Corvus

TEN

Karnos woke with a start. He had barely been asleep anyway. Some gaudy dream of standing talking to a crowd, and the men he spoke to were all cheering him, shouting his name, and sharpening knives.

Subtle, he thought with a mental grunt. Phobos, how is a man to live like this, for weeks at a time? I am Speaker of Machran. I made this army – I created it out of nothing. It is here by my will.

He turned in the straw, snarling and tugging his cloak about with him. They could at least have made me some kind of bed… there are ticks in this straw.

He scratched his crotch violently, and cursed aloud. Awake now.

In all seriousness – how does a man live like this? He thought of his well-stuffed mattress in Machran, and little Grania in it with her white skin and soft mouth. Or that new girl – the one with the lovely arse.

Here he was, one cloak to his name, lying on tick-infested straw with the damp of the ground creeping through it.

He opened his eyes wide.

The lamp was almost out of oil; a blue, guttering blossom pulsing round the wick. It was almost wholly dark in the tent.

What in hell was that?

He heard it again; a distant uproar, men shouting. He was used by now to the sound of the interminable quarrels, the fights that flared up out of nowhere; these were the background noises of the camp. But this was different; more urgent.

He sat up, adjusted the lamp so the end of the wick had a last drop of oil to suck into, and as the light strengthened, he scrabbled through the straw which lined the tent floor, fumbling for sandals, sword; anything which might orientate him to this strange and new place the night had found him in.

The tent flap was flung open and he saw a black silhouette with fire behind it.

“Some trouble over at the eastern end – might be nothing, but it sounds ugly. Want to come along?”

Kassander’s voice.

“Fuck it, yes. I’m awake now anyway. What time of the night is it?”

“The bad time, when men are tired but not quite asleep. This may only be a brawl.”

“I said I’m coming,” Karnos snapped, hopping into his sandals with his sword slung over one shoulder. “Help me with my cloak, will you? Phobos, what a life.”

In a camp this large, Karnos felt like a tick on the hide of some great unknown beast. He had never truly tried to imagine what a host of some twenty thousand men might look like; he had merely totted up the numbers as they came in. If they stood eight men deep in battle array their line would stretch around three pasangs.

It was as though a new and noisome city of leather and shit and woodsmoke had been planted on the world, and here he was in the middle of it, one more face in a teeming sea of them.

This was not like holding forth on the floor of the Empirion – the rules were different here. Walking through the camp, he was accorded a certain amount of -affectionate regard from the Machran host, a level of curiosity from the men of the other cities, but should a Cursebearer chance by, their eyes would be drawn to the black armour instantly, with a degree of awe that was almost religious.

I must get one of those one day, Karnos thought. It would perfect the image. Or redeem it, maybe.

He was a wealthy man; in the past he had tried to buy Antimone’s Gift from Cursebearers down on their luck, but his offers had been rebuffed with such contempt that he had given up on the exercise. Once a man had one of those things on his back, it seemed it took up some space in his soul. Death was all that would make him part with it. It was one of the gauges of a city’s greatness; how many Cursebearers it had as citizens.

There will be a few on the ground before all this is over, Karnos thought. I will talk to Kassander about it.

The two of them picked their way through the camp lines. The men had been sheltering in their tents, grumbling their way into sleep, or sharing a skin of wine, or rattling a game of knucklebones. Now the place was stirring again, and the paths between the bivouac lines were filling up with yawning, bad-tempered crowds, wondering what was causing the racket.

“I bet it’s the Aftenai again,” Kassander muttered. “A more bloody-minded set of fractious bastards I’ve never seen.”

The noise rose – men were fighting, it was clear now. They heard the clash of iron, and. someone shrieked, a death-scream.

“Phobos!” Kassander cursed, and he began to run.

Rictus felt the man’s blood spatter warm across his face as the drepana took the fellow’s arm off above the elbow. He was unused to the heavy lowland weapon; it felt like a butcher’s cleaver in his grasp, made for chopping and slashing.

He had the end of his cloak wrapped round his left arm, and threw it up in the next man’s face, making him flinch long enough for the drepana to arc round again and open his belly. A stink of shit and hot meat as his entrails flopped down his legs into the mud, entangling his feet. The man tripped up and gave a high-pitched scream, rolling in the ropes of his own insides.

“Now,” Corvus snapped, “back to us.”

Rictus turned in the space he had made and darted between Corvus and Druze. The Igranian’s pelta had been chopped in two and hung bloody from his arm. In the other his sword described a vertical circle as neat as a juggler’s flourish, and another one of the enemy went to his knees, wide-mouthed in disbelief, and then fell flat, cleaved open from collar to breastbone.

Corvus leapt in with a flash and took down a third. “Machran!” he shouted. “Machran to me!”

