Paul Kearney - Corvus

The men who were brought to his tent for the night were few in number, considering the size of the army, but they would go back to their comrades with fresh heart, telling of how the general of them all had sat down beside them and poured them wine, piled their plates with fresh meat and bread, and taken the time to hear the stories of their lives.

Good news and bad travels faster through an army than a man can run, and these efforts on Corvus’s part put new heart into the men. It was deftly done, and Rictus, for one, marvelled not only at Corvus’s handling of his many thousands, but at the stamina of the man, who never admitted to weariness, never lost his temper.

Youngsters from Hal Goshen, Goron and Afteni, conscripted into an army which had extinguished their city’s independence, would look up to find the man who had done it all to them enquiring after the state of their feet and their stomachs. After a half hour’s banter, Corvus would slap them on the shoulder as though they were old campaigners he had shared a thousand campfires with, and disappear.

They would be envied by their peers, pressed for stories of the encounter. They would begin to feel part of the massive bristling, brutal mass that was the army around them.

The army needed that boost to its cohesiveness. More and more of the spearmen in the ranks were now conscripts. Some of them had even fought against Corvus in the last battle. His treatment of conquered cities might be lenient by Macht standards, but the levies he imposed upon them were rigidly enforced. Demetrius, marshal of the conscript phalanx, was not a man to take no for an answer. When he enforced a levy, he split up the city centons of the men who had been pressed into service, scattering them throughout his morai, breaking up the identities of cities in the ranks, embedding loyalty within the formations he created to replace them.

It was an efficient but harsh process, and almost every morning when the army moved on they left behind them a gibbet with bodies swinging from it. To be left for carrion was the worst thing a Macht could imagine happening to him after death, and the lesson was quite deliberate – and it had been sanctioned by Corvus, the same smiling fellow who came round the campfires at night enquiring after the state of his new conscripts’ feet.

He appeared at Rictus’s campfire one night, walking in noiselessly from the teeming dark like an apparition.

About the struggling flames were all the usual suspects of Rictus’s acquaintance, plus a few more.

Valerian was there, and Kesero, as always; Fornyx, and Druze, who often dropped by with gossip once the army bedded down for the night. Rictus had come to like the dark Igranian, and he and Fornyx had become like bantering brothers, unable to say anything to one another that was not in some sense a goad. Each knew it, each enjoyed it. They were all listening intently to a particularly vile story that Fornyx was telling, interrupted with great relish every so often by Druze, when they realised that Corvus was just on the brim of the firelight, watching them, his face a white mask with a smile painted across it.

“Fornyx, don’t look at me like that. I’m not your mother.”

“Not with those hips,” Fornyx shot back. “Lord high and mighty – why don’t you pull up a knee and have some wine – I found a skin of it on the road today. It tastes like piss, but so does the water we’ve been drinking this last week.”

Corvus squirted wine into his mouth and swallowed. “That’s an Afteni vintage, if I’m any judge.”

“I think it followed the army a while before it lay down to die,” Fornyx said with a wink.

Corvus handed over the skin. “Here and there, if a skin of wine goes wandering, there’s no harm I suppose. So long as it does not become a habit. This army is made up of soldiers, not thieves.” He smiled.

The lazy drunken light left Fornyx’s eye in an instant. He sat upright, his splayed fingers sinking into the mud as he rose. “Thief is an ugly word. Not one to be thrown around lightly.”

The men around the fire fell silent, watching. The rain was hissing about the logs farthest from the flames, and beyond them the hum of other conversations about other fires went on, a background murmur. But here it seemed as though a silent bell had been struck, and they were listening to its echoes.

Druze broke it. “Tell the truth, I think I pissed in that wineskin earlier. My cock is so shrivelled these days, the neck just about fit. You ever tried to fuck a wineskin, Rictus?”

Rictus smiled, still watching Fornyx and Corvus. “Not me. I’m hung like a donkey. Ask Fornyx – you ever wonder why he’s such a bow-legged bastard?”

The men about the campfire lit up with laughter, and even Fornyx threw his head back with the rest of them. Rictus and Corvus caught one another’s eye, each smiling falsely with their mouths.

“Chief,” Rictus said, rising with a loud groan, “let me escort you away from these degenerates. They’re ill-educated runts. The best part of them ran down their mother’s leg.”

Another chorus, laughter, feigned outrage. The skin tossed about the campfire. Rictus took Corvus by the arm; his bicep was as slender as that of a girl, but made of steel wire.

“Let’s walk the camp, you and I.”

Corvus came with him, the rain falling on them both in the darkness. Rictus was as drunk as cheap wine and short commons could make him. He set his good arm about the younger man’s shoulders, and for some inexplicable reason thought that moment of Rian, and how he had kissed her hair in the upland pasture while they sat there with Eunion talking about the slight young man now walking beside him.

I’m getting old, he thought. Those tall enough to bear the spear are now young enough to be my sons. This boy here, he is a thing of genius, and he teeters on the edge of disaster. I see it now.

Phobos, how I miss them.

The drink set his mind running down courses he would as soon as left alone. He gripped Corvus tighter.

I had a son once, dead and burned. He would not be much younger than this boy here, if he had lived. Is that what I’m doing here?

“I hanged two men tonight,” Corvus said. “For looting and rape. Some farmer’s daughter they dragged back to camp.” His voice was a strained croak. “A time is coming when this army will have to live off the land like a host of locusts. I know that, but there are some things I will never tolerate. That discipline must be learned now, if it is to hold later, when this thing becomes harder.”

“You need to sleep,” Rictus told him.

Corvus smiled. “Sometimes I am afraid that I will go to sleep, and when I awake, the army will be gone, scattered to the winds. It’s getting harder, as we come west. In the east we were more tightly knit. I wish you could have seen us.”

“I wish so too,” Rictus said, honestly. “Tell me something, Corvus – how did it all begin? What was it that brought you to this?”

The smaller man halted and turned to look at him, the strange eyes with that light in them in the night. “This is what I was born for. I was conceived in war, and I am my father’s son.” “And who was your father?”

“Do you not know – have you never guessed? Rictus, I thought you more acute.”

“I’m tired and more than a little drunk, Corvus. Indulge me.”

They began walking again, round the perimeter of the sprawling camp. Corvus nodded to a sentry, spoke to the man and called him by his name.

“My father was once of the Ten Thousand, Rictus. From what my mother tells me he was a great leader, a good man who died needlessly.

“His name was Jason of Ferai.”

Rictus’s arm slipped from the younger man’s shoulders. He halted in his tracks.