Corvus

EIGHT

Druze halted, panting, and held up a hand. He made the hand into a fist. At once the column behind him bifurcated, splitting to left and right of the road in a movement reminiscent of a shoal of fish. The men formed a line, caught their breath, and began weighing the heft of the javelins in their hands.

“Some stubborn bastard has decided to make a stand,” he said.

The man to his right, a gangling thatch-haired youth with eyes the colour of cobweb, tossed his javelin up in the air and caught it again, out of sheer lightness of heart, it seemed.

“I hope so, chief. Antimone’s tits, I hope so. The last good fight I had was with a whore in Maronen.”

Druze grinned. He clapped the youth on the shoulder. “That’s right, brother – and I hear she won.”

A crackle of laughter ran along the ranks. The Igranians stood easily, tightening their belts, retying sandals, fingering the cruel iron points of their javelins. Each man carried a bundle of them, and these they now untied, checking the shafts for warp, stabbing them into the ground to clean the blades. They wore the felt tunics of the inner mountains for the most part, and rough wool chlamys whose folds they now tied up under their left armpits to leave their throwing arms free.

A pasang away on the road their path was blocked by a body of spearmen. These had formed up in four ranks and extended four to five hundred paces. At least sixteen hundred men, Druze thought, measuring them with his bright black eyes.

“They’ll be out of Goron, that city on the crag to the west,” he said. All humour left his face. He watched the enemy phalanx closely, noting their intervals, they way they stood, how they held their spears. These small details meant something. If spearmen kept their shields on their shoulders long before battle was joined, it meant they were nervous. If they left the ranks to piss or shit instead of doing it where they stood, it meant they were not well-drilled.

“These lads are not bad,” he said, noting the stillness in the enemy formation, and the fact that slaves to their rear were passing water-skins up the files.

The flanks of the phalanx were protected by woods, half a bowshot on either side of the road. Hazel woods, stark with winter but with enough brush remaining to act as a concealer. There might be more men in those trees, hunkered down on the cold ground with the snow numbing their bellies.

“Send back word to Corvus,” Druze said. “We’ll hold here for now. Gabinius, take a couple of fists down to the treeline and see if there’s anything more than rabbits in there. I want no surprises.”

“You got it, chief.” The thatch-haired youth sped off at a run, calling out to the men nearest him. Eight of them peeled out of the line and followed him down the roadside at an easy lope, black against the snow-covered ground. Druze blew on his hands.

“A cold day to die,” he said.

Down the vast column, Rictus strode along with the tireless pace of the old campaigner. As far as the eye could see the road was choked with marching men in both directions, and from their labouring bodies a steam rose in the chill air so that they were marching in a fog of their own making. There was little to see except the backs of the men in front.

They were two day’s march out of Hal Goshen, and Corvus was pushing the pace hard. The men’s armour was piled in the baggage wagons and they carried only what they had to on their backs, using their spears as staffs. The Dogsheads were an unmistakable scarlet vertebra in the backbone of the army.

Horses cantering past on either side of the trudging infantry, like ghosts from a swifter world. A knot of them reined in, the snow flying from their hooves, the animals snorting and white-streaked with sweat. Huge horses, larger than any the Macht countries ever bred. Atop one, a gaudily cloaked figure raised a hand. The Kufr, Ardashir.

“Rictus! Corvus wants you and the Dogsheads at the front of the column at once. Get your gear from the wagons and arm up – we have work to do!”

The Kufr’s long, shining face broke out in a grin, and as he sped off again his long black hair flew out behind him like his horse’s mane.

Fornyx grimaced. “I was just getting ready to piss.”

“Piss in your own time,” Rictus told him. “Valerian, Kesero – break ranks, off the road. Time to earn our pay, brothers.”

The line of the army’s march had mushroomed out, formations wheeling left and right of the road and taking up position in extended ranks, out to the trees. This was the old Imperial road of Machran, which had come all the way from Idrios, and the cities along its length kept it maintained and cut back the brush and woodland on either side of it to foil the designs of brigands and goatmen. Rictus led his centons off the road and marched them smartly past the waiting files of the army, aware of the hundreds of eyes watching his red-cloaked men.

“Tighten it up, you plodding fucks,” Fornyx quipped in an undertone. “Let’s make it look good for the crowd.”

There was a gap, where the vanguard had halted, and then beyond it were Druze’s Igranians and a body of the Companion Cavalry. The personal raven banner of Corvus snapped busily in the wind.

