Corvus

SIXTEEN

On the move at last, Corvus’s army did not present a very martial sight. Except for the absence of women, it looked more like a mass migration than a military formation. The men were bundled in their cloaks, most of them barefoot despite the cold, and scores were dropping out of the column to relieve themselves, squatting in the muck and rain-stippled water of the floodplain. Even the Companion Cavalry were afoot, leading their hangdog mounts off to the flank of the main column, the gaudy cloaks of the Kefren drenched and mudstained so as to blend in to the drear landscape.

The main column straggled along the line of the Imperial Road for over twelve pasangs, and the baggage train was even further back. Only in the van were there compact bodies of formed-up troops, like a fist kept clenched at the end of a withered arm. These were Rictus’s Dogsheads, and Druze’s Igranians. They plodded along with skirmishers thrown out in scattered clumps to their front. The Dogsheads had doubled their red cloaks over their shoulders to keep the hems out of the water, and their shields were slung on their backs, the bronze faces greening in the wet.

“All things considered, Fornyx said, “I prefer winter in the highlands.” He scratched his beard, squeezing the rain out of it.

“No good will come of him pushing the army like this,” Rictus said. “If it were up to me, I’d go into winter quarters in Afteni. It’s rich land around here. We could improve the roads back east and consolidate our hold on places like Hal Goshen, do the thing thoroughly.”

“Teresian hanged three deserters he caught yesterday,” Fornyx said. “Conscript lads from Goshen, been in the army about ten minutes, and missing home. He’s a bloody-minded bastard, that one. Reminds me of you, fifteen years ago.”

“Rules are rules,” Rictus said dryly, rubbing his wounded arm. “Corvus makes his own.”

“Well, they’ve brought him this far I suppose.”

Druze joined them, leaning on a javelin as though it were a staff. Pain had pinched lines about his eyes that had not been there before.

“Hear the news? Karnos is alive after all.”

Rictus was not surprised. “A born survivor, that fellow.”

“He’s on his way back to Machran, it’s said. The Afteni may have surrendered, but some of the hinterland cities are sticking by the League and marching their men back with him.”

“How many?” Rictus asked.

“Enough to make a fight of it.”

“Looks like our triumphal entry into Machran will be problematic,” Fornyx said, and spat into the mud.

“What does he mean to do, Druze?” Rictus asked.

“What do you think? He’s Corvus. He’d chase them to hell if they were still thumbing their noses at him. You mark my words, brothers, before the month is out we’ll be sitting in front of Machran looking at those big white walls and wondering how to get on top of them.”

“You can’t assault Machran, it’s never been done. It’s the strongest city in the world,” Fornyx protested.

Druze grinned. “All the more reason for him to try.” He patted Fornyx on the shoulder. “Cheer up! This is what it takes to make history.”

The army slogged onwards. Rolling out of their sodden blankets and tireless, cheerless camps well before dawn, the men were on the road while still chewing on salt goat and mouldy biscuit. They would march all day, though march was a euphemistic term for their mudsucking, agonising progress.

Then, as night fell, they would go into camp -another euphemism for lying huddled together in knee-deep mud with their cloaks and blankets drawn round their shoulders, their feet spoked towards whatever pitiable fire they could coax into life through the rain.

Corvus shared it all with them. The tents had been left behind with the baggage train, but a team of mules carried his along with the main body. He had it set up each evening with braziers burning bright and hot within, and he would spend part of every night rousing up those who seemed worst off with the flux or the cold, or carrying old wounds, and he would set them on clean straw in his tent, ply them with his own stock of wine, and a store of stories no-one had known he possessed. He did not seem to sleep at all.

The men who were brought to his tent for the night were few in number, considering the size of the army, but they would go back to their comrades with fresh heart, telling of how the general of them all had sat down beside them and poured them wine, piled their plates with fresh meat and bread, and taken the time to hear the stories of their lives.

Good news and bad travels faster through an army than a man can run, and these efforts on Corvus’s part put new heart into the men. It was deftly done, and Rictus, for one, marvelled not only at Corvus’s handling of his many thousands, but at the stamina of the man, who never admitted to weariness, never lost his temper.

Youngsters from Hal Goshen, Goron and Afteni, conscripted into an army which had extinguished their city’s independence, would look up to find the man who had done it all to them enquiring after the state of their feet and their stomachs. After a half hour’s banter, Corvus would slap them on the shoulder as though they were old campaigners he had shared a thousand campfires with, and disappear.

