Corvus (5 page)

FIRE
IN THE NIGHT

Autumn bit deeper
. Walking in the
woods was like strolling through a blizzard of dry, copper-coloured leaves, rattling
in the wind, circling and twining in fathomless dances. The earth itself was
growing colder under their feet, whilst the sky was a tumble of pouring cloud,
light and shadow chasing across it in endless patterns, following the sunset.

Aise had grown
thinner. In Rictus’s arms she felt light and spare and angled with bones, her
skin white as ivory where the sun never saw it.

She had always
been a modest woman, something Rictus knew to be rare in those blessed with a
face and form such as had graced her youth. His second night home she took him
by the hand and led him to their bed without a word, and they joined within it
like two polite strangers, until at last she seemed to come to life under him
with grudging moans, and her hands pulled him deeper into her. When he was
spent, they lay in the dark of the wind-wreathed room and their faces were so
close that he felt her lashes brush his cheek as her eyes opened in the
darkness. Her fingers ran down his flank, as though reacquainting themselves.

“What was this?”
she asked as she settled on a ridge of scar. “It’s new.”

He frowned. “I don’t
remember. A knife, I think. It was nothing.”

She found the
arrow-pock on his thigh, and her fingers circled it gently. “So many wounds.”

“War’s accounting,”
Rictus said. He lifted himself off her with some reluctance and they lay side
by side in the bed. “I have always been lucky that way. Antimone has spared me.”

“Or Phobos,” Aise
said. “They say the god of fear looks after those who do his work in the world.”

Rictus set a hand
on her flat belly, as taut as a girl’s despite the three children who had
bloomed within it. “Is that what you think of me, Aise, after all this time?”

“I know that when
I see you in that black armour and the red cloak, with the helm hiding your face,
I am afraid. There is something in your eyes, Rictus. Perhaps it is what has
made you what you are. It changes only when you look upon Rian.”

Rictus took his
hand away from her warmth and knuckled his eyes. “You and Fornyx. Sometimes I
wonder if either of you know me at all.”

She raised herself
on one elbow and moved closer to him once more, until they were skin to skin,
and the wetness at the crux of her thighs was leaking onto his hip. Even in the
dark, he knew she was smiling down at him.

“Perhaps, husband,
we know you better than you know yourself.”

Her mouth sought
his, hungry now. She straddled him with sudden energy, and their second
coupling had real joy in it, like some flash of memory, a moment from the past
when she had more flesh on her bones, and he fewer scars on his.

Thus, day by
day, his other life
claimed him, and Rictus’s spirit began to attune itself to the quiet routine of
the farm.

He and Fornyx
chopped wood until their palms blistered, beat the last of the hazelnuts off
the trees with long staves whilst the girls ran squealing around them, trying
to catch them in with baskets, and dug in the hard clay plot beside the house
for beet and turnip. They threw themselves into the work of the farm with such
gusto that Aise complained the slaves were becoming lazy, but Rictus loved to
come back into the house at dusk, stiff and filthy with the day’s labour, to
find the fire blazing and the girls at the table and Aise baking flatbread on
the griddle. He would seize his wife into his arms and kiss shut her protesting
mouth until she put her flour-whitened hands on his shoulders to push him away.

More often than
not Rictus and Fornyx would have wine after dinner, and Eunion would sing a
song of his youth, or go over some past campaign from history that the two men
had never heard of.

He had taught Rian
to read, and was now doing the same for Ona, so every evening after they had
eaten there would be his low singer’s voice in a murmur with Rictus’s youngest
daughter, the two of them heads together in a corner with a single lamp,
puzzling out the words on a scroll.

And then there
would be bed, Aise and Rictus always the last to go. Sometimes Rictus held back
to stand at the beehive hearth alone in the last red light of the fire,
savouring the warmth of the flagstones under his bare feet, the smell of bread
and wet dogs, the creaking of the roof beams over his head as the wind rushed
down from the mountains to stir the thatch. On still nights he could hear the
river trundling endlessly in its bed, and owls calling from the woods on the
valley sides.

