Corvus

PART ONE
THE SPEAR BY THE DOOR
ONE
THE QUIET WATER

As always, he halted on the crest of the last ridge. Leaning on his spear, he looked down in the gathering blue-shadowed dusk and something like a sigh ran out of him.

Before him, the land poured down in darkening folds and hollows until it met the flat shadow of the glen at the river-bottom. A flash of red there, as the river glanced up at the last light of the sun. Then the mountainsides all around seemed to crowd together as if huddling against the night, and the valley was blanked out, like a conjurer’s trick. But in the midst of that quiet darkness, he could see a light burning, steady and yellow.

The spear creaked under his weight. The leather straps of pack and shield dug into his shoulders. The heat of the day broke past him, a warm passage of air rushing down to fill up the cool darkness of the river-bottom below. He closed his eyes as the air kissed the glimmering sweat on his forehead, and turned, straightening.

Behind him, on the northern slope of the ridge, a long line of men sat by the side of the track. Every one of them was burdened with packed cuirass and strapped shield. Every one had a spear in his fist. They looked up as he turned to them, and their eyes were pale glitters as the sunset shattered across the mountains behind them.

“This is me,” he said. “I leave you here.”

Word went down the line. The men rose to their feet in a ripple of movement, like a snake shivering itself awake down the length of the track. Three burdened figures at their head made an arrowpoint of burdened shapes. One of them bore a banner, a staff of yew wood with a tattered flag that rippled idly in the breezes of the dusk. Upon its tattered face could just be made out the snarling, stylized muzzle of a dog or wolf.

“We’ll call on you before the first snows,” the banner-bearer said, a massively built fellow with a battered, craggy forehead and eyes like shards of blue glass below it. He grinned, showing broad yellow teeth, some of which had been ornamented with silver wire.

“No, you won’t. You’re full of shit, and you’ve too much gold in your pouch. Don’t spend it all at once, Kesero. And keep a wind-eye open for those fellows from Machran; Karnos, especially. The New Year comes, and you’re looking for jobs again.”

“And you, Rictus?” another of them said. He was younger, a long, lean, red-haired man who would have been pretty as a girl were it not for the deep scarred hole below his left eye which dragged the lower lid downwards, unbalancing his face, giving a him a look at once mocking and mournful.

“What about me?”

“Will we be seeing you after the turning of the year?”

Rictus paused. His gaze swept down the track over the scores of men who lined it silently, all of them looking up the ridge at him. The last of the sun caught his eyes and flashed back out of them in a red glare. He was a big man with a shock of yellow hair veined grey, broad in the shoulders, long in the arm, and there was not an ounce of excess flesh on his face. As his lips thinned, so the outline of his teeth could be seen behind them, and an old seam of scar tissue paled out from his lower lip and down his chin.

“I’ll wait for the New Year, Valerian, and see what Antimone brings me,” he said at last, making the words lighter with a smile.

Valerian hitched his pack up higher on his shoulders. “Well then, here’s to Hal Goshen, boys,” he said, his lop-sided face like two halves of different masks. “Here’s to red wine and wet women. I’ll come up with Kesero, Rictus, and dig you out of your burrow before the snows bury you too deep.”

He raised his spear above his head and pointed it towards the east. “Dogsheads!” he cried, and the word was caught up by the mountains and flung echoing around the high country. “March on – we can make ten more pasangs before Phobos rises.”

Behind him, the long files of men started out, taking a stony track along the crest of the ridge with the last light of the sun on their backs. Valerian held out a hand, and Rictus shook it. Then the big, crag-faced bannerbearer, Kesero, did the same. They led the line of burdened figures off, and Rictus stood and watched them go. As the men passed him on their way east, they each and every one nodded at him. A few struck their spears against their chests in salute. By the time the rearguard had gone by it was almost fully dark, and the stars were glimmering overhead in their tens of millions.

A dark shape uncoiled itself from the shadow below Rictus and stood to become a compact, black-bearded man with a face as sharp as a fox’s nose.

“Well, are you going to stand there until Phobos finds you, or are we to get on home?” the man asked waspishly. He yawned, and rubbed his eyes.

“It’s all downhill from here, Fornyx,” Rictus said. “Tonight you’ll sleep in a bed with a fire at your feet.”

The two men set off down the ridge to the glen below, from which the sound of rushing water could now be heard. They moved quietly, and their sandaled feet ate up the downslope with the steady pace of men who have been marching all their lives.