“There you have it,” Corvus said, dismounting and joining Rictus as his men reformed into line. “Goron’s citizen’s have decided to make a fight of it. Two morai of spearmen and a cloud of light troops hidden in the trees. Druze has sounded out the position; it can’t be turned without a long flank march over the hills, so we’ll pitch straight into it. You will assault with your Dogsheads, Rictus, with one of Teresian’s morai following you in. Druze will flush out the woods with his Igranians, and when the line is ruptured, I’ll take in the cavalry. Any questions?”

Rictus blinked rapidly, looking at the wall of spearmen ahead. Their shields were emblazoned with the gabios sigil for their city and their line had the not-quite-straight aspect of citizen soldiers.

It was a good plan – the boy with the painted nails knew what he was doing.

“I’ll hit their left,” he told Corvus. “Tell Teresian to take his mora in right, but slow, so I hit first. That’ll scramble them for him.”

“I’ll link with you on the left as you go in, and cover your flank,” Druze said. There was none of his mocking humour on display now; he was in deadly earnest. For the first time, Rictus warmed to him.

“All right, then. Let us join the Dance,” Rictus said, the age old aphorism of the Macht going into battle.

“Now we’ll see how Rictus of Isca fights,” Corvus said. And he had on his face an expression of such bright, intense happiness that he did not seem quite sane.

The Dogsheads fell into position in minutes. On their right, Teresian’s men took rather longer to dress their lines. These were Corvus’s regulars, and Teresian himself was going to take the mora in. One thing about Corvus’s officers; they all liked to lead from the front.

A few observations were exchanged between the two bodies of spearmen, with reflections on the chastity of one another’s mothers and other witticisms, until Fornyx put a stop to it.

“Save it for the buggers up ahead, you mouthy bastards,” he called out.

Rictus stepped forward of the line. For a moment he stood there, a black armoured statue in a red cloak, face hidden by the close helm, the transverse crest bristling in the wind. Then he raised his spear, and as the Macht behind him stepped out he joined the front rank, and the five understrength centons of the Dogsheads began their advance.

It began as a murmur, a hum upon their breath. But then Valerian struck out with the Paean, a lone, ringing voice in the midst of the phalanx. Others joined him, until the entire formation was singing it, the measured, mournful beat of the ancient melody keeping their feet in time. To their right, Teresian’s mora joined in.

And to their front, the men of Goron took up the song also, so that the whole battlefield was singing it, as though the two sides were coming together in harmony instead of mutual murder. It made of the coming fight a proper thing, a ceremonial event.

For Rictus, the Paean was something different. He no longer joined in the singing, and had not since returning from the Empire all those years before. He had never forgotten the second day of Kunaksa, when the Ten Thousand had sung that song, believing they were marching to their doom but advancing anyway, to make themselves worthy of memory. It had kept them going that day, had reminded them of who they were.

He no longer liked to sing it when fighting against his own people.

The enemy line levelled their spears and began to advance to meet the Dogsheads.

“Shoulder!” Rictus shouted, and his own men brought the long spears up so that the wicked points of the aichmes were jutting out to their front. The files were six men deep; usually they fought eight to a file, but Rictus had wanted to lengthen the line somewhat, and they were still a deeper formation than the more numerous enemy.

The men of Goron had made an error, trying to cover all the ground between the woods. They had thinned out their centons, the classic mistake of amateurs worried about their flanks.

Rictus turned his head this way and that, taking in the positions. In a few minutes he would be in the middle of the othismos, and blind to everything except the man in front who was trying to kill him. He saw Druze’s men going into the woods like a crowd of screaming fiends to his left, and saw the hidden skirmishers of the enemy rise out of the brush to meet them. His flank was covered.

“Charge!” he shouted. And the Dogsheads broke into a run.

They kept formation; they had drilled and drilled this a thousand times over the years. No citizen army could maintain their ranks at a run; they grew scrambled and ragged, lost the compact momentum that was the key to phalanx fighting. But Rictus’s men were professionals, the finest of their calling. They ate up the ground at a fast lope, still singing, and smashed into the enemy formation with an appalling crash of bronze.

Shields smashing against shields. An aichme thrust past Rictus’s eyes. Another went through his horsehair crest.

He gave a grunt as the weight of the men behind piled into him, lifting his feet off the ground for a moment. He jabbed out with his spear, ignoring the shrieking enemy spearman who was pressed up close to his face, stabbing into the third and fourth ranks.

