Paul Kearney - Corvus

If she lived long enough to have the memories.

I wronged Garin, she thought. I should not have sold Veria, for she was his wife in everything but name. I got rid of her because she reminded me too much of my own hurt, of the boy we lost. For that at least, I am paying now.

Lord, in thy goodness and thy glory, let me take it all upon myself, what remains ahead of us. Let it all be mine, the hurt and the evil to come. Protect my girls, and let the pain be on me alone.

She smelted smoke, heard a crackling, and turned round to find the thatch of the farmhouse on fire. Phaestus’s son, Philemos, was shooing the goats out of their bothy while the roof broke into flame above him.

“What’s with this, goatherder boy?” Sertorius asked.

“No need for them to burn,” Philemos said. His colour was up and his eyes were shining dark. “There’s been enough death here for one day.” He looked over at Aise and Rian and then looked away again quickly.

They gathered together in front of the farmhouse as it went up and the two mules brayed in fear at the smell of smoke and the massive rush of heat. All the outbuildings were on fire also, and the goats were streaming away in panic from the blaze. Sertorius was wearing Rictus’s spare soldier’s cloak, mercenary scarlet, while his accomplices were loading down the mules with hams, barley-flour, oil-jars and skins of wine.

“Not an obol in the place,” Sertorius said, staring at the burning house. “Where did the famous Rictus keep his money, is what I want to know? The bastard lives simply – there’s hardly a damn thing worth stealing.”

“The moneydealers in Hal Goshen have it all,” Aise said, “Safe in one of their cellar-vaults. He is not stupid enough to keep it here.” Sertorius looked at her with an eyebrow raised.

“We have what we came for,” Phaestus said. “It’s the best part of three hundred pasangs to Machran, and winter is on us. When we deliver these three to Karnos, you won’t want for money, Sertorius. I’ll see to that.”

“See that you do,” Sertorius said. “I am a man of many virtues and vices, Phaestus, and one might say that the one weighs in the balance against the other. Don’t try to leave your thumb on my scales.”

Then he grinned. “Ah, the warmth! Let us hope our campfire tonight will keep us as warm! But to the logistics of today. Adurnos, you will lead the spitfire girl. I will take the woman -”

“No,” Phaestos said. He stepped forward and grasped the long lashing of hide that hung from Aise’s wrists. “I’ll take her. Philemos, you lead the girl, and you, Sertorius, the child.”

“Fuck that,” Sertorius said. “Adurnos, the brat is yours. At least she’ll be light, carried. Shall we leave then, brothers and sisters? The day is trailing on and I want to get past the drifts at the top of this dungheap valley before darkness finds us.”

They set out. Sertorius led the way, and Aise was jerked into motion behind Phaestus as the older man tugged on her bonds. Philemos came next, Rian walking at his side as though he was escorting her for a ramble through the woods. Then came the big man with the broken nose, Adurnos. He settled Ona up on a mule with a curse, while Bosca, whom Styra had marked with her knife, brought up the rear, leading another heavily laden mule.

They crossed the river, their feet breaking through the snow-covered ice that had thickened on the surface of the water. The bite of the stream cleared Aise’s head somewhat. She heard a great crash behind her and looked back to see the roof of the farmhouse cave in with a rush of black smoke and scattered sparks. In the bright day, the flames were saffron-dark and solid as swords, drenched in sunlight.

Smoke the colour of an autumn storm rose in a high pillar in the air above the valley. It loomed over them all, casting its own shadow on the snow, and smuts from the burning floated over the trees like ethereal carrion birds.

At least you had a pyre worthy of you, Eunion, Aise thought. Now your ashes will be in the air and water of this place, like my son’s.

And Rictus, your precious gold is under the hearthstone where we put it.

Aise bent her head and followed her captors through the snow to the woods that hung dark and deep on the slopes of the glen above.

Behind her the home that she and Rictus and Fornyx and Eunion had made blazed into destruction, the stone walls toppling as the heat cracked them open, the hoarded grain, the oil, the olives and the wine -the very stuff of life – taking light and combusting in a boiling tower of black smoke that blighted the morning.

And in the flames at its base the bodies of the dead lay darkening into ash and dust; a grey taste on the wind, no more.

The city of Afteni, famous for its metal-workers, was now an island in a shallow sea. Built, like most Macht cities, on rising ground and surrounded by a twenty-foot wall, it found itself surrounded by water also, a knee-deep lake extending for two thirds of the city’s circumference.

Since the Battle of the Afteni Plain, which had seen the scattering – if not the destruction – of the army of the Avennan League, the clouds had gathered, black over the lowlands at the foot of the Gosthere Mountains, and had released their burden upon already saturated farmland. The Imperial Road had disappeared, sunk in brown water, and the entire plain had gone with it. There was only the endless dreary expanse of rain-stippled floodwater, with groves of olives and bedraggled vines and sodden trees straggling above it, cowering from the endless downpour.

And that had proved a salvation.

Karnos stood on the battlements of the citadel with a soldier’s oilskin cloak thrown round him, his own little tent against the wet, and peered east, striving to pierce the rain-curtain. Unconsciously, his arm came up and he began carefully kneading the bandaged flesh of his shoulder.

“It itches, Kassander – that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t smell, which is even better. You are a fast healer, Karnos. You heal like a young dog, as my mother used to say.”

“And what about the rest – how are they healing?”

“The last wagon train left for Machran only this morning, though they will need Phobos’s horses in the traces to make more than a few pasangs a day in this mire. I pity them.”

“They’re men of Machran – that’s where they belong.”

“They’re going back with a tale of defeat. You should beat them to it.”

“I will, as soon as I am done here. One man on a horse will travel faster. I wish to speak with Katullos first.”

“Antimone may have words with him before you do.”

“Nonsense! That old bugger? If seeing me become Speaker did not kill him, then a spear in his throat won’t.”

“He wishes to see you in any case. We must decide what to do with what’s left of the army.”

“I couldn’t keep the Pontis men here. I tried – I spent all last night talking to that fish-livered bitch Zennos – but he wasn’t having it. So there’s a thousand men pissed away.”

“He’s not the only one.”

“Come on, let’s get out of this fucking rain. It’s our friend at the moment, I know, but it’s like a friend you owe money to: uncongenial company.”

“Admirable candour from someone who has borrowed money from me more times than I care to remember.”

“Ah, don’t be such a girl. Come, have some wine.”

They retreated to a tall portico which ran around the base of a tower. There was a brazier burning there, a table covered with papers, and men were coming and going, adding to the pile.

“You have become newly fond of fresh air,” Kassander said, throwing back the hood of his own cloak.