Corvus (29 page)

“Then from the
sounds in the streets, there are a lot of ignorant people abroad tonight. Can
you hear them?”

Karnos nodded. “The
Mithannon is teeming like a puddle full of spawn. The incomers from Arkadios
and the other cities are intent on seeing the fleshpots while there’s still
some flesh to be had.”

“It’s what men do.”

“And a damned fine
idea!” Karnos exclaimed. He clapped Kassander on the shoulder. “Join me for
dinner. Bring your sister. I’ll have Polio hunt out the good wine. We’ll get
drunk and I’ll make an arse of myself - it’ll be like old times.”

Kassander smiled. “I
accept your gracious invitation.”

“Good! I’ll ask
Murchos and Tyrias too. Murchos can hold his wine and Scrollworm always has a
poem or two on hand to help preserve civilization.”

Kassander jerked
his chin towards the distant campfires. “You don’t think he’ll try anything
tonight?”

“Tonight? That
would be rude - he’s only just arrived. No, Kassander, our friends across the
way will be busy making plans tonight. They’ve cut two roads into the city, and
have three more to go. Tonight Corvus will be talking to his friends as we will
be, plotting our destruction. And if they’ve any sense, they’ll be doing it
with a drink in their hands too. I’ll have Gersic stay on the walls and report
to us later on; he’s too excited to sleep tonight anyway.”

“Aren’t we all?”
Kassander drawled.

Karnos’s villa on
the slopes of the
Kerusiad presented a fortress-like face to the world. Built around the
fountain-courtyard, it looked in on itself rather than out at the city, a fact
which Kassander had remarked upon more than once.

In summer, Karnos
threw parties centred on the fountain, and drunken guests had been known to end
up in it. So had their host. But with the advent of winter the long dining
tables were laid athwart the second hall, further inside, so that the sound of
the falling water was lost, and in its place a fire spat and crackled on a
raised stone platform at one end of the room, the smoke sidling out of a series
of louvred slats in the roof. The long couches upon which the guests sat or
reclined according to their preference were set out facing one another, and
slaves brought food to the diners on wooden platters and in earthenware dishes.

It was the way the
rich ate, and Karnos was nothing if not rich. He had never forgotten the
communal pot-meals of the Mithannon, with a dozen people dipping their hands in
the food at once and grabbing it by the fistful in an echo of the mercenary
centos. He had sworn never to eat like that again.

The meal was
plentiful but plain. Karnos had developed expensive tastes in many things, but
food was not one of them. He still relied on the country staples of bread, oil,
wine, goat meat and cheese. The wine, however, was Minerian, one of the finest
vintages ever trodden. Tyrias exclaimed as he tasted it, and held up his cup in
salute. “As sieges go, this one certainly begins with promise,” he said.

“I thought it
fitting to mark the day,” Karnos told him. He raised himself up off his elbow
and turned to the plainly clad woman seated apart from the men on an upright
backless chair of black oak.

“Kassia, are you
sure you’re quite comfortable? These couches were made by Argon of Framnos -it’s
like lying on a cloud.”

The woman, a handsome
dark-eyed lady with Kassander’s broad face, smiled at him. “It would scarcely
be proper, Karnos. And besides, I’ve spent enough evenings here to know you
will probably end this one on your back.”

The men laughed,
Kassander as loud as any. “My sister knows you too well, Karnos,” he said.

“She does.” Karnos
raised his cup to her. “Her honesty is as refreshing as her beauty is
intoxicating.”

“Your flattery is
like the wine,” Kassia shot back. “It needs to be watered down a little.”

“Forgive me, Kassia.
When a man is so dazzled by the exterior, he sometimes forgets what treasures
sparkle within.”

“And now you’re
becoming shopworn, Karnos. I have heard better lines in street-plays.”

“It’s true I have
not attended to the classics as much as I should. But it was Eurotas who said
that a woman’s face holds no clue to her heart.”

“Ondimion once
said that to quote from drama was to sully the air with someone else’s fart.”

“He did? And I
thought him a dried up old pedant. Still, you have proved his point.”

“There is a
concept called irony - let me explain it to you.”