He killed the file-closer with a jab to the eyes, slotting his spearhead into the man’s helm, the blade grating on bronze and bone as he pulled it out again. Blood sprayed warm across his forearm. The stench of excrement rose as men lost control of their bowels.

The Dogsheads shunted backwards a huge segment of the enemy’s line. Men went down, stumbling, disappearing in the scrum.

The enemy ranks became a formless mob of yelling figures, painted with blood, jabbing wildly with their spears. There was a sound like the clatter of a hundred blacksmiths at work. A broken spearhead arced through the air, the shaft a splintered flower.

The Dogsheads worked mechanically, stabbing out at eye-slits, naked throats, raised arms, picking carefully the flesh they wanted to ruin. This was shearing the sheep. A man had to stand in the ranks and take it. There was no running away for those at the forefront of the fighting. They lowered their heads into their shields and dug in their heels.

Rictus heard his centurions shouting above the clamour of the fight.’ “Push, you bastards, push!” Fornyx yelled, and the men in the rear ranks set their shields in the backs of the men in front and obeyed him.

Another shunt forward, the crushing weight of the men behind and the men in front.

Without the protection of his black- cuirass Rictus would not have been able to breathe in that packed mill of murder. Men passed out and were carried upright in the midst of it. There were bodies underfoot now, abandoned shields, and the ground was being trampled into muck beneath them, becoming mired with blood and other, baser fluids.

“One more!” Rictus shouted with what breath remained in his bruised lungs. “Dogsheads, forward!”

He could feel it, like a sudden change in the weather. The men of Goron were faltering; the pressure to his front was growing less. He met the eyes of the man pinned against him, and saw the doubt and defeat in them. He grinned.

“You are a dead man,” he said, and laughed.

The enemy line broke as the Dogsheads pushed forward a third time. First the men at the rear dropped their shields and ran, and then the panic spread. In seconds, the battle opened out. The enemy formation lost all order, became a mob in which every man thought only of himself. The pressure eased. The man pinned against Rictus backed away one pace, two, still looking into his eyes. He was a good soldier – it was why he was a file leader. He did not want to run, to drop his shield in shame and present his back to the aichmes of his foes. He was weeping.

Finally, when those behind him had left him, he turned to follow them, to run for the safety of his city walls. When he turned, Rictus stabbed him through the back of his neck, feeling the spearhead crunch through the man’s spine. He went down bonelessly.

Rictus stepped over him. The entire enemy line was in flight. To the right, Teresian’s men were following up with a chorus of wild halloos and shrieks of laughter: wordless, mindless noise, both exultation and relief. Rictus raised his spear, breathing fast as a sprinter.

“Halt!” He shouted. “Reform!”

The Dogsheads came together, tightened their ranks, and stood motionless amid a tide-wrack of bodies, piles of discarded shields. The men fleeing them were no longer soldiers, and not worth killing. The only way to catch up with them in any case would have been to drop their own shields. They had done enough.

Rictus stepped forward of the front rank, stabbed the sauroter of his spear into the ground and unhelmed, feeling the blessed chill of the winter’s day ease his throbbing skull. Fornyx joined him. His black beard was matted with blood.

“It’s always the third shove that does it,” he said, and nudged a corpse with his foot. It was the man Rictus had speared through the neck. He wore a bracelet of dried grass about his wrist, the kind a daughter might plait for her father on a summer afternoon. Rictus looked away from it.

There was a thunder on the air, a tremble felt through the soles of the feet. Teresian’s men opened up their ranks to the right, and through the gap came a torrent of cavalry, Corvus leading them with his personal banner snapping above his head. The spearmen roared as the Companions swept past, tall Kufr on big horses with bright coloured cloaks opening out from their shoulders like flags.

They took off after the fleeing men of Goron, a cavalcade of death, and began spearing them from behind as they ran. Soon the open ground leading up to the city in the distance was black with scattered bodies, and still the Companions hunted them, killing scores, hundreds, riding them down like greyhounds slaughtering hares.

“That is murder,” Fornyx said, his teeth bared with distaste.

Druze joined them. His Igranians were running in the wake of the cavalry, looting the dead, spearing the wounded, clearing up like jackals in the wake of a pride of lions. He offered Rictus and Fornyx a wineskin. Bitter highland wine, like that Rictus made at Andunnon. Druze wiped his mouth. His dark face was shining with sweat.

