Paul Kearney - Corvus

There was a growled murmur of agreement about the fires.

“He came in along with us,” Valerian said. “Remember that. He was in the front rank right beside me. He did not do it for a joke – that’s why he was there.”

“We’re mercenaries,” Rictus said quietly. “We voted for the contract. Our job is to kill and be killed; to look after one another when alive, when hurt and when dead. That comes first of everything. A man who has issue with that can take off the red cloak and walk away when this contract is done -but not before.”

“And when is this contract done, Rictus? On the fall of Machran?” Kesero asked.

“That’s what I agreed with him.” At that moment, Rictus could not quite remember the terms of the agreement, but it sounded right enough to his addled mind.

Kesero winked. “Then we’re going to be rich men very soon,” and he grinned so that his silver-wired teeth glittered white in his face.

The tension about the fires broke in ribaldry and laughter. After all, they were alive and standing, and they were victors of the greatest battle ever fought in the Harukush. In their minds they had already begun to bury the worst of the day’s memories, leaving what could later be polished up and made part of a better story.

Rictus knew this – he had done it himself. But he knew also that the black memories were kept by Phobos to fester in the depths of a man’s heart. He could never be rid of them; they became part of who he was.

“The supply wagons will be emptied and will take the more severely wounded back to Hal Goshen,” Corvus said, pacing up and down as was his wont. “The looting of the enemy camp is to stop – Teresian, you will see to that. Post more men – your oldest and steadiest. Karnos has stockpiled several day’s rations, and we will use them ourselves while our supply train is away.”

He paused as Rictus and Fornyx emerged from the darkness beyond the tent-flap, and his face broke open into a grin of delight.

“I knew a little thing like a slashed arm would not keep my old warrior down. Rictus, you look as pale as Phobos’s face – Teresian, give up your seat there. Brothers, the wine is standing tall in your cups; we can’t have that.”

Rictus sat heavily in the leather-framed camp chair. Corvus’s scribe, a plump, powerfully built little man named Parmenios, came forward with a waxed slate, his stylus poised.

“Marshal, how many of your men are still fit to fight?”

“Three hundred, give or take.”

Parmenios scratched the slate. His black eyebrows rose up his forehead a little. “A heavy accounting,” he said.

“I’ve heard it called worse,” Rictus snapped. His mind was a throbbing bruise. More than anything else he longed to lay his head down upon his arms on the map-strewn table in front of him.

Teresian offered him a cup of wine. “Drink with us, Rictus.”

They were all holding their cups off the table, looking at him. Poised for a toast, he realised. One-eyed Demetrius, the grim ex-mercenary, spoke for them.

“Today we saw how men fight, and die.” He lifted his cup higher.

“To the Dogsheads.”

“The Dogsheads,” the others repeated. Humourless Teresian, the suspicion gone from his grey eyes. Dark, smiling Druze, with his arm in a sling to match Rictus. And Ardashir, his strange long face solemn. They all drained their cups and then flicked out the dregs for Phobos, mocking Fear itself.

Rictus caught Corvus’s eye, and the strange young man winked at him.

The Dogsheads had been sent on a suicidal attack for sound military reasons; it was harsh, but rational. But Corvus had also thought this far ahead. Their obedience, their self-sacrifice had finally won round the doubters among his officers. Rictus had at last earned his place as one of Corvus’s marshals.

You conniving little bastard, Rictus thought, and he raised his empty cup to Corvus in a small salute.

“Back to business,” Corvus said briskly. “The roads are turned to soup with this god-cursed rain, and men who have abandoned their armour can run faster than those who have preserved it. The Igranians have done what they can, but I’ve no wish to scatter the army on a wild hunt along the Imperial road. We’re fairly certain that Karnos was expecting reinforcements before battle commenced. It remains to be seen if they will now remain in the field or return to their cities.”

“What of Karnos? Any news?” Rictus asked.

“Their dead are out there in heaps,” Ardashir said. “If he is one of them he will take time to find.”

Corvus waved his hand back and forth. “Dead or alive, he brought the League here to its destruction. At least a third of the enemy army is still on the field, and Machran lost most heavily of all the League cities, as I had intended. If we appear before the city walls within the next month, I will be surprised if they do not accept our terms.” “Machran itself,” Demetrius said, with an odd look of awe on his face.

“Machran folds, and the rest go down with it -they will not fight on once we have our feet planted on the floor of the Empirion,” Corvus said. “We are very close, brothers.”

Even through the haze of his exhaustion, Rictus found himself wondering; close to what?

Karnos of Machran is dead.

Karnos has been slain on the field of battle.

Karnos died heroically – no, no, damn it, that’s not it.

He lay in the wet crushing darkness and listened to the rain tap on the stiffened bodies which lay atop him. He was more thirsty than he had ever been in his life before. In fact it seemed to him that he had never really understood the true nature of thirst before. When the rain came he opened his mouth and let it trickle in, foul-flavoured from the corpses on top of him, but wet.

Life.

Karnos is alive, in the midst of the dead.

Men had gone back and forth across the battlefield in the aftermath of the fighting, looking for their own wounded, for enemy wounded to slay, for some trinket which might make their labour worthwhile, or perhaps a better weapon – or, if the gods were smiling, one of those miraculous finds, a black cuirass.

The expensive armour which had so impressed Karnos in the confines of his villa, he now knew to be inferior, gimcrack shite, and these men had seen it as such also. That had saved his life, for they had not tried to strip it from his very much alive and terrified body. And thus he lay here with his fellow citizens sheltering him from the rain.

And pinning him to the ground.

His arm was numb from the shoulder down, and he could not bring himself to look at the black shaft which protruded grotesquely from his flesh. It was a Kufr arrow, fired from a Kufr bow, created by a Kufr fletcher in some far-flung portion of the world which knew nothing of him. And yet it was now inside his flesh, intimate with the very meat of him. All that way, across the sea, in some strange foreign creature’s quiver, then laid against that bow, to flash through the cold air of the Harukush, and end up inside him, Karnos of Machran.

He started at his task again; that which had preoccupied him since the fall of darkness and the departure of the battlefield scavengers. He was inching the bodies of the dead off his own in increments a child could measure with their fingers. In this he showed a patience which he had previously not known he possessed.

As he did, his mind wandered. He remembered squatting in the heat and dust of Tinsmith’s Alley in the Mithannon, scratching at the scabbed-over burns on his bare feet where the sparks from his father’s hand-forge had landed.

He was seven years old, and a passing aristocrat in a himation as white as snow had dropped him a copper obol. He was staring at the little green coin, which would buy him a stick of grilled meat from a foodstall, or a pear-sized cup of wine from one of the shops at the bottom of the alley. It was the first time in his life he had been given something for nothing, and he liked the feeling.