“Enough!”
Kassander cried. “I wish you two would just get married and have it over with.”

“All intelligent
conversation ends with marriage, Kassander - you know that,” Karnos said,
waving a slave over for more wine. “Once the woman has her feet in the door the
talk is all of budgets and babies.”

Kassia looked the
slave-girl pouring Karnos’s wine up and down. “It seems to me you have too many
wives already, Karnos.”

“I have an
enormous heart, lady,” Karnos told her gravely. “It craves affection, but wilts
like a flower when confronted by the brutalities of everyday domesticity. I
have constructed my household to shield me from such indelicacies.”

The eyes of every
man in the room followed the willowy girl with the wine-jug as she padded back
into the shadows. Kassia sighed.

“You are a massive
boy, Karnos. The woman who married you would be yoked to a lifelong project.”

“And that,” Karnos
said triumphantly, “is the very definition of marriage. I thank you, lady, for
putting it so pithily.”

Kassander lay back
on his couch. “If the building were on fire, you two would stand inside arguing
over who had started it.”

“Argument between
a man and a woman is lovemaking without the orgasm,” Tyrias said with a raised
eyebrow.

“Ah there we are -
someone else farts,” Karnos said. “Can’t educated people converse without
digging up the bones of dead men?”

“You’re a trivial
bunch,” bull-necked Murchos grunted. “The world is on fire around us, Machran
besieged, our fates cast to the whims of the gods, and you sit here sipping
wine and indulging in sophistry. I’m glad the men on the walls don’t have an
ear in this room.”

“Given half a
chance they’d be doing the same, though with a little more raw gusto,” Karnos
said dismissively. “Tomorrow we’ll stand on the walls and look Phobos in the
eye. For tonight” - he poured a scarlet stream of wine onto the exquisite
mosaic of the floor - “here’s a libation to gentle Haukos of the pink face, god
of hope and men who drink too much. His palerfaced brother can kiss my hairy
arse - saving your presence, lady.”

“Your piety is
charming,” Kassia said. She stood up. “Gentlemen, I shall take a turn about the
courtyard to clear my head.” She lifted her veil from her shoulders and wound
it about her hair.

“Ah - the sun goes
in!” Tyrias cried. “Sweet Araian, how canst thou veil thy bright face from me?”

“Put your cup to
your mouth, Tyrias,” Karnos said, and rose in his turn. “Lady, will you lean on
my arm?”

“Is it steady
enough to bear me?” Kassia asked.

“I am a rock,”
Karnos told her, swaying slightly. “Kassander, I will walk your sister in the
shadows by my fountain. I assure you I am of innocent intent.”

Kassander waved a
hand. “Take her, take her.”

The cold air
struck Karnos like a splash of water as the pair left the firelit room for the
blue shadow of the outer courtyard. The fountain splashed white moonlight in
its pool and, looking up, Karnos found himself staring full into the pale face
of Phobos, leering over the city like a rounded skull. Kassia shivered and drew
closer to him. He could feet the warmth of her skin through the thin silken
peplos.

“Phobos is full,”
she said. “This is his season.”

Karnos put his arm
about her and nuzzled the silk-covered fragrant hair at her temple. “Kassia, we
are alive and well and there are ten thousand valiant men standing between you
and the barbarians beyond the gates.” He bent his head and kissed her through the
veil.

For a second her
mouth responded to his, coming to life, and then she withdrew, patting his arm.

“I had always
heard that men take liberties in wartime,” she said. And then, “It seems like
bad luck, with Phobos looking on.”

“Marry me, Kassia,”
Karnos murmured, his hands running up and down her arms, sliding the silk
across her skin. He could feel the raised stipple of goosebumps on her flesh.

“That old saw? You
have laid siege to my virtue for years, Karnos - what makes you think my walls
will yield to you now?”

“You love me, as I
have loved you all this time. What better moment to finally admit it than now,
when the world is liable to come crashing down around us?”

She looked up at
him, that strong jawline he loved, the courage in that broadboned face, the
moonlight making the veil covering it as translucent as mist.

“And is the world
to come crashing down, Karnos?”