He did not think
often of the gods as a rule, except when going into battle, but there were
times when he stood there in the quiet house with all the people he loved most
in the world sleeping about him within the broad stone walls, and he would
raise his head to quietly thank Antimone, goddess of pity, for allowing him
this.

He did not think
on Antimone’s other face, or dwell upon the fact that when she donned her Veil,
she was also the goddess of death.

The first real
snows came,
knee-deep in the space of a night, and along the margins of the river the ice
fanned out in brilliant gem-bright pancakes. The goats were now down in the
valley itself, Fornyx,

Funion and Garin
herding them from the high pastures while the dogs trotted on the flanks of the
flock and sniffed at wolf-tracks in the snow.

Now the wolf-watch
would have to begin, the menfolk of the farm taking it in turns to stay out at
nights beside the flock, huddled by a fire in the lean-to on the western valley
slope with the dogs for company.

Rictus and Fornyx
took the first night’s watch together, for while bringing the goats down from
the highland pasture, Fornyx had found the tracks of an entire pack quartering
the hills, and the tracks led south. So the two men set by a store of wood in
the lean-to during the day and as darkness fell they donned their old scarlet
cloaks, took up their spears and shouldered a skin of wine against the
bitterness of the night. Rian’s demand to come along was firmly rebuffed, and
Rictus kissed his womenfolk one by one before shutting the farmhouse door on
them and standing by Fornyx’s side in the chill darkness underneath the stars.

“You have the most
stupid grin on your face,” Fornyx said. “I can see it even in the dark. Didn’t
I tell you how they would come round?”

“You’re short and
ugly,” Rictus retorted, “but do you hear me bring it up? Come on, dogs.”

They crunched
through the frozen snow, the two hounds padding beside them, transformed into
lean, predatory shadows in the starlight. Once, Rictus held up a hand and they
both paused to listen. The half-frozen river had been muffled and there was
barely a breath of air moving in the valley. They could hear the creaking of
their own bones, and the soft rush of blood in their throats as their hearts
beat, like the sound of a panting dog.

There it was, far
off: the faint sad song of the wolf. The hounds beside the two men growled, low
in their chests.

“A bad sign, so
early in the year,” Fornyx said in an undertone.

“Mark of a hard
winter to come, my father always said. Phobos, it’s a heavy frost falling. Let’s
get that damned fire lit before our feet freeze to the ground.”

They trekked
through the brittle snow to the shelter and Fornyx set about lighting the fire;
he was far and away the best of them with flint and tinder. The goats -
twitchy, fey creatures up on the high pastures - seemed here almost
pathetically glad to see their masters, and the flock gathered in front of the
hut, a dark blot on the snow. Soon the firelight picked out the ranks of the
nearest, and their cold eyes reflected the flames at the men and dogs in the
lean-to.

Fornyx stood
stamping his feet up and down in front of the fire. He and Rictus had stuffed
their sandals with rabbit’s fur, which was singed by the flames as they stood
there, an acrid, campaigning smell.

“You think the
passes are still open?” Fornyx asked.

Rictus cocked his
head to one side. “Maybe. It’ll be worse up there on the high ridge. It depends
which way the wind blows the drifts.”

“I’ll bet Valerian
and Kesero are still down at the sea in Hal Goshen, in some tavern with their
bellies full of cheap wine and their laps full of some cheap tart’s arse.”

Rictus smiled. “If
they’ve any sense.”

“You know that
Valerian and Rian -”

“I know. I’m not
blind.”

“She’s of an age
now, Rictus, and Valerian’s a good man, for all his antics.”

Rictus opened his
hands out to the firelight with a curt nod. “I know Valerian’s worth, as well
as anyone.”

“But-”

“But he wears the
scarlet.”

“He doesn’t have
to wear it all his life.”

“He won’t be
wearing it if he wants to marry Rian. I would not have her live the life her
mother has led.”

“You have given
Aise a good life, Rictus,” Fornyx said quietly.

“It would have
been better, were I a man like my father was.”

Fornyx threw up
his hands. He knew better than to pursue a matter once Rictus had invoked his
father’s memory. “Reach me the wineskin, will you?”