“I know what is in your mind,” he said, “but if you fight against Corvus, this is what happens. These men had only to stay within their walls, accept our terms, and they would be alive with their families today.”

“War has its conventions,” Rictus said. “One does not pursue to the death when the foe is beaten.”

“He is different,” Druze retorted. “His wars are different. It is why he wins them.”

Fornyx took a long squirt of the wine and handed the skin back to Druze, his gaze never leaving the receding slaughter. “Yes, he’s quite some general, our little Corvus. But it’s one thing to beat an outnumbered band of citizens, something else to face up to the army of the League.”

Druze nodded. “I know this. And you know what, Fornyx? He is looking forward to it. He wants it with all his heart. And the more men the League brings against us, the happier he will be. Sometimes I think his sire is Phobos himself. He has no fear.”

“All men fear something,” Rictus said. “Even if it’s not death.”

“Then he fears failure,” Druze acknowledged. “More than anything else. More than death.”

The cavalry reined in perhaps two pasangs to their front. A few isolated, running dots were all that remained of the sixteen hundred men who had faced Rictus in line what seemed like only minutes before. The city of Goron had just lost its menfolk. All of them.

“What will he do now, sack the city?” Fornyx asked.

Druze shook his head. “That is not his way. He cannot abide violence done to women or children. I think maybe something happened to him in boyhood, to his own people. It is the thing he hates most.”

Rictus felt a strange relief. He had seen enough cities sacked before this, and not just his own. He loathed the vileness which came out in even the best of men when all the rules were taken away, when the basest of appetites were freely indulged.

“How did you come to serve him?” he asked Druze, wondering. The dark Igranian did not seem a man who had ever been defeated. He had the self assurance of someone always on the winning side.

“Corvus killed my father,” Druze said simply. “He beat my people in open battle one fine day west of Idrios. His Companions rode us down like they did these men today.”

“Phobos!” Fornyx exclaimed.

Druze smiled his dark smile. “My father was a fine warrior, but also a brigand and a braggart. I loved him, but I was not blind to his failings.

“He fought Corvus sword to sword, and fell. And afterwards Corvus gave him a funeral worthy of a king. My people are not city-dwellers. You would call them uncivilized, and you would be right; but they can appreciate greatness in a man just as you can. Corvus has it. And me, I wish to be there when it comes to full flower – for the adventure of it. I want to be part of the story.”

Rictus and Fornyx looked at one another, and Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.

The army camped that night outside the walls of Goron, their tent-lines greater than the city itself. During the afternoon, Corvus had had his men gather up all the dead from along the road and set them on a pyre, to be burned the next day. All through the night, the women of the city trickled down to the hill of bodies to keen and wail and mourn their husbands, their fathers, their sons, and their cries carried over the camp of the army like an accusation, as though Antimone herself were hovering overhead, black wings beating in the darkness, her tears falling unseen upon the snow.

Rictus was called to Corvus’s tent some time before the middle watch of the night, and entered to find most of the high command there, seated around the map-table with clay cups in their hands, braziers glowing bright and hot about them. Corvus was striding up and down, his long black hair loose. In the uncertain light of the hanging lamps he looked like some beautiful exotic girl dressed in a man’s chiton. The silver weapon scars on his forearms marred the image.

He greeted Rictus with that peculiarly winning smile, like that of a son who thinks he has pleased his father.

“Your men lived up to their reputation today, Rictus. That is the first time I have ever seen a spear phalanx keep its formation at a run. You have given Teresian’s spears something to think about.”

Teresian himself, a younger version of Rictus, did not seem particularly thoughtful. He stared at Rictus with veiled hostility, but held up a wine-cup in a grudging gesture of respect.

“We should not have had to fight today,” Corvus said, resuming his pacing of the tent. “It was stupidity on their part – what did they hope to accomplish?”

Anger lifted his voice a tone. He sounded almost shrill. “I have made an object lesson of the men of Goron – that example will travel ahead of us. I’m optimistic that we’ll have no more futile stands before we come to the hinterland of Machran itself. It is there that the campaign will have its climax. Word has come to me that the Avennan League is mustering at last, and Karnos has persuaded all the cities to send contingents. The decisive battle will be fought soon, before midwinter.”

“Karnos has done well,” Demetrius, the one-eyed marshal of the conscript spears said, tilting his head to bring his eye to bear.