They would be envied by their peers, pressed for stories of the encounter. They would begin to feel part of the massive bristling, brutal mass that was the army around them.

The army needed that boost to its cohesiveness. More and more of the spearmen in the ranks were now conscripts. Some of them had even fought against Corvus in the last battle. His treatment of conquered cities might be lenient by Macht standards, but the levies he imposed upon them were rigidly enforced. Demetrius, marshal of the conscript phalanx, was not a man to take no for an answer. When he enforced a levy, he split up the city centons of the men who had been pressed into service, scattering them throughout his morai, breaking up the identities of cities in the ranks, embedding loyalty within the formations he created to replace them.

It was an efficient but harsh process, and almost every morning when the army moved on they left behind them a gibbet with bodies swinging from it. To be left for carrion was the worst thing a Macht could imagine happening to him after death, and the lesson was quite deliberate – and it had been sanctioned by Corvus, the same smiling fellow who came round the campfires at night enquiring after the state of his new conscripts’ feet.

He appeared at Rictus’s campfire one night, walking in noiselessly from the teeming dark like an apparition.

About the struggling flames were all the usual suspects of Rictus’s acquaintance, plus a few more.

Valerian was there, and Kesero, as always; Fornyx, and Druze, who often dropped by with gossip once the army bedded down for the night. Rictus had come to like the dark Igranian, and he and Fornyx had become like bantering brothers, unable to say anything to one another that was not in some sense a goad. Each knew it, each enjoyed it. They were all listening intently to a particularly vile story that Fornyx was telling, interrupted with great relish every so often by Druze, when they realised that Corvus was just on the brim of the firelight, watching them, his face a white mask with a smile painted across it.

“Fornyx, don’t look at me like that. I’m not your mother.”

“Not with those hips,” Fornyx shot back. “Lord high and mighty – why don’t you pull up a knee and have some wine – I found a skin of it on the road today. It tastes like piss, but so does the water we’ve been drinking this last week.”

Corvus squirted wine into his mouth and swallowed. “That’s an Afteni vintage, if I’m any judge.”

“I think it followed the army a while before it lay down to die,” Fornyx said with a wink.

Corvus handed over the skin. “Here and there, if a skin of wine goes wandering, there’s no harm I suppose. So long as it does not become a habit. This army is made up of soldiers, not thieves.” He smiled.

The lazy drunken light left Fornyx’s eye in an instant. He sat upright, his splayed fingers sinking into the mud as he rose. “Thief is an ugly word. Not one to be thrown around lightly.”

The men around the fire fell silent, watching. The rain was hissing about the logs farthest from the flames, and beyond them the hum of other conversations about other fires went on, a background murmur. But here it seemed as though a silent bell had been struck, and they were listening to its echoes.

Druze broke it. “Tell the truth, I think I pissed in that wineskin earlier. My cock is so shrivelled these days, the neck just about fit. You ever tried to fuck a wineskin, Rictus?”

Rictus smiled, still watching Fornyx and Corvus. “Not me. I’m hung like a donkey. Ask Fornyx – you ever wonder why he’s such a bow-legged bastard?”

The men about the campfire lit up with laughter, and even Fornyx threw his head back with the rest of them. Rictus and Corvus caught one another’s eye, each smiling falsely with their mouths.

“Chief,” Rictus said, rising with a loud groan, “let me escort you away from these degenerates. They’re ill-educated runts. The best part of them ran down their mother’s leg.”

Another chorus, laughter, feigned outrage. The skin tossed about the campfire. Rictus took Corvus by the arm; his bicep was as slender as that of a girl, but made of steel wire.

“Let’s walk the camp, you and I.”

Corvus came with him, the rain falling on them both in the darkness. Rictus was as drunk as cheap wine and short commons could make him. He set his good arm about the younger man’s shoulders, and for some inexplicable reason thought that moment of Rian, and how he had kissed her hair in the upland pasture while they sat there with Eunion talking about the slight young man now walking beside him.

I’m getting old, he thought. Those tall enough to bear the spear are now young enough to be my sons. This boy here, he is a thing of genius, and he teeters on the edge of disaster. I see it now.

Phobos, how I miss them.

