Corvus (16 page)

The waterlogged
plain between the armies had once been good farmland, and there were still the
black thickets of olive groves strewn across it, but it had been inundated with
the rain that poured down from the hills so that now it bore more of a
resemblance to some wildfowler’s marsh, a grey mere of dappled mud and ochre
water.

Karnos had planted
his burgeoning army on a low rise across the Imperial road, and the water had
filled a ring around its foot so that it seemed like an island, or a vast
moated fort, pasangs wide; and the cloud hung so low that it almost met the
summit.

Eight pasangs to
the rear of the enemy army was the city of Afteni, renowned for its
metal-working. And behind that was Arkadios, and then to the west and south of
that one of the great cities of the hinterland, Avennos of the Laws, where
Tynon himself had lived and lectured for a time, back in the mists of the past.
He had been the author of those codes which now governed nearly all the Macht
cities. The origins of the Kerusia - the assembly that every Macht polity
possessed - lay there.

Avennos was not
the metropolis it had been; both Avensis to the south, which had been its
colony upon a time, and Arienus to the south-west had grown greater with the
passage of the years. But Avennos was a part of the Macht identity as surely as
Machran was. That, Rictus reasoned, was why Karnos had thrown his army so far
forward, extending his supply lines and landing himself in the same muck as
Corvus. To preserve that core of tradition. It was militarily unsound, but
politically it could not be faulted.

The darkness drew
in over the floodplain, a lightless black without stars or moons. The three men
lurched from one footfall to the next, the muck seizing them calf-deep. Once,
Druze went on his face and the others had to halt and lever him free, haul him
upright again. Corvus was seized by a fit of laughter, and after a
contemplation of their absurd condition it flapped through them all so that they
stood for a few minutes holding their mouths, leaning on one another like
drunks.

“I’ll lead,”
Corvus said at last. “I’m lighter than either of you clodhoppers, and I see
better in the dark. Grab a hold of my cloak and try not to pull me on my arse.”

They went on,
their only frame of reference in that starless murk the subdued glow of the
enemy campfires. Only a few were burning, fighting a losing battle with the
endless rain. Usually a host like Karnos’s would light up the night sky with
its fires like a city at festival time.

Corvus halted, and
Rictus felt the young man’s iron grip on his arm.

“Sentries,” he
murmured, his breath warm in Rictus’s ear. “We go right, cast around them.”

The three made a
laborious dog-leg about the sentries which only Corvus had seen. They were glad
of the rain, for the sluicing hiss of it covered their lumpen progress. Rictus
found his joints aching as they had not since the winter before, in the
siege-camp outside Nemasis, and he felt again the ache of the arrow-wound in his
thigh. The cold and the wet were always ready to recall his old scars, as
though in league with his ageing body to remind him of his mortality.

They waded as
quietly as they could through knee-deep freezing water, clenching their
chattering teeth shut, and began to hear other sounds than the rain ahead. Men’s
voices, a low hum of talk, and the chink and gleam of lights glancing through
the gaps in leather-canopied tents. The ground rose under their feet, became
marginally drier in that the mud was only ankle-deep.

“Here we are,”
Corvus said, as unconcerned as if he had led them into his own back yard. “From
here on in we straighten up and look like citizens. Perhaps we should go under
different names. Druze, you look like a Timus to me.”

“Boss,” Druze said,
“I would follow you to the far side of the Veil if you asked me, but don’t try
to make me laugh. It’s not one of your gifts.”

“I fall short in
that respect,” Corvus admitted, and they saw him grin under his hood. He seemed
as light of heart as a boy who has found a peephole in a bathhouse wall.

“I wonder if
Karnos’s tent is as big as mine. What think you. Rictus? You know him better
than I.”

“I think Druze’s
accent and your face will give us away in a moment. Let me lead, for Phobos’s
sake, and both of you keep your mouths shut.”

Corvus nodded, and
in an entirely different, clinical voice said, “Count the sigils you see. I
want to know which cities have brought up their levies.”