He hesitated a
moment, his face sombre, his eyes fixed on hers. Then the old buffoon’s grin
flashed out. “You think this city can fall while your brother and I defend it?
We are the Phobos and Haukos of Machran.”

She set a hand
across his mouth. “Don’t talk like that.”

“The gods can
laugh too, Kassia,” he said, kissing her cold fingers. “And Antimone loves
those who chance everything for the love of another, whether it be a soldier
shielding his brother on the battlefield, or a man risking all for the regard
of a good woman.”

She lifted her
hand and set it on his shoulder, atop the padding which still covered his
wound.

“I would have died,
had you not come back to me, Karnos. You will not make me love you more by
bleeding in some battleline.”

“I know. And that’s
why it is you for me, Kassia -you alone. It always has been.”

She walked away
from him, a slim upright shadow greyed by the moonlight.

“You play the fool
to win the heart of the mob, but I hate to see you do it. And you surround
yourself with slaves so you will not be alone - the only people in this world
you trust are old Polio and my brother.”

“And you.”

“If you trusted me
you would do as I asked.”

He shook his head
helplessly. “This is who I am. The way I live -”

“Is a scandal
which makes your name a topic in all the wineshops of the city. You find that
useful - I detest it.”

Karnos’s shoulders
sagged. “I cannot discard my people. They depend on me.”

“They are your
slaves, Karnos.”

“You have never
been poor, Kassia. You don’t know.”

She whirled on
him. “You damned idiot. You’re too frightened to let go of your past for fear
of ridicule. How the mob would marvel if Karnos of Machran became respectable!”
“It’s all appearances, nothing more.”

“It is not - it
goes right to the heart of you. You will always be the child of the Mithannon.
You are Speaker of Machran, Karnos, leader of the greatest city west of the
sea. You have nothing to prove.”

“Except to you.”

“Except to me,”
she said quietly. She stepped close to him again. “My dear, you are a better
man than anyone knows.”

“I am a coward and
a buffoon.”

“It is not
cowardice to feel fear. You do not need to wield a spear to show me your
courage. I know your quality, Karnos - I only wish more people did.”

She stood up on
her toes and kissed him. “Now go back to my brother. I will ask Polio to escort
me home.”

Karnos returned to
the warmth of
the inner hall, where the men on the couches reclined with their cups to hand,
and the slaves stood about the walls like attentive statuary. He held out his
own cup without a word, and Grania came forward to fill it. She smiled at him,
but his face felt like wood.

“Karnos,”
Kassander said, “Tell these fellows about the time you and I won that drinking
contest in the Mithannon. They won’t believe me - they have to hear it from
your own mouth.”

Karnos blinked.
His face came slowly to life. The old grin spread across it.

“It was last
summer, as I recall…” he said.

THE
GROVE OF OLIVES

The white, clean
world of the
highlands was behind them, and they were trudging downhill now, always
downhill, through the small farms and olive groves of the Machran hinterland.
The olive trees were black in the winter light, and seemed scarcely alive at
all; gnarled relics of a forgotten summer.

They camped
beneath them when they could, for shelter against the rain, and Aise cupped her
bound hands full of the dead leaves of the year gone by, brittle shavings with
the shape of spearheads. She smelled them, inhaling a last scent of the world’s
warmth.

The party grouped
about the fire, Ona and Rian huddling up to her like pups seeking warmth. Ona
was pale and empty-eyed, but now and again her furious barking cough would make
the men start and curse.

“Shut that fucking
brat up,” the one named Bosca snapped. He rubbed the scar at his eye where
Styra had exacted payment for her rape and murder. “Boss, do we really need to
be hauling that little shit with us? She’s not even of an age to fuck.”

Sertorius was
rebinding the straps that bound his thick-soled sandals to his feet. He did not
look up. “Take it up with Phaestus, or stow it.”

“If we have to
move quiet, she’ll be the bane of us all.”

Sertorius raised
his head at that. He looked at Aise, then shrugged. “We’ll see when the time
comes.”

Phaestus stumbled
into camp, his son at his elbow. His face had become ossified, a skull in which
his bright eyes burned. He half-fell in front of the fire, and Philemos reached
for the flaccid wineskin.