The drink set his mind running down courses he would as soon as left alone. He gripped Corvus tighter.

I had a son once, dead and burned. He would not be much younger than this boy here, if he had lived. Is that what I’m doing here?

“I hanged two men tonight,” Corvus said. “For looting and rape. Some farmer’s daughter they dragged back to camp.” His voice was a strained croak. “A time is coming when this army will have to live off the land like a host of locusts. I know that, but there are some things I will never tolerate. That discipline must be learned now, if it is to hold later, when this thing becomes harder.”

“You need to sleep,” Rictus told him.

Corvus smiled. “Sometimes I am afraid that I will go to sleep, and when I awake, the army will be gone, scattered to the winds. It’s getting harder, as we come west. In the east we were more tightly knit. I wish you could have seen us.”

“I wish so too,” Rictus said, honestly. “Tell me something, Corvus – how did it all begin? What was it that brought you to this?”

The smaller man halted and turned to look at him, the strange eyes with that light in them in the night. “This is what I was born for. I was conceived in war, and I am my father’s son.” “And who was your father?”

“Do you not know – have you never guessed? Rictus, I thought you more acute.”

“I’m tired and more than a little drunk, Corvus. Indulge me.”

They began walking again, round the perimeter of the sprawling camp. Corvus nodded to a sentry, spoke to the man and called him by his name.

“My father was once of the Ten Thousand, Rictus. From what my mother tells me he was a great leader, a good man who died needlessly.

“His name was Jason of Ferai.”

Rictus’s arm slipped from the younger man’s shoulders. He halted in his tracks.

“Tiryn,” he said. “Antimone’s pity, she was your mother.”

He remembered. He remembered. Almost a quarter of a century gone by, and still he could recall the happenings of those days in gem-sharp images. This boy’s mother was a beautiful Kufr woman who had been Arkamene’s concubine, abandoned and abused after Kunaksa. Jason had fallen in love with her, and she with him – as unlikely a pairing any story ever saw. Jason had been about to retire, to forsake the red cloak and the Curse of God, and buy a farm somewhere east of the sea, to live out his days in some obscure corner of the Empire, in peace.

Rictus shook his head, baffled with the bright glittering memory of it all.

“Your father,” he said thickly, “He was like a brother to me.”

“And it was because of you he died.”

“Yes, it was. I was a stupid boy, a young fool who had no self control.”

“My mother told me. She never forgave you, Rictus.”

“I do not blame her for that. Is this why you came seeking me, Corvus? Is this some kind of -”

“Revenge?” Corvus laughed. “My friend, I have been hearing stories of you since I was of an age to speak. I hold no ill will for the death of a father I never knew. But I counted always on meeting the famous Rictus, to face the legend and see what truth there was behind the stories.”

Rictus shook his head. “You of all people should know that stories are never anything more than an echo of the truth.”

“I have met the man, and he measures up to the stories, Rictus. If he did not, he would be dead by now.”

Corvus walked away, until the darkness was near swallowing him up. “You are a man of honour, and you know what excesses an army can commit, in victory or defeat. You think as I do, Rictus – you hate the things I hate. I need men like you right now. In the times to come I will need you even more.”

He wiped his forearm across his eyes, and seemed like nothing so much as some lost boy standing in the dark.

“I have fallen between two worlds. I have had to fight to find my way with the Macht – my own people. And yet Ardashir and the Companions see me also as one of their own.”

“You are lucky in your friends, Corvus. As lucky as I once was.”

“That may be. But I still do not belong in the world as I find it, so I have decided to refashion it. The Macht are – we are – ignorant barbarians, compared to the civilization that exists on the far side of the sea. And the Empire is tired and decadent, for all its riches, its ancient culture, its diversity. I think something better can be made of both.”

Rictus blinked, the last of the wine leaving his mind. “What are you saying?”

Corvus turned round and grinned. At once, he had that unearthly look about him again, and the tortured boy had vanished utterly.

“I am thinking aloud, daydreaming in the night. Pay me no heed, Rictus.”

He advanced on the older man. “If you had command of the army, what would you do now -how would you proceed against Machran?”

Rictus rubbed his chin, collecting himself. Corvus’s eyes on him were unsettling.

