Corvus (3 page)

But he stopped,
arms tight about her spare frame, she tense within the embrace as a man’s face
stiffens before a blow.

A neat, ordered
space. She had laid out a fresh chiton for him, and the battered sandals he
always wore about the farm. There were the year’s last flowers, fresh-cut in a
jar - the deep aquamarine jar he had brought all the way from Sinon, a lifetime
ago - she had always treasured it, for the memory. Clean linen, a jug and ewer,
all set out as she had set them out for him these twenty years and more,
sometimes under a roof, sometimes under the ragged canvas of an army tent, and
sometimes under nothing but the canopy of the stars. His anger drained away.

He laid her gently
down on the willow-framed bed, his face harsh and set. Then he kissed his wife
on the forehead, her own features unreadable in the shadow he cast before the
lamp. He stood over her a moment, a dark giant, an interloper filling the room
with his bulk and the smell of the road, the stink of the army. Then he turned
and left, closing the door behind him.

That first night
back in his home,
Rictus slept on the floor before the dying fire, wrapped in his scarlet cloak
with the dogs curled up around him for company.

THE
GOAT AND HIS EAGLE

AS
Rictus had
predicted, the snow
came that night, drifting down soundlessly in the black hours. He rose well
before dawn to poke the ashes of the fire into red warmth again and toss
kindling upon the pulsing glow of the embers. The dogs rose beside him,
stretching and yawning. Old Mij licked his face and would not leave him alone
until he had had his ears well scratched, while Pira, the young bitch, rolled
on the floor, arching her back like a cat.

He opened the
door, shivering in his well-worn cloak, and in the pre-dawn dark the snow
stretched grey and unbroken across the valley before him. Above the lip of the
mountains red Haukos still sailed, but his brother Phobos had almost set.

Rictus crunched
barefoot across the virgin snow, the dogs trotting after. In the blank
whiteness only the river seemed dark, prattling noisily to itself.

Rictus’s eye was
caught by tracks in the snow - a hare, and heading down to the brim of the
river was the spoor of an adventurous vole not yet ready for its winter sleep.
The dogs snuffled along the riverbank, lapping at the water.

Rictus knelt
beside them in the chill mud and dipped his hands in the flow, dashing the
water about his head and neck. The bite of it made him gasp, but brought him
fully awake.

When he returned,
the household was coming to life. The fire was a yellow roar now, and Aise was
tending a pot suspended above it; barley porridge, by the smell. The new slave,
Styra, was bringing in more wood and Fornyx was sat at the kitchen table, last
night’s drinking dragging down his face.

“You’re too damn
sprightly looking,” he told Rictus. “You don’t drink enough - never did. Lady”
- this to Aise - “Would there be any more of that fine yellow wine to chase
down the humours?”

“Porridge will
serve you better,” Aise said, and clicked a bowl down in front of him.

“Where are the
girls?” Rictus asked her. She did not look up from the pot as she replied.

“Out milking the
yard-goats. They’ll be in presently. Eat, husband, while there’s heat in it.”

He ate standing,
out of long habit, scooping up the glutinous stuff with his fingers, until he
caught Fornyx’s meaningful look, and took a horn spoon off the table instead.

The girls came in
with pails of warm goat’s-milk, chattering like starlings, though Ona went
wide-eyed and silent when she saw her father standing in his red warrior’s
cloak. Eunion was close behind them, wrapped in the greasy sheepskin he’d worn
in cold weather since Rictus had first known him. All at once the kitchen was
alive and crowded and noisy, the table framed by faces, the tick and clatter of
earthenware. Fornyx joined in the morning banter with Rian as though he had
never been away, and the dogs sat silently behind the two girls until their
patience bore fruit in the form of bread crusts soaked in milk.

Rictus remained
standing by the door, his spoon circling his empty bowl mechanically. He
watched them without a word, like some guardian apparition, and felt an
inexplicable ache near his heart. This was his family. He had brought it
together, had made it himself. The girls were of his own blood, and the others
were so bound to him by memories and the sharing of the years that they were as
good as kin.

Why, then, did he
sometimes feel that he was on the outside of it, looking in?