They walked
through the camp as brazenly as though they belonged there, Druze wiping the
muck off his pelta so the Machran sigil shone out white in the firelit gaps in
the dark. The camp of Karnos’s army stank worse than their own, and Rictus put
out of his mind thoughts of what his bare feet must be treading through.

Men were crowded
in their tents, huddled around guttering clay lamps and foul-smelling tallow
candles. Some resolute souls were keeping campfires going, atop each the
familiar villainous black shape of a centos, the great iron pot fighting men
had eaten from since time out of mind. There was a toothsome smell on the air
amid the baser stinks; Karnos’s men were eating stewed goat, ladling in mounds
of lentils and onions to eke out the meat. Lowland food; the smell of it
brought back memories of a dozen old campaigns to Rictus.

He had to shake
his mind into the moment; the scenes before him were so familiar that the sense
of danger was dulled.

He stopped short
when he caught sight of the
namis
sigil on some shields, painted in
blue. These were men of Nemasis, with whom he had fought only the summer
before. The gap-toothed man with the shaven head was Isaeos, the idiot whose
bumbling had cost lives and lost months in Rictus’s last contract. He bent his
head into his hood as he passed by.

The mismatched
trio of filthy strangers wandered through the camp without challenge, three
more nameless Macht in a sea of them. Rictus stopped counting sigils after he
reached twenty. Every city of the hinterland was here, and yet the camp was not
big enough to accommodate their full levies. Some must have been sending token
contingents, no more. Even among the members of the Avennan League, there were
hostilities and rivalries. Karnos had done well to come so far with so many.

No-one challenged
them. Rictus was not surprised. He had known citizen armies all his life. They
would fight like lions when the time came, but the idea of camp discipline was
beyond them; one might as well try to herd cats.

After only a few
weeks with Corvus, he had begun to take for granted the efficiency of the army
on the far side of the plain, to view it with even a trace of indulgence. He
had all but forgotten that his Dogsheads were the exception, not the rule, and
that Corvus had made something surprisingly different out of his own host.

Once again, he
found himself looking at this Kufr half-breed from a revelatory new angle.

Kufr. Now that was
something to factor into things.

The three
interlopers grew in confidence, emboldened by the black night, the rain and the
muck-stains which made them almost indistinguishable from every other man in
the camp. Rictus accepted a squirt of wine from a good-natured drunken fellow
with the
machios
sigil tattooed on his arm, and went so far as to ask
him where Karnos’s tent might be found.

“That fat bastard?”
the man cried. “He’s still in Machran with his cock up some slave-girl’s arse.
It’s Kassander you want, friend - he commands here. What are you, some kind of
messenger? Fucking rain - ain’t it a bitch, eh?” He staggered off, plashing
through the muck with the bullish determination of the drunk who knows where he
wants to go.

“The more I hear
of this Karnos fellow, the more I like him,” Druze said with his thick black
brows beetling up his forehead. “Had I the choice -”

A woman’s scream
cut across him, shrill and terrified.

“I said,” Druze
went on, “Had I the choice I’d much prefer -”

“Shut up,” Corvus
snapped. “Rictus, where was that?”

Rictus pointed
down the haphazard line of tents. “It’s not our concern, Corvus. There’s
nothing more to be seen here.”

He was ignored.
Corvus strode off on his own in the direction of the scream.

“Oh, shit,” Druze
muttered, and grasped Rictus by the arm, taking off in his leader’s wake. “Rictus,
for Phobos’s sake, get a hold of him.”

Corvus moved like
a black, silent raptor through the tent lines, with Rictus and Druze trailing
him.

He had thrown back
his hood, and his eyes caught the light of the campfires and reflected it back
a violent green.

He pulled back a
tent flap, and out of the interior blew a blare of lamplight, the stink of men’s
sweat, and something else, something high and keen and bitter in the night.
Fear.

BLOOD
AND BLUFF

Karnos woke with
a start. He had
barely been asleep anyway. Some gaudy dream of standing talking to a crowd, and
the men he spoke to were all cheering him, shouting his name, and sharpening
knives.

Subtle, he thought
with a mental grunt. Phobos, how is a man to live like this, for weeks at a
time? I am Speaker of Machran. I made this army - I created it out of nothing.
It is here by my will.

