Paul Kearney - Corvus

He looked old. For the first time, Fornyx saw the elderly man in him. The youth who had joined the Ten Thousand all those years ago was utterly gone.

“There’s not much to tell. No spearwork to speak of; our tools this last while have been the spade and the axe. The men spend what free time they have scouring the frozen wasteland they’ve made for a turnip or an onion that’s been overlooked. There’s not an olive tree or a vine left standing for twenty pasangs, and even the grass seems to be withering. Ardashir has had to move some of the horselines ten pasangs back east. Those big Kufr horses are starting to look like rag and bone. By the time the last of them die they won’t even be worth eating.”

Rictus coughed over his broth and winced, a hand set to his side. “And the men – our men?”

Fornyx frowned. “Corvus has taken them as a kind of bodyguard. Now that he’s cut us down to size he finds use for us as mascots. We have one under-strength centon still in the scarlet. Those here now are here to stay – Kesero has his heart set on the plunder of Machran. Valerian doesn’t say much. I think this kind of warfare is not to his liking.”

“Is it to anyone’s? What’s going on in the city? Do we have any inkling?”

“Machran is a different place now, Rictus, a world apart from ours. There’s no coming or going; the place is sealed up tight. If we’re hungry here, with supplies still coming in from the east and the foraging parties out night and day, then think what it’s like inside those walls, with a hundred thousand and more mouths to feed.”

“If all they had to eat was this shit they’d open the gates tomorrow,” Rictus said, setting the bowl to one side. He lay back in the bed – it had been made specially for him on Corvus’s orders – and looked at his old friend.

“Druze tells me you were going to leave the army when you thought me dead.”

Fornyx shrugged. “There didn’t seem to be much point to it any more.” “You were the one so keen to find yourself part of history, Fornyx. This is it – we are inside it right now. There were times in the Empire I wanted to lie down and die, many times -”

“I told you once I thought it must have been like some black dream of Phobos. I was right.”

“Well, then.”

“At least in the Empire you knew where you were going, Rictus. Here, I look around and wonder what it’s all in aid of. Are we here to make Corvus into a king?”

“I think so.”

“And you’re happy with that? That half-breed boy lording it over all the Macht like a Kufr tyrant?”

“He’s not as bad as you make out.”

“Oh I know – you and he are like family now. I see it, Rictus. He was half out of his mind with joy when Ardashir brought you back from the dead.”

“He is Jason’s son, and it was my fault his father died.”

“That’s not a debt he can hold over you all his life – he never even knew his father.”

“I knew him,” Rictus said firmly. “He was a better man than either of us, and his mother a fine woman.”

“A Kufr.”

“A Kufr, yes – does it matter?”

“Most of the clodhoppers in this army have no idea their beloved general has Kufr blood in his veins. What do you think they’d do if they found out?”

“Nothing. He has luck on his side, Fornyx. Knowing him, it would only add to his mystery.”

Fornyx lowered his head. “All right, all right. I hear myself and I sound like some bitching recruit missing his mother’s tit. This grand scale of war, it’s new to me. There are too many faces missing around the centos, Rictus, men you and I had marched with for years. They fell in windrows up on that wall, and at Afteni.”

“There will be others, Fornyx. The faces have always changed. Doesn’t he have you recruiting?”

Fornyx laughed. “He does. He has given permission for any spearman in the army to try for us. Valerian and Kesero have them lined up outside their tents every morning, young fellows with a hankering to wear that scarlet cloak and call themselves a Dogshead.

“There was a time, Rictus, years ago, when there were mercenaries in every city, and the red cloak was nothing more than a badge of shame. Now, since the return of the Ten Thousand, and with this campaign, it’s something else.”

“An honour,” Rictus said.

“Yes. Who’d have thought it?”

“We’ll take the best of them, and build the Dogsheads up again, Fornyx,” Rictus said, patting his friend’s hand.

Fornyx grinned with a flash of his old vulpine self. “We’re drilling them till they puke.”

TO the rear of the camp which sprawled across the Goshen Road, east of Machran, a fenced-off lumberyard and ironworks had been set up. Within it, Corvus’s secretary Parmenios was lord and master, and he had conscripted every carpenter and blacksmith to be found from Machran to Afteni.

Every day the waggons poured into the enclosure, bearing lumber and scrap iron and charcoal, and the forges sparked and hammered there day and night. Tall structures began to rise up in the middle of them, rising higher- day by day, and new orders went out across the countryside. Herds of cattle were brought in, slaughtered for the beef that the army would eat, and then stripped of their hides.

Soon the reek of a tannery was added to the smoke of the roaring forges, and Corvus set sentries about this strange enterprise of Parmenios’s, most of them Kufr from the Companions. They turned away every curious soldier who ambled over the hill to see what was going on, and the army buzzed with speculation as the last days of the year ran out, and the dark night of midwinter came upon the earth.

Almost two hundred pasangs to the south and east, the city of Avensis rose on its crag to dominate the wide plain between Nemasis and Pontis. A great trading settlement, a hub of the caravan trails which converged before joining the Imperial road, it was also the richest member of the Avennan League after Machran itself.

The men of Avensis had fought at Afteni and fallen by the hundred. Now the Kerusia had decided to wait upon events, so advised by Ulfos the polemarch, who had been at Afteni and seen the prowess of Corvus’s army first hand.

They were meeting in the citadel of the city, an airy colonnaded space that looked out over the fertile plain below. Ulfos stood upon the grey mottled marble, blowing into his hands.

Winter was here; even this far south it had its bite, though there was no snow on the ground as yet. The circle of the Kerusia was a fine place to meet on a summer’s day when the sky was a cerulean blue overhead, but today the place had a bleakness to it that matched the mood of the men taking their seats on the stone semi-circle of benches.

Parnon, the Speaker of Avensis, rose in the classic fashion, himation caught up over one forearm. He extended the other to Ulfos.

“General, you said you had news. Best to present it quickly.” One of the elderly Kerusia behind him sneezed, and there was a muttering, swiftly silenced by a look from the stately Parnon, his white beard jutting like a brush.

Ulfos turned around and beckoned at the antechamber beyond. At his signal, a scrawny, bedraggled figure limped into the Kerusia circle, a filthy shock-haired youth, his cloak in rags and his bare feet bloody.

“This can’t be good,” one of the old men muttered to his neighbour.

“Speak up, lad,” Ulfos said. “Give what you carry to the Speaker here and then tell him what you told me.”

The boy looked the Kerusia over, then reached into his cloak and produced a tattered, rain-spotted scroll. He handed it to Parnon.

“Your honour, that is a message from Karnos of Machran himself, with his seal upon it – and it ain’t broke, I made sure of that.”