Paul Kearney: Corvus

“Is it true what they say about him, that he is little more than a boy?” Rian asked, with a wide grin.

“He’s young, by all accounts, but it would take more than a boy to do what he has done these last three years. He has a dozen cities under him now, and rules them as King in all but name.”

Eunion nodded thoughtfully. “Corvus, he calls himself. That’s an old word indeed. I wonder how he dug it up. It denotes a black carrion bird, a raven or suchlike.”

“It’s what he’s called. His true name, no-one knows, or he has not seen fit to tell it, at any rate. But whatever his name is, he has an army of twenty thousand in the field this year, and it swells with each fresh conquest. When he takes a city, his terms are so lenient that its citizens are almost glad to fight for him afterwards. He enslaves no-one; he confiscates no land or property. All he wants are men to hoist spear in his ranks, and coin to finance his campaigns. He makes war feed upon itself.”

“I hear tell he reads like a scholar,” Eunion said with a curiously wistful smile.

“I don’t know about that. Folk say all manner of nonsense about him.” Rictus stared at Eunion, From his daughter, he might have expected it, but it disappointed him to see the old man caught up in the stories, the weave of myth that was thickening about this Corvus. He had experienced something like it in his own life, and knew how baseness could squat behind a legend. “I’ve also heard that he grows wings by moonlight, that he is the son of Phobos himself, that he’s not even one of the Macht, but some kind of demigod. You of all people, Eunion, should not believe all you hear.”

The old man smiled again.

“I know, master. But sometimes men need the stories.” He set a hand on Rian’s head. “We all do. It is what set us apart from the beasts.”

They felt his anger. Rian shrank from him towards Eunion, which made him angrier still. In silence, the three stared across the foothills to where the dark forests ended at the hem of the mountains in the north and west. Last night’s snow lay on the peaks; they were white as a dream of winter.

“I’ve always scoffed at signs and portents, not thinking them worth a rational man’s time,” Eunion said, “but were I a peasant from the hills -”

“A strawhead?” Rictus asked, mocking, bitter even.

Eunion inclined his own bald pate. “That is a word I’ve not heard for a long time, living up here. But, if you like. If I were an uneducated highlander, I might read something into old Grenj’s defeat of the eagle.”

“And what would that be?” Rictus asked, frowning again.

“The upset of normal things. Something new in the wind – a change for us. For all of us. For all the Macht.”

“You read a lot into a goat’s good luck,” Rictus said coldly. He did not like to hear Eunion talk like this.

“Forgive me, master. This boy conqueror, this… phenomenon. I don’t think he is going to leave the world without making a mark on it much larger than the one he has henceforth. And if I read you rightly, you believe the same. Fornyx let slip you are thinking of hanging up the scarlet. Is it true?”

Rian’s face upraised to him, open and delighted. “Father! Is it?”

“Eunion, you leap like one of these damn goats from one subject to another.”

“I think not. I think there is a connection there.”

Rictus said nothing for a long time. He bit into his onion, the crisp sting of it flooding his mouth, and then chased it down with a lump of creamy goat’s cheese.

“This Corvus is making war on us,” he said. “And it is a war like we haven’t seen before; he does things so differently. Do you know he has cavalry in his army – not as scouts or foragers, but as part of the main battle line? He is, as you say, a phenomenon.”

Rictus breathed in deep, smelling the tang of the pines on the wind, the close-to smells of goat and onion and the wool and sweat of his own body and those beside him. The grain of the world itself, this quiet emptiness of the highlands. A place apart, it had always seemed to him, beyond the concerns and confines of the lowland plains, the cities, the politicking of men.

He set one arm about Rian’s shoulders, and brought her tight to him, until he could smell the lavender and thyme that Aise always layered in the clothes chests.

“Father -”

“I’ve been a soldier all my life, Eunion. I’ve carried the Curse of God near a quarter-century and I have seen men kill one another in every manner in which the act can be conceived. It is part of life.

“For me, it has been a trade, a calling for which I find I have an aptitude, as other men can make music or build with stone and marble. I accept that. I have carved my life around it. But there is something else in the wind now. Things are going to change.

“I think that to carry a spear in the times to come is to fight in a war without end.”

He bent his head, and kissed his daughter’s black hair.

Autumn bit deeper. Walking in the woods was like strolling through a blizzard of dry, copper-coloured leaves, rattling in the wind, circling and twining in fathomless dances. The earth itself was growing colder under their feet, whilst the sky was a tumble of pouring cloud, light and shadow chasing across it in endless patterns, following the sunset.

Aise had grown thinner. In Rictus’s arms she felt light and spare and angled with bones, her skin white as ivory where the sun never saw it.

She had always been a modest woman, something Rictus knew to be rare in those blessed with a face and form such as had graced her youth. His second night home she took him by the hand and led him to their bed without a word, and they joined within it like two polite strangers, until at last she seemed to come to life under him with grudging moans, and her hands pulled him deeper into her. When he was spent, they lay in the dark of the wind-wreathed room and their faces were so close that he felt her lashes brush his cheek as her eyes opened in the darkness. Her fingers ran down his flank, as though reacquainting themselves.

“What was this?” she asked as she settled on a ridge of scar. “It’s new.”

He frowned. “I don’t remember. A knife, I think. It was nothing.”

She found the arrow-pock on his thigh, and her fingers circled it gently. “So many wounds.”

“War’s accounting,” Rictus said. He lifted himself off her with some reluctance and they lay side by side in the bed. “I have always been lucky that way. Antimone has spared me.”

“Or Phobos,” Aise said. “They say the god of fear looks after those who do his work in the world.”

Rictus set a hand on her flat belly, as taut as a girl’s despite the three children who had bloomed within it. “Is that what you think of me, Aise, after all this time?”

“I know that when I see you in that black armour and the red cloak, with the helm hiding your face, I am afraid. There is something in your eyes, Rictus. Perhaps it is what has made you what you are. It changes only when you look upon Rian.”

Rictus took his hand away from her warmth and knuckled his eyes. “You and Fornyx. Sometimes I wonder if either of you know me at all.”

She raised herself on one elbow and moved closer to him once more, until they were skin to skin, and the wetness at the crux of her thighs was leaking onto his hip. Even in the dark, he knew she was smiling down at him.

“Perhaps, husband, we know you better than you know yourself.”

Her mouth sought his, hungry now. She straddled him with sudden energy, and their second coupling had real joy in it, like some flash of memory, a moment from the past when she had more flesh on her bones, and he fewer scars on his.