Paul Kearney: Corvus

A woman stood outlined in the threshold, firelight and lamplight flickering out behind her along with the laughter of children. She snapped a word to the dogs and they calmed down at once, grinning happily. The laughter within ceased. Rictus stepped up to the door.

The woman who confronted him there was tall, iron-coloured in hair and eyes. She was wrapped in a finely spun woollen shawl the same saffron hue as the light behind her, so that she seemed bathed in bright warmth. She had a long face, strong-jawed as a man’s, and as she saw Rictus and Fornyx her eyes widened a trifle, but that was the only way the face changed. She reached back inside the house and produced a shallow dish.

“My lord. Welcome home,” she said, a voice as low as heather honey.

Both Rictus and Fornyx took salt from the dish and tasted it. “Antimone bless us all,” Fornyx said.

“Aise,” Rictus said. And he bent to kiss the woman on the forehead.

She stood aside. “Come in. Since you sent word from Nemasis we have been expecting you, this month and more.” A slight pause, long enough to be noticed. “It’s late, but there’s still some supper to be had.”

Rictus had to stoop to enter the house, and he blinked as the lamplight and woodsmoke within pricked his eyes.

A long, low mountain farmstead, built and flagged with stone, thatched with reeds from the riverside. It had a hearth the shape of a beehive opposite the doorway, from which floated the faint fragrance of baked bread. Oil lamps hung from the rafters, suspended by silver chains – he had brought those back from the Avensis siege, fifteen years ago – and the heavy pine table and benches he and Fornyx had hammered together with much drunken profanity some decade before remained, darkened with age and use.

There were unfamiliar touches though: a new loom stood in the shadows of the north wall, and a bronze hinged chest had replaced the old one he had stored his scrolls in for as many years as the house had stood.

And the people had changed also. Eunion came forward from his place by the fire, touching his fist to his chest. He rose more stiffly than Rictus remembered, and there was even less hair on his skull, but the lively intelligence in the dark eyes was the same.

“You are welcome home, master,” he said, still using the term although Rictus had freed him many years ago.

“Are you well, Eunion?”

“As well as always, sir. The lady keeps the life in me.”

The newcomers dumped their gear on the stone floor, unclipping the fastenings on their armour. Eunion took the black cuirasses from their backs one by one and set them reverently on the cross-shaped stands at the gable wall. The rest of their gear followed, until it seemed that there were two helmed and armoured men squatting in the shadows there, scarlet cloaks on their shoulders.

Aise had already disappeared out the back door and they could hear her clapping her hands for the slaves. Rictus thought to stop her – he wanted no fuss – but then thought better of it. It was her household, after all, and well over a year since he had been in it.

“Well, aren’t you going to speak to me?” he asked the two slim, upright figures by the fire. “Don’t you know me?”

“Always,” one of them said, and then sprang forward into his arms. He spun her round, laughing, breathing her in, feeling the litheness of her youth against him, then set her down and stared at her.

“Gods above, Rian, you’re taller still – will you never stop growing?”

“Not until I’m as tall as you,” she retorted. “One day I’ll look you in the eye.”

“You always look me in the eye.” He kissed her, cupping her face in, his big, spear-calloused hands. She had his eyes – he had been told – and the thick black hair of her mother’s youth. “How many summers are you now – thirteen?”

“Fourteen,” she corrected him scornfully.

“I’ll bet they’ve been trooping to the door in line to marry you,” he said.

“Yes, but none of them are rich enough – and I want a man who can read!”

Both Rictus and Kornyx laughed.

Aise returned with the two household slaves, Garin, a stocky man in his thirties, and a girl, a new one Rictus had not seen before.

“Where did you get her?” he asked Aise, frowning. It was he who decided on the buying and the selling of the slaves, part of the duties of the master of the household. “What happened to Veria?”

“She fell pregnant by Garin here, and lost the child. After that she mooned around and was no good for anything, so I sold her. I bought this girl, Styra, in Hal Goshen, at the big market.”

“Hal Goshen -” Rictus bit off his words, having seen Aise raise her chin in that combative way of hers, as though readying for a blow. Now was not the time.

He looked at Garin, who was busy stacking fresh wood and turf by the fire, but the man had his slave face on, stony blankness. He and Veria had been a couple, a unit that Rictus would not have broken. But even now, he was more sentimental about these things than Aise had ever been. It came from memories of his own loss, perhaps.

“Father, you haven’t said anything to Ona,” Rian said in a whisper, squeezing his hand.

“Yes, yes – come here girl, I won’t bite you.” Aise had soured his mood somewhat, and it showed in his voice. Ona approached him as a mouse might a hawk. He held out his hand to her – his other was still on his eldest daughter’s waist.

“Ona? It’s all right. Come here to me.”

His youngest daughter had grown up also, into a freckle-faced child with hair the same shade as horse-chestnut and great green eyes. She was seven – no, eight years old now. Rictus gathered her into his free arm and pulled her close, remembering how she had ridden screaming with laughter on his shoulders the previous autumn, and the three of them had come home from the woods with a basket of mushrooms, and beech leaves in their hair. He held his daughters in the circle of his arms and felt Rian’s breath on his neck, Ona’s stubby hands gripping his arm, and it seemed to him only then that he had truly come home.

There was good food laid out for them, despite the lateness of the hour. Garin built up the fire until it blazed like a lamp and the new slave, Styra, laid the table with the glazed plates Rictus and Fornyx had brought back from some long-ago coastal campaign, bright red earthenware decorated with dolphins and octopi.

There was barley bread and goat’s cheese, black olives and green oil, and slivers of cured ham from the pig they had killed only the month before. Garlic dug up from the riverside, and purple onions to make the eyes water, and fresh thyme to scent it all. And wine, the thin yellow resin-flavoured wine of the highlands. Rictus and Fornyx fell on the food like starved, dogs, and for a while the house was silent save for their grunts of appreciation, and the crackle of wood in the fire. At last, though, they were sated, and pushed back from the table with something between a grunt and a groan.

“Last year’s wine, lady?” Fornyx asked.

Aise nodded. “We put by six amphorae, and five are still full. We don’t drink wine much when the master of the house is away.”

Rictus stood up from the table, stretching. He ruffled Rian’s black hair as he passed her, and adjusted the midnight gleam of his cuirass where it was displayed on its stand at the eastern gable. He ran his fingers through the transverse horsehair crest of his helm, and touched the leather mid-grip of his spear.

For a while he stood there. Fornyx was coaxing Ona onto his knee – she had always been his favourite, perhaps because his own daughter had been russet-haired. Aise was clearing the table, and Eunion and the slaves had left for a last look in on the stock, what there was of it. The farmhouse was settling back into the interrupted routine of the night, having made space for Rictus and Fornyx within it.