Corvus (37 page)

Parnon tapped the
crumpled scroll against his upper lip. “How many spears can we still turn out,
Ulfos?”

“Maybe three
thousand, if we leave nothing behind.”

“You think we
could persuade the other polemarchs to meet here? Pontis, Arienus?”

“They’ve already
been beat once by Corvus, Parnon. What makes you think they’ll stake another
throw of the knucklebone?”

Parnon held the
scroll out. “Corvus lost a thousand men in his failed assault. He has had to
detach more to hold down Arkadios, Afteni, and the other hinterland cities. He
has nothing like the numbers that faced us before. If we do not try again now,
then it is over for Machran.”

“If Machran falls,
then no-one can stand against him,” one of the Kerusia said, an old man who
banged his olive-wood walking stick on the floor with a crack. “The cities of
the Planaean Coast have no armies to speak of; Minerias grows wine, not
fighting men. They’re soft - useless! There’s us, the Pontines and the
Arienans. That’s all the backbone left in this part of the world. By Phobos,
were I young again -”

“Therones is
right,” Parnon said. “All the best of the Macht fighting cities are either
already gone, or were at Afteni with us. We must reassemble them -it has to be
worth a try. I will go to Pontis myself.”

“Then you’d best
run as fast as that brave boy with the bloody feet,” old Therones barked, and
he banged his stick again.

North, along the
ancient caravan
trails which ran in the hollows of the hills and followed the fastest path like
the flow of water. The roads were brown now, rutted with hardened mud, and
there were few people upon them at this dark heart of the year.

The southern
hinterland of Machran had not yet seen the host of Corvus in all its might, but
they had endured the foraging parties he sent out to keep his army fed, and the
people of the small farms and towns south of Machran had marvelled at the sight
of the Companions on their tall black Kefren horses, beasts bred from the Niseians
that bore the Great King himself.

The Kufr who rode
them spoke Machtic, after a fashion, and sometimes they even paid for the grain
they took and the animals they herded away. They never cleaned out a district
entirely, but left the seed-corn and the makings of a new flock or herd behind
when they left.

The small farmers
of the plain about Gast and Nemasis and Avennos did not quite know what to make
of them; they possessed better discipline than the citizen armies that had
tramped over their lands from time immemorial, and their outlandish appearance
lent them a kind of alien glamour.

There were those
who grew hot-headed at the thought of Kufr looting the country of the Macht,
but for the most part these kept their thoughts to themselves, as did so many
in these days.

North again along
the ancient
caravan trail, and the land grew empty. The foraging parties of Corvus would
find nothing to glean here, for Karnos had already stripped the country bare in
preparation for the siege, and the local people had fled their farms rather
than starve. What had once been well-tilled farmland was now bare and sere, and
scattered houses lay empty to the rain and snow.

And finally the
city itself, the centre of the winter world, a subject of conversation in every
wineshop from Sinon to Minerias.

Machran had always
been a crowded city, even before the siege, but with the addition of the
refugees who had followed their retreating spearman rather than live in their
own occupied cities, the condition of the place had deteriorated. What open
spaces that existed within the walls had over the weeks been transformed from
parkland and gardens to shanty-towns, and thousands lived in cobbled together
shacks packed into every space available.

The first deaths
had begun. Not the normal everyday passing of the old and the very young, but
deaths caused by sickness and exposure. The old died as they always had, but
they died in greater numbers, unable to afford food or firewood at the inflated
prices now soaring all over the city. The Kerusia had tried to stamp out
profiteering, and hanged the worst offenders from a gallows newly erected near
the Amphion, but a thriving black market existed in the Mithannon and was too
widely patronised to be shut down.

The Kerusia met
infrequently now, and when it did there was little Karnos asked of them that
they did not agree to. A council of older men with their wisdom and their
insight might be a fine thing in time of peace, but in wartime hope withered in
the old more quickly than the young.

