Corvus (20 page)

“Advance! On me -
one, two - left!”

Kassander’s voice,
somewhere in front and to his right. He was only a few paces away, but packed
in the ranks of the phalanx he might as well have been on the far side of the
world.

The man behind
Karnos cursed him. “Get in step, you fat fuck. And watch that sauroter; you
poke me with it one more time and I swear I’ll break it off and jam it up your
arse.”

Laughter rattled
along the files. “Ostros, don’t you know who you’re talking to?”

“That’s the
Speaker, you stupid fuck!”

“Karnos - tell us
- how many slave-girls do you have a night, eh?”

“You horny old
bastard - I hear tell you’ve nothing but naked cunny to wait on you night and
day!”

Breathing heavily,
Karnos found the air to shout, “they smell better than you rotten bastards,
that’s for damned sure.”

“I’ll take a bath,
Karnos, and then you can suck my cock.”

The anonymity of
the crowd, the faceless helmeted heads; here was the citizenship of Machran,
where all men were equal under bronze. It made Karnos remember a time when he
had been nothing more than a quick-thinking slave dealer with a big mouth and a
memory for faces. For a few minutes, tossing the filth and the insults back and
forth, he was almost enjoying himself.

A great sound
erupted from the front ranks, like a massive groan. The men in the rear began
shouting forward. “What the fuck’s going on - you lads -what do you see?”

“They have
archers,” someone yelled back. “The Afteni and Arkadians are getting hammered.”

“Phobos! They’re
really getting fucked! Where the hell are the Arienans? Bastards should be on
our right.”

They were still
advancing, but slowly now, stop and start. Finally the halt was called. Karnos
could see nothing but the men in front and to either side - he could not so
much as turn around, and the close-fitting helm filled his head with a sound
like the rush of the sea. As he stood, he worked his feet in the mud, feeling
himself sinking into it. His feet were numb with cold, but despite that the
chiton he wore under his cuirass was soaked with sweat, and his throat was
parched - and the battle had not yet begun.

Yes, it had. He
could hear it now. A surf of noise rising up around him - it was almost
impossible to guess which direction it came from. He heard sharp above the roar
the screams of men in a last extremity of pain and fear, and a hammering of
metal.

“Front rank, level
spears!” came the order. Kassander again. “Centurions, hold together -prepare
to advance - advance!”

And they were off
again, but more quickly this time, the files shuffling into a fast march with
the centurions calling out the time. “One, two, one, two - pick it up there!”

“It’s redcloaks -
mercenaries!” someone shouted at the front.

His head bobbing
from side to side in the bronze helm, Karnos caught glimpses of the world
beyond the phalanx, and saw something coming towards them, something with
glittering teeth and shining in bronze and scarlet. He heard the Paean being
sung - but not by his own side. What in the hell was -

An enormous crash.
He was brought to a full stop, piling into the man in front. Behind him, the
weight of the three men of the file crushed him, the cuirass fighting the
pressure. He thought he would faint. He could see faces - helmed men facing the
wrong way – Phobos -they were facing him! And then the adder-strikes of
spearheads. He saw an aichme come lancing through the ranks in front of him to
bury itself in a man’s head and then snap off. The man was borne along by the
press for a few minutes, and then slid out of sight. The file closed the gaps,
the pressure unrelenting.

This is it, Karnos
thought. This is what the stories are for, what the poetry is about. I am here
in the middle of it at last.

The pressure and
the fear emptied his bladder, and the piss ran hot down his legs, but he barely
noticed.

“Level your
fucking spear!” the man behind him shouted, and he hefted the weapon horizontal
on his shoulder, feeling the sauroter tear into flesh behind him as he brought
it up. He rested the long weapon on the wing of the file-leader’s cuirass for a
second, getting used to the balance of it, and then thrust forward into the
red-cloaked mass that faced him. The spearpoint jarred, the whole shaft
quivering in his fist as he struck a shield.

