Paul Kearney - Corvus

“If they are defeated.” Rictus was more puzzled than alarmed. Did this boy want to fight against hopeless odds?

Corvus seemed to catch his thought. “Where is the glory, Rictus, in beating citizen armies one by one in an endless series of petty battles? No, we will let them combine. Let them grow confident in their numbers. Once they have mustered, they will find the confidence to come out and meet us spear to spear.”

“Glory,” Rictus repeated. He looked round the other men in the tent, thinking of the morning’s slaughter. That had been a petty affair indeed, but the women keening at the funeral pyre would disagree.

He shook his head. Maybe I am too old, he thought. I have forgotten what ambition was like. What it can do in a man.

Druze winked at him. Teresian was lost in his wine. Demetrius, the oldest, seemed as unperturbed as a stone. Rictus had heard his name before; he had commanded a mercenary centon years in the past, lost his eye fighting for Giron on the Kuprian Coast, and had gone east. To end up with Corvus.

And Ardashir, the Kufr marshal. He met Rictus eye to eye, and there was something surprising in his face. A kind of fellow-feeling. A sympathy. Then the Kufr looked away and Rictus was left imagining it.

“What is it you want?” he asked aloud. “What is all this for?”

Corvus stopped his pacing, his pale face lifted in surprise.

“An odd question for a sellspear to ask,” Teresian sneered.

Yes, Rictus thought; one day you and I will have a reckoning, my friend.

“Not so odd,” Corvus said. “And Rictus is more than a sellspear. Much more.” He cast his gaze about the tent, and a silence fell in which the keening of the women out at the pyre could be heard as a rumour on the wind.

“He commanded an army once, the most celebrated army the Macht have ever fielded, outside of legend.”

I commanded it by chance, Rictus thought. Because all the best men were dead. It was a whim of Phobos, no more.

But he said nothing.

“I was born outside of Sinon, in the land beyond the sea,” Corvus went on. “Most of you here already know this. I have seen the Empire that Rictus marched through, or a corner of it – as has Ardashir. He and I grew up together, and whether he be Kufr or no, he is my brother in all things but blood.” He stared at the men in the room deliberately, meeting their eyes one by one.

“Sinon is where the march of the Ten Thousand ended, where their epic came to a close.” Now he looked at Rictus.

“Not in glory, but in squalor. When the last centons of these heroes finally straggled down to the shores of the sea, what did they do?

“They set about each other like squabbling dogs. They killed one another for gold, for insults given and taken on the long march west. They were riven into pieces before they even saw the sea. They were Macht, and they had defeated the armies of the Great King over and over in open battle. They had humbled an Empire, but they could not govern themselves.”

A flash of something passed over Corvus’s face, something between contempt and anger. It chilled Rictus’s spine to look upon it. This boy, he was -

“That is the fatal flaw within the Macht,” Corvus ploughed on. His face was a mask without colour, the strange violet eyes within it bright as those of some feral animal.

“Unless they face death from without, then they will spend their lives fighting each other – farmyard cocks all crowing on their separate dunghills. This is what we are, here in the Harukush, the poorest patch of stone in the world.

“In the Empire the Macht are a thing of legend and wonder, a tale told to frighten children. We are the fearsome beast of the night, the things which crossed the sea to wreak havoc, and then disappeared. I know – I have heard these stories across the Sinonian. But here -” Disgust crossed his face. “Here we are a million struggling dwarfs, all pissing and moaning about where we shall have space to shit.”

He lifted his chin, stood straight. He was slight as a girl, but Rictus had no doubt in that moment that he could have killed any one of those in the tent who stood up against him. Men smelled fear and weakness, as surely as dogs did. And in Corvus there was none. He was a creature of singular determination.

“I am here to unite the Macht, to make of them one people, one purpose, We were put upon this world to rule it, and that is what we shall do. To make us all of one will, I must conquer all. I intend to bring all our people under one ruler.”

He smiled with a moment’s disarming irony.

“I will wear the black Curse of God, Rictus; on the day that I am named King of the Macht.”

“Phobos, what a damned awful stupid time of year to be in harness,” Fornyx said in disgust. “My second winter campaign in as many years. This is no way to run the shop.”

He and Druze stood in the mire with their cloaks over their heads and stared at the flat grey world of the rain. In the country to their front the water had gathered in broad sword-pale lakes in which the black outline of trees stood forlorn and stark. The mountains were invisible, the sullen shadow of the clouds gnarled over the north and west, the sky brought low to meet a colourless landscape. And the rain did its best to bring the two together in one new element composed of equal parts water and mud.

“Six day’s march to Machran,” Druze said with that sinister, oddly winning smile of his. “Or maybe not.”

“And still he pushes us on, your lord and master,”

Fornyx said. “What did we make, day before yesterday – six pasangs? The baggage spent a whole day just travelling the length of the column – and as for the supply lines, well…”

“I wish it was snow,” Druze said. “Snow I am used to. But this lowlander’s winter of yours, it sucks at a man’s marrow, neither one thing nor the other.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Fornyx said with a grin. “You’ll have to, if you’re not to retire back to banditry in the hills.”

“There are worse trades, my friend. My people, they have strong places carved out of the very rock of the world, back in the Gerreran Mountains above Idrios. We hole up in those in the winter like bears, eat ourselves fat and greasy and fuck, our women until they walk bow-legged.”

Fornyx snorted with laughter. “Not a bad way to pass the winter. Me, I like the idea of a fishing town on the Bay of Goshen, where the sky is blue all through the dark months and a man can sit at one of those wine shops on the water and stare out at the Sinonian while eating fresh octopus and grilled herrin.”

They stared silently at the rain for a long while, their feet ankle-deep in mud.

“I have wine in my tent…” Fornyx said at last, grudgingly.

“We are here to watch the enemy,” Druze said.

“Look at them – they’re not going anywhere. The bastards are as mired in shit as we are.”

Out at the limits of visibility it was possible to make out a shadow on the world, dark as a forest. Within that shadow were the lights of struggling campfires.

They covered the land for many pasangs. As the rain-curtain shifted and drifted aimlessly, it was possible at times to make out the lines of the enemy’s tents, but that was all. There was no movement, not a single ominous snake of men on the march. The enemy army was as motionless as a felled tree.

“A cup or two would not hurt,” Druze admitted. “All right, then.”

“And a game of knucklebones perhaps – Kesero had one on the go when I left.”

“Not for me. You red-cloaked bastards cleaned me out last night.”

The two men turned and began making their slow, plodding way back down the long slope they had ascended in the morning. They were barefoot; the mud sucked even the most heavily strapped footwear off men’s feet. Some two dozen Macht were standing in the rain waiting for them: half Druze’s Igranians, the rest scarlet-cloaked Dogsheads of Fornyx’s centon. One of these spoke up.