Corvus (34 page)

The little company
moved out. Sertorius led Aise on a leash, and she stumbled in his wake, her
once beautiful face bruised and swollen and bloody. Then came hulking Adurnos,
carrying Ona on his shoulder as though she were a sack. The child’s eyes were
dead as stones, and when she gathered breath for a cough he set his fingers
over her mouth and smothered it.

He was followed by
Philemos and Rian, half-dragging Phaestus with them. Bosca brought up the rear.
He amused himself now and then by shoving Rictus’s eldest daughter in the back,
his grin a yellow gleam in the darkness.

They straggled
through the night, a haggard company of travellers at the end of their journey.
As they drew nearer to Machran they could smell burning; not woodsmoke, but a
putrid, sickening reek that hung heavy in the night.

“That’s a funeral
pyre,” Sertorius sniffed, “a big one.”

“There’s been a
battle,” Philemos said.

The river was loud
and pale to their right. The open plain about Machran seemed deserted, the city
and the conqueror’s army facing each other across it as though separated by a
gulf of shadow.

“Phobos is rising,”
Phaestus said. He fell to one knee. Philemos hauled him up again. Phaestus
leaned his weight on the shoulders of his son and Rictus’s daughter.

“Forgive me,” he
murmured to Rian.

“Shit,” Sertorius
said. “Someone’s out there - I can see them. Down, all of you.”

They lay in the
broken crackling rows of a winter vineyard. The plants had been slashed and
trampled flat, but were still high enough to conceal them. Sertorius and his
men drew their knives.

A pair of shadows
lurched by not two hundred paces away to the south, one supporting the other
like a man helping a drunken friend. They were making a painfully slow progress
across the plain to the camp of Corvus’s army.

Sertorius breathed
out. “Just stragglers, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Up, up - let’s go
before the night gets old.”

Aise stood staring
at the retreating shadows for a moment before the leash at her throat jerked her
into motion. She trudged after Sertorius again, head down, her feet bare and
bloody and the white skin of her naked shoulder shining like a bone under the
rising moons.

The pyre was
still burning as they
passed it, flames licking here and there in fitful tongues. There were people
coming and going between it and the open gate of the Mithannon, and centons of
spearmen standing in ordered ranks. Women were keening and sobbing, an eerie
chorus in the night, and the torchlight made of it all a dark tableau of shadow
and fire, a dramatist’s invocation of grief. The company made their halting way
to the looming gateway of the city, and there were stopped by men in full
panoply, one bearing a centurion’s transverse crest.

“Your names and
district.”

“Phaestus,”
Sertorius said, “This is on you, now.”

The old man
straightened and seemed to find some last reserve of strength. He stood tall in
front of the centurion.

“I am Phaestus of
Hal Goshen, and I bear news for Karnos, Speaker of Machran. You must take me
and those with me to him at once.”

When the centurion
did not move, he barked out in a much louder voice, “Do as I say!”

The strength left
him. He sagged, and was seized with a fit of wet, bloody coughing.

The centurion
turned to one of his men. “Get Kassander here.”

From the Mithannon
Gate to Kerusiad
Hill was two pasangs as a crow might fly, half as long again by the meander of
the Mithannon’s cramped streets and alleyways. Phaestus and Aise had nothing
left in them, nor any strength to trudge over the hard cold cobbles of the city
amid the night-time crowds. When Kassander arrived he looked over the
travellers one by one. As he saw Aise’s condition his eyes widened and anger
made of his mouth a wide, lipless slot.

“What has happened
to this woman?”

“She tried to
escape,” Sertorius said. Standing by the burly armoured polemarch he seemed
like a jackal cowering before a lion. “She’s been difficult from the start. We’ve
travelled over half the Gostheres to get here, through snowdrifts as high as
your head. Been near three weeks on the road.”

Kassander flicked
a hand at the centurion. “Cut her free. The other one too.” He looked down at
Sertorius and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He turned.

“I know you,
Phaestus. We have met in the past.”

“You know me,”
Phaestus agreed. He lay on the cobbles with Philemos supporting him. “I must
see Karnos.”

