Corvus

TWO

AS Rictus had predicted, the snow came that night, drifting down soundlessly in the black hours. He rose well before dawn to poke the ashes of the fire into red warmth again and toss kindling upon the pulsing glow of the embers. The dogs rose beside him, stretching and yawning. Old Mij licked his face and would not leave him alone until he had had his ears well scratched, while Pira, the young bitch, rolled on the floor, arching her back like a cat.

He opened the door, shivering in his well-worn cloak, and in the pre-dawn dark the snow stretched grey and unbroken across the valley before him. Above the lip of the mountains red Haukos still sailed, but his brother Phobos had almost set.

Rictus crunched barefoot across the virgin snow, the dogs trotting after. In the blank whiteness only the river seemed dark, prattling noisily to itself.

Rictus’s eye was caught by tracks in the snow – a hare, and heading down to the brim of the river was the spoor of an adventurous vole not yet ready for its winter sleep. The dogs snuffled along the riverbank, lapping at the water.

Rictus knelt beside them in the chill mud and dipped his hands in the flow, dashing the water about his head and neck. The bite of it made him gasp, but brought him fully awake.

When he returned, the household was coming to life. The fire was a yellow roar now, and Aise was tending a pot suspended above it; barley porridge, by the smell. The new slave, Styra, was bringing in more wood and Fornyx was sat at the kitchen table, last night’s drinking dragging down his face.

“You’re too damn sprightly looking,” he told Rictus. “You don’t drink enough – never did. Lady” – this to Aise – “Would there be any more of that fine yellow wine to chase down the humours?”

“Porridge will serve you better,” Aise said, and clicked a bowl down in front of him.

“Where are the girls?” Rictus asked her. She did not look up from the pot as she replied.

“Out milking the yard-goats. They’ll be in presently. Eat, husband, while there’s heat in it.”

He ate standing, out of long habit, scooping up the glutinous stuff with his fingers, until he caught Fornyx’s meaningful look, and took a horn spoon off the table instead.

The girls came in with pails of warm goat’s-milk, chattering like starlings, though Ona went wide-eyed and silent when she saw her father standing in his red warrior’s cloak. Eunion was close behind them, wrapped in the greasy sheepskin he’d worn in cold weather since Rictus had first known him. All at once the kitchen was alive and crowded and noisy, the table framed by faces, the tick and clatter of earthenware. Fornyx joined in the morning banter with Rian as though he had never been away, and the dogs sat silently behind the two girls until their patience bore fruit in the form of bread crusts soaked in milk.

Rictus remained standing by the door, his spoon circling his empty bowl mechanically. He watched them without a word, like some guardian apparition, and felt an inexplicable ache near his heart. This was his family. He had brought it together, had made it himself. The girls were of his own blood, and the others were so bound to him by memories and the sharing of the years that they were as good as kin.

Why, then, did he sometimes feel that he was on the outside of it, looking in?

Eunion had been a tutor of literature before Rictus and his men had defeated his city’s army in battle. A tithe of the defeated citizen-soldiers had been sold into slavery as part of the negotiations which had concluded the war – some petty little affair away to the west of Machran – Rictus could no longer even remember the name of the city that had hired him to battle Eunion’s people.

The defeated had drawn lots, to see who would be sold, and Eunion had simply been unlucky. He had a beautiful singer’s voice, and he knew every ballad and lay of the western lowlands; for this, and his learning, Rictus had purchased him, to preserve him from the slave-agents who picked like crows in the aftermath of every battlefield. A simple decision, made on the whim of the moment. It had kept Eunion from the mines, and had gained for Rictus the friendship of an exceptional man, as upright and decent as it was possible to be in this fractured world.

Fornyx had taken scarlet with a brute mercenary centon while still little more than a boy. He had been badly used by them, made into a camp servant. Rictus’s own centons had destroyed them in a hard, bitter fight near the Kuprian coast. It had been autumn, the campaigning season almost over, and the two little armies had fought in a rainstorm, churning the ground beneath their feet into a mire in which the wounded were trampled and suffocated.

When the battle was over, Rictus had discovered the boy Fornyx busily smashing out the brains of his own centurion with a stone. He had recognised the look in the boy’s eyes – had seen it in the eyes of a host of others like him up and down the war-torn cities of the Harukush. Once, his own face had looked the same. So he recruited the undersized Fornyx into the ranks of his own centons, and in time the boy had become a man, and had proved more faithful than any hound, though possessed of an acerbic wit that could ignite men in a roar of laughter or set them at each other’s throats in the time it took to drink a bowl of wine.

There had been a woman, in later years, and a daughter, but these had been killed by goatmen while travelling to join Fornyx here, at Andunnon. It was the only time Rictus had ever seen his friend weep, as they burned the pitiful remains of his family on a hasty pyre. After that, it was as though some light had gone out of him.

Not until both Rictus’s own daughters had been born had Fornyx regained some of his old flash and fire, as though Rian and Ona were in some way a reparation for the wife and daughter he had lost. He had lived at Andunnon ever since – Aise had insisted. Fornyx was senior centurion of the Dogsheads, second in command. He was a natural leader, accustomed to commanding the most hardbitten of men. But Rictus’s daughters knew him as Uncle Fornyx, who brought them back trinkets from his travels and told them tall tales that made them squeal with laughter.

He was the closest thing to a brother that Rictus had ever known.

