Paul Kearney - Corvus

Rictus watched the blood dripping from his fingertips with a kind of morbid fascination. He was clenching a filthy clout about his arm at the elbow, twisted tight as he could make it, and the trickle had slowed at last. Even so, the torchlight in the tent seemed incredibly bright to him, splintering in shards and blades, like ground glass in his eyes. That would be the thump on the head, he supposed. He had already been sick once, and were there anything left in his stomach he had no doubt he would be so again.

Fornyx’s face swam into view, shadow in light. He felt the weight of his friend’s hand on the numb meat that was his forearm.

“I got the carnifex.”

“There are men hurt worse than me,” Rictus said muzzily.

“That artery wants stitched shut, or you’ll bleed white. Now shut your mouth before I slap you.”

Rictus smiled. He leaned back, was caught by Fornyx before he toppled off the blood-slimed wooden table, and drifted into a hazier place in his mind. Aise was there, young and smiling again, and Rian had flowers in her hair, a marriage-crown of primroses and forget-me-nots. But who was the man in shadow beside her?

He felt a stab of sharp pain that jolted him awake again. They were holding his arm down and old Severan, one of the Dogsheads’ two carnifexes, was working a blood-brown needle through his flesh. Another scar for Aise to find, Rictus thought.

His gaze drifted. The great tent was full of the stink of death, a slaughterhouse reek. Men were lying on sodden straw or were being pinioned upon stout wooden tables as the army physicians went to work. A strange and horrible calling, to spend one’s days delving into the living flesh of other men.

Rictus dragged himself back to the present, putting to the back of things the pop of the needle as it threaded through skin and muscle and dragged the slashed halves of his arm back together.

“What’s the butcher’s bill?” he asked Fornyx.

The dark little man bent close and looked in his eyes. “Lucky you had a good helm, or that spear would have drilled a hole through to the bone.”

“Fornyx -”

“Forty-six dead on the field, nine from our own fucking arrows. Ninety-six wounded, of whom -Severan?”

The grey-haired man working on Rictus’s arm grunted. “Thirty or so of those will be back in scarlet within a week or two – like the chief here. But of the rest, there are a dozen who will take longer – broken bones and the like. The rest are done with soldiering for good.”

“A third of us,” Rictus said in a cracked whisper.

“A hard day’s work,” Fornyx said. “He gave us the worst job on the field.”

“He gave it to us because he knew we could do it,” Rictus said.

“That’s pretty fucking magnanimous of you.”

“It’s the truth, Fornyx. You know it too. He gave us the hardest job because we are the best he has.”

A bleak smile flitted across Fornyx’s face. “It is a distinction which could well prove the death of us all.”

“Not today,” Rictus answered. He closed his eyes, nausea rising like a blush in his throat. He clenched his teeth shut until his jaws creaked, let it pass.

“I’m done here,” Severan said, rising with a groan and pushing his fists into the small of his back in the way Rictus often did after rising in the mornings.

“Keep that arm slung for a week, and stay awake for the rest of the night – Fornyx, don’t you let him sleep – I’ve seen too many men with a knock on the head sleep their way through Antimone’s Veil. You hear me now?”

“I hear you, you old bugger.”

Severan slapped him on the shoulder and then stumped off to the carnage of the tent without another word.

“No sleep. Ah, Phobos take it,” Rictus groaned.

“You heard him. Let me get you to Corvus’s tent. He wants to see all his underlings tonight, and it’s as good a way to keep you awake as any.”

“Fuck you, you evil-eyed little scrawny bastard.”

“Careful, Rictus; you know I love it when a girl talks dirty.”

Antimone was weeping. It happened often after a battle, especially a large one. The more blood on the ground, the more tears she shed, it was said. The rain came down in a soft cold shroud to fill up the rutted footprints of the living and the dead, to patter on the eyes of the corpses littering the field. At least at this time of year, the process of decay would not set in so quickly as during the usual summer campaigning.

Rictus leant on Fornyx’s bony shoulder as they made their unsteady way through the camp. He could remember little of the battle’s end. The Dogsheads had charged into the mass of Machran warriors once, withdrawn, and then charged again. The next thing he remembered was fighting to keep his head out of the mud while men stood on him.

Well, the thing was done now, at least. The camp was full of drunken men reliving their own versions of the day’s events, pouring thankful libations of wine into the ground for Phobos, for Antimone, in thanks at having survived with eyes and arms and balls intact.

The Dogsheads were more subdued. They had lit two huge fires kindled from broken enemy spears, and were standing around them in their red cloaks passing wineskins with the thoughtful purpose of men who mean to drink deep. They raised a cheer at seeing Rictus, however, and the mood around the fires brightened. Valerian and Kesero were there, Kesero limping with a linen rag knitted about the big muscles of his right thigh, Valerian untouched and as earnest as always.

“You had us worried when we saw you taken into the butcher’s tent,” he said to Rictus. “For a second, we thought you might be in trouble.”

“No trouble,” Rictus assured them. “An aichme’s love-bite is all.”

“Our employer has his victory,” shaven-headed Kesero said. “I hope it makes him happy.”

“Machran is finished now,” one of the other men put in: Ramis of Karinth, Kesero’s second, a high-coloured strawhead who was already drunk. “We must have killed or maimed half the men they had on the field.”

“I believe we did,” Valerian said with a half-smile. “Now I know what a great battle is like. And I know why the stories make of them such glorious and terrible things.”

His mutilated face gave the smile a bittersweet cast. Rictus set a hand on his shoulder. Yes, he thought, I believe Rian could do worse.

“What’s our story now, boss?” another voice broke in. Praesos of Pelion, a good steady fellow like to make centurion in a year or two, if he survived.

Rictus collected his swimming thoughts. “I’m on my way to Corvus now. We’ll see what’s what. There will be a shitload of clearing up tomorrow, for one thing – we must police the battlefield, burn the dead, collect what arms were left on them, and reorganise.”

“Not many of us made it into the enemy camp,” Praesos said. “Every other bugger in the army was there before us, leaving their wounded on the ground. By the time we got round to it, it was picked clean or under guard.”

“We don’t fight for plunder,” Valerian snapped at him. “We look after our hurt and dead first of everything – it’s the way it is done.”

“Well said, brother,” Kesero grinned, “but you can’t blame the lads for being a little put out. We do the right thing, and it leaves us with empty purses while Demetrius’s fucking conscripts raped the place.”

“Aye – what about some pay?” someone called out, back from the firelight and the golden shimmer of the flame-caught rain.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rictus said.

“He threw us into the biggest shithole of the day,” Kesero said, “and we came out smiling. I think he owes us a bonus.”