“Can you walk?”

Phaestus smiled
faintly. “I’ve walked this far.”

“I will have a
cart brought here. Centurion!”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stay with these
people. When transport arrives escort them to Karnos’s villa on the Kerusiad.
Then set a guard about the house.”

He turned to
Sertorius, leaned in so close that the bronze face of his helm was misted by
the other man’s breath.

“I don’t give a
fuck who she is; you’d better have a good reason for treating a woman that way.”

For a city
under siege, Machran did
not lack liveliness, even at this hour of the night. The mule-drawn cart sent
for them had to have a path cleared for it through the crowds by the escorting
spearmen, and by the time it had meandered across a third of the city, Phobos
was almost set and Haukos was high in the sky.

Pink Haukos - to
the Macht he was the moon of hope, but across the teeming Empire of the Kufr,
he was called
Firghe,
moon of wrath.

Word had gone
ahead of them. When the mule-cart finally completed its clattering ascent of
the Kerusiad Hill, the doors of Karnos’s villa were already open in a blaze of
torchlight, and the master of the house stood wrapped in a woollen chlamys
against the cold, his household all about him. He saw the condition of those in
the cart and clapped his hands. Half a dozen slaves congregated on the vehicle.
Phaestus lifted his head, but could not speak.

Karnos bent over
him and took his hand. “My friend, be at ease. Your wife and daughters arrived
here over a week ago. I have them quartered in comfort further up the hill. I
shall send word to Berimus.” Phaestus closed his eyes, and tears trickled down
his face. Karnos patted his shoulder.

“You must be
Philemos,” he said. “A fine looking young man. I salute you for seeing your
father to safety.” Philemos bowed his head, looking more than anything else
ashamed. Karnos sucked his teeth a moment.

“You three,” he
said to Sertorius and his comrades. “What part did you play in all this?”

“We were the
escort,” Sertorius said with a grin that flickered on and off in his face. “Without
us, Phaestus would be dead in the drifts of the Gostheres.”

“Is this true?”
Karnos asked Phaestus. The older man’s eyes opened and he nodded.

Karnos ran his
gaze over the brutalised captives in the cart. Rian met his eyes with a
glaring, tearstained defiance, holding Ona in her arms. Aise sat with her head
resting on her elder daughter’s shoulder, eyes shut, barely conscious.

“You are to be
congratulated,” he said at last to Sertorius. “It’s not a time to be on the
road.” He raised his voice slightly. “Polio.”

“Master?” The old
steward was also staring at the women in the cart, his white beard quivering.

“We must find a
space for these three fine fellows to lay their heads. Water for washing, food
and wine - whatever they want. Have the cook run something up.”

“How about a plump
little slave girl?” Bosca leered.

Karnos looked at
him. “Centurion?”

“Yes, Speaker.”

His eyes were
still fixed on Bosca. “I want four men to stand guard over our guests here.
Make sure they do not wander round my house and lose themselves.”

“Yes, Speaker.”

“Now listen here,
Karnos -” Sertorius exclaimed.

“Ah, I have it.
Grania, show these gentlemen to the grain store. You will forgive me, my
friends, but I am a little short on space.” Karnos jerked his head to one side
and the spearmen clustered around Sertorius, Adurnos and Bosca. The slim slave
girl led the way.

“Phaestus - you
tell him!” Sertorius shouted over his shoulder. “You’d be dead were it not for
me!” The spearmen shoved him along in Grania’s wake with the relish of angry
men.

Karnos was still
staring at Rictus’s brutalised family. “
Phobos
,” he seethed under his
breath. He and Polio looked at one another.

“We couldn’t stop them,”
Philemos said miserably. Karnos looked at him with contempt, then shook his
head and touched Rian gently on the arm.

“Lady, you are in
my house now, and here I swear no man shall touch you.”

Rian bent her head
and began to sob silently.

The slaves went
about their
business in unaccustomed silence. They had rarely seen their master in such a
mood. He was not shouting, ranting or throwing winecups at the walls, as they
had seen him do many a time on returning from the Amphion. He was not drunk,
nor was he impatiently shouting orders as was his wont.