A gap opened up in the ring that surrounded them and they were through it in a moment, slashing to left and right, out of the firelight and into the rainswept dark. Rictus tripped on a guy-rope and went on his elbows, only to be seized upright by the scruff of his neck and shoved onwards. Even in that instant, he found himself startled by the brute strength in Corvus’s thin frame.

More men running at them, weapons in their hands. They were in the midst of a massive, congealing mob of bewildered figures, all shouting at once. The wounded were squealing behind them, and torches were being lit from the campfires. The rain hammered down on their faces and their legs were drained of energy, nothing more than mindless sinew hauling on the bone.

Rictus thought his chest was about to burst. He could not speak. Corvus and Druze both grabbed him and half-dragged his burly form through the tent-lines. An animal growl rose out of his throat; anger went white hot through his limbs and restored some sense to his head.

“Get the fuck off me.” He shook away their helping hands.

Men shouted enquiries at the trio, unsure. Druze tossed aside his split shield and tucked his maimed arm in his cloak, bundling up the fabric around a slash which had laid him open to the bone.

“Knucklebones,” Corvus said loudly, panting. “Cheating bastards tried to rob us. They’re still at it back there.”

“Halt and identify yourselves,” some officious prick yelled at them.

“Kiss my arse. We have a hurt man here – go stop that fight back there,” Rictus shot back.

“Hold your ground!”

There were too many around them, crowding as men will about bad news or a quarrel. Rictus reversed his drepana and punched the officious prick low down in the groin with the wooden bulb of the weapon’s pommel, then shouldered him aside. When the man next to him protested in snarling outrage, Corvus laid the flat of his sword against his temple, and he went down like a dropped sack of sand.

“Out of our bloody way.”

They were through again, into the darkness, a tight, determined knot moving with a purpose, like an arrowhead plunging through the bowels of an ox.

Kassander bent and held the lamp up as he entered the tent. Karnos followed, mastering the impulse to retch at the stench within.

“What in the world happened here?”

The bloodied man in the torn chiton was holding the flesh of his forearm onto the bone, gore dripping in black strings from between his clenched fingers.

“He came in here like something sent by Phobos. He had a white face, and eyes, eyes like -”

“What happened to these men?” Kassander asked patiently. The inside of the tent was a charnel house, chopped-up corpses steaming as the heat left them. The back of the tent had a rent slashed in it from top to bottom.

“We had a girl, a slave girl the mess had gotten from the wagon-park. We were taking turns on her and he came in out of nowhere – General, his eyes -they were not those of a man. He came in here like a storm, killing right and left. There were others with him. They grabbed him as he was about to finish me off, cut open the back of the tent, and then they all went out that way. They cut us up like we were rabbits on a block, general. They were not men at all.”

The man was in white bloodless shock, his lips blue. “Go to the carnifex,” Kassander told him. “I’ll talk to you later. What’s your name?”

“Lomos of Afteni, your honour.”

“All right Lomos, get out.”

“Wait – where’s the girl?” Karnos demanded.

“She ran. She’s all right. It was just some fun, General, I swear.”

“Go – go on – get that looked at.”

Karnos and Kassander squatted on their haunches amid the carnage, the lamp’s light lending a flicker of mocking movement to the bodies. Karnos counted five men there. It was as close as he had ever come to violent death in his life thus far, and while his stomach was still heaving, his mind studied the scene with a revolted fascination.

“Drepana wounds,” Kassander said, moving the lamp this way and that. “The strawheads use stabbing swords. We must find that girl – perhaps she was not a slave at all, and had relations in camp – it has been known. Come, Karnos.”

The camp was bristling like a kicked anthill now. The two men emerged into the rain to find that something was still going on, out near the eastern lines. A fully armed centurion with a transverse crest halted in front of Kassander.

“General, we think the enemy is behind this -there are infiltrators in the camp, and they’ve been raising hell. We have men hurt and killed all over the eastern end.”

“Phobos!” Kassander hissed. He scraped a hand through his hair and turned to Karnos. “This makes no sense.”

“Is it the precursor to an attack, you think?” Karnos asked. His heart lurched in his chest. Only a few days before, the notion of battle – real warfare, with himself in the thick of it – had seemed like the stuff of distant and slightly absurd conjecture. Here, in the chaos of rain and firelight, with other men’s blood soaked into his feet, it was real and terrifying.

“We must turn out the army, just in case,” Kassander decided. He turned to the centurion, noticing the alfos sigil on his shield. “Are you from Afteni?”

“Yes, general – these are my men butchered here.”

“Pass it along the lines – the men are to arm and stand-to. I want them formed up on the eastern side, by centon.” He turned to Karnos, his big, good natured face something entirely different now.