In most respects
the city was ruled by himself and Kassander, with help from Murchos and Tyrias.
Due legal process was quietly set aside for the duration, and the edicts of the
quartet went unquestioned, backed up as they were by all the fighting men of
the city.

The ground barley
and oats that were held in the city granaries were doled out once a week in the
open area around the Amphion where the assembly had usually been convened in
happier times. Now it was a fight to keep the hungry people in line, and the gravelled
walkways were becoming ever more constricted, hemmed in by the jerry-built
slums of the refugees from Arkadios.

The ground in the
Avennan Quarter had always been low-lying, and soon it became infamous for the
miasma which hung around it, the effluent from thousands of people living more
or less in the open, squatting to relieve themselves wherever they could find a
quiet corner.

Karnos went
everywhere in a nondescript box chair now, borne by four of his most trusted
slaves. When he walked on the streets openly he would not get a hundred paces
before some woman would be holding her sick baby up to him and shrieking. So he
went through the streets of Machran - his city -looking out from behind a
twitching curtain while the slaves negotiated a way through the febrile crowds,
aided by a file of spearmen who were unafraid to use their shields to bowl the
stubborn or bloody-minded out of the way.

He watched as day
by day the great capital of the Macht, with its towering marble buildings and
soaring domes, became a cesspool of the desperate and the wicked. Little could
be done about public order, because the spearmen were needed on the walls -
even so, they had put out two major fires in the last week.

He climbed out of
the box-chair in front of his house, and Polio was waiting for him, slamming
the heavy doors behind him, and shutting out the close-packed chaos of the
streets outside. Like water, the people seemed to gather in the hollows of the
city in preference to the hilltops, and the Kerusiad Hill was quieter than the
districts around the Empirion and the Amphion.

As for the
Mithannon, it had become a law unto itself, and gangs were operating there with
relative impunity. Not the old, well-established street-tribes of Machran, but
new, disorderly, vicious bodies of desperate men who would not pick up a weapon
to defend the walls, but would fight to maintain control over the few wretched
alleyways they considered theirs to rule.

No doubt that was
where Sertorius and his henchmen were now.

The three had
broken out of the villa the day after they had arrived and had disappeared into
the vastness of Machran. There was no point in trying to find them again; they
would fit well into the anarchy prevailing in the Mithannon. Karnos was glad
they were gone, in a way that made him feel ashamed. He had wanted the three of
them dead, for the brute animals that they were, but his own part in the death
of Rictus’s wife left him with dirty hands. He did not feel he had the right to
sit in judgement over anyone anymore, no matter what Kassia said.

He was not the
only one, either. Phaestus had joined his family in a rented villa further down
the hill, and Karnos had not spoken to him since the day after his arrival in
the city. He was failing fast, at any rate, coughing his lungs out of his mouth
piece by piece. Antimone’s wings beat over him now, and from what Philemos had
told Karnos, the old man did not seem to mind. He had led a blameless life, but
had ended it with one brutal act, and seemed to feel that his painful death was
punishment for it.

We all think more
and more in terms of death and the gods these days, Karnos thought. We flick
out our libations and make light of it when we have wine inside us and the wolf
is far from the door, but break down our world a little, let us glimpse the
eyes watching us from beyond the firelight, and we call on the gods like
children wailing for a parent.

“Any trouble?” he
asked Polio automatically.

“No, master. The
guard’s day shift was just relieved. There is nothing to report.”

Twice in the last
fortnight, prowling mobs had sallied up the hill looking for the house of
Karnos, to let him know just how much they resented his mishandling of the city’s
administration. Twice, Machran spearmen had beaten them back, and killed
several of their own citizens in the process.

Law and order,
Karnos thought. In the end it all comes down to who has the biggest stick.

“Have we visitors?”

“Master Philemos
is here, and the lady Kassia is waiting for you. Polemarch Kassander sent word
by runner that he will be here for dinner.”

“Dinner!” Karnos
laughed. “Very well. Thank you, Polio.”

