Corvus (27 page)

Then, as night
fell, they would go into camp -another euphemism for lying huddled together in
knee-deep mud with their cloaks and blankets drawn round their shoulders, their
feet spoked towards whatever pitiable fire they could coax into life through
the rain.

Corvus shared it
all with them. The tents had been left behind with the baggage train, but a
team of mules carried his along with the main body. He had it set up each
evening with braziers burning bright and hot within, and he would spend part of
every night rousing up those who seemed worst off with the flux or the cold, or
carrying old wounds, and he would set them on clean straw in his tent, ply them
with his own stock of wine, and a store of stories no-one had known he possessed.
He did not seem to sleep at all.

The men who were
brought to his tent for the night were few in number, considering the size of
the army, but they would go back to their comrades with fresh heart, telling of
how the general of them all had sat down beside them and poured them wine,
piled their plates with fresh meat and bread, and taken the time to hear the
stories of their lives.

Good news and bad
travels faster through an army than a man can run, and these efforts on Corvus’s
part put new heart into the men. It was deftly done, and Rictus, for one,
marvelled not only at Corvus’s handling of his many thousands, but at the
stamina of the man, who never admitted to weariness, never lost his temper.

Youngsters from
Hal Goshen, Goron and Afteni, conscripted into an army which had extinguished
their city’s independence, would look up to find the man who had done it all to
them enquiring after the state of their feet and their stomachs. After a half
hour’s banter, Corvus would slap them on the shoulder as though they were old
campaigners he had shared a thousand campfires with, and disappear.

They would be
envied by their peers, pressed for stories of the encounter. They would begin
to feel part of the massive bristling, brutal mass that was the army around
them.

The army needed
that boost to its cohesiveness. More and more of the spearmen in the ranks were
now conscripts. Some of them had even fought against Corvus in the last battle.
His treatment of conquered cities might be lenient by Macht standards, but the
levies he imposed upon them were rigidly enforced. Demetrius, marshal of the
conscript phalanx, was not a man to take no for an answer. When he enforced a
levy, he split up the city centons of the men who had been pressed into
service, scattering them throughout his morai, breaking up the identities of
cities in the ranks, embedding loyalty within the formations he created to
replace them.

It was an
efficient but harsh process, and almost every morning when the army moved on
they left behind them a gibbet with bodies swinging from it. To be left for
carrion was the worst thing a Macht could imagine happening to him after death,
and the lesson was quite deliberate - and it had been sanctioned by Corvus, the
same smiling fellow who came round the campfires at night enquiring after the
state of his new conscripts’ feet.

He appeared at
Rictus’s campfire
one night, walking in noiselessly from the teeming dark like an apparition.

About the
struggling flames were all the usual suspects of Rictus’s acquaintance, plus a
few more.

Valerian was
there, and Kesero, as always; Fornyx, and Druze, who often dropped by with
gossip once the army bedded down for the night. Rictus had come to like the
dark Igranian, and he and Fornyx had become like bantering brothers, unable to
say anything to one another that was not in some sense a goad. Each knew it,
each enjoyed it. They were all listening intently to a particularly vile story
that Fornyx was telling, interrupted with great relish every so often by Druze,
when they realised that Corvus was just on the brim of the firelight, watching
them, his face a white mask with a smile painted across it.

“Fornyx, don’t
look at me like that. I’m not your mother.”

“Not with those
hips,” Fornyx shot back. “Lord high and mighty - why don’t you pull up a knee
and have some wine - I found a skin of it on the road today. It tastes like
piss, but so does the water we’ve been drinking this last week.”

Corvus squirted
wine into his mouth and swallowed. “That’s an Afteni vintage, if I’m any judge.”

“I think it
followed the army a while before it lay down to die,” Fornyx said with a wink.

Corvus handed over
the skin. “Here and there, if a skin of wine goes wandering, there’s no harm I
suppose. So long as it does not become a habit. This army is made up of
soldiers, not thieves.” He smiled.