He turned in the
straw, snarling and tugging his cloak about with him. They could at least have
made me some kind of bed… there are ticks in this straw.

He scratched his
crotch violently, and cursed aloud. Awake now.

In all seriousness
- how does a man live like this? He thought of his well-stuffed mattress in
Machran, and little Grania in it with her white skin and soft mouth. Or that
new girl - the one with the lovely arse.

Here he was, one
cloak to his name, lying on tick-infested straw with the damp of the ground
creeping through it.

He opened his eyes
wide.

The lamp was
almost out of oil; a blue, guttering blossom pulsing round the wick. It was
almost wholly dark in the tent.

What in hell was
that?

He heard it again;
a distant uproar, men shouting. He was used by now to the sound of the
interminable quarrels, the fights that flared up out of nowhere; these were the
background noises of the camp. But this was different; more urgent.

He sat up,
adjusted the lamp so the end of the wick had a last drop of oil to suck into,
and as the light strengthened, he scrabbled through the straw which lined the
tent floor, fumbling for sandals, sword; anything which might orientate him to
this strange and new place the night had found him in.

The tent flap was
flung open and he saw a black silhouette with fire behind it.

“Some trouble over
at the eastern end - might be nothing, but it sounds ugly. Want to come along?”

Kassander’s voice.

“Fuck it, yes. I’m
awake now anyway. What time of the night is it?”

“The bad time,
when men are tired but not quite asleep. This may only be a brawl.”

“I said I’m
coming,” Karnos snapped, hopping into his sandals with his sword slung over one
shoulder. “Help me with my cloak, will you? Phobos, what a life.”

In a camp this
large, Karnos felt like a tick on the hide of some great unknown beast. He had
never truly tried to imagine what a host of some twenty thousand men might look
like; he had merely totted up the numbers as they came in. If they stood eight
men deep in battle array their line would stretch around three pasangs.

It was as though a
new and noisome city of leather and shit and woodsmoke had been planted on the
world, and here he was in the middle of it, one more face in a teeming sea of
them.

This was not like
holding forth on the floor of the Empirion - the rules were different here.
Walking through the camp, he was accorded a certain amount of -affectionate
regard from the Machran host, a level of curiosity from the men of the other
cities, but should a Cursebearer chance by, their eyes would be drawn to the
black armour instantly, with a degree of awe that was almost religious.

I must get one of
those one day, Karnos thought. It would perfect the image. Or redeem it, maybe.

He was a wealthy
man; in the past he had tried to buy Antimone’s Gift from Cursebearers down on
their luck, but his offers had been rebuffed with such contempt that he had
given up on the exercise. Once a man had one of those things on his back, it
seemed it took up some space in his soul. Death was all that would make him
part with it. It was one of the gauges of a city’s greatness; how many
Cursebearers it had as citizens.

There will be a
few on the ground before all this is over, Karnos thought. I will talk to
Kassander about it.

The two of them
picked their way through the camp lines. The men had been sheltering in their
tents, grumbling their way into sleep, or sharing a skin of wine, or rattling a
game of knucklebones. Now the place was stirring again, and the paths between
the bivouac lines were filling up with yawning, bad-tempered crowds, wondering
what was causing the racket.

“I bet it’s the
Aftenai again,” Kassander muttered. “A more bloody-minded set of fractious
bastards I’ve never seen.”

The noise rose -
men were fighting, it was clear now. They heard the clash of iron, and. someone
shrieked, a death-scream.

“Phobos!”
Kassander cursed, and he began to run.

Rictus felt the
man’s blood spatter
warm across his face as the drepana took the fellow’s arm off above the elbow.
He was unused to the heavy lowland weapon; it felt like a butcher’s cleaver in
his grasp, made for chopping and slashing.

He had the end of
his cloak wrapped round his left arm, and threw it up in the next man’s face,
making him flinch long enough for the drepana to arc round again and open his
belly. A stink of shit and hot meat as his entrails flopped down his legs into
the mud, entangling his feet. The man tripped up and gave a high-pitched
scream, rolling in the ropes of his own insides.