He sat in his
chair before the fire of the main hall and stared into the flames with
unblinking eyes as though he were waiting for something to appear there. The
long room was almost in darkness, a few single-wicked lamps glowing in the
corners. His chlamys lay on the floor at his feet, and no slave had yet dared
approach to pick it up.

It was Polio who
broke his dark reverie.

“Master, the lady
Kassia is here.”

“
What?
Fuck!”

“Shall I show her
in?”

Karnos stared into
the fire again. He had lost weight, and as the flesh had melted from his face
so the bones beneath had become more prominent. He was no longer the florid fat
man he had been before Afteni. .

Polio cleared his
throat. “I believe Kassander sent her. She has two servants with her, and
baskets of linens.”

Karnos nodded. “That’s
Kassander’s way. I was going to send for a carnifex to look at them, but the
last thing they need is another fucking man pawing -” He clenched his teeth
shut on the words. “Let them in, Polio.”

Before Polio could
move away, Karnos set a hand upon the older man’s fingers and gripped them.

“Thank you,” he
said.

Polio raised his
eyebrows slightly. “You do not need to thank me for a thing, master.”

“Perhaps I will
before this is done. What about Phaestus and the boy?”

“They are
sleeping.”

“Let them sleep
then. And send in that bloody woman.”

He bent and tossed
another log on the fire. Pine wood, hewn from the forests north of the Mithos
River. The resin in the timber oozed and spat and flared up in little knots of
white fury.

“Sitting in the
dark?” Kassia’s voice said behind him.

“The dark seems
best, for now.”

She bent and
retrieved his cloak from the floor. “Kassander told me, said I might be needed
here. I brought two good women. One’s a midwife. They will look after them.”

Karnos nodded.

“What are you
going to do with them?”

He looked up, and
laughed. “What would you have me do? They were brought here because they are
the family of a dead man. Their suffering has no significance, no sense to it.”

“Most suffering
doesn’t.”

Karnos clenched
one fist in another. “What a filthy world we live in, Kassia.”

She sat in the
chair across from him, picking at the threads of his chlamys, teasing out the
wool. “There are a thousand women like them in the city.”

“I am responsible
for this, Kassia. Me.” He stood up, began pacing the room, in and out of the
dark and the firelight and the lamplight, up and down like something caged.

“I encouraged
Phaestus to do this thing. It was his idea, but I wrote, urging him on. Get
them, I said. Bring them here. We will hold this over the great Rictus’s head
and cleave him from Corvus. I was so fucking clever about it. My seal on a
scroll of paper is what brought them to this.”

Kassia stared at
her busy fingers picking the wool in her lap. “I see.”

“It is one thing
to face a man on a battlefield, or on the floor of the Empirion for that
matter. But this is pure poison, even had it worked.”

“You love your
city, Karnos,” Kassia said simply. “You would do anything that would help
preserve it.”

“You have not seen
them, or the leering bastards that brought them here. I would have killed those
animals on the spot, except I am no better. It would not be justice, unless I
had the same done to me - I am complicit.” “You did not know this would happen,
Karnos.”

“A man’s
family
,
Kassia.”

“Do they know he
is dead?”

“What? No - not
yet. I must tell them, I suppose.”

“Not tonight, for
Antimone’s sake. They have been through enough.”

“You are right not
to marry me. I am not fit for a decent woman.”

She stood up and
blocked his path, took him by the arms as he tried to sidestep her. “If that
were so I would not be here, and this would not be tearing you up the way it
is. You made a mistake, Karnos. But you are leader of a great city in desperate
times, making a hundred decisions a day. You will be wrong some of the time,
and because you have power in your hands, your mistakes will bring misfortune
and misery to people. That is the nature of your position.”

Karnos stared at
her and managed a strangled laugh. “By God, Kassia, you can be a cold-blooded
bitch when you want to be.”

She slapped him
across the face, eyes blazing. “You are Speaker of Machran. You do not have the
time to indulge your guilt. The thing is done. That’s all there is to it.”