“You’re not retiring. You just tell them that to mess with their heads,” Fornyx said, picking at his teeth with a thumbnail as he walked.

Rictus strode along in silence, eyes fixed on the single point of light in the widening glen below them.

“And if you were,” Fornyx went on, “Why bury yourself up here in the hills? It’s a hard scrabble up this high, Rictus.” When he received no response, he went on, “Any city in the Harukush would shower you in gold just to have your spear planted on their walls. You could live like a king, had you a mind to.”

“We have no kings,” Rictus said quickly. “And me, I’ve no wish to set myself up as one. Damn it, Fornyx, don’t you ever shut up? You love these hills as much as I do. And besides, there’s enough gold buried under Andunnon’s hearth already.”

Fornyx grinned, looking more vulpine than ever. The top of his head barely reached the taller man’s shoulder, but the muscles in his arms and legs were like corded wires, and he kept pace with Rictus’s long stride without obvious effort.

“I find conversation an amusement, and if no-one will talk to me, then I’ll amuse myself until they do.”

“Well, amuse yourself in silence for a moment, will you? Stop here.”

They halted, almost on the brim of a mountain river, which fell flashing from a rocky bluff to the west and ran along the bottom of the glen, foaming and purling in its stony bed. Rictus breathed in the cooling air deeply.

“Smell the pines?” he asked. “There’s still garlic growing on the far bank, and thyme, too. I wonder how the barley did this year.”

“The same as it did last year, I shouldn’t wonder,” Fornyx said with a snort. “Aise and Eunion will have the place blooming, as they always do. Come, let’s cool our feet.” He began splashing across the silver-flashing river.

Rictus watched him go, smiling slightly. In the hanging woods that carpeted the upper sides of the glen, an owl hooted as though it, too, wondered what was keeping him. His hand went up to his neck, and there at the lip of his cuirass it brushed against a cord of rawhide upon which hung a wolf’s tooth and a rounded fragment of coral. Then Rictus began to wade across the cold, fast-flowing river in Fornyx’s wake.

The dogs came. out barking as they approached the eaves of the farm, but their barks changed to delighted yips and whines as they caught the scent of the two men. Big, brindled hunting hounds, they bounced around Rictus and Fornyx like pups, tongues lolling happily. A square of light opened into the night, dazzling, wiping out the stars and making the glen around them into depthless black space.

A woman stood outlined in the threshold, firelight and lamplight flickering out behind her along with the laughter of children. She snapped a word to the dogs and they calmed down at once, grinning happily. The laughter within ceased. Rictus stepped up to the door.

The woman who confronted him there was tall, iron-coloured in hair and eyes. She was wrapped in a finely spun woollen shawl the same saffron hue as the light behind her, so that she seemed bathed in bright warmth. She had a long face, strong-jawed as a man’s, and as she saw Rictus and Fornyx her eyes widened a trifle, but that was the only way the face changed. She reached back inside the house and produced a shallow dish.

“My lord. Welcome home,” she said, a voice as low as heather honey.

Both Rictus and Fornyx took salt from the dish and tasted it. “Antimone bless us all,” Fornyx said.

“Aise,” Rictus said. And he bent to kiss the woman on the forehead.

She stood aside. “Come in. Since you sent word from Nemasis we have been expecting you, this month and more.” A slight pause, long enough to be noticed. “It’s late, but there’s still some supper to be had.”

Rictus had to stoop to enter the house, and he blinked as the lamplight and woodsmoke within pricked his eyes.

A long, low mountain farmstead, built and flagged with stone, thatched with reeds from the riverside. It had a hearth the shape of a beehive opposite the doorway, from which floated the faint fragrance of baked bread. Oil lamps hung from the rafters, suspended by silver chains – he had brought those back from the Avensis siege, fifteen years ago – and the heavy pine table and benches he and Fornyx had hammered together with much drunken profanity some decade before remained, darkened with age and use.

There were unfamiliar touches though: a new loom stood in the shadows of the north wall, and a bronze hinged chest had replaced the old one he had stored his scrolls in for as many years as the house had stood.

And the people had changed also. Eunion came forward from his place by the fire, touching his fist to his chest. He rose more stiffly than Rictus remembered, and there was even less hair on his skull, but the lively intelligence in the dark eyes was the same.

“You are welcome home, master,” he said, still using the term although Rictus had freed him many years ago.

“Are you well, Eunion?”

“As well as always, sir. The lady keeps the life in me.”