The lazy drunken
light left Fornyx’s eye in an instant. He sat upright, his splayed fingers
sinking into the mud as he rose.
“Thief
is an ugly word. Not one to be
thrown around lightly.”

The men around the
fire fell silent, watching. The rain was hissing about the logs farthest from
the flames, and beyond them the hum of other conversations about other fires
went on, a background murmur. But here it seemed as though a silent bell had
been struck, and they were listening to its echoes.

Druze broke it. “Tell
the truth, I think I pissed in that wineskin earlier. My cock is so shrivelled
these days, the neck just about fit. You ever tried to fuck a wineskin, Rictus?”

Rictus smiled,
still watching Fornyx and Corvus. “Not me. I’m hung like a donkey. Ask Fornyx -
you ever wonder why he’s such a bow-legged bastard?”

The men about the
campfire lit up with laughter, and even Fornyx threw his head back with the
rest of them. Rictus and Corvus caught one another’s eye, each smiling falsely
with their mouths.

“Chief,” Rictus
said, rising with a loud groan, “let me escort you away from these degenerates.
They’re ill-educated runts. The best part of them ran down their mother’s leg.”

Another chorus,
laughter, feigned outrage. The skin tossed about the campfire. Rictus took
Corvus by the arm; his bicep was as slender as that of a girl, but made of
steel wire.

“Let’s walk the
camp, you and I.”

Corvus came with
him, the rain falling on them both in the darkness. Rictus was as drunk as cheap
wine and short commons could make him. He set his good arm about the younger
man’s shoulders, and for some inexplicable reason thought that moment of Rian,
and how he had kissed her hair in the upland pasture while they sat there with
Eunion talking about the slight young man now walking beside him.

I’m getting old,
he thought. Those tall enough to bear the spear are now young enough to be my
sons. This boy here, he is a thing of genius, and he teeters on the edge of
disaster. I see it now.

Phobos, how I miss
them.

The drink set his
mind running down courses he would as soon as left alone. He gripped Corvus
tighter.

I had a son once,
dead and burned. He would not be much younger than this boy here, if he had
lived. Is that what I’m doing here?

“I hanged two men
tonight,” Corvus said. “For looting and rape. Some farmer’s daughter they
dragged back to camp.” His voice was a strained croak. “A time is coming when
this army will have to live off the land like a host of locusts. I know that,
but there are some things I will never tolerate. That discipline must be
learned now, if it is to hold later, when this thing becomes harder.”

“You need to
sleep,” Rictus told him.

Corvus smiled. “Sometimes
I am afraid that I will go to sleep, and when I awake, the army will be gone,
scattered to the winds. It’s getting harder, as we come west. In the east we
were more tightly knit. I wish you could have seen us.”

“I wish so too,”
Rictus said, honestly. “Tell me something, Corvus - how did it all begin? What
was it that brought you to this?”

The smaller man
halted and turned to look at him, the strange eyes with that light in them in
the night. “This is what I was born for. I was conceived in war, and I am my
father’s son.” “And who was your father?”

“Do you not know -
have you never guessed? Rictus, I thought you more acute.”

“I’m tired and
more than a little drunk, Corvus. Indulge me.”

They began walking
again, round the perimeter of the sprawling camp. Corvus nodded to a sentry,
spoke to the man and called him by his name.

“My father was
once of the Ten Thousand, Rictus. From what my mother tells me he was a great
leader, a good man who died needlessly.

“His name was
Jason of Ferai.”

Rictus’s arm
slipped from the younger man’s shoulders. He halted in his tracks.

“Tiryn,” he said. “Antimone’s
pity, she was your mother.”

He remembered. He
remembered. Almost a quarter of a century gone by, and still he could recall
the happenings of those days in gem-sharp images. This boy’s mother was a
beautiful Kufr woman who had been Arkamene’s concubine, abandoned and abused
after Kunaksa. Jason had fallen in love with her, and she with him - as
unlikely a pairing any story ever saw. Jason had been about to retire, to
forsake the red cloak and the Curse of God, and buy a farm somewhere east of
the sea, to live out his days in some obscure corner of the Empire, in peace.