“I would take the hinterland cities, first off. They’re broken up at the moment, demoralised. They should be ripe fruit. Then I would sit out the winter in them, divide up the army to garrison the major cities and prepare to attack Machran in the spring. By that time the new levies will have settled in and the men will be rested and ready for another fight. Machran will be a hard nut to crack open. We must prepare ourselves for it.”

“I agree on that. But if we wait until spring, the untaken League cities, and Machran itself, will have time to recover from the shock of their defeat. In all likelihood, we would have our work to do all over again. Given time, Karnos will reconstitute the League – he is a resourceful man.”

“Then what would you do?”

Corvus smiled. “Were I Rictus, I would do what you suggest. It is the sensible thing. But I am Corvus.

“We will move on Machran with all we have, at once, invest the city through the winter if we have to. I want the thing over and done with by the spring. We have them on the run right now – let us keep them that way.”

Rictus shook his head. “We don’t have enough men.”

“Numbers aren’t everything, if an army is all motivated by one spirit, one idea. There is a thing I have found about the Macht since I began leading them and fighting them; something that is different from the peoples of the Empire. They will fight for an idea, an abstraction – if that idea is powerful enough. It is what makes them a great people.”

“It will take more than an idea to scale the walls of Machran.”

“Oh, I know. Parmenios is working on it. For a fat little man with inky fingers, he has some ideas that would startle you.” Corvus turned to walk away.

“Best continue with my rounds. I have not yet spoken to Ardashir this evening…” He paused, turned about. “Rictus, do you know why Fornyx hates me?”

The question took Rictus off guard. “I -”

“Because he loves you, and he thinks I have brought you to this by threat of death. You and I know different. There is nowhere in the world you would rather be right now than here with this army.”

Corvus raised a hand, almost like a salute, and then walked off into the darkness.

In the days of marching that followed, the land rose under their feet and the rain began to ease. They came upon signs of the retreating League army: broken wagons, dead mules and discarded items of personal gear littering the roadside.

With the improvement in the weather the men’s spirits lifted, and they made better time. By now, all the food that they had raided from the League camp’s stockpiles had been eaten, and they were on short rations. Corvus finally sanctioned a series of foraging expeditions, led by the mounted troops of the Companions. The two thousand cavalry split up into half a dozen strong columns and criss-crossed the countryside for pasangs on either side of the Imperial road.

They were gone for several days, though couriers were sent back to the main body by Ardashir to keep Corvus informed of any enemy movements he had sighted.

The army had become a vast, hungry, short-tempered horde, kept in check by the personality of its leader and his senior officers. Those who had campaigned before were philosophical about the shortages, but the new conscripts were especially restive. Watching Demetrius at work in the camp during the evenings, prowling his lines like a cyclopean schoolmaster, Rictus was reminded of his own efforts to keep the Ten Thousand in check on their long march west. It was like holding a wolf by the ears.

Ardashir’s columns returned in time for the first lowland snow of the winter, a skiffle of white that was soon trampled into the earth by the passing thousands.

His horse-soldiers made their way into camp on foot, leading their mounts, for the big animals were weighed down with the pickings of the countryside round about. Herds of goats and cattle and pigs trotted with them, and that night the army feasted as though it were a festival; the men erected spits above their campfires and gorged on fresh meat, baked flatbreads, and the fragrant green oil of the Machran hinterland. Morale lifted, and centons gathered about the night-time fires began to talk of the riches of Machran and what their share of them might be.

Arkadios hove into view on their horizon, and the army formed up for battle before its walls. The usual terms were offered, and accepted with stiff formality by what remained of the city’s Kerusia.

But it was a hollow gain. The fighting men of the city had left for Machran, along with a large part of the population. Arkadios was a shell of itself, and the garrison that Corvus left there was met with sullen hostility. The woman of the city spat at the soldiers of Corvus, and assured them that their stay would be short.

The army marched on, making good time now, and the conscript spears were at last beginning to cohere in their new morai. They kept pace with the veterans, listened to their stories, and began to take something like pride in themselves. After all, they were part of something grand and important, witnesses to one of the great moments of history.

More than that, they were now part of an army which had a tradition of victory. The Macht had been fighting amongst themselves for time out of mind; it was no unnatural thing to make war against their own kind. And they were at least on the winning side.

They had not yet considered where victory might take them, or what it might do to the world they knew.