“We must gather the Kerusia, and rouse out all the contingents at once. There’s no telling what this presages.”

Karnos nodded. “You’re the soldier, Kassander.”

“You’re the man who got us all here, brother. It’s your job to talk to the other city leaders. We must assemble the army at once.”

Rictus, Corvus and Druze collapsed in the sucking mere some half pasang from the enemy camp, and lay in the freezing water, utterly spent.

“It must be near daylight,” Rictus said. “We have to get on, or we’ll be stuck out here like cockroaches on a tabletop when the sun comes up.”

Corvus was wiping blood from his face with the corner of his sodden cloak. “Agreed. Look at them, Rictus; you see what we have done?”

There were torches lit all over the enemy camp now, travelling up and down it like fireflies. Even out here they could hear the surf of noise on the hill, men’s voices raised in an angry clamour.

“Reminds me of stoning a hornet’s nest when I was a boy,” Druze said.

“It was madness,” Rictus said, turning to Corvus. “By rights, we three should be dead in there, or captive.”

“I saw your face when you looked in that tent,” Corvus said, unabashed. “There was a time when you would have done the same thing. You wanted to, tonight.” “I have learned to think of the consequences of my actions.”

“I have learned to trust to my luck sometimes, Rictus. And it has held. Phobos watches over me. He brought us out of there.”

“It was insane,” Rictus persisted.

“If a sane and sensible life includes walking past rape without blinking, then I would rather be dead,” Corvus said, and there was a cold menace to his words that made Rictus and Druze look at one another.

He wiped his eyes with his cloak hem. “Sneer if you will, Rictus.”

“I am not sneering.” Rictus thought of the sack of Isca, of Ab Mirza in the Empire, the excesses of the Ten Thousand.

Once, I was the same, he thought.

“It may be expedient to tolerate what revolts you,” Corvus said, “but where does that leave you, in the end? Better to die fighting for what you know is right and wrong.”

“Black and white,” Rictus said.

Corvus smiled. “Indeed. Druze, my brother, how is that arm?”

“It stings a little.” Druze’s face was pinched with pain.

“Then let’s get you back home.” Corvus put his arm about Druze’s shoulders and pulled him close, then kissed him on his forehead.

“You took that blade for me,” he said.

They staggered through the marshland with the adrenaline of the fight still singing in their nerves. It brought them another pasang or so, before draining away, leaving them wrung-out and thick-headed. At least that was how Rictus felt. Corvus began to talk again, as easily as a man lingering over his wine.

“Twenty sigils; that’s the hinterland cities plus a few more. I saw the alfos and hammer of Arienus there, and Gast and Ferai – even Decanth. But they are not sending their full levies, or Karnos’s army would be twice as big. Druze, give me your arm – that’s it.

“It means they’re holding back. Even now, they are not fully combined. Perhaps they do not rate their own danger as high as they should. I want them all in front of me, the men of every great city of the Macht. If we are to help our friend Karnos gather them all in his ranks, we will have to twist his tail a little more – more than we have done tonight.”

“Boss, I think you went over there looking for a fight,” Druze said.

“Perhaps I did. Did you see their lines? Amateurs, ankle-deep in their own shit, half-drunk most of them, their sentries gathered around fires and blind to the dark. At least we got them out of their blankets for a night.”

He looked back. A grey light was growing in the air, Araian making her slow way up the back of the clouds to the east.

“Dawn is coming, and they’re forming up on the brink of the hill – look, Rictus – they’ll be all morning at it.”

A black line was growing across the land, thickening and lengthening with every minute. Spearmen, moving into battle array.

“It would be rude not to respond,” Corvus said, his pale grin back on his face. “When we get back, I think I’ll have to turn out our lot to say hello.”

Rictus looked at him sharply.

“You mean to bring on a battle?”

“Why not? Warfare is half blood and half bluff, Rictus. Karnos does not know what we’re about, so he’s taking the sensible route; he’ll stand his men there in the rain for as long as he thinks we’re about to come at him. Last night, the curtain went up. Now I intend to amuse the audience further.”

With the rising of the sun, the clouds that had blanketed the sky for so many days finally began to part and shift, as though Araian had become impatient and was peeling them back to see what had become of the world. The rain petered out, and as the light broke broad and yellow across the flooded plain between the two camps it was caught by the pools of standing water and set alight in dazzling flashes of rippled reflection.

The curtain rises, Karnos thought. You would almost think he had planned it that way.

He stood uncomfortable and self-conscious in his panoply, acutely aware that there was not a single dint in his shield or scrape on the bronze greaves strapped to his shins. He had bought a layered linen cuirass in Afteni years before, the best of its kind, the belly reinforced with iron scales, the wings painted crimson and inlaid with black niello work. It had seemed splendid and martial back then; in this camp it now seemed brash and ostentatious when worn amid thousands of heirlooms and hand-me-downs, scraped and patched and rebuilt after numerous campaigns.