The newcomers dumped their gear on the stone floor, unclipping the fastenings on their armour. Eunion took the black cuirasses from their backs one by one and set them reverently on the cross-shaped stands at the gable wall. The rest of their gear followed, until it seemed that there were two helmed and armoured men squatting in the shadows there, scarlet cloaks on their shoulders.

Aise had already disappeared out the back door and they could hear her clapping her hands for the slaves. Rictus thought to stop her – he wanted no fuss – but then thought better of it. It was her household, after all, and well over a year since he had been in it.

“Well, aren’t you going to speak to me?” he asked the two slim, upright figures by the fire. “Don’t you know me?”

“Always,” one of them said, and then sprang forward into his arms. He spun her round, laughing, breathing her in, feeling the litheness of her youth against him, then set her down and stared at her.

“Gods above, Rian, you’re taller still – will you never stop growing?”

“Not until I’m as tall as you,” she retorted. “One day I’ll look you in the eye.”

“You always look me in the eye.” He kissed her, cupping her face in, his big, spear-calloused hands. She had his eyes – he had been told – and the thick black hair of her mother’s youth. “How many summers are you now – thirteen?”

“Fourteen,” she corrected him scornfully.

“I’ll bet they’ve been trooping to the door in line to marry you,” he said.

“Yes, but none of them are rich enough – and I want a man who can read!”

Both Rictus and Kornyx laughed.

Aise returned with the two household slaves, Garin, a stocky man in his thirties, and a girl, a new one Rictus had not seen before.

“Where did you get her?” he asked Aise, frowning. It was he who decided on the buying and the selling of the slaves, part of the duties of the master of the household. “What happened to Veria?”

“She fell pregnant by Garin here, and lost the child. After that she mooned around and was no good for anything, so I sold her. I bought this girl, Styra, in Hal Goshen, at the big market.”

“Hal Goshen -” Rictus bit off his words, having seen Aise raise her chin in that combative way of hers, as though readying for a blow. Now was not the time.

He looked at Garin, who was busy stacking fresh wood and turf by the fire, but the man had his slave face on, stony blankness. He and Veria had been a couple, a unit that Rictus would not have broken. But even now, he was more sentimental about these things than Aise had ever been. It came from memories of his own loss, perhaps.

“Father, you haven’t said anything to Ona,” Rian said in a whisper, squeezing his hand.

“Yes, yes – come here girl, I won’t bite you.” Aise had soured his mood somewhat, and it showed in his voice. Ona approached him as a mouse might a hawk. He held out his hand to her – his other was still on his eldest daughter’s waist.

“Ona? It’s all right. Come here to me.”

His youngest daughter had grown up also, into a freckle-faced child with hair the same shade as horse-chestnut and great green eyes. She was seven – no, eight years old now. Rictus gathered her into his free arm and pulled her close, remembering how she had ridden screaming with laughter on his shoulders the previous autumn, and the three of them had come home from the woods with a basket of mushrooms, and beech leaves in their hair. He held his daughters in the circle of his arms and felt Rian’s breath on his neck, Ona’s stubby hands gripping his arm, and it seemed to him only then that he had truly come home.

There was good food laid out for them, despite the lateness of the hour. Garin built up the fire until it blazed like a lamp and the new slave, Styra, laid the table with the glazed plates Rictus and Fornyx had brought back from some long-ago coastal campaign, bright red earthenware decorated with dolphins and octopi.

There was barley bread and goat’s cheese, black olives and green oil, and slivers of cured ham from the pig they had killed only the month before. Garlic dug up from the riverside, and purple onions to make the eyes water, and fresh thyme to scent it all. And wine, the thin yellow resin-flavoured wine of the highlands. Rictus and Fornyx fell on the food like starved, dogs, and for a while the house was silent save for their grunts of appreciation, and the crackle of wood in the fire. At last, though, they were sated, and pushed back from the table with something between a grunt and a groan.

“Last year’s wine, lady?” Fornyx asked.

Aise nodded. “We put by six amphorae, and five are still full. We don’t drink wine much when the master of the house is away.”

Rictus stood up from the table, stretching. He ruffled Rian’s black hair as he passed her, and adjusted the midnight gleam of his cuirass where it was displayed on its stand at the eastern gable. He ran his fingers through the transverse horsehair crest of his helm, and touched the leather mid-grip of his spear.

For a while he stood there. Fornyx was coaxing Ona onto his knee – she had always been his favourite, perhaps because his own daughter had been russet-haired. Aise was clearing the table, and Eunion and the slaves had left for a last look in on the stock, what there was of it. The farmhouse was settling back into the interrupted routine of the night, having made space for Rictus and Fornyx within it.