Eunion had been
a tutor of
literature before Rictus and his men had defeated his city’s army in battle. A
tithe of the defeated citizen-soldiers had been sold into slavery as part of
the negotiations which had concluded the war - some petty little affair away to
the west of Machran - Rictus could no longer even remember the name of the city
that had hired him to battle Eunion’s people.

The defeated had
drawn lots, to see who would be sold, and Eunion had simply been unlucky. He
had a beautiful singer’s voice, and he knew every ballad and lay of the western
lowlands; for this, and his learning, Rictus had purchased him, to preserve him
from the slave-agents who picked like crows in the aftermath of every
battlefield. A simple decision, made on the whim of the moment. It had kept
Eunion from the mines, and had gained for Rictus the friendship of an exceptional
man, as upright and decent as it was possible to be in this fractured world.

Fornyx had taken
scarlet with a brute mercenary centon while still little more than a boy. He
had been badly used by them, made into a camp servant. Rictus’s own centons had
destroyed them in a hard, bitter fight near the Kuprian coast. It had been
autumn, the campaigning season almost over, and the two little armies had
fought in a rainstorm, churning the ground beneath their feet into a mire in
which the wounded were trampled and suffocated.

When the battle
was over, Rictus had discovered the boy Fornyx busily smashing out the brains
of his own centurion with a stone. He had recognised the look in the boy’s eyes
- had seen it in the eyes of a host of others like him up and down the war-torn
cities of the Harukush. Once, his own face had looked the same. So he recruited
the undersized Fornyx into the ranks of his own centons, and in time the boy
had become a man, and had proved more faithful than any hound, though possessed
of an acerbic wit that could ignite men in a roar of laughter or set them at
each other’s throats in the time it took to drink a bowl of wine.

There had been a
woman, in later years, and a daughter, but these had been killed by goatmen
while travelling to join Fornyx here, at Andunnon. It was the only time Rictus
had ever seen his friend weep, as they burned the pitiful remains of his family
on a hasty pyre. After that, it was as though some light had gone out of him.

Not until both
Rictus’s own daughters had been born had Fornyx regained some of his old flash
and fire, as though Rian and Ona were in some way a reparation for the wife and
daughter he had lost. He had lived at Andunnon ever since - Aise had insisted.
Fornyx was senior centurion of the Dogsheads, second in command. He was a
natural leader, accustomed to commanding the most hardbitten of men. But Rictus’s
daughters knew him as Uncle Fornyx, who brought them back trinkets from his
travels and told them tall tales that made them squeal with laughter.

He was the closest
thing to a brother that Rictus had ever known.

And then there
was Aise. Rictus
watched her sit by the fire as was her wont, eyes softening as she listened to
Fornyx elaborate on one of his preposterous yarns at the table, and the girls
listened agog.

Aise was the
spoils of war, a slave-girl given to Rictus in part-payment for a debt. He had
been hired by a poor highland town to defend it through a long winter from the
ambitions of its more prosperous neighbour. The job done, the town had little
in the way of coin to pay with, and so had given over what it could - cattle,
pig-iron, wine, and slaves.

The tall,
beautiful dark-haired girl who carried herself like a queen had caught Rictus’s
eye at once, something the town elders had no doubt been counting upon. She was
indeed a beauty, but it was not that which had drawn Rictus to her - he had
seen beautiful slave-girls by the thousand in the course of his campaigns. No,
it was the way she held herself, the stillness that seemed to be about her.

In the first few
weeks of his ownership, Rictus had not even attempted to bed her. He had seen
what rape did, and though there were many men who regarded it as simply a part
of the process of warmaking, he hated it with a cold fury. He had killed his
own men for it before now. Instead, he treated Aise with courtesy, almost as
though she were his guest. He was not even sure why.

At least, it was
not something he could have put into words that made sense - even to Fornyx.
But it was around the campfires in those early days that he had looked at the
faces about him: Fornyx, Eunion, and then Aise, and had come to realise he had
found something rare here, or had a chance to. A kind of wholeness perhaps.

He was not without
self-awareness; he knew, deep down, that he was trying to recreate the family
he had once lost, years before in Isca’s fall. But that did not mean he was
wrong.

