Paul Kearney - Corvus

“Halt!” He shouted. “Reform!”

The Dogsheads came together, tightened their ranks, and stood motionless amid a tide-wrack of bodies, piles of discarded shields. The men fleeing them were no longer soldiers, and not worth killing. The only way to catch up with them in any case would have been to drop their own shields. They had done enough.

Rictus stepped forward of the front rank, stabbed the sauroter of his spear into the ground and unhelmed, feeling the blessed chill of the winter’s day ease his throbbing skull. Fornyx joined him. His black beard was matted with blood.

“It’s always the third shove that does it,” he said, and nudged a corpse with his foot. It was the man Rictus had speared through the neck. He wore a bracelet of dried grass about his wrist, the kind a daughter might plait for her father on a summer afternoon. Rictus looked away from it.

There was a thunder on the air, a tremble felt through the soles of the feet. Teresian’s men opened up their ranks to the right, and through the gap came a torrent of cavalry, Corvus leading them with his personal banner snapping above his head. The spearmen roared as the Companions swept past, tall Kufr on big horses with bright coloured cloaks opening out from their shoulders like flags.

They took off after the fleeing men of Goron, a cavalcade of death, and began spearing them from behind as they ran. Soon the open ground leading up to the city in the distance was black with scattered bodies, and still the Companions hunted them, killing scores, hundreds, riding them down like greyhounds slaughtering hares.

“That is murder,” Fornyx said, his teeth bared with distaste.

Druze joined them. His Igranians were running in the wake of the cavalry, looting the dead, spearing the wounded, clearing up like jackals in the wake of a pride of lions. He offered Rictus and Fornyx a wineskin. Bitter highland wine, like that Rictus made at Andunnon. Druze wiped his mouth. His dark face was shining with sweat.

“I know what is in your mind,” he said, “but if you fight against Corvus, this is what happens. These men had only to stay within their walls, accept our terms, and they would be alive with their families today.”

“War has its conventions,” Rictus said. “One does not pursue to the death when the foe is beaten.”

“He is different,” Druze retorted. “His wars are different. It is why he wins them.”

Fornyx took a long squirt of the wine and handed the skin back to Druze, his gaze never leaving the receding slaughter. “Yes, he’s quite some general, our little Corvus. But it’s one thing to beat an outnumbered band of citizens, something else to face up to the army of the League.”

Druze nodded. “I know this. And you know what, Fornyx? He is looking forward to it. He wants it with all his heart. And the more men the League brings against us, the happier he will be. Sometimes I think his sire is Phobos himself. He has no fear.”

“All men fear something,” Rictus said. “Even if it’s not death.”

“Then he fears failure,” Druze acknowledged. “More than anything else. More than death.”

The cavalry reined in perhaps two pasangs to their front. A few isolated, running dots were all that remained of the sixteen hundred men who had faced Rictus in line what seemed like only minutes before. The city of Goron had just lost its menfolk. All of them.

“What will he do now, sack the city?” Fornyx asked.

Druze shook his head. “That is not his way. He cannot abide violence done to women or children. I think maybe something happened to him in boyhood, to his own people. It is the thing he hates most.”

Rictus felt a strange relief. He had seen enough cities sacked before this, and not just his own. He loathed the vileness which came out in even the best of men when all the rules were taken away, when the basest of appetites were freely indulged.

“How did you come to serve him?” he asked Druze, wondering. The dark Igranian did not seem a man who had ever been defeated. He had the self assurance of someone always on the winning side.

“Corvus killed my father,” Druze said simply. “He beat my people in open battle one fine day west of Idrios. His Companions rode us down like they did these men today.”

“Phobos!” Fornyx exclaimed.

Druze smiled his dark smile. “My father was a fine warrior, but also a brigand and a braggart. I loved him, but I was not blind to his failings.

“He fought Corvus sword to sword, and fell. And afterwards Corvus gave him a funeral worthy of a king. My people are not city-dwellers. You would call them uncivilized, and you would be right; but they can appreciate greatness in a man just as you can. Corvus has it. And me, I wish to be there when it comes to full flower – for the adventure of it. I want to be part of the story.”

Rictus and Fornyx looked at one another, and Fornyx’s mouth twisted in a wry smile.

The army camped that night outside the walls of Goron, their tent-lines greater than the city itself. During the afternoon, Corvus had had his men gather up all the dead from along the road and set them on a pyre, to be burned the next day. All through the night, the women of the city trickled down to the hill of bodies to keen and wail and mourn their husbands, their fathers, their sons, and their cries carried over the camp of the army like an accusation, as though Antimone herself were hovering overhead, black wings beating in the darkness, her tears falling unseen upon the snow.

Rictus was called to Corvus’s tent some time before the middle watch of the night, and entered to find most of the high command there, seated around the map-table with clay cups in their hands, braziers glowing bright and hot about them. Corvus was striding up and down, his long black hair loose. In the uncertain light of the hanging lamps he looked like some beautiful exotic girl dressed in a man’s chiton. The silver weapon scars on his forearms marred the image.

He greeted Rictus with that peculiarly winning smile, like that of a son who thinks he has pleased his father.

“Your men lived up to their reputation today, Rictus. That is the first time I have ever seen a spear phalanx keep its formation at a run. You have given Teresian’s spears something to think about.”

Teresian himself, a younger version of Rictus, did not seem particularly thoughtful. He stared at Rictus with veiled hostility, but held up a wine-cup in a grudging gesture of respect.

“We should not have had to fight today,” Corvus said, resuming his pacing of the tent. “It was stupidity on their part – what did they hope to accomplish?”

Anger lifted his voice a tone. He sounded almost shrill. “I have made an object lesson of the men of Goron – that example will travel ahead of us. I’m optimistic that we’ll have no more futile stands before we come to the hinterland of Machran itself. It is there that the campaign will have its climax. Word has come to me that the Avennan League is mustering at last, and Karnos has persuaded all the cities to send contingents. The decisive battle will be fought soon, before midwinter.”

“Karnos has done well,” Demetrius, the one-eyed marshal of the conscript spears said, tilting his head to bring his eye to bear.

“He’s quite the orator, it seems, and the Machran polemarch, Kassander, is an old friend of his – they work together like the hand and the gauntlet. All this is to our advantage.”

“I fail to see how,” Rictus said. “The League can muster thirty or forty thousand men if it has the time to muster them. We don’t have half that here.”

Corvus smiled. “But if those thirty or forty thousand are fairly beaten in open battle, the thing will be done at a stroke – all the hinterland cities will have been defeated at once.”