He tried again,
aiming for a helm-slot, but struck empty air. A spear came the other way, the
two shafts clashing together as they met. The aichme dunted him in the
forehead, rasped along the crestbox and snapped his head back. He would have
fallen were it not for the men behind him pushing into the small of his back.
His eyes were full of tears. There was something wet inside his helm and he did
not know whether it was blood or sweat.

He stabbed again,
angry now, and from his chest there came that hoarse animal roaring that had no
thought behind it but was a base response, a defiant bellow of rage. Thousands of
men were making it -it was part of every battlefield. It rose now and filled
the air above them, as deafening as the blacksmith’s clatter of iron on bronze.
This was the
othismos
, the bowels of war itself.

They were
advancing, step by step, and mixed in with the wordless bellowing were cries of
triumph. Karnos stepped over a body, glanced down quickly and saw a red cloak
on the ground. He stepped on the man’s body and it moved under his feet, still
warm.

He vomited, with
the sensation and the heat of the press and the singing sound in his head. The
vomit ran down his fine ornate cuirass unheeded, one more stink among many. The
fluids of mens’ insides were running into the muck at their feet, and making of
it a terrible mire. They plunged their dogged way through it, calf-deep.

The sandal was
sucked off Karnos’s right foot, but trailed behind him, its strap entangled in
his greave, until someone behind him trod on it and snapped it free. They were
still advancing. Up front, someone shouted, “They’re pulling back!” and a growl
of triumph tore through the files. But seconds later someone else shouted, “Arrows
- they’re shooting at us!”

The long black
clothyards of the Kefren poured down upon them. As if in a dream, Karnos saw an
arrow strike the helm of the man in front and flick up into the air, jerking
his head to one side. Most of the men were wearing cuirasses of stiff, layered
linen, and Karnos watched in horrified fascination as the arrows came arcing
down like black snakes and clear through the wings of the armour, burying
themselves in men’s shoulders, smashing collar-bones.

A new cry, from
behind this time. A javelin flew over Karnos’s head - he saw the cold gleam of
the iron point not a foot from his eyes. The file-closers were shouting. “About
face! The bastards are behind us, brothers!”

The phalanx was
losing its cohesion, men turning this way and that, desperate to see what was
going on. The advance stalled and the lines intermingled. Packed close together
by the threats to front and rear, the men of Machran stood irresolute,
frightened, angry. The centurions were bellowing orders like men possessed, but
the spearmen in the ranks seemed as unresponsive as cattle.

The sweat running
down the small of Karnos’s back went icy cold. This was not how it was supposed
to be. There was no order now, and even the centurions were beginning to look
about themselves in growing panic. How had -

A crash to the
front - the fearsome red-cloaked mercenaries had hammered into their face
again, laying on the pressure. The air was crushed out of Karnos’s chest as the
crowd tightened, recoiling on itself. Some men tripped and went down,
unwounded, and were then trampled to suffocation in the deepening mud at their
feet.

Karnos looked at
the sky, the black arrows raining across it. The press of men tilted this way
and that, battered on all sides. He heard the roar and clash of a fresh onset
off to his left, and the entire phalanx shuddered as though it had taken a
body-blow. Someone shouted that the left wing had been routed, and then a few
moments later some other idiot insisted it was the right wing.

It did not matter
- they were pinned here like a turtle on its back. The cohesiveness of the
phalanx might have gone, but the pure brute weight of meat and metal remained.
It was being packed tighter on itself.

Karnos’s feet were
dragged from the mud, sucking as the press shifted and took him with it. He
gasped for air, and beat down the impulse to scream for space, for room to move
and breathe. For the first time, the reality of his own death began to crowd
his mind.

And the pressure
began to ease. The sea-roar of noise - in his helm changed, picked up a note.
Oh, thank Antimone, the crowd was opening out. The tide had turned, it seemed;
this was the way it was supposed to happen after all. Victory was still there,
in the air. In his relief, he felt he could almost taste it.

Men were throwing
down their shields and tearing off their helms, shouting about betrayal and
defeat. The phalanx, which a few moments before had seemed a brute, packed,
immovable thing, now began to fall apart. As men abandoned their bronze
burdens, so they became more mobile, and somewhere out at the edges of the
formation, or what was left of it, they were running.