Corvus was hurling the army across the hinterland like a spear. On all sides, cities whose men had been bloodied in the battle of Afteni stood unconquered, but he ignored them all, even ancient Avennos to the south. He had momentum now, and they were shackled by the inertia of their defeat.

Ardashir’s foraging columns reported no sign of organised resistance, in the lands round about. The hinterland cities had shut their gates and were awaiting events. They were waiting to see what would happen before the walls of Machran.

Rictus and his Dogsheads were in the van with the Igranians as usual, when a mounted patrol came cantering down the long slope ahead and reined in just in front. Corvus was there, and Ardashir, the two of them as bright-eyed as if they had been drinking.

Corvus threw up a hand. “Rictus, come forward. There’s something over the hill you have to see!

Fornyx, pass word down the line – all senior officers to the front of the column at once.”

Fornyx raised a hand. “Off you go,” he said to Rictus. “Don’t keep the little fellow waiting.”

“Go piss up a rope, Fornyx,” Rictus said, and took off up the hillside at a trot, his heavy shield banging on his back.

He stopped, gasping, at the crest of the hill. A knot of horsemen had gathered there, and Corvus had dismounted. Rictus knew the spot – there was a stone waymarker here at the side of the road.

Machran loomed in the distance, a vast stain upon the land, the smoke from ten thousand hearths rising up to cloud the air above it. A famous view – Ondimion’s plays had scenes set on this spot, and Naevius had made a song about it.

Corvus and Ardashir stood marvelling at the sight.

“Machran at last,” Corvus said. “After all this time.”

Rictus suddenly realised. “You’ve never seen it before.”

“Never – just read the plays and heard the songs and listened to men speak of it over their wine. I have maps of this city; I know its geography as though it were written across my dreams. I know the men who rule it, their names and families. But this is the first time I have seen it for myself – Ardashir too. I have been travelling years to stand at this spot, Rictus.”

“I wish you joy of the sight,” Rictus said with a smile. Here was the boy again, alight with the wondrous marvels of the world. There was something… unspoilt about Corvus. It was more than the mere enthusiasm of youth – it was a kind of appetite. He would always find the new experiences of his life to be vivid and memorable and worth the cost, like a man who has a fine nose for wine, who finds in it subtleties and fragrances that others miss. What was the line Gestrakos had used? Eunion was fond of quoting it.

“A man who has a passion will always find life to his taste,” Rictus said aloud.

Corvus turned to him at once. “A man who cares for nothing is a man already dead,” he said, finishing the couplet. “Rictus, you surprise me. I had not thought you a philosopher.”

“A friend quoted me that, a long time ago.”

“Then he was a wise man. For soldiers, the sayings of Gestrakos are a window on our lives.”

The head of the column reached them, and Fornyx raised a hand to halt the Dogsheads. Behind them, the line of marching men ran as far as the eye could see, and the weak winter sun ran along it, raising sparks and flashes off spearheads, helms, the brazen faces of shouldered shields.

“We are what – four pasangs from the walls?” Corvus estimated. “I will pitch the command tent on the slope ahead. Rictus, your men shall bivouac forward a pasang, and Druze’s Igranians with you. The rest will file in behind. I must inspect the line of the walls close-to before I decide how to post the rest of the army.”

“They’ve seen us,” Ardashir said. “Look; they’re closing the gates.”

Rictus could just make out the fall of shadow in the wall as the massive South Prime Gate was slowly pushed shut in the distance. It was something he had never seen before: Machran shutting its gates. He looked at the endless snake of the high fortifications running across the land for pasangs, and shook his head at the thought of assaulting such a place.

“The countryside is empty,” Ardashir said, shading his pale eyes with his hand. “There’s not a man or a beast to be seen for pasangs. It would seem Karnos has prepared the city somewhat.”

“I expected no less,” Corvus said. He mounted his horse, and the animal – a coal-black gelding which made him look small as a child on its back – threw up its head and snorted as it caught his mood.

“Bring up the baggage train, and deploy the army along this ridge, just in case he wants to come out.”

“He won’t come out,” Rictus said.

Corvus nodded. “I know – but we must show willing, and besides, it’s a grand thing to see an army file into line of battle. It will give the men on those walls something to think about.”

He bent and patted the neck of the restive gelding, crooning to it with words of Kefren. Then he straightened and flashed a wide grin at them all.

“Brothers,” he said, “today the siege of Machran begins.”