“Where did you go this year, father?” Rian asked, joining him before the sombre panoply of his armour.

He remembered this summer’s fighting, the endless marching through the dust, the incompetent wrangling of the men who were his employers. Blood blazing scarlet in the withered grass. A man with his guts spilled out, trying vainly to keep the flies off them. His men singing as they slew. Rictus closed his eyes for a second.

“It was nothing much. A lot of running around in the hills about Nemasis. Scarcely real soldiering at all.”

“What about your men? Are they – are they all alive?”

“Not all of them, my honey. That is war; not everyone can come back from it. But we sang the Paean over the pyres of the dead, and gave the losers back their kin, and so settled the thing.”

“And is Valerian all right?”

Rictus looked at her with eyes only half amused. “Valerian is all of a piece, the same as ever. Don’t tell me you still carry a lamp for him, my girl?”

Rian blushed, and her face seemed to bloom like a flower. “I was curious, is all.”

“Well, you may see him up close ere the winter comes. He and Kesero have promised to visit before the snow closes the passes.”

“Really?” Her face lit up – a daisy touched by the sun. She reached up and put her arms about his neck and kissed his scarred chin.

“Really. Now get to bed, and take your sister with you. It’s near the middle of the night.”

“In the morning I’ll show you a new cave where Eunion says the bears sleep.”

“Yes, you do that – now off to bed.”

Over the years the farmhouse had been enlarged and extended. Once it had been no more than a long room with a rude firepit and a single crooked doorway covered by a flap of goatskin. That had been in the early days. Back then Rictus and Fornyx and Eunion had clinked up the walls themselves, stone by raw stone, and used willow withies to support a turf roof. Aise had cut the turves herself, handing them up to the men as they perched on the walls above.

That first winter had been so cold that all four of them had huddled under the sheepskins together at night, so close to the fire that the wool was singed black, and wolves had prowled and snuffled just outside the door.

Since then, the place had expanded with almost every year – near on twenty of them. And in that time, Rictus had fought in fifteen campaigns, missing all but a handful of summers and springs here.

Andunnon, he called this valley of his – The Quiet Water – for as the river curled round the glen bottom beyond the house, so it broadened in its bed and became a sleepier, brown thing with trout as tawny as freckles flitting shadowlike in the sunlit depths. It had also been the name of his childhood home, far north and cast of here, near the burnt ruins of what had once been a city.

Now, Andunnon had blossomed from a single stone hut into a farm proper. They had cut back the brush and tamed the tangle of wild olive trees on the western slopes, planted vines to the east where the glen caught the best of the sun, and harvested barley in the flat rich soil of the valley floor. Bread, wine, and olives, the trinity of life, they had made here. And children, to carry that life on after them. It was more than Rictus had once ever dreamed of having. And it had cost no blood to build.

The farmhouse had annexes and extensions grafted onto it now: rooms for slaves and visitors, and for Fornyx, whose home this was also. It had become an ungainly, ill-planned sprawl of stone and turf and reed-thatch which nonetheless seemed as much part of the landscape as the river which bounded it. The farm had settled into the earth itself, part of the seasons as a man’s hand is part of his arm. No matter how far Rictus marched, and how many men’s eyes he took the light from, this, here, was where he belonged, and where his spirit found what peace his memories allowed.

Fornyx had staggered off to bed, the potent yellow wine singing in his head, and now Rictus joined Aise by the dying fire, the hounds lying sprawled and content at their feet. She had snuffed out the lamps, all save one cracked little clay bowl which would light their own way when they retired, and between its guttering light and the red glow of the sinking hearth she seemed almost youthful again, the lines hidden, the strong bones of her face brought out by the shadows.

Rictus could see Rian in that face, and Ona, and the boy who had been born between them and whose ashes were now in the earth and air of the valley itself. He reached out his hand and Aise looked at him with that guarded smile of hers and let him take her fingers in his own.

“Well, wife,” Rictus said.

“Well, husband.”

The wind was picking up outside, and Rictus knew from the whistle in the clay-chinked chimney that it was from the west, off the mountains. It would bring snow with it soon, perhaps even tonight. He almost started to ask Aise if the goats had been brought down to the lower pastures yet, but caught himself in time. She would have seen to it already, as she saw to everything while he was away.

“The sow had a litter of six,” Aise said, withdrawing her hand. “We slaughtered two, sold the rest down in Onthere. We lost two kids to the vorine, but in the spring Eunion and Garin found a den north of Crag End hill, and killed the vixen and her cubs. There have been no more of them about since then.”