Rictus shook his
head, baffled with the bright glittering memory of it all.

“Your father,” he
said thickly, “He was like a brother to me.”

“And it was
because of you he died.”

“Yes, it was. I
was a stupid boy, a young fool who had no self control.”

“My mother told
me. She never forgave you, Rictus.”

“I do not blame
her for that. Is this why you came seeking me, Corvus? Is this some kind of -”

“Revenge?” Corvus
laughed. “My friend, I have been hearing stories of you since I was of an age
to speak. I hold no ill will for the death of a father I never knew. But I
counted always on meeting the famous Rictus, to face the legend and see what
truth there was behind the stories.”

Rictus shook his
head. “You of all people should know that stories are never anything more than
an echo of the truth.”

“I have met the
man, and he measures up to the stories, Rictus. If he did not, he would be dead
by now.”

Corvus walked
away, until the darkness was near swallowing him up. “You are a man of honour,
and you know what excesses an army can commit, in victory or defeat. You think
as I do, Rictus - you hate the things I hate. I need men like you right now. In
the times to come I will need you even more.”

He wiped his
forearm across his eyes, and seemed like nothing so much as some lost boy
standing in the dark.

“I have fallen
between two worlds. I have had to fight to find my way with the Macht - my own
people. And yet Ardashir and the Companions see me also as one of their own.”

“You are lucky in
your friends, Corvus. As lucky as I once was.”

“That may be. But
I still do not belong in the world as I find it, so I have decided to refashion
it. The Macht are - we are - ignorant barbarians, compared to the civilization
that exists on the far side of the sea. And the Empire is tired and decadent,
for all its riches, its ancient culture, its diversity. I think something
better can be made of both.”

Rictus blinked,
the last of the wine leaving his mind. “What are you saying?”

Corvus turned
round and grinned. At once, he had that unearthly look about him again, and the
tortured boy had vanished utterly.

“I am thinking
aloud, daydreaming in the night. Pay me no heed, Rictus.”

He advanced on the
older man. “If you had command of the army, what would you do now -how would
you proceed against Machran?”

Rictus rubbed his
chin, collecting himself. Corvus’s eyes on him were unsettling.

“I would take the
hinterland cities, first off. They’re broken up at the moment, demoralised.
They should be ripe fruit. Then I would sit out the winter in them, divide up
the army to garrison the major cities and prepare to attack Machran in the
spring. By that time the new levies will have settled in and the men will be
rested and ready for another fight. Machran will be a hard nut to crack open.
We must prepare ourselves for it.”

“I agree on that.
But if we wait until spring, the untaken League cities, and Machran itself,
will have time to recover from the shock of their defeat. In all likelihood, we
would have our work to do all over again. Given time, Karnos will reconstitute
the League - he is a resourceful man.”

“Then what would
you do?”

Corvus smiled. “Were
I Rictus, I would do what you suggest. It is the sensible thing. But I am
Corvus.

“We will move on
Machran with all we have, at once, invest the city through the winter if we
have to. I want the thing over and done with by the spring. We have them on the
run right now - let us keep them that way.”

Rictus shook his
head. “We don’t have enough men.”

“Numbers aren’t
everything, if an army is all motivated by one spirit, one idea. There is a
thing I have found about the Macht since I began leading them and fighting
them; something that is different from the peoples of the Empire. They will
fight for an idea, an abstraction - if that idea is powerful enough. It is what
makes them a great people.”

“It will take more
than an idea to scale the walls of Machran.”

“Oh, I know.
Parmenios is working on it. For a fat little man with inky fingers, he has some
ideas that would startle you.” Corvus turned to walk away.

“Best continue
with my rounds. I have not yet spoken to Ardashir this evening…” He paused,
turned about. “Rictus, do you know why Fornyx hates me?”

The question took
Rictus off guard. “I -”

“Because he loves
you, and he thinks I have brought you to this by threat of death. You and I
know different. There is nowhere in the world you would rather be right now
than here with this army.”