Paul Kearney: Corvus

As always, he halted on the crest of the last ridge. Leaning on his spear, he looked down in the gathering blue-shadowed dusk and something like a sigh ran out of him.

Before him, the land poured down in darkening folds and hollows until it met the flat shadow of the glen at the river-bottom. A flash of red there, as the river glanced up at the last light of the sun. Then the mountainsides all around seemed to crowd together as if huddling against the night, and the valley was blanked out, like a conjurer’s trick. But in the midst of that quiet darkness, he could see a light burning, steady and yellow.

The spear creaked under his weight. The leather straps of pack and shield dug into his shoulders. The heat of the day broke past him, a warm passage of air rushing down to fill up the cool darkness of the river-bottom below. He closed his eyes as the air kissed the glimmering sweat on his forehead, and turned, straightening.

Behind him, on the northern slope of the ridge, a long line of men sat by the side of the track. Every one of them was burdened with packed cuirass and strapped shield. Every one had a spear in his fist. They looked up as he turned to them, and their eyes were pale glitters as the sunset shattered across the mountains behind them.

“This is me,” he said. “I leave you here.”

Word went down the line. The men rose to their feet in a ripple of movement, like a snake shivering itself awake down the length of the track. Three burdened figures at their head made an arrowpoint of burdened shapes. One of them bore a banner, a staff of yew wood with a tattered flag that rippled idly in the breezes of the dusk. Upon its tattered face could just be made out the snarling, stylized muzzle of a dog or wolf.

“We’ll call on you before the first snows,” the banner-bearer said, a massively built fellow with a battered, craggy forehead and eyes like shards of blue glass below it. He grinned, showing broad yellow teeth, some of which had been ornamented with silver wire.

“No, you won’t. You’re full of shit, and you’ve too much gold in your pouch. Don’t spend it all at once, Kesero. And keep a wind-eye open for those fellows from Machran; Karnos, especially. The New Year comes, and you’re looking for jobs again.”

“And you, Rictus?” another of them said. He was younger, a long, lean, red-haired man who would have been pretty as a girl were it not for the deep scarred hole below his left eye which dragged the lower lid downwards, unbalancing his face, giving a him a look at once mocking and mournful.

“What about me?”

“Will we be seeing you after the turning of the year?”

Rictus paused. His gaze swept down the track over the scores of men who lined it silently, all of them looking up the ridge at him. The last of the sun caught his eyes and flashed back out of them in a red glare. He was a big man with a shock of yellow hair veined grey, broad in the shoulders, long in the arm, and there was not an ounce of excess flesh on his face. As his lips thinned, so the outline of his teeth could be seen behind them, and an old seam of scar tissue paled out from his lower lip and down his chin.

“I’ll wait for the New Year, Valerian, and see what Antimone brings me,” he said at last, making the words lighter with a smile.

Valerian hitched his pack up higher on his shoulders. “Well then, here’s to Hal Goshen, boys,” he said, his lop-sided face like two halves of different masks. “Here’s to red wine and wet women. I’ll come up with Kesero, Rictus, and dig you out of your burrow before the snows bury you too deep.”

He raised his spear above his head and pointed it towards the east. “Dogsheads!” he cried, and the word was caught up by the mountains and flung echoing around the high country. “March on – we can make ten more pasangs before Phobos rises.”

Behind him, the long files of men started out, taking a stony track along the crest of the ridge with the last light of the sun on their backs. Valerian held out a hand, and Rictus shook it. Then the big, crag-faced bannerbearer, Kesero, did the same. They led the line of burdened figures off, and Rictus stood and watched them go. As the men passed him on their way east, they each and every one nodded at him. A few struck their spears against their chests in salute. By the time the rearguard had gone by it was almost fully dark, and the stars were glimmering overhead in their tens of millions.

A dark shape uncoiled itself from the shadow below Rictus and stood to become a compact, black-bearded man with a face as sharp as a fox’s nose.

“Well, are you going to stand there until Phobos finds you, or are we to get on home?” the man asked waspishly. He yawned, and rubbed his eyes.

“It’s all downhill from here, Fornyx,” Rictus said. “Tonight you’ll sleep in a bed with a fire at your feet.”

The two men set off down the ridge to the glen below, from which the sound of rushing water could now be heard. They moved quietly, and their sandaled feet ate up the downslope with the steady pace of men who have been marching all their lives.

“You’re not retiring. You just tell them that to mess with their heads,” Fornyx said, picking at his teeth with a thumbnail as he walked.

Rictus strode along in silence, eyes fixed on the single point of light in the widening glen below them.

“And if you were,” Fornyx went on, “Why bury yourself up here in the hills? It’s a hard scrabble up this high, Rictus.” When he received no response, he went on, “Any city in the Harukush would shower you in gold just to have your spear planted on their walls. You could live like a king, had you a mind to.”

“We have no kings,” Rictus said quickly. “And me, I’ve no wish to set myself up as one. Damn it, Fornyx, don’t you ever shut up? You love these hills as much as I do. And besides, there’s enough gold buried under Andunnon’s hearth already.”

Fornyx grinned, looking more vulpine than ever. The top of his head barely reached the taller man’s shoulder, but the muscles in his arms and legs were like corded wires, and he kept pace with Rictus’s long stride without obvious effort.

“I find conversation an amusement, and if no-one will talk to me, then I’ll amuse myself until they do.”

“Well, amuse yourself in silence for a moment, will you? Stop here.”

They halted, almost on the brim of a mountain river, which fell flashing from a rocky bluff to the west and ran along the bottom of the glen, foaming and purling in its stony bed. Rictus breathed in the cooling air deeply.

“Smell the pines?” he asked. “There’s still garlic growing on the far bank, and thyme, too. I wonder how the barley did this year.”

“The same as it did last year, I shouldn’t wonder,” Fornyx said with a snort. “Aise and Eunion will have the place blooming, as they always do. Come, let’s cool our feet.” He began splashing across the silver-flashing river.

Rictus watched him go, smiling slightly. In the hanging woods that carpeted the upper sides of the glen, an owl hooted as though it, too, wondered what was keeping him. His hand went up to his neck, and there at the lip of his cuirass it brushed against a cord of rawhide upon which hung a wolf’s tooth and a rounded fragment of coral. Then Rictus began to wade across the cold, fast-flowing river in Fornyx’s wake.

The dogs came. out barking as they approached the eaves of the farm, but their barks changed to delighted yips and whines as they caught the scent of the two men. Big, brindled hunting hounds, they bounced around Rictus and Fornyx like pups, tongues lolling happily. A square of light opened into the night, dazzling, wiping out the stars and making the glen around them into depthless black space.