They were running
away. Karnos stared in disbelief so utter that it cancelled out the
bowel-draining fear. “No! No!” he screamed. All Machran was here in front of
him, seven thousand men, the heart of the greatest city in the Macht world -
and it was bleeding to death in the churned muck, or in flight right in front
of his horrified eyes.

He sagged as the
men about him moved away. A shield, dropped by his neighbour, struck his
anklebone an agonising blow. He raised his head to shriek his pain and his
anger at the cold sky, and the falling arrow lanced cleanly through the right
wing of his cuirass, sinking into his shoulder with an impact that sent him
reeling on his back into the bloody mire below.

LONG
NIGHT’S JOURNEY

Rictus watched the
blood dripping
from his fingertips with a kind of morbid fascination. He was clenching a
filthy clout about his arm at the elbow, twisted tight as he could make it, and
the trickle had slowed at last. Even so, the torchlight in the tent seemed
incredibly bright to him, splintering in shards and blades, like ground glass
in his eyes. That would be the thump on the head, he supposed. He had already
been sick once, and were there anything left in his stomach he had no doubt he
would be so again.

Fornyx’s face swam
into view, shadow in light. He felt the weight of his friend’s hand on the numb
meat that was his forearm.

“I got the
carnifex.”

“There are men
hurt worse than me,” Rictus said muzzily.

“That artery wants
stitched shut, or you’ll bleed white. Now shut your mouth before I slap you.”

Rictus smiled. He
leaned back, was caught by Fornyx before he toppled off the blood-slimed wooden
table, and drifted into a hazier place in his mind. Aise was there, young and
smiling again, and Rian had flowers in her hair, a marriage-crown of primroses
and forget-me-nots. But who was the man in shadow beside her?

He felt a stab of
sharp pain that jolted him awake again. They were holding his arm down and old
Severan, one of the Dogsheads’ two carnifexes, was working a blood-brown needle
through his flesh. Another scar for Aise to find, Rictus thought.

His gaze drifted.
The great tent was full of the stink of death, a slaughterhouse reek. Men were
lying on sodden straw or were being pinioned upon stout wooden tables as the
army physicians went to work. A strange and horrible calling, to spend one’s
days delving into the living flesh of other men.

Rictus dragged
himself back to the present, putting to the back of things the pop of the
needle as it threaded through skin and muscle and dragged the slashed halves of
his arm back together.

“What’s the
butcher’s bill?” he asked Fornyx.

The dark little
man bent close and looked in his eyes. “Lucky you had a good helm, or that
spear would have drilled a hole through to the bone.”

“Fornyx -”

“Forty-six dead on
the field, nine from our own fucking arrows. Ninety-six wounded, of whom
-Severan?”

The grey-haired
man working on Rictus’s arm grunted. “Thirty or so of those will be back in
scarlet within a week or two - like the chief here. But of the rest, there are
a dozen who will take longer - broken bones and the like. The rest are done
with soldiering for good.”

“A third of us,”
Rictus said in a cracked whisper.

“A hard day’s
work,” Fornyx said. “He gave us the worst job on the field.”

“He gave it to us
because he knew we could do it,” Rictus said.

“That’s pretty
fucking magnanimous of you.”

“It’s the truth,
Fornyx. You know it too. He gave us the hardest job because we are the best he
has.”

A bleak smile
flitted across Fornyx’s face. “It is a distinction which could well prove the
death of us all.”

“Not today,”
Rictus answered. He closed his eyes, nausea rising like a blush in his throat.
He clenched his teeth shut until his jaws creaked, let it pass.

“I’m done here,”
Severan said, rising with a groan and pushing his fists into the small of his
back in the way Rictus often did after rising in the mornings.

“Keep that arm
slung for a week, and stay awake for the rest of the night - Fornyx, don’t you
let him sleep - I’ve seen too many men with a knock on the head sleep their way
through Antimone’s Veil. You hear me now?”

“I hear you, you
old bugger.”

Severan slapped
him on the shoulder and then stumped off to the carnage of the tent without
another word.