And then there was Aise. Rictus watched her sit by the fire as was her wont, eyes softening as she listened to Fornyx elaborate on one of his preposterous yarns at the table, and the girls listened agog.

Aise was the spoils of war, a slave-girl given to Rictus in part-payment for a debt. He had been hired by a poor highland town to defend it through a long winter from the ambitions of its more prosperous neighbour. The job done, the town had little in the way of coin to pay with, and so had given over what it could – cattle, pig-iron, wine, and slaves.

The tall, beautiful dark-haired girl who carried herself like a queen had caught Rictus’s eye at once, something the town elders had no doubt been counting upon. She was indeed a beauty, but it was not that which had drawn Rictus to her – he had seen beautiful slave-girls by the thousand in the course of his campaigns. No, it was the way she held herself, the stillness that seemed to be about her.

In the first few weeks of his ownership, Rictus had not even attempted to bed her. He had seen what rape did, and though there were many men who regarded it as simply a part of the process of warmaking, he hated it with a cold fury. He had killed his own men for it before now. Instead, he treated Aise with courtesy, almost as though she were his guest. He was not even sure why.

At least, it was not something he could have put into words that made sense – even to Fornyx. But it was around the campfires in those early days that he had looked at the faces about him: Fornyx, Eunion, and then Aise, and had come to realise he had found something rare here, or had a chance to. A kind of wholeness perhaps.

He was not without self-awareness; he knew, deep down, that he was trying to recreate the family he had once lost, years before in Isca’s fall. But that did not mean he was wrong.

When he had first bedded Aise, it was because she had come to him of her own accord, and that had made her even more singular in his eyes. They joined together out of curiosity and a kind of mutual hunger. Perhaps she, too, had been trying to recreate something of a previous life, one she had lost forever.

Less than a month later, Rictus freed both Aise and Eunion, while Fornyx rolled his eyes and the other centurions took bets on how long the pair would stick around.

And that had been twenty years ago.

Aise looked up from her bowl at him. Her magnificent mane of hair was bound up tight at the back of her head, iron-grey right through now, and there were dark lines running from the corners of her nose. The shapeless long-hemmed chiton she wore made her almost sexless, and her hands were raw-knuckled and coarse with the work of a highland farm. But her eyes were the same, that sword-edge grey so rare in the lowlands. Like himself, she had the eyes of a highlander.

A bubble of laughter burst round the table, Eunion throwing back his head like a boy. Fornyx rose, wiping his mouth, the joke still in his eyes. “Ah, you’re a whimsical lot, to see humour in the tale of my mishaps. Lady, I thank you for the food – I believe I’ll go look upon the day outside, and perhaps add something to the flow of the river. Will you join me, brother?”

Rictus cast one more look at his wife, but she was clearing the table, issuing orders to the girls and to Eunion, calling for the slaves. The machinery of the farm was ticking smoothly. His return had barely made it pause.

“I’ll join you. I’m not needed here.” The flat ugly tone of his voice made Aise stop and look at him once more, but whatever she was thinking remained tucked out of sight behind her eyes.

The sun was up over the mountains now and the valley was a sharp-edged glare of white and blue. The dogs crunched through the thin snow-crust, sniffing at invisible trails of scent. Rictus stood beside Fornyx as the smaller man pissed into the river, eyes closed and smiling.

“Give her time,” he said to Rictus, then walked upstream before kneeling in the snow to wash.

“Time for what – to begin missing me?”

“We were away a year – more than a year. She is mistress here, Rictus. Then you come home and throw things out of kilter. It’ll take time, but you’ll both come to it in the end – you always do.” More quietly he said: “Every year the same.”

“I heard that, you little squint.”

“Well, good. Listen to yourself – fretful as a child. In three days Ona will have her arms around your neck, Aise will have a kiss for you morning and night, and Rian will still think her father a god among men.”

“I’m a fool, perhaps, thinking of retiring, of staying here year round.”

“You’re a fool, certainly, but not because you lack the love of your family. You’re a damn fool if you think you’ll ever find it enough in life to herd goats and plant barley.”

“It was good enough for my father, and he was Iscan.”

“It’s not Isca.” Fornyx straightened, puffing. “Phobos, that water’s cold! Rictus, that red cloak on your back is all you’ve ever known – Antimone’s pity, you were the leader of the Ten Thousand! And for good or ill, you always will be. I’d bet you a year’s pay that the next war you come to hear of, you’ll be moist as a girl to get your legs around it.”

“And what about you, you black-bearded little weasel – have you no hankering to settle yourself and -” He almost said it. Watch your children grow up. It was in the very air between them.

“If I have a home,” Fornyx said, grave now, “then it is here. And the day you hang up the scarlet I will do the same. I would serve under no other but you.”

“No-one else would have you.”

Fornyx grinned. “Don’t be too sure. To have been the Second of Rictus of Isca, that counts for a lot in this world.” He hesitated.

“I do envy you, though.”

“Envy me what?” Rictus asked. It is Aise, he thought. It has always been Aise. But Fornyx’s next words surprised him.

“What you saw, in your youth. The places you marched, the world you wandered across. You were part of a legend, Rictus, and you saw sights few of the Macht have ever imagined. The land beyond the sea, and the Empire upon it. For all of us it is nothing more than a story, or the words in a song. But you were there. You fought at Kunaksa. You survived the charge of the Great King’s cavalry, and the long march home. I would give anything to have been part of that.”

“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.