Corvus (17 page)

“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.