Paul Kearney - Corvus

The Avennans were much the same, though they liked to see their city as the true heart of the civilized Macht, the place where laws were made. The thought of it being ruled by an upstart warleader of no family, who employed the Kufr as soldiers, was anathema to them. They, too, would march with Machran. Two thousand men under Tyrias, who liked to call himself the Just, but who was known more commonly as Scrollworm, for he was more at home in a library than on a battlefield, despite his polemarch’s helm.

All told, some nine thousand men marched out of Afteni with Kassander leading them west. Nine thousand men who meant to man the walls of Machran to the end. It was enough. It would have to be enough.

The rest had gone their separate ways, the mauled contingents from the other cities trailing out of Afteni in a less martial fashion, for many of them had thrown away their arms on the field to aid their flight. And it was understood that Afteni itself would capitulate to the invader when he finally got his army moving again through the mud.

It still wanted a month to midwinter.

Karnos bent low in the saddle, hissing with the damnable pain of it. He dropped the reins and shook Kassander’s hand.

“March them hard, brother. The longer we have to ready the city the easier the thing will be.”

“You should have an escort, Karnos. You’re not near healing, and if you fall off that horse it’ll take a file of men to push you back up on it again.”

“I’m thinner than I was, I’ll have you know.” Karnos tugged the oilskin soldier’s cloak closer about his neck. “Gersic is enough. He’s a good boy, over-eager, sincere, and none too bright; just the type I like to have about me. I mean to do it in four days at most.”

“You have my letters.”

“Next to my heart, Kassander. Whatever rumour has run ahead of me, I bear the first official news. And I will tell it my way.”

“If you have time, look in on my wife and sister -let them know I’m not ash on the wind.”

“I will, brother.” Karnos straightened, swore viciously at the pain angling through his shoulder, and then kicked the barrel-chested lowland cob into a trot. It flailed its way through the floodwater, like a boat chopping through a heavy swell.

He raised his good hand in farewell, and at the head of the long column half a dozen centons who recognised him set up a cheer. Then he disappeared into the mist of the rain.

Karnos was not a man attuned to the natural world. He was more at home on pavement than pasture, and while he loved to eat red meat, he saw no virtue in killing it himself. The debating chamber, the bedroom, the marketplace – these were the places he felt at home. He still had his father in him, he supposed – in all three places the essence of the thing was a kind of haggling.

Now, as the land rose under his horse and the floodwaters began to recede, he pushed the animal hard, cantering to one side of the stone-paved road that led all the way to Machran with young Gersic shadowing him on a lighter, more spirited animal. Karnos’s horse was a dogged bay with a rolling gait that was less aggravating to the jolting pain of his wound. He liked the animal – it had a stubborn heart, and it ploughed through the muck of the roadside as though it would never stop.

The natural world. It was a world shaped by the Macht, cowed by millennia of occupation, ploughed and planted and pruned to meet the needs and fashions of men. This was the finest farmland in all the Macht lands – sometimes they brought off two harvests a year in the hinterland of Machran. One could feed an army here, if one timed it right. And even in winter, the farms which dotted this country would have storehouses and byres and smokehouses full of grain and oil and meat on the hoof.

That was the problem.

Whatever Corvus’s logistic woes were at the moment, they would vanish as soon as his army came this far west. He could live off the land for weeks, perhaps months, without worrying about his supply lines back to the east.

It was going to come down to an exercise in endurance. Karnos did not believe it was possible to assault the walls of mighty Machran so long as they were defended, but Machran was a great city with over a hundred thousand mouths to feed. The problem would come when they grew hungry faster than Corvus’s army.

There would have to be something done about that, and no-one was going to like it.

They stopped for the night in a village off the road, some nameless little place with a noisome wine-shop and a menu painted on the walls. Karnos spent coin liberally, silver obols with the machios sigil upon them, and held court in a corner by the fire while Gersic rubbed down the horses and did whatever it was horseriding types did to keep the animals on all four legs.

The local population gathered in the smoky musk of the place and listened to Karnos tell of the battle lately fought, a hard-clenched affair according to him, in which both sides had suffered horribly, and it had been a near-run thing who should be declared victor.

He told them that the men of Machran and Arkadios and Avennos would be marching through soon, that the war was not over, that they were to keep faith with the customs of their fathers and pay no mind if the usurper Corvus came their way; he was a passing catastrophe, like an earthquake, or a summer thunderstorm.

He had not convinced them – he could see it in their faces. Not even his heavily edited version of the truth could disguise the fact that the League forces were in retreat. He slept that night with his pack beside him on the floor of the louse-ridden best room, and scratched at the sodden dressing wound clammily about his shoulder.

He and Gersic were on the road before dawn, the night’s wine hammering at Karnos’s temples, the village left buzzing with apprehension behind them. For once in his life, Karnos found himself wishing he had kept his mouth shut.

More days, grey with rain and fatigue, the horse under him the only thing of warmth in the world. They stopped in Arkadios, halfway to Machran now, and here Karnos was welcomed by the Kerusia, given leave to speak before the assembly. He measured his words here more carefully, and did not gloss over the defeat.

He spoke bluntly of the carnage on the Afteni Plain, the fact that their menfolk were marching back west, not to defend Arkadios itself, but to add to the defence of Machran.

He liked the Arkadians. They were a bright, sophisticated people much like his own, and if one could give an entire city a certain character, then Arkadios would be a rakish younger son. The Arkadian assembly was known to be mercurial and volatile, and Karnos had both abuse and praise thrown at him as he stood there in the marble amphitheatre off the agora. But he gave as good as he got, relishing the opportunity to indulge his wit, playing upon his wound, talking up the bloodiness of the battle which was becoming more and more a settled series of pictures in his mind.

He did not win them over, but he won their respect. He had to make one concession, though; if Arkadians were to defend Machran, then Machran must take in those Arkadians who chose to flee their own city and put their trust in Machran’s walls. To this he agreed, knowing that he had committed himself to an unwise move. He had tried too hard with his last knucklebone, and knocked some of his own pieces off the board.

Well, he thought, you want to eat eggs, you got to break eggshells.

The road again, the sturdy uncomplaining horse under him to whom he talked as he rode. His shoulder pained him less, and under the bandages his wound was closed, and the heat was leaving it.

The rain stopped at last, and all across the vast lowland bowl of the country about him the sun caught in a thousand splashes of white reflected water-light, and green came into the world again. He and Gersic passed through the towns of the hinterland: Lomnos, Verionin, Mas Gethir, Gan Brakon. This was the most thickly populated area of the world that Karnos knew, and the people here counted themselves citizens of Machran, and had the vote in her assemblies. He was almost home again, and the thought of a hot bath and his own bed and Polio to see to his needs was a potent spur to his tired frame. He drove his horse harder, thinking of the men on the road behind him, the things that must be done on his arrival.