Paul Kearney - Corvus

“It’s no good. We must leave the waggons – even infantry can outmarch the damn things. Bring the mules along. We must pick up the pace and get back to the city. Arkamosh, head back down the column and tell the rest. Break off back the way we came. Make all speed.”

“I thought we had all the Macht beaten or penned up in the city,” Shoron said.

“They are a stubborn people,” Ardashir replied. “Defeat does not come easy to them.”

The men at the head of the infantry column saw a fistful of horsemen in the distance, half hidden by the rain; they disappeared over the crest of a hill and were gone. The rain turned icy, and the day closed in on them. Steam rose from the men tramping along in their armour. Their shields bore the alfos sigil of Avensis, and further back in the column, the piros sigil of Pontis. They marched in their stubborn thousands, their faces set towards the north, and the siege-lines of Machran.

“Empty your pockets, gentlemen. Let’s see what we’ve all brought to the pot,” Sertorius said.

The gang about the battered table muttered and did as they were told, like hulking children obeying a schoolmaster. Onto the burn-scarred wood fell scraps of root vegetables, a rind of salted meat, cheese blue with mould and some crusts of flatbread, hard as the wood of the table itself. A pause, and Sertorius ran his eyes over them one by one. A second shower of scraps followed, much like the first.

“Now the other. Don’t hold back, brothers – we are all in this together now.”

There was a clinking little waterfall of coin. Bronze obols for the most part, but there were threads of silver in it, and at the end Bosca grinned yellow in his beard and set a single gold obol atop the pile. There was a silence as the other men about the table looked at it.

“Bosca, how in the world?” Sertorius began.

“I ventured up Kerusiad Hill last night, boss, and a fine-looking lady gave me this to escort her home.”

“You fuck her?” Adurnos asked. A professional enquiry, nothing more.

“She was older than my mother, and hardly a tooth in her head.”

“He did, then,” Sertorius said, and the table broke into laughter.

People walking by the group of men at the crossroads stopped and stared a moment at the mirth, then walked on hurriedly.

They were gathered together under a tattered cloth awning in the front of what had been a wineshop. But the shop had been looted and burnt out weeks ago, and was now little more than a shell, a fitting base of operations for Sertorius’s new venture in Machran.

He had seven men under him now, a tight-knit gang who had all been strangers to the city until the siege. Apart from Adurnos and Bosca, there were a pair of brothers from Arkadios, and three Avennan soldiers who had pawned their armour for food long ago and were now intent only on avoiding starvation, as the siege drew near its end.

Food, or the procurement of it, was what obsessed them all, as it did every person still alive within the walls. The grain-dole had been halved, and was barely enough to keep a child standing, let alone a full grown man. Antimone was hovering over the city now, waiting for the end. There were wild-eyed prophets who haunted the shanty-towns and swore that they had seen her gliding on black wings around the dome of the Empirion at night.

There was no longer any wood to be spared for burning the dead, and the corpses were tossed over the walls each morning by details of men who were paid in bread. Women were selling themselves for a crust, offering their children to strangers for some morsel that would keep the life in them another day.

Lurid rumours of cannibalism ran through the Mithannon, but Sertorius for one did not put much stock by them. There were still rats to be had, two obols apiece, and enterprising archers had started to shoot down the crows and ravens that circled the city as though it were one vast carrion pit. They were not such good eating, but they kept the life in a man.

Sertorius lifted up the gold obol, and clapped Bosca on the shoulder. “You see this, boys? Right now we would pay this for a boiled chicken, or a half skin of wine. But this here means something. We get clear of this shithole, and this piece of gold is worth a horse, or some cattle, or a slave. We got to remember that, if we’re to come out of this smiling.”

“I’d rather have the chicken,” one of the Arkadians said.

“Right now we all would. But think on it, lads -there’s houses up on the Kerusiad that are stuffed with these. When the whole thing turns to ratshit, we all have to stick together, and think of the future. One day very soon, that Corvus is going to come in over the walls, and when that happens, we’ll be ready. There will be a shower of gold for those who keep their heads, and maybe other things too.” His face hardened. “I hear tell that Phaestus, the old bastard, is still alive, and living in comfort in a house not far from Karnos’s.”

“Fucker,” Adurnos said with feeling.

“And we know where Karnos’s house is, don’t we? He’s the richest bastard in the city – think what he has stowed away up there.”

“That little black-haired bitch,” Bosca said, running his hand through his matted beard. “By Phobos, boss, I’d die a happy man if I could get a cock in her before I go.”

Sertorius brought a fist down on the table. “There you are, then. We wait this out, boys, steer clear of the other crossroads-gangs and keep our heads down. Then, when the big show begins, we make our way up to the Kerusiad, settle some old scores, and fill our pockets. We play this right and the whole thing can end happy. Are you with me?”

Around the table, the men growled in agreement.

There was hunger on the other side of the walls also. The supply waggons trundled in ceaselessly from the east, but there was never enough to go round, and the men in the various camps of Corvus’s army grew restless.

Desertions had begun, conscript spearmen who had had enough and were sick of the tented lines, the huddled campfires, and the persistent hunger. This was not how they had imagined war.

Corvus toured the camps with an escort of Dogsheads, and Ardashir’s Companions patrolled the stockade-lines ceaselessly to deter those who had had enough from putting their discontent into action, but despite the arrival of fresh levies from some of the eastern cities, there was a growing disquiet in the army, a feeling that their general might have miscalculated.

Rumours flew abroad like crows – Maronen had rebelled, and the uprising had been put down by its garrison only after a bloody battle that had seen the streets run red. Hal Goshen and Afteni were simmering with discontent, and reinforcements meant for the army surrounding Machran had been diverted to reinforce their garrisons.

Most unsettling of all, there were scattered reports that the Avennan League had recovered from its mauling of the year before, and was now assembling an army for the relief of Machran. It was already on the march, camp gossip said. Soon Corvus would be caught between two fires, and the besieger would find himself outnumbered and surrounded.

“There is truth in some rumours,” Corvus said. He stood in front of the map table with his father’s black cuirass gleaming dark and menacing on its stand behind him. In front of the table stood all the senior officers of the army, except one.

“I have had word from Ardashir this evening. He’s in the hills twenty pasangs to the south of our lines, a foraging trip with two hundred of the Companions and a train of waggons.” Corvus let his strange bright eyes range over the silent men standing before him. Rictus was there, hollow-cheeked and lean as a winter wolf. Beside him stood Fornyx, and then Teresian, one-eyed Demetrius, dark Druze, and Parmenios, not so plump as he had been, and wearing armour now like the rest.