Paul Kearney - Corvus

He scratched his crotch violently, and cursed aloud. Awake now.

In all seriousness – how does a man live like this? He thought of his well-stuffed mattress in Machran, and little Grania in it with her white skin and soft mouth. Or that new girl – the one with the lovely arse.

Here he was, one cloak to his name, lying on tick-infested straw with the damp of the ground creeping through it.

He opened his eyes wide.

The lamp was almost out of oil; a blue, guttering blossom pulsing round the wick. It was almost wholly dark in the tent.

What in hell was that?

He heard it again; a distant uproar, men shouting. He was used by now to the sound of the interminable quarrels, the fights that flared up out of nowhere; these were the background noises of the camp. But this was different; more urgent.

He sat up, adjusted the lamp so the end of the wick had a last drop of oil to suck into, and as the light strengthened, he scrabbled through the straw which lined the tent floor, fumbling for sandals, sword; anything which might orientate him to this strange and new place the night had found him in.

The tent flap was flung open and he saw a black silhouette with fire behind it.

“Some trouble over at the eastern end – might be nothing, but it sounds ugly. Want to come along?”

Kassander’s voice.

“Fuck it, yes. I’m awake now anyway. What time of the night is it?”

“The bad time, when men are tired but not quite asleep. This may only be a brawl.”

“I said I’m coming,” Karnos snapped, hopping into his sandals with his sword slung over one shoulder. “Help me with my cloak, will you? Phobos, what a life.”

In a camp this large, Karnos felt like a tick on the hide of some great unknown beast. He had never truly tried to imagine what a host of some twenty thousand men might look like; he had merely totted up the numbers as they came in. If they stood eight men deep in battle array their line would stretch around three pasangs.

It was as though a new and noisome city of leather and shit and woodsmoke had been planted on the world, and here he was in the middle of it, one more face in a teeming sea of them.

This was not like holding forth on the floor of the Empirion – the rules were different here. Walking through the camp, he was accorded a certain amount of -affectionate regard from the Machran host, a level of curiosity from the men of the other cities, but should a Cursebearer chance by, their eyes would be drawn to the black armour instantly, with a degree of awe that was almost religious.

I must get one of those one day, Karnos thought. It would perfect the image. Or redeem it, maybe.

He was a wealthy man; in the past he had tried to buy Antimone’s Gift from Cursebearers down on their luck, but his offers had been rebuffed with such contempt that he had given up on the exercise. Once a man had one of those things on his back, it seemed it took up some space in his soul. Death was all that would make him part with it. It was one of the gauges of a city’s greatness; how many Cursebearers it had as citizens.

There will be a few on the ground before all this is over, Karnos thought. I will talk to Kassander about it.

The two of them picked their way through the camp lines. The men had been sheltering in their tents, grumbling their way into sleep, or sharing a skin of wine, or rattling a game of knucklebones. Now the place was stirring again, and the paths between the bivouac lines were filling up with yawning, bad-tempered crowds, wondering what was causing the racket.

“I bet it’s the Aftenai again,” Kassander muttered. “A more bloody-minded set of fractious bastards I’ve never seen.”

The noise rose – men were fighting, it was clear now. They heard the clash of iron, and. someone shrieked, a death-scream.

“Phobos!” Kassander cursed, and he began to run.

Rictus felt the man’s blood spatter warm across his face as the drepana took the fellow’s arm off above the elbow. He was unused to the heavy lowland weapon; it felt like a butcher’s cleaver in his grasp, made for chopping and slashing.

He had the end of his cloak wrapped round his left arm, and threw it up in the next man’s face, making him flinch long enough for the drepana to arc round again and open his belly. A stink of shit and hot meat as his entrails flopped down his legs into the mud, entangling his feet. The man tripped up and gave a high-pitched scream, rolling in the ropes of his own insides.

“Now,” Corvus snapped, “back to us.”

Rictus turned in the space he had made and darted between Corvus and Druze. The Igranian’s pelta had been chopped in two and hung bloody from his arm. In the other his sword described a vertical circle as neat as a juggler’s flourish, and another one of the enemy went to his knees, wide-mouthed in disbelief, and then fell flat, cleaved open from collar to breastbone.

Corvus leapt in with a flash and took down a third. “Machran!” he shouted. “Machran to me!”

A gap opened up in the ring that surrounded them and they were through it in a moment, slashing to left and right, out of the firelight and into the rainswept dark. Rictus tripped on a guy-rope and went on his elbows, only to be seized upright by the scruff of his neck and shoved onwards. Even in that instant, he found himself startled by the brute strength in Corvus’s thin frame.

More men running at them, weapons in their hands. They were in the midst of a massive, congealing mob of bewildered figures, all shouting at once. The wounded were squealing behind them, and torches were being lit from the campfires. The rain hammered down on their faces and their legs were drained of energy, nothing more than mindless sinew hauling on the bone.

Rictus thought his chest was about to burst. He could not speak. Corvus and Druze both grabbed him and half-dragged his burly form through the tent-lines. An animal growl rose out of his throat; anger went white hot through his limbs and restored some sense to his head.

“Get the fuck off me.” He shook away their helping hands.

Men shouted enquiries at the trio, unsure. Druze tossed aside his split shield and tucked his maimed arm in his cloak, bundling up the fabric around a slash which had laid him open to the bone.

“Knucklebones,” Corvus said loudly, panting. “Cheating bastards tried to rob us. They’re still at it back there.”

“Halt and identify yourselves,” some officious prick yelled at them.

“Kiss my arse. We have a hurt man here – go stop that fight back there,” Rictus shot back.

“Hold your ground!”

There were too many around them, crowding as men will about bad news or a quarrel. Rictus reversed his drepana and punched the officious prick low down in the groin with the wooden bulb of the weapon’s pommel, then shouldered him aside. When the man next to him protested in snarling outrage, Corvus laid the flat of his sword against his temple, and he went down like a dropped sack of sand.

“Out of our bloody way.”

They were through again, into the darkness, a tight, determined knot moving with a purpose, like an arrowhead plunging through the bowels of an ox.

Kassander bent and held the lamp up as he entered the tent. Karnos followed, mastering the impulse to retch at the stench within.

“What in the world happened here?”

The bloodied man in the torn chiton was holding the flesh of his forearm onto the bone, gore dripping in black strings from between his clenched fingers.

“He came in here like something sent by Phobos. He had a white face, and eyes, eyes like -”

“What happened to these men?” Kassander asked patiently. The inside of the tent was a charnel house, chopped-up corpses steaming as the heat left them. The back of the tent had a rent slashed in it from top to bottom.