Rictus nodded.

“We had a good pressing, a dozen jars. I made that olive paste you like, with the black vinegar from the lowlands – we got a skin of it when I sold the pigs.”

“You should not have sold Veria,” Rictus said quietly.

Aise’s face did not change.

“She was discontented, harping on about her dead baby, and she was unsettling Garin with her keening.”

“A dead child is no light thing,” Rictus said, heat creeping into his voice. Aise seemed not to hear him.

“I had to go into the chest for gold to make up the difference, but Styra is a better prospect. She’s young, she has good hips, and Garin will father a child on her soon enough.” She paused. “Unless you would prefer to plough her furrow yourself.”

Rictus looked at his wife in baffled anger, searching her face in the red firelight.

“I don’t fuck my slaves, wife. It is something I have never done.”

“I was your slave; you fucked me,” Aise said coldly.

Something like a chill went down Rictus’s back. They had gone straight back to the old caches of forgotten weapons stored in their hearts, and unearthed them all sharp and glittering again.

“It was different then – we were different. Gods below, woman, I will not go over this again the very night I appear back home. You are the stone I have built this life here upon. What’s done is done.”

“And through the year’s campaigning, do you have some camp girl service you at the end of the day?”

“You know I do, on occasion – I’m a man. I have blood in my veins.”

“When you left, you said it was a summer campaign, no more – and here you are with almost a year and a half gone by. You said it was over, Rictus. No more soldiering. You said you would put aside the scarlet and stay here with me.” “I know.”

“We need no more money- we have everything here a man could want.”

“Except a son,” he snapped. And the instant he said it he could have slapped his own face. Such stupid warfare, as fruitless as the year’s campaigning.

Aise stared into the fire, seeming somehow to wither before him, though she did not move.

“I should not have said that – I had no cause,” he said, reaching for her hand again. She gave it, but it was limp in his fist; obedient, no more.

“Men want sons,” Aise said lightly. “That is the way of life. It’s how they make themselves remembered. A daughter leaves the house, and she becomes someone else’s family. A son continues his own.” She faced Rictus squarely, her face as blank as a blade. “You should take another wife.”

“I have a wife.”

“I’m past bearing children now, or as close as makes no matter. And you are no longer young either. If you want an heir you must father one on some decent woman – it would not do to have a slave as his mother.”

“You were a slave once,” Rictus reminded her sharply. “Do you think that matters to me, after all this time?”

She smiled, and in her face there was both bitterness and a peculiar kind of happiness, as if a memory had lit up her eyes.

“You freed me. You would have no other but me. I do not forget, Rictus. I will never forget that.”

“Then let’s go to bed,” he said, tugging on her hand like a child intent on its mother’s attention. It was like pulling on the root of an oak.

“No; I will bide here awhile with the dogs. Go you to bed – there’s a dish of water to wash in.”

“There was a time when you would have washed me yourself, Aise, and I would return the favour.”

“We are not youngsters, Rictus, coupling like dogs every chance we get.”

“We’re not dead yet, either,” he snapped, and he rose, the anger flooding his face. He seized his wife by the arms and drew her to her feet. Her eyes met his, blank as slate. With something like a snarl he hoisted her into his arms and strode across the room, the dogs whimpering at the mood in the air. He kicked open the door that led to their bedroom – there was a single lamp left burning in it, and his muscles locked as he prepared to toss her onto the bed.

But he stopped, arms tight about her spare frame, she tense within the embrace as a man’s face stiffens before a blow.

A neat, ordered space. She had laid out a fresh chiton for him, and the battered sandals he always wore about the farm. There were the year’s last flowers, fresh-cut in a jar – the deep aquamarine jar he had brought all the way from Sinon, a lifetime ago – she had always treasured it, for the memory. Clean linen, a jug and ewer, all set out as she had set them out for him these twenty years and more, sometimes under a roof, sometimes under the ragged canvas of an army tent, and sometimes under nothing but the canopy of the stars. His anger drained away.

He laid her gently down on the willow-framed bed, his face harsh and set. Then he kissed his wife on the forehead, her own features unreadable in the shadow he cast before the lamp. He stood over her a moment, a dark giant, an interloper filling the room with his bulk and the smell of the road, the stink of the army. Then he turned and left, closing the door behind him.

That first night back in his home, Rictus slept on the floor before the dying fire, wrapped in his scarlet cloak with the dogs curled up around him for company.