Paul Kearney - Corvus

“We are men of blood, you and I, Rictus. Sons of Phobos himself. You can no more set aside your nature than can I. In the times to come, you will don that cloak once more, you will heft a spear, and you will follow your calling. Do not try to tell me different. I see in you the restlessness that I have felt in myself all my life. If you join with me, you will be a part of great things; you will live your life as it was meant to be. You will have a part in the changing of the world. And I will keep faith with you forever. This I swear, to Phobos himself.” Then he looked Rictus in the eye.

“If you do not join with me, then I will do what I must. You will die here today. But I promise you that you will die alone. Fornyx here will be spared – as will your family – and your men will take service with me. Your name will have a place in the story, but your part in it will be over. Today.” He smiled a little, and in his face there was something genuine -an earnest regret.

Then he turned away, and at once his eyes blazed like those of a hungry animal.

“I will let you think on it. And I will see you outside when you have made up your mind. Druze, let us go.”

Druze rose and opened the door, letting in a blare of white light and the chill air of the world outside. He and Corvus went out, closing the door behind them. For a few moments Rictus was blind in the dimness of the farmhouse, his vision flaring with afterimages. It seemed that not only his eyes but his mind was reeling a little with what he had been told. As his vision returned, he drank deep of his wine.

“Modest little bastard, ain’t he?” Fornyx said, sitting down heavily.

“A phenomenon,” a voice said, and both Rictus and Fornyx started. It was Eunion, forgotten in the corner. He rose stiffly now and approached the table with the scroll still hanging in his hand. The dogs whined as they picked up the mood of the room.

“A slave’s gift,” he said with a tight smile. “To have oneself overlooked.”

“A gift I find myself wishing I had,” Rictus conceded.

“You think he means what he says?” Fornyx asked.

It was Eunion who answered. “He means it, master, he means all of it. He is a man who has a certain picture of himself in his head, and he will do anything to keep that picture real. Such men are the most dangerous of all to know. They are not pragmatists, but dreamers.”

“His dreams have taken him far,” Fornyx said sourly, running his fingers through his beard. “Rictus, we’re in a corner here – we’ll have to go along with the little fuck, for now at least.”

Rictus sat rolling the wine around in his mouth. He was curiously detached. He felt that he had never in his life tasted a cup of wine so completely, enjoying every nuance of its taste. There were complexities within it he had not guessed at, far beyond the run of his own mountain vintages.

Something else – this Corvus knew him, knew him well enough to prod at the weaknesses in his makeup. Not just the veiled threats to his family and his men, not just a crude leverage. One gained men’s obedience that way, but not their loyalty.

Corvus had lifted a curtain and made a promise of something greater beyond it, and Rictus knew, without question, that if this slender, terrible boy gave his word on something,” he would keep it. Because, as Eunion had said, he was a dreamer, and to break his word would destroy some picture he held of himself in his mind.

Rictus looked at his friends. “We can trust him,” he said. “I know it.”

Fornyx let out a low whistle. “You’re going to do it.”

“It’s that or death – why not?” Rictus replied. He stood up, the wine loosening his brain. Looking around the homely room, he realised that this place had always been a refuge for him, and he hoped it always would be. But Corvus had been right – and Fornyx too.

He would live and die with a scarlet cloak on his back.

Hal Goshen. In old Machtic the name denoted a gateway, and in the centuries since men had settled there, that was what it had been, commanding a gap between stone and water.

The Gosthere Range, a jagged, rocky, bare-headed line of high hills or low mountains, threw out a long spin here, some two hundred pasangs from north-east to south-west. At the end of it, on a wide flattened knob of high ground, the city had been built. It overlooked the ancient highway that connected the eastern portion of the Harukush with the western, and was a scant fifteen pasangs from the sea.

The lowland ground between coast and mountain hail been fought over for generations, and was the root of Hal Goshen’s prosperity. It had deep, black soil which might yield two good crops a year, if the weather were kind, and down on the shore to the south were scores of fishing villages and small towns whose menfolk counted themselves citizens of the city on the hill, and voted in its assemblies. The port of Goshen itself was the largest of these, linked to the hilltop city by a fine road. It had one of the best natural harbours on the southern seaboard, and a prosperous fishing fleet was based there.

An army travelling west across the Harukush would find the land narrowing between the mountains and the sea, until the grey tufa walls of Hal Goshen were before it, like the cork in a bottle. To drink the wine of the west, that cork would have to be popped.

A company of men stood on the high ridge northeast of the city and halted there to take in the wide sweep of the world before them. It was bitterly cold, and snow was blowing across the ridge in clouds as hard and heavy as sand, pluming off the peaks of the mountains behind them in long banners across a pale sky, blue as a robin’s egg.

Corvus seemed to feel the cold more than most. He was buried in a thick cloak, highlander’s felt, and held the hood close about his mouth.

“There she lies, the door to the west. I hope we shall not have to knock too hard,” he said.

Rictus scanned the open country to the south of the city, the scattered farms, so much closer together than in the highlands. A taenon of earth here would be a mere tithe of the expanse a man would need to support a family in the high country. Even with autumn well into its stride, the place had a prosperous, comfortable look, lined with vines and well-spaced olive trees, the woods cut back, the wetlands drained, neat tufa walls everywhere; a thousand years of labour or more. A tamed landscape, this; a fat pigeon waiting for a hawk.

“It does not seem to me that the men of Hal Goshen are much panicked by your army,” Fornyx said. Snow had greyed his beard and eyebrows. He looked pinched, almost as grizzled as Rictus.

“Our camp is eight pasangs back to the east,” Corvus said, his gaze fixed hungrily on the city. “But I hey know we’re here. They closed their gates eight days ago, and brought what provisions they could within the walls. The road to the port has been cut by my cavalry.”

“I see no burnt farms or uprooted vines,” Rictus said.

“That is not the way I make war,” Corvus told him. “I mean to possess this city, and the lands around it. I do not intend to capture a wasteland.”

“Then how do you feed your men?” Fornyx asked, genuine surprise in his voice.

“Trains of supply wagons are sent to me from my eastern possessions,” Corvus said. “That is why I am able to keep campaigning with winter coming on. We do a certain amount of foraging when we are on the march, but in general I find that it is best not to despoil a country whose inhabitants you wish to conciliate.”

“It could be argued that a man whose farm is burning is more apt to listen to reason,” Fornyx said.

Corvus turned his strange pale eyes upon him. “I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge.”