“He’s quite the orator, it seems, and the Machran polemarch, Kassander, is an old friend of his – they work together like the hand and the gauntlet. All this is to our advantage.”

“I fail to see how,” Rictus said. “The League can muster thirty or forty thousand men if it has the time to muster them. We don’t have half that here.”

Corvus smiled. “But if those thirty or forty thousand are fairly beaten in open battle, the thing will be done at a stroke – all the hinterland cities will have been defeated at once.”

“If they are defeated.” Rictus was more puzzled than alarmed. Did this boy want to fight against hopeless odds?

Corvus seemed to catch his thought. “Where is the glory, Rictus, in beating citizen armies one by one in an endless series of petty battles? No, we will let them combine. Let them grow confident in their numbers. Once they have mustered, they will find the confidence to come out and meet us spear to spear.”

“Glory,” Rictus repeated. He looked round the other men in the tent, thinking of the morning’s slaughter. That had been a petty affair indeed, but the women keening at the funeral pyre would disagree.

He shook his head. Maybe I am too old, he thought. I have forgotten what ambition was like. What it can do in a man.

Druze winked at him. Teresian was lost in his wine. Demetrius, the oldest, seemed as unperturbed as a stone. Rictus had heard his name before; he had commanded a mercenary centon years in the past, lost his eye fighting for Giron on the Kuprian Coast, and had gone east. To end up with Corvus.

And Ardashir, the Kufr marshal. He met Rictus eye to eye, and there was something surprising in his face. A kind of fellow-feeling. A sympathy. Then the Kufr looked away and Rictus was left imagining it.

“What is it you want?” he asked aloud. “What is all this for?”

Corvus stopped his pacing, his pale face lifted in surprise.

“An odd question for a sellspear to ask,” Teresian sneered.

Yes, Rictus thought; one day you and I will have a reckoning, my friend.

“Not so odd,” Corvus said. “And Rictus is more than a sellspear. Much more.” He cast his gaze about the tent, and a silence fell in which the keening of the women out at the pyre could be heard as a rumour on the wind.

“He commanded an army once, the most celebrated army the Macht have ever fielded, outside of legend.”

I commanded it by chance, Rictus thought. Because all the best men were dead. It was a whim of Phobos, no more.

But he said nothing.

“I was born outside of Sinon, in the land beyond the sea,” Corvus went on. “Most of you here already know this. I have seen the Empire that Rictus marched through, or a corner of it – as has Ardashir. He and I grew up together, and whether he be Kufr or no, he is my brother in all things but blood.” He stared at the men in the room deliberately, meeting their eyes one by one.

“Sinon is where the march of the Ten Thousand ended, where their epic came to a close.” Now he looked at Rictus.

“Not in glory, but in squalor. When the last centons of these heroes finally straggled down to the shores of the sea, what did they do?

“They set about each other like squabbling dogs. They killed one another for gold, for insults given and taken on the long march west. They were riven into pieces before they even saw the sea. They were Macht, and they had defeated the armies of the Great King over and over in open battle. They had humbled an Empire, but they could not govern themselves.”

A flash of something passed over Corvus’s face, something between contempt and anger. It chilled Rictus’s spine to look upon it. This boy, he was -

“That is the fatal flaw within the Macht,” Corvus ploughed on. His face was a mask without colour, the strange violet eyes within it bright as those of some feral animal.

“Unless they face death from without, then they will spend their lives fighting each other – farmyard cocks all crowing on their separate dunghills. This is what we are, here in the Harukush, the poorest patch of stone in the world.

“In the Empire the Macht are a thing of legend and wonder, a tale told to frighten children. We are the fearsome beast of the night, the things which crossed the sea to wreak havoc, and then disappeared. I know – I have heard these stories across the Sinonian. But here -” Disgust crossed his face. “Here we are a million struggling dwarfs, all pissing and moaning about where we shall have space to shit.”

He lifted his chin, stood straight. He was slight as a girl, but Rictus had no doubt in that moment that he could have killed any one of those in the tent who stood up against him. Men smelled fear and weakness, as surely as dogs did. And in Corvus there was none. He was a creature of singular determination.

“I am here to unite the Macht, to make of them one people, one purpose, We were put upon this world to rule it, and that is what we shall do. To make us all of one will, I must conquer all. I intend to bring all our people under one ruler.”

He smiled with a moment’s disarming irony.

“I will wear the black Curse of God, Rictus; on the day that I am named King of the Macht.”