He looked in on
Rictus’s children. They had a suite of rooms at their disposal, and he had
hired a quiet, middle-aged Arkadian woman to look after the youngest.

She was kneeling
on the floor now with the little russet-haired girl, Ona, and the two of them
were assembling wooden blocks in front of a meagre fire.

For weeks now, the
child had withdrawn from the world. She cried silently night and day, and would
speak to no-one except her sister, but would become absorbed at the sight of a
trinket or crude toy, crooning over it for hours.

The room was warm,
at least, and there were a couple of lamps burning. He met the eyes of the
nurse and shook his head when she made to lift the little girl for him to look
at, then walked past the doorway without a sound, feeling like a thief in his
own home.

Rian, Rictus’s
beautiful eldest daughter, was in the inner courtyard, sat on a bench with a
blanket round her shoulders. Philemos stood in front of her, chattering away.
He was quite a talker when he got going, Philemos. Karnos liked the lad; he had
courage, though he would never be physically formidable, and he was clearly
besotted with Rian.

Karnos stood
silently behind a pillar and watched the pair of them. Rian’s skin was pale as
a hawthorn bloom, and her ordeal had brought out the exquisite bones of her
face. Sadness made her features even finer. Philemos had told Karnos of their
journey to Machran, and he knew there was a strength in Rian that matched that
of her dead mother.

You had a fine
family, Rictus, Karnos thought. You should have kept out of all this, stayed in
the hills and left your spear by the door. How could a man not be happy with
what you had?

Rian looked up and
saw him there. Philemos paused in mid flow, and gave her his hand. They came
towards him side by side, and Karnos suddenly realised that the affection was
not all one way.

It was Kassia who
had drawn their eyes. He could smell her perfume as she came up behind him and slid
her arm through his.

“The master of the
house returns. How went the day, Karnos?”

He set his hand on
hers, smiled at Philemos and Rian.

“It goes much
better now than it did. What say you we all take a seat by the fire, and I’ll
tell you about it?”

MOON
OF WRATH

The foraging party
was two hundred
strong, strung out along two pasangs of track, its column broken up by
lumbering waggons and the braying stubbornness of a mule train. At its head a
knot of horsemen rode with their cloaks pulled up over their heads, and the
tall Niseians plodded below them in gaunt doggedness, their coats staring and
as muddy as the harness of their masters.

“Old Urush here is
near the end of his rope,” one of them said in Kefren, patting the corded neck
of his mount. “It’s been nothing but yellow grass and parched oats for him
these three weeks past.”

“The Macht eat
horses,” another said. “They think nothing of it. How can a race pretend to
civilization when they will eat a horse?”

“You might be glad
of a taste of it ere we’re done,” a third said, a grin splitting the golden
skin of his long face. “Ardashir, what say you?”

Their leader
reined in and held up one long-fingered hand. “Shoron, you have good eyes -
look south to where the track goes round the spur of the hill, maybe seven
pasangs.”

“I can’t see a
thing. The rain is like a cloud in this country.”

“Wait a moment, it
will shift - there. You see?”

The Kefren called
Shoron dug his knees into the withers of his horse and raised himself up off
the saddle. He shaded his eyes as though it were a summer day.

“Mot’s blight,
that’s infantry, a column marching this way. I count… blast the rain. Maybe
five thousand - the column’s at least a pasang long. Could be more.”

“Bless your sight,
Shoron,” Ardashir said. He looked back at the long train of horsemen and
waggons and mules behind him. His mount picked up his mood and began to lumber
impatiently. He hissed at it. “Easy, Moros, you great fool.” He shook his head.

“It’s no good. We
must leave the waggons - even infantry can outmarch the damn things. Bring the
mules along. We must pick up the pace and get back to the city. Arkamosh, head
back down the column and tell the rest. Break off back the way we came. Make
all speed.”

“I thought we had
all the Macht beaten or penned up in the city,” Shoron said.