They sat out the
night, taking it in turns to doze once the middle part of it was past. They
talked desultorily of old battles, old comrades, and the attractions of various
women they had known. They hardly noticed when the snow began to fall again, a
grey veil beyond the firelight that paled the sleeping goats and brought into
the valley an absolute hush, as though the world was awake and aware, but
waiting breathlessly for some happening.

The fire died
down, and in the snowbound silence they heard again the high, distant call of
the wolf.

The goats stirred
uneasily at the sound, dislodging snow from their backs so they became piebald.
Now that the flames were low, Rictus and Fornyx could see how bright was the
light from the two moons. Cold Phobos, his face as pale as pewter, and warm
Haukos his younger brother, whose light tinged the snow with a pink like
watered wine. Both moons were full in the sky, and around them the ice crystals
in the air arced in a double halo of rainbow light.

“Fear and Hope,
both full in the sky together. It’s an omen, Rictus,” Fornyx murmured. They
were both staring aloft, spellbound.

“I don’t believe
in them,” Rictus growled, but he, too caught some of the sense of wonder, a
feeling that they were standing on the threshold of some change in the world.

“I’ve seen it
maybe four times in my life, and every time it was on the cusp of new things.”

“Ach -” Half
angry, Rictus turned away. He hated talk of omens and portents. His life had
leached all sense of the numinous out of him. He believed in what his hands
could do and his eyes could see, and though he invoked the gods in prayer and
thanks it was as much a reflex as anything else, a grace-note. He did not
believe -

“Fornyx - look
there, on the ridge to the south. Do you see it?” He crunched out of the last
dimming glow of the firelight and stared across the fields of snow to the dark
woods of the hills above, and beyond them, the high ridge which marked the
entrance to the valley, maybe six pasangs away. There in the moon-drenched dark
was the light of a single fire, as steady as a candle-flame in a glass lantern.

“I see it.” Fornyx
joined him, shivering. “It’s a campfire, up on the side of the ridge. They must
be deep in the drifts up there, whoever they are.”

“Valerian? Kesero?”

“Too close. They
know this valley - for the sake of six pasangs they’d have marched through the
night, knowing a warm bed was here waiting for them. Whoever is up there,
Rictus, does not know Andunnon.”

Before the sun
came up, Rictus and
Fornyx were back in the farmhouse. The rest of the family rose to gape as the
two men methodically armed one another, hauling on the black cuirasses which
were Antimone’s ageless gift to the Macht, belting on their swords and
strapping bronze greaves to their shins. The girls clustered around their
mother, round-eyed, and Eunion, after a moment’s shock, unearthed his own
hunting spear. Rictus saw this and held up a hand.

“No, no my friend.
You stay here.”

“What is it,
Rictus?” Aise asked calmly, her arms around Ona’s shoulders, her face white and
fixed as a statue’s.

“It may be
nothing. Fornyx, tie up that damned loose strap at my back, will you?” The two
men checked one another over, tugging on straps, tightening buckles.

“Shields?” Fornyx
asked.

“And helms. We may
as well look the part.”

Ona began to cry.

Within minutes,
the Rictus and Fornyx of the farm had vanished. In their place now stood two
heavily armoured mercenaries, their eyes mere glitters in the T-slits of their
helms, the scarlet cloaks of their calling on their shoulders, shields on their
left arms, spears at their right. They had become men of Phobos, the god of
fear.

“Stay in the house,”
Rictus told the others. “If we’re not back by mid-morning, pack some things and
head for the north, up in the hills. Make for the old shepherd’s bothy on the
high pastures. This may all be for nothing, so do no thing that cannot be
undone.” He caught Eunion’s eye. “Keep them safe, you and Garin, until we
return.”

Eunion nodded,
swallowing convulsively.

Rictus stared at
Aise, then Rian, a blank mask, unknowable. The face of death. Without another
word, he ducked out of the house, and Fornyx followed him.

They could smell
woodsmoke on the
still air, the only smell in the white snow-girt morning. Without speaking,
they trudged uphill into the woods, shields slung on their backs, spears at the
trail.