Paul Kearney - Corvus

“What word of the Dogsheads?” Corvus asked Rictus, making for the banked red coals of the brazier and standing so close to it they could smell the singeing wool of his chiton.

“Fornyx and your man Druze report that the enemy camp is about as lively as ours – no coming or going. No-one can make a move in this weather.”

Corvus seemed profoundly satisfied by this news. “Excellent. Ardashir, the supply train?”

“It’s making slow progress some twenty pasangs up the road. The wagons are up to their axles and the oxen are dying on their feet. It will be at least another two days before it reaches us.”

“Ah.” Even this did not dim his high spirits. “Brothers, we must not let a little rain dampen our mood. There may be a way to have some fun out of this downpour. Teresian, the wine stands by you; pass it round, man.”

Fun? Rictus thought. He looked at Ardashir and the Kufr shrugged.

“I feel the urge to get to know my enemies better,” Corvus went on. “There they are over the hill by the thousand, and we have not so much as said hello to one another. This Karnos is a fascinating fellow, by all accounts – like you, Rictus, a self-made man of a certain age. I’m thinking I should get a better look at him.”

“I know Karnos – I’ve spoken to him many a time,” Rictus said. “He’s a braggart, an upstart slave-dealer with a silver tongue.”

“That tongue of his certainly has a way of getting things done,” Corvus replied, still in a good humour. “Look across the way and name me one other member of the Machran Kerusia who could have got their levies out on the road as quickly as Karnos did. No, he’s a man of some substance this fellow, not just a crowd-pleaser.” He paused. “I think I would like a look at him.” “What shall we set up – some kind of embassy?” Teresian asked, narrow-eyed.

“We could pitch a tent between the armies,” Ardashir suggested.

Corvus held up a hand. “I was thinking of something a little more personal. I want to get a look at him tonight.”

They were all foxed by his words, and then it dawned on Rictus. “You want to enter the enemy camp.”

Corvus cocked his head to one side, and flakes of mud fell off his face. He peeled off some more, held it in his hand. “Why not – covered in this, all men look alike.”

“Corvus, my brother -” Ardashir began.

“Not you, Ardashir – no amount of mud could cover your origins.” Corvus was smiling, but the humour had dimmed in him. He was in earnest.

“You, Rictus – will you come with me?”

A moment of silence, the rain drumming on the roof of the great tent.

“You think it wise?” Rictus asked evenly.

“I did not say it was wise. I said it was what I intended to do. And as you are one of my marshals, I should like your company.”

Another test. Rictus held the younger man’s eyes. Something like perfect understanding passed between them.

“Very well,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. “Shall it be we two alone, then?”

“The fewer the better. But I wish Druze to join us – he has a gift for escapades.”

“And when shall we leave?”

Corvus stretched in front of the brazier so that its red glow underlit his face, making it seem less than ever like that of a normal man.

“We’ll wait for darkness,” he said. “And Rictus -”

“Yes?”

“We’ll travel light. Your cuirass will stay here, and that scarlet cloak with it.”

Rictus nodded. Both Teresian and Ardashir were protesting, claiming it was a hare-brained venture, unnecessary risk. They did not use the word madness, but it was in their thoughts all the same. Both Corvus and Rictus ignored them. The leader of the army and his newest marshal needed to find trust in one another, and they both knew it.

His life will be in my hands, Rictus thought, as mine has been in his. I have only to raise my voice in the enemy camp, and he will be captured, and this army of his will fall apart. He knows this.

He had to marvel at Corvus’s audacity. This boy -

No; he was not a boy. That way of regarding him was no longer tenable. In fact he was no younger than Rictus had been when he had been elected leader of the Ten Thousand. Sometimes, with the selective memory of a middle-aged man, Rictus forgot that he, too, had been something of a prodigy.

He took off his cloak, and began unclicking the fastenings of his black cuirass. He stared at the other Curse of God in the tent, perched on its armour-stand like some silent ghost. Who wore you? He wondered. Were you one of us, who made the March beside me?

He placed his cuirass beside its fellow, and for a moment all the occupants of the tent fell silent, looking at them.

These were the keystone of the heritage of the Macht. No Kufr had ever possessed or worn one of them in all of recorded history. Antimone’s Gift was a black mystery at the heart of the Macht world. Sometimes, Rictus thought that if one could puzzle out the origins of these artefacts, then one would have unravelled the enigma of the Macht themselves. He had come to think, during the long march all those years ago, that the Macht were somehow not part of this world they inhabited. At least, they had not been here in the beginning.

And he knew, now, why Corvus hesitated to wear the black armour. He was half Kufr, and even his undoubted courage must flinch at the thought of a creature of Kufr blood donning the Curse of God.

Who knows? Rictus surmised. Maybe it will not even let him wear it. How would that look? So he lets it sit here, a temptation and a reproach.

And he suddenly had a blink of insight into the engine that drove Corvus on.

He wants to rule the Macht, because he wants to feel that he is truly one of them. If the Harukush acclaims him its ruler, how can he not be one of us?

Eunion was right, Rictus thought. He is a dreamer. But there is more to it. This is what drives him on, this thing gnawing at his guts. He has surrounded himself with fatherless boys and made of them a family. He wants to belong.

Perhaps that is his other secret; to take the orphaned and make them feel part of something again.

They left the camp at dusk, three mudstained men in nondescript woollen chlamys, barefoot in the chill suck of the mud, their hoods pulled over their faces like the komis of the Kufr. They bore the lowland drepanas that Karnos’s troops would carry, and Druze had painted across his leather pelta the machios sigil of Machran.

The waterlogged plain between the armies had once been good farmland, and there were still the black thickets of olive groves strewn across it, but it had been inundated with the rain that poured down from the hills so that now it bore more of a resemblance to some wildfowler’s marsh, a grey mere of dappled mud and ochre water.

Karnos had planted his burgeoning army on a low rise across the Imperial road, and the water had filled a ring around its foot so that it seemed like an island, or a vast moated fort, pasangs wide; and the cloud hung so low that it almost met the summit.

Eight pasangs to the rear of the enemy army was the city of Afteni, renowned for its metal-working. And behind that was Arkadios, and then to the west and south of that one of the great cities of the hinterland, Avennos of the Laws, where Tynon himself had lived and lectured for a time, back in the mists of the past. He had been the author of those codes which now governed nearly all the Macht cities. The origins of the Kerusia – the assembly that every Macht polity possessed – lay there.

Avennos was not the metropolis it had been; both Avensis to the south, which had been its colony upon a time, and Arienus to the south-west had grown greater with the passage of the years. But Avennos was a part of the Macht identity as surely as Machran was. That, Rictus reasoned, was why Karnos had thrown his army so far forward, extending his supply lines and landing himself in the same muck as Corvus. To preserve that core of tradition. It was militarily unsound, but politically it could not be faulted.