Paul Kearney: Corvus

There had been a woman, in later years, and a daughter, but these had been killed by goatmen while travelling to join Fornyx here, at Andunnon. It was the only time Rictus had ever seen his friend weep, as they burned the pitiful remains of his family on a hasty pyre. After that, it was as though some light had gone out of him.

Not until both Rictus’s own daughters had been born had Fornyx regained some of his old flash and fire, as though Rian and Ona were in some way a reparation for the wife and daughter he had lost. He had lived at Andunnon ever since – Aise had insisted. Fornyx was senior centurion of the Dogsheads, second in command. He was a natural leader, accustomed to commanding the most hardbitten of men. But Rictus’s daughters knew him as Uncle Fornyx, who brought them back trinkets from his travels and told them tall tales that made them squeal with laughter.

He was the closest thing to a brother that Rictus had ever known.

And then there was Aise. Rictus watched her sit by the fire as was her wont, eyes softening as she listened to Fornyx elaborate on one of his preposterous yarns at the table, and the girls listened agog.

Aise was the spoils of war, a slave-girl given to Rictus in part-payment for a debt. He had been hired by a poor highland town to defend it through a long winter from the ambitions of its more prosperous neighbour. The job done, the town had little in the way of coin to pay with, and so had given over what it could – cattle, pig-iron, wine, and slaves.

The tall, beautiful dark-haired girl who carried herself like a queen had caught Rictus’s eye at once, something the town elders had no doubt been counting upon. She was indeed a beauty, but it was not that which had drawn Rictus to her – he had seen beautiful slave-girls by the thousand in the course of his campaigns. No, it was the way she held herself, the stillness that seemed to be about her.

In the first few weeks of his ownership, Rictus had not even attempted to bed her. He had seen what rape did, and though there were many men who regarded it as simply a part of the process of warmaking, he hated it with a cold fury. He had killed his own men for it before now. Instead, he treated Aise with courtesy, almost as though she were his guest. He was not even sure why.

At least, it was not something he could have put into words that made sense – even to Fornyx. But it was around the campfires in those early days that he had looked at the faces about him: Fornyx, Eunion, and then Aise, and had come to realise he had found something rare here, or had a chance to. A kind of wholeness perhaps.

He was not without self-awareness; he knew, deep down, that he was trying to recreate the family he had once lost, years before in Isca’s fall. But that did not mean he was wrong.

When he had first bedded Aise, it was because she had come to him of her own accord, and that had made her even more singular in his eyes. They joined together out of curiosity and a kind of mutual hunger. Perhaps she, too, had been trying to recreate something of a previous life, one she had lost forever.

Less than a month later, Rictus freed both Aise and Eunion, while Fornyx rolled his eyes and the other centurions took bets on how long the pair would stick around.

And that had been twenty years ago.

Aise looked up from her bowl at him. Her magnificent mane of hair was bound up tight at the back of her head, iron-grey right through now, and there were dark lines running from the corners of her nose. The shapeless long-hemmed chiton she wore made her almost sexless, and her hands were raw-knuckled and coarse with the work of a highland farm. But her eyes were the same, that sword-edge grey so rare in the lowlands. Like himself, she had the eyes of a highlander.

A bubble of laughter burst round the table, Eunion throwing back his head like a boy. Fornyx rose, wiping his mouth, the joke still in his eyes. “Ah, you’re a whimsical lot, to see humour in the tale of my mishaps. Lady, I thank you for the food – I believe I’ll go look upon the day outside, and perhaps add something to the flow of the river. Will you join me, brother?”

Rictus cast one more look at his wife, but she was clearing the table, issuing orders to the girls and to Eunion, calling for the slaves. The machinery of the farm was ticking smoothly. His return had barely made it pause.

“I’ll join you. I’m not needed here.” The flat ugly tone of his voice made Aise stop and look at him once more, but whatever she was thinking remained tucked out of sight behind her eyes.

The sun was up over the mountains now and the valley was a sharp-edged glare of white and blue. The dogs crunched through the thin snow-crust, sniffing at invisible trails of scent. Rictus stood beside Fornyx as the smaller man pissed into the river, eyes closed and smiling.

“Give her time,” he said to Rictus, then walked upstream before kneeling in the snow to wash.

“Time for what – to begin missing me?”

“We were away a year – more than a year. She is mistress here, Rictus. Then you come home and throw things out of kilter. It’ll take time, but you’ll both come to it in the end – you always do.” More quietly he said: “Every year the same.”

“I heard that, you little squint.”

“Well, good. Listen to yourself – fretful as a child. In three days Ona will have her arms around your neck, Aise will have a kiss for you morning and night, and Rian will still think her father a god among men.”

“I’m a fool, perhaps, thinking of retiring, of staying here year round.”

“You’re a fool, certainly, but not because you lack the love of your family. You’re a damn fool if you think you’ll ever find it enough in life to herd goats and plant barley.”

“It was good enough for my father, and he was Iscan.”

“It’s not Isca.” Fornyx straightened, puffing. “Phobos, that water’s cold! Rictus, that red cloak on your back is all you’ve ever known – Antimone’s pity, you were the leader of the Ten Thousand! And for good or ill, you always will be. I’d bet you a year’s pay that the next war you come to hear of, you’ll be moist as a girl to get your legs around it.”

“And what about you, you black-bearded little weasel – have you no hankering to settle yourself and -” He almost said it. Watch your children grow up. It was in the very air between them.

“If I have a home,” Fornyx said, grave now, “then it is here. And the day you hang up the scarlet I will do the same. I would serve under no other but you.”

“No-one else would have you.”

Fornyx grinned. “Don’t be too sure. To have been the Second of Rictus of Isca, that counts for a lot in this world.” He hesitated.

“I do envy you, though.”

“Envy me what?” Rictus asked. It is Aise, he thought. It has always been Aise. But Fornyx’s next words surprised him.

“What you saw, in your youth. The places you marched, the world you wandered across. You were part of a legend, Rictus, and you saw sights few of the Macht have ever imagined. The land beyond the sea, and the Empire upon it. For all of us it is nothing more than a story, or the words in a song. But you were there. You fought at Kunaksa. You survived the charge of the Great King’s cavalry, and the long march home. I would give anything to have been part of that.”

“I’ve heard many men say the same thing, usually while drunk,” Rictus said. “But never you.”

“I thought I had too much sense. We know war, you and I. So I know what it must have been like -like some black dream of Phobos. But to have been part of that, to make history – that would have been something.”

Rictus remembered.

The shattering heat of those endless days on the Kunaksa hills, the stench of the bodies. The shrieking agonies of the maimed horses. And the faces of those who had shared it with him. Gasca, dead at Irunshahr, not much more than an overgrown boy. Jason, whom he had loved like a brother, who had come through it all only to be knifed in a petty brawl in Sinon, within sound of the sea.