to
feel the cold more than most. He was buried in a thick cloak, highlander’s
felt, and held the hood close about his mouth.

“There she lies,
the door to the west. I hope we shall not have to knock too hard,” he said.

Rictus scanned the
open country to the south of the city, the scattered farms, so much closer
together than in the highlands. A taenon of earth here would be a mere tithe of
the expanse a man would need to support a family in the high country. Even with
autumn well into its stride, the place had a prosperous, comfortable look,
lined with vines and well-spaced olive trees, the woods cut back, the wetlands
drained, neat tufa walls everywhere; a thousand years of labour or more. A
tamed landscape, this; a fat pigeon waiting for a hawk.

“It does not seem
to me that the men of Hal Goshen are much panicked by your army,” Fornyx said.
Snow had greyed his beard and eyebrows. He looked pinched, almost as grizzled
as Rictus.

“Our camp is eight
pasangs back to the east,” Corvus said, his gaze fixed hungrily on the city. “But
I hey know we’re here. They closed their gates eight days ago, and brought what
provisions they could within the walls. The road to the port has been cut by my
cavalry.”

“I see no burnt
farms or uprooted vines,” Rictus said.

“That is not the
way I make war,” Corvus told him. “I mean to possess this city, and the lands
around it. I do not intend to capture a wasteland.”

“Then how do you
feed your men?” Fornyx asked, genuine surprise in his voice.

“Trains of supply
wagons are sent to me from my eastern possessions,” Corvus said. “That is why I
am able to keep campaigning with winter coming on. We do a certain amount of
foraging when we are on the march, but in general I find that it is best not to
despoil a country whose inhabitants you wish to conciliate.”

“It could be
argued that a man whose farm is burning is more apt to listen to reason,”
Fornyx said.

Corvus turned his
strange pale eyes upon him. “I have found that there are two ways of dealing
with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in
between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”

“Your world is a
stark and simple place,” Fornyx said.

“I sleep well at
night,” Corvus retorted with a grin.

Rictus listened to
their exchange without a word. He was thinking of Hal Goshen. For twenty years
he had lived close by - Andunnon was barely sixty pasangs away, up in the
Gosthere hills. He knew the men inside those tufa walls, had sat at their
tables and drunk their wine. Phaestos, the Speaker of their kerusia, had hired
him more than once, had eaten in Andunnon, hunted with him. He and Aise had
been to the theatre there, to see
Ondimion
acted. Her scarlet dress had
been bought in the city agora.

It was from the
port of Goshen that Rictus had taken ship for the Empire, so long ago. The sea
had been black, then, with the ships of the Ten Thousand.

He had no wish to
see this city besieged, assaulted, or watch its people broken and enslaved.
This was too close to home, to the memories that spanned the web of his life.

“Your reasoning is
sound,” he told Corvus. “Hal Goshen and its surrounds can muster some four
thousand fighting men, maybe two thirds of them spearmen. They have no chance.
If we inform them of that fact, then I don’t believe that it will prove difficult
to make the Kerusia open the gates.”

Corvus nodded,
watching Rictus’s face closely. “That would be my take on it also. Of course,
it would be better if this were pointed out to them by someone they know.
Someone they trust.”

Rictus looked down
at the hooded youth, frowning. “Indeed.”

Fornyx broke in. “Well,
what say you we go take a look at this army of yours first? I want to see what
all the fuss has been about.”

An army’s camp
usually announced
itself on the wind, with the stink of men’s excrement. That, and woodsmoke. As
they tramped down from the high land to the plain below they were able to take
in the smell on the breeze, and at once it brought back to Rictus a spate of
memories.

In all the
fighting he had done since returning with the Ten Thousand over two decades
before, he had never been part of a force greater than two or three thousand
men. The inter-city conflicts of the Macht were small-scale affairs, conducted
almost to a kind of ceremony. Sieges such as that of his last campaign were unusual.

The fighting men
of two cities would line up in the summer, well before harvest-time, and crash
into each other with all the tactical refinement of two rutting slags. Often
the battlefields they fought upon had been fought over by their fathers and grandfathers,
cockpits of war since time immemorial. One side would win, one would lose, and
the victor would dictate terms. It was rare that such an encounter would lead
to the extinction of a city as a political entity - the Macht considered it
vaguely impious to destroy a polity entirely.

There were special
cases, however. Rictus’s own city, Isca, had been extinguished by a combination
of her neighbours because Isca had drilled her citizens like mercenaries and
made war on others with the intention of subjugating them entirely to her will,
rendering them her vassals. To the Macht this was intolerable, unnatural. War
in the Harukush was a bloody ritual, a way to make men of boys, and enhance a
city’s riches and prestige. It was not conducted with the aim of outright
conquest.

And now Corvus had
changed all that.

How the hell did
he do it? Rictus wondered. Who is this boy and where does he come from? He had
so many questions, and he had not yet admitted even to himself that part of the
reason he was here was sheer, avid curiosity. He wanted to see how it had been
done.

The camp of Corvus’s
army was huge, a sprawling scar upon the face of the countryside. Roughly
square, it was perhaps twenty taenons of tents and horse-lines and wagon-parks,
the largest encampment Rictus had ever seen in the Harukush. Fornyx halted in
his tracks at the sight of it and ran his fingers through his beard. “Phobos!
So all the bullshit is true, after all. You really have conquered the east, and
you’ve brought half of it here with you!”

Corvus pointed out
segments of the camp to them both.

“Those lines
nearest to us are the conscript spearmen, citizens of the eastern cities who
are here for the duration of the campaign. Behind them are my own spears, who
have followed me since the fall of Idrios, two years ago. Druze’s Igranians are
encamped on the north side, and in the rear are my Companions, the cavalry of
the army.”