When he had first
bedded Aise, it was because she had come to him of her own accord, and that had
made her even more singular in his eyes. They joined together out of curiosity
and a kind of mutual hunger. Perhaps she, too, had been trying to recreate
something of a previous life, one she had lost forever.

Less than a month
later, Rictus freed both Aise and Eunion, while Fornyx rolled his eyes and the
other centurions took bets on how long the pair would stick around.

And that had been
twenty years ago.

Aise looked up
from her bowl at
him. Her magnificent mane of hair was bound up tight at the back of her head,
iron-grey right through now, and there were dark lines running from the corners
of her nose. The shapeless long-hemmed chiton she wore made her almost sexless,
and her hands were raw-knuckled and coarse with the work of a highland farm.
But her eyes were the same, that sword-edge grey so rare in the lowlands. Like
himself, she had the eyes of a highlander.

A bubble of
laughter burst round the table, Eunion throwing back his head like a boy.
Fornyx rose, wiping his mouth, the joke still in his eyes. “Ah, you’re a
whimsical lot, to see humour in the tale of my mishaps. Lady, I thank you for
the food - I believe I’ll go look upon the day outside, and perhaps add
something to the flow of the river. Will you join me, brother?”

Rictus cast one
more look at his wife, but she was clearing the table, issuing orders to the
girls and to Eunion, calling for the slaves. The machinery of the farm was
ticking smoothly. His return had barely made it pause.

“I’ll join you. I’m
not needed here.” The flat ugly tone of his voice made Aise stop and look at
him once more, but whatever she was thinking remained tucked out of sight
behind her eyes.

The sun was up
over the mountains now and the valley was a sharp-edged glare of white and
blue. The dogs crunched through the thin snow-crust, sniffing at invisible
trails of scent. Rictus stood beside Fornyx as the smaller man pissed into the
river, eyes closed and smiling.

“Give her time,”
he said to Rictus, then walked upstream before kneeling in the snow to wash.

“Time for what -
to begin missing me?”

“We were away a
year - more than a year. She is mistress here, Rictus. Then you come home and
throw things out of kilter. It’ll take time, but you’ll both come to it in the
end - you always do.” More quietly he said: “Every year the same.”

“I heard that, you
little squint.”

“Well, good.
Listen to yourself - fretful as a child. In three days Ona will have her arms
around your neck, Aise will have a kiss for you morning and night, and Rian
will still think her father a god among men.”

“I’m a fool,
perhaps, thinking of retiring, of staying here year round.”

“You’re a fool,
certainly, but not because you lack the love of your family. You’re a damn fool
if you think you’ll ever find it enough in life to herd goats and plant barley.”

“It was good
enough for my father, and he was Iscan.”

“It’s not Isca.”
Fornyx straightened, puffing. “Phobos, that water’s cold! Rictus, that red
cloak on your back is all you’ve ever known - Antimone’s pity, you were the
leader of the Ten Thousand! And for good or ill, you always will be. I’d bet
you a year’s pay that the next war you come to hear of, you’ll be moist as a
girl to get your legs around it.”

“And what about
you, you black-bearded little weasel - have you no hankering to settle yourself
and -” He almost said it.
Watch your children grow up
. It was in the
very air between them.

“If I have a home,”
Fornyx said, grave now, “then it is here. And the day you hang up the scarlet I
will do the same. I would serve under no other but you.”

“No-one else would
have you.”

Fornyx grinned. “Don’t
be too sure. To have been the Second of Rictus of Isca, that counts for a lot
in this world.” He hesitated.

“I do envy you,
though.”

“Envy me what?”
Rictus asked. It is Aise, he thought. It has always been Aise. But Fornyx’s
next words surprised him.

“What you saw, in
your youth. The places you marched, the world you wandered across. You were
part of a legend, Rictus, and you saw sights few of the Macht have ever
imagined. The land beyond the sea, and the Empire upon it. For all of us it is
nothing more than a story, or the words in a song. But you were there. You
fought at Kunaksa. You survived the charge of the Great King’s cavalry, and the
long march home. I would give anything to have been part of that.”