Men received their panoplies from their fathers; some were decades old, rebuilt and repaired time and again. The bronze breast-plates could be older still. But Karnos’s father had never been prosperous enough to belong to the ranks of armoured spearmen that formed the backbone of every citizenry.

I am Karnos of Machran, he told himself. It may be that I am not much of a soldier, but it is I who have created this army, and I hold it together. They sneer at me as the slave-dealer from the Mithannon, but it is I who am cheered by the mob of Machran. I have done what none of them could do, for all their noble heritage and their bloodlines and their ancient heirlooms.

He turned around. Some two dozen men faced him, all in full armour, six in the Curse of God. This was the military Kerusia of the Avennan League, and it comprised the fighting leadership of the greatest of the Macht cities. They were all here today in some form or other: Ferai, Avensis, Arienus, even great Pontis from the south, whose membership had been for decades considered purely nominal. They had all brought their citizens to this hill, perhaps not as many as they might have, but they were here.

Kassander was here too, and his smile warmed Karnos, brought him upright in his heavy war-harness. He had never before been so conscious of his girth: amid these lean, ascetic-looking aristocrats he looked soft; even Periklus of Pontis, twenty years older, seemed more athletic.

But he spoke for Machran here, and the seven thousand spears she had sent to the field. His city was more populous than any two of the others combined, and had once been the seat of the ancient monarchy that had ruled all the Macht. The names of those kings had been lost to history, but the legend of them remained, as did the pre-eminence of Machran itself.

“The enemy moves,” Karnos said, raising his voice to be heard over the marching phalanxes on the slopes below. The tents were emptying like a decanted jug, pouring a sea of men out onto the plain of Afteni.

“Last night it seems he conducted a reconnaissance of our camp. Today, he has set his troops in motion. It would seem that his numbers have been exaggerated; we outnumber him three to two, and what is more the ground is too soft for his cavalry. The odds favour us, brothers” – how that word almost stuck in his throat – “and while not all the promised city levies have yet joined us” – he paused, looking his sombre audience up and down with a hint of accusation, a note of disappointment – “we have the power here to defeat this Corvus where he stands. He has made a mistake, one which we must make fatal.”

“You mean to fight here?” Glauros of Ferai asked. “Today?”

“Today.”

“The ground may be bad for horses, but it is too wet for spears also,” Ulfos of Avensis said. “Can you see our morai advancing through that muck?”

Kassander spoke up.

“Corvus is a soldier of great talent. His strength is in manoeuvre. His troops are better drilled than ours and thus more flexible. We must bog him down and bring our numbers to bear.

“This place, at this time, we can rule his cavalry out of the equation, and we cannot be sure of doing that somewhere else, or at some other time. We have a unique chance here. Citizen levies put their heads down and push; it is almost all they are trained to do. We do that here, and our numbers will soak up anything he can throw at us. We have the soldiers of twenty different cities here who have never fought together before – brothers, we cannot let this thing get complicated.

“We advance on a long front, into the floodplain, and there we fight this Corvus to a standstill. It will not be pretty, and Phobos knows there are many standing on this hill today who will be on the pyre by nightfall, but it is the surest way to take our kind of fighting to the enemy.”

There was a silence as this sank in. They respected Kassander; he had been a soldier all his life, a mercenary in his youth before old Banos had brought him in to train up the Machran city guard. But his present position was due to Karnos, whom they despised. Karnos could almost see the wheels turning in their heads as they stood there cultivating their patrician aloofness, Katullos among them.

“Let this not be about politics,” he said. “Whatever you think of me, consider the position as it stands.

We are here, brothers” – this time the word came easier, for he was sincere – “we are here to preserve the liberty of our cities and our institutions from a tyrant. All else is an indulgence.”

He caught Katullos’s eye, and thought he actually saw a flicker of approval there.

“There are men of Hal Goshen in the ranks across the way, and Maronen and Gerrera and Kaurios. These have been conscripted into this Corvus’s army against their will, their cities enslaved and their treasuries emptied. How hard do you think they will fight for the invader?

“We have but to hold the line, and they will see what way their freedoms lie. Without his cavalry, this Corvus is nothing but a master of slaves.” There were a few arch looks at this, from those who knew him. Karnos, whose wealth had been built on the backs of slaves. No matter – he had them now. He and Kassander had swayed them. Thank the goddess.

There would be a battle today, the greatest fought in the Harukush for generations.

And he, Karnos, would have to be in the middle of it.

His own rhetoric had led him to overlook this.

As his father had used to say, with the fatalism of the poor; you want to eat bread, you got to grind the corn.