Paul Kearney - Corvus

“Well make sure you speak up for us in Machran, Phaestus – make me look good. I’ve not come all this way for a pat on the head and a bronze obol set in my hand. Me and mine have earned something substantial, getting these bitches this far.”

“Get us into the city and you shall have your just deserts, Sertorius, I promise you,” Phaestus said.

“Very well, then. Up, ladies! The last leg lies before us.”

He bent Over Aise again. “Soon that sweet cunny of yours will get a rest, wife of Rictus. You can spend what’s left of your days looking back on the fond memories we ploughed you with.”

Then he turned and set his face close to Rian’s. “I only wish I had tasted you, my little honey-pot. I would have given you dreams to remember me by.”

He straightened. “Let’s go. Adurnos, carry the brat, and keep it quiet.”

The little company moved out. Sertorius led Aise on a leash, and she stumbled in his wake, her once beautiful face bruised and swollen and bloody. Then came hulking Adurnos, carrying Ona on his shoulder as though she were a sack. The child’s eyes were dead as stones, and when she gathered breath for a cough he set his fingers over her mouth and smothered it.

He was followed by Philemos and Rian, half-dragging Phaestus with them. Bosca brought up the rear. He amused himself now and then by shoving Rictus’s eldest daughter in the back, his grin a yellow gleam in the darkness.

They straggled through the night, a haggard company of travellers at the end of their journey. As they drew nearer to Machran they could smell burning; not woodsmoke, but a putrid, sickening reek that hung heavy in the night.

“That’s a funeral pyre,” Sertorius sniffed, “a big one.”

“There’s been a battle,” Philemos said.

The river was loud and pale to their right. The open plain about Machran seemed deserted, the city and the conqueror’s army facing each other across it as though separated by a gulf of shadow.

“Phobos is rising,” Phaestus said. He fell to one knee. Philemos hauled him up again. Phaestus leaned his weight on the shoulders of his son and Rictus’s daughter.

“Forgive me,” he murmured to Rian.

“Shit,” Sertorius said. “Someone’s out there – I can see them. Down, all of you.”

They lay in the broken crackling rows of a winter vineyard. The plants had been slashed and trampled flat, but were still high enough to conceal them. Sertorius and his men drew their knives.

A pair of shadows lurched by not two hundred paces away to the south, one supporting the other like a man helping a drunken friend. They were making a painfully slow progress across the plain to the camp of Corvus’s army.

Sertorius breathed out. “Just stragglers, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Up, up – let’s go before the night gets old.”

Aise stood staring at the retreating shadows for a moment before the leash at her throat jerked her into motion. She trudged after Sertorius again, head down, her feet bare and bloody and the white skin of her naked shoulder shining like a bone under the rising moons.

The pyre was still burning as they passed it, flames licking here and there in fitful tongues. There were people coming and going between it and the open gate of the Mithannon, and centons of spearmen standing in ordered ranks. Women were keening and sobbing, an eerie chorus in the night, and the torchlight made of it all a dark tableau of shadow and fire, a dramatist’s invocation of grief. The company made their halting way to the looming gateway of the city, and there were stopped by men in full panoply, one bearing a centurion’s transverse crest.

“Your names and district.”

“Phaestus,” Sertorius said, “This is on you, now.”

The old man straightened and seemed to find some last reserve of strength. He stood tall in front of the centurion.

“I am Phaestus of Hal Goshen, and I bear news for Karnos, Speaker of Machran. You must take me and those with me to him at once.”

When the centurion did not move, he barked out in a much louder voice, “Do as I say!”

The strength left him. He sagged, and was seized with a fit of wet, bloody coughing.

The centurion turned to one of his men. “Get Kassander here.”

From the Mithannon Gate to Kerusiad Hill was two pasangs as a crow might fly, half as long again by the meander of the Mithannon’s cramped streets and alleyways. Phaestus and Aise had nothing left in them, nor any strength to trudge over the hard cold cobbles of the city amid the night-time crowds. When Kassander arrived he looked over the travellers one by one. As he saw Aise’s condition his eyes widened and anger made of his mouth a wide, lipless slot.

“What has happened to this woman?”

“She tried to escape,” Sertorius said. Standing by the burly armoured polemarch he seemed like a jackal cowering before a lion. “She’s been difficult from the start. We’ve travelled over half the Gostheres to get here, through snowdrifts as high as your head. Been near three weeks on the road.”

Kassander flicked a hand at the centurion. “Cut her free. The other one too.” He looked down at Sertorius and a muscle in his jaw flickered. He turned.

“I know you, Phaestus. We have met in the past.”

“You know me,” Phaestus agreed. He lay on the cobbles with Philemos supporting him. “I must see Karnos.”

“Can you walk?”

Phaestus smiled faintly. “I’ve walked this far.”

“I will have a cart brought here. Centurion!”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stay with these people. When transport arrives escort them to Karnos’s villa on the Kerusiad. Then set a guard about the house.”

He turned to Sertorius, leaned in so close that the bronze face of his helm was misted by the other man’s breath.

“I don’t give a fuck who she is; you’d better have a good reason for treating a woman that way.”

For a city under siege, Machran did not lack liveliness, even at this hour of the night. The mule-drawn cart sent for them had to have a path cleared for it through the crowds by the escorting spearmen, and by the time it had meandered across a third of the city, Phobos was almost set and Haukos was high in the sky.

Pink Haukos – to the Macht he was the moon of hope, but across the teeming Empire of the Kufr, he was called Firghe, moon of wrath.

Word had gone ahead of them. When the mule-cart finally completed its clattering ascent of the Kerusiad Hill, the doors of Karnos’s villa were already open in a blaze of torchlight, and the master of the house stood wrapped in a woollen chlamys against the cold, his household all about him. He saw the condition of those in the cart and clapped his hands. Half a dozen slaves congregated on the vehicle. Phaestus lifted his head, but could not speak.

Karnos bent over him and took his hand. “My friend, be at ease. Your wife and daughters arrived here over a week ago. I have them quartered in comfort further up the hill. I shall send word to Berimus.” Phaestus closed his eyes, and tears trickled down his face. Karnos patted his shoulder.

“You must be Philemos,” he said. “A fine looking young man. I salute you for seeing your father to safety.” Philemos bowed his head, looking more than anything else ashamed. Karnos sucked his teeth a moment.

“You three,” he said to Sertorius and his comrades. “What part did you play in all this?”

“We were the escort,” Sertorius said with a grin that flickered on and off in his face. “Without us, Phaestus would be dead in the drifts of the Gostheres.”

“Is this true?” Karnos asked Phaestus. The older man’s eyes opened and he nodded.

Karnos ran his gaze over the brutalised captives in the cart. Rian met his eyes with a glaring, tearstained defiance, holding Ona in her arms. Aise sat with her head resting on her elder daughter’s shoulder, eyes shut, barely conscious.